*
By the time I get home, I am shivering with the cold. I plug in the kettle. While it boils, I remember how once, after we were married but before we had children, I had a heavy cold that I called the flu in order to gain David’s attention. It was hard to get David’s attention when he was distracted, a little exaggeration was sometimes needed, something that played on his knee-jerk chivalry. David’s reaction to any problem was to solve it. So when I told him I thought I had the flu, he made me a hot toddy. What did he put in? I tried to remember as the kettle boiled; lemon juice, honey – whisky. I drag a kitchen chair over to the cupboard above the fridge-freezer. Our few spirit bottles were always kept up here, to keep them safe from the children, ‘To keep them safe from me,’ David used to say, but neither of us were great drinkers. Student drinkers, David and I had been, beer and crisps in the pub, wine with our Friday dinner if we were feeling sophisticated. Our taste in alcohol never really graduated.
I fetch down the bottle of whisky, which is dusty even though it has been kept in a cupboard. I find a large white mug. There is no lemon in my fridge, of course – I haven’t bought any fresh food in weeks – but somewhere at the back of the herbs and spices cupboard I know there is a green bottle of some yellow fluid full of e-numbers that claims to be a substitute.
Our kettle is slow. While I wait for it, I check the telephone. There is a message from Aunt Lorraine, trying to sound cheery but wondering why we haven’t spoken for a while. I remember that my mobile, in my handbag, is switched off. When I turn it on, I find there are three missed calls from David. He only left a message on the last one, saying shortly, ‘Hi, it’s me. Can you call me? On the mobile.’ There is background noise I can’t identify.
This is unusual. After our bad patch, David insisted I call him at the house in the evenings rather than at work or on his mobile, an act of loyalty to Chloe, I suppose. If so, it was an act of loyalty Chloe herself didn’t seem to appreciate. If she answered the phone at all, she would hand it straight to David, and even when David answered, I could feel her presence behind his words, the ghost of her in the pauses between his phrases. She couldn’t leave us alone. It took me a while to find such behaviour gratifying and even when I did, any small sense of victory I might have felt was spoiled by the fact that David could still not see her for what she was. David might never believe what she was like, but I knew, and she knew I knew.
Why had it all started again, now, the letters, after Betty? Because she thought I was weak again? Didn’t she realise that after losing Betty, there was nothing she could do to me, that I was strong as an ox?
I call David’s mobile. He answers immediately. I can hear hubbub in the background.
‘It’s me. Where are you?’ I say.
‘Stag’s Head,’ he replies. ‘I’ve sneaked out for a pint.’ This is also new. ‘How are you?’
‘Fine,’ I reply brightly. ‘I thought there was something wrong with Rees.’
‘Oh God no, sorry, he’s asleep. He had a busy day so I gave him a bath and got him in early. Chloe’s mum is over, so I made my excuses.’ His tone is matey. ‘Listen, I think we should have dinner. Soon. I don’t think I handled it very well, when I saw you in the unit.’
Handled, I think. I am something that must be handled. There is a strange pause on the end of the line. Even though he is not speaking, I can hear that his voice has cracked. I don’t know what to say, so I listen in silence. He is gulping.
I sit down on a kitchen chair, my hot toddy forgotten. I listen. After a while I say, gently, ‘You okay?’
‘No, I’m not,’ he replies in a whisper, and then his voice goes completely. ‘I miss her every day, Laura. I miss her so badly. I don’t think…’ he fades out again. I imagine him with his head down over an open newspaper, trying to hide his distress from anyone who might be seated nearby. When he speaks again, his voice is lowered but every bit as broken and wretched. ‘I just want to talk about her, please, please. Please can we meet for dinner, just us, just nothing else?’ And then he does it. He says my name, in that plain way of his. ‘Laura…’
‘Of course we can.’ I realise I have been waiting for this, ever since Betty was taken away from us, that there is no one I want or need but David.
‘When? When are you free?’
When am I not free? I want to say. What, or who, does he imagine restricts my movements? ‘Well, I can come now if you like.’ I sense a moment here, a door ajar. ‘Or you can come over if you like.’ It occurs to me as I say this – and it is a shocking, transgressive thought – that if he comes over, we might have sex.
I can hear him thinking it through. ‘I don’t think it would be a good idea if I came to the house.’ I wonder if he has had the same thought.
‘Because you would find it too difficult or because you’d have to explain to Chloe later?’
There is a pause. ‘Both.’
‘Okay, where?’
‘There’s a new tapas place, at the end of the road here. It was quiet when I came past.’
‘I know I’ve seen it. Not exactly doing a roaring trade.’
His voice has reacquired its normal tone but I can hear effort beneath. ‘God, I’m starving, actually.’
‘Me too.’
This is untrue but we need this exchange to lighten the mood, to make this unexpected meeting possible. I look at my watch in the same spirit, an empty gesture. ‘I can come now if you like, just give me a minute to have a cup of tea and put my coat on.’ It is quarter to eight. If David put Rees to bed himself then he must have only just got to the pub – the Stag’s Head is on his side of town, only a few minutes’ drive from his housing estate. I wonder how long he will have before he has to explain to Chloe where he has been, that he has seen me: ridiculous under the circumstances, but gratifying too, his need for subterfuge.
*
He is waiting in the restaurant when I get there. The restaurant is nice, in the way that new restaurants always are: clean tablecloths and polished glasses, a suffusion of red in the decor and a glowing manager at hand to greet the handful of customers who have bothered to make it out on a night like this. It is on a long road of launderettes and takeaways on the new side of town that is all boxy housing estates and roundabouts. David is already seated, in an alcove in a far corner. He is facing the door, like a detective who needs to keep an eye on who comes in or out. As I approach, he looks at me and tries a smile. I realise I despise him; words can scarcely describe how much. I hand my coat to the manager who has followed me across the restaurant and is hovering in anticipation, then slide into my side of our cubicle. I look at David and feel calm, strong, reserved. I cannot believe this is a man I wept and pleaded for, a man who brought me to my knees. When he came to see me in the hospital I thought how little I felt for him but I’ve gone a step further. My new plan, I realise, is the first secret I have ever kept from him. I am learning something he could have told me years ago, how easy it is to despise someone you are deceiving.
He gives me a half-smile.
‘So,’ I say lightly, as he hands me a menu, ‘Chloe’s babysitting for us while we have dinner.’
‘Chloe and her mother,’ he corrects me.
‘You order,’ I say, handing him back the menu. I think: we are meeting because his own grief is inadequate. He needs to borrow a little of mine.
‘What do you want to drink?’ he asks. Perhaps Chloe is sick of his grief – however much she loves him, she must feel excluded by our loss. Perhaps he has realised it would be a good idea to give her a night in watching television, laughing at something stupid, without having to deal with him and his inability to find stupidity amusing.
‘Beer,’ I say. Oh no, she won’t be watching television. Her mum is there. I have the impression she and her mother are close and that David finds this difficult, although I can’t recall how I might have learnt this. He was unused to having in-laws as a feature in a relationship, I suppose. He got an easy ride with me in that respect,
if nothing else.
‘Me too,’ he says.
I am only guessing, but I resent being used as a substitute. If he is having difficulty with Chloe, or she with him, then they should sort it out between them.
The waiter approaches. David glances down the menu and rattles off an arbitrary list of tapas drawn at random from each section of the menu, concluding with, ‘Two beers.’
The waiter sighs and rattles off his own list, a choice of seven or eight different sorts of bottled lager. David looks at me and I shrug. He chooses. After the waiter has gone, we sit in silence until he comes back with the bottles. It is a long silence and a grateful one. I feel us appreciating it, and each other, and I soften, just a little.
When the waiter puts the bottles of beer on the table, pouring first mine then David’s, the moment is broken.
David asks about my brief stay in the psychiatric unit. ‘Will there be any follow-up?’
I shrug. ‘Not as far as I’m concerned.’ We are not here to discuss me. It is just something he has to get out of the way.
I ask him a few desultory questions about work. He went back for two weeks and then realised it was too early, he said, and had to stay at home for a bit. Now he’s doing short days. They’ve been very good. I tell him about the notes and cards from my team. I do not tell him I have spoken to Jan H or that I visited my office only an hour before. He has no right to know what I am up to. Our attempt to make ordinary conversation peters to an end and we return to silence. The only other people in the restaurant are a couple on the far side of the room. They are eating in silence too.
The waiter brings an oval-shaped metal plate of green beans, slimy with olive oil and scattered with pink cubes of ham. He places the plate on the table between us and turns away. David pushes the plate towards me.
I nod at them. ‘Thought you said you were hungry.’
He shakes his head in reply.
‘Do you remember when we had to take her to hospital?’ he says.
‘The UTI?’
‘White as a sheet.’
When she was three, Betty went down with a urinary tract infection, one of those things little girls are prone to. The first we knew about it was when she had what’s known as a rigor, one step down from a febrile convulsion. She was at home playing, one Saturday morning, when David carried her into the kitchen to show me. She was white as a sheet in his arms, goose-pimpled all over, mouth and eyes half open, trembling from head to foot. I took her temperature. 39.4, but no other cold or flu-like symptoms. I said, ‘Get the car,’ even though we both knew it was parked outside our house. At A & E, I carried her in and demanded they do a lumbar puncture straight away but the house doctor said, ‘Let’s try and get some bloods first.’ David and I both held her down and she still kicked the doctor’s glasses off his nose.
‘She didn’t like that doctor, did she?’
David smiles. ‘Certainly didn’t – mind you, neither did I.’
‘He was young.’
‘The nurses didn’t like him either.’
‘Yeah, they didn’t.’
The arrival of tortilla dissolves this memory and David falls silent again. All at once, unbidden, I remember how, in the early days, when I knew he was coming to my flat at the end of the day, I would get undressed and into my silk kimono, with nothing underneath. It was a ludicrous garment, pink silk with huge, full-blown flowers in a deeper pink. It had a green sash that never stayed tied unless you pulled it into a tight bow. I liked to answer the door to him like that, like a housewife from a seventies porno video. I liked to pull him in, rough in his outside coat, reeking of the cold outside. Sometimes, he would push the kimono from my shoulders before we even said hello. We had sex on the communal stairs, once, me with the kimono tied tightly round around my waist with its party bow, him still in his huge coat, boots on his feet, mud on the carpet – the journey we have been on, from there to here.
Then, with a rush of bitterness, I remember that he has been on the same journey with Chloe. The early sex must have been even sweeter with her, tinged as it was with all the power of something forbidden. What was I, in the early days? A new girlfriend: but her, she was something he wasn’t supposed to have. Then, as if that was not enough, he went on to have a baby with her too, a tiny human being to redeem their guilt. I imagine all the things I don’t like to imagine – them staring together at their new child. I can picture it all too clearly. There is nothing he has done with me that he hasn’t done with her, until now.
Why is he here, in this restaurant, sharing reminiscences and pretending to be my equal? He has her, and a new baby – and now he has Rees into the bargain.
I sit back and sigh. I have made an attempt to pick at the tortilla but what little appetite I had is gone. We are silent for a long while and while we are, the waiter brings dish after dish of tapas to sit beside the untouched green beans.
He is watching me, his eyes intent. ‘Do you still hate me, after this?’ he asks. He was always disturbingly good at guessing what I was thinking.
I look away, making a small, scornful sound at the back of my throat. ‘God, even now, it’s all about you, isn’t it?’
‘That’s not what I meant.’
‘What did you mean?’ The tone in which I say this makes it clear I don’t expect an answer and he doesn’t attempt one. Instead, he picks up a fork and prods lightly at a thick chunk of chorizo. The fork springs back.
He tosses the fork down on to the tablecloth and says, in a harsh voice, ‘Look, it’s not as simple as you think, okay? It never was, but it particularly isn’t now. Right?’
‘What?’
‘Me and Chloe. It was never the easy ride you thought.’
‘I never said it was.’ I can’t believe we are having this conversation. I look away, then back at him, muttering, ‘I don’t bloody believe this…’
‘That was why you kept calling us at four in the morning?’
It is an unfair hit. It was only a phase, those four-in-the-morning calls. I was beside myself. The kids were too, waking at all hours of the night, and sometimes I simply couldn’t stand the thought of him and Chloe being asleep when I was not. I wanted to share it with them, some of what I had been dumped with. I’m not proud of it. I wasn’t proud of it at the time. I knew it was only playing into their hands, cementing my position as their common enemy. I should have had more dignity but I couldn’t help myself.
If he is going to hit below the belt, then so am I. ‘Why are you raising all this now?’ I say calmly. ‘Don’t you think it is a bit late? Something more important has happened.’
‘I know,’ he says, raising his hands. He pauses for a moment, then says, looking down at the table, ‘Things are very difficult at home at the moment.’
‘Of course.’
‘No, I don’t mean Betty. Even before Betty. Chloe, well, I’ve had to look after her a lot.’
Despite myself, I am intrigued. This is taking this evening’s disloyalty to Chloe to a different level. He was always so proud of himself on that score. ‘I don’t talk about you to her and I don’t talk about her to you,’ he said to me once, smugly, as if that made it okay to be fucking us both at the same time.
He leans forward towards me and lowers his voice, even though no one else is nearby. ‘About two months after Harry was born, she went into a real tailspin. At first I didn’t take it too seriously.’ I bet you didn’t. ‘I’d been there before, after all. I told her it was natural. I was expecting her to lift up, after a while, like you did. Harry was colicky, you know, first baby and all that. It was a difficult birth. She lost a lot of blood. They probably should have done a section. He fractured her coccyx on the way out. They didn’t realise at first. She was in a lot of pain and we didn’t know why for ages. And then he wouldn’t feed. She was having a difficult time, I could see that. Anyway, maybe I didn’t handle it well.’
The waiter materialises beside our table. It must be obvious to him that he is intruding – David si
ts back and neither of us looks at him – but he doesn’t go away. After a meaningful pause, he says, ‘Is everything all right?’
Glancing at the table, I see we have touched nothing. To get rid of him I say, ‘Could I have another beer, please?’
‘Of course. Sir?’
David shakes his head.
Once the waiter has gone, David leans forward again on his elbows. ‘She went right down and she doesn’t seem to have come back up.’
‘Is she taking anything?’ I ask.
David shook his head. ‘She won’t. She won’t take anything. She keeps talking about restarting feeding but that’s ludicrous. She won’t listen. And then, about three months ago, she started rejecting Harry. At first it was just, you know, I would get home from work and he was howling and his nappy hadn’t been changed all day. He was soaking wet, Laura, honestly, drenched through. Then I spoke to the neighbour. She told me that she can hear Harry screaming every time she walks past our house. She walks her dog all the time this neighbour. Every time, she heard him. I asked Chloe and she went berserk and said all sorts of things about the poor woman. You wouldn’t believe the names she called her. It was after that she started getting secretive.’
He stops and puts his head in his hands.
I think of the time I told him about Chloe making those phone calls, and the vehemence with which he insisted she was incapable of such behaviour. I think of how I haven’t even shown him the letters because of how convinced he had seemed of her innocence. I am biting my tongue. Do you believe me now? I want to say. Shall we pause for a moment to allow you to compose your apology?
He lifts his head. His face is wretched. ‘She rang me up at work one day. Harry was about four months old. She said, you’ve got half an hour to get here, or I’m going to hurt the baby. Then she hung up.’
‘God…’
‘I got there as fast as I could. She was upstairs, under the duvet. Harry was in his cot, crying. The door to his room was closed. When I went in to her, she wouldn’t get out of bed. She was fully clothed, but she wouldn’t get up.’
Whatever You Love Page 20
