Whatever You Love

by Louise Doughty

  Lorraine did not respond immediately, but continued loading the dishwasher. ‘Off down the boozer with the boys, is it?’

  There was something about the way she said it, a dryness in her tone I had not heard before, that made me pause in what I was doing, my hands still in the foaming suds – she used a different brand of washing-up liquid from mine and I had put too much in. It was frothing up over the sides and on to the countertop.

  ‘No, no… well, not that often I don’t think…’ David went to the pub after work sometimes but recently he had been too busy, I thought. I realised I didn’t know which it was: the office or the pub. He didn’t volunteer the information and I didn’t ask. I never asked David questions, after all, it was always the other way around. This was pre-Chloe, when as far as I knew, David and I were happy together and my life with Betty was absorbing enough for me not to question that.

  I still didn’t know any different, there in Lorraine’s kitchen, but what came to me then was an awareness that I didn’t know any different – knowledge that my ignorance existed.

  Aunt Lorraine lifted the door of the dishwasher awkwardly – her bulk made her stiff when she bent. She twiddled with the dial, pushed two buttons with jabs of her plump forefinger and the dishwasher made a je-jung sound as it bounced and ground into life. She picked up a tea towel from the countertop and wiped her hands. Still without looking at me, she said thoughtfully, ‘Well, there’s a price to pay with a boy like our David, I suppose.’ She looked at the door, towards where her sitting room was full of her husband and her relatives. Her expression was clouded. ‘I should know that as well as anyone…’ she muttered.

  I didn’t know what she was talking about. A price? What price was I paying for having David? What price had she paid for Uncle Richard? It seemed an odd way to refer to a relationship – was there always a price to be paid? If so, I wasn’t aware that I was paying one.

  We finished clearing up, then took coffee for ourselves and went into the sitting room where Uncle Richard was playing a board game with the older of Ceri’s two boys – the youngest boy was upstairs with Betty. Everyone else was sitting on chairs around the room. The paint stripper sat, admired and then discarded, amongst half-finished wine-glasses on the dining table. ‘They are playing weddings,’ David informed me, referring to our daughter and her cousin, and pulled a face. I sat down on the arm of the sofa and leaned towards him, reaching out a hand to smooth down his hair where it was sticking up and crinkled, towards the back of his head. He moved his head away. I had only meant to be affectionate but the sharpness of his movement suggested irritation, as if he thought I was trying to infantilise him.

  The door from the hallway opened; in walked Betty. She had an old net curtain round her shoulders and was using one hand to clutch it in place. In the other, she held a sink plunger, thrust before her like a ceremonial mace. On her head, she was wearing a yellow T-shirt that she had helped herself to from Lorraine’s laundry basket and which I knew to be in lieu of a gold crown – in Betty’s mind, the line between brides and princesses was blurry. Both got to dress up and be worshipped and that was fine by her.

  We broke into spontaneous applause. All the adults gave their own, particular sort of exhalation – vocalised in my case, a long ‘Aaah…’, a sigh from Aunt Lorraine, a grin from David, an explosive chuckle from Uncle Richard, who reached out to grab her, destabilising the yellow T-shirt. Whatever the different quality of those reactions, they all meant the same thing to Betty as she pushed herself free of Uncle Richard, replaced the T-shirt on her head and stood in the middle of the room, clutching the rubber plunger and beaming round at us all. All I have to do is walk into a room, she was saying to herself. That’s all I have to do.

  I leaned over and kissed the top of David’s head and this time he did not move away but reached out a hand and squeezed my knee in acknowledgement of our shared pride. In that respect, nothing had changed. We were still the smuggest parents in the world.

  *

  When Rees was born, it was payback time. It began with the trouble I had feeding him. He wouldn’t latch on if his life depended on it – which it would have done were it not for the joys of formula milk. I developed mastitis and had to take antibiotics. Oh, and he screamed all night. It was only then I realised what a mistake I had made in having our easy baby first. ‘God,’ I said to David one evening, ‘I had coffee at Sally’s house this morning.’

  ‘Mmm…’ he murmured, wiping down the hob, while I sat on a high kitchen stool, a wide-awake little Rees in my arms. I launched into my tale with some enthusiasm. This sort of story was what filled my day at that point in our lives.

  ‘I was trying to feed him, you wouldn’t believe how smug that woman is…’ The youngest of Sally’s four children, Willow, had just gone up to Reception with Betty and Sally was incredibly broody. She had watched me trying to feed Rees at her kitchen table and made one suggestion after another. By the time she said, ‘Have you tried lying flat on your back with him across your shoulder?’ I had been ready to scream. The harder I had tried to get Rees to latch on, the more frantic he had become. I was sweating profusely – Sally’s kitchen was overheated, I had just had a hot drink and both breasts were full, the pads in my nursing bra sodden with warm milk. In the end, Sally had almost snatched Rees from me and walked around her kitchen with him on her shoulder while I removed my zip-up fleece, took deep breaths and tried to calm down. Rees, meanwhile, had become more and more hysterical. By the time Sally handed him back – unwillingly, for it was admitting defeat – he was beetroot-coloured.

  ‘Honestly,’ I burbled to David, as he stood with his back to me, attending to a boiled-over, dried-hard crust of something on the hob, ‘someone should explain to that woman that childrearing doesn’t have to be a competitive sport. It’s only because she’s got nothing else going on in her life, that’s why she’s so obsessed with being helpful. And then, when I did finally get him latched on, she tried telling me that…’

  I told this story to David in the same way I told him all my stories about my day with Rees, with an air of cheery desperation to which he never responded. I was trying to re-conjure his fascination with Betty when she was a newborn, our shared joy at that time. But by then, Chloe was on the scene.

  *

  Chloe arrived in our lives before Rees was born, before he was even conceived, when Betty was four years old. David had just been promoted and was Chief Designer. He didn’t design pens – their designs were set in stone – he designed the machines that made the pens, the cutters and pressers and enamellers. As far as I could work out, being Chief Designer meant he did less designing, rather than more. It meant he got dragged into endless managerial meetings with the men who decided how many other men and women lost their jobs because of his improved designs for the machines. David was a draughtsman at heart. What he liked was spending hours over huge wooden boards with lots of very sharp pencils resting in a line in the groove across the top. When he got promoted, he spent more time with the men in suits and less time with the sharpened pencils. Chloe was his replacement, hired from a rival firm.

  I knew. I know everybody says that with hindsight but I did, I had a premonition. David came home from work two weeks after his promotion and said, almost as soon as he was in the door, ‘The new me started today.’

  He was standing in the hallway, flipping off his shoes. I had come from the kitchen to greet him, as I still did in those days. Betty usually flung herself at his legs but a favourite cartoon was on television and she was settled in front of it.

  ‘Oh, yes?’ I said, and even then, even before I knew his replacement was female, I felt something in my stomach.

  He passed me, on the way into the kitchen. ‘She’s called Chloe,’ he said, over his shoulder.

  I followed him. He went straight to the bread bin and tossed back the lid.

  ‘I’ve made chicken,’ I said. ‘What’s she like?’

  He paused for a fraction too long. ‘Okay
, nice. Her CV is amazing. I’m dying to talk to her.’

  I walked past him, to fill the kettle. While my back was turned, he added, ‘Might take her to lunch tomorrow.’

  I could have written the rest of the story there and then, that very evening.

  9

  My suspicions began as quickly as the affair but it was six months before I confronted him. It says something for David’s wilful guilelessness that, throughout that period, he continued to have his phone bill itemised. I can still recall the sickening sense of trespass I felt, the dread, as I extracted those bills from the cardboard file he kept on a shelf in the box room – your spouse’s personal paperwork: pornography for the distraught. The rhyme we were taught in General Science, I remembered it then, as I stopped halfway through the bills to close the door on to the landing, even though I was alone in the house at the time. Little Johnny took a sip/But now he’ll sip no more/For what he thought was H2O/Was H2SO4. How many lies can you tell in six months? At a conservative estimate of one a day, that’s nearly two hundred lies, each one a droplet: drop, drop, drop.

  I rang the number that appeared with suspicious frequency on the bills, in such a shuddering fury that I didn’t take the precaution of withholding my own mobile number before I dialled. Why should I? I had nothing to hide. The phone went straight to voicemail. You’ve called Chloe Carter’s mobile phone. Please leave a message after the tone. Somehow, even knowing her full name was painful. She was not a phantom Chloe. She was Chloe Carter. Examining the bills, one after the other, I knew that what I had suspected was true – David and Chloe’s affair had begun very soon after that first lunch. There was no extended period of flirtation or wary skirting of each other, I was certain of that. That wasn’t David’s style. I recognised the pattern of calls; the short ones when he broke off hastily for some reason – he was forever ringing when he was on his way from one meeting to another – I remembered how frustrating I had found that, in the early days. Then, the long ones: fifty- six minutes was the longest. How easy it is to spend fifty-six minutes talking in the early days of a relationship. It goes by in a flash. You have talked of nothing at all.

  *

  And so, late that night: an ambush. The setting was our bedroom, with its mushroom-coloured walls and the satin cushions I insisted on, which David always hated. (In revenge, he hung a tasteless watercolour above our bed.) The protagonists: David and I, with a bit part for our daughter. The scene opens with the heroine, myself, waving a mobile phone bill in her husband’s face. Cue an aria of denial.

  Exhaustion adds a special edge to a couple’s shared hysteria. His admission, when it finally came, was defiant, but after a further hour of tears and bellowing, Betty staggered in from her bedroom in her blue spotted pyjamas, hair awry with static from her pillow, demanding tearfully that we tell her why we were doing ‘that shouting’. She wanted me. I was a limp, sodden rag. David carried her back to bed and I can only presume her softness as he settled her was what finally undid him. Without meaning to, she and I had played the nice and nasty policemen in David’s interrogation. When he came back into our bedroom, I looked up at him. I knew my face was dissolved in misery, never a good look. I didn’t care. I was devoid of pride. ‘Is it over?’ I asked brokenly, choking on the threat implicit in my words. ‘Are you going to stop seeing her now? Is it over?’

  It was half past three in the morning. We had been arguing for nearly four hours. His shoulders drooped. ‘Yes,’ he said, and covered his face with both hands. ‘It is, it is. It’s over, okay, I’ll tell her, it’s over.’

  If I had asked him at that moment if the moon was made of blue cheese, he would have sworn on bended knee that it was, that it always had been and always would be, until the end of time.

  *

  David was always sincere; that was what made him so hard to resent. He would think a thought or feel a feeling and out it would tumble from his mouth, like jelly beans from one of those bar-top sweet dispensers, tumbling in coloured curves, unpackaged and immediate. ‘She just seems so vulnerable, somehow,’ he said to me once when, out of sheer masochism, I demanded he explain what had attracted him to Chloe. ‘Sort of vulnerable but brave, a bit like you were, I suppose, coping with your mum and never having had a dad, and she’s like that although it’s a very different situation, sort of fragile but just incredibly clever at the same time.’ It was like being lacerated with a broken bottle. ‘She’s incredibly good at design, much more intuitive than I was. She should be earning twice what she is.’ I saw that he had completely forgotten who he was talking to, chatting to me as if I was a mate, as if I expected – let alone wanted – honest answers to my questions. ‘She’s had a really tough time actually, dreadful family. It’s amazing she’s got such a good sense of humour.’

  Another time, when I was ranting about her perfidy, he rounded on me and said, in a tone of voice quite chilling in its calm and logic, ‘Look, if you met Chloe in a pub or something, you’d like her, honestly, you two have lots more in common than you’d think.’

  ‘We’re both fucking you, you mean.’

  ‘Apart from that,’ he replied with a patient sigh. ‘You even…’ he was going to say something he thought the better of – unusual for David to stop himself, so it must have been quite spectacular in its tactlessness. ‘You both lost your dads when you were young.’ Chloe was half Irish. When David had told me this, my heart had sunk. I could picture their sneering conversations about English-English people all too easily. Chloe’s father had died when she was a toddler, although her mother lived locally and there were various siblings around up north. In the previous weeks and months, I had prised far more information out of David than was good for me. I even knew she was allergic to tomatoes. I was glaring at him.

  ‘We even what?’

  ‘You both like going for walks on the cliffs…’ he concluded, a little lamely, and turned away, point made.

  Not after that, I didn’t.

  At that stage, I had no idea why he was so determined, in the face of my justifiable disdain, to win me round to the idea of Chloe being a nice person. At that stage, I still thought of her as a storm to be weathered rather than climate change.

  For a few months he and Chloe stopped having sex, I think, although I am sure there were still many strained lunchtimes at work when they met and clutched hands beneath the pub table. It was probably this period that did for me, in retrospect – I should have turned a blind eye, let it burn itself out. Instead, I made myself into an obstacle, something as devoid of personality as a concrete paving slab.

  *

  He moved out for a while, to a one-room flat above a pub in Eastley, so that he could ‘think about what’s best for all of us’, but Betty’s bewilderment and misery were so obvious that after four months he came back. His return filled me with optimism. I began to think the worst was over. At that stage, I still believed I held the advantage, that it was only a matter of time.

  *

  The first phone call came one morning. David was at work, Betty at nursery. I was on my knees before the open door of the freezer. I had removed the drawers and was chipping at the furry lining of ice inside the cabinet with a blunt knife, a job I found satisfying out of all proportion to its actual worth. The phone was on the floor beside me. I had just extracted a slab of ice and was holding it, ready to lob it up into the sink. I put the knife down and answered the phone. I should have put down the ice. ‘Hello?’ I said. ‘Hello…? Hello…?’ There was a brimming silence. ‘Who is this?’ Meanwhile, my other hand grew wet and numb as the slab of ice defrosted on my palm. I hung up, put the phone back on the floor, lobbed the ice, continued with my task. I dismissed it, that first time, trying to pretend I didn’t know it was the start of something.

  The phone calls came in fits and flurries after that: sometimes several a day, sometimes nothing for a week. When I had withheld numbers barred from the landline, they started coming through on my mobile. I couldn’t bar withheld numbers from that
as David’s office and Betty’s nursery numbers were both automatically withheld via their respective switchboards.

  The rows I had with David about these calls were the most bitter of all and marked the final unravelling of our relationship. David swore blind it wasn’t Chloe. ‘She says she isn’t doing it and she wouldn’t lie about something like that,’ brow furrowed, expression all earnest. ‘She isn’t like that. She’s very honest and actually a really nice person.’ I was incandescent. I didn’t need him to tell me what she was like. I knew what she was like – she was a woman who had an affair with a married man who had a small child. That was what she was like. As the situation deteriorated between David and me, he even accused me of imagining the calls, or making them up.

  I knew what she was doing. It was a cheap trick, designed to make me look hysterical and paranoid in David’s eyes, and in that, wholly effective. She was prowling round my home, scratching at the door. She was telling me, you may have got him back for now but I know where he is and I haven’t given up. It was then – and only then, I swear – that I began to hate her.

  The letters were later, I think – yes, they came later.

  *

  Then I pulled my trump card – well, in truth, it was not so much my trump card as the last card in my pack, my final bid to keep my family intact. During a brief period of reconciliation with David, one Friday night when we were both drunk and feeling uncharacteristically sentimental, I managed to fall pregnant with Rees.