Текст книги "The Husband's Secret"

Автор книги: Liane Moriarty

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Текущая страница: 17 (всего у книги 25 страниц)

chapter thirty-four

Tess shifted in her seat and felt a pleasurable ache in her groin. Just how superficial are you? What happened to your supposedly broken heart? So, what, it takes you THREE DAYS to get over a marriage break-up? Here she was sitting at the St Angela’s Easter hat parade thinking about sex with one of the three parade judges, who was right now on the other side of the schoolyard wearing a giant pink baby’s bonnet tied under his chin and doing the chicken dance with a group of Year 6 boys.

‘Isn’t this lovely!’ said her mother beside her. ‘This is just lovely. I wish –’

She stopped, and Tess turned to study her.

‘You wish what?’

Lucy looked guilty. ‘I was just wishing that the circumstances were happier – that you and Will had decided to move to Sydney and that Liam was at St Angela’s and I could always come to his Easter hat parades. Sorry.’

‘You don’t need to be sorry,’ said Tess. ‘I wish that too.’

Did she wish that?

She turned her gaze back to Connor. The Year 6 boys were now laughing with such crazy abandon at something Connor had just said that Tess suspected fart jokes must be involved.

‘How was last night?’ said Lucy. ‘I forgot to ask. Actually, I didn’t even hear you come in.’

‘It was nice,’ said Tess. ‘Nice to catch up.’ She had a sudden image of Connor flipping her over and saying in her ear, ‘I seem to remember this used to work quite well for us.’

Even before, when he was a young boring accountant with a nerdy hairstyle, before he got the killer body and the motorbike, he’d been good in bed. Tess had been too young to appreciate it. She’d thought all sex was as good as that. She shifted again in her seat. She was probably about to get a bout of cystitis. That would teach her. The last time she’d had sex three times in a row, and not so coincidentally, the last time she’d got cystitis, was when she and Will had first started dating.

Thinking about Will and their early days together should hurt, but it didn’t, not right now at least. She felt light-headed with wicked, delicious sexual satisfaction and . . . what else? Vengeance, that was it. Vengeance is mine, sayeth Tess. Will and Felicity thought she was up here in Sydney nursing a broken heart, when in fact she was having excellent sex with her ex-boyfriend. Sex with an ex. It left married sex for dead. So there, Will.

‘Tess, my darling?’ said her mother.

‘Mmmm?’

Her mother lowered her voice. ‘Did something happen last night between you and Connor?’

‘Of course not,’ said Tess.

‘I couldn’t possibly,’ she’d said to Connor that third time, and he’d said, ‘I bet you could,’ and she’d murmured, ‘I couldn’t, I couldn’t, I couldn’t,’ over and over, until it was established that she could.

‘Tess O’Leary!’ said her mother, just as a Year 1 boy’s birdcage hat slipped from his head. Tess met her mother’s eyes and laughed.

‘Oh, darling.’ Lucy grabbed hold of her arm. ‘Good on you. The man is an absolute spunk.’

chapter thirty-five

‘Connor Whitby is in a very good mood today,’ said Samantha Green. ‘I wonder if that means he’s finally got himself a woman?’

Samantha Green, whose eldest child was in Year 6, did part-time bookkeeping work at the school. She charged by the hour, and Rachel suspected that St Angela’s would still pay for the time Samantha was spending outside the office next to Rachel watching the Easter hat parade. That was the problem with having one of the mums work for the school. Rachel couldn’t very well say, ‘Will you be billing us for this, Samantha?’ When she was only there for three hours, it really didn’t seem necessary for her to stop work to watch the parade. It wasn’t like her daughter was taking part. Of course Rachel didn’t have a child taking part either, and she’d stopped work to watch. Rachel sighed. She was feeling itchy and bitchy.

Rachel looked at Connor sitting at the judges’ table wearing his pink baby’s bonnet. There was something perverted about a grown man dressed up as a baby. He was making some of the older boys laugh. She thought of his malevolent face on that video. The murderous way he’d looked at Janie. Yes, it had been murderous. The police should arrange for a psychologist to look at the tape. Or some expert in face-reading. There were experts in everything these days.

‘I know the kids love him,’ said Samantha, who liked to wring a topic dry before she moved on to the next one. ‘And he’s always perfectly nice to us parents, but I always sensed something not quite right about that Connor Whitby. You know what I mean? Ooh! Look at Cecilia Fitzpatrick’s little girl! She’s just beautiful, isn’t she? I wonder where she gets it from. Anyway, my friend Janet Tyler went out with Connor a few times after her divorce and she said Connor was like a depressed person pretending not to be depressed. He dumped Janet in the end.’

‘Hmmm,’ said Rachel.

‘My mother remembers his mother,’ said Samantha. ‘She was an alcoholic. Neglected the kids. Father ran off when Connor was a baby. Gosh, who’s that with the birdcage on his head? The poor kid is going to lose it in a moment.’

Rachel could vaguely remember Trish Whitby turning up at church sometimes. The children were grubby. Trish scolded them too loudly during the service and people turned to stare.

‘I mean, a childhood like that has to have an impact on your personality, doesn’t it? Connor’s, I mean.’

‘Yes,’ said Rachel so adamantly that Samantha looked a bit taken aback.

‘But he’s in a good mood today,’ said Samantha, getting herself back on track. ‘I saw him in the car park earlier and I asked him how he was and he said, “Top of the world!” Now that sounds to me like a man in love. Or at least a man who got lucky last night. I must tell Janet. Well, I probably shouldn’t tell poor Janet. I think she quite liked him, even if he was strange. Oops! There goes the birdcage. Saw that coming.’

Top of the world.

Tomorrow was the anniversary of Janie’s death and Connor Whitby was feeling on top of the world.

chapter thirty-six

Cecilia decided to leave the parade early. She needed to be moving. When she sat still, she thought, and thinking was dangerous. Polly and Esther had both seen that she was there, and there was only the judging to follow, and Cecilia’s daughters weren’t going to win, because she’d told the judges last week (a thousand years ago) to make sure they didn’t. People got resentful if the Fitzpatrick girls won too many accolades; they suspected favouritism, making them even less likely to volunteer their time to the school.

She wouldn’t run again for P&C president after this year. The thought struck her with absolute certainty as she bent down to pick up her bag from next to her chair. It was a relief to know one thing for sure about her future. No matter what happened next, even if nothing happened, she would not run again. It simply wasn’t possible. She was no longer Cecilia Fitzpatrick. She’d ceased to exist the moment she’d read that letter.

‘I’m going,’ she said to Mahalia.

‘Yes, go home and rest,’ said Mahalia. ‘I thought you were about to faint away for a moment there. Keep the scarf. It looks lovely on you.’

As she walked through the quadrangle Cecilia saw Rachel Crowley watching the parade with Samantha Green on the balcony outside the school office. They were looking the other way. If she was quick about it, she’d get by without them seeing her.

‘Cecilia!’ cried Samantha.

‘Hi!’ cried Cecilia and let loose a string of violent profanities in her head. She walked towards them with her keys held prominently in her hand, so that they’d know she was in a rush, and stood as far away from them as could be considered polite.

‘Just the person I wanted to see!’ called Samantha, leaning over the balcony. ‘I thought you said I’d get that Tupperware order before Easter? It’s just that we’re having a picnic on Sunday, assuming this lovely weather holds! And so I thought –’

‘Of course,’ interrupted Cecilia. She stepped closer to them. Was this where she would normally stand? She’d completely forgotten about the deliveries she’d intended to do yesterday. ‘I’m so sorry. This week has been . . . tricky. I’ll come by this afternoon after I pick up the girls.’

‘Wonderful,’ said Samantha. ‘I mean you just got me so excited about that picnic set, I can’t wait to get my hands on it! Have you ever been to one of Cecilia’s Tupperware parties, Rachel? The woman could sell ice to Eskimos!’

‘I actually went to one of Cecilia’s parties the night before last,’ said Rachel. She smiled at Cecilia. ‘I had no idea how much Tupperware was missing from my life!’

‘Actually, Rachel, I can drop your order off at the same time if you like,’ said Cecilia.

‘Really?’ said Rachel. ‘I wasn’t expecting it so soon. Don’t you have to order it in?’

‘I keep extra stock of everything,’ said Cecilia. ‘Just in case.’ Why was she doing this?

‘Special overnight service for VIPs, eh?’ said Samantha, who would no doubt be storing this information away for future reference.

‘It’s no trouble,’ said Cecilia.

She went to meet Rachel’s eyes and found it was impossible, even from a safe distance like this. She was such a nice woman. Would it be easier to justify if she wasn’t nice? She pretended to be distracted by Mahalia’s scarf slipping from her shoulders.

‘If it suits, that would be lovely,’ said Rachel. ‘I’m taking a pavlova to my daughter-in-law’s place for lunch on Easter Sunday, so one of those storage thingummies would come in handy.’

Cecilia was pretty sure that Rachel hadn’t ordered anything that would be suitable for transporting a pavlova. She’d find something and give it to her for free. It’s okay, John-Paul, I gave your murder victim’s mother some free Tupperware, so everything is all squared up.

‘I’ll see you both this afternoon!’ she cried, waving her keys so energetically that they flew from her hand.

‘Oops-a-daisy!’ called Samantha.

chapter thirty-seven

Liam won second prize in the Easter hat parade.

‘Look what happens when you sleep with one of the judges,’ whispered Lucy.

‘Mum, shhh!’ hissed Tess, glancing over her shoulder for scandalised eavesdroppers. Besides, she didn’t want to think about Liam in relation to Connor. That confused everything. Liam and Connor belonged in separate boxes, on separate shelves, far, far away from each other.

She watched her small son shuffle across the playground to accept his gold trophy cup filled with tiny Easter eggs. He turned to look for Tess and Lucy with a thrilled, self-conscious smile.

Tess couldn’t wait to tell Will about it when they saw him this afternoon.

Wait. They wouldn’t be seeing him.

Well. They would ring him. Tess would speak in that cheerful, cold voice women used when they spoke to their ex-husbands in front of their children. Her own mother had used it. ‘Liam has good news!’ she’d tell Will, and then she’d pass Liam the phone and say, ‘Tell your dad what happened today!’ He wouldn’t be Daddy any more. He’d be ‘your dad’. Tess knew the drill. Oh God, did she know the drill.

It was hopeless to try and save the marriage for Liam’s sake. How ridiculous she’d been. Deluded. Thinking that it was simply a matter of strategy. From now on Tess would behave with dignity. She’d act as if this was an ordinary, run-of-the-mill, amicable separation that had been on the cards for years. Maybe it had been on the cards.

Because otherwise how could she have behaved the way she had last night? And how could Will have fallen in love with Felicity? There had to be problems in their marriage; problems that had been completely invisible to her, problems she still couldn’t name, but problems nonetheless.

What was the last thing she and Will had argued about? It would be useful right now to focus on the most negative aspects of her marriage. She forced her mind back. Their last argument was over Liam. The Marcus problem. ‘Maybe we should consider changing schools,’ Will had said after Liam had seemed particularly down about some incident in the schoolyard, and Tess had snapped, ‘That seems a bit dramatic!’ They’d had a heated disagreement while they were packing the dishwasher after dinner. Tess had slammed a few drawers. Will had made an ostentatious point of repacking the frying pan she’d just put in the dishwasher. She’d ended up saying something silly like, ‘So are you saying I don’t care about Liam as much as you do?’ and Will had yelled, ‘Don’t be an idiot!’

But they’d made up, just a few hours later. They’d both apologised and there had been no lingering bitterness. Will wasn’t a sulker. He was actually pretty good at negotiating a compromise. And he rarely lost his sense of humour or ability to laugh at himself. ‘Did you see the way I repacked your frypan?’ he said. ‘That was a masterstroke, eh? Put you in your place, didn’t it?’

For a moment Tess felt her strange inappropriate happiness teeter. It was as though she was balanced on a narrow crevice surrounded by chasms of grief. One wrong thought and down she’d tumble.

Do not think about Will. Think about Connor. Think about sex. Think wicked, earthy, primal thoughts. Think about the orgasm that ripped through your body last night, cleansing your mind.

She watched Liam walk back to his class. He stood next to the one child that Tess knew: Polly Fitzpatrick, Cecilia’s youngest daughter, who was shockingly beautiful, and seemed positively Amazonian next to spindly little Liam. Polly gave Liam a high-five, and Liam looked almost incandescent with happiness.

Dammit. Will had been right. Liam did need to change schools.

Tess’s eyes filled with tears, and she felt suddenly ashamed.

Why the shame, she wondered as she pulled a tissue from her bag and blew her nose.

Because her husband had fallen in love with someone else? Because she wasn’t lovable enough, or sexy enough, or something enough, to keep her child’s father satisfied?

Or was she actually ashamed about last night? Because she’d found a selfish way to make the pain disappear. Because right now she was longing to see Connor again, or more specifically, to sleep with him again, to have his tongue, his body, his hands obliterate the memory of Will and Felicity sitting on either side of her, telling her their horrible secret. She remembered the feel of the length of her spine being flattened against the floorboards in Connor’s hallway. He was fucking her, but really he was fucking them.

There was a burst of sweet feminine laughter from the row of pretty, chatty mothers sitting alongside Tess. Mothers who had proper married sex with their husbands in the marital bed. Mothers who were not thinking the word ‘fuck’ while they were watching their children’s Easter hat parade. Tess was ashamed because she wasn’t behaving as a selfless mother should.

Or perhaps she was ashamed because deep down she wasn’t that ashamed at all.

‘Thank you so much for joining us today, Mums and Dads, Grandmas and Grandpas! That concludes our Easter hat parade!’ said the school principal into the microphone. She put her head on one side and waggled her fingers around an imaginary carrot stick like Bugs Bunny. ‘That’s all folks!’

‘What do you want to do this afternoon?’ asked Lucy, as everyone applauded and laughed.

‘There are a few things I need at the shops.’ Tess stood and stretched and looked down at her mother in her wheelchair. She could feel Connor’s eyes on her from the opposite side of the yard.

She’d always felt somehow wronged by her parents’ divorce. As a child, she’d wasted hours imagining how much better her life would have been if her parents had stayed together. She would have had a closer relationship with her father. Holidays would have been so much more fun! She wouldn’t have been so shy (how she managed to rationalise this, she didn’t know). Everything would have been just generally better. But the truth was her parents had a perfectly amicable divorce, and eventually became relatively friendly. Sure, it was awkward and strange visiting her father every second weekend. But really, what was the big deal? Marriages failed. Children survived. Tess had survived. The so-called ‘damage’ was all in her mind.

She waved at Connor.

New lingerie was what she needed. Extremely expensive lingerie that her husband would never see.

chapter thirty-eight

Cecilia left the Easter hat parade and drove straight to the gym. She got on the treadmill, put the incline and speed up as high as they could go and ran as if she was running for her life. She ran until her heart pounded, her chest heaved and her vision blurred from the sweat dripping into her mouth. She ran until there wasn’t room for a single thought in her head. It was a wonderful relief to not be thinking, and she felt like she could have run on for another hour, if it wasn’t for one of the gym instructors stopping abruptly and quite unnecessarily in front of Cecilia’s treadmill and saying, ‘You okay there? You don’t look too good to me.’

‘I’m fine,’ Cecilia went to say, furious with him for bringing the real world crashing back into her consciousness, except that she couldn’t talk, or breathe actually, and at that instant both her legs turned to jelly. The instructor grabbed her around the waist and slammed the palm of his hand on the treadmill to stop it.

‘You’ve got to pace yourself, Mrs Fitzpatrick,’ he said, helping her off the treadmill. His name was Dane. He taught a weights class that was popular with the St Angela’s crowd. Cecilia often did it on a Friday morning before her weekly grocery shop. Dane’s skin was young and dewy. He looked about the same age as John-Paul had been when he killed Janie Crowley. ‘I reckon your blood pressure is sky-high right now,’ he said, his eyes bright and earnest. ‘If you want, I could help you work out a training programme that would –’

‘No thank you,’ panted Cecilia. ‘But thank you, I’m just, well, I’m just leaving actually.’ She walked away quickly on wobbly legs, still fighting for breath, sweat pooling in her bra, ignoring Dane’s entreaties to do a few stretches, to cool-down, to at least drink some water, Mrs Fitzpatrick, you’ve gotta rehydrate!

On the way home she decided that she couldn’t live another moment with this, it was impossible. John-Paul would have to confess. He’d turned her into a criminal. It was preposterous. While she was in the shower, she decided that confessing wouldn’t bring Janie back and Cecilia’s daughters would lose their father and what was the point of that? But their marriage was dead. She couldn’t live with him. So that was that.

While she was getting dressed she made her final decision. John-Paul would turn himself into the police after the Easter break, give Rachel Crowley the answers she deserved and the girls would just have to live with an incarcerated father.

As she blow-dried her hair, it was suddenly blindingly obvious to her that her beautiful daughters were all that mattered, were her only priority and that she still loved John-Paul, and she’d promised to be true to him in good times and bad, and life would go on as it always had. He had made a tragic mistake when he was seventeen. There was no need to do or say or change anything.

The phone was ringing when she turned off the hairdryer. It was John-Paul.

‘I just wanted to see how you are,’ he said gently. It was like he thought she was ill. Or, no, it was like she was suffering from a uniquely female psychological condition, something that was making her fragile and crazy.

‘Marvellous,’ she said. ‘I feel just marvellous. Thanks for asking.’

chapter thirty-nine

‘Happy Easter!’ said Trudy to Rachel as they packed up the office that afternoon. ‘Here, I got you a little something.’

‘Oh!’ said Rachel, touched and annoyed, because it hadn’t occurred to her to get a present for Trudy. There had never been any exchanging of gifts with the old school principal. They’d rarely exchanged pleasantries.

Trudy handed over a charming little basket filled with a variety of delicious-looking eggs. It looked like the sort of thing Rachel’s daughter-in-law would buy her: expensive, elegant and just right.

‘Thank you so much, Trudy, I didn’t –’ She waved her hand to indicate her absence of a gift.

‘No, no.’ Trudy waved back to indicate it wasn’t necessary. She’d stayed in her bunny suit for the entire day, and looked, Rachel thought, perfectly ridiculous. ‘I just want you to know how much I appreciate the work you do, Rachel. You carry this whole office, and you let me be . . . me.’ She lifted one of her rabbit ears out of her eyes and gave Rachel a level look. ‘I’ve had some secretaries who found my working approach somewhat unusual.’

I bet they did, thought Rachel.

‘You make it all about the children,’ said Rachel. ‘That’s who we’re here for.’

‘Well, you have a lovely Easter break,’ said Trudy. ‘Enjoy some time with that scrumptious grandson of yours.’

‘I will,’ said Rachel. ‘Are you . . . going away?’

Trudy didn’t have a husband or children or any interests that Rachel knew of outside the school. There were never any phone calls of a personal nature. It was hard to imagine how she’d be spending the Easter break.

‘Just faffing about,’ said Trudy. ‘I read a lot. Love a good whodunnit! I pride myself on guessing who the murderer is – oh!’

Her face turned bright pink with distress.

‘I quite like historical fiction myself,’ said Rachel quickly, avoiding her eye and pretending to be busily distracted with picking up her bag and coat and Easter basket.

‘Ah.’ Trudy couldn’t recover her equilibrium. Her eyes filled with tears.

The poor girl was only fifty, not that much older than what Janie would have been. Her kooky grey wispy hair made her look like an elderly toddler.

‘It’s fine, Trudy,’ said Rachel softly. ‘You didn’t upset me. It’s perfectly fine.’