‘Yes, of course you do. I was forgetting.’ He frowned, and the hollows under his eyes deepened alarmingly. This was a man who was hoping to be mistaken, who was grappling with a mystery he suspected he had no hope of solving.
‘How long had it been brewing?’
He shrugged and took refuge in flippancy. ‘Who knows what goes on in my wife’s mind?’
I searched for a clue to Paige’s decision. Had Martin beaten her up? Demanded that she become a sex slave? I tried the obvious line. ‘You can go a bit mad after having a baby. I did. You feel so unsettled and unsure.’
‘Paige?’ he said. ‘Never.’
Yet his bewilderment and hurt were so profound that I could almost touch them. ‘Paige feels I don’t pay enough attention to the children but apparently I demand too much from her. She says she has enough children to look after. She needs to concentrate on them and I get in the way’
Despite the sun warming my back, I felt cold. ‘Martin, Paige has gone mad. Are you sure the doctor is keeping an eye on her?’
‘As far as I know, but I’ve been away quite a lot.’ He pushed aside his untouched coffee. ‘It’s a battlefield at home, but Paige is sane and well. I’ve no doubt of that. Each time she gives birth she becomes… well, stronger and more implacable. Like Clytemnestra or whoever that dreadful woman was who killed her husband for fun.’
‘He’d just slaughtered her daughter.’
‘Had he? Oh, well.’ He reached down for the handle of his bag. It’s perfectly correct that I don’t devote every waking breath, or every sleeping one for that matter, to the children. I leave that to Paige.’
‘What do you want me to do, Martin?’ I asked gently. ‘Although I’m not sure what I could do, except try to persuade Paige that’s she wrong.’
Martin gazed down at the table. He was searching for something to cling to. ‘Try to persuade her to do anything and you’ll achieve the opposite. But could you keep an eye on her? She’s not as strong as she thinks.’ He got to his feet. ‘Thank you for the coffee.’ Large and baffled, he hovered above me. ‘I know it’s a lot to ask, Minty, at the moment, but if you could keep tabs on her? Sooner or later she’ll come to her senses. Actually, I’m not sure I want to live with her at the moment anyway – she’s so awful.’ He yanked out the expanding handle of his suitcase with some force. ‘She should never have left the bank. That’s where her energies are best deployed. Children have ruined her.’
When I tackled Paige, she was unrepentant and not at all mad. ‘Martin doesn’t fit in with the children,’ she said, as she hefted baby Charlie from one breast to the other. I noted the breast was looking less joyously abundant, and floppier than it had been. ‘He’s always coming home at the wrong time, and wanting a meal or his shirts washed.’
‘Linda can do that, or some of it, surely?’
She thought about this for a while. There was an exultant expression in her eyes, which I didn’t recognize. ‘He prevents me concentrating on the children.’
I changed my mind. Paige was unhinged. ‘Have you been to the doctor lately?’
‘No need.’ She addressed the fuzzy head of her sucking son. ‘Mummy’s fine, isn’t she? We’re doing just fine.’
‘You should go,’ I said.
There was a hum in the quiet, organized kitchen: dishwasher, washing-machine. Upstairs my twins were being entertained grudgingly by Jackson and Lara. It was only four o’clock on a Saturday afternoon but the table was already laid for the children’s six o’clock supper, and the oven timer had been primed to spring into life at five thirty.
Oddly at sea, I twisted my hands in my lap. ‘Obviously I can’t occupy the high ground on broken marriages -’
‘Obviously,’ said Paige, rudely.
‘But that’s it, Paige. I can say something because I know.’
‘Know what?’
‘How to convince yourself that what you’re doing is OK.’
Charlie thrust his head back and Paige’s nipple popped out of his mouth. ‘Oh, look!’ she exclaimed. ‘He’s got a sore lip. Poor little boy’ She nuzzled his cheek with lingering tenderness. ‘Mummy will make it better.’
I didn’t often think about my mother and it’s safe to say that, while she was alive, my mother didn’t often think about me in a real, proper, motherly way. First, she was always too tired from trying to earn a living after my father abandoned us. Second, she didn’t like me. Consequently, I lay many of life’s ills at her door because, as the self-help manuals point out, it’s your mother who sets the tone. When she was alive, I pretended she was dead. Then she was dead and, for a while, I pretended she wasn’t.
‘Listen to me.’ Paige did not look up from Charlie. I got up and snatched poor Charlie out of her arms. He felt bulky and compact and smelt of half-digested milk. He protested at this sudden change, but I didn’t care. ‘You will li sten to me. It’s very easy to think yourself into rightness. “Yes,” I used to say to myself. “Rose is so complacent. She doesn’t care about Nathan in the way he needs. She deserves to lose him. A person as careless as Rose doesn’t deserve a husband like Nathan.” In the end, I felt it was almost my duty to take Nathan away.’
‘And you succeeded. So?’
‘You’re missing the point, Paige. You can reason yourself in and out of anything. That’s the trouble with reason. It’s flexible.’
Paige stood up and held out her arms. ‘Give me my baby,’ she ordered. ‘He needs changing.’
I clung to Charlie. ‘You can’t honestly think that the children will be better off without Martin?’
‘Hark at who’s talking.’
‘Felix and Lucas are suffering terribly.’
Paige succeeded in prising Charlie away from me. ‘I appreciate your concern, Minty,’ her face closed, ‘but I’d rather you didn’t interfere in this one.’
‘Don’t imagine because I’ve been away that I’m letting you out of my sight,’ Gisela said. ‘I want to know everything. You’ll hate me for being a busybody, but you’ll be grateful too.’
Gisela had been in the South of France for a month, and on her return she had phoned and arranged to take me out to lunch. The Vistemax car had picked me up from Paradox, a little perk that I made no effort to hide from Deb et al. Gisela was installed inside it. She was tanned and fit and kissed me warmly. I kissed her back – I’d missed her.
‘I hope you’re demanding answers from Theo,’ she continued. ‘Unless you’re stroppy, lawyers let things drift.’
The car purred off in the direction of Kensington. I gave an edited rundown on the financial and legal situation, then asked, ‘Did anyone help you, Gisela, when you were struggling with all the detail?’
She hesitated. ‘Sometimes… Well, Marcus did. He’s good on that sort of thing.’
‘Actually, the detail isn’t my main worry. It’s the boys. They miss Nathan.’
She glanced down at her hands, folded elegantly in her lap. ‘It’s awful for you at the moment.’
‘Sometimes their sadness is almost too much to bear. They wanted to go looking for him the other day. They’d packed a bag each.’
A variety of expressions chased across Gisela’s smooth complexion. Then she said briskly, ‘Bear it you must.’ She opened her bag and produced her diary. ‘Now I need your advice. Or, rather, I’d like to talk to you, so I’m going to offer you a bribe.’
‘I suppose it’s about Marcus.’
‘In a way everything’s always about Marcus. I’ve tried not to let it be, but that’s proved impossible. He’s sort of… always there.’
‘Because you want him to be,’ I pointed out.
‘I suppose so.’
The car slowed for traffic-lights. The thought of the expensive food Gisela was about to buy for me made me feel a little nauseous. ‘Gisela, I’m not that hungry. Appetite seems to have deserted me.’