Contracted: Corporate Wife

Quite, thought Lou. ‘You’re right. I don’t know why I was surprised, really. I suppose it’s because you don’t seem like the marrying kind,’ she said, thinking of his lifestyle. Playboy or not, he clearly didn’t spend much time at home.

‘I’m not,’ said Patrick with a grim smile. ‘That’s why I’m divorced. We were only married a couple of years. We were both very young.’ He shrugged. ‘It was a mistake for both of us. That’ll be a bit of news for the girls in Finance,’ he added, not without a trace of sarcasm.

‘I’ll pass it on,’ said Lou, smiling blandly in return.

Patrick held up the bottle and squinted at the dregs in surprise. ‘We seem to have finished the bottle,’ he said, sharing out the last drops and upending it in the ice bucket. ‘Do you want another? Your toy boy is probably longing for an excuse to come over and see you again!’

Lou rolled her eyes. ‘I think I’d better eat,’ she said, ignoring the toy-boy crack.

The champagne had slipped down very nicely. A little too nicely, in fact. She was beginning to feel pleasantly fuzzy. She might even be a bit tipsy, Lou realised, hoping that she would be able to make it to the restaurant without falling over or doing anything embarrassing. They hadn’t had time for a proper lunch and it was all starting to catch up with her.

She felt better in the restaurant. The waiters fussed around, bringing bread and a jug of water without being asked. Obviously they could see that she needed it.

Lou took a piece of bread, and spread butter on it. This was no time to worry about her diet. She needed to line her stomach as quickly as possible.

She tried to focus on the menu, but kept getting distracted by Patrick opposite. He had been easier to talk to than she had expected. Of course, the champagne had probably helped. He certainly wasn’t as brusque and impersonal as usual. She had even found herself warming to him in a funny kind of way. It was as if they had both let down their guards for the evening. It must be something to do with being stranded away from home and tired…and, oh, yes, the champagne.

She really mustn’t have any more to drink, Lou decided, but somehow a glass of wine appeared in front of her and it seemed rude to ignore it. She would just take the occasional sip.

‘So,’ said Patrick when they had ordered. ‘What’s happened to your children tonight? Are they with their father?’

‘No, Lawrie lives in Manchester.’ There was a certain restraint in her voice when she mentioned her ex-husband, he noticed. ‘I knew I’d be late back to London even if the trains had been running, so I arranged for them to stay with a friend. They love going to Marisa’s. She lets them watch television all night and doesn’t make them eat vegetables.’

Which was probably more than Patrick needed or wanted to know. He was only making polite conversation after all. She was getting garrulous, a sure sign that she had had too much to drink. Better have another piece of bread.

‘Have you got any children?’ she asked, thinking it might be better to switch the conversation back to Patrick before she started telling him how good at sport Grace was or how adorable Tom had been as a baby.

‘No,’ said Patrick, barely restraining a shudder at the very idea. ‘I’ve never wanted them. My ex-wife, Catriona, did. That’s one of the reasons we split up in the end.’ His mouth pulled down at the corners as he contemplated his glass. ‘Apparently I was incredibly selfish for wanting to live my own life.’

Lou frowned a little owlishly. ‘But isn’t the reason you get married precisely because you want to live your life with another person, that you want to do it together and not on your own?’

She’d spoken without thinking and for a moment she thought she might have gone a bit far.

‘I told Catriona before we got married that I didn’t want children,’ said Patrick, apparently not taking exception at the intrusiveness of her question. ‘And she said that she understood. She said she didn’t want a family either, that she didn’t want to share me with anyone else, not even a baby.’

He rolled his eyes a little as if inviting her to mock his younger self who had believed his wife, but Lou thought she could still hear the hurt in his voice. He must have loved Catriona a lot.

‘We agreed,’ Patrick insisted, even as part of him marvelled that he was telling Lou all this. ‘It wasn’t just me. I thought we both wanted the same thing and that everything would be fine, but we’d hardly been married a year before she started to lobby for a baby.’

He sounded exasperated, and Lou couldn’t help feeling a pang of sympathy for poor Catriona. You’d have to be pretty brave to lobby Patrick Farr about anything.

‘It’s quite common for women to change their minds about having a baby,’ she said mildly. ‘It’s a hormone thing. You can be quite sure you’re not interested, and then one day you wake up and your body clock has kicked in, and suddenly a baby is all you can think about. I was like that before I had Grace.’

‘Yes, well, I’ve learnt the hard way that women change their minds the whole time,’ said Patrick grouchily. ‘If I’d known then what I know now, I wouldn’t have believed Catriona in the first place. But I was young then, and it was a blow.’

‘It must have been a blow for her too,’ Lou pointed out. ‘It doesn’t sound as if you were prepared to compromise at all.’

‘How can you compromise about a baby?’ demanded Patrick. ‘Either you have one or you don’t. There are no halfway measures, no part-time options, on parenthood.’

That would be news to Lawrie, Lou couldn’t help thinking. He seemed to think that he could drop in and out of his children’s lives whenever it suited him.

‘Plenty of fathers don’t have much choice but to see their children on a part-time basis,’ she said, struggling to sound fair. ‘It can work.’

‘I didn’t want to be a father like that,’ said Patrick flatly. ‘I don’t believe in half measures. Either you do something properly, or you don’t do it at all.’

Not the king of compromise, then.

CHAPTER TWO

‘YOU could say that about marriage too,’ said Lou, courage bolstered by all the champagne she had drunk.

Patrick twisted a fork between his fingers, his expression bitter. ‘I would have stuck with our marriage no matter what, but Catriona wanted a divorce. So that’s what happened. We didn’t do it at all.’

‘What happened to Catriona?’

‘Oh, she met someone else. She got her children…three of them…but now she’s divorced again. Her husband ran off with his secretary for a more exciting and child-free life, I gather, so she’s on her own again.’

‘You know,’ he confided slowly, ‘Catriona always used to say that if only she could have a baby, she would never be unhappy again, but I still see her occasionally, and she doesn’t look very happy to me. She’s got the children she wanted, but she looks exhausted and worn down.’

‘I’m not surprised if her husband’s left her and she’s dealing with three children by herself,’ said Lou.

‘She’s got help,’ said Patrick unsympathetically. ‘She got the house and she’ll have someone to clean it and an au pair to take care of the kids. She doesn’t even have to work. And when it comes down to it, it was her choice.’

‘It’s tiring bringing up children,’ said Lou, although she was feeling less sympathetic since hearing about the cleaner and the au pair and the lack of a mortgage.

A cleaner, imagine it! Imagine having a house with no rent or mortgage to pay. Even better. She’d hold on the au pair though. Grace would make mincemeat of the poor girl.

‘Kids can be very consuming,’ she said.

‘I know,’ said Patrick. ‘That’s precisely why I’ve chosen not to have them. You can keep all your dirty nappies and your grazed knees and your adolescent tantrums. I don’t want to be bothered with any of that.’

‘But are you any happier than Catriona?’

‘Of course I am!’

Lou looked unconvinced. ‘You say she’s not happy, but I bet she is. I bet she doesn’t regret having those children for an instant. Of course it’s hard work. There are days when I’m so exhausted just getting through the day, and it all seems a never-ending battle, and then I’ll look at the back of Tom’s neck, or hear Grace laughing, and they’re so…miraculous…I feel like my heart’s going to stop with the sheer joy of them. Do you ever feel like that?’

‘I do when I look at my Porsche,’ said Patrick flippantly.

‘Enough to make up for a failed marriage and losing your wife?’

‘Look, I was bitter when Catriona left. Of course I was,’ he said, a slightly defensive edge to his voice. ‘I’m not going to pretend I’ve been ecstatically happy all the time, ever since, but I’ve moved on. I’ve been successful in a way I would never have dreamed of when I was married to Catriona. I’ve built up some great companies, and I’ve made lots of money while I was at it. I’ve worked hard and I’ve had a good life. And I’ve got the kind of car most men can only fantasise about.’

‘Oh, well, as long as you’ve got a nice car…’

‘You may mock, but it means a lot.’

‘I think you may need to be a man to understand that one,’ said Lou. Tom and Lawrie certainly would.