Chapter Fifteen
November 2012
The first time Lydia realised exactly what Graham had meant at the wedding was when Theo went off to a buck’s night in Amsterdam. She’d been blinded to the subtle changes in him, and perhaps if Graham hadn’t had a word with her she would have gone on being oblivious to what was happening. Theo had always liked to have nice things. Even in his rugby days, his attire, even when casual, was always a good label, plus a decent rugby shirt. After university it was the flashy car, and then of course it was the corporate job and the suits, the highly polished shoes and the hobnobbing with a social circle that enjoyed spending a bit of cash. They went on outings to Ascot, trips to Europe, they ate at prestigious London restaurants and if Lydia hadn’t been looking closely, the undercurrent of what Theo had been keeping from her would’ve been missed.
Before Theo went on the buck’s night he surprised Lydia with a pre-booked trip to New York. ‘Call it an early Christmas present,’ he said.
‘Can we afford this?’ she squealed, throwing her arms around him. New York was high on her list of places to visit one day and it was the best present a girl could ask for.
He kissed her full on the lips. ‘I got a bonus so yes, we can afford it. I may even let you loose in Bloomingdales if you behave yourself.’
She hugged him tight even though he was already wrapped up in a winter coat ready for the off. ‘You behave yourself in Amsterdam,’ she said seriously. ‘I’ve heard all kinds of stories about that place.’
‘You’ve been there, you know it’s not all bad.’
‘When you and I went, it was bulb fields, bicycle rides and sunny days. You and the boys are about to embark upon the dark, the cold and seedy bars. We saw a few of those in broad daylight, remember?’
‘Hey, come here.’ He wrapped her in his arms again. ‘I promise I’ll be good and it’s only two nights so I’ll be back before you know it.’
After she waved him off and returned to the warmth of the flat, Lydia made herself a cup of tea and got back into bed to read her book. But she couldn’t concentrate. She was going to New York!
She shut her book and grabbed the laptop from the floor on Theo’s side of the bed instead. She wanted to immerse herself in photographs of the Big Apple, get excited for what they could see and do. The trip would be around the time the famous Macy’s Thanksgiving Parade was on, and she Googled proximity to the store from their hotel, wondering whether they could be a part of it this year.
With a second cup of tea and New York fully researched, she logged on to her bank account. She was managing to pay her credit card off every month, which was good, so she could afford a few treats in New York as long as she didn’t go too crazy. Maybe a pair of shoes like the girls in Sex and the City or perhaps clothes from famous department stores. She’d look like Julia Roberts walking down the street with bags hanging off each arm!
Lydia didn’t log on to the savings account she and Theo had opened a couple of years ago very often. She tried to leave it alone. But she’d just take a quick peek today. Perhaps Theo wouldn’t mind if she took out a few hundred pounds for some extras on the trip, because once they tied themselves down with a mortgage, their holidays would probably have to come to an end. With a standing order going in to this account from each of them every month, she usually tried to forget about it, knowing it would be a surprise to see how much it had accumulated over time. The plan was to eventually buy their own place, whether a flat or a house, but something to get them onto the property ladder.
Lydia reached out to get her cup of tea as the circular symbol at the top of the banking page turned round and round, logging on to their savings account but her hand stopped when the balance appeared on the screen in bold black letters.
She’d wanted a surprise after not looking at it for so long, and a surprise was certainly what she got.
*
‘How could you?’ she yelled, almost before Theo had had a chance to put his bag down when he returned home after gallivanting around Amsterdam. ‘There’s less than five thousand in the account and we’ve been saving for two years!’
‘Jeez, Lydia. Stop shouting, my head’s going to explode.’
‘Everyone saves!’ She didn’t get any quieter. ‘We want our own place, but it’s also security for the future. How could you!’
‘Not everyone saves, Lydia.’
His comment added fuel to her anger. ‘For some reason you refuse to see the point of a safety net, you want to jump without a parachute and never mind the consequences!’
‘Stop yelling at me, for Christ’s sake!’
‘Your dad warned me, you know.’ Her comment got his attention.
‘What are you talking about?’
‘He told me to look out for you, that you were in with a bad crowd. I mean for God’s sake, Theo, you’re in your twenties, not your teens! Do you really need me to keep you on the straight and narrow?’
He slumped down on the sofa but Lydia had no idea whether he felt beaten, guilty, or whether it was simply because he was so hungover and completely knackered. ‘Dad had no right to say anything.’
‘He was thinking of you.’ He looked so defeated her voice softened, but she was still angry, upset more than anything because when she’d thought they were saving hard, he’d been helping himself to chunks of money along the way. ‘I think it’s about time you told me everything, Theo. What have you been buying? Is it more expensive suits? Going out on the town? What? I think you owe me the truth.’
When he looked at her, it was the first time since they’d been together that he’d looked genuinely lost and torn apart. It was the first time she’d ever seen him so completely devastated.
Lydia sat down on the opposite end of the sofa. She didn’t want to get too close to him, have him touch her and make her forget all about needing to know the truth.
It took him a while to start but when he did it all came out.
‘It started fresher year.’
‘What did?’ When he stayed silent she added, ‘Say it, Theo.’
‘My gambling.’ He had the good grace to look down. Lydia hadn’t been expecting that response and she knew if he looked at her now he’d see shock written all over her face. She’d been expecting him to say he liked to spend on holidays, clothes, dinners out and generally living the high life in London and way beyond their means.
Her voice was barely audible. ‘Is that how you lost all our money? Playing games?’
‘If you want me to tell you everything, I need you to stay calm.’
He had a cheek, but as her mouth opened to yell at him, she realised she needed to do as he’d said and she’d find out everything.
‘When my dad left, I was gutted. I was furious. I hated him. I went out with my mates, got wasted and tried to forget about what he’d done to my mum.
‘When I started university I was hanging around with a good crowd but they were from pretty privileged backgrounds, not a student loan between them. Anyway, they took me to a casino in Bristol one night and we spent a bit, not too much, and had a good laugh. They were regulars there and at first I held back, knowing it was stupid to even try to join in but they were persuasive and I ended up back there, again and again. At first I wasn’t spending hardly anything and I’d watch them, win or lose, but generally escape everything else.
‘When my mum ended up at the doctor and he prescribed antidepressants, my anger at Dad flared up all the more. He’d done that to her. For my eighteenth birthday, Dad had given me some money, a decent sum, and I hadn’t touched it at all. I was determined I’d work a part-time job through university like most other people, because then that money would be there at the end of it.’
This was the Theo Lydia knew, the Theo who worked hard, not the Theo who lied and went behind her back. ‘Go on,’ she urged.
‘Mum was in a terrible state. According to Grace, some days she couldn’t even get herself out of bed. Grace was petrified she’d do something stupid but insisted that what Dad had done was a sign that the marriage was at an end. She told me it happened to people all over the world every day but I hated that she was making excuses for him. I saw red. I withdrew a decent chunk of the money from my account and thought well, hey, if he can piss his life away with an affair and a broken marriage, maybe I’ll just do the same. I don’t know what good I thought it would do, I wasn’t thinking straight. Up until then I’d only ever bet small amounts and had a couple of wins, nothing major. So I upped the stakes. I got into poker, dice games, and I lost a bit but had enough wins to mean I wasn’t spending a huge amount.
‘Then one night I made a major bet, a thousand pounds in one hit.’
Lydia put her hands across her mouth. ‘You lost it all?’
He harrumphed. ‘That’s the laugh of it. No, I didn’t. I won, I won big. I tripled my money and I was totally high on the feeling. It was like a drug, the rush that sends you over the edge, makes you feel invincible, as though you can do anything. It was the best feeling I’d had in ages. After that night I was there, at the casino, every week. The crowd I hung with were all my mates, the atmosphere was buzzing, electric, and I forgot about everything else.’
‘Your mum, you mean?’
‘Her and Dad, and they’d occupied my mind for so bloody long that I needed an escape.’
‘Had you spent all of your dad’s money?’
‘Not at that stage, no. I won big a few more times after that, then had a couple of losses, but I figured you couldn’t always win. It was a game but one I felt I was on top of. I started thinking I could make it into a profession, I’d heard of someone from school doing that. He didn’t have a job, he played games, quizzes, slot machines, and that’s how he made enough money not to work a nine-to-five office job.’
‘Sounds like a load of crap.’ Lydia’s voice startled Theo. ‘I mean, what a load of shit, Theo! He sounds like a lazy-arsed idiot thinking that could be a job.’
Theo shrugged. ‘You’re probably right. The reality hit for me soon though, because after nine months and a few big wins, came the losing.’
Theo cut off the conversation and went to the bathroom while Lydia made a cup of tea for each of them. He still looked devastated, a demeanour that helped her keep her anger levels low.
When he returned he admitted, ‘I lost pretty much all of the money Dad left me.’
‘How much?’ One look from Theo said it all. It was a lot. ‘How much, Theo?’
‘Ten thousand pounds.’
Her cup of tea dropped to the floor.
*
‘Let me do that.’ Theo took the saucepan of potatoes and carried on mashing them. It was a token gesture but Lydia thanked him. He’d always made the best mashed potatoes, no lumps, unlike hers.
But it was going to take more than mashed potatoes to fix this.She looked at the patch on the carpet in the lounge area where her tea had gone everywhere and they’d done their best to clean up the mess. Since his admission at losing his entire savings to gambling, they’d not said a word about it. Lydia had taken off for a long walk and the second she got back she went onto autopilot to fix them something to eat – a normal task to take her mind off what he’d told her.
They ate dinner in silence, cleared up, and Theo poured two glasses of wine.
‘Thanks.’ Lydia took her glass and this time sat on the floor, on the lilac rug they’d chosen together when they first moved in. With her free hand she lost her fingers beneath the fibres.
‘I wish you’d say something, Lydia.’ Theo was gulping back his wine as though it would help.
‘Did the gambling carry on all through uni?’ She couldn’t look at him, she had to trust him to tell the truth now.
‘No, I swear. The fresher year was the worst of it and after the showdown with Dad when he found out what I’d done – I told him during a blazing row one night, thinking it’d show him what he’d driven me to – I got my act together and stayed away from the casino. The others tried to get me down there but I wasn’t having any of it. I went a few times after that but drank beer and sat in the background watching.’
‘What did your dad say?’
‘He was furious, told me how stupid I was, that I hadn’t wronged him but I’d wronged myself. He was right but I despised him at that point because Mum was in a bad way.’
‘What brought you to your senses?’
‘Mum. She got worse.’ Tears pricked the corners of his eyes, but Lydia couldn’t be sympathetic, at least not yet. ‘She’d been coping when she was on the medication. But then Dad told her everything that had gone on with me, and after that she fell apart a second time.
‘I felt awful. She didn’t deserve a mess of a son as well as a husband who’d upped and left. I pulled myself together for her and for myself.’
‘But not for your dad,’ Lydia concluded.
His silence confirmed it. The anger he still felt.
‘What happened this time, Theo? What made you go back to your old ways?’
He shook his head. ‘I haven’t gone back to my old ways at all. I got carried away on a couple of occasions, that’s all. The first was at the horse racing, the second at a dog track. I had sure-fire tips and they didn’t pay off. And then I got stupid. I thought, I only need to win big once, and I’d done it before, then I could put all the money back in the account and you wouldn’t even have to know.’
Lydia sighed. ‘So even then, you were lying to me.’
‘I wasn’t lying to you.’
‘You were. You were lying by omission.’
‘I’m sorry, Lydia.’ He put his wine glass on the coffee table and knelt in front of her. She resisted at first when he tried to pull her into his arms but eventually relented.
‘Your dad only mentioned to watch out for you because he worries,’ she said when they pulled apart. ‘It shows how much you mean to him.’
Theo looked deep into her eyes and with his fingers below her chin, tilted her mouth up to meet his. His kiss told her everything would be okay. ‘I know, but I’m angry he brought it up with you, because it’s my own business. I’m not his little boy anymore and I wish he’d stop trying to fix the family he left.’
‘He didn’t leave you, Theo. He left your mum, not you and not Grace.’
‘It feels like much the same thing to me, Lydia.’ He looked sad and she saw the layers of vulnerability he usually hid so well. ‘I’m sorry, I really am. I’ll make this up to you, I swear.’
‘You made a mistake.’ She said it more to convince herself than to absolve him of any guilt.
‘A huge mistake,’ he agreed. ‘And it won’t happen again.’ He looked into her eyes. ‘It won’t, I swear. I’ll do anything to make it up to you, anything.’
She thought about it. ‘Come with me to the karaoke bar on Friday night.’
He pulled a face. ‘Walked right into that one, didn’t I?’
‘You have to sing.’
‘Okay.’
‘I mean it. Any song, but you’re getting up there on stage and proving to me how sorry you are.’ If he ever pulled anything like this again she’d string him up for it. They’d worked hard to save and in a few moments of madness he’d lost a ridiculous sum of money.
True to his word, Theo did exactly what she’d asked, and in the karaoke bar that Friday night after a bottle of wine at home for Dutch courage and another gin and tonic each when they arrived, Theo came through on his promise. He got up there on the stage in front of a crowd cheering and clapping and he belted out Kenny Rogers The Gambler. And all the while, Lydia had a huge smile across her face. Because this was her guy, her man. He’d made a mistake and he’d told her everything now, and for that, she couldn’t punish him any more than he was punishing himself.