The Guest, page 2
“Exhaustion. I was too tired to help Laure change the sheets.”
He came to sit beside her and bounced up and down, testing the mattress.
“It seems quite comfortable,” he remarked. “I don’t think I’ve ever slept in here before.”
“Once, when you had that awful bout of flu.”
“Oh yes, I remember.”
Iris reached over and flipped back the covers on his side of the bed. “Come on, let’s get some sleep.”
He climbed in and turned off the bedside light. In the dark, they lapsed into silence.
“What are you thinking?” Iris asked.
“That this bed isn’t as comfortable as ours.” Sensing Iris’s smile, he sighed. “I’m thinking about Pierre, about him having a child, a daughter. I’m thinking—when? How old is she? Did Laure tell you?”
“Not exactly. She thought that maybe Pierre had some sort of mid-life crisis and that the birth was recent. But apparently, the daughter is older. He said it was a one-night stand. I can’t work out if that’s better or worse.”
“Better for Laure maybe, but not for the child.” Gabriel’s voice was grim. “Has Pierre had any contact with his child, or the mother, since?”
“Not since he discovered he was the father—at least that’s what he told Laure.”
“Then why say something now? Why not let sleeping dogs lie?”
“Maybe he had a crisis of conscience.”
“Or regrets. He and Laure never wanted children, did they?”
“No. Well, Pierre didn’t and Laure went along with it because she loved him. If he’d wanted ten kids, she’d have accepted it.”
“Really?” Iris sensed Gabriel frown. “Did she tell you that?”
“Yes, last year, when she hit forty.”
She shifted closer to him, hoping he would put his arms around her and draw her close. But he moved too, rolling from his back onto his side, and lay facing the wall. It was new, this turning away from her. Before, they would start their sleep with him curled around her, his chin resting on the top of her head, his arm across her body, anchoring her to him. Now, she was the one to curl around him. Not only that, he’d taken to wearing a T-shirt in bed, whereas before, he would sleep bare-chested. It was as if he hoped this thin material barrier would dampen any desire she might have for him.
Soon, his breathing deepened and to stop herself from worrying about him, about them, Iris turned her thoughts to Laure and Pierre. She and Gabriel had met them in the Bahamas twenty years before, where she and Gabriel had gone to celebrate their first wedding anniversary. Laure and Pierre had been on their honeymoon, and the two couples had hit it off immediately. Iris had been enchanted by Laure; petite in build, with straight brown hair that fell midway down her back in a glossy sheet and inky eyes framed by long lashes that almost touched her fringe, Laure was the epitome of a chic Parisienne. She had a neat nose that turned up ever so slightly at the end, and her lips were so naturally red it seemed she was permanently wearing lipstick. Once Iris got to know her, she’d been surprised to learn that Laure never wore makeup and realized it would be the equivalent of someone scribbling over a beautiful painting.
Their friendship had strengthened over the years, with a weekend visit every couple of months, and a holiday together once a year. They had keys for each other’s homes. Pierre sometimes traveled for his job, and if Laure was joining him for the weekend, Iris would get a cheery email: The flat will be free for the last weekend in the month, if you want a break in Paris. Likewise, if Iris and Gabriel were going away, they would let Laure and Pierre know that their house was free. It was why Laure had felt able to move in while they were in Scotland; Iris had messaged to tell them they’d be away. It was the first time they hadn’t had any advance warning—Yes, wonderful, thank you, we’d love to use the house for a few days!—but Laure understandably had had other things on her mind.
Restless, Iris latched onto the rhythm of Gabriel’s breathing, hoping it would draw her into sleep. But before it could, he moved quietly from her arms, slid silently from the bed and left the room, closing the door softly behind him. She listened to where his footsteps took him; along the landing, past their bedroom where Laure was sleeping, and down the stairs.
She fought the instinct to go after him. If he’d wanted to talk, he would have woken her.
3
In the quiet of the house, in the dark of the night, Gabriel paced the sitting-room floor, softly treading a path from wall to window and back again, acknowledging how he had taken for granted the ease at which he used to fall asleep. Tired in both mind and body at the end of a crushingly busy day at the surgery, he would be out like a light as soon as his head touched the pillow. But for the past two months, since finding Charlie in the quarry, sleep had evaded him. And now there was more grief to keep him awake.
He couldn’t get his head around Pierre having a child. He’d wanted to phone Pierre, to offer his support, act as a buffer between his two friends, but Laure had persuaded him not to. She’d said to wait until tomorrow, and he had respected that, mainly because by then it was past midnight in France. There’d been something else stopping him. Laure had apparently walked out of their flat in Paris last Sunday, which meant Pierre had had six days to phone him, had he wanted to talk. But he hadn’t called. Perhaps he was afraid that Gabriel would judge him. He wouldn’t, of course—although when he thought back to the conversations they’d had when Pierre heard of yet another friend who’d been having an affair, Pierre had always been outraged. Maybe he didn’t class a one-night stand as an affair. But in Gabriel’s book, a betrayal was a betrayal, whether it lasted a few hours, a few months or a few years.
Gabriel paused in his pacing and gave a sigh so heartfelt it was almost a groan. The word “betrayal” brought back the guilt he’d felt earlier when he’d told Iris he preferred to come home instead of stopping overnight in York. He’d known what Iris had planned, and had enough self-awareness to know that he wouldn’t be able to go through with the romantic evening, and night, that she would have been expecting. For some reason, since finding Charlie, he hadn’t been able to make love to his wife.
He continued his restless pacing, another worry presenting itself to him. How was he going to be able to cope with being at home for the next however many months until his colleagues deemed him fit to resume his duties?
“Take your time,” they’d said. “We have a locum to cover for you, we can cope. Don’t come back before you’re ready.”
“Two months,” he’d said grudgingly. “I’ll take two months off but no more.”
He hadn’t seen it coming. Burnout had crept up on him slowly, insidiously, suffusing him with a mounting dread, first the dread of trying to keep on top of his workload, then the dread of the ever-increasing demands of his patients and not being able to do his best for them, then the dread of actually going into the surgery. It had come to a head one Wednesday when he hadn’t been able to get out of bed, when the thought of the day in front of him had overwhelmed him to the point of terror. He knew he needed a break; he hadn’t taken any holiday for almost a year. When the other partners in the practice told him they didn’t want to see him back at work for months, he’d been shocked. But he wasn’t the first of them to have suffered from burnout, and he suspected he wouldn’t be the last.
They’d talked to him about doing something for himself, finding a new hobby. He used to enjoy running and would often go for a run before work, when dawn was just breaking, and the world silent and still. That was how he’d found Charlie in the quarry. He hadn’t been running since.
Gabriel understood that if he was to get better, he would need to keep himself busy both mentally and physically, but he couldn’t think how. He was also worried about getting under Iris’s feet. She was an interior designer, and was used to spending a large part of the day working in the office they’d created for her in one of the outbuildings. He didn’t want her to feel that she should be spending time with him.
He and Iris had been lucky in their twenty plus years of marriage. They’d met when she joined the squash club where he played a couple of times a week. She was twenty at the time and still at university, and Gabriel twenty-six, and three years later, they had married. Two years after that, they’d been blessed with the birth of Beth. Gabriel would have liked to have more children but it had been a difficult pregnancy. Iris had had terrible sickness, not just in the morning but throughout the day, which had left her clinically depressed. She hadn’t wanted to go through it again and Gabriel couldn’t blame her.
When Beth had been born, and the midwife had handed her to Gabriel, he’d been overwhelmed by a flood of emotions.
“Happy?” Iris had asked him, noticing his tears, and Gabriel had told her that yes, he was, because after those difficult nine months, the baby was finally there. But there had been more to his tears, because at the very moment he’d held Beth, so tiny and fragile, in his arms, he couldn’t understand why they had decided to have her, when one day she would die. He had never shared this darkness with anyone and, eventually, it had gone away. Until Charlie Ingram.
Maybe if he hadn’t known Charlie, his death wouldn’t have affected him so much. But he had instantly recognized, in the bruised and battered almost-adult face, traces of the boy he used to coach at football, back in the days when he was a volunteer at Beth’s primary school on Saturday mornings. He’d sometimes chatted to Charlie’s mum, Maggie. Like Beth, Charlie was an only child, and when Gabriel had seen the light leaving Charlie’s eyes, the terrible darkness he had felt at Beth’s birth had come back. Would Maggie have gone ahead and given birth to Charlie if she’d known she’d have to go through the pain of losing him eighteen years later? The answer had to be yes, because of the joy Charlie would have brought Maggie during those eighteen years. But if it were Beth—well, Gabriel didn’t know. Somehow, the immense joy she had brought him over the last nineteen years made it harder for him to accept that one day, she would die.
He stopped his pacing and shook his head vigorously, wanting to rid his mind of thoughts of Beth dying. Weary, he slumped in a chair. He would have liked to go back to bed but he was afraid to, afraid that if Iris woke, and reached for him, he would have to hurt her feelings by turning his back on her. There were other bedrooms; he could sleep in one of those instead.
4
Iris tiptoed down the stairs to the kitchen, careful not to wake either Gabriel or Laure. Gabriel hadn’t come back to bed last night; she presumed he’d slept in the other guest room.
Yawning, she reached for the kettle, filled it with water and switched it on. The hiss of air bubbles joined the hum of the fridge, the sounds too loud in the early morning silence.
The door opened, making her jump.
“Hello.” Laure was standing there, wearing one of Iris’s navy T-shirts tucked into a pair of her white tennis shorts, tightened at the waist with a belt to stop them from slipping down. The too-big clothes only enhanced Laure’s vulnerability; even in the misery of her situation, she managed to look beautiful, her dark eyes bright with unshed tears. “I thought I heard you down here.”
Iris pushed all thoughts of a quiet cup of tea from her mind and gave Laure a hug, conscious that her friend was showered and dressed while she was still in her dressing gown. “I couldn’t sleep.”
“Me neither.”
“Tea?”
Laure gathered her hair into her hands, pulled it over her right shoulder and twisted it nervously. “Please.”
They made their tea the way each of them wanted—Laure’s without milk—and carried it through to the sitting room where they would be more comfortable for the heart-to-heart chat Iris knew they were going to have.
“Is this okay?” she asked, pulling the low table nearer to the sofa so that their tea and phones were within easy reach.
“Perfect.”
Laure settled at one end of the sofa, Iris at the other, their legs drawn up onto the cushions so that their feet met in the middle. As Laure reached for her mug, the early morning sun streaming through the window burnished her hair a rich mahogany.
“How are you?” Iris asked.
Laure took a careful sip of her too-hot tea. “Hurt. Confused. He said he never wanted children. Maybe if we’d had some, I wouldn’t be feeling so betrayed.”
“How did you find out that he has a child?” Iris asked, because Laure had been so tearful last night it had been hard to follow the actual sequence of events.
Laure cupped her hands around her mug. “I first knew something was wrong after the holiday we spent with his family at Easter. It was to celebrate his mother’s seventieth birthday so all Pierre’s cousins were there with their children, and his sister with her four children. It was lovely, but always after these holidays, Pierre and I joke about the lucky escape we had, because we are exhausted from playing with his nieces and nephews. I like that we joke about it, I need to hear Pierre say it, because sometimes when I see all the families together, I’ve wished that we’d had children. But when I see how relieved he is that we didn’t go down that road, the sadness I feel goes away because I know we did the right thing in deciding not to have any. At least, for him,” she added, gulping back tears. “But then, after those holidays, he became very quiet and I thought it was something to do with his work. I kept asking him what the matter was but he said he was fine. It got to the point where he was no longer talking to me and last week, I said that I wished we’d had some children because at least I’d have someone to talk to. I was trying to make a joke, because I needed to see him smile; I was trying to get him back to how he used to be. And that’s when he told me.”
“What did he say?” Iris asked, struck that for the last couple of months, both their husbands had been in crisis.
Laure put her mug down on the low table, took a tissue from her sleeve and blew her nose delicately.
“He just turned and looked at me and asked me how I would feel if he told me that he had a child. My first reaction was that he was joking. Then I saw something on his face and it made me so scared. It was like—desperation. And I thought, this is real, this is not a joke, and I knew we’d reached a defining moment in our marriage and that I needed to stay calm and say the right thing.”
“And did you?” Iris asked, trying to think of what the right thing would have been. “Stay calm?”
Laure gave a little laugh. “No, of course not. I was so upset that I couldn’t be nice or reasonable. I thought it was recent, that the baby had been born a few weeks before, it would have explained why Pierre had been withdrawn for the last couple of months. But then he told me that it had happened some years ago.”
Iris’s mobile buzzed, interrupting Laure. She glanced at the screen and saw a message from Beth: Hi Mum, free for a chat? She hesitated, torn between her daughter and her friend, but answering Beth at this point in Laure’s story felt rude. Reaching out, she turned off her phone.
“So how did Pierre know about the baby? You said yesterday that it was a one-night stand and that he hadn’t kept in contact with the mother.”
Laure nodded. “Apparently, a few months ago, he bumped into the woman in Paris. She was with a child and Pierre said that as soon as he looked at her, he felt this connection and immediately knew that she was his. But when he asked, the woman denied it; she was annoyed that he should think it just because they’d slept together once. Pierre apologized and suggested they had a coffee together for old times’ sake. And while they were sitting on the terrace of Les Deux Magots, while the mother wasn’t looking, he took a stray hair from the child’s head and used it for a DNA test.”
“What?” Iris couldn’t keep the shock from her voice. “Can he do that? I mean, is it legal? Without the mother knowing or giving her consent?”
“I don’t know.” Laure gave a Gallic shrug. “I don’t think it’s against the law.”
“So what does Pierre intend to do, now that he knows the child is his?”
“I don’t know. He says he wants to be involved in her life, because he has already missed so much of it. But he doesn’t want to make trouble for the woman.”
“He already has, by telling you.”
“I almost wish he hadn’t, because then I wouldn’t have had to leave. But I couldn’t stay, I couldn’t bear to look at him.” Laure reached for her mug, took another sip. “It was all right me coming here, wasn’t it? Now that Mum has moved in with her new man, I didn’t feel I could go to her, especially when I don’t particularly like him. I didn’t want to stay with any of my friends in Paris as I didn’t want them to know, and anyway, I wanted to get as far away from Pierre as I could.”
“I’m glad you felt you could come here. But what about your job?”
“I called and told them I’d had a personal crisis and asked to take the rest of my holiday allowance. I’ve been here a week now so I’m due back at work on Monday the twenty-seventh. Is that okay?”
Iris made a quick calculation; three weeks. She gave Laure a smile. “Of course.”
“I thought at first it might be Claire.”
“Sorry?” Iris said, her mind still on the three weeks.
“I think Claire might be the child’s mother.”
“Claire?” Iris frowned, thinking of Pierre’s childhood friend who, on finding herself on her own at the age of forty and desperate for a child, had conceived her daughter using a sperm donor.
“Yes. Pierre said it wasn’t, he was angry when I suggested it, and when I said I would ask Claire myself, he became even angrier. I asked him to tell me who she was, this woman he had slept with and who had borne his child, and he said it was someone he’d met on a business trip, that they had got drunk and had ended up sleeping together.”
“So why do you still think it’s Claire?”
Laure gave a hollow laugh. “How can I believe anything Pierre tells me when he has lied to me for the past six years?”
“Is that how old his child is?”
