The Dilemma(37)

‘That’s good. Well, I’ll let you get on. Goodbye, love, see you later.’

Jeannie hangs up and I stand for a moment wondering what I’d have been like if I’d had parents like Jeannie and Mike. A different version of myself? I think of Izzy and her confidence. And Adam with his quiet self-belief.

I take a minute, watching everything going on around me, at the piles of plates and baskets of cutlery being carried out to the tent, at Emily, the young girl from the caterers, filling small vases with the flowers that I ordered. They arrived when I was out, along with another bouquet, this time from Jess’s mum, who can’t come tonight. Although I’m glad Marnie isn’t here, I hate that she’s missing out on all this because she would have loved it. I look for my phone to take some photos to send her but it isn’t in my bag. I look around; I must have put it down somewhere. I check the terrace but it isn’t on the table, or anywhere in the kitchen.

Going into the hall, I phone my mobile from our house phone. When it starts ringing, I put down the landline and listen carefully, hoping to hear where it’s coming from. But I can’t locate it, not even when I try again. Maybe I left it at the spa. I remember seeing it face down on the table when we had lunch, but I don’t know what I did with it after that. Hopefully Jess or Kirin will have picked it up. I’m about to phone and ask them when I realise that their numbers are in my mobile. I think about asking Adam to phone Nelson and get him to ask Kirin. But I’ll be seeing them later, so I can ask them then. And I don’t really have time to worry about my phone.

Liz comes to ask me where I want the cutlery, set out on trays in the tent or in a pot in the middle of each table. She asks me about Marnie, and I tell her that I’m secretly hoping she’ll FaceTime during the evening. If I can show her the garden, if she can see everything, she’ll be able to be part of it.

A sudden thought hits me – that maybe the reason Marnie has gone away for the weekend to a place without wi-fi is because she needs an excuse not to FaceTime tonight, because Rob will be here and she’s worried she might give something away. Or, more probably, because she can’t face looking Jess in the eye and asking her how she is when she’s having an affair with her husband. I’m so angry with her. How could she? How could she have an affair with Rob? I still can’t get my head round it. I’ve tried to make excuses for her, blame it all on Rob, tell myself that he took advantage of her, that he played on her vulnerability and slowly reeled her in. But at some point, she consciously crossed the line.

There are no words to describe how I feel about Rob. As I sat in my car that day, the day I discovered the truth, I tried to work out when their affair had started. Even though it made me ill to think about it, I was certain he was the father of the baby Marnie lost. I was sure – hoped – that there hadn’t been anything between them while she was still at school, which meant it must have started once she was at university. But she was at Durham, nearly three hundred miles and a four-hour drive away from Windsor, so how had they been able to see each other to start an affair? Rob worked five days a week and to my knowledge, he’d never gone away for the weekend on some pretext, or missed a Sunday bike ride with Adam and Nelson.

Then it dawned on me – those two days a week last year, when he’d worked away from home, he went to the Darlington offices of his company. I knew Darlington was somewhere in the north of England but I didn’t know where exactly. I scrabbled in my bag for my phone and located Darlington on Google Maps. It wasn’t as far north as Durham – but was it near enough for him to have gone to see Marnie while he was there? When I discovered that it would have taken him half an hour to get there by car, I felt ill. I wanted to phone his boss and ask him if it really had been as Rob had said, that he hadn’t had any choice about the new job – that although the company knew his wife had MS, they’d forced him to work away from home. But I was too scared I’d be told what I suspected was the truth, that Rob had asked – or at least put himself forward – for the job.

There was something else too. Because of the relationship between us all, it would have been normal for Rob to have looked Marnie up when he was in Darlington. We wouldn’t have thought anything about him taking her out for a drink or a meal. It’s what an uncle would do for his student niece, because that was how we considered Nelson and Rob, as Marnie’s uncles – she had even called him Uncle Rob until a few years ago, for God’s sake! Yet he had never mentioned to us that it was something he was going to do, and no bells had rung for me because I hadn’t realised how close the two places were. But once I realised, his silence damned him. What surprised me was that Adam had never questioned it. If he had gone anywhere near Aberystwyth, where Cleo was studying, he would have automatically looked her up.

It took me a long time to pluck up the courage to go back and face Jess that day. I phoned Paula and asked her to tell the office that I was ill, then told Jess I’d come home early because I wasn’t feeling well. She made me a cup of tea and insisted I went to bed, and I lay there, staring at the ceiling, trying to work out how I was going to tell her that her husband was having an affair with my daughter. But my mind wouldn’t go there, just as it wouldn’t let me tell Adam what I suspected when he came to see how I was. I wanted to think everything through before I destroyed their worlds.

I walk restlessly around the kitchen, realising that although the food looks lovely, I’m not going to be able to eat any of it, feeling as I do. I know I’ll enjoy my party once it’s got going, as long as I can avoid Rob. To fill in the time, because I don’t have my phone, I go to the sitting room and look through my cards again. Most of them are from people I’ll be seeing tonight but there are some from those I didn’t invite, and even though there’s no reason why I should have invited Kirin’s two cousins, or Ian’s mum, or the girl from the hairdressers, I still feel bad that I didn’t.