Chapter Thirty
‘What are we going to do?’
Frank stared hopelessly at his wife. They were sitting on sofas in the Chelsea Harbour flat, face to face across the coffee table, an oddly formal way for a married couple to talk to each other. His back was to the big windows that looked over the water below, the boats moored in the shelter of the small marina, and the clear daylight meant that he could see Lexy’s face very clearly. She was make-up free, her hair pulled back, modestly dressed, very much as she had been the day when she had come down to Sandbanks only to find herself surrounded by paparazzi, locked out of her own house.
‘You look pale,’ he found himself saying when she didn’t immediately answer his question.
‘Yeah,’ Lexy said, managing to sketch a smile at her own expense. ‘No sunbeds or spray tans at Schloss Hafendammer! No drink either. And I’ve kicked the fags, you’ll be happy to hear.’
‘That’s great,’ Frank said with huge relief. ‘I always wanted you to do that.’
‘It wasn’t that hard,’ Lexy admitted. ‘No one there smoked, so it wasn’t like you saw someone at it and got a craving. Same with the drink. After a while I stopped even thinking about fags and booze. It was herbal teas and filtered water from morning to night. Honestly, not having coffee was the worst thing of all.’
She managed a grin.
‘I’m really going to watch the drinking now I’m back, I promise. Did you see I lost weight? That’s from not having wine for a month.’
Frank nodded, and a memory of Caroline gently dismissing Lexy’s detox by calling it a diet retreat couldn’t help but pop into his head.
‘It’s like a miracle! No one ever loses weight giving up fags, do they?’ Lexy said lightly. ‘I got bloody lucky, eh? I’ll be sending everyone I know who wants to quit to Switzerland for a month! You can’t nip out to the shops for extra snacks when you get the munchies – you’re stuck up this mountain with them feeding you vegetable soups and tiny little portions of poached fish and making you chew every bite twenty times.’
‘Doesn’t sound much fun,’ Frank said.
‘It’s not supposed to be fun,’ Lexy said. A slight edge came into her voice. ‘I wasn’t at a spa in the Maldives getting massages every day, Frank.’
‘I didn’t think you were,’ Frank muttered.
Silence fell, and not for the first time. Frank stared down through the glass coffee table at the rug below, a black and white swirling design that he had never much liked. Lexy’s gaze, however, was fixed on him as she tried desperately to read his mind, to work out what he wanted. It was the day after her return from Switzerland, and she had asked him to come up and see her in London: she was unable to bear the idea of asking to come to Sandbanks, only to have him tell her that she wasn’t wanted there because Caroline was in residence.
Frank, however, had taken the request that he come to London as just another sign that Lexy wasn’t committed to their marriage or their children. She had asked after Laylah and London, of course, as soon as he arrived, and said how much she had missed them; but how much did that actually mean?
A very straightforward man, he had never been more conflicted in his life. Although he had resisted the awful, sick temptation to watch the video of Lexy and Deacon getting hot and heavy, the photographs of them together were etched into his memory. What if those images never left him? How was he supposed to deal with that?
He didn’t know how to tell Lexy about these doubts. They were too scary for him to articulate; it was as if speaking them aloud would make them concrete. So he stayed quiet, waiting to hear what she had to say.
‘Look, Frank, I’m not going to make any excuses. I really fucked up. I’m sorry,’ Lexy said, leaning forward, trying to meet his eyes. ‘I wanted to get publicity, like Emily suggested. That’s why I went along with it and didn’t push Deacon off me straight away. But that’s not an excuse, I promise. It’s an explanation. I was a bit pissed, and I got carried away, and I should have come home straight afterwards. I did everything wrong, okay?’
Frank nodded slowly, still staring at the carpet.
‘And I tried to say sorry,’ she went on. ‘I came to the house to apologize. I rang and rang you from that shitty hotel to beg you to let me in, so I could see you all and say how sorry I was. Sat on the balcony and cried my head off. I get why you locked me out – I might have done the same thing under the circumstances, I suppose. But you could at least have rung me back.’
Lexy had no idea, of course, that Frank had never heard any of her messages or read any of her plaintive emails or letters beyond that first text. She blamed Caroline for a great deal of the extent to which this situation had escalated, but she had not yet reached the point where she realized the degree to which Caroline had actively tried to break up her marriage.
‘I wouldn’t’ve known what to say, Lex,’ Frank said quietly. ‘To be honest, I still don’t know what to say to you.’
Lexy took a deep breath.
‘I want to stay married, Frank,’ she said: she was determined to avoid saying the word divorce. ‘I fucked up, I went too far, but I’m really trying to fix things. I know you always thought I drank too much. And, like I said, I’ve given up the fags.’
‘It’s almost too good to be true, isn’t it?’ Frank said, raising his head to look at her. ‘Like you waved a magic wand and turned into someone else.’
Lexy felt strangely light, as if the ground had dropped away from her. Not in a good way: not like the thrill of a roller-coaster ride, but the experience, in an unfamiliar swimming pool, of stepping into what you think is shallow water and finding yourself floundering in the deep end instead. She had not expected this reaction. She had assumed, naturally enough, that Frank would be overjoyed at hearing how she had cleaned up her act.
‘I mean,’ he said, not realizing the extent to which he was parroting words Caroline had drip-fed into his mind for precisely this eventuality, ‘it’s not just that you went too far. You got caught out, and now you’re saying everything I want to hear so you get back in my good books again.’
‘Not just saying,’ Lexy protested. ‘I’m doing it! I really have stopped smoking – and honestly, I’m not going to drink half as much now as I used to do—’
‘What about the blow?’ he said, inexorable. ‘You still planning to go on caning it with the girls?’
‘No. I promise,’ she said firmly. ‘I’d do some lines when I’d had a few drinks and someone had it, or ordered it in, and I’d get carried away. But I’m not going to be drinking like that any more, so I won’t make bad decisions. I’ll be coming home earlier. It just won’t be an issue.’
Frank stood up, and Lexy hoped that he was coming to sit next to her, maybe even hold her hand. Instead, however, he barely glanced at her as he walked round the sofa, turning his back to her, looking down at the marina several stories below.
‘Frank?’ she said nervously. ‘I’m getting really freaked out. I don’t know what to say. I thought you’d be happy about all of this—’
‘It’s just,’ he said to the window, ‘I already said it sounds too good to be true, didn’t I? You’ve done something that you know’s the biggest no-no for me in the world – you’ve dragged our kids through the mud – and so you try to fix it by fucking off to some luxury spa and coming back telling me you’ve somehow magically changed into everything I wanted you to be! It sounds too easy, doesn’t it?’
‘Frank!’ she protested, panic rising now. ‘Please, you have to believe me that it wasn’t easy, and it wasn’t a luxury spa! I’ve been working so hard – talking to Doktor Weinstein about my drinking and smoking, what triggered them, how to make sure I don’t fall back into bad habits. I promise, this is me realizing that I need to sort my life out. I’m getting too old to piss around, I need to—’
‘Lex!’
Frank swung around, and even with the light behind him, Lexy could see how contorted his face was.
‘Do you know how many times you’ve said “I, I, I”?’ he burst out. ‘It’s not just about you, that’s my point! Or if it is, it shouldn’t be!’
Lexy’s breath caught in her throat. There was no arguing with this. Frank was right. For all her newfound virtue, for all the quasi-therapy sessions she had had with Doktor Weinstein, working out why she reached for her Pinot with lemon slice, and then another and another, she hadn’t made a connection beyond that to her responsibilities as a wife and mother.
She had made it all about her; her need to get back Frank and the happy life she had had with him and the kids. She had thought that if she fixed what Frank didn’t like about her, what had caused her to behave so recklessly, then she could return to it very easily, as if it were just an upgrade to an operating programme. Lexy 2.0, now with improved communication skills, less alcoholic intake and a nicotine patch firmly applied . . .
‘I wrote letters to you and the kids,’ she said weakly. ‘From the detox centre. I asked you guys just to drop me a line, or send me a card . . .’
‘Lex,’ Frank sighed wearily. ‘Come on, don’t lie to me. This is why I’m so worried. You dropped us like a stone for a month, and now you want to walk back in as if nothing has happened – no, actually, even more than that, you want me to give you some kind of credit for having cleaned yourself up! It was so hard for us with you suddenly gone, and headlines screaming about you having run off with Deacon, of all people . . . I mean, Laylah actually knows who he is! She and her friends listen to his band! Please don’t try to tell me that the Swiss post just managed to fuck up sending multiple letters to us! Have some respect for my intelligence, eh?’
Lexy’s eyebrows shot so high up her forehead that she could feel the muscles, weakened from her regular Botox injections, struggling feebly to do what was suddenly being asked of them. She realized in that moment how much had been going on in her home while she had been away. There was absolutely no way that all her letters had failed to reach Frank.
She thought of the phone messages, both to the landline and the mobile, the stream of texts she had sent him. She remembered sitting on that balcony at the Ferry Hotel, curled up on the horrible sofa, crying and waiting, unable to believe that Frank would not even pick up the phone and ring her. And she understood, with the slow, calm sensation of a loser in a chess game working out how her opponent had constructed their winning strategy to surround and conquer her troops, that none of her attempts at communication had ever reached Frank.
Lexy opened her mouth to speak, and then stopped. She had seen the positioning of the final chess piece, and she had realized that it would be counter-productive to tell Frank the truth. He would not, her instincts were screaming, believe a word she said about Caroline having intercepted every attempt Lexy had made to contact her family.
And if she persisted, Lexy would simply sound paranoid and turn Frank against her. Frank would perceive her as lashing out against a sweet, innocent young woman who had helped him look after the children when Lexy had walked out on them, who had consoled him when he was lonely and certainly never rolled home drunk and randy on a regular basis after having downed a vat of Pinot Grigio with her girlfriends . . .
You’re not going to beat Caroline in an argument with Frank, some small, cold part of her brain told Lexy. She’s covered her back against any direct attack. After all, who’s he going to believe? You’re the drunk. You’re the one who went on a coke binge after you snogged the face off a boybander. While she’s been swanning around your house making big eyes at Frank and pretending she enjoys plaiting Laylah’s hair for hours as Laylah bangs on about whether Barbie, Island Princess is better than Barbie and the Three Musketeers . . .
So, knowing all that, who’s he going to believe?
Not you.
‘Okay, you’re right,’ she said, and a sense of calm wrapped itself round her as she spoke those words, as cool and clear as the Swiss mountain air. ‘You’re right about everything. I have made it all about me. I’ve been doing that my entire life – just ask my mum, it’s the first thing she’d say if you asked her what I was like! So yeah, it’s not just stopping smoking, cutting down on drinking, is it?’
Frank, his muscular bulk silhouetted against the sky and sea behind him, shook his head slowly.
‘I need to prove myself,’ Lexy continued, thinking fast. ‘I get that. I’d feel the same if it had been you behaving like I did. I wouldn’t just let you walk back in as if nothing had happened.’
Frank rewarded this with a single nod.
‘So,’ Lexy said, feeling increasingly sure that she was saying exactly the right thing, making exactly the right decision. ‘Here’s how I should do it. I should move back to Sandbanks –’
She saw Frank flinch, but she dug her nails into her palms and carried on bravely.
‘– and look after the kids myself,’ she said. ‘I’ll sack the nanny – they’re all useless anyway. I’ll hole up there and spend my time being a proper mum. Cook their breakfasts and dinners, take them back and forth from school every day, the whole works.’
‘But –’ Frank shuffled his feet awkwardly.
‘And you can move in here – with Caroline if you want,’ she said, managing, through a heroic effort, to pronounce her rival’s name without venom dripping from each syllable. ‘I mean, I know what’s been going on. I could see from the photos that you two’re . . .’
She considered how to phrase this without either sounding like a raging bunny boiler or giving him and Caroline legitimacy by calling them a couple.
‘. . . having sex,’ she finally continued. ‘I’m not stupid. I’ve known you for a long time, Frank. I know you two are . . . I know you two got together while I was away. I hate it, of course! Don’t get me wrong. I absolutely bloody hate it.’
She held her breath, hoping that he would tell her that Caroline meant nothing to him, that he wanted to work on his marriage, that he’d never see Caroline again.
But he didn’t.
‘I was so lonely,’ Frank mumbled to his feet. ‘I don’t feel okay about cheating – don’t get me wrong. I broke my own rule and I’m not proud of it. It just – happened.’
Lexy dug her nails into her palms once more to stop her saying the words that were trembling on her tongue, desperate to be spoken.
Just happened, my arse, she thought bitterly. That may be what you think, but I’m willing to bet Caroline planned the whole thing, softened you up, and picked just the right time to go in for the kill.
Normally, Lexy would have blamed the cheating husband. He was the one who had made the vows, not his affair partner. She’d always railed against the term ‘homewrecker’ in her column, complaining that there were much worse words for the woman involved with a married man than for the man himself, who was the cheater in the situation; she’d often added that it was interesting that when the genders were reversed, and it was a man having an affair with a married woman, there were no offensive terms for him. ‘Homewrecker’ didn’t sound quite right applied to a man, somehow.
But in this case, considering Lexy’s own bad behaviour, she couldn’t blame Frank for falling for someone who must have waged a very clever and careful campaign to get him into bed. He had been completely destabilized, believing that Lexy had barely tried to get in touch with him, a sitting target for a woman prepared to present herself as everything Lexy was not, clever enough to have twisted him round her finger to the point that he could not bring himself to tell his wife that he would give her up.
Lexy had already forgiven Frank. She wanted him back. She wanted her life back. And if she had to let him move in here with Caroline, have them occupy the marital bed in both damn houses until she worked out how to make a brilliant counter-move, that was exactly what she’d do.
Frank had slumped back onto the sofa now, his head in his hands; she couldn’t see his face, couldn’t read any sense of how he was feeling. Knowing him, however, his wife was sure that the predominant sensation was guilt. This was the type of behaviour he had always vehemently opposed, and even though the circumstances were very unusual, it was the first time ever in their marriage that Frank had not occupied the moral high ground.
That bitch Caroline, Lexy thought viciously. Look at the state of Frank! She’s really done a number on him! I’m going to play her at her own game – fuck her over, just like she’s done to me!
And it wouldn’t be enough revenge, Lexy realized vindictively, just to get her husband back. She wanted more. She wanted to destroy Caroline, grind her underfoot, see her reduced to nothing, sobbing in misery. A famous quote from Conan the Barbarian popped into her mind, Conan responding to the question: ‘What is best in life?’ with the answer: ‘To crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentation of their women.’
Lexy set her teeth. She was ready to go full Conan. She wanted Caroline crushed, driven, lamenting, a public laughing stock.
And when I get Frank back, the first thing I’m going to do is drag outside, with my bare hands, the mattresses the two of them had sex on, pour a can of petrol on each one and watch the bloody things burn to ashes.