Sharing Sean
Sharing Sean
A Novel
Frances Pye
for Chris
Contents
One
One
Jules had put off clearing out the office for ages.
Two
Terry crossed her hands over the oversize wheel and spun…
Three
The sharp, metallic sound of an electronic doorbell echoed through…
Four
“Give me one.”
Five
“Hello, sweetheart. How about I help you with that?” A…
Six
Lily strolled through the large tent, whispers rising in her…
Seven
Terry bicycled slowly up Holly Hill, toward Lily’s house, standing…
Eight
Mara was in her long, thin, brick-walled back garden, diligently…
Nine
Dressed in her turquoise and gray aerobics teacher’s outfit, Lily…
Ten
Still in her black bus driver’s uniform, Terry sat outside…
Eleven
Jules’s town house in Chelsea was her own personal haven.
Twelve
Sean tugged at his collar, took a deep breath, and…
Thirteen
It was four in the morning. Sean woke to find…
Fourteen
“I dumped him.”
Fifteen
Lily grabbed the handle of the corkscrew and yanked backward.
Two
Sixteen
Sean closed the job specs he had been working on,…
Seventeen
Mara knelt over the bowl, scrubbing brush poised, breathing in…
Eighteen
“Well, I suppose someone’s got to start this. Here goes.”
Nineteen
“You look tired.” Lily leaned against Mara’s cracked counter and…
Twenty
Rules had been around for over two hundred years. Inside,…
Twenty-One
Terry walked into the latest coffee-shop addition to the High…
Twenty-Two
“How’re you doing, Tilly?”
Twenty-Three
Sean looked up at the dilapidated old factory. Hidden away…
Twenty-Four
Sean and Paul both revved their go-carts, ready for the…
Twenty-Five
“Amy! Where did you get this?” Mara stood in her…
Twenty-Six
“You haven’t?”
Twenty-Seven
“Hi, it’s me.”
Twenty-Eight
Jules stood over the plastic glass, staring at the dipstick,…
Twenty-Nine
Mara had had a bad feeling about Lily’s dinner party.
Thirty
“This seems quite straightforward.” Robin Heath, a well-groomed, beautifully dressed…
Thirty-One
“It’s happened.” Jules couldn’t hide her excitement. Ever since the…
Thirty-Two
Jules walked from one hot, crowded, smoky room into another.
Thirty-Three
Clive Morris stood in the foyer of the LWT Building,…
Thirty-Four
Sean stood in the shadowy, candlelit living room, a glass…
Thirty-Five
Lily sat huddled in her favorite chair. The thunder had…
Thirty-Six
“He called her a what?”
Thirty-Seven
“You were right, Lily. He is marvelous. Absolutely marvelous. We…
Thirty-Eight
The house was dark.
Thirty-Nine
Sean wasn’t sure what he was going to do right…
Three
Forty
Mara hustled the girls into their coats and out of…
Forty-One
“To Jules.” Lily raised her glass of champagne and took…
Forty-Two
Sean stood outside the door to Jules’s little house. It…
Forty-Three
Mara stood huddled in a phone box opposite an enormous…
Forty-Four
Jules closed the door behind the Harrods delivery man. She…
Forty-Five
“This is amazing.”
Forty-Six
The smell of frying onions, of garlic and ginger and…
Forty-Seven
“Terry!”
Forty-Eight
“Lils. Guess what?”
Forty-Nine
Jules clicked off on the last of her e-mails. Unfortunately,…
Fifty
Terry walked up the street, toward her house. The wind,…
Fifty-One
“Things have changed a lot, pet, I’m afraid. You’re still…
Fifty-Two
“Lily?”
Fifty-Three
Clive drove at around five miles an hour down the…
Fifty-Four
“Hi, this is Terry. Leave me a message. Or I’ll…
Fifty-Five
“Are you all right?”
Fifty-Six
Jules opened her eyes to see unfamiliar blond-wood furniture, a…
Fifty-Seven
“There’s something there, I tell you.”
Fifty-Eight
Sean turned off Chiswick High Road onto Mara’s street, unaware…
Fifty-Nine
“So what do you think he’ll say?”
Four
Sixty
Sean scrunched up the tiny strip of paper and threw…
Sixty-One
Sean opened his eyes. It was still dark. Slowly, quietly,…
Sixty-Two
Sean forced himself to ease up on the accelerator. The…
Sixty-Three
The giant bus swung around the tight corner, into the…
Sixty-Four
The door opened.
Sixty-Five
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
Sixty-Six
Sean supposed he would soon get tired of the tinny…
Sixty-Seven
Jules was ecstatic.
Sixty-Eight
Paul didn’t find out until lunchtime. Newspapers weren’t a regular…
Sixty-Nine
It wasn’t until early afternoon that Terry noticed the odd…
Seventy
Paul wasn’t sure how to feel when he discovered that…
Seventy-One
Mara thought something had changed when she opened the door.
Seventy-Two
Lily walked down the stairs to the theme song from…
Seventy-Three
“And this is the garden.” Mara walked out of the…
Seventy-Four
“Paul? Are you home?” Terry shouted as she walked through…
Seventy-Five
Surrounded by dusty boxes, Sean stood in the center of…
Seventy-Six
Terry shut the newspaper and added it to the growing…
Seventy-Seven
“This is it? The only offer?” Mara held the telephone…
Seventy-Eight
“Happy Christmas, love.”
Seventy-Nine
Jules ran to the toilet, leaned over it, and threw…
Eighty
“We did what?”
Eighty-One
Jules stood on Terry’s doorstep. She hadn’t called ahead because…
Eighty-Two
Operating on autopilot, Mara pulled another box toward her and…
Eighty-Three
“So we’ve got to come up with some way to…
Five
Eighty-Four
“Hello.”
Eighty-Five
Sean flicked through his mail. Travis Perkins wanted paying for…
Eighty-Six
Jules played nervously with the cocktail napkin that had come…
Eighty-Seven
Mara lay back in the bubbles. She adored this room.
Eighty-Eight
“Claire? Claire?” Jules’s words echoed through the cavernous room.
Three Years Later
Eighty-Nine
“You can’t wear that!”
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Praise
Copyright
About the Publisher
One
one
Jules had put off clearing out the office for ages. Not so much because she expected to find anything, more for fear of reawakening painful memories of her time with Will. But she needed the space; her Chelsea town house was far from large, and keeping one room locked away made no sense. So she steeled herself, inched open the door, and, armed with a vacuum cleaner, dusters, and tons of rubbish bags, she went to work.
Heaps of old letters, of bills and receipts, of ancient yellow, curled faxes and aged theater programs were piled on the floor, against the walls, and on the expensive antique satinwood desk Jules had bought for her then-beloved husband. Even the seat of the matching chair was stacked high with out-of-date catalogs and used checkbooks and grubby bits of paper.
But there were no ghosts. No lingering shades of Will, of his handsome face, his charming smile. No pain. No unhappiness. Not even any memories. Just a dusty, dirty, disused room. And the detritus of a life. Of a marriage.
Jules eased the paper wrapping off a curl of black plastic bags, pulled one from the roll, and teased it open. To begin with, she threw everything away, eager to get rid of it and Will. But as she made her way through it all, she began to look at a letter here and there. Soon she was reading everything, amazed by this new insight into someone she had thought she knew as well as she could know anyone. She’d been aware that her husband wasn’t the most truthful person in the world—her girlfriends Lily, Mara, and Terry still laughed at his telling a story about how he had once rescued a party of English schoolchildren who were lost in the Gobi Desert—but reading through the litter of his life she realized just how bad it had been. Truth held as little meaning for him as Egyptian hieroglyphics did for her.
There were dozens of complaints from dissatisfied customers of his interior design company. Letters threatening court action unless he returned deposits paid on jobs he hadn’t finished. Jobs he hadn’t even started. Jobs he had no intention of ever starting. Will had always insisted that his clients loved him. That the reason he never made any money was because he couldn’t bear not to use the best materials, the best fabrics. But in reality it was because he never got around to doing any work at all.
Amazed by the sheer depths of her ex-husband’s duplicity, Jules plowed through the heaps of unpaid bills. The stacks of final demands. The endless, threatening notes from creditors.
Then, she picked up a letter from a Mr. Giddes, a fertility consultant based in Harley Street. As she read through it, her body went rigid with shock.
“Bastard. How could he do this to me?” she screamed.
Will had lied to her. He was infertile.
Where a normal sperm count was between 20 and 100 million, his was barely 5 million. That might seem like a lot—after all, it took only one—but Jules knew those kinds of low numbers made fathering a baby almost impossible without the help of in vitro fertilization. Particularly as, according to this, Will also had nonexistent motility. In other words, the few sperm he was producing were going nowhere.
“I am afraid that, given these results, there is no chance of your fathering a child in the usual fashion,” the letter clearly stated.
Will’s sperm was useless. Inert. Dead.
All those years, he’d let her believe that he was fine, knowing she was going to be devastated every month when she found out she wasn’t pregnant. He had watched her ripping open packets of tests, listened to her praying that this would be the day, heard her sobbing as she realized that yet again there would be no baby. He watched her, on the street staring at infants, crying when she saw pictures of mothers and newborns, drooling over the tiny dresses in Petite Etoile. Year after year. Without saying a thing.
She should have known something was wrong when he refused to go for a sperm test. She’d believed his story about the son he’d fathered when he was in his twenties, the son who’d later been killed, with his mother, in an accident. When her tests came back and there was nothing wrong with her, her doctor suggested that that was no guarantee, that the mother might have made a mistake about Will’s being the father. Or even lied. So Jules had tried to talk to Will, to ask him as gently as she could to take the test anyway, just to confirm things. And he’d hit her. Hard. She could still hear him yelling at her. Didn’t she understand what she was asking? Why did she want to hurt him by dredging up all those old, bad memories associated with children and hospitals and tests? The whole thing was unnecessary, just a stupid whim to reassure her and that old hag of a doctor she’d insisted on seeing. He’d fathered a child. His sperm was fine. If there was a problem, it must be with her.
Now, looking at the letter, knowing the truth, his lies appeared pathetically, painfully obvious. Back then she’d been too worried to think straight. Instead, she had convinced herself that all the two of them needed to do was relax, be patient, and it would happen. There were years of taking her temperature, of rushing home to make love at the right moment, of lying back afterward, giving things time to happen, hoping month after month, only for those hopes to be dashed again and again as every test proved negative. Until, finally, worn out, unable to cope with even one more disappointment, Jules gave up on the idea.
Lily, Terry, and Mara had wanted her to go for fertility treatments, but she couldn’t bring herself to do it. She was convinced that it would just mean more of the same: eager expectation followed by bitter disappointment, only magnified a thousand times once doctors and procedures and hospitals were involved.
Jules stared at the letter in her hand, repelled by the musty smell of disuse that hung in the air, struggling to understand how much her ex-husband must have hated her.
She started to cry. All those wasted years. If he had only told her, had just been honest, she would have embraced IVF. She would have given anything, sacrificed anything to make sure it worked and that she and Will had a child together. Part of her knew she wasn’t being rational, that their disastrous relationship wouldn’t have been saved by a baby. She would’ve hated being tied to him forever as the mother of his child. And been terrified that if he could hit her, he might do the same to their baby. But she allowed herself to dream, if only for a moment. Their child would have been school age by now, a little son or daughter for Jules to dress and play with and love. The only thing she had ever really, really wanted and failed to get was a child. Instead, she was alone.
Jules crushed the paper she was holding in her hands, hurled it at the wall, then hunted for something more satisfying to throw. Something that might break. There was nothing. She spun around, her white-blond hair flying around her face, her pale green eyes raging, and kicked out at a paper-stuffed black trash bag, sending it soaring across the tiny attic bedroom her ex-husband had once used as an “office.” Her mind was filled with dreams of revenge, of wonderful, satisfying retribution, of ways to make Will feel as bad as she had when she’d read the letter.
But then, she stopped short. Wait a second. If he’d lied to her, that meant she was fine. A huge smile spread over Jules’s elegant, tanned face. She was fine. She was only thirty-eight; there was still time. She could have a baby. Her smile got impossibly wider. A baby.
two
Terry crossed her hands over the oversize wheel and spun it to her left. Thank God for power steering. Without it, there was no way a hundred-and-twenty-pound, five-foot-nothing like her could
do this job. The double-decker bus passed the glassed-over entrance to Victoria Station and made its way unerringly through the crowded bays, then pulled up in an empty space. Terry turned off the engine and heard the heavy footsteps of passengers leaving the upper deck and pouring out of the rear of the bus.
It was lunchtime. They were in the middle of the first warm spell of the year and everyone was desperate to catch some sunshine in case this was the only glimpse of summer they’d get. Just as keen to get a short break from her hot, airless cab, Terry opened the door and leaped the four feet down to the ground.
“You’re crazy,” came a shout, and a short, round, smiling man in a black serge uniform with a ticket machine on a strap appeared at Terry’s shoulder. “One of these days, you’re going to break a leg.”
“Silly. All these years and I haven’t yet, have I?” Terry smiled at Fred, her conductor.
“You’re getting on, love. Women’s bones, they get brittle, you know.”