The Story After Us: A heartwarming tale of life and love for modern women everywhere

by Fiona Perrin

  I crept back down a couple of stairs and crouched. Through the upright wooden poles of the bannister, I could see the shadow of Lars on the hall wall. He was leaning forward and talking urgently and what he said was in clear English in the middle of the Swedish: ‘the right thing,’ and then he repeated it with what sounded like a sad chuckle: ‘the right thing’.

  I slumped onto the stair and went cold. Did I hear him correctly? Did he really say that awful phrase from a few months back? Perhaps I hadn’t heard right.

  But Thor was now repeating my name and saying something that I understood as: ‘How could you not love her?’

  I sat as still as I ever had, holding my breath. I thought I might be sick while I waited for the reply.

  Lars said then, ‘I do love her as the mother of my children. But I just don’t feel the same way any more.’

  It was in another language but was as clear and painful as if it had been inscribed, already translated, on my heart with a sharp implement, letter by letter. Even in that moment, I knew it would always be there, never healing. I clutched my chest and tried hard not to gasp. My breath, when it came, was short and fast and I strained to keep quiet.

  As I reeled, Thor raised his voice: something about ‘beautiful’ and ‘impossible’ and ‘what you had was special’.

  Lars hissed, ‘It’s not about that.’ I heard angry: arg and arguments, which was the same in both languages, then kan inte sluta – can’t stop. Then he very clearly said, ‘I care deeply, but I don’t love her like that any more.’

  I’d thought I’d felt all the pain I could feel in the last few months, but I hadn’t. Nausea rose in me, acid bile at the back of my throat. He’d said our love was dead. Gone. Never to be brought back to life.

  I made no noise although everything in me wanted to scream.

  Then outrage. It came fast on the heels of my hurt, racing in like Usain Bolt in the hundred metres. This was the Lars who was begging me to stay with him! The man who’d got good and drunk and caused a scene; the guy who had promised to show me – and was pulling it off so far – how much the kids and I meant to him.

  But it was them, not me, that was making him act as he was. They were the reason he wanted to come back.

  ‘How long have you felt like this?’ Thor asked angrily.

  ‘I don’t know, but a while,’ Lars said, his voice rich with guilt. ‘I was busting my gut for the business, thinking I was doing it for all of us, but, after a while, every time I came home we just argued about how I was away all the time. Ami was right, I was.’

  ‘What do you think she’s going to say, left for days and weeks at a time to bring up the kids on her own?’ Thor went on, like a furious barrister, arguing my case. He was reminding Lars of times he’d flown into London and how I was always on my own and then, ‘What did you fucking expect?’

  Thor had always had my corner. Still, it made no difference. There was no going back: Lars had actually said out loud that he didn’t love me like that any more and I’d heard him say it.

  I rocked silently on the stairs.

  ‘And somehow in the end, even though I wanted to see the kids, it was easier to stay away,’ said Lars. ‘I could go home and have another argument, or I could go and win some new business; for quite a while I convinced myself that that was what mattered… but in the end, I had to accept that I loved her as the mother of my children but no longer in the way we had. I didn’t want to go home to her and the constant arguments. It’s all my fault, I know that.’

  I wanted to gasp with rage. Now, he admitted that most of it was down to him. But my anger couldn’t compete with the overwhelming sadness I felt as he set about this slow dissection of our marriage.

  ‘It seemed easier to divorce. Fairer on both of us. That’s what I told myself. I was never going to get lovely, smiling Ami back and I didn’t deserve to.’

  Thor snorted. ‘It’s so fucked,’ he said.

  Then on and on like new shards of glass into the open wound that was me, Lars said again, ‘I just don’t feel it any more.’

  Then that word again familj – family. I listened to him tell the story of the kids nearly suffocating in Swedish. Thor’s expressions of indignation. Then Lars: how it had all come to make him realise he needed to change and change for good: ‘ändra för gott.’

  I was numb now from the plain simple truth: Lars was doing what he thought was right rather than wanting to stay with me for me. And he was pretending otherwise rather than watch his family destruct.

  The slow poisoning of our marriage had no antidote.

  Still I clutched at straws, desperate that he should still care; what about his anger when he’d found out about me sleeping with Peter? Didn’t that show he still loved me?

  No. Now he went on, talking about that, obviously well aware of his emotions. Why couldn’t he have been this honest with me? I could see his shadow on the wall, slumped like a beaten man. In a low voice, he was telling Thor about me and another man. ‘I was jealous, really jealous,’ he said. ‘But then I realised how much I must have hurt her to make her do that so soon and that it was just that – jealousy rather than anything else.’

  Sober as if I hadn’t drunk a drop, I knew I’d heard enough. Gradually, I got up and quietly moved again upstairs, taking care not to step where I knew the stair creaked.

  I went through the motions of cleaning my teeth, pulling on a T-shirt to sleep in, crawling into bed and putting my head back onto the same pillow where I’d spent months crying.

  I’d gone through the shock of Lars leaving me, then the grim acceptance that I could do nothing to stop him wanting to divorce me. But when he knew about Peter, I’d allowed myself to think that he really wanted me back too, the old me – and that had made me hope for a moment, naively, that we could go back to what we’d had.

  I saw now that that was a ridiculous, romantic notion. It was born of not wanting to let go of the dreams of the early years, despite the nightmares of what came later.

  He’d been trying so hard with the kids… yes, with the kids, and being perfectly friendly to me. Apart from the odd remark about ‘going out for dinner’ or ‘giving me more time’ and the occasional slightly forced flirtation, he hadn’t tried to rebuild our relationship beyond that of parents.

  Cathy and Jeremy ‘rubbed along’. The fact that her and Jeremy’s love had gone years ago didn’t make her get up and leave. My parents stayed with one another through some false mythology they’d created even though Mum was clearly dealing with a depressive in denial.

  How many other marriages were there out there, staying together for the love they once had, because the families they’d created were too precious to leave?

  I guessed that Cathy and Jeremy didn’t discuss it. I knew my folks didn’t. I imagined the years that followed while our kids grew up: the best we could hope for was that we’d manage to get along with one another. We wouldn’t discuss it either, because the moment we did it would become impossible to ignore. Even while I hated him for his dishonesty, I knew he was taking the tried and tested path of many marriages – unspokenly functioning as a family but no longer lovers.

  But was I any different? Really? I’d been so hurt, so desperate to stay married, but once I’d thought he wasn’t coming back I’d jumped into bed with someone else pretty fast. I’d planned a future without him. Look at how I’d closed the doors of our house and become, very quickly, my own family of three.

  As the initial shock of hearing what he’d said subsided, my brain went into an overdrive of self-accusation.

  Did I love Lars any more than he loved me? I didn’t dream of dressing up and going out on date night with him. I didn’t ask him to stick around once the kids were in bed. Or long to hold him and have sex with him. There was a cautious companionship now, but the chasm between us was so wide that I hadn’t wanted to try to cross it either.

  All the love was gone. And I was grieving for a time that had passed: like trying to relight a candle when t
he wick is burnt and the wax is all splattered and done.

  ‘You’re just as false,’ I told myself. ‘You’re doing the right fucking thing as much as he is. At least be honest with yourself.’

  But was this enough? The price of my family staying together was that all Lars and I had was a new-style marriage of convenience? Could I live for years and years knowing that he no longer loved me and I no longer loved him?

  I had a dull ache at the front of my head now and knew that I would be awake for a long time that night.

  Tomorrow, though, I’d call Ulrika, the wisest person I knew.

  *

  I was awake early from the little sleep I’d managed. I couldn’t face seeing Lars as I didn’t know what I’d say, so I left a note for him asking him to drop the kids at school, kissed them and crept out into the flurry of sleepy commuters. The bus engine seemed to rhythmically echo the chant in my mind: ‘the right thing to do’.

  I texted Ulrika, asking if I could come round on my way home, and she replied:

  It’ll be lovely to see you.

  Then I determinedly pushed the tiredness, hurt and anger away and got to work on thinking about Campury getting into the US.

  It was unusual to consult a mother-in-law about whether to stay married to her son, I thought as I got on the Tube, but I needed her wisdom now – an ‘Ulrika moment’.

  She opened the door in a way that made it clear she knew I wasn’t just dropping by for a casual chat. She kissed me, paper-cheek to mine, made me camomile tea, gave me a blanket to put over my legs on the sofa, pulled her shrug around her and waited before prompting: ‘I guess you’ve come to talk about you and Lars.’

  I blushed but nodded.

  She continued, ‘We haven’t really had much chance to talk because I’ve been away and Lars has been here so much…’ we both laughed at the irony of this ‘… but I’ve been so worried about you.’

  ‘I’ve been OK,’ I said. ‘And I always knew you were there if I needed you.’ The unspoken assumption was that I needed her now.

  She smiled. ‘But you’re both trying again?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘but…’

  ‘You don’t know if this is going to work?’

  ‘Yes.’ She was so understanding. ‘The thing is, I’d just somehow got used to the idea that we were getting divorced and, after all the shock subsided, I was just angry, really angry with Lars. It was a really rough few months.’

  ‘Years really?’ She said it without judgement or malice – hers were observations on what humankind did to one another, gentle prods to get us less wise souls to see something from another perspective.

  ‘Yes, years.’ I took a deep breath and put my mug down. Then I told her about the previous evening: the dinner where we’d laughed together for the first time in forever and then the cold thump of hearing that he didn’t have feelings like he used to have for me any more. Ulrika came and sat beside me as I cried and she held me in her long arms. Her shrug was warm.

  She said nothing aside from, ‘Poor Ami, so hard,’ until I finally calmed down, then, ‘So now it’s not the grand romance it once was, and it’s not the parting of the rough seas.’

  ‘We were supposed to be trying to learn how to be friends again before we see if we could go back to being married.’

  ‘You thought that would work?’ Ulrika said. ‘I mean, bring back the grand romance?’

  ‘I think I’ve just not wanted to believe that it was all gone.’ Her pale eyes were so like Lars’. ‘I hoped, I suppose, while knowing that really we both feel the same way.’

  ‘You didn’t want to admit it to yourself…?’

  ‘Right. And I suppose me overhearing him means I know and I can’t ignore it any more.’

  ‘But you’re getting on?’

  I nodded. ‘Of course, we’re not living together.’

  ‘Hmmmm…’ Ulrika pondered and prompted me at the same time.

  ‘Do some marriages manage to keep those feelings?’ I asked, thinking of the way she always talked about her husband.

  ‘Some do,’ she said. ‘But all of them go through times when it’s difficult and you seem to be together because of habit or the children rather than each other.’

  I raised an eyebrow and she laughed. ‘Even mine. Although I probably don’t remember those times now as much.’

  I bit my bottom lip. ‘It really hurts not to be loved like you once were. But I’ve turned so awful, Ulrika, all I did for months was shriek at him when he was around and hate him when he wasn’t. And he wanted to divorce me… and now he’s with me for the wrong reasons.’

  ‘Why are they the wrong reasons? You both care so much about being a family and for the children. Those are not the wrong reasons. Why does it have to be more than this right now? You’re getting on with each other and the kids seem happy to me… that’s quite a lot of progress.’

  I sighed. ‘Are you saying that we need to forget about the grand romance?’

  ‘I’m just pointing out that at the moment this is maybe what it is.’

  ‘You think the love might come back?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Ulrika, but not unhopefully – what she meant was that she couldn’t promise. ‘But you’re trying to do the only thing you both know how to do right now.’

  ‘That’s a good way of thinking about it,’ I said. I picked up my mug but the camomile tea was tepid in the general cold of the room.

  Ulrika didn’t seem to notice this and carried on. ‘You both need to be kind to yourself and each other; take some time; find out what happens next without pressuring yourselves.’

  I hugged her again, nodding – she was right. There was no need to rush back into the solicitor’s office.

  Ulrika smiled. ‘But how come now he lives with me he stops going away all the time?’ She said it with all the affection of a mum who’d got her son back.

  We chatted then about the children and how they were coping well now, before I got up to go.

  ‘Anything I can do, I’m here,’ said Ulrika, hugging me again on the doorstep.

  God, I love that woman, I thought, getting on the bus. So, Lars was doing the right thing, but the right thing was an awful lot of what I’d wanted. The children were getting more stable, Tess had moved on and I was getting the slow pace I’d asked for to make up my mind. Lars and I could be in the same room for a couple of hours without sharing a cross word. We were making – as Ulrika had pointed out – progress.

  ‘OK for now,’ I said to myself.

  Still, I knew that it would take a long time to get over hearing those words on the stairs: even as we stumbled forwards, there was no going back.

  *

  Cathy rang to tell me that she was sending me an invoice for what sounded like a huge sum. I grimaced as, with the recent money coming in from Campury, I’d had to prioritise paying Bridget and some other bills. It was going to be a while before the cold winds of poverty felt as if they’d lifted. I was going to have to get some cash from my dad.

  ‘It sounds like a lot of money when you’ve changed your mind,’ she said.

  ‘I haven’t yet,’ I reminded her. ‘It’s just a decision on hold. Anyway, tell me, how was date night with Jezza?’

  ‘Oh, you mean Jeremy,’ she tinkled. ‘It wasn’t a great success.’

  ‘Why? Food not up to it?’

  ‘The food was fine but I’d forgotten that Jeremy slurps the garlic butter from snails. We got home and he watched TV. After that I could hear him snoring in the night; he even hisses through his teeth.’

  ‘Why don’t you put him in the spare room?’

  ‘I did that years ago. I can hear him from down the hallway. I went downstairs and made a cup of tea.’

  ‘I’m sorry the evening wasn’t a success,’ I said before saying goodbye. But she sounded so cheerful about listing Jeremy’s faults today, so maybe it had served a purpose.

  I had the weirdest relationship with my divorce lawyer.

  *
<
br />   I didn’t tell Lars I’d heard him on the stairs talking to Thor. What was the point? The first evening as he went to go back to his mother’s, I railed at him in my head: ‘Is this enough for us?’ but I said nothing out loud. Instead I thought about the children, snoring gently upstairs, relaxed by knowing that their parents weren’t fighting any more and, instead, were giving them structure, routine and consistent love.

  We weren’t telling the truth about how we felt. The difference was that I hadn’t lied about it the way I thought Lars had – pretending he wanted me as well as our family.

  But what he’d actually said was he’d always love me as the mother of his children. He meant a very different love from when we’d climbed Primrose Hill and decided to spend our lives together. Now it was love between people who knew each other so well; who had a shared past – some of it good and much of it heartbreaking; but mostly two people who were mother and father to the two little people sleeping above us.

  34

  Ben and I were lying on the dirty grass in Soho Square. The summer had so far been the sort that promises tropical temperatures but only delivers drizzle. Today, however, a Monday, the sun had really come out. Every other inch of the square was crammed with media types trying to catch some Vitamin D in their lunch hour. We’d already eaten our Prêt sandwiches and I was wishing that I’d also ordered a raisin Danish.

  ‘What do your mum and dad think about you and Lars?’ The question came out of the blue. ‘You don’t talk about them much.’

  ‘I’m off to see them this weekend. I’ve been worried about it to tell you the truth,’ I said, sitting up and blinking in the light. I looked down at Ben and couldn’t see whether his eyes were open or closed, behind his Ray-Bans. ‘My father suffers from depression. Mum is being extremely nice to me from a distance – she couldn’t leave him – he sank into another funk when he heard about me getting divorced.’

  ‘They’re your parents. They’ll want whatever makes you happy.’ He’d told me that his parents had both died – within a year of each other six or seven years ago.