Private Lives

Chapter 10

Seb had been close to tears when he got back home from the restaurant, dripping wet, waking Eva who was asleep in the living room. ‘Have you seen Rosie, Mum? Is she here?’

That night he’d got away with telling Eva he and Rosie had just had a row, that everything would be fine. Eva didn’t believe him, of course, but it was late. When Eddy rang to say that Rosie was safe, Eva knew without asking that Seb needed to be alone.

‘Try to sleep,’ she said before she left.

Tonight, when he lets himself into her house, she’s sitting next to the flickering wood burner, a handmade quilt over her knees, almost as if she had been expecting him. As she slowly closes the book on her lap, clocks the overnight bag slung over his shoulder and turns her strong blue eyes on her only child, he knows that he’s going to have to tell her everything.

He sits down opposite his mum, pressing the heels of his hands into his eye sockets so he doesn’t have to look at her, and tells her a version of the truth. He tells her that they hadn’t had sex in so long, that Rosie seemed simply disinterested in their marriage, in him. He hears the pathetic whine in his voice as he says those words. He tells her what he told Rosie, that Abi’s website had fallen into his lap. He tells her how sorry he is, how much he regrets it.

He doesn’t tell her there were so many times he nearly turned back. How he was close to not calling Emma – Abi’s work name – from outside the cafe as she’d instructed him to do. Almost didn’t press the buzzer to the flat and almost didn’t walk up the flights of stairs to the tiny central London studio. But his body kept pushing him forward like it had already disassociated entirely from his brain. He’d noticed his wedding ring just before he knocked on her door. What a fucking cliché. He slipped it into his coat pocket and managed to smile back at the blonde woman who answered the door in a silk kimono. Her feet were bare, tattooed in complicated patterns. So different to Rosie’s; he couldn’t stop looking at them.

‘It’s your first time?’ she asked, still smiling, once they were both inside.

Seb tried to talk but just kind of spluttered and nodded, which made her smile more. He fumbled with the money which she took from him with ease, tucking it into her pocket.

‘It’s OK to be nervous,’ she said. ‘Would you like some fizzy water?’

He was glad to bookend the appointment with a shower, washing both the before and after Seb away so when he left the apartment he wasn’t sure who he was any more. He was just a man who in ninety minutes had replaced his desperate craving with something new, a dull ache he couldn’t name. As he waited for a train back to Waverly, the thought occurred to him that perhaps what he had just done wasn’t so bad after all. Emma was bright, kind and, yes, very attractive, but the whole thing was transactional. She was entirely attentive, but he knew that she didn’t have any more feeling for him than the basic affection she’d maybe feel for a cafe barista. Perhaps he could think of sex with Emma as a kind of physical therapy – relief for body and spirit. Something Rosie might not need but he did, like visiting an osteopath or getting some acupuncture. All the fierce moralizing about it was a waste of time, a cultural obsession that had surely caused a lot of harm and done little good. As an affair was a relationship – that meant being attentive to the subtleties of someone else, their smell, their sense of humour, their values, and sharing those same intimacies with that person – it would engage brain and heart. That was the difference, he told himself. That reasoning was what made him visit a second time.

But now, lying in the gloom of Eva’s spare room, he realizes it doesn’t matter what he thought about it. For Rosie, it wasn’t about Seb and his body, it was about her and it was about him, and now it’s about her friend. There is no justification or explanation that will change that. From her point of view, he has betrayed her in the most degrading way possible.

Seb wakes at four a.m., pulls on tracksuit bottoms and a faded T-shirt, lets himself out and walks home. The air is chill, and Seb starts to panic as he walks, picking up the pace, imagining getting home and finding empty beds, missing passports. As soon as he’s through the front door he takes the stairs three at a time, but there, of course, they are. Rosie and Greer fast asleep, Rosie clinging on to their daughter like she’s charging her own gravitational force, the one that will keep her from drifting away from them all entirely. He strokes Greer’s hair, and she stirs slightly before he goes to check on her brother and big sister.

He goes downstairs without turning on any lights, sits on the kitchen sofa and looks up how to delete the search history on his phone. He waits for his phone to finish deleting everything, all those women lurking in its synthetic memory, and where he used to feel a spike of excitement, he now just feels hollow.

Electronically cleansed, he waits for the first glimmer of sunrise before getting up to unload the dishwasher, put the kids’ porridge on, fold the washing, just about outpacing his despair with order and movement. He hears Greer laughing first, and then Heath grumpily shouting at her to be quiet. They’ll all be awake now. His hand shakes as he carries a mug of tea upstairs to Rosie.

Greer is sitting up in bed, her hair a tangled halo, a schoolbook in her lap. Rosie is lying on her back, listening.

He’s a shit.

‘Daddy!’

‘Morning, my loves.’ Seb watches Rosie turn to look at him, her hand shielding her eyes, weak protection against the morning light. Her face is creased with sleep. She looks exhausted, confused. ‘Let’s let Mummy sleep a bit more – why don’t you read to me downstairs?’

‘This book is boring.’ She throws it on the floor as she starts to shuffle off the bed. ‘Can we play witches’ school instead?’

‘We can play whatever you want.’

While Greer is cutting out a green frog for her cauldron and Heath is flicking through a magazine at the table, Rosie comes into the kitchen. She’s showered, perfumed, dressed for work and is moving quickly. The Monday morning panic snapping at her heels, she’s already fighting the brand-new week.

‘Where’s Sylv?’ she asks Seb, her voice crackling with tension.

‘She’s not down yet.’

Rosie tuts and turns to the bottom of the stairs. ‘Sylv, you up?’

Sylvie shouts something indecipherable back, which makes Rosie tut again. Seb moves to the kitchen door. He asks quietly, ‘I thought maybe we could not go to work today?’

She looks at him, but he can tell she can’t see him; she’s blind with anger. ‘Why?’

‘I was thinking we could talk …’

She looks like she wants to spit in his face. ‘I don’t want to talk.’ She pushes past him, reminding Heath, ‘Sweetheart, it’s Monday, you’re supposed to be in your football kit, remember?’

Sylvie finishes her geography homework at the kitchen table while Seb changes into work trousers and a shirt. The thought of staying here, his betrayal everywhere, fills him with more dread than going out into the world. He’ll go to work. He loads the dishwasher while Sylvie looks up facts about volcanoes on his phone. ‘Oh, you got a new message, Dad. Auntie Anna says, “Seb, we need to talk …”’ she reads before he clumsily snatches the phone, knocking her hand too hard.

‘Ow, Daddy!’ She flinches dramatically, rubbing her arm, his phone clattering to the tiled floor. He picks it up but doesn’t read the message from Anna, lets it rest on top of the other unread messages and calls from Eddy.

‘Sorry, Sylv.’ His hand is shaking as he comes towards her, reaching to touch her, but she pushes him away before leaving to walk to school.

When Seb opens the front door, their neighbour Martin is shepherding his daughters along the bumpy pavement on their pink bikes.

‘Morning, Seb!’ Martin says, smiling from his crouched position next to his youngest, who is balanced on stabilizers at a precarious angle. ‘Good weekend?’

Seb manages to nod and say, ‘Fine, thanks, Martin. You?’

Martin grimaces and says something about his in-laws before he stands up straight and shouts at his elder daughter, ‘Jessie, I asked you to wait!’

Seb gratefully turns left, away from Martin, taking the longer route to school.

He isn’t walking alone for long before Vita calls his name. ‘Sebbo!’ She crosses the road towards him, her son, Luca, silently following.

Seb looks at the squirming kid first. ‘Morning, Luca,’ he says while Vita arranges herself on Seb’s arm.

‘So, how was it?’

Seb, blank, replies, ‘How was what?’

‘PLATE!’ Vita squeals while simultaneously rolling her eyes. ‘I’m so jealous you got that reservation, but Anna’s always so on it, isn’t she …’ And while Vita witters away, they greet other parents. Seb scans their faces, and he is relieved to notice that nothing’s changed. Some, like Vita, perform friendship; others are slightly formal. The world is turning, just as it should, but no one else apart from Seb seems to notice the strange new tilt.

Mrs Greene is already at her desk and, like every morning, she stands to slide open her little glass doors fully as soon as she sees Seb. ‘Morning, Mr Kent,’ she says, smiling. She’s not once called him Seb.

She takes her glasses off her face, like she wants Seb to see her eyes, to better see the faith she has in him pouring out of her. She sometimes reminds him of Eva and at the thought of his mum, how she’ll be waking this morning, trying to digest everything he told her last night, Seb thinks his knees are about to give way. He holds on to the reception counter and hears himself croak, ‘Morning, Mrs Greene. How are you?’

Mrs Greene waves his question away as the school phone starts ringing; she doesn’t have long. None of them do first thing in the morning. ‘I just wanted to remind you to mention the work starting on the sports pavilion.’

Blankness again, and Mrs Greene’s smile widens because she knows how busy he is – it’s only natural he’ll forget the odd thing occasionally.

‘In assembly?’ she offers and Seb’s organs drop.

It was his own stupid initiative. Once a month the whole school congregates in the hall. First a different year group performs something – music, maybe a poem – and then the kids can ask Seb questions about the school or raise any concerns they might have. It’s part of his plan to make sure the kids feel ownership over the school, like they have some agency in how it is run.

‘Just be ready for some questions about the sports pavilion from the students, mostly around what’s going to be in the vending machines.’ Mrs Greene wrinkles her nose and puts her hand on the still-ringing phone.

‘Thanks for the heads-up, Mrs Greene.’

She glows a little brighter at him before putting her glasses back on and answering the phone. ‘Waverly Community Secondary, good morning.’

Usually, he goes to the staff room first, makes tea for anyone who wants one and chats to his colleagues, but this morning he goes straight to his office. As he fumbles with his keys, he feels the air shift as someone stands right behind him.

He turns, and staring at him with a look of pure revulsion is Anna.

‘We need to talk,’ she says, keeping her arms folded.

He nods, turns back to the lock and says, ‘OK. Come back at lunch …’

‘No, now.’

‘Anna, it’s assembly in ten minutes …’

He pushes his office door open, and Anna ignores him, follows him straight into the stuffy, boxy room. She turns towards him, proud and livid, a righteous representative for every woman who has ever been hurt by a man. He closes the door slowly before coming to sit on the edge of his desk, keeping his eyes low as he says, ‘I can see you’re upset, Anna.’

Anna laughs joylessly.

‘You should know that I’m doing everything I can to make things right.’

Which must be the wrong thing to say because Anna’s shaking her head. ‘Not even you can make this right, Seb.’ Her voice is practised, calm, but she’s still shaking her head at him. ‘What you’ve done is unforgivable.’

‘I’m sorry you feel that way, Anna.’

‘No, no, Seb. It’s not that I feel that way, it’s the truth.’ She’s actually shaking now, vibrating with indignation, with rage. ‘You think there’s any way we can be friends again when you pretend to be this holier-than-thou person, but all along you treat women like things that can be bought and sold – just things to fulfil your pathetic needs?’

‘Anna, that’s not fair, you know I don’t …’

‘No, Seb. The person I thought I knew could never, ever demean women like that. But you did. You made an appointment to abuse a woman – not once, but twice. Honestly, it sickens me. You – the real you – sicken me.’

That isn’t him. Seb is slowly finding out that he is many inglorious, ugly things, but Anna is wrong. He isn’t an abuser. But Anna’s got too much to say; there’s no room for Seb to defend himself.

‘You know I grew up watching women sell themselves at the end of our road? I’d be drawing my bedroom curtains and see them get into strangers’ cars. They were all addicts, Seb, all of them painful to look at, and I’d hate those men then just as much as I hate them now, because even back then I couldn’t understand how they could ignore the sadness in those girls’ eyes, ignore the fact they were hurting them even more than the needles they stuck into their arms …’

‘Look, Anna. I know you’re angry, I know you’re hurt, and perhaps you have a right to be, but it wasn’t like that. I didn’t abuse anyone. She was doing that work legally and of her own volition …’

‘That’s what you have to tell yourself, isn’t it? That she actually enjoyed it? That she chose to have dick after disgusting dick inside her?’ Anna moves closer to Seb. ‘I don’t think you’re that stupid or that naive. I think you know she hated every second of it, that she was doing it for drugs or because she was abused as a child, probably both. But still you went along with it, you still paid her so you could rape her, and that makes you a monster.’

Seb’s never heard his darkest fears spoken out loud before, even by himself, let alone someone else. These screaming accusations should turn him to ash, but they don’t because Seb is certain that the person Anna’s describing is not him. What she’s describing is not what happened in that tiny, soulless W1 studio. He knows it, and he also knows that there’s no way he can prove it.

Instead, he does the only thing he can.

‘That’s enough.’ He moves to open the door for her to leave, but she grabs him by the arm, her sharp nails digging painfully into his skin.

‘No, you fucking don’t. I’m not finished yet.’

Seb pulls his arm away from her. ‘Anna. Stop. I know you’re upset, but that’s enough. I have done something wrong, you’re right. I betrayed my wife, broke promises we made to each other – I get that. I regret it bitterly but I’m not going to stand here and let you call me a monster. What happened was legal and it was between two consenting adults.’ He pauses for a bit, thinks, Fuck it, before adding, ‘In a way, there’s no difference between what Eddy did in Singapore and what I did.’

Anna’s face turns a strange puce colour; she looks like she’s about to vomit. ‘Eddy didn’t pay, he didn’t abuse anyone.’

‘No, he didn’t pay, but he did flirt, laugh and, let’s be honest, he definitely didn’t mention your name.’

A sob rises in Anna’s throat then, winding her and making her fall forward. She shakes her head at him, like she can shake his words out of her ears. ‘Eddy’s different now.’

‘OK, Anna.’

She starts crying – big, angry, rasping sobs – but Seb holds himself steady, stops himself from comforting her.

She holds up her hand, making a small space between her thumb and forefinger. ‘I’m that close, I swear to God, I’m that close to telling everyone what a shit you really are.’

Seb stares at her and tries to feel if this threat is genuine or not. He forces calm into his voice and says, ‘I have a right to a private life, Anna.’

‘And I have a right to ensure my kids are guided by someone who isn’t a liar and who doesn’t abuse women. And now, knowing what I know about you, I have a duty to all the other parents who have a right to know who you really are, the real man making huge decisions about their kids’ futures.’

‘Anna …’

‘The only reason I haven’t so far is because of Rosie and the kids, of course.’

Seb’s heart sinks. His poor children.

‘I think you know, deep down, that you’re not fit to lead this school, Seb.’

‘Anna, what I did has no bearing at all on my position here. That hasn’t changed. I’m still just as capable, I’m still the same person …’

‘Not to me you’re not. And if you stay in your position, you’ll leave me with no choice.’

‘You’re threatening me?’

‘If that’s what you call it. I don’t care. I’m just looking out for the children. All our children.’

‘What do you want, then, Anna? Seriously, what do you want from me?’

She doesn’t pause; it’s like the words are right there, waiting for her. ‘I want you to know that we’ve had enough. Men like you pretending you’re safe, feigning friendship, when you’re the worst abusers of all. Men like you – entitled, educated, privileged men – can’t keep treating women like we’re dolls to be played with when you feel like it. I want you to feel what it’s like to be publicly shamed and then I want you to disappear.’

The bell rings for the school to gather for assembly but Anna doesn’t take her eyes off Seb. ‘You should come clean, Seb. Tell the whole school that you can’t continue as head teacher. It’s your one chance to do something that is truly right, and if you don’t, then I will.’

She turns and, with one last disgusted glance at him, opens the door and walks away.

Seb stays perched on his desk, holding his head in his hands, adrenaline flooding his body, his thoughts like fire ants. Anna hadn’t shut the door behind her and suddenly Mr Clegg, the geography teacher and deputy head, pokes his bald head into Seb’s office and asks, ‘You all right?’

Seb looks up at him and, standing, says, ‘Yeah, just a bit of a headache, that’s all. I’ll take some paracetamol.’

Mr Clegg nods, backing out into the hall.

Seb nudges his office door shut. He is right, isn’t he? Everyone’s entitled to a private life. Even teachers, even head teachers. What if Mr Clegg secretly loves dressing up in leather and being spanked with a paddle? That’s none of anyone else’s business. Would that make him unsafe to do his job? No, no, of course it wouldn’t. Anna is wrong. He can be both: a reliable professional and a fallible man who messed up big-time. Anna is always so ready to explode, so full of rage. Eddy will help calm her down, just like Seb calmed her down when she found out about Eddy’s affair. All Seb has to do is call Eddy and ask. He just needs to get through the next few days. Just needs to help Rosie understand that he did what he did because he felt so stuck, so scared, so lonely. If he can find the softness in himself to share all that with her then maybe, just maybe, they can heal together.

He picks up his notepad and a pen, and takes a sip of water from the glass that has sat stale on his desk all weekend.

When he enters the hall, he feels every one of the six hundred pairs of eyes on him.

He lets his gaze blur as he turns towards them. Just get through this.

‘Morning, everyone,’ Seb says, his mouth twitching. ‘I hope you all had a good weekend …’

He swallows, the saliva bitter in his throat.

‘We’re starting today with an assembly from the Year Nines with a “celebration of autumn”, which sounds wonderful. So, over to you, Year Nine.’

Before he leaves the stage, he looks up briefly at the blur of young people in front of him, and one face lifts into focus. Lily. She’s sitting next to Blake, at the back, looking at him like everyone else, but she’s serene, composed, smiling faintly, and Seb knows he not only holds his own fragile family’s future in his shaking hands, but also that of this talented young woman. His body fills like a sack of wet cement; he can’t sit where he’s supposed to but rushes out of the side door, the sniggers and whispers from the students like falling arrows at his back.