‘What!’ he burst out. ‘I do not fancy her!’
‘Well, she certainly fancies you, don’t tell me you didn’t notice, and you looked like you were quite enjoying it.’
‘Yeah, well, if you think that, you’re paranoid. You probably think that every woman who looks at me fancies me.’
‘I’m not, I …’ I couldn’t explain what I meant. I had seen how they talked at my birthday, heads inclined towards one another. Of course they fancied each other. That was all I meant. I didn’t mean I thought they fancied each other, and were plotting behind my back to sleep with each other. They just fancied each other. It was an observation. ‘I saw you. Look, I’m not stupid, I could just see it, that’s all.’
‘You were really drunk that night,’ he said. ‘I wouldn’t trust your own recollection if I were you.’ As he walked back into the bedroom he said, ‘Honestly, Lisa, the hospital is wall to wall pretty young nurses, I work with them every day, and if I was going to go for one of them I’d have more sense than to choose one that was your best friend’s kid sister, believe you me.’
*
The new thing always makes the old thing look dowdy. It doesn’t matter if the old thing is better looking, more intelligent, more interesting. The new thing has something with which the old thing can never compete and it’s a quality that casts a magic glow over every glance and smile, every small gesture – it even makes tripping up in the street seem charming and hilarious. It’s called novelty.
*
The following weekend, it was icily cold with brilliant sunshine and we went for a walk down to the river. We sat by the river on a patch of scrubby ground that sloped up sharply above the path. The occasional dog walker passed by. It was cold and I didn’t want to sit for long but the unexpected sunshine felt like such a gift, so desperate are we all by the end of February. Matty picked up two brown stones from the patch of meagre grass between us. ‘Give me your bag,’ he said.
‘Why?’ I asked.
He held out his palm. ‘Look,’ he said. ‘It’s a Lisa pebble and a Matthew pebble. We can put them on the mantelpiece.’
‘We haven’t got a mantelpiece.’
‘Jeez, girl!’ he said, pushing at my shoulder. ‘You’re a right romance killer. Okay, Mrs Pedant, we’ll put them on the windowsill in the bedroom.’ He took hold of my hand and put the pebbles into it, then he closed my fingers round them and clenched my hand with his. ‘And in years to come …’ I looked at him. He looked into my eyes: that sensation, I hadn’t felt it in a while, the feeling that my lungs had become shallow. ‘In years to come, Lisa Evans, we will look at Lisa Pebble and Matthew Pebble next to each other, and maybe there’ll be some little Baby Pebbles next to them, and we’ll remember our walk along the river, and even if you’re being a right pain in the arse and really getting on my nerves at that particular moment, they will make us feel happy.’
He removed his hand. I opened mine. The two pebbles lay on my palm. They were quite ordinary pebbles, brown and grey, one larger than the other and kidney-shaped, the other a smoother, flatter oval. ‘Am I the fat one or the thin one?’ I asked.
‘What do you think?’ he said. ‘Come on, Grandma!’ He leapt to his feet and held out his hand to pull me up. I slipped the pebbles into the side pocket of my bag.
*
On our way back home, we took a detour to cross the park. The sun had dimmed, the way it can in winter, even on a cloudless day, and there was only one family in the children’s play area – a dad with two children. They left as we approached.
‘Fantastic!’ exclaimed Matty. ‘Let’s go on the swings. Come on, Evans!’ he said. ‘Let’s see how high you can go!’ He ran up to them and jumped onto one, pushing off immediately with his long legs. ‘Bet I can go higher!’
He won easily of course, not just because of his greater strength – the chains of the swings were shortened to discourage teenagers from monopolising them – but because of his recklessness, throwing his body back and forward from one perilous horizontal to another, making the swing seat jump and judder.
‘Come on,’ he shouted gleefully, ‘that’s pathetic! Throw yourself into it, what are you afraid of?’
Perhaps it was because he called me pathetic – or perhaps it was simply the turn of phrase, the one he had used in our bathroom discussion, what are you afraid of? Whatever the reason, I kept a laugh in my voice as I responded; it was banter, I swear, I wasn’t trying to provoke him – or at least, that’s what I thought at the time.
‘What am I afraid of? Well I’m more afraid of you and Jasmine than I am of swinging high!’
Matthew jumped off the swing at the height of its forward trajectory and landed neatly with both feet. He took a couple of steps to the side and turned to me, and at first I thought he had moved towards me in order to avoid being hit by his swing as it swung back but then I saw the expression on his face. Straight away, I dropped my feet to the ground and the soles of my trainers made a discordant scraping sound along the anti-injury rubber surface beneath the swings. I juddered awkwardly to a halt.
He stood in front of me. ‘Why do you have to spoil everything?’ he asked.
Instantly regretful, I tried to joke him out of it. ‘Don’t be daft, I wasn’t, I mean, I didn’t …’
‘Yes, you did.’ He turned and began to walk away.
I pushed myself off the swing. My bag fell off my shoulder as I did and the swing danced a merry jig. Matthew was already striding off down the path. I followed. ‘Matthew!’ I said, a plea in my voice.
He stopped dead on the path, a few metres away, but did not turn around. I was forced to run up to him and stand in his way, looking into his face, searching it for clues. ‘Come on …’
‘Come on what?’
‘It was a joke.’
He gave me a level look. ‘You don’t think much of me, do you?’
‘Of course I do!’
‘That’s what you think, though. Every time I talk to another woman, you think I’m after something. I’m not allowed to have friends or colleagues, women friends, am I? Am I not supposed to talk to anyone? Am I supposed to ask your permission before I send a text?’
I let my arms drop. An enormous weariness came over me. ‘No, I’m not saying that, I didn’t, I just think it’s odd texting a young woman who’s clearly admiring of you, that’s all …’
‘What, I have to account to you for everything I do now, is that it? And she doesn’t “admire” me, as you so euphemistically put it. For your information, she’s thinking of specialising in paediatric care and because that was one of my F1 specialities I’m helping and advising her. It’s what I do, Lisa, I like to help people. I help young men as well as women. There’s an F2 at the hospital, I’ve been mentoring him because he’s unhappy in A & E, I guess you’re not going to object to him. He’s called Robert and he weighs fifteen stone. But as Jasmine is a pretty young woman she’s not serious about her career in your book, is she? Is that how you treat your pupils? Pretty ones not allowed to be ambitious or clever?’
‘No …’ My sense of weariness grew, enveloping me in a kind of dark-grey surge, like a tidal wave full of dust and debris. How had this happened? We were having a nice afternoon. All I had done was make an off-the-cuff remark – now I’d spoiled everything.
‘I’m sorry, I …’
‘You have no idea how hurtful your assumptions about me are,’ he said. ‘If you think that’s what I’m capable of, then what are you with me for, what’s the point?’
A kind of panic came over me then, a feeling that this whole thing was ridiculous. Less than half an hour ago he had used the phrase ‘in years to come’ and closed his hand over mine and talked about baby pebbles. Was I really going to damage this relationship beyond repair over Jasmine? And another thought, swift on the heels of that – if I break up with Matthew over him texting Jasmine then where will he go to console himself? I could see him and Jasmine in The New Place already. I could hear his sigh, ‘I was rea
lly keen on Lisa but she was just so insecure, quite paranoid really …’ and I could see Jasmine nodding, sympathetically, eager to convince him, without overdoing it, that in comparison with me she was really, really reasonable.
How to explain to him that it was painful to me, his concern for her? It had never occurred to me that he might be sleeping with her until he had planted that dark worm of a thought into some raw little cavity in my skull when we were talking in the bathroom. It was hard for me that, as a nurse, she spoke his language – the acronyms they would use without explanation, somehow that was the most painful element of all. And then I thought, how ridiculous … oh God, Lisa, are you really saying he’s not allowed to have colleagues? You’re going to drive him away with all this. He’ll get fed up, any man would.
If the situation that Matthew and I found ourselves in had been reversed, there on that late February day beneath the cold winter sun, all Matthew would really have wanted to know was, how far did it go? Did you sleep with him? If he were satisfied that I had not, it would not have counted as an infidelity. He was being quite genuine in thinking that because he hadn’t slept with her, I was making a fuss about nothing. How could I explain to him that that wasn’t the point? I had tried, but he would always come back to nothing has happened and in the face of that incontrovertible – and true – fact, my pain seemed unreasonable.
But pain is still pain, no matter how unreasonable. You can’t rationalise it away any more than you can rationalise away a headache. The argument becomes different, then. Whether you have slept with her or not, your conduct is hurting me. Doesn’t that bother you? I struggled to find a way of articulating this to him. Whenever I tried in my head, I made myself sound clingy and whiny. I made myself sound like a child.
We stood for a while like that, facing each other: him implacable, me increasingly despairing. In the end, he put both hands on my upper arms and said, his voice a model of reasonableness, ‘Look, Lisa, it’s a whole bloody month till your Easter hols. Get a grip. You always go a bit crazy at the end of term and I get it, your job is stressful, but mine is too and what if I got completely paranoid every time I got overworked?’
‘I’m not paranoid …’ I said, but weakly.
‘You think it’s easy for me, being on the receiving end of all this, considering what I do all day long?’
‘That’s not what I …’
‘Just answer the question. You think my life is easy, stress-free, do you?’
‘I’ve never said …’
‘Answer the question, yes or no. Is my life easy or not? Don’t give me a load of bullshitting caveats, just answer the question, is my life easy, yes or no?’
‘No.’
He heaved a sigh and his shoulders sank a little, as if I had just made an enormous concession. ‘Thank you.’
We stood like that for a moment or two, his hands still on my arms. Then he lifted his hands and placed them firmly on my shoulders. When he spoke, his voice was gentle, conciliatory.
‘Look at me.’
The injunction made me look at the ground.
‘Lisa, I said, look at me.’
I looked into his eyes.
He shook his head slowly, lips pressed together, his expression one of sorrow rather than anger. ‘Just think about this for a minute. Which of us spends all day problem-solving, prioritising, being rational, and which of us lives in the realm of the imagination? You teach novels, and plays and poetry, all well and good I’m sure, but you spend your whole life with stories people have made up. You wouldn’t be like this if you taught chemistry or geography, believe me, or if you had a job like mine where every day is about prioritising what’s important and what’s not. If you did that, you would realise Jasmine is nothing. Can we please just keep a sense of perspective?’
In the face of these observations, I did not know how to respond. Anything I said would sound like a protest against the rational.
He shook his head again. ‘You overthink everything, don’t you?’
‘I …’
He took my chin in one hand and looked at me very lovingly, his grey eyes pouring sympathy and understanding upon me. ‘Don’t you? I know you’re stubborn, Lisa, but really, think about it, give me this one concession. Your whole life, being an only child and everything – I bet you had imaginary friends as well, didn’t you? You’ve always used your imagination and you’ve always thought too much about stuff, you’ve always over-analysed. I’m right, aren’t I?’
I could think of no counter to this argument.
‘You forget, I know you.’ He kissed me lightly on the top of my head and said, ‘Come on, it’s cold, let’s get you home.’
17
I was sleeping badly. I didn’t tell Matty but I thought I might need to see my GP if it went on. I began plotting my visit and where I would hide the pills so that Matty would not see them and then be able to tell me I wasn’t thinking straight because I was tired and disorientated.
*
In early March, I had an epiphany. I was walking home from work, in a light rain, the leaves on the trees wet and the pavement feeling damp and spongy, and it came to me: it wasn’t working, me and Matty. I was unhappy. I would ask him to leave.
I would do it that very evening, I decided, after dinner. I would be calm, and kind – I would be careful. I would tell him everything I admired about him and say how sad I felt because there were so many things about him that were amazing, but the truth was we had moved in together too quickly, it had all been a bit whirlwind and cohabitating so fast had been a mistake. He would argue, of course. Several times he had said, during rows, that if I really felt that way then we should split up, but I had never said it, so he would know I was sincere. He would get angry, perhaps, and tell me I was being ridiculous, oversensitive, paranoid. He would ask me if I was drunk, or tell me I needed professional help. Throughout all of it I would remain calm. It didn’t matter, I would say, whether or not he agreed I had a valid reason to be unhappy – the fact of the matter was that I was unhappy. And I needed some time to work out why and whether it was fixable. I wasn’t saying it was over, I was just saying I wanted him to move out and give me a bit of space.
At that, I knew, he would say there was no way he was ‘giving me space’. If I was going to be this stupid then I didn’t deserve his patience – and I should know one thing: if he left, that was it. Once he was out that door, he would be gone for good. He wasn’t going to be messed around by me.
This declaration would make me panic a bit. It would take every ounce of self-possession I had to say I was sorry to hear that but, nonetheless, I wanted him to leave.
As I walked along Thorpe Road, I felt a great cloud begin to lift. Why hadn’t I thought of this before? Instead of responding, often with panic, to what he said, why hadn’t I thought to make my own decision? I had spent so much time reacting to Matty and what he wanted that I hadn’t stopped to think about what I wanted for myself.
I put my key in my door – my door – and thought, yes, we will have that discussion tonight.
*
Matty was home an hour later. He bounded through the door like a puppy and said, ‘I’ve made a decision!’
I looked at him, the big grin on his face, the sparkle in the dark star of his eyes. Whatever the decision might be, it clearly wasn’t the same as mine.
‘Come on come on, Old Lady …’ He grabbed my arm and pulled me to the sofa. His laptop was on the coffee table. He hadn’t even kicked off his shoes or shaken off his coat.
He had taken to calling me Old Lady, Old Girl – Poor Old Dear. I was only four years older than him but he liked to remind me of it.
He opened the lid of his laptop while shrugging his big grey parka from his shoulders. ‘Get your passport,’ he said. ‘Get mine too, it’s in the drawer with my boxers.’
I hadn’t seen him this animated for a while – suddenly he was full of the enthusiasm he had had in the early days of our relationship.
When
I returned from the bedroom, he was scrolling through Google Flights.
‘What are you doing?’ I said, although it was obvious.
He reached up and took the passports from me, then, with the other hand, grabbed me and pulled me down next to him. He put a hand on the back of my head and pulled my face towards his, planting a rough kiss on my mouth and shoving me away. ‘You’ll see.’
He was looking at flights to Venice.
I looked at him and wanted to say, we can’t afford this, or, I’m a teacher, we’ll have to go at Easter or half term, think of how much it will cost, but it was hard to burst his bubble – it was just so nice to see him happy, like the old Matty.
‘I know what you’re thinking,’ he said, as he scrolled down the flights, ‘but I reckon if we do something like travel on the Saturday of the Easter weekend, that won’t be too popular, or we can look at half term if Easter is already too expensive.’
‘Where will we stay?’ I said.
‘Flights first, hotels later,’ he said. ‘C’mon, it’s pasta time for real, Grandma, and we’ll go on a boat to that island where they make the coloured glass. You love all that stuff!’
The sense of resolution I had felt on my walk home melted like snow.
*
Rosaria hadn’t been in touch for some time – we hadn’t seen each other properly since my birthday, in fact. But it was winter – it was so much easier just to hunker down at home – and now we were saving up for Venice. Matty had pointed out we could make back what our flights cost just by missing a few meals out. Put like that, it made sense to save as much as possible until our trip was out of the way.
One Monday, I got a text from her. Hey stranger, how about a drink this week, Weds or Thurs maybe? Long time no see. Xxx
Matty and I were on the sofa watching a cop drama. I replied to Rosaria. Yes sure great idea! Thurs better but I’d better check w Matty. Sorry been so busy, you know how it is. Xx
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