Believing the Lie - Elizabeth George [53]
She’d said, “Oh,” and tried to hide her surprise.
He’d hurried on with, “I rather thought it was time. I probably should have told you before now, but I didn’t quite know how to put it.”
Manette didn’t like the way she felt about this, but she forced a smile and said, “Oh. Lovely, Freddie. Anyone I know?”
“No, no. Of course not. Just someone…”
“How’d you meet?”
He moved back from his desk. On the monitor behind him, she could see a graph and she wondered what he was working on. Profits and losses, probably. He was also due to analyse wages and benefits. And there was the not small matter of formally going through the books following Ian’s death. When on earth had Freddie even found the time to meet someone? she wondered. He said, “Actually, I’d rather not talk about it. It feels a bit uncomfortable.”
“Oh. Right.” Manette nodded. He was watching her earnestly to gauge her reaction so she was careful to give him a cheerful one. “P’rhaps you c’n bring her by, then. I’ll want to see if I approve. You don’t want to make a second mistake.”
“You weren’t a mistake,” he told her.
“Ah. Thanks for saying that.” She fished in her bag and brought out her car keys. She said brightly, “Still my best friend, then?”
“Still and always,” he replied.
What he didn’t say was what she knew: that they couldn’t go on forever as they were, divorced but housemates, everything the same in their lives save where they slept and with whom they made love. What remained was the deep friendship that had always existed between them, which was, at the end, the root of the problem. She’d often thought since the day they’d agreed to divorce that things might have been different had they been able to have children together, that their relationship wouldn’t have deteriorated to the point of their dinnertime conversation being all about the benefits of a self-cleaning and self-deodorising lavatory and how to market it. One couldn’t go on like that indefinitely without waking up one morning and wondering where the magic had gone. A friendly divorce seemed the best solution.
Well, she’d known Freddie would find someone else eventually. She intended to do the same herself. She just hadn’t thought it would happen so quickly. Now she wondered if the truth was that she just hadn’t thought it would happen at all.
She eased her car through the gates of Margaret Fox School. She’d not been here before, but Niamh had told her where Tim would be waiting. There was a supervised holding area near the administration building, Tim’s mother had said. Manette’s name would be on a list matching to Tim’s name. She was to take her identification with her. A passport was best if she had one. There would be no quibbling over that.
She found Tim easily enough since the lane into the school led directly to the administration building, with the classrooms and dormitories forming a quadrangle behind it. Her cousin’s son was hunched on a bench with a rucksack at his feet. He was doing what, in Manette’s experience, most teenagers did with their free time these days. He was texting someone.
She pulled up to the kerb, but he didn’t look up, so intent was he upon what he was doing. This gave her the chance to observe him and she did so, reflecting not for the first time upon the extremes to which Tim went in order to hide his resemblance to his father. Like Ian, he’d been late to puberty, and he still hadn’t gone through a growth spurt. So he was small for his age, and out of his school uniform, he would look even smaller. For then he donned clothes so baggy that they draped upon him, and even the baseball caps he favoured were too large. They covered his hair, which he’d not cut in ages and which he allowed to hang in his eyes. He would want, of course, to hide those eyes most