Separate Lives

by Kathryn Flett

Genres: General Fiction

Synopsis

Your partner of ten years, and the father of your children, receives a text. You happen to see it. 'Start living a different kind of life ... P :-) xxx'. You don't know anyone with the initial P, so what's with the smiley face and the kisses? Narrated by Susie, her partner Alex and the mysterious 'P', Separate Lives is an achingly funny, moving and honest portrayal of marriage and adultery. These characters are never less than totally human. You'll have met people like them. They might even be you.

Release date: July 5, 2012

Publisher: Quercus Publishing

Print pages: 400

Sample

June 2009

Susie

I know it’s a cliché, but it was the text on Alex’s phone that did it. And yes, obviously I shouldn’t have been reading his texts, but if you dared look me in the eye and tell me you had never done the same thing, frankly I wouldn’t believe you. Because we all have.

The text simply said: Start living a different kind of life … P :-) xxx

Several thoughts jostled for my undivided attention simultaneously.

Who the hell is P? And what’s with the smiley? (And how come they forgot to LOL?). Three kisses. P’s a She …

Shit – Alex is getting out of the shower.

I tapped the phone in an attempt to return to the blank screen but only succeeded in opening the new Up iPhone App that Alex had got for the kids. It was tempting – though only for a moment – to see what level they were ‘up’ to. Instead, I shoved the phone back into Alex’s jeans and rearranged a simulacrum of the heap of clothes he’d left on the bedroom floor. By the time he appeared I was tidying my knicker-drawer. And humming. It occurred to me that tidying a drawers-drawer is pretty much at the bottom of the list of desperate displacement activities. And humming while doing so means you may as well have the words ‘GUILTY OF SOMETHING, M’LUD’ tattooed on your forehead. In this case, pants-placement-plus-humming was just the easiest plausible thing I could pretend to be doing under the guilt-inducing circumstances. It was just as well that Alex remained completely uninterested by my presence. As was, increasingly often, the case.

‘Nice shower?’

But before I’d even got past ‘nice’ to ‘shower’ I knew this was the most absurd non-question I could have asked. It sounded like something a guilty somebody might say in a soap. Alex, still dripping a little and clad only in a too-small towel that did nothing for his incipient paunch, frowned and looked at me as though I were a particularly stupid and annoying child to whom he wasn’t even related.

‘Yeah, you know – hot water, shower gel, that sort of thing.’

Alex leaned over to pick up his clothes. Relieved, I turned back to my drawers, unearthing a black Myla thong that had been in my Christmas stocking three – maybe four? – years ago, in the days when Alex probably didn’t get smiley-face xxx texts from ‘P’ and the prospect of hot, thongy sex with the missus wasn’t the sexual equivalent of being forced to undertake a Bushtucker Trial on I’m A Celebrity. I pushed the thong to the back of the drawer. It would probably be another four years before I’d see it again.

‘Right,’ said Alex, ‘I’m going to drag the kids away from the TV. Hurry up, would you?’

‘Yes, give me five minutes.’

As Alex went downstairs, I walked into the bathroom and looked at myself in the big old Venetian looking glass, the only mirror I’d ever owned that always seemed to go out of its way to flatter me. I tried not to wear my ‘mirrorface’; that pseudo-blank (yet ever-so-slightly Joan Rivers) make-up-application expression which, in the best light and with the right tools, means that reinvention isn’t entirely beyond the realms of possibility. As I slowly began to apply my face-the-world mask to the blank canvas, the face peered back. I let it droop a little, stopping short of pulling the totally bonkers expression that might reveal the brutal, animated truth: that today I looked every minute of my thirty-nine years.

It was not a face that had ever been described as pretty – at least not since I’d hit puberty, shed the puppy fat, acquired cheekbones and suddenly appeared a lot closer to a legal sixteen than a jailbaity twelve – but it was still a good sort of face and usually scrubbed up OK. I’m a blonde, but not naturally – half-head-highlighted and therefore what my sort-of sister-in-law once described, slightly cruelly but entirely accurately, as ‘a school-run blonde’.

So: green eyes set slightly too far apart, pale Celtic skin, a neat nose and a serviceable sort of mouth currently distorted by being bitten at one side, my face arranged itself into a stillness that managed not to refer too obviously to the churning in my solar plexus. But there was definitely something in the eyes – a sort of panicky, adrenalized look, offset by exhaustion and the knowledge that this being Saturday morning, there were another forty-eight hours of varying degrees of domestic discomfort to be borne before Monday morning would allow me to reclaim my grown-up head and think properly about ‘P’s text and the emotional ramifications thereof.

Pippa

Dear Mum,

It’s been a while since I’ve done this, so where to start? Where to finish? Maybe it’s just best to write until I run out of words. No idea where that will end up, but … I should probably start with the text from Lisa, inviting me to dinner with her and Guy. I nearly turned it down at the last minute because it was – a bit randomly – on a Wednesday and I’m often a bit done-in on Weds after the gym. And then there was Hal’s senior school interview, at College Hall, on the same day, which meant that he’d either be all wired and wanting to be on the Wii all night, or morbidly miserable because he’d screwed up … and wanting to be on the Wii all night. So either way I didn’t feel as though I should be going out. And then the weather was starting to get me down – that last-gasp-of-spring sort of weather that always seems to turn up just when you think summer is finally under way and it starts raining and looks as though it will never ever stop.

So I wasn’t going to go but then it turned out that Hal was cool with the whole College Hall interview thing, and said, ‘Don’t stress, Mum, I’ve totally walked it’ (twelve-year-olds), then he actually said, ‘You should go out, Mum – you deserve it.’ (Er, hello?) And so I got Marta to babysit at the eleventh hour and just chucked on the first clean pair of skinny jeans I could find and didn’t even bother washing my hair and turned up at Lisa and Guy’s place in West Hampstead with a bottle of wine.

It was just six of us – Guy and lovely Lisa, obviously, and Guy’s mate Steve, who used to be the Harlequins’ physio but is now the go-to personal trainer for about six north/north-west London postcodes (luckily I’d seen him in Grazia just last week so I was up to speed), and Steve’s sweet wife, whose name I’ve already forgotten – she’s a senior stylist at John Frieda who has just got an OU degree in Eng Lit. And then there was Guy’s twin, Alex, whom I’d heard about from Lisa but never actually met. I think he was there by accident, having stopped by to see Guy after work, before Lisa persuaded him to stay for the chilli.

So it was a good evening. Easy. No big deal – just a bunch of people chatting about this and that. No politics, or religion, or political religion (thank God!) and I really hardly spoke to him until dessert (Ben and Jerry’s or cheese – it was totally Wednesday) and when we first started talking it was just the usual polite probing: ‘So,’ (me to Alex) ‘what do you do?’ ‘Oh I work in magazines. I’m the publisher of Excellent, Excellent Fitness and Max Men. And you?’ … ‘Oh that’s cool. Well, I used to be a model agent – Lisa was one of my “girls” – but now I’m mostly a mum, and not so yum.’ And Alex said, ‘From where I’m sitting you look pretty yum,’ and I laughed, and Lisa overheard this and raised an eyebrow across the table at me, as if to say ‘wooooah!’, but I’d had three glasses of a delicious Bordeaux (not mine, incidentally – mine was a so-so Sauvignon) and it was only 10 p.m. and I knew Marta was good till 1 a.m., and tomorrow wasn’t exactly looking busy, so, whatever (as Hal would say. And now, apparently, do I).

Anyway, Lisa was kind of locked into a conversation with … um, I wish I could remember her name … and Guy and Steve were off on one about some great rugby match, which just left me and Alex to shoot the breeze. And after the breeze had been well and truly blown away, it got a bit personal.

I didn’t really want to talk about David, but once I’d explained that I was a single mum of a twelve-year-old boy and Alex asked what had happened to Hal’s dad, I ended up (and I blame the Bordeaux) telling him all about meeting David at one of those model-heavy parties (perhaps modellite is a better description, given the amount of canapés they weren’t consuming) I hadn’t really wanted to go to, and how he’d pretty much swept me off my feet (not least by saying that models didn’t do it for him … anymore). How our first date had involved David chartering a private plane and taking me for Sunday lunch in Le Touquet, and how we’d walked along the dunes and he’d explained what a hedge fund was in language I could actually understand and then said that while he loved his work he wasn’t ever going to be defined by how much he earned, that there was a big world out there and more than anything he was looking to meet the mother of his children because, without a family, what was the point of all that hard work – and money? And how I’d actually fallen for all of that.

Anyway, on I went and Alex was a really good listener. Such a good listener, in fact, that I made him listen when I would have been better off changing the subject. Instead I told him about the engagement ring in the soup six months later at the Aman in Bali, the wedding six months after that at Luttrellstown Castle, falling pregnant with Hal on our honeymoon in the Maldives, moving into the house (that bloody house) in Hertfordshire … I had practically got to the end of the marriage before I remembered to ask Alex about himself. Which is not like me, but he made it too easy. Though I did tell him other things too – all the family got brief name-checks, in case you’re feeling sidelined, though I may not actually have covered all the pets. And no, I didn’t tell him about the really important stuff, didn’t fill in the biggest gaps. My tongue was a bit loose, but there are limits.

So Alex told me about magazine publishing (about which I pretended to know less than I do, because even you know model agent = models = magazines ) and he told me about his kids and his house and … he didn’t say much about his wife, which was, for a married man, a pretty glaring omission. But I tried not to notice the glare and we just chatted and eventually it was eleven thirty and people started making time-to-go noises and even though I didn’t want to go I knew it was a school-night for everybody else, so, weirdly, I ended up being first out of the door, mostly so I wasn’t the last. Alex gave me a peck on the cheek and said it had been lovely to meet me. And Lisa gave me a kiss and a bit of finger-wagging. Not that she needed to because that was that. Really nice guy. Married. End of. I don’t do married. No woman who’s had it done to her is ever going to do married men, are they, Mum? Especially not a second-generation dumpee.

Alex

Thursday 4 June 2009

From: [email protected]

To:     [email protected]

Good to see you and Lisa last night. Didn’t realize I was crashing a dinner party – sorry. Still wanna meet up for a beer tho. Stuff to talk about. Value your input. A

From: [email protected]

To:     [email protected]

No worries, mate. You looked like you were having a good time anyway?! Thought you must have met Pip before at our place, but obv not! Anyway, can do quick beer after school 2moz, if that’s OK?

From: [email protected]

To:     [email protected]

Roger that! The usual, 6.30?

From: [email protected]

To:     [email protected]

10-4.

Friday 5 June 2009

From: [email protected]

To:     [email protected]

Sorry bruv – have to blow you out tonight, big stuff going down at HQ with the Germans. Will prob be working late anyway and better get home. Don’t know exactly why I’d better get home, but I feel I should. A

From: [email protected]

To:     [email protected]

No probs. And you’ve got to get home because home is where the heart is, right? G

From: [email protected]

To:     [email protected]

So they say! A

Thursday 11 June 2009

From: [email protected]

To:     [email protected]

Just tried your phone but no joy. Listen, really need to talk. Things not quiet on the Western Front. Or the Eastern Front. Or indeed any fucking Fronts … Call me when you pick this up? A

From: [email protected]

To:     [email protected]

Out of this twunting meeting by 5. Call you then … G

From: [email protected]

To:     [email protected]

Just got to say, further to our chat? Holy shit. Hang in there. We’re just talking about a hunch, nothing hard-and-fast. Don’t let it eat you up. No need to steam in and say anything until you’ve got something to say, right? Thinking of you. Let’s just get this party out of the way then we can all breathe easy. OK, easier … G

From: [email protected]

To:     [email protected]

Thanks. It’ll be fine. Grateful for input, as ever. Home now … A

Susie

‘Susie. HURRY UP.’

I glanced at my watch – the Cartier Tank that had been an eighteenth birthday present from my father and which was in permanent need of a service, having run six minutes slow since the late twentieth century. I’d been in the bathroom for four minutes.

‘Coming.’ I made it sound bright and efficient and I’m-on-top-of-all-this-Saturday-stuff. This was a lie.

I slicked on some tinted moisturizer, slightly cloggy mascara and the muted Mac Viva Glam gloss that I felt was appropriately ‘Saturday morning’; the kind of noncolour on which I had relied since motherhood had somehow mysteriously dictated I leave the hot pinks and vampy reds behind.

And while I’d assumed that having babies was responsible for the muted lips, here, now, in front of this mirror a zingy lightbulb moment of clarity indicated that this might not in fact be the case. Perhaps it had been the moment I’d swapped my trademark bright red lips for tastefully grown-up gloss that indicated the passing of the Susie I had been and announced the arrival of the Susie I had become: a woman who asked her partner of ten years – her apparently straying, semi-stranger of a partner, the recipient of smiley-face texts from a red-lipsticked mystery woman (P almost certainly hadn’t left vampy reds behind) if he’d had ‘a nice shower?’. For fuck’s sake.

A last glance in the mirror and a comb through the dirty-blonde bird’s-nest. Noises were now coming up the stairs. Specifically the noises of a recalcitrant four-year-old male child – Charlie, aka Chuck – being reluctantly persuaded into a pair of shoes which, maternal multi-tasking brain effortlessly clicking into gear, I recognized were almost certainly the ones he had just outgrown.

‘Alex. Those SHOES,’ I shouted down the stairs. ‘They don’t fit him anymore. I meant to tell you.’

At the bottom of the stairs Alex was kneeling on the floor pushing a small foot into a smaller shoe, while Chuck was wearing an expression like a freshly smacked bottom – puffy, red, with a hint of grizzle. I sighed, pushed – almost elbowed, but not quite – Alex out of the way, removed the shoes and found an emergency replacement pair of Bob the Builder trainers that had been gifted by a friend with no taste and no children.

‘There,’ I said soothingly. ‘Lula, where are you?’

Lula is my – our – eight-year-old daughter. What with the postnatal hormones, she was very nearly Tallulah, after Jodie Foster in Bugsy Malone, but when I finally got around to registering her birth relative sanity had thankfully prevailed.

‘Your daughter,’ said Alex – she was always ‘my’ daughter when he couldn’t relate to her – ‘is watching Hannah Montana. As per.’

I went into the living room where she was indeed curled like an apostrophe on the sofa, sucking her thumb and staring at Miley Cyrus with a kind of crush-fostering girl-longing I entirely understood – I’d felt pretty much exactly the same way about Jodie in Bugsy Malone. Just for a moment I was disarmed by her loveliness. My straight light-brown hair had, when combined with Alex’s conker-coloured curls, given Lula a genetic legup. Those long thick honey-coloured strands (one of which was being chewed and which may or may not have been harbouring a nit), the delicately olive skin (Alex’s), Bambi legs (Alex’s) and green eyes (mine) made Lula the kind of child people first stared at and then smiled at in supermarkets, their days apparently brightened. Anyway, until recently Lula would have sneered at Hannah Montana as being ‘yuck! For girly-girls’ but something had shifted recently and a newly emerging Lula had started saying unnerving things like ‘when I grow up I want to be Cheryl Cole’. So much for the vetcum-part-time-firewoman.

‘Lula, let’s go. Like, now.’

The drive from north-west London to Suffolk was long and leavened only by Jonathan Ross on Radio 2, the occasional lingering shoe-related grizzle from Chuck before he decided to conk out and the bleep of Lula’s Nintendogs. Alex seemed to be lost in his thoughts – red lipsticked, thong-wearing thoughts? – so I was left with mine. Which, with autistic-spectrum variety, ranged from the banal to the hyperventilatory.

‘You’re quiet,’ said Alex at one point, just as we pulled into our preferred motorway services pit-stop for the traditional mid-morning caffeine-and-wee.

‘I am. You’re not wrong. I’m very quiet. On the outside.’

Alex glanced at me quizzically.

‘And what does that mean, precisely?’

‘I think it means just that. Not talkative. On the inside, however, I’m practically Jonathan Ross.’

He left me to it.

My outlaws, Mr and Mrs Fox – to whom we were heading for a family gathering in honour of (brace yourself for the irony) their golden wedding anniversary – live in a rambling, low-slung house painted Suffolk Pink, which is about two shades the bearable side of Barbie but still very much on the Disney Princess spectrum. It is the kind of house that looks unarguably attractive in estate agent’s windows or on Location, Location, Location but which has always struck me as absurd for anybody less than 300 years old to actually live in.

I grew up in London, in an Edwardian mansion flat, and have always been about high ceilings and cornices and lots of light and never particularly charmed by a beam, which always makes me think I’m in the kind of hearty, engraved-tankards-behind-the-bar pubs I invariably want to leave immediately. The Foxes, on the other hand, are into their inglenookery and have spent their entire lives collectively banging their heads on lintels, which may explain a lot but, nonetheless, is all the more perverse because they are a family of giants – the shortest person in the family, Alex’s mother, Joan, is five foot nine.

The Foxes habitually refer to the family homestead as The Pink House, though it is in fact called (gag-reflex alert) ‘Whispers’, after the sound of the East Anglian winds breezing through the fronds of the Weeping Willow by the stream. If I had been an American marrying into this family, I would probably have died of the joy of Englishness when I first heard this. However when Joan first told me about Whispers I had to suppress a snort and retreat to the loo. For ever after, if only by me, The Pink House was referred to as ‘Careless Whispers’.

The most annoying thing about Careless is not the low-slung ceilings (I’m five foot seven so it’s navigable with minor stooping) but the fact that every room leads off every other room and none is quite big enough to contain everybody comfortably, especially if ‘everybody’ is more than six people, which it invariably is, what with Mr and Mrs Fox having four offspring and, thus far, seven grandchildren.

However, I do appreciate the gardens, even though, as a confirmed Londoner, I have never seen the point of having more garden than house. Houses are the bit that matter, gardens a luxury. And gardens with lawns that have to be mowed by small tractors (the Foxes have three acres) are a luxury from which I am pretty certain I shall forever be excluded. Owning a proper garden is, to me, a bit like waking up one day and suddenly finding oneself welded to a trug, yearning to vote Tory and knowing how to pronounce ‘tsk-tsk’. But the kids, needless to say, adore Careless, and as we pulled into the gravel with just enough wheel-spin to announce ourselves, even I had to admit it scrubbed up pretty well for a 300-year-old, without recourse to lip-gloss, and on this warm mid-June day, with its ‘anyone-for-tennis’ lawns and herbaceous border ablaze, Careless had never looked more like a double-page spread from Country Living. Or, indeed, a particularly pastel scene from Fantasia.

Nigel Fox – Alex’s father – was already at the (wisteriafestooned, obviously) door, glass in hand.

‘Aha. Alex. Susie. Offspring. You’re last. Welcome.’

Nigel does actually talk like this, in short barked sentences. He was one of six children so presumably while growing up he rarely got a word in and it was a habit that stuck. When he joined the RAF it was probably considered an asset.

‘Dad,’ said Alex, with no particular inflection or warmth, and I noted, not for the first time, that Alex instantly deflates from his habitual Alpha-maleness as soon as he comes into contact with his father. I used to worry about it a bit, feel for him – but not these days. I’ve had more conversations with Alex about his ego-puncturing relationship with his father than I can count and I wasn’t particularly looking forward to the one we’d almost certainly be having on the drive home tomorrow. The contents of my empathy cup, far from running over, had all but evaporated.

‘Grown,’ barked Nigel, pointing at his grandchildren, ‘haven’t they.’ Statement not question.

‘They do tend to,’ I said. ‘I’ve tried pruning them but it’s no good.’

‘Ha. Susie. Funny.’

Inside Careless, a skulk (‘it’s the collective noun’, Nigel had told me, the first time we’d met) of Foxes ‘Hi’d and ‘How are you?’d and jostled for some kissing. A newly reinvigorated Charlie instantly disappeared with his five-year-old cousin, Jack, Isobel’s second ‘miracle’ IVF baby, and the one for whom that Mumsnetty term ‘Little Emperor’ could have been coined. I have always failed to be charmed by Jack but Charlie worships at his (designer-shod) feet. Lula, meanwhile, had already paired off with her eight-year-old cousin, Isobel’s daughter Chloe, a bright, devastatingly plain, tomboyish dogs-and-ponies girl of whom I was extremely fond, though I feared that now Lula was coming over all Girls Aloud she and Chloe were bound more by familial ties than by any shared interests. But still, vanishing children was one of the upsides of a Fox family gathering. It meant I could conceivably reclaim a portion of otherwise-occupied brain for myself.

So, apart from Nigel, who thinks kissing is common, in no particular order I kissed:

* Prickly, put-upon, wildly clever Isobel, Alex’s older sister, successful human rights lawyer and single (‘through choice! MY choice! And my choice of donors too!’) mother to Chloe and Jack.

* Guy, Alex’s older-by-five-minutes twin brother. Handsome, charming Guy, a professional rugby player turned sports agent who had not only retained his genetic share of Alpha-maleness but somehow kept on acquiring even more. One day I imagined the potentially flammable combination of success and testosterone might cause him to explode in a puff of machismo.

* Guy’s brand-new, as of last weekend – though they had been together three years – fiancée, the no-longer-borderline-anorexic and therefore even more exhaustingly beautiful American ex-model turned hip boutique owner, Lisa, who predictably thought Whispers was ‘like, toadally heaven’.

* Guy and Lisa’s (runs in the family) twins, six-month-old Stanley and Poppy, who virtually at birth had been dubbed Pea and iPod by Isobel – nicknames that were in danger of sticking.

* The Fox firstborn, Will, an RAF officer and owner of an upper lip so stiff that on the rare occasions when he smiled, as now, it appeared to if not actually crack then certainly creak a bit. Will had suffered a horrible loss when his childhood sweetheart, Marianne, died of breast cancer when they were both thirty (he is forty-seven now, so I never knew her). Their son, Luke, meanwhile, was just nine months old when his mother died and Will has brought him up alone and, despite the demands of his job, quite brilliantly ever since. Still single, though stalked by squadrons of women bearing both sympathy and, no doubt, Myla thongs, Will is an acquired taste but one worth acquiring. Alex, interestingly, is not remotely close to his big brother.

* Finally, in the kitchen – the only part of the house that references the twenty-first century because, despite the Aga, it’s surprisingly un-farmhouse-y and, with its limestone work surfaces and handle-less drawers and cupboards, rather more Bulthaup-y – I found Joan doing her usual bossy matriarchal thing alongside four young cooks hired for the occasion: tonight’s sit-down dinner for a hundred in a marquee which, I could now see through the French doors, was being erected, distractingly, by numerous topless men.

‘Darling. Susie. Just the woman. Come and kiss me. But I’m very floury.’

If Will is a taste worth acquiring then Joan is a taste that may well be a lifetime’s work, like learning to appreciate hundred-year-old eggs. On the surface we get on very well – she’s clever and funny (if Will is Nigel Junior then Joan is Isobel Senior) and very much the flame around which her family gathers for warmth. However, if she didn’t actually give birth to you and you try to get a bit too close then you’re always in danger of meeting a moth-like fate.

Af. . .