Plan B by Emily Barr Read Free Book Online

secret. It was going to be much more clear cut now that he was taking a plane between his two lives. He would step onto the aeroplane as Matt, and step off it as Hugh.
    Hugh was genuinely excited that half his life would now be in France. He had wanted this. He had wanted something different, had come to be exhausted by dashing from one part of the south of England to another. He was not going to keep this up for long because of the fucking money, but he reckoned he could manage a year. That was his deadline. He could live this double life for a year, and then he was going to have to decide. A year was optimistic. A year meant calling various credit cards into play and cutting down on extravagances, but he could do it. Thinking of it as a year meant that the decision, the showdown, was a comfortingly long way off.
    He was tentatively assuming that when his year was up he would leave Jo and make the France thing permanent. Admittedly, the new life had not got off to a good start. Hugh smiled to himself as he sped away from it, in relief at the certain knowledge that he was not going to spend that night pretending to be comfortable on a lilo that, even when fully inflated, plunged down to meet the stone-tiled floor as soon as he lay on it. At least his weight see-sawed Emma and Alice high into the air. They had genuinely slept. He had been sure of it. Alice, at least, was incapable of pretending.
    Tonight, he would sleep in an obscenely comfortable queen-sized bed, under a thick duvet, with his beautiful wife next to him. He switched the radio on and sang along with Otis Redding. ‘Sitting on the dock of the bay.’ He was a bastard, and he got away with it because his behaviour was out of character. He was not one of life’s natural bastards. He was an accidental bastard. He hummed as he drove through miles and miles of pine forests, towards Bordeaux.
    He parked in the medium-stay car park, locked his car, and headed for the terminal. Once there, he used the phone card he had already bought to call Emma and Alice.
    ‘Darling!’ he said to Emma. ‘How are you two? OK so far?’
    ‘Oh Matt!’ she exclaimed. ‘We’re a bit lost without you. It’s Daddy,’ she added as an aside. ‘How was the drive? Is the flight on time?’
    He reassured her on both fronts, although he hadn’t checked about the flight.
    She chatted, barely pausing for breath, eager to keep him on the phone for as long as she could. She went over her plans for the next few days. She would try to enrol Alice in the local school. She would chase up the builders and the architect. Matt loved the fact that she had refrained from pointing out to him that their much-fanfared emigration was, so far, utterly miserable. That the house was terrible, the weather was terrible, that she was already horribly lonely because he had removed her from everything that had always held her together. She should have been screaming at him. Luckily, Emma did not do screaming. She would go to any lengths to avoid confrontation, and this was what made his lifestyle possible. He castigated himself, again, for taking advantage of her sweet nature.
    Then he made a second call.
    ‘Darling!’ he said, with exactly the same inflection he had used when he called Emma. ‘It’s me. Not too bad at all. I’ll be home around seven, with any luck. I’ll call from Gatwick. Love you both.’
    Hugh was surprised at how pleased he was to be back in London. Everything was familiar and easy, here. He took the Gatwick Express to Victoria, marvelling at the rush-hour crowds on the station. He bought a paper and a coffee and forced his way onto a packed tube train. He changed onto the High Barnet branch of the northern line at King’s Cross, and got off the train at Highgate. From Highgate station, he walked through the rain for ten minutes, swinging his carrier bag of guilt-stricken airport presents, and turned left into Highcroft Road. He stood outside a tall brick house and gave himself his