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…’
