Surprise Me(72)

At last we emerge into the fresh air. I’m quite dazed and my head is pounding. There were too many bright lights and voices and faces and memories. Not to mention emotional encounters. Not to mention mystery conversations involving a million pounds, maybe two.

We stand in the hospital forecourt for the longest time, wondering whether to go for a cup of tea or not and looking cafes up on our phones, before Sue and Neville decide that no, in fact they’ll catch the earlier train to Leicester. So then we’re into a round of hugs and future arrangements, and that takes forever, too.

When, finally, we pile into the car, I feel exhausted. But I’m wired, too. I’ve been waiting to be alone with Dan. I need to get to the bottom of this.

‘So, you had a nice long chat with my mother!’ I say lightly as we pull up at some traffic lights. ‘And I thought I heard you talking about … money?’

‘Money?’ Dan gives me a quick, impenetrable glance. ‘No.’

‘You didn’t talk about money at all?’

‘Not at all.’

‘Right,’ I say after a long pause. ‘Must have made a mistake.’

I stare out of the windscreen, feeling a heaviness in my stomach. He’s lying. Dan’s actually lying to me. What do I do? Do I call him out? Do I say, ‘Well, guess what, I heard you saying “a million pounds, maybe two”,’ and see what he says?

No. Because … just, no.

If he wants to lie, he’ll lie, even if I do throw ‘a million pounds, maybe two’ at him. He’ll say I misread his lips. Or he’ll say, ‘Oh, that. We were talking about the local council.’ He’ll have some explanation. And then he’ll be on his guard. And I’ll feel even more desperate than before. I’m just quelling an urge to wail, ‘Oh, Dan, please tell me, please tell me what’s going on,’ when he wriggles in his seat and clears his throat and speaks.

‘By the way, I’m having some old friends round. But don’t worry, I’ve arranged it for your Pilates night so you won’t be bored by us.’

He gives a short little laugh, which doesn’t ring quite true, and I stare at him with fresh concern. The million pounds (maybe two) feel instantly less urgent. I’m now more perturbed by these old friends. What old friends?

‘Don’t worry!’ I say, attempting an easy tone. ‘I’ll cancel Pilates. I’d love to meet your old friends! Which old friends are these?’

‘Oh, just … friends,’ says Dan vaguely. ‘From back in the day. You don’t know them.’

‘I don’t know any of them?’

‘I don’t think so, no.’

‘What are their names?’

‘Like I say, you don’t know them.’ Dan frowns into his mirror, as he changes lanes. ‘Adrian, Jeremy … There was a whole bunch of us. We volunteered at the St Philip’s Garden.’

‘Oh, right!’ I shoot him a savage smile. ‘The St Philip’s Garden. Brilliant. What a super idea, to invite them round, after all this time.’ And I leave it a full five seconds before I add in my lightest tones, ‘And what about Mary, did you ask her, too?’

‘Oh yes,’ Dan says, still apparently preoccupied by the road. ‘Of course.’

‘Of course!’ My savage smile gets even brighter. ‘Of course you invited Mary! Why wouldn’t you?’

Of course he bloody did.





ELEVEN


This is officially a Marital Situation. And actually I’m quite freaked out, in a way I really didn’t expect to be.

I feel as though our whole marriage, I’ve been playing around with worries. They were amateur worries. Mini-worries. I used to sigh and roll my eyes and exclaim, ‘I’m so stressed!’ without knowing what ‘stressed’ really was.

But now a real, genuine, scary worry is looming at me, like Everest. Ten days have passed since the hospital event. Things haven’t got any better. And I can’t sigh or roll my eyes or exclaim, ‘I’m so stressed!’ because they, I now realize, are things you do when you’re not really worried. When you’re really worried, you go silent and pick at your fingernails and forget to put your lipstick on. You stare at your husband and try to read his mind. You google Mary Holland a hundred times a day. Then you google husband lying what does it mean? Then you google husband affair how common? And you flinch at the answers you receive.

God, I hate the internet.

I especially hate the photo of Mary Holland that pops up every time I google her. She looks like an angel. She’s beautiful, successful and basically perfect all round. She runs an environmental consultancy and she’s done a TED talk on emissions and is on some House of Commons committee and she’s run the London Marathon three times. In all the photos I can find of her, she’s wearing what look like eco clothes – lots of natural linens and ethnic-looking cotton tops. She has clear pale skin and blunt yet gorgeous features and wavy dark hair (she’s got rid of the frizz) which sits around her face in a pre-Raphaelite cloud. Dimples when she smiles, obviously. Plus a single silver ring which she does not wear on her left hand.

Previously, I might have thought: Well, she’s not Dan’s type. All his other exes are more like me – fine-featured, fairly conventional and mostly blonde. But clearly she is his type. Clearly I know my husband far less well than I thought I did. He’s into gardening. He has a bunch of old friends I’ve never heard of. He fancies dark-haired girls in eco clothes. What else?