A Family Man

by Amanda Brookfield

  ‘I just wish I knew what had happened, what to think. One minute I’m convincing myself she’d been coldly planning her getaway for months, and the next I imagine her banged up in some decrepit motel having some kind of breakdown, without the courage or will to pick up the phone —’ He broke off and plunged another forkful of salad into his mouth. ‘The weird thing is she doesn’t have any money. Nothing has been taken from our joint account and the small stash we’ve got in the Halifax is untouched – I found the pass-book and phoned them to check. So what the hell she is living on I cannot imagine.’

  ‘Matt.’ Louise put down her knife and fork. ‘There is something you should know.’

  He stopped eating at once, alerted by her tone.

  ‘I’ve had a letter.’

  ‘From Kath?’

  ‘From Kath.’

  ‘Where is it? Let me see it.’

  ‘Just listen a minute.’ Louise pushed her knife and fork together and folded her arms. She could feel the pounding of her heart through the fine cashmere of her cardigan. Even now, on the very edge of revelation, she was not sure she was doing the right thing. The letter had only come that morning. Its arrival had made her feel relieved and curiously pleased, both because Kath was clearly okay and because the confidences within it pulled her at last towards the knot at the heart of the drama. The question of how much to reveal to Matt had throbbed inside her all day, gathering intensity until seeing Matt himself seemed the only way to cope with it, to find a pretext for planting herself in front of him and then to let her instincts direct the rest. She unfolded her hands and pressed her palms on the tops of her thighs. ‘It’s not good, Matt. It’s … I wasn’t sure even whether to tell you about it … She’s …’ Louise curled the tips of her fingers until all ten nails were digging so deeply into the thin wool of her tights that she could feel the ridges in her skin. ‘Turns out there is someone else. Though she doesn’t say who. The postmark was too smudged to read. She’s gone, Matt, I really think she’s gone.’

  ‘Let me see,’ he repeated, his voice hoarse.

  Louise reached down into her bag and handed the letter across the table; one side of one sheet, folded up small, as if shy of itself. Like one of the secret missives passed round desks in a classroom, she thought, watching as Matt pressed out the folds of the paper and read of greater cruelty than Louise had ever expected to meet in her lifetime. Civilised cruelty, though, phrased and packaged in the language of emotional reasoning.

  * * *

  … I don’t know when, if ever, we shall meet again. I am far away now with someone else, someone whom I love more than words can say. My only regret, of course, is Joshua. Even writing his name hurts more than perhaps even you can imagine. If there was any way I could have taken him with me I would. I know Matt will treat him well. Matt is kind. If he hadn’t been I would never have stayed with him so long. If you see him, tell him to get on with his life and not look back. Tell him I had to do it in the way I did or I would have chickened out. As it is, I know I have done the right thing. I am happy. At last I have seized life instead of waiting for it to seize me.

  ‘Matt, I’m so sorry.’

  ‘Pretty definitive, isn’t it?’ He picked up his wine, made as if to drink it but then set the glass down again, gripping the stem so roughly that Louise feared it might snap.

  ‘Do you want to talk or do you want me to go?’

  He ignored her question and slapped the letter with the back of his free hand. ‘Not much room for manoeuvre, is there? She can’t bring herself to write to me because I’m the living-death merchant, good enough to bring up her son apparently – or rather, kind enough – but not worthy of a direct explanation, an apology, for fuck’s sake —’

  ‘I think she felt that if —’

  ‘Don’t tell me what she fucking felt,’ he cut in, his voice low and hard. ‘It’s quite clear that neither of us knew what the fuck Kath felt about anything.’ He pushed his chair back and stood up, searching for the pockets of his trousers and finding only the flaps of his shirt. ‘Humans do not really touch each other, you know, Louise. They don’t know anything about each other. I mean, take Anthony. What can you be sure of other than the fact that he is the father of your children? He could be bed-hopping his way down the East Coast for all you know; and if he isn’t perhaps he’s wishing he is. But he’s not going to tell you, is he? Because it would be inconvenient, unhelpful, irrelevant to his requirements as far as you are concerned …’ He broke off, appalled at himself. ‘Sorry, Louise, I’m not thinking straight.’

  Louise had gone very pale. ‘I know. It’s okay. I’m going now. You can keep the letter if you want to.’

  ‘No, you have it. I don’t want it.’

  There was a small squirl of lettuce stuck to the bottom of the paper, she noticed, glued with dressing like a piece of green phlegm. She stared it at hard, saying, ‘What Kath has done is the most terrible, selfish, unbelievable …’

  ‘But men leave their wives and families all the time, don’t they?’ He laughed bitterly. ‘No big deal. Who am I to complain? It’s high time the trend went the other way. The fact that I happen to be a useless father —’

  ‘You’re not useless, you’re —’

  ‘Who is he, Louise? Who’s she with?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ She held his gaze, noting the bloodshot fatigue of his eyes, the way the fine lines under his lower lashes looked so deep and delicate suddenly, as if carved into being by the tip of a sharp knife. ‘I really don’t know. I’d better go.’ She turned and slowly made her way to the front door. ‘Call me any time. And if you ever need help in the evenings I’m sure Gloria wouldn’t mind, now she’s got some free time again. You’ve only to ask.’

  * * *

  He reached round her and opened the door, bracing visibly at the gust of cold air that surged in from outside.

  ‘Thanks. If things get desperate I might need to take you up on that. In the meantime I’ve decided to put a notice up in my local corner-shop – regular baby-sitter required, that sort of thing. See what turns up. We had a really nice girl called Clare who came from time to time, but she’s left.

  Gone to learn how to manage hotels in Bristol or something.’ He stepped outside and turned to face the wind, which beat at his cheeks and stung his eyes with tears. ‘Next Friday I’m meeting some of the parents from Josh’s school. A birthday party. You never know, it might throw up some answers.’ He made a face, hugging his elbows against the cold.

  Louise pulled the lapel of her coat across her chest and fastened it under her chin. ‘Night, then.’

  ‘Where’s your car?’

  ‘Round the corner.’

  ‘I’ll walk you if you like.’

  ‘No need.’ She was in a hurry suddenly to be gone, away from his dejection and her helplessness in the face of it. The thought of her own home, her own life, swelled inside her mind like light. She pictured her two children wrapped under their bright duvets with their mobiles stirring gently on the slight currents of warmed air, their night-lights casting pretty shadows across the bookshelves and tidy huddles of soft toys. She would put on her pajamas, brew herself some cocoa and curl up with the phone; tell Anthony how she cherished him, how much she longed for him to come home.

  8

  After the grime and shambles of London, Matt always entered the Yorkshire village to which his father had retired six years before with a distinct sense of unreality, marvelling at the trimmed hedges, the litter-free pavements and gleaming paintwork. Even the ducks, invariably bobbing on the pond next to the main green, were inclined to look somehow coiffeured and orderly, as if programmed to behave in a manner befitting an environment so masterfully under the thumb of its residents. Sometimes he had to remind himself that the wildness of the moors was only a mile away, sanitised in part by footpaths and signposts, but still sufficiently sweeping and magnificent to remind onlookers that habitats like Rushton were tiny triumphs of orderliness among a beauty of vast and
superior strength; that only the briefest of spells without lawnmowers and residential societies would see the place engulfed by its natural surroundings once more, crushed like a pebble beneath a boulder.

  Dennis Webster’s home was the last in a line of converted almshouses, each with pocket-sized gardens back and front, and small, brightly painted front doors, set deep into the dark stone, like open mouths in a line of startled faces. Opposite them, across a stretch of green that played host to a memorial cross to the Great War, was Rushton’s main public house, an imposing building of grey brickwork fronted by tyres full of flowers and several decorative cartwheels.

  By the time Matt turned the final bend of the main street and caught the cross in his car headlights, a ghostly shadow in the dark, his head ached with fatigue. Thanks to the birthday tea at Maria Schofield’s, it had taken an unprecedented two hours to reach the MI, an exhausting stop-start process in the gridlock of the Friday night rush hour. Instead of falling into a proper sleep, Joshua had dozed and woken in rhythm with the faltering progress of the traffic, making demands that added to the stress of the journey and quietening only when Matt traded Radio 4 for the taped ordeals of SpongeBob SquarePants.

  The week since Louise’s evening visit had passed in a blur of continuing to go through the motions with Josh, interspersed by long patches of indolence and hopeless retrospection. Though he posted an advert for a childminder in the Mr Patel’s window, Matt could muster nothing beyond resigned despondency when no one responded to it. When Dennis had suggested a weekend break in the country, he leaped at the idea, promising to drive up after the ordeal of the birthday party and secretly pinning his hopes on the journey as a reason to leave early.

  In the event, they stayed rather late. Partly because of Joshua’s evident enjoyment of the occasion and partly because Matt himself, much to his surprise, had had something of a good time; or had at least sensed that he might one day rediscover a state of mind where having a good time could become a real possibility. As well as heaped plates of enticing children’s party food, there was beer and wine for the adults. While the entertainer earned his fee in the sitting room, Matt and the other parents had hung around in the kitchen, picking at leftovers and the half-consumed birthday cake, an impressive home-made replica of a cartoon monster with yellow fruit pastilles for eyes and a shaggy coiffure of red liquorice tendrils. Charged with glucose and two bottles of beer, Matt had found some of his initial unease dissolve. Having steeled himself for enquiries about Kath, it had been something of a relief to find himself welcomed into the group with no probing questions at all. They knew, he had realised suddenly, looking round the room at his companions, all of them female apart from a starved, intense-looking man called Desmond, who spent most of the time with his ear glued to a mobile phone. Grateful that some version of his stricken circumstances should have become public knowledge without any effort on his part, Matt slipped easily in and out of their faintly riotous conversations about the vile habits of four-year-olds and whether being a party entertainer was a career pursued out of love or insanity. When a reference to Kath finally came, from an earnest grey-eyed woman called Heather, it was proffered so timorously and with such obvious concern for his feelings that Matt felt nothing but gratitude.

  ‘I just want to say that we all know you’re going through something of a hard time at the moment,’ she murmured, catching him when no one else was within easy earshot. She paused to sip her wine, eyeing him uncertainly. ‘None of us knew Kath that well. She kept very much to herself. We had no idea … but if there’s anything we can do, anything at all…’

  * * *

  ‘Mary Poppins would be a big help, if anyone’s got her phone number,’ said Matt wryly.

  She smiled. ‘I can’t manage that, but I do know a good au pair agency.’

  ‘Thanks, but I don’t really feel up to sharing the house with anyone else at the moment, though I may have to resort to that in the end.’

  ‘Well, any time Josh wants to come and play with Lucy we’d be delighted to have him.’

  Matt was prevented from responding to this kindness by Desmond, who – perhaps out of some delayed primeval reaction to being so outnumbered – chose that moment to intervene with a monologue on Arsenal’s chances in the Premiership. Matt, who had always related more easily to rugby than to football, found himself glancing back enviously at the knot of women huddled round the debris of paper plates and crumbs on the kitchen table. He had enjoyed Heather’s expression of support and wanted more of it, he realised. That these women should turn out not to know Kath very well after all only enhanced the appeal of talking to them. Louise was too close to home – too close to Kath.

  He managed to shake off Desmond at last, but not until the doors of the sitting room burst open, heralding the conclusion of the entertainer’s routine and the resumption of normal parental duties. Joshua was one of the first to rush out, waving a creation of twisted balloons, his face pink with overexcitement and heat, his T-shirt plastered with smeary brown remnants of his tea. Across the room, Heather caught Matt’s eye and smiled.

  ‘A few of us meet on Tuesday afternoons,’ she called, her voice barely audible above the hubbub. ‘Next week it’s at my house. Laycock Avenue. Number eighty-two. Three o’clock. Do join us if you would like to, if you’ve got the time.’

  ‘Thanks, I might just do that.’

  And then again he might not, thought Matt, turning into the road that ran past the last of the cottages, some of the appeal of being welcomed into such a group waning from having had five hours in which to ponder the matter. As he turned off the engine, his father emerged from a side door waving a torch and shouting, his Jack Russell, Hoppit, springing round his ankles.

  ‘I’d half given you up.’

  Matt eased himself out of the car and stretched, curling his fingers at the sky, which was a velveteen black and prinked with more stars then ever seemed to penetrate the murk of London. ‘Sorry. I would have called.

  Battery on my mobile’s dead and I didn’t want to waste more time by stopping. Christ, the traffic. Unbelievable.’

  ‘What can I carry?’

  ‘The bags, if you can manage them. I’ll do Josh.’

  Though small, the cottage boasted three bedrooms. The largest was on the right side of the central staircase, next to the bathroom, while the other two were on the left, linked to each other through a low-beamed door. The farthest and smallest of these was where Joshua slept, in a narrow divan bed which Matt himself had used as a small boy.

  Having successfully eased his son under the sheets without eliciting more than a sleepy murmur, Matt sat down on the edge of his own bed.

  Dropping his face into his hands, he rubbed his eye sockets till pink and yellow fuzz filled his vision. It was weird to make the journey on his own, to be there with Joshua tucked up next door and no Kath at his side. His father had moved to the cottage around the time they first met. He had rarely been there without her. Never, in fact, Matt realised, frowning at the effort of remembering the past, seeing the pair of them suddenly like characters in the story of someone else’s life.

  Downstairs he could hear his father clumping in through the back door with the bags, grunting and muttering to himself as he always did when imagining he was out of earshot. A strong smell was coming from the kitchen, something meaty. Though he should have been hungry, Matt felt suddenly faintly sick. As time passed, the confusion of missing Kath – of how to miss her – had got worse. To want someone who had committed such a gross act of betrayal was too desperate, too pathetic, to accept. To be angry was far easier, but unsustainable. A part of him wished that she had simply had a breakdown after all, as he had tried to believe in the beginning. Breakdowns weren’t anybody’s fault. They did not involve failure or the conscious decision to cause pain.

  In spite of the temperature of the bedroom, Matt shivered. For a moment he wanted nothing more than to crawl into bed; not to have to face the effort of communication that awai
ted him downstairs. He had spent much of the previous night clawing his way through drawers and cupboards out of a sudden frenzied need for clues as to the identity of Kath’s lover. For the first time since her departure, he stripped the sheets off their bed, filled with a sudden revulsion at the thought of what might have taken place between them. An image of Kath naked astride another man, her back arched, her head thrown back in the throes of a pleasure so acutely familiar to him, blocked his mind as he grappled with the bedding, struggling to stuff it into the laundry basket. Before tugging off the pillowcases he pressed each one to his face, breathing in the musty smell of unwashed cotton, too distraught to know whether it was the scent of his rival or some sweet lingering perfume of his wife that he hoped to find. His only meagre discovery had been a slim brown envelope of black-and-white photos, slipped under the paper lining of a drawer. They were the kind done for portfolios and auditions, showing Kath in glamorous mode, her lips dark with lipstick, her eyes wide and adoring.

  Matt was jolted back to the present by the sound of Dennis’s gravelly voice, loud and slightly indignant, bellowing up the stairs. ‘Matt? Are you coming down or what?’

  They ate steak and kidney pie, of the sort bought ready made and steamed in a tin, with thick gravy and suety pastry that stuck round the ridges of Matt’s teeth. By way of accompaniment there was a generous pile of packet mixed vegetables and two cans of Boddington’s. Sitting opposite his father at the small square kitchen table, Matt was transported back to the latter part of his teens, when the death of his mother had led to the first of many such meals, in another, larger kitchen, when the silence had been filled with sorrow of a different kind.

  ‘Have you heard from her?’ grunted Dennis at length. He put his cutlery down to await the reply, working his tongue at a piece of gristle lodged between two back molars.