Foursome Novel – For twenty years, we were inseparable. I thought our happy life would last forever, but when my husband expressed his love to my best friend after getting drunk and even tried to peck her, everything would change. Our marriage, our friendship, would be ruined. “I’m serious.” “You’re drunk,” I said, standing up from the sofa and putting some distance between us. ” “I love you, Rebecca. I always have.” Oh, my God. That sentence made me sick again. By the way, my husband Daniel was sleeping upstairs in our bedroom. “Alex, you’re ridiculous. Do you deserve your wife, me, and my husband? The four of us are good friends! You’re ruining everything!” He was crazy. How dare he read something into our relationship that didn’t exist? “What are you talking about? You like my friend?” His wife came down from upstairs trembling. The world war was about to break out.
Rebecca and Daniel, Alex and Isabel. It was the four of us for as long as I can remember. At least ever since Daniel and Alex, best friends since they were twelve, advertised for two flatmates to share their rundown, rented, second-year house in Windsor, and chose first Isabel and then me because they thought we looked like we might put out, as Dan once so delicately put it. We did in the end, although I’d held out till Christmas. We’d thought about advertising again once we had coupled up into two of the four rooms – we were students; we needed the money – but we liked it just being the four of us. We felt like a family. And that’s how it stayed for the next two decades. After college we rented flats in London, a few streets from each other, we had our weddings and then our babies in quick succession. We spent Christmas and birthdays and New Year’s Eve together.
We were a unit. We didn’t need anyone else. A couple of months ago, Alex suddenly announced that he wanted out. There was no big drama – no one else was involved; he had just decided he needed to move on. He felt stifled, he said. Like he’d been in one place for too long and he needed to get out and see what else the world had to offer. He had left the girls – eight-year-old twins, Nicola and Natalie – with Isabel, and he had moved into a new home, which was conveniently waiting for him only a few streets away so that he could still visit them. He wanted it to be civil, he said. He and Isabel could arrange times convenient to both of them when Alex could have the twins (although he pleaded with Isabel to let him visit whenever he wanted but she, quite rightly, wasn’t going to let him have it all his own way). They would remain friends. Of course, it wasn’t really turning out like that. Isabel had fallen to pieces. She had always wanted to be married.
That sounds bad. I don’t mean for the sake of it, but she was one of those women for whom planning a wedding wasn’t just about the day – she was as excited about the following forty or fifty years. She used to fantasize about being old with children and grandchildren and making jam in a house in the south of France with kids and friends and dogs running around all over the place. Not that it should have made any difference – not that Isabel was even aware of it – but she and Alex looked the part. Both blonde and tanned and glowy, like the couple on top of a wedding cake. When you saw them together, you just thought, Oh yes, of course. And once she fell in love with Alex she embraced his family like they were her own, and they adored her in return. She was the daughter-in-law every mother would have wanted. She had never questioned that she was in it for life. And Alex – or so I always thought – couldn’t believe his luck that this beautiful, warm, loyal woman had chosen him. Maybe she mothered him a little too much, but he was as complicit in that as she was.
She had loved looking after him and he had loved being looked after. There had been no hints, no indications that anything was wrong. She had had no time to adjust to the fact that maybe her marriage wasn’t as perfect as she had always thought. It was just over. Boom. One day it was there and then it was gone. Alex wasn’t faring much better. Faced with his newfound freedom he realized he had no idea what to do with it, and he was spending most of his time flopping around our little flat feeling sorry for himself. In any battle, it seems, you have to choose sides and with him spending so much of his time with us we were always going to look like we were on his, although that still makes me feel very uncomfortable. I know he’s Dan’s best friend forever, but it pisses me off what he’s done. Not just to Isabel and the girls, but to all of us, our cosy little group. He might just as well have turned round and said, ‘Sorry, you’re all boring me.’ I feel let down.
When I wonder aloud how Isabel is coping, or question what it was that drove him to make such a dramatic statement, he shuts the conversation down. It’s only when I bring up the subject of the twins that he’ll be drawn on the topic. He misses them – he doesn’t know if he can spend a life away from them – but is that any reason to stay in a bad marriage? I never offer him any sympathy. He made his bed. Dan loves the twins, as do I. Surrogate baby sisters to our two (Zoe, who is thirteen, and eleven-year-old William), they have been a part of our day-to-day lives for the whole of theirs. How could Alex do this to them? I ask him. How could he do it to Isabel of all people? I’ve sometimes wondered what Dan would say if I put my foot down, invited Isabel to stay with us, if I told him that I didn’t want to see Alex, that I couldn’t forgive him.
Would he go along with me or would the history of their friendship still win out? It seems so unfair but, I suppose, that is hardly the point. The point is that Daniel and Alex are like brothers. And this is how Alex repays him. Before he made his grand declaration of love for me, before he said those three words that would change everything forever, the evening had started out fun. Both Dan and I have a tendency to take things too seriously, to worry about everything before it’s happened so, for both of us, having Alex around has always been the perfect antidote to that. He’s like a walking stress ball, or at least he was. A breath of fresh air. The bottom line is that he’s one of my best friends. He’s in the top three, after Dan but equal to Isabel. But that’s all he has ever been. A friend. So let’s just say that I didn’t see it coming. His declaration. We get back to the flat and I’m just thinking that maybe he’s being a little bit weird. A little bit needy.
And then, once we’ve established that Dan and the kids are all in bed, and we’re sitting in the living room because Alex has insisted we open a bottle of wine anyway, that’s when he tries to put his hand on my leg. I shrug it off, obviously, but in a way that I hope looks casual. I don’t want to draw attention to it, make it real. But he puts it straight back on and I say, ‘Alex, don’t,’ and that’s somehow an invitation for him to blurt it all out. Great. My best night ever. In the morning I struggle to get up for work. I’m feeling blurry. Fuzzy round the edges like a partly rubbed-out version of myself. I can’t deal with getting drunk these days. I think my body’s trying to tell me I’m too old. My head hurts. Dan is sweet, getting up with me and offering to make me coffee and toast, which I can’t quite stomach. He’s surprised that Alex isn’t in the spare room and for a split second I think about telling him, but I decide against it. It was nothing. A momentary blip on Alex’s path to post-Isabel enlightenment.
But it still might make Dan feel uneasy and I would never want that to happen. Besides, I have absolutely no doubt that Alex – if he even remembers it – will be in the throes of a spiritual as well as a physical hangover. It’s not every day you declare your love for your best friend’s wife. I know he’ll be feeling like , sweating about the prospect of me telling Dan what happened. I decide that the best thing to do is never mention it again. To anyone. Ever. Thinking that, I realize that the only person who would appreciate the horror of what happened last night is Isabel, but I obviously can’t share it with her. So I go to work without saying anything to anyone and just hope that it’ll all go away.