The Loving Husband

by Christobel Kent

  Straight away Jo was on her feet, explaining to them around the table (a cousin of Jo’s; one of her exes and his wife; a girl from a different magazine; a foreign guy; none of them Fran’d seen before or since) how she knew Nathan. Or how she’d met him at least, as it turned out Jo barely knew him at all, he’d been hauled in to make up the numbers after a terrible speed-dating evening he’d been to for a bet and Jo for a joke (or so she said). Then she was exclaiming over his injuries, and as he explained them (he’d come off his moped, it was new and he wasn’t used to it, ‘I’m a menace,’ he apologised, ‘but no one else got hurt’) all the time he kept looking at Fran, ducking his head in that shy way she somehow already recognised and without thinking she had shifted at the table to make space for him beside her.

  It had been a month since Fran had broken up with Nick and it had still been raw, heading over to Jo’s that night in the wet London dark, negotiating streets and buses alone. Lugubriously, someone (Carine on the problem page, with her poker-straight hair and obsessive-compulsive shoe collection) had said to her, you have to give it a year, even if you’re the one who ended it, until he’s not the first thing you think of when you wake up. And as Nathan held her gaze from Jo’s front door Nick was abruptly shifted from the centre of her imagination, the place he’d occupied for nearly two years, out to the periphery. Tough.

  So sidelined was Nick, so suddenly, that she’d forgotten about the roses, twenty a day since she had turned to him at the door of his newest place, a cavernous warehouse club space in east London and said, I’ve had enough of this, and walked away. Pale roses – nothing as obvious as red for Nick with all the hours he’d put in on the design of the clubs – but there they were when, coming back from Jo’s that first night with Nathan behind her she pushed her front door open, in vases and buckets and jars, on the sink and the breakfast bar and even up on the sleeping ledge.

  Nathan had taken her home on the moped, a spare helmet in his box, shrugging, sheepish. ‘Someone always needs a lift,’ he said, and she had marvelled at his organisation. And she’d asked him up, stone cold sober. She didn’t want to say goodbye to him, it was as simple as that. He’d made her smile, he’d loved a book she’d loved, she’d seen him watching her mouth move as she spoke, making her breathless. ‘Are you sure?’ he said, smiling as she put her key in the lock and asked him. ‘I mean, yes, please.’

  At her shoulder in the doorway she’d heard Nathan make a sound, almost a laugh, and the first thing she’d done – before she got time to get nervous or to wonder, was it too quick, she hardly knew the guy – was to lift them one bunch after another from their water and dump them, dripping, in the bin.

  ‘You’re not a ballerina in your spare time, are you?’ was all he’d said, holding open the plastic sack for her to drop another bunch in. ‘They throw these on the stage.’ She had laughed, being not at all the ballerina type, not tall or wiry but compact, with inconvenient breasts – and with one hand on the place where her hip flared from her waist, he had ducked and kissed her, quick and dry and shocking.

  ‘He’s a change for you, isn’t he?’ said Jo, eyeing her over a cup of coffee the next day in the newest café in the streets below the office block, a crowded place with wooden benches outside. The rain from the night before had cleared and the day was sparkling. Jo had nudged her out from in front of her screen at midday, wanting the news. ‘He’s certainly not a Nick, is he?’

  ‘You mean, he’s not flash,’ she said, and it warmed inside her, her new secret. ‘No. Nathan’s not flash.’

  She had felt the beginnings of a blush, then, pushing the thought of Nick back where it belonged in the past. Nathan came from the real world, where you got up and went to work every morning, and he wasn’t flash. In the dark, he had been different too. In her bed. He was quiet, he was methodical, he was determined. It seemed to her he had a plan that involved working her out, what she liked. ‘This?’ he said on that first night, stopping, lifting his head, waiting for her to respond. She was used to something wilder, more headlong, something that knocked the breath out of her: Nick had even left bruises, sometimes. She liked this, being made to wait as he circled her, keeping his distance. She sipped her coffee in the sunshine, under the rinsed blue sky, hugging her secret.

  ‘Is that maybe just as well, though?’ said Jo, still eyeing her tentatively. ‘At this point. I mean, it’s not like you’ve ever had it easy. Give yourself a break. Someone decent.’

  ‘Huh,’ said Fran, still thinking of him, then looking up. Registering, almost with a sigh, what Jo was talking about. ‘Yes. Maybe.’

  Because Jo came from a background as settled as they came, one brother, one sister, her mother a nurse, her father a solicitor, mortgage long since paid off, the lawn cropped to velvet and tomatoes in the greenhouse. They still came to London to take Jo, thirty-four, out to a restaurant on her birthday, and although she grumbled, Jo seemed to like it. But Fran had never known her father, although her mother had told her they met at art school and he’d ended up – she’d said vaguely, when Fran had asked, aged twelve – In India, or somewhere. Gentle and sweet and hopeless, Fran’s mother had died of pneumonia (self-neglect, the doctor who came to sign the certificate had said angrily) in a rented bedsit in Brighton when Fran was twenty-one.

  What Jo meant, sitting on the hewn wooden bench in new London sunshine, was perhaps it was time for a safe pair of hands. ‘He said he was a builder?’ Jo had relaxed into sharpness now, grilling her.

  ‘Something like that. Project manager. He runs building sites.’ He had talked to her about his job, lying back on her pillow, watching her get up, walk into the kitchen. ‘All over the place, but he’s based in London. He seems very … practical.’ Her thoughts wandered to his long-fingered hands, the safe pair of hands.

  She’d cut herself, halfway through chopping an apple. He’d been there even before she’d known she made a noise, a gasp caught in her throat. He’d been out of bed and behind her, and he’d reached round and taken the knife out of her hand. ‘Where’s your first aid kit?’ Smiling at her blank expression, never having had a first aid kit, taking her hand between his to examine it. ‘Sit down,’ he’d said. ‘Let me.’

  Of course it didn’t stay like that, not exactly. She wasn’t stupid, she knew relationships had to change, had to develop. Babies changed things.

  Five years, and they had rushed past Fran in a blur while she tried to grapple with it. Opening the door to a new flat, a different house, Nathan working, working, working – away for days then home too tired to talk. A baby, slick and red in a midwife’s hands and Fran watching Nathan’s head turn to her in the delivery room, watching for his reaction.

  She knelt in the mud, in the dark and tried to pull him up but she already knew, from the cold unyielding weight of him, that Nathan wasn’t coming back. In her chest panic contracted to a shrieking certainty, made of terror. He was gone.

  Chapter Three

  ‘Is there someone in the house? Fran?’ The voice on the line was steady but urgent.

  ‘Not in the house,’ she said, and her breath ran out.

  Where was her mobile? Crashing into the too-bright blur of the kitchen, there’d been no time to look so Fran was standing with her back against the bolted door holding the wall-mounted handset that had been there when they arrived. They had almost not renewed the landline contract, was the thought that banged about in her head as she tried to form sensible answers. What is your address?

  ‘Try to keep calm, Mrs Hall.’ The emergency services operator was patient. ‘Your postcode?’

  She couldn’t remember. She should know her own postcode.

  And her responses were delayed, out of sync: she didn’t know what she knew. What if he is in the house? What if he doubled back? How long was I out there?

  She held her breath, listening. Nothing.

  ‘Mrs Hall?’

  ‘I saw someone outside,’ she said. Clarified. Her tongue felt thick.

  Across t
he wet field, her feet sliding in the boots as she had run, there had been a moment when she almost blacked out from not breathing and she had had to steady herself. On through the high ghostly space of the barn, but it wasn’t until she was back on the doormat in a welter of mud and cold sweat did she remember what she’d seen. The brief outline of a man against the headlights. A man or a scarecrow, there one minute, one fraction of a second, then swallowed up by the dark.

  She’d knelt beside Nathan, trying to arrest her own slide into the ditch, smelling the cold mineral sludge down there below their bodies, tasting bile in her throat. Last night’s wine now rose sourly back inside her. What was he doing out here?

  ‘Nathan.’ Half lying against his utterly unresponsive weight she pleaded, breathless. Desperate. ‘Nathan.’ She reached her hand down to his face that must be turned away from her in the dark because all she could feel was his hair. Stiff, dead hair. Wet. A sticky soft place under the matted strands. ‘What the hell … Were you … What the hell…’ She couldn’t finish the sentence but it didn’t matter, because no one was listening. She lowered her head to him, searching for the smell of him in the dark, the smell of his skin. Blood was in the air like iron, and the muddy smell of waterlogged land, but she couldn’t smell him. She found his hand and lifted it to her lips, and it rose inside her, a choking sob. Nathan.

  In the kitchen the hair rose on her scalp in terror as she clutched the receiver. ‘He was so cold.’

  There were so many things she wanted to ask the operator, but the woman was on her set course and would not be diverted, however many times she had to repeat herself. Telling Fran to remain calm. Someone was on their way. They would be there soon.

  Don’t hang up.

  She went on holding the handset, facing the wall, and then she heard a sound, behind her, tiny but distinct: the sharp crack of something hitting a window.

  At a crouch Fran was across the room in seconds, the receiver of the phone dangling behind her, she was at the door, her hands shaking as she felt for the key she had already turned, the bolts she had slid. Locked; locked. She fumbled for the switch and turned off the light and held herself there, against the door, trying to listen over the pounding of her heart and the blood roaring in her ears: Stop, she told herself. Upstairs they were asleep in their beds, Emme and Ben. If she were to fall, or faint, or scream, they would be unprotected. Stop. Listen. Fran listened.

  In the dark now there was only quiet. No footsteps on the gravel under the window, no whispering at the door behind her. He wasn’t coming. He wasn’t coming.

  It took a while for her to register that the sound of the sirens came from outside her head, that it wasn’t just a version of the ringing that had been in her ears since she knelt beside him. She saw the blue light first, revolving at the corner of the kitchen window. She heard the slam of a vehicle’s door and the murmur of voices but numbly she waited. She didn’t move when she saw the knuckles rapping on the window, heard the ‘Hello there?’ Then the voice said, ‘This is the police, Mrs Hall. We have an ambulance. Mrs Hall?’

  Then there was the sound of another vehicle, the heavier wheeze of a diesel engine, and the light changed, yellow beyond the blue. She stayed put as the strangers muttered on the other side of the back door: Nathan, she pleaded, silently, Nathan, Nathan, and a sob rose in her throat, my Nathan, my warm Nathan.

  Cold.

  A fluorescent jacket appeared in the window, where the stone had struck. ‘Is it your husband, Mrs Hall?’ came a man’s voice. ‘Mrs Hall?’ and she knew she had to answer them.

  Police. Police. She wasn’t ready for that. As she came outside a man stepped forward beside the policeman and she looked at him instead. A man in a tabard with his backpack full of medical equipment, he was older, almost sixty, a face pouchy and kind, and hope flared inside her, desperate and dreadful. There was a female paramedic too, with dreadlocks tied back, weary. Fran stared from one face to the other. ‘Please help him,’ she said, taking hold of the man’s sleeve. ‘He’s called Nathan. I’ll … he’s out there.’

  They had torches and at the sight of the beams swinging ahead of her, lighting the wet grass, the fear jumped and sprang like electricity. ‘He was still here,’ Fran told them, ‘I thought he’d been waiting for me to come,’ but they kept walking so perhaps she only thought she’d said it. Turning to look for corroboration somewhere she saw the policemen motionless at her kitchen door. Sanity, she understood, wasn’t something she could take for granted at the moment, and with that thought the future rose ahead of her, black and busy. A whole different life was waiting and as they walked towards the barn it was already being reconfigured.

  From where he knelt on his haunches the middle-aged paramedic looked up at her – she could see the sag of his chin in the light from his torch – and said, ‘Is there a relative you can call? Anyone?’

  There was no one.

  Just the two of them, she and Nathan, each of them alone, although strictly speaking Nathan did have a family, they just weren’t the kind that kept in touch. Nathan’s father was up north, a long way up and old. Nathan’s mother was in a home with a version of dementia that wasn’t Alzheimer’s: Nathan had explained that to Fran carefully. There was a sister but she was working abroad. Miranda.

  ‘You like him, right?’ She and Jo were standing on the roof of the magazine’s offices. Head down over the cigarette she was lighting, Jo didn’t answer straight away.

  It was a clear day, cool. Up till then she’d told Jo it all, progress reports. Nathan was a good cook, he had taken her to Brighton for a weekend, they’d gone to the cinema, she’d met his best friend from home, Rob. Two months in Nathan had asked her to move in and Jo had just shrugged. ‘Good for you.’ He had a nice airy maisonette, handier for work than her bedsit on the end of the Victoria line, so why not? She had been sheepish about telling Jo it was more than that. Not just practical. He was so assured, so clever. Watching a news item on television he’d always know the back story, and yet his hand always went out to make sure she was there, on the sofa beside him.

  But this news was different, it was bigger. Fran was nervous. On the cool rooftop she eyed Jo’s cigarette with envy. Actually smoking it would make her throw up, though: even the smell made her take a step back.

  There’d been one night, maybe five years earlier, and both of them heading for thirty when Fran had gone with Jo to a baby shower, a new phenomenon, that had ended with the two of them getting hammered and a bit hysterical with it. At two a.m. from behind the cubicle door of some club’s toilets she had heard Jo say, with drunken solemnity, ‘If I’m not knocked up by the end of the year I’m going to top myself.’ When she emerged she just walked to the mirrors to reapply her eyeliner as if nothing had happened, but it wasn’t the kind of thing you forgot.

  ‘So?’ Fran was waiting for an answer. They weren’t strictly allowed on the roof, health and safety, but everyone did it. The question was obviously leading somewhere and Jo eyed her, warily.

  ‘Why?’ She held out the pack to Fran, who shook her head, and Jo’s eyes had narrowed even though she already knew Fran had been trying to stop for months. It wasn’t Nathan who wanted her to give up, Nathan had said nothing.

  ‘Sure,’ said Jo, shrugging. ‘I like him.’ She turned and leaned with her back to the rail, examining Fran. ‘He’s clever, I’ll give you that. Ambitious. Early days though, right?’

  Fran looked out over the gleaming slate roofs then, not answering. You could see as far as Sydenham Hill to the south on a day like this, the Crystal Palace radio mast, close-packed terraces curving away and up, warm red-brick in the sun; to the north Highgate and the big gleaming white sentinels of blocks once modern, housing for the masses. ‘I’m pregnant,’ she said.

  ‘You what?’ Jo went still, the smoke curling from the cigarette in her hands. She let it fall on to the felt, ground it out. ‘Fran? Tell me you’re joking.’

  Smiling, sheepish, Fran held Jo’s gaze, buoyed up by the eup
horia that had still not subsided, after a week, more, even if it had an edge to it now, fear of the unknown.

  ‘Fran,’ said Jo, and a note of alarm came into her voice, ‘it’s … how long have you been together? Three months?’ Fran felt her face examined, Jo frowning into it. ‘Christ alive,’ she said. ‘Are you going to … did you…’ a warning note creeping in, ‘was this planned?’

  At that Fran had pushed herself off the rail so abruptly that Jo stepped back. ‘Not planned,’ she said, giddy with recklessness. ‘You can’t plan everything, though, can you?’ Unable to stop herself, defiant, angry, even as she saw some little shutter go down in Jo’s face, she went on. ‘I mean, I’m thirty-four.’ An intake of breath. ‘I want a baby.’ Jo’s face stiff now. ‘And I love Nathan.’ Just the tiniest sound escaped Jo then, of impatience that summoned up all those times they’d rolled their eyes together at the word love, before she grabbed Fran’s hand, her shoulder, in a hug. ‘He’s been amazing,’ said Fran. ‘Really.’

  He had, too. Kneeling on the bathroom floor beside her as she vomited those first six weeks, not just mornings but coming in queasy from the tube ride home, murmuring to her, ‘It’s OK,’ holding her hair back. ‘It means your body’s working.’ Unperturbed, he had a knack of generating calm. He was patient as they sat together waiting for the first scan.

  ‘It must be so hard,’ he said, turning to her as they sat side by side on the plastic chairs under the pinned flyers about healthy eating and chlamydia. ‘Without your mum,’ and she’d found herself suddenly, stupidly speechless, with tears coming into her eyes.