Got You Back Read online

  In the early days she had thought she might travel up and down with him sometimes, but as soon as Finn had settled into his primary school it had seemed ridiculous to uproot him every few weeks. And, besides, it had actually felt like a relief to have one less person to worry about for a few days at a time. It was inevitable, though, that with so much time spent apart their close ties would start to unravel. That their two worlds would overlap less and less. He had never been very interested in her job anyway, not fully understanding how life-threateningly crucial it was that the new face of Holby City didn't turn up to an awards do wearing the same dress as one of Girls Aloud.

  When she'd first met James she had moved back home to her parents’ house in Bath to save money. She had accidentally run over a neighbour's cat in her Citroën and, traumatized, had taken it straight to the local vet where James was, at the time, doing some on-the-job training. The cat, sadly, had failed to pull through, despite James's best efforts, but somewhere in the middle of the blood, guts and tears he had asked Stephanie out for a drink and she had agreed. Tiddles's loss had been her gain.

  James, it seemed, had been as wowed by her ambition and skill as she had been by his. It was love at first sight. Well, lust and a bit of a rapport, which was all you could realistically hope for. But, somewhere along the line — somewhere, that was, around the time she had found she was pregnant with Finn — James had persuaded her to give up her lofty dream to be the new Vivienne Westwood and move into something less all-consuming, something which would allow her to spend time with the baby.

  At first he had been supportive — it had been his idea, after all — encouraging her move into freelance dress-making and enjoying all the extra home comforts her working part-time — and in the spare room — afforded him. But then, three years ago when she had decided she wanted more, that she wanted to get back on the path to having a career rather than just a job, and had persuaded him to buy the house in London so that she could be near the young women with too much money and little enough style of their own that they were happy to employ someone to find their clothes for them, she had soon realized that he was actually a little embarrassed by her work.

  ‘Stephanie dresses people who can't dress themselves,’ he would say to their friends, finding himself hilarious. ‘No, she's not a carer, nothing so worthy.’

  Remembering this, Stephanie flung a pile of dresses, which had just been sent over from La Petite Salope, on to the sofa just as Natasha came in from the tiny room next door holding up a red shift. ‘Is Shannon Fearon a size sixteen?’ she asked, mentioning a young ex-soap opera actress who had recently shot back into the public eye by winning a celebrity singing competition, and who Stephanie was dressing for a photo shoot that afternoon.

  ‘Really or officially?’

  ‘Really.’

  ‘She is.’

  ‘OK, well, this might do.’ Natasha started to unpick the size sixteen label in the neck of the dress, then rooted through a small metal box and found a label marked ‘size ten’ to replace it. It was always good to make the client feel skinny and confident. That way, if a journalist asked how big they were, they could reply that they were well under the average size for a British woman, without giving away that they were clearly talking rubbish with a sub-conscious downward flick of the eyes.

  ‘Fine,’ Stephanie said, without looking.

  Natasha sat down, moving the crumpled pile of dresses out of the way. ‘Stop dwelling on it,’ she said, ‘because you'll turn it into something even if it's nothing. Don't worry about things before you have to. That's my motto.’

  ‘One of them,’ Stephanie said.

  Natasha had worked alongside Stephanie as a pattern cutter when Stephanie was still in her dress-maker phase and then had readily agreed to come along in the role of assistant when Stephanie had set herself up as a stylist five years later. She didn't want any responsibility, she'd said. Work, to Natasha, was something you did during the day. Then you went home and forgot about it. Natasha had a lovely home with a husband who worshipped her and three well-behaved, neat children. She had never had to worry about random text messages or what Martin was up to for half the week. Consequently her face was almost free of lines and she looked at least five years younger than the forty-one it said on her birth certificate. Over the years she had become much more friend than colleague. ‘Mock if you want but you know I'm always right,’ she said now.

  ‘Of course you are,’ Stephanie said fondly. ‘I'll try. It just makes me so angry that some silly cow might have turned his head, tried to steal my husband from under my nose without even thinking about me and my life. And my son.’

  ‘You don't know that.’

  ‘No,’ Stephanie said. ‘I don't know that.’

  But the thought wouldn't leave her head. What else could it mean, after all? I'm really missing you. Kiss. Kiss. Kiss.

  She couldn't concentrate at the photo shoot and found herself snapping at Shannon when she'd complained that a particular dress made her look fat. ‘That's because you are fat,’ Stephanie had wanted to scream, although that would have been unfair. Shannon was most definitely not fat but she was short and disastrously proportioned so she had a tendency to look dumpy. In the end Natasha had suggested that Stephanie go home early before a fight broke out.

  Luckily Finn was already there, playing ball in the tiny garden with Cassie, the nanny, so Stephanie could occupy herself with making him snacks.

  Finn, at seven, could still be cajoled into keeping her company, and even though usually she would be cross with him for playing his favourite new game of rolling cherry tomatoes off the kitchen table and trying to make them land in the cat's bowl (one point if they went in the water, two if they landed in the Whiskas), she was so grateful to have a distraction that she just let him get on with it. Just after six she heard the front door open and slam shut again.

  ‘Hello,’ she heard James call.

  ‘Hi,’ she managed to shout back, weakly

  He headed straight upstairs without stopping by the kitchen to see her. Not that this surprised her: he usually went up to the bedroom and changed out of his work clothes then settled down with the newspaper till dinner-time. He rarely asked her what she had done at work, and if he did, she normally didn't answer truthfully because he would only roll his eyes or make some sarcastic remark that he thought passed as a joke. If she was being honest with herself she would have realized she hardly ever asked him what had happened at the surgery either. She loved animals but she couldn't rustle up much interest in stories about their ingrowing claws or dodgy hips. But Stephanie had always believed that all marriages went through this stage when there were young children around. There were simply more things to worry about, other considerations that were more important than ‘Did you have a good day at work?’ She had thought they would come out the other side of it once Finn was a bit older, and live out a blissful old age together, with all the time in the world to indulge in idle chat. She'd obviously been delusional, she thought now, pounding a chicken breast until it was nearly see-through. She stopped when she saw Finn, white-faced, at her elbow.

  ‘Are you OK?’ he asked, in his best grown-up voice, a mimic of the way she said it to him several times a day.

  She bent down and kissed the top of his head. ‘I'm fine, darling.’

  ‘You don't look OK,’ he said stubbornly.

  His face was creased with worry, and Stephanie felt guilty for having allowed her mood to affect him. She picked up a tomato and rolled it along the table from which it dropped on to the head of a startled Sebastian and bounced off his ear, into his organic chicken in gravy.

  Try as he might, Finn couldn't hold back a smile. ‘Excellent,’ he said.

  3

  If you had asked James Mortimer how his life was — and if he had been in the mood to tell you the truth, because, actually, he had confided in no one over the last year, knowing that to tell one person would be to tell the world — he would have told you it w
as complicated. That he loved his wife Stephanie, deep down, but that somewhere along the line it had all got a bit safe and maybe even a little dull; that he adored his son and would never want to hurt him; that he had feelings for Katie that bordered on love, and that when he was with her he felt alive and invigorated in a way that routine family life no longer had the power to make him feel.

  He wouldn't have admitted that what he was doing was wrong because he was trying to convince himself that there was no harm in it. He believed he was happy, Stephanie, he believed, was happy, and Katie certainly was. OK, so it was a bit of a ticking time-bomb waiting to explode. One of these days he knew he'd have to make a decision, plump for one life or the other. One day either Stephanie was going to insist that he gave up his life in Lincolnshire and moved to London full-time or Katie would grow tired of waiting for him to settle in the country. But until that happened his life suited him. As long as he didn't think about what he was doing too much.

  James, if hehad been being honest, would probably have said that the easiest, most carefree timesofhis double existence were the long journeys each week between London and Lincoln, Lincoln and London. He took his time in the car, listening tomusic, singing along. Hewould stop several times, not just at service stations but occasionally veering off into Bedfordshire or Hertfordshire to visit a quiet pub or a Michelin-starred restaurant, ananonymous man taking time out between his two lives.

  He had never deliberately set out to create a double life for himself. When he had first met Katie he had been feeling particularly low, particularly hard-done-by by Stephanie. He had felt sorry for himself — poor James, working so hard and slogging up and down the country because his wife had insisted that was what he do. He was tired from the travelling and lonely on his nights away from home, holed up in the flat above the surgery eating microwave meals and drinking beer out of the can. He missed the day-to-day dramas of family life, the way his routine had been so entwined with his wife and son's that he had always felt part of a team. He was miserable. Katie was sweet and pretty and vulnerable and crying, and it had seemed like the most natural thing in the world to put his arm round her. And then, of course, one thing had led to another. It wasn't the first time his head had been turned by an attractive woman since he'd got married, it was just the first time he'd acted on it. He had thought it was the textbook ‘bit of fun’, the classic ‘What she doesn't know won't hurt her’, the clichéd ‘It's different for men, sex is just sex — it doesn't mean we love our wives any less.’

  He had invited Katie out to dinner and she had said yes, and he had found himself trotting out the story he had prepared in advance, that his marriage was over and that the only reason he travelled to London every weekend was to see his son. Because Lower Shippingham was such a small place, the news had got round and he was now having to keep up the lie with colleagues and friends too. Lucky for him that there was no one Stephanie had kept in touch with. As she never tired of telling him, she hated Lower Shippingham and everybody in it, so there was little chance of her ever coming for a visit.

  Katie had eaten mussels and oysters and prawns with her fingers, and he had laughed at her and said she reminded him of Daryl Hannah in Splash, which she had taken as a compliment. He had been charmed by her sweetness, her hopeful — some would have said naïve — view of the world. He had always found Stephanie's dry cynicism funny, they had always shared a rather cruel sense of humour, but Katie's optimism was so… unchallenging. It was relaxing to spend an evening with someone who wasn't looking for ways to contest everything you said for comic effect.

  The other thing Katie did, which ensured that James would want to see her again, was say no. He had walked her home to her little cottage, buying condoms from the machine in the restaurant toilet before they left. On the doorstep she had thanked him for a lovely evening and had allowed him to kiss her just enough to let him know she was interested, then pushed him away and said goodnight. James was intrigued. It was that easy. He had known he had to see her again.

  In the end Katie had kept him waiting for six dates before she had invited him into her bed for comfortable and undemanding sex. He had felt under no pressure to perform, so focused was she on making sure he was having a good time. By then he was hooked, having got used to the home cooking, the back rubs and the cosy, quiet life in Katie's cottage, so much more comfortable than the flat above the surgery.

  Suddenly Katie was his girlfriend, not just a woman he had gone on a date with once. And he had found he liked it. It made his life in the country so much more homely. The first few times he had gone back to London for the weekend he had walked around in a cold sweat — a mixture of guilt and the fear of discovery. He had felt wretched, as if the enormity of what he was doing only became a reality when he was with his family. He promised himself he would break it off with Katie, that he would try to pretend it had never happened, make it up to Stephanie and Finn somehow. But then he would go back to Lincolnshire and Katie would be there, just wanting to look after him, and he would convince himself that he wasn't hurting anyone, he was just trying to make life away from home a little more bearable.

  This evening he had arrived home from his practice in St John's Wood at the usual time, sweating and irritable after a half-hour journey in the car that anywhere else would have taken ten minutes. He felt out of place in London. He had grown up in the countryside and, although he had spent five years in Bristol studying to become a vet, he had always known he would move back out to the sticks to practise. He could understand why Stephanie had needed to get back to work, to find a career, but there was no denying he resented the fact that this meant he had to spend half of his week in town.

  He looked down at the list of tomorrow's patients, which Jackie had emailed him over, as she always did at the end of every day, all listed in that rather cutesy way that town veterinary practices often had, with the first name of the animal rather than the person who was bringing them in: Fluffy O'Leary, a Siamese cat who was having her teeth brushed, Manolito Pemberton, a Chihuahua with foot troubles — caused, James had no doubt, by the fact that his elderly owner never let his paws touch the ground — Snoopy Titchmarsh, Boots Hughes-Robertson, Socks Allardyce. The list went on and on with not a genuine problem between them. He sighed. Three days of indulged baby substitutes. When he was feeling especially hard-done-by he felt that Stephanie ought to be more grateful that he spent half of his life doing a job he hated.

  Stephanie didn't know what she had been expecting when she saw James that evening — that he would come in and say, ‘I've met a woman called Kathy,’ or suddenly start talking about a colleague called Kitty he had never mentioned before. What she hadn't prepared herself for was that he would be the same old James.

  ‘Did you have a good day?’ she said, with as much dignity as she could muster, once they had sat down at the table.

  ‘Great,’ he said, smiling in a way that made swallowing her food impossible.

  ‘Anything exotic?’ Usually days that were described as ‘great’ were those on which he had carried out an intricate operation on an unusual pet. A salamander, or once, even, a small monkey. At least, that was what she had always thought. Clearly wrongly. I'm really missingyou. K. Kiss. Kiss, Kiss.

  ‘No,’ he said, stuffing a huge piece of chicken into his mouth. She waited to see if he would elaborate. He didn't.

  ‘Jonas has got a puppy,’ Finn piped up, getting his father off the hook.

  Stephanie had no idea who Jonas was, but she knew where this was going. ‘No, Finn, no puppies.’

  ‘That's so unfair. Jonas is a year younger than me and he's allowed a puppy so why aren't I?’

  ‘Who is Jonas anyway?’ Stephanie asked, not really caring what the answer was.

  ‘Oh, Mum, you're so stupid.’ Finn sighed and turned back to his food.

  James was humming to himself between mouthfuls, something he often did and which Stephanie had always found irritating, but today it seemed to have taken on a new
significance. It was as if he was saying, ‘Look how happy I am. Look what a great week I've had, shagging Katherine.’

  Stephanie looked at him across the table. I have to get a grip, she thought. One text does not mean he's having an affair. He smiled an I-haven't-a-care-in-the-world smile at her, and she turned away.

  ‘Eat your peas,’ she said to Finn, trying to sound like her normal self.

  ‘I already have, stupid,’ Finn said, picking up his plate and turning it upside-down to demonstrate his point. ‘See?’

  Once Finn had been persuaded to go to sleep, at about eight thirty, Stephanie had claimed a headache and announced she was going to bed. James had stretched out a hand to touch hers as she walked past him, eyes still glued to the TV.

  ‘Night, darling,’ he'd said. ‘Hope you feel better.’ His phone, which was lying on the coffee-table, had beeped to announce a message coming through.

  ‘That'll be Karmen,’ Stephanie had wanted to say, but instead she'd huffed out of the room. Or maybe it's Kara or Kayla or Katie, she thought, accidentally hitting on the right name finally, although, of course, she didn't know that yet.

  4

  Katie Cartwright was in love, she was sure of it. She didn't know where it had come from, this sudden, overwhelming attraction to James, but come it had and now it was all she could think about. She had been in love before — or, at least, had thought she was. She was thirty-eight years old, after all. It would be strange if this was the first time. In fact, she had never been without a man in tow her whole adult life. As soon as one disappeared over the horizon another had always popped round the corner. But she had never felt like this. She had known James for almost exactly a year, she thought now. Nearly a year to the day since her dog Stanley had had to have corrective surgery on his leg and she had cried because she was so scared something might go wrong, and, next thing she knew, the kindly (not to mention handsome) vet had his arm round her shoulders and the rest was history, as they say.