Five Unforgivable Things

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First published in Great Britain by HarperCollins 2018

Copyright © Vivien Brown 2018

Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2018

Cover photographs © Shutterstock.com

Vivien Brown asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

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: 9780008252144

Ebook Edition © July 2018 ISBN: 9780008252151

Version 2018-05-16

For all the babies we have longed for, loved or lost

Table of Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Prologue

Number One

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Number Two

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Number Three

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Number Four

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Chapter 41

Chapter 42

Chapter 43

Chapter 44

Chapter 45

Number Five

Chapter 46

Chapter 47

Chapter 48

Chapter 49

Epilogue

Acknowledgements

About the Author

About the Publisher

Prologue

Kate

I don’t know why I’m talking to you. It’s not as if you can do anything to help, or undo what’s already been done. You will listen, though. I know that much. You’ll listen and you’ll let me talk, let me work things out for myself, just as you always have. You don’t tell me what to do, the way Dan does, or tries to, even now.

Dan and me. We were happy once. For a long time, we were happy, when it was just the two of us, loving and laughing, living in the moment, just enjoying being young. And being together. It seemed enough back then; more than enough. But it wasn’t. Not in the end. Dan wanted more, and when it came down to the now-or-never moment, so did I. A baby, a family, a happy-ever-after.

But it wasn’t what we got.

One last throw of the dice, that was what we were offered. A once-in-a-lifetime chance, with six numbers on it, and it could have landed on any one of them, or none of them at all. We both knew that. It all came down to luck, in the end. And to nature. Maybe even fate. Like most things in life, if you don’t take control of them, if you take your eye off the ball…

I did all right for a while, dealt with all the bad stuff the best I could. There are ways, you see. Tricks I learned, disguises I plastered across my face, masks I hid behind. Ways to get from day to day, coping, managing, putting one foot in front of the other. Ways to go forward, when all you really want to do is go back. Not thinking too hard. Or trying not to think at all. Being grateful for what you have, instead of dwelling on what you’ve lost. Keeping busy. Well, that one was easy enough. Sleep, when you can get it, which wasn’t so easy at all. Pills…

If there is one thing you’ve taught me, it’s that pain fades, dampens into something less raw. And so do memories, if you let them. But I can’t forget the mistakes. Everyone makes them, I suppose. But, for us, there were just too many. Things we did. Things we didn’t do, but should have. Things we did wrong.

Oh, it wasn’t just Dan. It was me too. I admit that. In fact, it was me who started it. Me who told the lie that set everything in motion, like a runaway train it’s impossible to stop. Yes, we made mistakes. Big ones. Mistakes that can’t be undone. Mistakes it’s almost impossible to get back from, no matter how much you wish you could.

Moments in our lives, when the things one of us chose to do would alter everything for both of us, alter the course of our marriage. And they did. They altered it, almost irrevocably. And very nearly broke us.

Five unforgivable things.

NUMBER ONE

Chapter 1

Kate, 1976

The first time I set eyes on Dan Campbell, I didn’t fancy him at all. He was younger than me, for a start. Only by a couple of years, as it turned out, but enough for it to show. And his hair was a strange kind of half-blonde, half-mouse colour. A bit streaky, like it was neither one thing nor the other. I wasn’t sure if he’d made an attempt to colour it himself with some dubious home-dye kit or if it was what nature had dealt him, but in any case I had always preferred tall, dark handsome types, and Dan fell down on all three counts.

I was at a party in someone’s flat, part of a tall Victorian terrace, indistinguishable from a hundred others, with a dirty brown front door and crumbling windowsills, somewhere in West London, with just a bit of gravel and a low wall and a badly- lit pavement lying between it and the main road. The flat was up three flights of stairs. It was a bit grotty, with threadbare carpets and dodgy paintwork, and a dead spider plant on a shelf by the door with piles of bent fag ends squashed into what must once have passed as compost. Every time I went into the kitchen to look for another drink it felt like my shoes were sticking to the floor. Beer spurting in all directions when people pulled the tabs on shaken-up cans didn’t help, not to mention the cheap wine dripping as it was poured, inexpertly, into plastic glasses, and the odd dropped sausage roll trodden greasily into the lino. Still, nobody seemed to notice, or care, except me.

To be honest, I wasn’t really sure whose flat it was, or even whose party it was. Back then, once the pub closed, it didn’t take much to get me to follow whoever I happened to be with to wherever they happened to be going. Anything was better than going back to my mum’s, now that Trevor was there. That particular Saturday night, though, I wasn’t really in the mood for partying. I’d only been there an hour or so, and the bloke I thought I was with had clearly had other ideas and moved on to a rather over-loud redhead with a low-cut top and eyelashes long enough to swat a fly. Not that I minded. He was hardly the love of my life. Still, his defection had left me worrying about how I was going to get home. Whether I’d missed the last bus, how far it was to walk, and how safe. Whether I could afford a taxi.

I was picking my way down the last of the narrow litter-strewn staircases, holding my bag in one hand and clutching the rickety banisters with the other, heading for the front door, when Dan Campbell walked in. Only, I didn’t know who he was then. Just some random stranger, letting himself in, not even seeing I was there.

He had his head down, dripping rain from a long grey mac. He was fumbling a set of keys out of the lock and back into his pocket, and carrying a soggy carrier bag, bottles chinking together inside it as he stopped to stamp his shoes on the doormat. I peered out past him, through the open door, into the darkness, split only by the glow of passing traffic, still heavy despite the time of night, wipers thrashing, headlights on, hazy at the edges. Rain. Lots of it. It hadn’t been raining when I’d arrived and it wasn’t something I’d bargained for when I’d dressed to go out. Taxi it was, then, if I didn’t want to ruin my new heels, or my hair. I’d just have to raid Mum’s secret tin when I got home if it turned out I didn’t have enough for the fare. Not that it was much of a secret when I knew exactly where she hid it. But Trevor didn’t know, and that was what mattered.

I reached the bottom step and hesitated, waiting for this drenched man to finish wiping the water from his glasses and the mud from his shoes and notice me, move aside, leave my exit clear, but the door slammed behind him, shutting out the rumble of the traffic, enclosing us in that small space, with just the thump of the music above us, oozing its way through several layers of ceilings and floors.

And then he lifted his face and looked at me, a bit startled, and I looked right back at him, a lot less so, and you know how, sometimes, you just feel it? A connection, an understanding, something in the eyes that says, ‘Stay. Stay and talk to me. It’s much too early to leave. Come and re-join the party. You know you want to.’ Actually, he may have said it for real, not just through his eyes. I can’t be sure now. Whether he was already a bit drunk, or I was. It’s a long time ago, and the combination of time and lager tends to tamper with the finer details, shroud them all in a woozy kind of fog that may or may not have been entirely unpleasant, or unwelcome.

But, for whatever reason, or possibly for no obvious reason at all, I picked up my bag from where I’d been resting it on the table in the communal hallway, the one with all the junk mail on it, and I followed him back up the stairs to the party. Even though he was clearly too young, too short, too streaky, not my type at all. Even though all those things ran instantly through my head and were just as instantly dismissed, I still followed him up those stairs. I still did as he asked, and stayed.

And it wasn’t until the next morning, when I woke up in a different flat, with a pounding headache, wearing an unfamiliar man-sized t-shirt and no knickers, and watched him pull back the curtains and hand me a cup of tea and a broken custard cream, that I finally found out his name.

‘Hi, Kate. Just in case you don’t remember, I’m Dan,’ he said, sitting down at the end of the bed. ‘Dan Campbell. And if you want a couple of aspirin with that, just say. I’m sure I have some somewhere.’

I shook my head. A nip to the toilet and a quick escape into the fresh air were all I really needed right then. And answers to the sort of awkward questions I suddenly felt totally unable to ask. How exactly had I got here? In this bed? His bed? And did I …? Did we …?

I sat up, pulling the rumpled sheets and a mound of blankets up with me, careful not to let the t-shirt ride up and reveal anything it shouldn’t, and drank my tea. It was way too milky and could have done with more sugar, and the biscuit was bordering on being stale, but I was feeling self-conscious enough just being there without complaining about the catering.

‘I’ll leave you to get up when you’re ready.’ He stood up and tossed a dressing gown onto the bed. ‘Here, use this if you like. Bathroom’s just through there. And I’ve got eggs, if you’re interested.’ He took the empty cup from my hands. ‘And more tea. Plenty more tea. Anyway, I’ll be in the kitchen. Pop in, please, even if it’s only to say goodbye.’

He closed the door behind him and I lay back and just let myself breathe. Well, he was a gentleman, I’d give him that. Protecting my modesty, not trying to peek, or cop a feel or anything. I looked around the bedroom. It was small, quite dark and old-fashioned in décor, with a high ceiling and one of those big round paper light shades hanging right above my head. The walls were lined with shelves, piled high with records, paperbacks, magazines, all chucked in any old how. I was dying to see what they were, to work out what his taste was in music, what sort of stuff he read. I even had a strange urge to start tidying them for him, setting the books upright, shuffling things into some kind of order, but I didn’t want him to come back in and catch me being nosey, interfering. It was none of my business what possessions he had, or how he chose to store them. It wasn’t as if I had any plans to see him again, after all.

In the bathroom, I sat for a while, draining my bladder dry, waiting for the throbbing in my head to subside. I ran the taps in the sink for ages, but the water stayed alarmingly cold. I splashed it about as briefly as I could get away with, over my face and hands, under my armpits, then slipped back into the clothes I’d worn the night before. I’d found them all heaped up on a chair next to the bed, knickers on top, as if I’d removed them last. Or he had.

My mouth still tasted of alcohol, or the stale remains of it, at least. I picked up a rolled-up tube of toothpaste with the lid missing, squeezed a drop onto my finger and ran it backwards and forwards over my teeth, and did the best I could to sort out my tangled hair, short of actually washing it.

There was a waste bin under the sink. The most likely place to find evidence, if there was any. I bent down to pick it up. There wasn’t a lot in it. A used razor, a cardboard tube from the middle of a toilet roll, a lump of dried-up chewing gum, but no sign of an empty Durex wrapper, which worried me. A lot. Either we hadn’t, or we had done it without taking any precautions. Oh, my God. Doing it with a man I’d only just met would have been bad enough, but not being careful was unthinkable. I took a deep breath and opened the door. It was time I found my way to the kitchen.

‘Before you ask …’ he said, as soon as I walked in, as if he was some kind of mind-reader. ‘No, we didn’t. Not that I wouldn’t have liked to. But you were pretty drunk, and I’m not that sort of a bloke. Okay? It was late and you had no obvious way of getting home, and I couldn’t let you even think of doing it alone anyway, in your state, so I offered you a bed. My bed. Apologies that I didn’t change the sheets, but I’d had a few drinks myself, and the sofa was calling …’

I nodded with relief and sat down at the small formica-covered table. ‘Well, I’m glad we’ve cleared that one up. I don’t usually … you know … with men I’ve only just met. But thanks, for the bed. And for putting my mind at rest. I did need to be sure.’

‘Understood. Say no more about it.’ He pulled at the fridge door and rummaged about inside. ‘Now … eggs. Scrambled or fried?’

I suddenly felt starving hungry, and Dan Campbell, it transpired, cooked exceedingly good eggs. Big and white with bright runny yolks, and bread cut into thick soldiers that we dipped and dripped with sheer abandon as we sat together and talked, starting slowly to feel a little less like strangers.

Dan was twenty-two, which surprised me as he looked younger, and a trainee accountant, which, taking one look at his dark-rimmed glasses and the pale, rather serious, face that peered out from behind them, somehow didn’t surprise me at all. He lived three floors below last night’s party, which was where we were now, in the flat to the left of the downstairs hallway. He told me that he shared it with someone called Rich, who, according to Dan, was probably still crashed out in a drunken post-party stupor on some grimy armchair upstairs and was unlikely to be back for a while yet. Did I remember Rich? Tall, ginger hair, covered in freckles … I tried to, but I couldn’t. In fact, there was very little about the party after I re-joined it that I could remember with any clarity at all. I really should stop drinking so much. It didn’t help with anything. With not having a proper job at the moment, or with still being stuck in my old room at Mum’s, with the tape marks from my old pop posters still liberally splattered over the wallpaper, hideous flowery curtains and all. And it definitely didn’t help with the Trevor problem. I wasn’t sure that anything, except hiring a hit man, was going to shift Trevor, so it was probably time I just accepted he was there to stay. Mum’s house, Mum’s rules, Mum’s choice. A bad one, but she’d have to find that out for herself. It wasn’t as if I hadn’t made a few bad choices myself recently.

‘Would you like to meet up again? Go for a drink or something?’ Dan was clearing away the plates and had his back to me so I couldn’t see his face, whether he really meant it, or was just being polite.

‘I don’t know.’

‘Why not?’ He turned back towards me and there it was again, that look, that connection, as his gaze locked on to mine. ‘I think you might actually enjoy it. If you let yourself. Go on, Kate, take a chance. What’s the worst that can happen? We sit in some pub all evening with nothing to say to each other? Find we have nothing in common? You discover I’m the world’s worst kisser, or I bore the pants off you, or you can’t stand my aftershave? At least you get a free half of shandy and a ride home. Let’s be honest. You have nothing to lose!’

And he was right, of course. I had nothing to lose but my heart, and by the time I walked out of that flat just thirty minutes later, into a bright cloudless Sunday morning that suddenly sparkled with possibilities, I was fairly sure a big chunk of it was already gone.

Chapter 2

Natalie, 2017

Natalie hesitated outside the bridal shop. The lights were on inside, so it was still open, even though it was almost five-thirty. The dress in the window was absolutely stunning, in sleek sculptured ivory satin with just a hint of lace in all the right places, and tiny buttons that glinted like pearls. It was exactly the kind of dress she had longed for ever since she and Phil had finally set the date, but going inside a shop like that by herself would just feel way too strange. Even if she tried the dress on, which she so wanted to do, how would she know it was right with nobody there to oooh and aaah and spin her around in all directions and take sneaky pictures on their phones?

Natalie wasn’t used to doing things alone. In fact, these last few days had probably – no, definitely – been the first she had ever spent entirely by herself. Phil was away at a work conference so boring she didn’t even want to hear about it when he called, let alone be there with him, and Mum was off on one of her regular retreats, her mobile deliberately switched off. Jenny and Beth were visiting some seaside spa place together on a cheap mid-week deal for two. Natalie hadn’t been able to get the time off work to join them, even if squeezing an extra bed into their room had been a possibility, but the truth was she hadn’t been asked. Despite their distance, the bridesmaid question still hung in the air between them, unspoken but so obviously there, and she knew that by the time they came back, it needed to be answered.

Natalie shook her thoughts away, tentatively leaned into the glass door of the shop and eased it open. Although the best of the summer was over and the days were already starting to get noticeably shorter again, the sun was bright today and she could feel her spirits lift along with it. The path through the park was bordered by bouncing rows of tiny-headed purple pansies, newly planted in neat rows, and, after a week of relentless drizzle, her raincoat and boots were at last stuffed back in the hall cupboard in favour of a lighter jacket and her favourite sandals. There was something about the change in the weather that seemed to promise better things to come, making her feel suddenly bold. It was her wedding, after all. Not theirs. And she would do things the way she wanted to, whatever any of them said.

The shop’s interior was an oasis of beauty and calm. There was a deep cream carpet and floor-to-ceiling mirrors without so much as a smudge on their shiny gilt-edged glass. The sweet scent of jasmine drifted in the air but, in the absence of any real flowers, it seemed to be coming from a huge fat candle that floated in the centre of a bowl of water on a shelf, well out of harm’s way, behind a small desk in the corner. Little red velvet-covered chairs were dotted about around the edges of the room, between tall slim glass cases with the most wonderful satin shoes, beaded bags and glittering tiaras displayed on their shelves. One wall, the longest one, off to her right, was swamped by an unbroken row of big billowing floor-length dresses that brought the phrase ‘as far as the eye can see’ instantly to her mind. There was nobody else about and, for a moment, she just came to a standstill right in the centre of it all, feeling completely overwhelmed.

‘Can I help you?’ A small bird-like woman, with a slight foreign accent Natalie couldn’t quite place, and a tape measure looped loosely around her neck, emerged from behind a curtain at the back of the shop, revealing a brief glimpse of a hidden workroom beyond, with a sewing machine and scraps of satin and lace strewn across a cluttered table in the centre, and yet more dresses, draped on hangers from an over-full coat stand and all encased in see-through plastic bags.