This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

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Source ISBN: 9780008316099

Ebook Edition © July 2019 ISBN: 9780008316082

Version: 2019-06-15

Dedication

To my husband, Jeremy

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Acknowledgements

Keep Reading …

About the Author

About the Publisher

CHAPTER ONE

How to make blue playdough

What you’ll need*:

1 cup water

1 tablespoon vegetable oil

½ cup salt

1 tablespoon cream of tartar

Blue food colouring

1 cup flour

*A sharp eye to catch bits before they’re ground into the carpet

Combine water, oil, salt, cream of tartar, and food colouring in a saucepan and heat until warm. Remove from heat and add flour. Stir and knead like it’s your husband’s head, and he’s just informed you he’s working through the children’s bath time, again. Warning: The kids will eat more playdough than you realise. It will turn everything in their digestive systems a deep shade of yellow. Apt really, when you’re discovering what a coward the man you married has become.

It was a particularly muggy spring evening when my usually uneventful, comfortably boringly suburban life fell apart. I was eight months pregnant, sweaty, grumpy and was working late. Again.

‘So, tell me a bit about what’s happened.’ I had tucked my phone into the crook of my neck, a pen making an indent in my middle finger as I scribbled on my notepad. Somewhere beyond the door to my makeshift home office in our spare bedroom, I could hear my two-and-a-half-year-old son, Thomas, pushing a toy truck or car repeatedly into the freshly painted wall of the kitchen. At least, I hoped it was a car. The way our day was going, it might have been his father’s head.

The woman at the other end of the phone coughed. Could she hear me tapping my pen on my notebook? I eyed the clock: 6.30. My workday was meant to finish at 5 p.m., but the emails from my editor had become increasingly frantic. If we didn’t want yet another front-page story about the unseasonable weather, I needed to get a quote from this woman about her burgled-for-the-fourth-time-in-a-month clothes store.

‘I don’t want to make myself more of a target …’ I could hear her jangling a bunch of keys.

I deployed the most soothing tone I could muster. She sounded about the same age as my mother, but the photos I’d found of her in our files looked as if she was only a decade or so older than me. ‘I’m sure you won’t. You must want something done to improve safety?’

I bit my lip, allowing her silence to spread out between us. She did not take the hint to fill it.

‘More security guards for the mall? Better monitoring?’ I tried. ‘Have you lost a lot of money?’

A wail echoed down the hallway. She didn’t seem to register it. Judging by her breathing and the whir of vehicles in the background, it sounded as if she was hurrying across a car park.

‘Oh, heaps. The insurance excess wipes me out each time. I’m too scared to work late here by myself.’

I swallowed. ‘I’d love you to raise awareness of the problem.’ I had to get the words out before she came up with another excuse to put the phone down. ‘Maybe stop other business owners getting caught out.’

‘I guess.’ The line went silent again.

Thomas howled from the next room. I cringed. Could his father not handle one bedtime alone? ‘Have you any footage? We could post it on social media, see if anyone IDs the guys?’

I nudged the door open with my foot and stuck my head through, gesturing frantically at my husband, Stephen, to reduce Thomas’s noise output by a couple of thousand decibels.

He strode past, throwing Thomas over his shoulder and marching him out of the kitchen, toothbrush clenched in one hand and pyjamas in the other. He shot me a pleading look as he rounded the corner, which I pretended not to see.

‘Just imagine how good it would feel if you found them. Plastered their names and photos around the place a bit.’

A few minutes later Stephen’s voice reverberated through the walls. ‘No more stories. I’m going to sit at the end of the bed while you go to sleep, okay?’ Then more forceful. ‘Thomas. Get back into bed. Right now. I’m not joking this time, buddy.’

I rolled my eyes. Perhaps if my husband hadn’t styled himself as the fun parent, he might not find the process so tough. But then, bedtime wasn’t a breeze for boring-strict-Mum when I did it every other night of the week, either.

The office door opened, and Thomas strutted in. Grabbing my leg, he tried to pull himself up, mountain-climber style, into my lap. Stephen appeared behind him, grabbed the neck of his dressing gown, bundled him up and carried him away. I heard a thump through the door as Stephen dropped him back on his bed. ‘Water!’ Thomas wailed.

‘I’m sorry, you’ll have to call me back.’ The woman at the other end of the phone cut off the call.

I dropped the phone on to my desk and shifted in my chair. A rivulet of sweat gathered between my maternity bra and the top of the stretched skin of my stomach. All I wanted to do was lie on the couch and eat my way through the rest of the packet of chocolate biscuits I had hidden from Thomas in the top of the larder. I checked the desktop calendar lying open beside my notebook. Eight working days until my maternity leave started.

Somehow, less than half an hour later, the story was filed. I tried to push the image out of my mind of the store owner trotting to her car, wielding keys positioned between her fingers. There was still a continuous rhythm of bangs and thuds reverberating from Thomas’s room as he rolled around in his bed, his knees colliding with the wall. I gathered the empty glasses and plates from around my desk and carried them through to the kitchen.

As I placed them in the soapy suds still stewing in the sink, I became aware that Stephen’s phone was buzzing on the counter, the vibration moving it across the shiny surface. It was a rare sighting of his phone in the wild. Stephen’s phone was normally either at his ear, in his hand or his pocket. He had even taken a brief call while I was in labour with Thomas – apparently, there was something more pressing happening that afternoon at the building firm he owned. I hadn’t let him forget that one.

I kept my hands in the water, idly picking away at determined blue playdough under my nails. How long should I hang back before I ventured down the hallway and relieved Stephen? At some point, all kids have to fall asleep, right? Even with dads who were no doubt giving in to requests for one more story or an extra bedtime song.

The phone buzzed again. I turned it over. It was a message, not a call, and from a number that I didn’t recognise.

‘Miss you,’ the message blinked. Surely a wrong number. I swiped to unlock the phone, putting in the date of our wedding anniversary as the security code. It brought up a text exchange with the unsaved contact. Odd.

‘What are you up to?’ Stephen had asked on Monday night. Monday night? I had been contorting myself at a prenatal yoga class, trying to maintain my zen. I’d dragged myself down for a rare class at the studio, though it would have been much easier to just stay home and do another YouTube workout on the LEGO-strewn lounge floor. Stephen had said he was working late, that night. I remembered because I’d had to send Thomas to my parents, where he’d wreaked overtired havoc.

‘Just lying on the couch,’ the mystery number replied.

‘Lucky couch.’ He signed the message off with a heart-eyed emoji. An emoji! Was that meant to be cute?

‘What are you doing?’

‘Sitting here, thinking about you. See you soon?’

‘Of course.’ Whoever the other number was, the message was ended with a heart in return.

Then the exchange had fallen dead for a couple of days. I lowered myself to the kitchen floor, the too-trendy square handle of the cabinet sticking into my back, the cold metal of the phone in my hands. Lucky couch? Thinking about you? I could not get my thoughts to run in order. It was like watching television when Thomas had the remote, zipping forward then doubling back. The blood had retreated from my fingertips, and my stomach had started somersaulting. The tiles were cold under my shins. What was going on?

I shut my eyes. Stephen had been away from home more than usual, blaming work. I’d assumed he was doing extra hours so that he could take some time off when the baby arrived. It had never occurred to me to question whether he might have been somewhere else.

It had been a long time since he had said anything that flirty to me. And what if there was more to it than just messages? On the one hand, the idea was preposterous. This was my clueless Stephen. He once tied himself in guilty knots when a woman at a party gave him her number. Later, we discovered she only wanted him to advise which type of steel she should use for her fence. But on the other, he wasn’t the type to message anyone for the fun of it. I had had to show him how to set up reminders to reply to his work emails, and it had been months since he bothered to respond to any of my texts.

Thomas had finally fallen silent in his bedroom, and I could hear Stephen plodding back down the hallway towards me, blinking like he’d returned from a disappointing all-night dance party. He rubbed his eyes as he emerged into the white LED light of the kitchen but stopped in the doorway when he clocked his phone in my hands. He looked at the illuminated screen, then my face and back again. ‘What are you doing?’

‘Who is this?’ I rose to my feet.

I had to grip the cold floor with my toes to keep myself upright. ‘Who are you texting?’

He spluttered, a mottled flush spreading over his face. He looked as if he’d just swallowed something rancid. ‘What? No one.’

I thrust the phone at him. He snatched it from my hand and looked at the open conversation.

‘What is going on?’ My words were harsh in the balmy evening air.

He pushed the phone away, his hazel eyes sparkling. ‘Nothing is going on. I can’t believe you’re going through my phone.’

I stared at him. An evening chorus of crickets had started up in the garden, highlighting the silence between us. I watched him struggle for words. My flicker of hope that there was a story to explain the messages evaporated. He had always become tongue-tied at the first hint of a lie and would avoid someone for months rather than risk a confrontation. The back of my throat was caustic with heartburn and fear danced on my nerve endings. I had only just finished getting the baby’s room ready, and Stephen still had to put the cot back together. What had he done to us? To me?

He hunched his shoulders and turned away, taking cover from my gaze. ‘I don’t have to stand here and be interrogated by you. Am I not allowed any privacy anymore?’

He flung open the fridge, grabbed a bottle of beer and stalked over to the living room. I heard the TV switch on. Was that it? He was just going to try to ignore it? I had swallowed dozens of minor disappointments for the sake of our little family, but this one wasn’t going to be one of them.

I followed him. ‘You can’t just walk away. Who is this?’

He stared at the television, determinedly avoiding my eyes, his shoulders drawn up to his ears.

‘Talk to me.’ I grabbed his callused hand and pulled him towards me. I could hear my voice becoming more and more shrill. Was he not even going to make eye contact? I stepped in front of him to block his view of the screen. ‘I’m Thomas’s mother. I’m about to have your second child, for God’s sake. I deserve to know what is going on. I’ve given you fifteen years of my damn life.’

He still would not turn to face me. I could see his Adam’s apple bobbing in his throat as he swallowed hard.

‘Just bloody answer me!’ I swiped a thick stack of magazines from the coffee table on to the floor. The clatter as they hit the beautiful grey wood (we had agonised over it when we remodelled a year earlier) seemed to rouse his attention. He grabbed his keys from the coffee table in front of him and stood up. ‘I don’t have to listen to this.’

Pulling a sweatshirt from the back of the couch, he strode towards the front door and marched outside. The door slammed behind him and I stared at it as I heard his boots crunch over the gravel out to his truck. He heaved the driver’s door shut, the wheels spinning on the stones as he took off down the driveway.

I poured myself a glass of iced water, wishing it were wine, my hands shaking. It was only 8.30 p.m. What was I meant to do? I pondered calling a friend but what do you say: ‘Hello, nice evening isn’t it? I think I’ve just caught my husband having an affair.’

If it turned out he wasn’t, it would be witheringly awkward to make small talk with the neighbours at our next barbecue. And if it transpired that he was – but we stayed together regardless – no one would look him in the eye. I could not imagine anything worse than turning up to drinks at my perfect friend Charlotte’s house and having everyone look at me, the scorned wife. Poor Rachel, stuck with a cheating husband and a new baby.

I flicked through the channels on the television, but the sound washed over me like white noise. I drummed my fingers on the faded black of my overworked maternity leggings. My heart was still pumping as if I were running. I muttered a silent apology to my daughter, tucked up with her feet planted firmly in my ribs, who replied with a swift kick.

Stephen had done some stupid things in the time we had been together. There was the purchase of a boat that didn’t run, which was still under a tarpaulin in the garage. He’d only started his own business because he’d stormed off a building site over some minor dispute he’d let fester for months. My reminder that we’d just signed up to our first mortgage wasn’t enough to dissuade him.

But if you’d asked me even the day before if he would chuck away everything we had for a fling with someone else, I would have said categorically not. We had worked so hard.

There were men who slipped their rings into their pockets at work drinks and just needed to be offered a halfway-decent opportunity and the – often clearly misguided – belief they wouldn’t be caught.

But I had always thought Stephen was in the other camp – the stoic, reliable type who dropped their wives into conversation and had cute photos of their kids as screensavers on their phones. He could be charming, charismatic – people liked him. But I knew – or thought I knew – he was loyal.

Who was the mystery number? There was that woman at the supermarket deli counter who always gave him a cocktail sausage for Thomas. She was quite pretty, probably, without the hairnet. There was the bartender at the dodgy bowling club he and the guys from work usually went to – but I was sure she had been flirting with me, not him, the one time we had run into her when she was off the clock.

I scrolled through the photos on my phone. It was a procession of images depicting inane domestic bliss, the sort of thing that teenage-me would have rolled her eyes at. There we were, getting married on the beach in Fiji. Posing with plates of complicated breakfasts and glasses of overpriced wine at various restaurants through the years of married life we had before Thomas. Then some floaty-dress baby bump pictures from the first time around, when I had time for wafting around on a beach with a photographer. Fitting Thomas into his car seat on the way home from the hospital. Him tottering across the lounge as he learnt to walk. Dressing up in Dad’s work clothes.

Thomas had only just learnt how to line up the camera on my phone to perfectly capture all of our double chins.

It was after 4 a.m. when I heard a key rattle in the lock as Stephen returned. I was still sitting on the couch, staring blankly at the almost-silent television, tracing patterns in the textured fabric of the cushions. I held my breath as he neared the living room door. The light was on – he would know I was inside. He paused briefly but then the door to the spare room clicked shut. I sat on the couch, my fingers tracking the movement of blood through my temples. Questions were stomping around in circles in my mind: Was she someone I knew? What was going on? What the hell was I going to do?

I knew our relationship had changed. But whose doesn’t, when you have children? Years ago, I had a stash of hugely impractical, very skimpy lingerie that I brought out every night he stayed at my place. I crept out of bed sometimes before he woke to put make-up on and would go to a yoga class every night after work and twice at the weekends, coming home relaxed and stretchy. It had been a long time since I had crawled into our bed in anything other than my faded grey favourites and my yoga was now done most often in front of my laptop, with Thomas imitating alongside me, until he got bored. Although it wasn’t like Stephen was auditioning for an aftershave advert each night, either – he was still sporting boxers that were dotted with holes.

Our sex life recovered a bit as Thomas got older, and then I fell pregnant with number two. Stephen was surprised if I was even still conscious once Thomas was in bed each night. Then, when the nausea of the first trimester subsided, Stephen remembered how weird he thought it was to have sex when there was a baby ‘right there’. ‘Especially when it starts moving around,’ he complained. ‘It’s like being in bed with two people … but not in a good way.’

Lately, I’d felt like our family had divided into two camps – un-fun Mum wanting vegetables eaten and teeth brushed, and Thomas and his best mate Dad, who came home from work when the hard stuff was done, ready to play. But that was hardly unusual if my circle of friends was representative. We’d all pondered early on how our husbands seemed to regress twenty years with the arrival of a baby, while we aged ten.

Stephen and I had told each other that it was normal, and we would get back on track eventually. We decided there was no point having a regular ‘date night’ – we would prefer to lie in front of the TV and see how many chocolate biscuits we could eat in half an hour, than go out somewhere public where we would have to wear pants and bribe a babysitter.

When had he changed his mind?

I should have been weeping for the loss of my family but, afraid to look into that particular abyss, I was seething for more practical reasons. I barely had time for a shower each day and beat myself up when I had to make a phone call just when Thomas needed me. I was torn between my need to work harder than every childfree twenty-something on my team and to out-parent the stay-at-home mothers I went to playgroup with on a daily basis. I pulled eighteen-hour days juggling my work–life ‘balance’. It was exhausting. Yet he had managed to fit in a sexy liaison with someone else? I could kill him.

I wrenched myself up and started walking towards the spare bedroom. Stephen was still awake, staring at the lit screen of his phone as I pushed my way into the room. He quickly tapped the device to lock it, sending the room into darkness.

‘I need to know right now.’ I lowered myself on to the end of the bed. ‘Are you seeing someone else? Is that what this is?’

He was silent. The air seemed to throb between us. I slapped his leg through the duvet. ‘Stephen! You can’t get out of this one.’

His voice was strangled as he pushed himself up on the pillows as if to get away from me. ‘Yes.’

‘Who is she? Is it someone I know?’ I paused, feeling ill, as I realised the possibility. ‘Have you been there tonight?’

He turned over in the bed. ‘Please, can we talk about it in the morning?’

I took a deliberate breath in, then out, using every drop of my willpower to channel my deep yogi breathing I’d mastered all those years ago. ‘No. We cannot talk about it in the morning.’

He pushed himself up on the pillows. I noticed his lined forehead, his short-cut hair becoming a little more sparse around the temples. ‘Fine. I’ve been seeing Alexa. She didn’t want me to say anything to you until after the baby came. But now you know.’

He flopped back and put his hands over his face. Like it was my fault that I was finding out at the wrong time. I pulled my hand back from where it lay on his leg as if I had been burned.

Alexa. The name cut through my mental fog. The too-perfect interior designer with the TV show and stupidly expensive coffee table books. She’d been working with him a lot. I should have known something was going on when he told me, completely straight-faced, that he was going to a lunch meeting with her about the colour scheme for a pet dog’s bedroom at the big country house he was working on. Instead, I’d just been jealous that he got to have an expensive steak and pricey bottle of wine while I was stuck at home, trying to write a column about a proposed new tax, while I jiggled Thomas on my knee and sang along to Fireman Sam.

Alexa was gorgeous. Of course. If you take the average pregnant person and try to imagine the complete opposite, you have her. Tall, slim, impossibly glossy long hair with gold highlights that bounce around as she wanders about in intricately patterned harem pants. That first night we met, at an end-of-year function for Stephen’s business, she had just returned from a mountain trek and thirteen-day scuba diving course and reeked of the calm confidence that it seems possible to acquire when you have more than fourteen and a half minutes a day to devote to your own interests.

Brought back to the present with a shock, I could taste my dinner bubbling up into my oesophagus at the thought of her. A scream forced its way up. I grabbed the china vase from the bedside table and hurled it at the wall. ‘How could you?’ I screamed. ‘How the hell could you do that?’ I squeaked, more softly the second time. The vase didn’t even break, rebounding with a thud on the carpet.

He stared at me. ‘You’ll wake Thomas. Do you know how long it took me to get him to sleep?’

I stood in shock, then ran for our bedroom. A pile of his clothes lay in a heap on the end of the bed. As I curled up, I realised the whole room smelt of the aftershave I had been buying him for the last ten years.

I woke up a couple of hours later to the sound of Thomas and Stephen in the kitchen, clattering spoons into bowls as they assembled breakfast. I stretched, feeling the bones click back into place in my neck, and barrel-rolled off the bed. My baby seemed to stretch too, contorting as she found her way back to the centre of my upright body.

I edged the kitchen door open. Thomas was perched on his step stool, pouring milk into the bowl, and on to the bench, from which it was dripping on to the floor. The kettle was boiling and our dog, Waffle, nudged her empty water bowl across the tiles with her greying nose. Stephen grabbed the milk bottle from Thomas. ‘I told you to be careful. Let me.’

‘I do it!’ Thomas glared but looked chastened. Stephen rarely snapped at him. His father tried to guide the pour. He looked up as he heard me shuffling in, my legs numb from the baby cutting off my blood supply. He quickly turned his gaze to Thomas again.

I watched the pair of them as Stephen positioned Thomas into his chair at the dining table. More cereal was spilling down the front of his T-shirt. I handed Stephen a cloth to wipe him, but he looked flummoxed, so I snatched it back and dabbed at the mess.

‘I’m going to ask my mum to take Thomas out for a while, so we can talk today.’ I kept my voice calm, channelling the woman who fronted the kids’ TV show that kept Thomas occupied for a sanity-saving hour each Saturday morning. My husband might be trying to ruin our lives, but I was going to keep this from Thomas – as well as everyone else – for as long as I could.

Stephen swallowed, and focused on my hand blotting Thomas’s T-shirt. ‘I have to go to the site this morning. I can come back about eleven.’

I kissed Thomas’s forehead. ‘That’s fine. Thank you.’

We were talking to each other as if we were business acquaintances, who didn’t particularly like each other.

He had barely made a dent in his toast when he stood up and stuffed his keys and phone into a bulging pocket, whistling for Waffle to follow him into his truck.

‘Say goodbye to Dad,’ I prompted Thomas, who was watching a shimmer of sunlight dance across the wall. I was not going to miss an opportunity to remind Stephen of what he would be leaving behind. I would have pulled out my sonography scans and dangled them in front of him if I could.

‘You shirt,’ Thomas pointed at my front. I was still wearing Stephen’s baggy grey T-shirt, which I’d had on the day before. There was a saucy smear across the front, where Thomas had wiped his face as I hugged him after a messy afternoon tea. He raised a puzzled eyebrow.

I arranged my face into as neutral an expression as I could manage. ‘I didn’t have time to get changed.’ I shot him what I hoped was a reassuring smile. He was frowning. It was time to deploy my best upbeat your-mother-is-definitely-not-falling-apart voice again. If I presented him with the wrong type of jam with his toast, it could throw him off for the whole day. Now I was turning up in day-old clothes and acting like his father was a stranger in our kitchen. ‘Everything is okay, darling. You’re going to Gran and Granddad’s this morning. That will be fun, won’t it?’

By 11.30, there was still no sign of Stephen. I paced the house, watching the driveway. Every time I tried to return to my desk, the words on the computer screen seemed to flitter in front of me. I was scanning a press release for the third time, still with no idea what it said, when my phone vibrated. A message from Stephen at last. I gritted my teeth as I opened it. ‘Can’t make it back this morning.’

I stabbed at the phone to call him. It rang and rang before voicemail clicked in: ‘Hi, it’s Stephen Murchison, I can’t come to the phone …’

‘You can’t or you won’t?’ I growled at it and tried again. And again. At the sixth time, he answered. ‘I cannot talk to you right now,’ he hissed. ‘I’m on site.’

Had I always been married to such a selfish coward? Did he think I could just put my own life on hold until he had time to spare for me?

‘You were meant to be coming back here at eleven.’ My anger reverberated through my body so hard I thought he must be able to hear it down the phone line. ‘I need to know. Is that it for our marriage? For our kids? How long has this been going on for?’ I spat the words at my computer screen.

‘I don’t know.’

There was a sound of movement, a door slammed. He must have gone to sit in his truck.

‘A month maybe. Two. I’ve developed feelings for her.’ His voice trailed off as if I was meant to just accept it. Like, oh you’re in love with her? That’s all right, then. Please carry on. Don’t let me be an impediment to your happiness.

Instead, I let the silence hang between us. He might as well have been speaking a different language. The Stephen I knew thought ‘feelings’ should be approached in the same way as a particularly virulent infectious disease. The first time I’d told him I loved him, he said: ‘me too’. We’d got engaged while on holiday in Hawaii because, watching loved-up Japanese couples exchanging vows on the sand, he’d said: ‘I suppose you want to do that, too?’

At last, he sighed. ‘I’ll move out while we figure out what to do.’

‘You’ll move out?’ I was suddenly shouting so loud it made my throat hurt. ‘Damn right you’ll move out. I never want to see your face again.’

I pressed the button to end the call, my hands shaking as if I had downed twenty-six coffees. A month or two? In that time, I had dragged him to midwife appointments, he had sat with me while I agonised over paint colours for the new baby’s room and we had planned Thomas’s third birthday party. We’d even pored over which species of dinosaur Thomas might like on his cake. All that time he had been talking to someone else, confiding in her? The crushing weight of the loss was overwhelming.

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Mummy Needs a Break

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MUMMY NEEDS A BREAKSusan Edmunds

Copyright

Dedication

CHAPTER ONE

MUMMY NEEDS A BREAK
Susan Edmunds