I never fully told you what it was like when Solly was born. It was January – absolutely freezing. Snow everywhere. I was holed up at home with this newborn who didn’t stop screaming. I got mastitis, so badly I was shaking and feverish. On my way to the GP I had to sit down on a bench in the snow because I couldn’t walk the distance.
I was hit by this wall of grief for Mum. I wanted her so badly – to ask her what to do, to have her say it was all right, I was doing all right. I wanted her to take care of me – for someone to take care of me. I felt like a baby taking care of a baby. I didn’t get dressed from one day to the next. Sometimes when he wouldn’t stop screaming, I thought he’d been swapped, that he was someone else’s child, unrelated to me.
One day a health visitor came and she was kind to me. It all came pouring out. I just cried and cried. After that things got better slowly. My milk supply improved, we got the hang of feeding. The more sleep I got, the more I was able to cope – even four-hour stretches made a huge difference. But it was one of the worst times of my life. If you think I’ve been down on your pregnancy and you having a baby on your own, it’s because I don’t want you to go through what I went through.
Then, last summer – during that heatwave, d’you remember? – when everything was good; we were living close to each other and Solly was great, Jon-Oliver reappeared. I told you how reluctant I was at first, how difficult it had been to get over him, but he went on a charm offensive, like he was love-bombing me. Looking back, I’m not sure if he was love-bombing me, or just getting round me to get to Sol.
I was reluctant for weeks, months even. That only seemed to make him keener. He was the very best version of himself, buying stuff for Solly, delighting in Solly. That’s the other thing about having a kid on your own – there’s no one who delights in them as much as you do. So having his dad doting and sharing the good stuff. That was very … well, it was amazing. There was someone to text my photos to: pictures of him asleep – Sol is so beautiful when he’s asleep.
Or texts about silly things he did or said. The feeling that Jon-Oliver wanted us, really wanted us, was overpowering. I just got to a point where I thought I’d be crazy not to give it another shot. No, I know I didn’t tell you. I didn’t want to tell you.
Our situation, Manon, you and me living together – I didn’t want it long term. I didn’t want to be married to you and bringing Solly up without a dad. I wanted someone to love me and take care of me. And when Jon-Oliver was charming, it was turbo-charged. He had mega-watt charisma and it was being launched right at me. You never saw it, you were always at work, but the three of us … fuck. It was heaven.
Thing is, when you’ve had your guard up as long as I have against Jon-Oliver; when you have been wounded as much as I have and then you let your guard down again, and then you’re deceived again, it’s five times as bad. I should have stayed hardened but I didn’t. I knew what he was really like, yet I was stupid enough to fall for his charm again.
I made myself vulnerable, opened myself up, and look what happened. Not just that, I’d opened Sol’s life to him. So when I found texts on his phone again – sex texts, texts from women saying, ‘Are you hard?’ or ones saying, ‘Your appointment with Angel is confirmed for 11 p.m.’ – I knew I’d fallen for the shit again, and that he’d only wanted me because I was reluctant, and now that I wasn’t reluctant he was going to ride roughshod all over the both of us. I decided he wasn’t going to get away with it.
D’you know what it’s like to feel so angry you could commit murder, while having to sing ‘Wheels on the Bus’ and stay soft for all the cuddles and the stories that Solly needs? It was close to impossible. I was pretending with Sol, when inside I was boiling with rage. And that made me even angrier, that everything I had with Solly had been corrupted by him.
I didn’t confront him. I pretended I didn’t know about the shagging. And then, early November, he asked me to sign some legal papers. He was making Solly the beneficiary of one of his companies offshore, as a tax dodge. He told me it was only temporary, that he’d take Sol off the paperwork within six months. But for the time being, Solomon was the sole beneficiary of ￡9million held in a shell.
And at the same time I was being chased by the NHS for five grand I didn’t have because they’d made a fucking admin error and overpaid me. I was working nights, watching Sol in the day; I was so dog-tired I could hardly stand, and he was jetting here and dining there and shifting millions about and every now and then he expressed these ‘concerns’ about the environment Sol was growing up in, the way I allowed him to watch telly while I dozed on the sofa, the amount of time he spent at the childminder, the fact that Fly was around.
He was an arsehole. He started to hint that he could provide a better life for Sol than I could: proper nanny, top-flight nursery, private schooling, everything money can buy. He could buy and own and go after the things he wanted, but he was incapable of loving anything.
He was erasing me. He was erasing my role as Sol’s mother. I’m a lot of things, but I’m a good mother. I love that boy. I couldn’t let him do it to me. I couldn’t …
She squints out to sea.
Then scrubs across her writing with great loops from her pen.
Solly is patting the top of his sandcastle with the back of his spade.
How to explain her relationship with Gary Stanton, her relationship with Giles Carruthers?
She flips the page.
Me and Giles? We wanted the same thing, for different reasons of course. It cropped up one evening at a lavish bank function that all staff had to attend. Jon-Oliver was all over some 20-year-old in a low-cut dress, even though he’d asked me to go with him as his plus-one. Anyway, Giles and I had both had a bit to drink and we started watching Jon-Oliver and that led to each of us venting about him, I guess. Giles was pitted against him at the firm and it was driving him demented. Jon-Oliver had signed the Chinese billionaire and it had blown Giles out of the water. He said, ‘We don’t have to just take it, you know.’ Giles is a narcissist of gigantic proportions. He cannot bear even a sniff of humiliation. It was Giles’s suggestion to put one of the Titans guys onto it while Solomon was on the paperwork of Pavilion Holdings. A window of opportunity, he called it.
What did Giles get from me? A hand to hold, I guess, or maybe someone to hide behind. I did wonder if Giles was in it with me so he could pin it on me if things got rough. Or maybe he got from our collaboration the same thing people get from a stiff drink before an ordeal: Dutch courage.
Truth was, he would’ve done it without me.
She crosses this out, too.
She cannot send any of it to Manon.
She tries again but her back is so sore, a line of pain between her shoulder blades from the tension in her wrist and her rounding over the pad.