Love Will Tear Us Apart

by Holly Seddon

  ‘This is nothing.’ I laugh but he doesn’t. Holiday exposure to the kids is always a shock to his system, and we left Blackheath seven hours ago.

  The tick-tock of the indicator is the only sound. The engine holds our breath for us and we pull back onto the road and roll into the blackness ahead.

  We finally reach our holiday cottage. In the back, Izzy has fallen into a dribbly sleep while Harry is drooping, close to nodding off. Paul leans across and pats Harry’s shoulder. ‘We’re here, time to wake up.’ As Harry shakes himself awake, Paul opens the back door and scoops Izzy up into a curly bundle. His right hand is tucked under her bottom while the other strokes the mahogany hair out of her sweaty face. She’s only four, but she’s a solid little unit. I notice his knees buckle a bit.

  Breathing in the tangy air, heavy with ozone and the promise of sea, I take Harry’s hand. He’s dozy enough not to fight me off – a devastating new habit that’s taken effect over the last school year. We lean on each other as we walk up to the front door. The key is exactly where they said it would be. I’m giddy with relief.

  ‘Come on, Kate, she’s not getting any lighter,’ Paul says, shifting Izzy onto his hip. I fumble my way in, and feel for a light switch on the unfamiliar wall.

  ‘Oh, it’s beautiful,’ I say.

  ‘This is nice,’ says Harry, scratching his head.

  ‘This girl is definitely growing,’ says Paul, kicking his shoes off.

  I know the layout of the cottage from the booking website, but it’s always different in the flesh. You can feel the temperature of a place, smell the air freshener and the remnants of what the previous guests cooked for their last, melancholy dinner. The whole place seems entirely unknown, clandestine.

  This cottage really is lovely. And it should be. I wrote off three whole days finding just the right place. One pyjama-ed leg tucked under me, clicking through galleries of pictures until my eyes stung. So many pretty cottages had sofas that looked a little hard, or an uninspiring white oven in the sea-facing kitchen. The lovelier we’ve made our own home, the more this stuff seems to matter. Avoiding disappointment to the point of mania. And it has to be right. No distractions, it has to be right.

  Paul pads upstairs and I follow closely behind to click on more lights, while Harry sits heavily on the bottom step.

  ‘Come on upstairs,’ Paul whispers hard. ‘Time for bed, Harry.’

  Harry drags himself up to a wobbly stand and starts to plod up the stairs after us, before sitting back down to take his shoes off. I shouldn’t have bought him lace-up trainers, it takes for ever to get him in and out of them, which drives Paul to distraction.

  I know full well that they’ve not brushed their teeth as we tuck them in and kiss their sweet, sweaty heads. I didn’t make them go for a wee either. I’ll play dumb through any accidents.

  I run back into the black cold to fetch a carrier bag of journey-mess from the car. For a brief, chilly moment I think about lowering myself into the driver’s seat. I imagine moving my hands slowly around the soft curve of the steering wheel and gingerly feeling the smooth tip of the gear stick. But I don’t sit down. Instead, I lock the car with a thick satisfying click and wonder what it would feel like to drive home alone.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  1981

  In my memory, my mum’s ill periods seemed more like long lie-ins. She’d be in bed but claiming that the rest was in preparation for going out to her studio. Theoretically, her studio was the place where she made jewellery and painted canvases or customised clothes.

  Occasionally in the morning, I’d tip-toe into her bedroom to find the bed empty, and hear her throwing up in her bathroom. Once, I overheard Mrs Baker talking to her husband, who did the gardens for us. ‘She’s down with another bloody hangover.’ One of my first thoughts after Mum died was, ‘Hope you feel guilty now, Mrs Baker.’ It’s impossible to say how long Mum’s illness was sneaking around her body, interfering like a malevolent version of Beezer’s Numskulls, planting little cartoon bombs. Maybe it all happened like a flash flood and all those earlier episodes were just commonplace hangovers – or come downs – but either way, I didn’t appreciate Mrs Baker’s constant, open judgement.

  I don’t entirely trust my recollections, though. My pace is off. Memories from several years can come in one big rush and neighbouring days can seem years apart. The past is a hall of mirrors and, besides, I’ve seen first hand how two children can have a totally different understanding of the same situation.

  With all those caveats in place, I’ll say that by Christmas after the first bout of illnesses, my mum seemed fine. She was back in her usual clothes, up and out of bed most days, sometimes before lunch. Her blonde hair was always a little bit wild, thick like a lion’s mane and as shiny as shredded glass. She wore leather trousers and a lot of animal print. One time, she smeared a line under her eyes like Adam Ant but changed her mind when she saw me giggle. She was very young. Eighteen when she married my father, nineteen when she had me. My father, Roger Howarth, had been in his thirties. To her friends my mum was Suki, to my father she was Susannah. I think she’d also been Susannah to her own father but I never met that generation. Not on either side.

  After the bout of sickness in ’81, Mum emerged newly interested. Dressing me up and sometimes dropping me at the bus stop in her old Jaguar, so long as the weather wasn’t too cold for the engine to start. My father hated that car, but my mother could never get to grips with the Alfa Romeo he bought her. And that never started in the cold either.

  When I couldn’t hold my mother’s interest any longer, she returned to her London friends and I picked back up with Paul. At weekends, we peddled hard on our bikes to meet by the stream or cycle two abreast into Castle Cary, the nearby town. We’d whip by the crumbly orange Somerset-stone terraces, like cycling past rows and rows of LEGO.

  We spent hours staring at the swans in the Castle Cary horse pond, daring each other to find out if they really could break a human’s arm. The big white birds eyed us with contempt as we nudged each other and tried to calculate their wingspan. Most days, we bought a five-pence bag of sweets, inspecting them carefully through the semi-transparent paper before committing, trying to avoid any blackjacks.

  In September 1981, Paul and I turned nine within days of each other and our adventures moved indoors as the temperature dropped. I visited Paul’s house every weekend while my mum slept, shopped, or returned mothlike to the flame of London. My father stayed locked in his office. At Paul’s, we watched Grandstand and the wrestling with his dad, ate fistfuls of lardy cake, wrote songs using Paul’s tiny Casio keyboard and played card games like Rummy, Patience and Pontoon. We got really good at a game called Shit Head and I wish I could remember the rules. I certainly remember the giddy liberty of saying ‘shit’ without repercussion.

  We briefly made up our own band. Naturally, Paul was the keyboardist because he owned the keyboard. We were heavily influenced by Sparks and Ultravox, whose megahit ‘Vienna’ we both loved. Our band was called The Captain and Kate, which I still can’t say without laughing, although I took it very seriously for the three weeks we were in circulation. The best part was that Paul came up with the name, which means that for some reason nine-year-old, four-foot-tall Paul really did want to be known as ‘The Captain’. He had a surprisingly emotional row with his mum when she asked if it was a word play on the Captain and Tennille and we disbanded soon after. The Captain. Even now, if a ship’s captain appears on TV, Paul only has to raise one eyebrow and we’re both in stitches.

  In November that year, the tornadoes came, ripping holes in the country one Monday night. We convinced ourselves that they were coming back to hit Little Babcombe the next night and met after school to build a bunker in the disused coal shed in the Loxtons’ garden. We spent ages sweeping it out and covering the walls with cardboard and masking tape. The sky was dark grey when we started and pitch black by the time we finished. Our hands were thick with coal dust that had mixed with f
rost to make a punishing paste. Paul had already changed into jeans and a jumper but I was still wearing my royal blue school uniform and what had been a crisp white shirt.

  We took out tins of food squirrelled from the cupboard, torches, a pack of cards and a tin of biscuits. A haul we figured was all pretty tornado-proof. After six, I called my house from the chunky rotary dial phone in Paul’s hallway. My mother answered, which caught me off guard. I asked to stay the night at Paul’s and was given a breezy okay. That night, sleeping bags rolled at the ready, we lay on Paul’s bed, topping and tailing. We were both wearing pairs of his pyjamas and our school shoes so we could act swiftly in case of emergency. The Z-bed was pushed against the window to protect us. We were prepared to run to the bunker when the winds came, and took it in turns to stay awake on tornado watch. We woke up on Paul’s bed on Wednesday morning, curled into each other like baby animals, huddled for warmth. The freezing air outside the house was calm, the bunker untouched. Before I ran for my school bus, Viv made us locate and return all the stuff we’d stolen, although we were allowed a biscuit from the tin afterwards. Later that day, I was given ten strong swishes of the cane across my blackened bare legs for turning up at school thick with coal paste and wild-eyed through lack of sleep. I didn’t go to Paul’s that night, I lay in the bath, running my classmates’ laughter and insults over and over in my head. I gradually let more and more scalding water into the tub until I couldn’t feel my feet and my temples pulsed and the red welts on the backs of my thighs went numb.

  My father spent most of Christmas 1981 in his London office, dealing with something happening somewhere in Poland that involved his money but that didn’t concern me. My mum and I spent it in our pyjamas, Mr and Mrs Baker away visiting their grandchildren, the shelves gathering dust. We didn’t manage to cook the dinner and ate beans on toast with cheese grated on top for Christmas lunch. We didn’t watch the Queen’s speech but agreed to tell my father that we had. It was the best Christmas I ever had.

  On the morning of New Year’s Eve, I came down in my nightdress to find breakfast laid out for the household. Grapefruit juice in a jug, tea in the pot, toast in the stand. Mrs Baker was back. My mother had called her so she could drive to London in the early hours for a very important party.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  November 2012 – Sunday night

  ‘We must decide what to cook for Saturday night,’ I say, as we inspect the kitchen, fiddling with the utensils and coffee machine, which is better than the one we have at home and is giving Paul stirrings for an upgrade. I want to lay the groundwork for Saturday night now, because if we leave it, we’ll have left it until Saturday afternoon and it will become a problem. Our anniversary meal will become an emergency, we’ll not know what we fancy, or where to get it, and the whole night will disintegrate into cold, unspoken nothing. My moment, my nerve, will be lost. Another ten years could trickle past.

  ‘Let’s have something local,’ Paul says, half of his voice lost to the inside of a cupboard he’s rooting through. He likes to have ‘local’ things. Cromer crabs in Norfolk, Welsh lamb in Wales, and Gloucester Old Spot in the Cotswolds. For a moment, I imagine him on these holidays without me. I wonder where he would go, if he could go anywhere.

  ‘I’m not really sure what food Cornwall’s famous for,’ I say, lightly.

  ‘Cornish pasties, do you think?’

  ‘Yeah, yeah. Clotted cream and pasties. Yum, let’s have a big bowl of clotted cream with a pasty on top,’ I say with faux belligerence that makes him smile at last. I search online while he pours us a glass of wine from the complimentary basket.

  ‘Seafood,’ I say, ‘and ale. Seafood floating in ale?’

  ‘Ooh, ale,’ he says, smiling easily now. ‘That’ll put hairs on your chest.’

  I wish I could wrap this moment neatly and hide it away, among the boxes of baby clothes. I’m hoarding these fleeting moments even before they turn into memories.

  In six days’ time, we’ll have been married for ten years. That’s quite an achievement by modern standards. ‘And they said it wouldn’t last!’ That’s the joke people make, isn’t it? No-one says that about us.

  Ten years is tin, apparently, which I was at a total loss how to deal with. I can’t imagine what gifts this would have encouraged even in the olden days. A tin hat? In the end, I just cheated. In my leather holdall, I have a pair of cufflinks in a beautiful box tucked into a new tin can that’s been artistically ‘distressed’ to look like an old tin can. I also have a £500 first edition of Under Milk Wood.

  Paul and I have always liked to make a quiet fuss over intimate events. Neither of us gets birthday or Christmas gifts from siblings, or parents. We don’t have sprawling, extended families to make a big deal about anything, so it’s down to us. It started a very long time ago, before we were ‘together’, even. With every pay rise and bonus, the prizes got bigger, the bar got winched up until the rope was so taut it squeaked.

  Of course, I’ve not worked for a very long time so I suppose in the cold light of examination, Paul is buying both our presents. I don’t think he sees it like that and I try not to. It’s what he wanted and he never complains. Not to me. Lately I’ve wondered, when I’ve dared, if he’s described our set-up to someone new. If he’s allowed the corners of his mouth to turn down in symmetry with theirs, if he’s rolled his eyes at the disparities and the sacrifices, things I never considered he might resent.

  The cottage is relentlessly white, still bright this late in the evening. The walls are panelled with pale painted timber, the floorboards washed in a similar shade. An overstuffed sofa is the colour of clotted cream and the creamy grey rug tickles our feet like sea spray. It’s white in a way only a holiday home can be.

  The kitchen has huge suspended white pendant lights and the cream Aga makes my tummy flutter. Paul and I leave the curtains open and head into the living room. I place my glass on the windowsill and flop into a soft pale grey armchair next to a tiny window with just a slap of sea view. The deep dark blue is lit in peeps by the fat moon.

  ‘Dylan Thomas honeymooned in this village, you know.’ As I say it, I have my eyes closed but I know that an appreciative smile will be creeping across Paul’s face. I glance over. He too has flopped onto a sofa, eyes closed, empty wine glass resting on the arm. His feet are bare and his toes wriggle this way and that, this way and that, in time to music I can’t hear.

  ‘You’ve picked well, Kate,’ he says and I smile again. I walk over to top up his wine and he reaches for my other hand, stroking it just briefly.

  ‘Let’s take the kids to the beach tomorrow after breakfast,’ I say. The hug of the underfloor heating leads me to make bold plans I probably won’t fancy in the cold November morning.

  I snuggle back down into the belly of the armchair, my head on a cushion that smells of cinnamon and nutmeg.

  ‘I could fall asleep right here,’ I say. And I hear the steady rhythmic breathing that tells me I’ve already lost Paul.

  I take a sip of my crisp, floral wine, and reach into my pocket. It’s still there, of course. I don’t want to see it again, not yet. But I need to check it’s there.

  CHAPTER SIX

  1982

  When it wasn’t showing gloomy pictures of the dole offices and unemployment queues that year, the TV news was filled with the Falklands war. Mick was suddenly furnished with all sorts of opinions on and information about Argentina and its people. Like much of the UK, I think, Paul and I had never heard of the Falklands. When Mick tried to explain to us why ‘we’ owned an island eight thousand miles away, he grew quickly frustrated by our questions.

  ‘I still don’t get why it’s ours,’ Paul whispered to me as he made us a Kia-Ora in the kitchen.

  ‘Maybe your dad doesn’t really know either and that’s why he’s getting cross.’

  Mick had a tendency towards tearful patriotism in certain circumstances, and blanket disapproval of the upper echelons of British society in the next breath. Wh
ile Viv clucked and cooed over pictures of the new royal baby in the papers that August, Mick had rolled his eyes and made cutting remarks about another mouth on the teat.

  ‘Dad’s a republican,’ Paul explained. ‘He doesn’t think we should have a queen.’

  ‘Oh, hang on boy, I wouldn’t go that far,’ Mick spluttered. ‘I just don’t think we should be paying for them, not with all these new ones being born.’

  ‘One new one,’ Viv chided. ‘Charles and Diana have had one little baby and it’s a bloody blessing after the year this country’s had.’

  ‘That’s how it starts, Viv.’ Mick grew animated. ‘You’ll see, they’ll have another one in a year or two, then another, then another. He looks like a randy bugger, that Charlie, and a nice young maid like her to get his hands on.’

  ‘Mick!’

  My own parents never talked like this. They barely talked at all. And my dad had nothing but respect for the royal family. But Viv and Mick seemed to enjoy play-fighting. Paul was used to it and rolled his eyes but I couldn’t get enough, my face flushing with excitement.

  ‘You’re the only randy bugger around here, Mick Loxton,’ Viv laughed as Mick chased her around, trying to slap her bum.

  ‘Gave you one royal prince, didn’t I? Fancy another?’

  ‘Mick!’

  Mostly, we had our eyes on September, and turning ten.

  Ten was the big one. We started talking about turning ten almost as soon as we turned nine. Ten meant something back then. Nowadays, we’d no more allow our kids out on their own at ten or eleven than at five. They’re shuttled between playdates and wholesome activities and extra tuition with their feet barely touching the pavement.

  But when our tenth birthdays finally came, we got jobs sticking up skittles at the local pub, The Swan. Paul had to beg his mum to let him do it. It meant a late night on a Tuesday – a school night. Paul’s dad Mick was all for it.