in at half past six this morning.’ I was braced, defying him to ask why I hadn’t got her home before then. Or why I hadn’t called him. Or why I should have done some other bloody thing that would have stopped us being the people that everyone nodded at the mention of and said, ‘I know who you mean.’ Before putting on that face, so damn smug that they’d done it right.
Apparently Patrick hadn’t been married to me for all this time without learning something. He might not know where to find the cheese grater, that a Hoover bag needed changing if it wasn’t picking up or that no one other than me was allowed to use the turquoise towels, but he knew enough to recognise when not to poke the bear.
He sounded contrite. ‘Let me get you a cup of tea, then tell me what I can do to help.’
I made the childish part of me – ‘Look round the kitchen and pick a bloody job! Any of the thirty-seven that need doing!’ – bow down to the last sliver of adult cordiality. ‘Thank you. Perhaps you could go and pick all the dog-ends out of the plant pots outside. Or see if you can fix the leg on the dining room chair?’
I carried on scrubbing. I could hear my heart thudding in the silence.
Patrick passed me a mug of tea.
‘I’m sorry. I’m sorry it came out like this.’
‘You knew, didn’t you? That’s why you were so against having him here. In case your little secret came to light.’
Patrick stepped towards me, shaking his head. ‘No, no. I genuinely didn’t. Jo, you know me better than that. I would have taken responsibility if Ginny had told me.’
He tripped over her name and my heart dipped at the understanding that the very mention of her would always evoke complex and contradictory emotions. As much as I was in a place to assume the worst, I noted a little release of tension at Patrick’s words. I instinctively recognised the truth.
I wasn’t finished yet though.
‘But the fact remains you did know you’d slept with her and chose not to tell me.’ I sat back on my heels. ‘I’ll always wonder if it was really me you wanted or whether there was more to it, whether she turned you down and I was a convenient safety net. And I will never ever understand how you didn’t know you’d got her pregnant. It must have occurred to you that you could be the father.’
Patrick sat on the floor next to me. I wanted to tell him to be careful not to get bleach on his jeans. ‘Jo, I asked her as soon as she told you she was pregnant.’
‘How did you ask her? Did you phone her? Send her an email? How did you both decide that you would just continue planning to marry me while she was carrying your baby?’
‘I rang her.’
‘When?’ I imagined him leaving the office at lunchtime, sitting huddled on a bench, waiting to find out whether he’d got his girlfriend’s best friend pregnant.
‘I can’t remember now. When did she tell you she was expecting? May? June? It was straight away after that. I’d proposed to you by then, hadn’t I?’
‘What did she say?’
Patrick looked up at me, his face, the one that I could pick out of a crowd – the face that said safe and home and family and roots and belonging – troubled and uncertain. ‘It was nearly two decades ago, Jo. The rough gist was that I shouldn’t flatter myself that I’d score a hit with a one-time only session and that the baby was nothing to do with me.’
‘And then you agreed that neither of you would mention it to me?’
‘We did talk about it, of course we did, but at the time, we just thought it would cause unnecessary bad feeling and awkwardness between us all for nothing.’
I grunted. ‘You can say that again.’
Patrick stretched his legs out. ‘I know you won’t believe me because of what we know now, but it really didn’t mean anything. And that’s easy for me to say because I’m not the one dealing with the news that my wife has had a baby with another man. I promise it was no more important to me than say—’
I put my hand up to stop him. ‘Please don’t name any other one-night stands for me to be jealous of.’
‘I wasn’t going to. I was trying to think of an