The Girl in the Corner

by Amanda Prowse

  He cried noisily, messily, with his eyes streaming and his nose running. She hated the way he let his secretions run over his skin; disliked the display. It reminded her of when George was little and scraped himself or sustained a minor cut. He would squeeze and prod to make blood appear, thinking this was the route to more attention and a whole heap of indulgence from his mum. He was right. But her husband’s tears had the opposite effect.

  She thought about Dolly, hatching a plot for her to meet the brother she adored . . . Supposing I do go out for a drink with him and he is just disappointed and things get messed up and he doesn’t like me or I don’t like him? Then it would make things weird between us . . . Things wouldn’t be weird between us, no matter what happened . . . Rae wasn’t so sure now. She had seen the curl of dislike in her best friend’s top lip more than once over the years at the mention of someone who had said or done something in opposition to the Latimers.

  ‘Paul won’t tell anyone, and if you choose not to, then that is the end of it.’

  ‘You think so?’ she fired. ‘You don’t think he might tell Sadie? You don’t think she, Karina, might have told someone she works with? You don’t think there’s the remotest possibility that our staff are laughing behind our backs because they all know? You don’t think they might in turn tell one of your nieces or nephews or Hannah or George?’

  ‘No. I don’t think that. She’s gone and that’s that.’

  His words sounded a lot like a fait accompli and she was again struck by his naivety, as if that could possibly be the end of it. As her numbness began to fade and her limbs stopped trembling, she felt the oddest of sensations, as if someone had turned on a tap deep in her gut and all her hope, optimism, love and respect for the man had started to drain away, and it was happening quicker than she would ever have thought possible.

  It was such a shift that she felt embarrassed to be braless in her cotton nightie in front of him, a stranger now; something she could not have imagined. She folded her arms across her chest, shielding herself from the man she had planned on having sex with only minutes ago.

  Howard slipped down from the bed and crawled over to her. He reached up and held her by the shoulders; he was crying again and his limbs were shaking, his eyes bloodshot, his breathing laboured, laden with the fumes of booze drunk in celebration of their marriage.

  ‘Rae, please, listen to me,’ he began, and she felt his grip tighten as his desperate words were met with her silence. ‘I know it doesn’t make much sense, but it’s as though this has made me realise what I stand to lose – and I can’t lose you! I can’t!’ He looked into her eyes and she tuned out his voice, thinking instead how this felt a lot more like restraint than affection and she didn’t like it one bit.

  Shrugging free from his grip, she scrambled to her feet and stood looking down at her husband, who now lay in a foetal position on the carpet.

  ‘We have lied to each other,’ she began. ‘You have lived with me for the last few weeks without owning up to the thing you did, probably hoping it would never come to light, and I lied to you, Howard. I told you earlier that everything was going to be okay, but that wasn’t true. It won’t be. It can’t be. Not now.’

  She grabbed her robe from the foot of the bed and made her way downstairs, where she laid her head on a cushion on the sofa and waited for dawn to break.

  As the days passed by, Rae looked back at the path they had trodden since that night, and in the aftermath she saw the way littered with hurt, mistrust and physical pain, barriers simply too numerous for them to clear quickly, if at all. And yet here they were, keeping up the facade, living under the same roof and chatting with jollity to anyone who called. She knew she felt differently about the man she had married and wrestled with two questions. First, would a happy man choose a moment of madness with a stranger to throw his marriage away? She didn’t think so. And second, what on earth she was going to do now? Rae wondered in her quieter moments just what sadness or issues had been brewing away inside her husband’s mind, of which she had been unaware. Not that this made what he did excusable, not even a little bit.

  ‘Right, pizza and movie night – our place or yours?’ Dolly yelled down the phone.

  ‘Oh . . . we can’t. Not tonight.’

  ‘What do you mean, you can’t?’ Dolly spat.

  ‘I mean, the kids are busy with stuff, we have a lot on and we’re . . . exhausted.’

  ‘For God’s sake, Rae! Have you been taking your Make-Me-Extra-Boring pills again? Because I think you need to cut back on your dosage!’

  Rae closed her eyes, in no mood for her friend’s humour. ‘Yep, something like that.’

  In the wake of Howard’s confession, she coped with the aching void of loneliness that filled her by adopting silence. It felt easier. Retreating to the furthest corners of the house, with sadness and bewilderment seeping from every pore, she contemplated the icy wind that whipped through any room when they were both in it. She wanted to be as far away from him as possible, figuring it was easier than to face him and recount in her mind the moment of confession that led to her sense of estrangement, with her feelings towards him altered. Their verbal exchanges were rare, words barbed and sharp, chosen carefully for maximum effect; a crescendo of emotion could now flare from the smallest of kindling. Rae found she couldn’t look at him, she was so angered, disgusted, ashamed, hurt – and he couldn’t look at her; probably, she suspected, for much the same reasons.

  ‘Is this how it’s going to be?’ he would snap on occasion, his shirt collar askew, sitting in the dark of night, as he placed the glass tumbler down hard on the kitchen table, his breath laden with fumes of the brandy that oiled his conscience and skewed his memory.

  ‘I didn’t choose this,’ she said once.

  ‘I know, I know, I know!’ he yelled. ‘But how long, Rae? How long exactly is the right amount of punishment for two weeks of indiscretion?’

  She stared at him, hating this statement of fact: two weeks . . . Fast, inadequate, lazy coupling without love, mere weeks, a thrill, so easy . . . thoughtless . . . ruinous . . . An odd amount of time for an affair to rise and fizzle. Not long enough, in her opinion, for anything meaningful to evolve and yet long enough for the sordid interaction to squash her marriage under its heel.

  ‘I don’t know, Howard – you tell me.’

  The moment she found out lived in her mind, playing like a sharp-focused movie she didn’t know how to erase. And it played when she left her warm bed to visit the bathroom in the middle of the night. It played while she idled in traffic. It played while she queued in the supermarket, cooked supper, ran the vacuum over the carpets of their home, unplugging it four times to enable her to cover the square footage, and it played every time her husband left the house alone.

  There was the occasional time when Rae would remember a moment so tender: the birth of the kids; his kindness as a dad; how he wept when she miscarried after Hannah and before George. Yes, in these moments, with her guard down and her bruised heart offered up for inspection, she thought she might be able to sweep the whole thing under the carpet, get over it and go back to normal – forget, even – but these moments were fleeting.

  She was ridiculously saddened by the timing of it, coming as it did in the wake of such an important marker, a milestone, twenty-five years. She could not now think about their anniversary party without the throb of shame and embarrassment, remembering how Paul handed her a glass of champagne with a knowing look, and it made her shiver.

  Cards inscribed with heartfelt messages still stood tall on the mantelpiece and on the shelves of the sitting room. She could hardly bear to look at them, thinking of how she had pulled them from the envelopes and read the messages of congratulation with a smile, before Howard’s infidelity had changed their nature into something mocking.

  Their simmering silence kept a tsunami of words at bay. It wasn’t pleasant, but it was a rut they had fallen into: the new normal. It was also a hard, hard habit to break.
Each of them, she suspected, and for very different reasons, was wary of unplugging the dam that lurked in their throats: a barrier built of so many thoughts knotted together, forming a wall behind which sat howls of sadness, recrimination and apology, growing bigger and pushing harder until sometimes she felt it was almost impossible to take a breath.

  Rae felt lost, adrift and strangely like an interloper in the house she had called home since the kids were little. For the first time since her teens she felt like Rae-Valentine Pritchard, looking in with awe at the life and workings of the Latimer family. She continued to cook Howard’s supper, but left it on the stove for him to collect and take to the study or the TV room, where he watched his noisy documentaries. They no longer ate together. They no longer shared a bed. She laundered his clothes, but to do this or any task without love turned each exercise into a proper chore that left her feeling quite exhausted as well as exploited. As a couple they lay low, made excuses. They missed a birthday party, and a housewarming for Paul’s youngest daughter, Ella.

  Rae could not face seeing Paul, who she guessed would either pretend he had no knowledge and greet her as if everything was normal, or offer some sort of sign that he was aware but was trying his best to remain neutral, supportive of them as a couple while acting as the keeper of her husband’s tawdry secret. She couldn’t decide which she’d find worse. The thought of meeting the family while feeling this exposed, no longer able to reach for Howard’s arm on the stairs, nod to him across the crowded room when she wanted to go home or smile at his booming voice, taking comfort from the fact that he was close by, filled her with a cold, hard dread. It meant her world was now built on shaky foundations and it took all of her strength not to fall.

  One of the hardest aspects was that there was no one she could talk to. Rae was wise enough to know that if she confided in her parents they would carry the anger around silently in their hearts like a grudge, fearful for and protective of their youngest daughter, something she didn’t want for them or her. They were still only able to utter the name ‘Tracy Moxon’ with a shake of the head and a fixed sneer. Tracy Moxon: the girl who had won the County Amateur Ballroom Cup 1989, robbing Debbie-Jo of an all-expenses-paid, three-week course at the Barry Newcombe Dance Academy. She couldn’t stand the idea of them doing the same to Howard, no matter that he might deserve their malice a whole lot more than Tracy Moxon had. Even if she and Debbie-Jo had been close enough for her to confide in, Rae knew she was busy with her own family. Lee hadn’t worked for a while on account of his bad back; her oldest boy, Taylor, had just split up with his girlfriend; and Debbie-Jo was working long shifts at the garden centre as well as singing in the Lower Red Lion of a weekend, putting on her sequinned frock and hammering out hits while the punters played darts and laughed over warm chicken and chips.

  And the one person she wanted to talk to was her best friend, who still, with very little prompting, was more than ready to extol the virtues of her beloved brother, his deification an ongoing process. Not only did Rae fear that Dolly would try to defend Howard, she also didn’t want to be the person who might dull the shiny esteem in which Dolly held him. This situation only added to her feeling of loneliness. It hurt that the one person in the whole wide world who she knew would fight her corner would, she suspected, on this topic, sit on the fence. Rae needed more.

  It was unspoken but curiously appeared perfectly choreographed, the way they put up the facade when the kids called or came around. Smiling politely, chatting to the children and through the children, they were wary of letting the cracks show. Protecting them as well as themselves.

  People noticed; of course they did.

  ‘Can you take Dad his coffee, love?’ She placed the mug on the table in front of George, home for a weekend.

  ‘Why don’t you take it?’ Her son eyed his bowl of cereal with something that looked a lot like longing. ‘Oh my God, have you guys had a row?’ He jumped up from the table with mock horror. ‘Please don’t get divorced! Don’t make me choose! I don’t want to live in a broken home!’ he yelled comically and took the mug, disappearing out of the kitchen with a chuckle.

  ‘You already do, George. You already do,’ Rae whispered under her breath.

  Dolly in particular eyed her with suspicion. ‘What’s up with you?’ she asked as she poured wine into glasses and rummaged in the fridge for leftover apple pie. ‘You have a face like a smacked arse.’

  ‘Nothing is wrong with me,’ Rae lied – not something that came easy when talking to her best friend.

  ‘Well, there obviously is! You are doing your fake smile and talking with that little edge to your voice that means you might be saying nice things but your thoughts are murderous! I know you.’

  Dolly placed the dish containing half a pie on the granite countertop in her kitchen and cut it into three slices. Lifting one with her fingers, she dangled the narrow end of the puff pastry into her mouth and bit down, scooping apple juice from her chin with her finger. This was how they were: at ease, friends for so long – and having slept top to toe most weekends of their teens in Rae’s single bed – that they could now eat, talk and live as comfortably together as they did when they were alone. It also meant Dolly knew things were not good.

  ‘I’ve just got a lot going on right now.’

  ‘Oh, pull up your big-girl pants, Rae-Valentine! Life is good!’ She spoke with her mouth full and Rae gave a dry laugh. It was for Dolly, that was for sure.

  Rae was stacking the dishwasher in the kitchen when she heard him walk into the room.

  ‘I found this on my desk.’

  She turned and acknowledged the black velvet box in his hand, in which nestled the teardrop necklace. He walked towards her with his hand outstretched. She smelled the whiff of brandy on his breath, probably sipped in the dining room before coming to talk to her. She knew that he now needed Dutch courage, wary of her reaction. Well, that was his fault.

  ‘I don’t want it and so I thought you might be able to take it back.’

  ‘You don’t want it?’ he asked with thinly disguised dismay.

  ‘That’s right. I don’t want it.’ She spoke clearly, wondering in disbelief how he supposed she might be glad of the diamond.

  ‘But—’ He started off with indignation but clearly ran out of steam.

  She decided to help him out. ‘But what, Howard? You think I want to own that gift bought while you were in full knowledge of the situation but I was not, happy to be given such an extravagant thing? What did you think? That if you showered me with diamonds and trips to the Caribbean I might just be able to turn a blind eye to the whole thing? Laugh it off and polish my jewels?’

  ‘No, no, I . . .’

  ‘Good. Because if you thought that then you really don’t know me at all – which is kind of funny because I now realise that I don’t know you.’

  ‘Don’t say that,’ he whispered. ‘You do. You know me and you know us.’

  Rae whipped around to face him. ‘I don’t, not really. I am so hurt, Howard. I’m so hurt!’ She placed her hand on her heart. ‘I feel empty, completely empty, and it feels crap! I would have bet my final dollar on you being the last man in the world to have an affair. Vinnie, Paul, any of them . . . I could in the right circumstances imagine a situation where they might have been tempted. But you?’ She shook her head, trying her best to keep her tears at bay. ‘Not you, Howard. I felt smug. I did! I thought we had cracked it. We have been together nearly all my life and I never . . .’ Emotion robbed her of the thread. ‘It’s kind of smashed everything because you were the anchor, you were the starting point and the finish line, my compass, my everything; and now that’s gone, I’m left wondering what the hell am I doing? I am lost. I am so lost.’

  He let his head hang down and cried tears that matched her own.

  ‘I don’t want to take this back; I want you to keep it. Please,’ he managed eventually.

  ‘No.’ She was resolute. ‘I won’t.’

  ‘Antigua . . .
’ he began.

  Rae laughed. ‘Well you can forget Antigua – as if we could go on holiday and drink cocktails and sit by a pool! I don’t want to be anywhere with you – not here, not there; nowhere. I wish I could disappear.’

  ‘I can’t cancel it.’

  ‘So, take the necklace back and at least you won’t be too down on the deal.’ She slammed the dishwasher shut.

  ‘I didn’t mean that. I was just saying.’

  ‘What do you want, Howard? What exactly do you want me to say? What do you expect?’

  He shook his head, seeming as much at a loss to answer this as she was.

  ‘Why don’t you go without me?’ he suggested.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Go to Antigua without me. You said you want to get away. Go on our holiday – it’s all paid for and it might help.’

  She stared at him, wondering if anything would help, ever.

  ‘I just want things to be right again, Rae; that’s all.’

  It sounded like a simple request. She could tell by his manner that he considered it possible that they might as a couple heal, as if it were as simple as finding a way to reach a compromise.

  ‘I love you, Rae-Valentine, and I will not let two weeks of madness spoil our lifetime together. I can’t. It would be such a waste.’

  ‘It’s not your decision to make. But you are right, and that is the tragedy of it; it is such a bloody waste.’

  He placed the black velvet box on the granite countertop and left the room.