off into the middle distance as I finally spotted my suitcase sliding down the chute and onto the carousel. Then he pressed the Send button anyway.
It was past ten o’clock by the time we had collected our luggage and walked out into the arrivals hall. Bennett tossed me a clipped ‘G’bye, West!’ as his driver stowed his ‘Joseph Bennett’ sign and picked up my boss’s enormous suitcase while I sloped off to queue for a taxi. Every trip Bennett ever went on was, essentially, an ego trip and he wasted no opportunity to make sure I knew where the power lay in our new working relationship. Although we both lived in North London, it would never have occurred to him to offer me a lift and I was glad not to feel obliged to accept.
The taxi journey home seemed to last an eternity which was nowhere near long enough for me. I felt an oppressive, suffocating guilt about everything that had happened. I was dreading seeing Natasha again and also worried about how Olivia would feel when she read Bennett’s latest text. It was totally irrational of me to blame him for any part of what had happened – yet still I did blame him. Why had he had to make the terrible situation I’d created so much worse? Why, when faced with competing options of what to do, could he not have done the right thing? Why did he have to be such an arse? Was it, as the scorpion said to the frog, simply his nature?
The house was almost completely dark when I walked in. Looking up the stairs, I could see a faint light peeping out from behind the three quarters-closed door of our bedroom. Natasha was probably sitting up in bed reading, looking forward to hearing all my news. And I still had absolutely no idea what I would say to her when I saw her. I rifled through the post on the table, annoyed at the staggering ordinariness of it all, reminding me I was back in the real world of bills and junk mail and putting out the dustbins on a Sunday night.
I took off my shoes, picked my way through the dark living room into the kitchen and ran a glass of water from the cold tap. I gulped it down in one draught, then decided I needed a pee, so I popped into the downstairs toilet and took my time emptying my bladder as quietly as I could before washing my hands as if I was scrubbing up for a delicate operation. Then, bereft of further reasons for delay, I climbed the stairs with all the perky enthusiasm of a condemned man walking to the execution chamber, opened the bedroom door and prepared to meet my fate.
Natasha was propped up on her pillow, fast asleep. The book she was reading – this month’s book-group selection – hung limply in her right hand, a thumb wedged uncomfortably in the crease where it had tried to close, saving her place. She was still wearing her glasses and her soft brown hair had fallen forwards, half-covering her eyes. She looked at peace – as if she had gone to bed without a care in the world.
I made no attempt to wake her, grateful to put off even longer the shattering of her delusions. Carefully, I prised the book from her sleeping hand and placed it on her side table. Then I turned off the light directly above her head, and replaced it with the weaker glow from my bedside lamp. I tiptoed into the children’s bedrooms just to look at them as they slept. Helen was lying exactly as I imagined Natasha had left her. Not a hair out of place, her duvet perfectly even and tucked up crisply under her chin like a floral pie crust. By her head lay her favourite teddy – a souvenir from a previous trip to New York – now worn in places from too much loving. I wanted to hug her and plant a kiss on her perfectly smooth forehead but didn’t feel I had the right. How could I use the lips that the previous night had wandered all over Olivia Finch’s illicit body for such a precious assignment? I watched her breathing for a while, then muttered a quiet ‘goodnight’ and left.
Entering Matthew’s room, I was greeted by a totally different scene. He was spread-eagled across his bed, his limbs arranged in a casual swastika. All his bedclothes were on the floor – his duvet, pillow and even his under-sheet. Perhaps he had woken in the night in the throes of a terrible nightmare and thrashed around wildly waiting to be rescued, or perhaps he’d gone to bed still pretending to be a spaceman or a dinosaur hunter and somehow managed to strip his bed in the midst of the action. Matthew was a deeper sleeper than his sister so I risked stroking his hair as I lifted his head to replace his pillow. I re-covered him with his Thunderbirds duvet and left the room. He would have to make do without his sheet tonight.
Finally, I went into the bathroom, stripped off my well-travelled clothes and ran a bath. After I’d brushed and flossed my teeth and scraped my face with an expensive exfoliating cream (the legacy of some long-forgotten Father’s Day or anniversary), I poured a generous helping of bubble bath into the running water, stirred it to create a thick foam and climbed in. I lay there without moving a muscle for some minutes, enjoying the sensation of the hot water on my skin. Then I scrubbed myself vigorously with a harsh abrasive scrunchy thing of Natasha’s (the legacy of a long-forgotten Mother’s Day or anniversary) like a religious pilgrim purging himself, desperate to obliterate every molecule of my sin.
By the time I hauled myself out of the bath, towelled myself down and walked back into the bedroom, it was after midnight and Natasha was snoring contentedly. After a week of looking after the kids on her own, she would be at least as shattered as I was after my almost sleepless night and long journey home. I turned off my light and slipped into bed. As I closed my eyes, I remembered that I’d left Natasha propped up with her glasses still perched on her nose. I turned my lamp back on and tried to remove them without disturbing her, but as I lifted them, one of the arms caught her in the eye and she woke with a start. For a moment she was completely disoriented as if she didn’t recognise this strange man in her bed and I feared she would scream, but once her vision had cleared and the fuzzy shape resolved itself into the familiar figure of her husband, her look of alarm broadened into the most welcoming of smiles.
‘Ah, honey, you’re home,’ she whispered, ‘am I glad to see you!’ Then a pause as a look of concern spread across her face. Had I already given away something in mine? ‘Is something wrong?’
‘No,’ I replied, hiding the truth with casual ease. ‘I’m just really tired. Go back to sleep and I’ll tell you all about it in the morning.’
‘You’re on earlies,’ she said so quietly that I could barely hear her, her eyes already closed. She was asleep again before my head hit the pillow.
Despite the feeling of almost numbing exhaustion, it took me ages to fall asleep. I was still on New York time and my mind was buzzing. Should I tell Natasha what had happened? She’d never believe it – she’d laugh in my face at the thought of me, plain old Joey West, schtupping Olivia Finch. She’d laugh even more if I told her that not only had I slept with this lustrous, illustrous woman, but, it appeared, she seemed to think I was Bennett.
I can’t have been asleep very long when I was woken by a bouncing bomb of a small boy erupting into the room, jumping up and down and shouting at full volume in his delirium at seeing his daddy after so long. A week is a long time for a three-year-old and quarter past five was as long as Matthew could wait before coming in to check that I really was back.
‘You’re on earlies,’ Natasha reminded me from behind locked eyelids. ‘All week.’
Matthew threw himself on me, forcing me awake. He had some exciting news that couldn’t wait. ‘Daddy, daddy,’ he shouted, ‘we’ve got a new fucking fish! Mummy bought us a fucking fish!’
I was half dragged out of bed and out of the room, pausing only to grab my dressing gown from the back of the door to protect me from the early-morning cold. Matthew swept down the stairs before me and into the living room. He wasn’t tall enough to reach the light switch, but was unperturbed by the darkness, negotiating his way through the cluttered room and skipping over discarded toys as if fitted with radar. When he reached the small, octagonal fish tank in the corner, he felt around on the lid to activate the switch that threw light into the watery casket.
‘Where is it?’ he said to himself as he pressed his nose up against the glass to get a better view inside, ‘where is the fucking fish? Daddy,’ he called, remembering I was there but not bothering to look back, ‘can you fee the fucking