The Half Sister, page 14
She doesn’t even know what she’s asking herself. ‘The pub,’ she says.
‘Oh, you know . . .’
‘No, I don’t,’ she says.
He turns to look at her as he unfastens his tie. ‘I’m detecting a little jealousy,’ he says.
Kate can’t help but flinch at the irony of his statement.
‘Or is it regret?’ he asks, smiling.
‘Regret at what?’ she says sharply.
‘That you turned down my invitation to go for a drink on a lovely summer’s evening.’ He looks at her with raised eyebrows. ‘You should have come – you would have enjoyed it.’
She wouldn’t bet on it. ‘Who was there?’
He turns away from her again and goes into the en suite bathroom. ‘Oh, you know, just the usual lot.’
If Kate hadn’t seen her husband flirting with a woman in a pub, if she hadn’t known it was the woman who was causing the destruction of her family, then perhaps she wouldn’t have noticed the flippant, ‘Oh you know . . .’ A sure sign that he’s on the back foot.
‘Who? Ben, Jamie . . .?’ she asks.
‘Yeah,’ he calls out from the bathroom. ‘They came a bit later, along with a few of the others.’
‘So, what? You were a Norman No-mates until they arrived,’ she says, piling on the pressure.
These were not the jealous thoughts she was used to having. This was not the kind of marriage they had. Kate prided herself on being a laid-back wife, at one with her husband’s career, friends and social life, on the rare occasion it didn’t include her. Whilst her girlfriends bickered and bitched about their partners going out without them, berating them when they dared to return later than 10 p.m., she would smugly declare that she trusted Matt with every bone in her body.
Now, she can’t shake off the ominous feeling that her complacency might be about to turn around and bite her on the behind.
‘No, a couple of us were there,’ he says. ‘Including the new junior reporter. You should have come; you’d have liked her. She reminds me of you when you were first starting out.’
Kate’s head feels as if it’s about to explode. She doesn’t know whether she feels relieved or even more suspicious. Jess is the girl he employed?
‘How’s she getting on?’ Kate asks.
‘Really good,’ he says. ‘She’s got a good nose for a story.’
‘What was her name again?’ Even she can hear the forced nonchalance in her voice. She holds her breath, waiting for him to answer.
‘Jess,’ he says. And in that moment, she flips the resounding question of, What the hell is he playing at? to What the hell is she playing at? There’s nothing to suggest that he knows anything more than he’s letting on, but it’s too much of a coincidence to think that Jess just happened to get a job with Matt.
‘You okay?’ he asks, as he comes back in and lies on top of the bed naked. ‘You look a bit pale.’
She nods, consumed by the unsettling feeling that Jess is up to something. There’s no doubt in Kate’s mind that she knows what she’s doing – the problem is, what is it?
Matt reaches across and pulls her into him, but although nothing’s changed between them, she can’t help but feel that everything’s different. If she doesn’t recoil from him physically, she ashamedly shirks from him emotionally, knowing it’s not his fault, but blaming him all the same.
‘You’d tell me if something was wrong, wouldn’t you?’ he asks, as if able to sense it.
‘Of course,’ she says, whilst wondering where she’d even begin.
As soon as she hears Matt’s breathing change, she slides herself out from underneath his arm, looking back to check he’s asleep. She pads quietly to his side of the bed and carefully unplugs his phone. Their pin codes for everything have always been the date of their wedding anniversary, and although they’ve often joked that they’re a criminal’s dream, right now she’s thankful that he hasn’t changed it.
There’s just enough light filtering in from outside for Kate to make her way into the living room, avoiding the brutal corners of the coffee table, to sit on the sofa. She opens up Matt’s emails and runs her eyes down the list, waiting for something or someone to jump out. She tells herself she doesn’t know what she’s looking for, except she does. As her eyes dart over anonymous names and meaningless subject headings, she can no longer tell whether her stomach is churning with nausea because she’s pregnant or because she’s doing something she never believed she’d do.
Kate is immediately drawn to the numerous emails from ‘jessica.linley@theecho.com’, which prove that she works with Matt. Seeing the evidence that he was telling the truth in black and white is a relief. The content is innocent enough, as they bounce back and forth on news items and feature ideas, but they tell her nothing more of who Jess really is, or where she’s from. Kate’s eyes trail down the list, looking for something more.
She searches for Jess’s name and finds more correspondence under the subject heading of ‘Junior Reporter’. Sent from a personal email address, Kate is taken aback by the image that fills the screen as she clicks on the attached CV, shocked to be face to face with the woman who calls herself her half sister. There’s a familiarity about her dirty blonde shoulder-length hair, wide-set eyes and straight nose, but Kate tries to convince herself that it’s because they’ve already met. She will not allow the resemblance to Lauren to infiltrate her brain.
The covering letter, addressed to Mr Walker, is innocuous enough, with no mention of any supposed connection. As Matt had said, it seems she’d come straight from university in Bournemouth, where she’d studied journalism. Now, Jess says in her letter, I want to work on the country’s top-selling newspaper. Kate groans at the attempted flattery, before forwarding the email onto herself and deleting it from Matt’s sent box.
‘Kate!’
She jumps up, banging her calf into the ‘bastard’ coffee table and biting down on her tongue to stop herself from screaming out.
‘What are you doing?’ asks Matt. She can just make out his silhouette in the doorway.
‘I was just . . .’ she starts, as his phone burns a hole in her hand.
‘Couldn’t you sleep?’
‘I . . . erm . . . no.’ The panic of getting past him to put his phone back onto his bedside table is messing with her ability to talk. ‘I had a headache.’
‘But you’re okay now?’
‘Yes,’ she says, thankful that it’s dark and he can’t see the guilt written all over her face.
‘What time is it?’ he asks. ‘I couldn’t find my phone.’
‘Erm, around midnight I think,’ she mumbles. ‘Here, let me help you.’ She scurries past him into the bedroom and rushes round to his side of the bed.
‘It might help if we put the light on,’ he says, flicking the switch.
Kate instantly falls to her hands and knees.
‘Are you sure you’re okay?’ Matt asks.
No, she’s not okay. Her heart’s thumping through her chest and she feels sick at how he will react if he finds her with his phone. Not because he knows there’s anything incriminating on there, but because she’s breached the trust that they’ve always shared.
‘Here it is!’ she exclaims, far too loudly. ‘You must have knocked it onto the floor.’
‘Oh,’ is all he says, but it’s enough to let her know that he doesn’t believe her.
23
Kate
Kate’s sleep is interspersed with vivid dreams of Matt, Lauren and her mum and dad, each of them vying for screen time in her head. They all float in and out, in various guises – unrecognizable as the humans they are, yet it is still somehow immediately obvious who’s who. The only cast member who looks like her real self is Jess, who is ensconced in the corner of a room, beckoning the family members over, one by one, to whisper to them. When it’s Matt’s turn, she holds his face and kisses him, long and deep, all the while looking at Kate.
When the alarm clock goes off, Kate hits the snooze button, hoping that she’ll be thrown back into the dream for just long enough to see what happens in the end. But Matt’s already moaning beside her and she feels an intense hatred for him, still so hurt by what he’d done in the dream that she’s momentarily unable to separate it from reality.
‘I didn’t get a wink of sleep,’ he says, though Kate knows that’s not strictly true, as she heard him quietly snoring at least three times. ‘It’s so bloody hot – there’s just no air.’
Kate sits up slowly, as if trying to fool her body into thinking she doesn’t feel well. She groans, for effect, as she lets her head fall heavily onto her bent knees.
‘Do you feel rough?’ asks Matt, leaning over to her side of the bed to rub her back.
She goes to speak, but clamps her mouth shut and nods instead.
‘Okay, you need to lie back down,’ says Matt. ‘Slowly.’ He supports her as she lowers herself back onto the mattress. ‘I’ll go and get a bucket.’
As Kate closes her eyes, a replay of her dream flickers on the inside of her eyelids, the image of Matt and Jess branding itself on her memory. She hopes, like most dreams, that it will have all but eradicated itself by lunchtime.
‘Here,’ says Matt, fetching in the spare washing-up bowl from under the kitchen sink and laying it down on the floor beside the bed.
It feels like she’s a child again, feigning illness to get off going to school. Her father would take one look at her hot red face, burnt by the radiator, and send her straight back to bed. Her mother wasn’t quite so easy to deceive and would watch her through narrowed eyes as she took her temperature with a thermometer.
‘Why don’t you take the day off?’ says Matt. ‘You can’t possibly drag yourself in like this.’
‘Mmm, I think I might,’ she manages through closed lips.
How ironic that as soon as she makes the decision, a rumbling of nausea circles in the pit of her stomach – like a washing machine on a slow spin.
She watches as Matt gets himself ready for work and can’t help wondering what he’s thinking as he selects the tie he’s going to wear. What would he say if she told him who his junior reporter really was? Would he be surprised? Would he pull her on it? Would he fire her on the spot?
But then Kate is forced to admit to herself that as of yet, Jess hasn’t actually done anything wrong. In fact, she’s probably the model employee, but if she’s expecting Kate to believe that this is all nothing but a huge coincidence, then she’s got another think coming.
‘Does this go?’ asks Matt, holding a pink and grey striped tie up against himself. It works well with his white shirt and charcoal suit. Better than the red one in his other hand.
‘I’d go for the red one,’ says Kate, just to be difficult.
He immediately swaps them over. ‘Are you going to be okay?’ he asks, his face full of concern. ‘I’m going to struggle to get in early tonight – the Prime Minister’s called a press conference up in Birmingham and God knows what crap they’re going to announce. Do you want me to see if I can shoot back at lunchtime?’
Kate shakes her head. ‘No, I’ll be fine. I’ll wait for this to pass and see how I feel. I’ve got some work I can do from here anyway.’
He leans in and kisses the top of her head. ‘Okay, look after yourself, and that little one,’ he says, smiling. ‘Hopefully this won’t go on for too much longer and you can start to enjoy being pregnant.’
As soon as Matt leaves, Kate grabs her phone and pulls up Jess’s CV from her emails. She quickly scans the salient points before putting a call into Bournemouth University. She doesn’t know what she’s looking for or expecting to find, but she refuses to sit by and allow this woman to railroad her life.
‘Hello, Student Verification,’ says the cheery voice at the other end of the line, far quicker than Kate had anticipated.
‘Oh hi, I’m looking to employ one of your former students and I’m calling for a reference.’
‘I’d be very happy to do that for you,’ says the woman. ‘But I will need signed consent from the former student in order to release the information.’
‘Of course,’ says Kate, her job having taught her to bend the rules when necessary. ‘I have that already, but I do need this quite urgently.’
‘We can normally turn it around in five days.’
Kate was hoping to get the clarification she needed over the phone, but she doesn’t get the impression that this jobsworth will court such an impetuous request.
‘Ah, that’s going to be too late I’m afraid,’ says Kate. ‘Listen, I’m in the area today, is there any chance I can pop in? I’d hate not to be able to offer your student this opportunity just because I’ve been a bit slow on the uptake.’
And because you’re hemmed in by bureaucracy, she says to herself.
‘Well, we wouldn’t normally accept requests made to the office in person.’
‘I appreciate that, but I’m really up against it here. It’s totally my fault, but if there’s any way . . .’
‘Okay,’ says the woman reluctantly. ‘But I can’t promise anything. If the office is particularly busy, we might not be able to do it there and then.’
‘That’s a chance I’m prepared to take,’ says Kate cheerily.
‘If you’d like to give me the student’s name now, I can put it onto the system. It might quicken it up for you and then you only need to show their consent when you come in.’
‘That’s great,’ says Kate over-enthusiastically. ‘It’s Jessica Linley.’
She puts the phone down and types out a two-line letter using Jess’s address, prints it out and signs it. How that constitutes consent, Kate doesn’t know. But it’s clear that Jess isn’t playing by the rules, so why should she?
It’s predicted to be a record-breaking July temperature today and, in typical British fashion, the DJ on the radio is warning people to stay indoors and check on vulnerable neighbours. Kate wonders how other countries manage to keep functioning when the thermometer goes over thirty degrees, whilst London’s train tracks are buckling and its roads are melting. It’s menial thoughts like this that keep her from tearing her hair out, as she tries to figure out what Jess is up to.
She chooses a floral jumpsuit, with cap sleeves and three-quarter length trousers, in the hope that it will keep her cool on the two-and-a-half-hour train journey. The fabric is light, and the belt can be tied loosely around her waist to allow for its daily expansion.
Even though Kate knows where Bournemouth is on the map, she’s still surprised to find the train speeding through the New Forest, a place where she spent many family holidays as a young girl. The pink heathers that adorn the heathlands take her back to the house they rented in Lyndhurst, where they’d have ponies join them in the back garden as they had picnics. The four of them would rent bikes and cycle through the ancient woodland that was peppered with three-hundred-year-old trees and grazing deer.
But the happy memories are suddenly overpowered by the events of their last holiday here, when Kate remembers an almighty row between Lauren and their dad. She could only have been twelve, but never had the four-year age gap between her and her sister felt wider. Whilst Kate was still studying diligently, Lauren had ‘gone off the rails’, in her mother’s words. Rose would never have said that to her daughter’s face, but it was certainly the opinion she’d aired to Harry after a particularly unpleasant slanging match.
‘I don’t care what you say,’ Lauren had shouted. ‘This is my life and I love him and he loves me.’
‘But darling,’ said Harry, in his best placating voice, ‘you’re only sixteen. You’ve got your whole life ahead of you.’
‘You met Mum when she was sixteen,’ said Lauren defiantly. ‘And that seems to have worked out okay.’
‘But times are different,’ said Harry. ‘You’ve got so many more opportunities. You can go anywhere. Be anyone.’
‘I don’t want to go anywhere or be anyone. I want to be with him. It’s our decision and there’s nothing you can do to stop me.’ Kate had sat at the top of the stairs as the whole house reverberated when Lauren slammed the front door.
‘What are we going to do?’ Rose had cried.
‘It’s her decision,’ said Harry resignedly. ‘I don’t see what else we can do.’
‘You have to do something,’ said Rose. ‘We can’t let her ruin her life.’
‘But if that’s what she wants to do . . .’
‘I will not allow this man . . . this boy,’ Rose had spat, ‘to destroy all her dreams. She wanted to go to university. She wanted to go to America. She wanted to be a journalist. She wanted to be so many things, and now she’ll be none of them.’
Harry had taken Rose into his arms. ‘You make it sound as if her life is over,’ he’d half laughed.
‘What kind of father lets his sixteen-year-old daughter throw it all away on a whim?’ said Rose.
‘I don’t know what you want me to do.’
‘She’s gone off the rails and it’s your job to pull her back in.’
Kate didn’t know what he’d done, but Lauren was never the same again.
‘Are you going to the coast for the day or are you on your way home?’ asks the lady sat opposite Kate, interrupting her thoughts. She hadn’t noticed her there before – she must have got on at the last station, when Kate was immersed in the memory.
‘I’m just going to Bournemouth for the day,’ she says, smiling politely, a little part of her hoping that it will be enough to signal the end of the conversation. If only to save Kate from having to explain what she’s doing there.
‘It’s a lovely part of the world, isn’t it?’ says the woman, nodding her head at the window. ‘I don’t know how you townies live amongst all that smoke and noise.’
‘It’s exhilarating at times,’ says Kate. ‘But then I come somewhere like this and I suddenly realize what I’m missing out on.’
The woman smiles. ‘Well, you’ve certainly got the weather for it. You’ll be seeing the south coast at its best. Are you visiting family?’
Despite knowing the question might well be asked, Kate is still caught off guard when it is.
