by Sue Watson
Intoxicated by the whole experience of having a new friend round, I made a little joke to Sonia about wanting her to stay and chat all evening.
‘I’d love to open a bottle of wine and tell Simon to get himself a pizza – I don’t feel like cooking,’ I laughed.
‘Sod that. Let him get a pizza; better still get him to cook your dinner,’ she was saying loudly as he walked in. I hadn’t heard him arrive and was shocked to see him standing there. Sonia giggled, waiting for me to join her, but I felt awful. It was so disloyal of me to be saying stuff like that to a virtual stranger. I saw him stiffen, and the tell-tale flexing of the jaw muscle only I could see, and my heart sank.
‘Oh, so to what do we owe the pleasure?’ he asked, putting on his most charming smile.
Sonia immediately went all girlish and flushed and told him her name.
‘Well, Sonia, it’s lovely to have you here.’
‘It’s lovely to be here – you have a beautiful home,’ she said.
I didn’t say anything, just watched and listened with a rictus grin. It was like a game of tennis and I knew at any minute he was going to either hand her the winning trophy or hit the ball so hard it smacked her in the face.
‘Yes, it’s not a bad old place, is it?’ he said, taking in the kitchen like he’d never seen it before. ‘It takes a lot of blood, sweat and tears to own a house like this, Sonia… Mine,’ he added with a grin and she looked a little confused, but smiled along with him.
‘Coffee, Simon?’ I heard my tiny voice ask into the silence.
‘No, darling, I never have coffee after 6 p.m., you know that.’ He turned to Sonia. ‘It makes me jittery, Sonia.’
‘Oh, yes of course, the caffeine.’
‘That and not having a decent meal waiting when I’ve been working hard all day, and this one,’ he gestured towards me, ‘is just chatting away in the kitchen to you.’ He added a flashing smile like he was joking. He wasn’t.
‘Simon…’ I attempted what I hoped sounded like a flirtatious reprimand.
‘Oh, I’m sorry, I didn’t realise I was keeping Marianne from her chores,’ Sonia said.
‘Well it seems you are,’ he replied, staring at her, unsmiling.
The smile fell from her face as she turned to look at me, then back at Simon as she stood up. ‘I’m sorry – I didn’t realise it was the 1950s,’ she said, recovering well with a victorious smile to match his. They both now glared at each other as she picked up her handbag, called her daughter downstairs and left the house, banging the door as she went.
Simon was furious, I could see it in his eyes, but he pretended to find it funny and laughed. Squeezing my cheek, he asked me why I wasn’t laughing.
‘Because it wasn’t funny,’ I said, wanting to cry. I’d thought I’d made a friend. ‘I’m embarrassed. She’ll tell all the other mothers that we have a weird relationship… like I’m some kind of Stepford Wife.’
‘Which is exactly why you shouldn’t be mixing with these lowlifes,’ he’d said, pouring himself a large glass of red. ‘Just because a woman loves her husband and wants to welcome him home after a hard day’s work doesn’t make her a Stepford Wife,’ he added. ‘I wish.’
I gave him a half-smile, grateful he was still in the mood to joke slightly – and knowing it wasn’t worth fighting over. I was smarting from the encounter though and wondering how I would handle it when I saw her again, but I pushed down my resentment, held back the tears and began peeling the vegetables.
I never spoke to Sonia again. I saw her in the playground and she smiled, but it felt like pity, and I didn’t need pity, I needed a friend. I have a friend now in Jen. I feel comfortable with her, and what’s even better is that she’s met Simon several times and she knows how to handle him. He criticises her to me but responds well to flattery and flirting – and Jen’s good at that. I’d love to bare my soul, tell my friend everything. I’ve hinted that he can be difficult to live with, but Jen didn’t pick up on anything and just laughed, adding flippantly, ‘Aren’t they all?’
Chapter Nine
It’s been several days since I discovered the emails and I’ve been on tenterhooks, not sure what or who I believe any more, including myself. All I know is that I don’t have the strength to go through another drawn-out argument that escalates into physical and mental pain. So I’ve stayed away from Caroline. I’ve tried not to think about her and I’ve avoided going into Simon’s office and checking on his emails. But I don’t know how long I can live like this, knowing he is living another life, and that it is easily accessible to me with just a couple of clicks.
I can deal with Simon. I can just about cope with his moods and the way he sometimes treats me because I want us to stay together as a family. It’s a small price to pay for the kids to feel secure and happy, but if, as I suspect, he’s genuinely in love with someone else, I can’t take it. ‘When I promised to stay together til death do us part, I meant it, Marianne. I just hope you did too,’ he said recently. But now I wonder if he just wants me here to punish me for not being the woman he wants me to be – and for what happened all those years ago. When will I have paid my dues? Isn’t it enough that I think about my baby daughter every day, and cry for her most nights before I fall asleep?
* * *
Simon’s a surgeon – he needs precision in his day-to-day life – but I’m concerned he’s getting worse and it’s tipping over into something else. He’s always been a perfectionist and often tried to impose that on me, and now and then he’ll be physical, nasty, but then he just carries on like nothing’s happened. I’m guilty too: I lie to myself and say he’s stressed, it’s the last time he’ll hurt me and the last time I’ll let him, but then it happens again. Recently, his anger hasn’t stayed in the bedroom, it has bloomed red and raw into our daily lives and he’s started to pick even more at what I feel are the few things I can do. My beurre blanc sauce is too thin, the new duvet cover in the spare room is ‘cheap looking’, his books aren’t in alphabetical order on the shelf, the kids aren’t doing their homework correctly. These are all in my domain, elements of our life that I have some control over and some skill for, and I feel like I’m being erased. I’m slowly becoming invisible the more he criticises, bullies and humiliates me – especially in front of the boys. I’ve always prided myself on how I look after our family; it’s important that the kids are happy and doing well at school. I attend most parents’ evenings on my own, I know who the children play with, I’m aware of the boys’ upcoming SATs tests and totally on top of Sophie’s AS levels and the three A levels she’ll take next May. And yet I still feel I’m not good enough. ‘You need to make sure the boys are doing their maths,’ Simon’ll say, ‘because Alfie couldn’t add up three plus seven the other day. What’s going on?’
These days, when Simon’s around, I feel like I’m standing on the outside looking in. I had no family, but as a child I watched families on TV, watched my friend’s parents, and this isn’t how it should be. I remember the Oxo ad like everyone else, and the dad would come home for dinner and everyone would be included. But sometimes I feel like Simon alienates me from the kids – he pulls funny faces when I say things, and if he and the boys are telling jokes and I try to join in, he rolls his eyes and says ‘girls aren’t funny’. The boys enjoy this banter, but I think it’s disrespectful. It’s not good for them to see girls as less than boys and it hurts.
This evening, he directed this towards Sophie, making an unkind remark about the jeans she was wearing and how they ‘do nothing for you’, which caused her to burst into tears and run upstairs. I wanted to run after her, but I knew it would cause even more upset if I did.
‘What the hell’s wrong with her… what do they call it nowadays? She’s a complete snowflake!’ he’d snapped.
‘Simon, she’s a teenager. She hates herself and she’s under pressure. You commented on her physical appearance – can’t you see how upsetting that was?’
I know I’m treading on eggshells,
but this is important; it’s about an already struggling teenage girl who doesn’t need her father’s insensitive remarks. It worries me a lot, that like the boys, she may have been getting the wrong impression of relationships from the snippets of our life together that she sees. I try to hide the difficult moments – our little lies, the tension, the bickering, the fights – but we all live together and kids see a lot. I want our children to remember the happy times, and not have their childhood and their own relationships blighted by how they perceive their parents to be. Simon can be difficult, and currently I’m not making things easy with my concerns about him playing away, but we can also be loving and caring and I have every hope that we’ll soon be okay again.
I know he is upset, but he’s too proud to chase after her, apologise or at least give her a hug. I doubt he’s too proud to give Caroline a hug. All of the issues in our family started when she came on the scene and the sooner she’s out of his life the better for all of us.
Simon later made it up to Sophie by saying he’d give her a driving lesson, and she seemed happier, but something must have happened during the lesson because they came home late and she went straight up to her room in tears. He clearly felt guilty about whatever had happened – he wouldn’t tell me, but I know someone’s going to pay for that. And I know it’s me. So now I’m waiting for the fallout and, just as predicted, he starts by calling through to me from the sitting room that the throws on the sofa are apparently ‘messy’.
I’m with the boys in the kitchen, but as soon as he calls I leave them and wander in with an already defeated sigh. It’s late, the boys have been a handful, I’m worried about Sophie – and I think the throws look fine. In fact, I spent the good part of an hour today folding them so each corner lined up with the other (as he’d suggested a couple of weeks back). I’d embraced this too much and it had become a monkey on my back: each time I passed the sitting room, I went in, and only after I’d done this about twenty times could I drag myself from the room.
I am on the edge.
‘I buy you cashmere throws and you treat them like cheap acrylics,’ he says, impatiently guiding me across the living room for a masterclass on fucking throw folding.
‘Simon, they’re fine…’ I say, trying to keep the irritation out of my voice.
‘To you everything’s fine, you leave mess everywhere, the place is covered in dust and you—’
‘Simon, I dust every single day. I polish until I can see my bloody face in everything.’ I can’t hold back, I’m so tightly wound today I feel like I’m going to burst.
‘Don’t swear, you’re better than that,’ he spits.
‘I’m not though, am I? I’m not better than that. This is me, and I’m not good enough.’ I’m almost shouting. I know this won’t end well but I’m on the edge of hysteria. The tension of the past few days is overwhelming me. I can’t stop myself. ‘I’ve never been good enough, have I Simon? Your mother made that clear from the moment she saw me, and I’ve been proving her right ever since.’
He’s now marching between the sofas, dropping the throws that I painstakingly folded on the floor.
‘Don’t speak about my mother like that, God rest her soul.’
I’m incredulous at his piety. ‘God rest… Simon, you’ve never even been to her grave…’
‘How dare you.’ He stops what he’s doing. I wonder if I’ve gone too far; why did I have to push his buttons? I could have just folded the fucking throws and left it at that.
‘It’s… it’s true, but I’m not blaming you, your relationship with your mother was cold…’
‘Oh, and you’d know all about families, wouldn’t you? Your own mother dumped you practically when you were born.’ He’s glaring at me and I have this urge to hide from him.
‘Simon, please, let’s not… I was just saying…’ I start, now wanting only peace. But the genie is out of the bottle. And I opened it.
He comes towards me, grabbing me by the collar of my jumper, almost lifting my feet off the ground. His face is in mine, and his eyes are so filled with hate, it’s burning my skin. I should have kept my mouth shut. I could kick myself for saying something so mean about his mother. What kind of wife am I that I can be so cruel?
‘Only saying are you…?’
I feel the heat from his face in mine, his eyes boring into me and I stand still, holding my breath, waiting for the blow. I think he might bang his head into mine, because both his hands are now round my throat, so he doesn’t have one free to hit me. I can’t take this again; recently his flashes of anger have become more frequent, more prolonged, more scary. And for the first time in my marriage I’m genuinely worried that he might strangle me and I’ll become a number on a list of victims of domestic violence.
When I was single in my twenties, living the party life in London, I was strong and independent. I wouldn’t even let a man pay for a meal. Never did I ever imagine myself in this situation, standing here in my own home with my husband’s hands at my throat, genuinely fearing for my life but unable to stop it. When did I become this way?
I wait for my punishment, holding my breath, hoping it’s quick and silent. But suddenly, Charlie’s voice cuts into the thick toxic air – he’s yelling for me and I make an attempt to pull myself away from Simon’s grip.
‘Stay here,’ he commands, but I shake myself free – my child needs me. ‘Marianne, if you go, you’ll be sorry,’ he warns, as I falter in the doorway. His anger is tangible, but I can’t ignore my child.
‘Mummyyy!’ Now Alfie’s shouting and Charlie’s joining in; just the sound of their wails is enough to cause a physical reaction in me. I’m rushing through the hall to the kitchen where Alfie has banged his head on the island, and I immediately wrap him in my arms and kiss his little face.
‘Darling, let Mummy see,’ I say, gently parting his hair to see if he’s cut his scalp or if there’s a lump. I can’t see anything but call Simon, who runs in, and in the wake of his child’s injury, all anger towards me is momentarily forgotten.
He pushes me aside roughly and does a perfunctory check of Alfie’s head. ‘You okay, mate?’ he asks, and I can see he’s looking into his eyes, checking them with his own, gently touching the wound.
‘He banged his head – shouldn’t we take him to A & E?’ I ask.
‘No, he’ll be okay, but I do think we have an emergency on our hands,’ he says, alarmingly.
‘Oh… what? What?’ I can barely contain my fear and panic but he seems to be enjoying it.
He looks around at Alfie and back at Charlie. ‘I think what we need is emergency chocolate ice cream.’
There are yelps of joy as Charlie mounts Alfie, almost knocking him over, demanding he also be included in this ‘emergency’.
I laugh with relief and reach out for Alfie, hugging him and kissing Charlie on the head. I wonder where the chocolate ice cream is coming from. There’s none in the freezer; Simon doesn’t approve.
‘Okay – so Nurse Mum… take out the emergency ice cream,’ Simon says.
The boys look at me and I’m a little lost. ‘I… don’t… we don’t have any… Doctor.’
Simon puts on an expression of genuine surprise. ‘Have you eaten all the ice cream, Mummy?’ he says, rolling his eyes, and the boys protest at ‘greedy Mummy’, who apparently spends her days emptying the fridge of treats.
‘Okay then, if Mummy ate it, she can replace it,’ Simon says.
I look from him to the boys – is he teasing?
‘What… do you…?’
‘Go and get us some emergency chocolate ice cream.’ He says this with lightness in his voice, but only I see the darkness that’s returned to his eyes.
‘Yeah… go on Mummy,’ Charlie joins in, delighting in this game.
‘Now?’ I ask.
Simon nods and looks at the boys who now nod along with him.
‘But it’s late… it’s after eight o’clock. I’ll have to drive to the supermarket on the other side of town.�
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‘Yes, you will,’ Simon says. ‘Won’t she, boys?’
‘Oh yes,’ they say in unison.
* * *
‘What do you want from me, Simon?’ I say. He’s in the kitchen holding a corkscrew, an unopened bottle of wine on the oasis in front of him. The boys have now finished the chocolate ice cream I drove twenty-five minutes across town to purchase. It’s almost 9 p.m. and they’ve gone to bed, Alfie complaining of tummy ache and Charlie threatening to be sick.
‘What I want…’ Simon is flushed with anger and taking a bottle of red and twisting the cork. I feel like he’s pushing the sharp metal into me, twisting it into my flesh as he grinds it into the bottle. I rarely if ever challenge him, but merely asking what it is he wants is seen as a challenge – it’s all relative. ‘What I want is for you to come to bed and continue the discussion we were having before you ran off hysterically screaming about calling an ambulance for a bump on the head.’
