by Kate Field
‘Mary …’
‘Don’t,’ I interrupted, suspecting from his tone of voice where this was going, and not wanting to hear it. ‘Don’t apologise.’
‘I can’t. I’m not sorry. I adore Leo.’ He shrugged, not in an insolent, careless way, but rather emphasising how helpless his feelings were, how powerless he was to contain them. And I was glad – how could I not be – that Leo was so well loved. Glad, and searingly jealous.
‘But you need to know,’ Clark continued, ‘how difficult this has been for him. He fought his feelings for so long. He talked about you constantly, how wonderful you are, and how he’d found more contentment in marriage than he’d ever expected.’
Contentment? It was the way I would have described our marriage too; and yet it sounded so inadequate when held up against adoration, against the strength of feeling so achingly obvious between Leo and Clark.
‘I didn’t encourage him. I didn’t set out to break up your marriage. He needed to make the choice himself, which way he wanted to go. It’s taken him a long time to acknowledge who he is. But he’s still who you knew too. He loves you as much as he ever did.’
‘And I love him.’
‘I know. That’s what I want to say. Don’t stop, will you? He needs us both.’
Clark held out his hand and I took it, but rather than shaking it, he covered it with his other hand, as if we were sealing a pact. And perhaps, in a way, we were: a pact to make this strange new family work, for Leo’s sake, and for Jonas and Ava. As if to emphasise the point, Clark mentioned the children over coffee, asking my advice about what they might like to do at the weekend.
‘Where are they tonight?’ Leo asked. ‘With Irene?’
‘No. Jonas insisted they didn’t need a babysitter, but I asked Daisy. Mum was busy. She was expecting a visitor. I think it might have been a man.’
‘A man? Irene?’
Leo’s reaction was exactly how I imagined it would be – we had joked for years about Mum’s lack of interest in men since my father disappeared. He smiled at me, his expression full of surprise, amusement, and mock horror, and in that moment, he was mine again: the boy who had joined me on the garden wall, and who had carried me through the teenage years with steady arms and unwavering loyalty. But it wasn’t true: he wasn’t mine. I had seen that tonight, in every glance and every touch he had exchanged with Clark; the way his voice softened with love when he spoke to him; the way they fed off each other, prompting jokes, nudging out stories, bringing out the best in each other. The flat had absorbed him too: the photo of Audrey and Bill that had once graced our house now stood on a shelf; his keys and phone lay in an oak bowl that I had given him as a birthday gift, now enjoying a new life here; and perhaps the most distressing sight – the hideous pottery coaster that Jonas had once made, bearing the misspelled legend, ‘World’s Gratest Dad’, sitting on a coffee table beside Leo’s current book. This was where Leo belonged. This was his life now, and I was his past. I was an expert at blocking out reality, but I couldn’t ignore it any longer.
The evening had been long enough. I guzzled my coffee, burning my throat, and popped to the bathroom before leaving. As I returned to make my excuses and say goodbye, Andrew’s voice rose over the smooth soul music that had been playing in the background all evening.
‘Have you set a date yet? Or are you going to leave us all behind and do it somewhere sunny?’
‘Is someone getting married?’ I asked, blundering into the conversation.
The room fell silent, save for the crooning voice of Marvin Gaye. Clark took hold of Leo’s hand.
‘Mary …’ Leo said.
It was obvious, of course, and I didn’t even have alcohol to blame for my slow wits. Who else could Andrew have been talking to, when the other two couples present were already married?
‘Mary,’ Leo said again. Happiness radiated from his face, though the bones of his knuckles stood out in sharp prominence as he gripped Clark’s hand. ‘It’s me. I’m going to marry Clark.’
Chapter 9
I closed the front door softly behind me, and kicked off my shoes so that my heels didn’t clatter on the tiled floor. The television mumbled in the living room, and I opened the door, never needing to see Daisy more. But Daisy wasn’t there. Ethan was sprawled on the sofa, long legs stretching across the room, Dotty curled up at his side. He looked over his shoulder and smiled.
‘What are you doing here? Where’s Daisy?’
‘Joe asked me over to play Xbox, so I said she might as well go home. You don’t mind, do you?’
I shook my head. At any other moment, I would have been thrilled: Jonas had once tried to involve Leo in his games but it had been a disaster never repeated. But I couldn’t take that in now. I’d expected Daisy. I hadn’t neutralised my expression or my feelings enough to see anyone else.
‘Mary?’
Ethan sprang up from the sofa, causing Dotty to grumble, came over to me and manoeuvred me under a lamp. He studied my face so minutely that he could probably have earned a first-class degree in it by the time he spoke.
‘What’s the matter?’
Catching sight of my reflection in the mirror above the fireplace, it was obvious why he had asked the question. My eyes seemed to have taken over my face: two huge, dark pits of anguish floating on a pale moon, surrounded by a galaxy of black hair. I was washed out, black. My name had never suited me better, on a night when it felt no longer mine.
‘Mary,’ Ethan repeated. His hands were gripping my arms. ‘What’s happened?’
‘Leo and Clark are getting married.’
His evident surprise was a relief. At least I wasn’t the last to know.
‘He told you tonight? At a dinner party?’
‘No. I overheard it.’
I closed my eyes, but couldn’t stop the scene replaying in my head. It had taken me a moment to process Leo’s announcement, for my brain to verify what my ears had heard. Humiliation crawled along my skin again as I pictured the looks of sympathy swiftly flung my way, and imagined the conversations that might be taking place right now. Can you believe she didn’t know?… Did you see her face?… That was a more entertaining dinner than we expected!
Ethan’s expletives pulled me back to my own front room.
‘I can’t believe he’s done this,’ he said, removing his hands from my arms and taking a step back. ‘No wonder you’re distraught. It’s so soon.’
‘It’s not that.’ That aspect hadn’t occurred to me, but he was right. It was soon. Less than six months ago we had been living in this house as man and wife. And now … My breath shuddered. ‘I’ve lost him.’
And then I couldn’t hold back; thirty years of practice couldn’t prevent the tears now. I cried, proper, heaving sobs that shook my body, scalded my cheeks, and fractured my breathing. Ethan gathered me into a hug, and when I didn’t stop, scooped me up and carried me over to the sofa, where he held me for I don’t know how long, until my tears and my body were equally exhausted. Gradually I became conscious of a solid, muscular chest beneath my head, so different from Leo’s squishiness, and of an unfamiliar floral scent filling my nose. I pulled away, and slid along the sofa, putting as much distance as I could between us.
Ethan went to the kitchen and returned with a wodge of paper towels and two glasses of brandy. I blew my nose noisily, scaring poor Dotty.
‘Did you think he would come back?’
‘I don’t know. I don’t know what I thought.’ I wasn’t sure that I’d been thinking at all; I’d blocked the unpleasantness out, as usual. The months since the Christmas party, when Leo first appeared with Clark, seemed blurry and unreal, as if I’d been sleepwalking through them. How had this happened? How had I let Leo go, and not put up any resistance? ‘What have I done?’
Dotty jumped on to the sofa, nuzzling her head against mine, her tongue licking the salty residue from my cheeks.
‘This is what I was worried about. This is exactly why I tried to warn you
at Christmas.’
‘Well, congratulations for being so smart. You always have to be right, don’t you?’
‘Jesus, how can you think I would want to see you like this?’ He jumped up, knocking his knee on the coffee table. ‘None of this is right,’ he said, bending over to rub his knee. ‘He shouldn’t have done this. I should never have …’
Floorboards creaked overhead as Jonas moved around his bedroom. Ethan stopped, and sat down on the other sofa.
‘Do you want him back?’ he asked.
It was an impossible question – pointless too. I could never have him back, that was clear from what I had seen tonight. I could ignore separation and divorce, but the sight of Leo’s joy at living with someone else filtered through even my thick blinkers.
‘I want things to be as they were.’
Ethan looked up at that.
‘Why? Because it was perfect? Because you were happy?’ He paused, waiting for a reply. He didn’t get one. ‘Or because it was safe, easy, what you were used to?’
I stared at him. Why was he saying this? One minute he had held me as I cried, and now it felt like I was under attack. His voice was gentle, but his gaze was ruthless.
‘We were content.’
‘Content? And was that enough? Leo said you’d not had a physical relationship for months. Is that true?’
‘He had no business discussing that.’ I stroked Dotty’s head, wishing the sofa would swallow me up. Yes, it was true, and it was humiliating, and I hadn’t expected anyone else to find out.
‘So why would you want to go back to that? You must have known something wasn’t right.’
‘Why? There’s more to a relationship than sex. Perhaps that’s where you’ve been going wrong.’
I glared at him, but didn’t find any anger in his face, only regret.
‘Perhaps I have,’ he said.
The credits rolled on the TV show, chirpy music shattering the strange, close atmosphere that hovered over us. Dotty yelped as my ring caught in her fur. It had been force of habit, getting ready to go out, to put on my engagement ring. My wedding ring was still in place too. I pulled them both off, bruising my knuckle trying to remove the wedding ring, and dropped them onto the coffee table. My finger looked oddly pinched without it, and the skin was shiny white, as if that one strip had been preserved from the ageing process.
Ethan picked up the wedding ring and rolled it in his fingers.
‘Grandma’s ring,’ he said. We hadn’t been able to afford new rings: Audrey had given us two old ones when we announced our engagement. ‘What will you do with it?’
‘Pass it on to Ava, I suppose.’
‘I carried this ring with me everywhere for two weeks until Leo put it on your finger. I honestly never thought it would come off.’ Briefly, he closed his fingers over the ring. I didn’t know what to say; I didn’t recognise this thoughtful, melancholy Ethan. He smiled at me, a guarded smile, concealing whatever he was thinking. ‘I’d better go.’
The next morning, I left the house to take Dotty for a walk a precise thirty minutes before Leo was due to pick up the children, intending to do a sixty-minute circuit and miss him. Ethan was the first to put a spanner in the works, dashing out of Audrey’s house before I was halfway down the drive, and vaulting over the hedge with impressive agility. He didn’t even have the grace to puff when he slid to a halt in front of me.
‘Hello!’ The sunny smile was back, as if the Ethan of last night was a figment of my imagination. ‘How are you this morning?’
‘Fine.’
‘As bad as that?’
He laughed, and I raised the shadow of a smile. I looked like hell, or one of its residents: black hair did no favours to a pale, unslept face.
‘Are you heading out? I thought you might have visitors.’ He pointed to the road, where a car was parked a couple of metres past the end of the drive. I didn’t recognise it.
‘It probably belongs to a walker.’ A terrifying thought sidled into my head. ‘It wasn’t there last night, was it?’
‘It might have been. Why?’
I looked down the drive to Mum’s garage. Her bedroom curtains were still closed, well past the time she was usually up and about.
‘Irene?’ Ethan laughed. ‘Good for her. How long has that been going on?’
‘I don’t want to think about anything going on.’ I didn’t know what was worse: the fact that Mum might be having sex at all, or the fact that if she was, it proved she was more desirable than me. Where had she met a man? If it was a man – I should know better than to make assumptions like that anymore. My left thumb rubbed along the inside of my ring finger, as it had been doing all morning, like a tongue unable to resist probing the gap left by a missing tooth.
‘Do you want company?’ Ethan asked. ‘I could do with some exercise. Mum seems to think I haven’t eaten properly for eighteen years. At this rate, I’ll need to pay for two seats when I fly back.’
‘You’re going back?’ I spun around, trying to untangle Dotty’s lead from my legs. ‘I thought you were here for six months.’
‘I’ll stay for as long as I’m needed.’
That wouldn’t be long the way Audrey was going: she had abandoned her stick already, and was coping remarkably well one-armed. I was wondering whether to agree that Ethan could join me – he certainly didn’t need the exercise, as his T-shirt revealed only too well, but I needed the company – when Leo pulled onto the drive. He came over and stood beside Ethan, and I marvelled, as I had done so often in the past, how the same two parents could have produced children with not a single obvious feature in common. Ava and Jonas didn’t look alike, superficially, but there was something about the shape of their chin and lips that marked a connection. With Leo and Ethan there was nothing: you could stare at them for days and not find so much as an eyelash the same length.
‘Are you taking Dotty out?’ Leo asked, bending down to stroke her head. She didn’t respond; she had taken umbrage at his desertion, and no amount of strokes would win her over. ‘Can it wait? I came early so we could talk.’
‘A bit late, isn’t it?’ Ethan said. ‘You should have talked to her before last night.’
‘In hindsight, it was unfortunate …’
‘Hindsight? Bloody hell, Leo, if you’d taken your nose out of your books for a second you’d have seen how obvious it was that this would happen.’
‘Let’s go back in.’ I felt like banging their heads together; they were squabbling more than Ava and Jonas. They didn’t know how lucky they were to have a sibling, even if they had nothing in common. ‘Dotty can wait a few minutes.’
I turned back to the house, Leo following, but glanced back when Ethan spoke.
‘Leo.’ I expected more sniping, but I was wrong. Ethan put an arm round Leo’s shoulder and gave him a quick hug. ‘Congratulations.’
Smarting at Ethan’s disloyalty, I marched into the house and sat at the kitchen table, keeping my jacket and shoes on. This wasn’t going to take long. I couldn’t bear it to take long.
Leo came up behind me and put his hand on my shoulder.
‘I’m sorry, Mary. I’d rather you hadn’t discovered the news that way.’
‘What, in public? It’s rather fitting, isn’t it? At least there was a smaller audience for my humiliation this time.’
My stupid, weak heart ached a little at the misery on Leo’s face when he sat down, but I ignored it. Last night I had grieved. This morning I was furious.
‘Who proposed? Did you do it? Was it the proper bended-knee affair?’
‘No. Clark proposed.’
That softened me, slightly. An image of Leo on his knees had tortured me all night. The image was drawn from imagination, not memory. His proposal to me had been a rushed question, blurted out in Audrey’s back garden, several weeks after he had returned from Oxford after completing his degree. He had been acting so strangely that it was a relief when he proposed rather than dumped me, and I hadn’t given a thoug
ht to the mechanics of it. I hadn’t realised I missed the huge, romantic gesture until I had pictured him offering it to someone else.
‘And have you set a date?’
‘Probably September, so there’s time for a honeymoon before term starts.’
‘Honeymoon?’ Another image I would much rather not have in my head. ‘Presumably something more exciting than a B&B in Llandudno?’
‘We had a special time in that B&B. I wouldn’t change it. I have no regrets about a moment of our time together.’
‘Then why end it? If it was so special, why aren’t we still together?’
‘Clark.’ He lifted his hands from the table, empty of words for once, a circumstance so unusual that it spoke more powerfully than anything he might have said.
‘And you couldn’t have resisted? For the children? For me?’
‘I tried. But things have seemed different ever since I turned forty. I may be halfway through my time. I couldn’t continue denying who and what I am.’
‘I see. That was quite some birthday present you gave yourself, wasn’t it? Licence to do exactly what you wanted. Will you be so generous when it’s my fortieth?’
Leo reached across the table and held my hand.
‘You have benefitted already, can’t you see? When did you ever challenge me like this when we were married? You only ever gave me half of yourself, as if you switched off a whole aspect of your character – your essential spark – when you entered this house. Did you truly believe I would have loved you less if you had disagreed with me sometimes?’
‘My dad …’ I began, but Leo interrupted.
‘I know. You blame Irene for driving him away. But nothing she did should have driven him away from you. If you hadn’t been so reasonable, I would have fought to my bones to see Jonas and Ava. Either he was a weak man, and didn’t deserve you, or there was more to his disappearance than you know.’
It was too much to absorb today. I had spent so many years loving Leo and resenting Mum, that I struggled to acknowledge that they were neither so good nor so bad as I had believed them. Leo rubbed his finger along the space where my ring had been until a few hours ago.
