by Sarah Long
‘He’s already researched the exact model for optimum comfort and seaworthiness. We’re supposed to go on a crash course in sailing, then go off round the Pacific.’
Sandra pulled a face.
‘And get shipwrecked on a desert island and eat insects for the rest of your miserable lives. Or else get captured by murderous Somalian pirates. Do you think Matt would pay the ransom?’
‘It’s not funny.’
‘Sorry. Quite thrilling though. Makes my plans sound pedestrian by comparison.’
‘Your plans?’
‘I’ve decided to leave Nigel and move in with Mariusz.’
‘No!’
Tessa saw that Sandra was sparkling with excitement.
‘It’s all agreed. Turns out I’ve done Nigel a favour as he’s in love with his therapist. Totally unprofessional but there you go.’
‘Don’t believe it! When did this happen?’
‘Been going on for a while, apparently. All that anxiety and manic eating has been to do with his reluctance to give in to his true feelings. Didn’t want to let me down, he said. Patronising bastard.’
‘That’s a bit harsh, he was unwell before he met her – that’s why he met her.’
‘You should see him now, right as rain. He’s got a real spring in his step. It’s like a giant weight has been lifted from his shoulders. That weight being me, obviously.’
‘And what about you?’
‘I’m happy! I’ve got a real sense of purpose, I’m going into business with Mariusz, offering full service from design through execution. And I don’t need to tell you how it feels to be having proper sex again. With a hot young man in my case, of course.’
‘You’ve always been more interested in physical appearances than I have,’ said Tessa.
‘I know, you’ve got the moral high ground as usual. Oh no, hang on . . .’
Tessa frowned.
‘But seriously, Sandra, I’m really happy for you. Does Poppy know?’
‘We told her last night. She’s surprisingly cool about it. I guess the atmosphere at home’s been pretty poisonous lately and she can see it’s better to have two happy parents living apart rather than sniping at each other. Although she’s such a little snob she’d rather Mairusz wasn’t a builder, she would have preferred a techie entrepreneur or something.’
‘Well, good for you.’
Over a second cup of coffee, Sandra outlined her plans. They’d sell the house, she would buy an apartment, for her and Mariusz to renovate, she was thinking two bedrooms and an enormous living space, a lateral conversion. She was sick of stairs and who needed all those poky little up and down rooms? Poppy would divide her time between them, everything would be hunky-dory.
As she listened to Sandra explaining her plans in such precise, realisable detail, Tessa knew for sure she wasn’t going to leave Matt. They went down in the lift to where Sandra had parked her bike and said their goodbyes.
‘Think hard before you make your decision,’ said Sandra. ‘I know I’m doing the right thing, it just feels like where I should be. But I’m not sure your heart’s really in it.’
Tessa watched her cycle off, then started walking slowly along the embankment. Tourists were taking photographs of themselves, excited family groups grinning in front of the giant wheel. A Thames Clipper boat steamed past, the chic way to travel to work. John had talked about bringing the boat up the Thames to a mooring in St Katharine’s Dock. They could stay there for a few days and do London, he said, after they’d completed the transatlantic voyage and achieved the nautical miles necessary to join the Ocean Cruising Club. ‘It’s our kind of club,’ he’d told her, ‘for people who’ve said “yes” to adventure!’ They could paint the town red, really live it up the way she deserved – and she’d be able to see her kids while they were there, before he whisked her off to sail round the Norwegian fjords.
It was the way he said it, so casually, as if spending time with her children was a small detail in their grandiose plans. He didn’t seem to understand they weren’t just a parenthesis, they were, still, the centre of her world. Just as Matt, for all his failings, was still at the heart of her existence. They had made a life together, you couldn’t just walk away and make another one. Or at least she couldn’t.
She made her way up on to Westminster Bridge, the traffic surging past her, Big Ben rising up, newly stripped of its scaffolding. She suddenly felt lonely and estranged in the bustle and heaving activity of her own city.
*
Uber cabs were all very well, thought Matt, but you had to admit that driving to work in your own car was the best possible start to the day. For one thing, you didn’t have to engage the driver in polite conversation which always ended in them asking you to give them five stars.
He pushed the seat back to its normal position. Tessa had left her usual debris, a congealed coffee cup, a screwed-up empty crisp wrapper. One thing you could say about her; she hadn’t shaped up into a tidy middle-aged woman, she was still the messy girl he had met all those years ago.
Marriage is like a dull meal with the dessert at the beginning. That’s what Toulouse Lautrec said in the old John Huston film he’d watched on Saturday night, when he was eating his solitary TV dinner.
Slowing down at a zebra to let a group of long-haired beauties cross the road, he let his mind wander lustfully back to some early highlights. The steamy hotel room in Istanbul where they’d broken the bed and had to do a runner; the Suffolk graveyard where they’d performed acts to make the dead blush; their first flat in Brixton with no furniture except a saggy mattress. The homes had become more luxurious over the years, without too disastrous a decline in the quality of their sex life. Until the chilliness that had recently crept into their marital bed, isolating them into mutual resentment.
By the time he reached Brompton Cross, the traffic had reached a standstill, then an ambulance came flashing up behind him, forging its way past on the wrong side of the road. Some poor cyclist, maybe, it was one a month on average, giving rise to the ghostly white bicycles propped up on roadsides throughout the city to remind motorists of the terrible consequences of a moment’s inattention.
Damn, he had an important meeting this morning and it wasn’t looking good. Satnav couldn’t be trusted in London, but maybe it could pick up traffic updates to suggest an alternative route. He clicked on the memory button to bring up his office address. Scrolling down the list, there were lots of northern-sounding places, Tessa must have set destinations to take the scenic route. Appleby, Gillamoor, evocative names to feed his retirement fantasies, when he could give up this nonsense and start living again, planting raspberry canes behind the manor house they would buy on the fringes of a pretty village. He might even take up drinking bitter again, or craft beer, as you now had to call it, parking his pewter mug on a hook behind the local bar and becoming the old bore he pretended to despise but secretly aspired to be.
Running through the list, he stopped at a name that was familiar. Thirsk, he’d been there on a childhood holiday, staying on a working farm where he’d been allowed to stroke a sheep, he could still feel the wiry toughness of the wool and the oily trace it left on his hand, smelling of grass and something more metallic. It wasn’t in the Lake District, though, it was in Yorkshire, he remembered buying a postcard from the post office with a cartoon of a simple-looking fellow in a flat cap and the caption ‘Yorkshire born and Yorkshire bred, strong in the arm and weak in the head’. Navigation had never been Tessa’s strong point, but that was a pretty circuitous route she had taken; she would have had to cut back across the Pennines, why would she have done that?
Forgetting his urgent appointment, he reached back to pick up the roadmap from the back seat, and flicked through the index to find the page for Thirsk. There were all the other places listed on the satnav – Helmsley, Kirbymoorside, Gillamoor, plotting a wiggly line running north-east, away from the Lake District.
An unfamiliar unease gripped him. Not the us
ual tension related to pressure of work and the nagging sense of disappointment and failure, he was used to that. This was more disturbing. Whatever else life threw at him, his one constant was Tessa, his source of comfort and support. His rock, if that didn’t sound too Paul Burrell. Had she been lying to him?
*
Tessa tossed the butternut squash in olive oil and garlic then spread it out in a roasting tin and into the oven, forty minutes at 200 degrees. I have measured out my life in tray-baked vegetables, she thought. But then again, what else were you going to do. You had to eat, didn’t you?
‘I don’t believe you’, John had said to her when she called him earlier. ‘You’re not thinking clearly; I’m coming over to make you change your mind.’ His determination had only made her more adamant, appalled at the thought of him turning up on her doorstep.
‘Please don’t,’ she’d said, ‘I’ve made my decision.’
It was hard to believe she had provoked such strong feelings, at an age when you think that sort of nonsense is behind you. She’d come close to breaking up her family, just to chase that fluttering excitement, the butterflies, the feeling you can’t speak for the excitement, the conviction that this was meant to be. Her head had been turned, like a silly girl she had been flattered into betraying her husband. To think she was ready to walk out on him just because someone had told her she had a great arse. Now she was determined; she’d put things right with Matt.
She started chopping a red onion on the board that had been a wedding present from her parsimonious Auntie May. You’d expect something more generous today, with weddings ever more extravagant and even the humblest bride encouraged to behave like a spoilt princess incapable of doing her own hair and make-up. Matt had already allocated a budget for Lola’s big day. ‘You never know,’ he said, ‘she might decide to get hitched and we want to make sure it’s a party to remember.’ Tessa was ashamed at how enthusiastically she had gone along with him. You would hope to have bigger ideas for your daughter than a Carole Middleton fantasy of her floating down the aisle in a pure white haze. Tessa’s own wedding dress had been hastily bought from Next in her lunch hour. A purple mini – the very antithesis of a patriarchal sacrificial meringue, as she’d smugly pointed out to Matt at the time.
John had wanted them to honeymoon on a Caribbean island, once they’d sorted out the formalities. He knew this great hotel on a sugar plantation, where they couldn’t do enough for you and he would take her swimming in the turquoise sea that was warm as bath water.
The onions were making her cry and she dabbed at her eyes with a piece of kitchen towel then slid the finely chopped vegetables into an old Le Creuset – another wedding gift, recently reinstated into her batterie de cuisine since orange had become fashionable again. Everything in this kitchen was infused with significance; she could tell you when each wooden spoon had been bought, her married life was represented in these things that had been carefully chosen to enhance her career as homemaker.
Sandra had been ruthless about dismissing her own household clutter. ‘I don’t care,’ she’d explained, ‘I want to start all over again, I feel like I’ve been given a whole new life, you only get fixated on stuff when everything else has died away.’
Tessa weighed out the rice and stirred it into the pan, watching it become opaque. In a separate pot, homemade chicken stock was heating, ready to be added a ladleful at a time, to give the creamy texture essential for a successful risotto.
She heard the front door open, the familiar jiggle of keys, then the tread of Matt’s feet coming slowly down the stairs.
‘Hi,’ he said, looking at her more intently than she was used to. ‘Shall we have a drink?’
He pulled a bottle out from the wine cooler.
‘If you feel that’s wise,’ she said lightly, ‘in view of the latest depressing research about middle-aged boozers.’
‘Why did you lie to me?’
Her stomach froze.
‘Sorry?’ she said, playing the innocent.
‘It’s true then. You’re a rotten liar, Tessa.’
He took a large sip of his wine.
‘Kirbymoorside, Fadmoor, Gillamoor, the clue is in the names. Not exactly the Lake District, is it? They don’t do moors there, do they, they have FELLS. You have to go to Yorkshire for moors. Although I suppose it’s all in the north so there’s a kernel of truth in there.’
What an idiot, she’d forgotten to delete her destinations.
‘The satnav,’ she said.
‘Yes, my satnav, in my car. Which I let you take for the weekend so you could visit your old schoolfriend in her hour of need. Except I checked her out and it appears she lives in Canada. What do you say to that?’
His anger cut through the muddle in her brain. She’d have to tell him the truth.
‘You’re right,’ she said. ‘I was lying.’
She wasn’t a Catholic, but she could feel the release of the confession. Sitting in that dark booth, whispering your sins through the grill to the unseen priest or, in this case, her rather less-forgiving husband, who had now started to laugh.
‘Don’t tell me, you’ve got a fancy man!’
He was so amused at the impossibility of such a thing that she wanted to put him straight.
‘Fancy isn’t the word I’d use. But yes. I was seeing somebody and now it’s over.’
That wiped the smile off his face.
He slammed his glass down.
‘You! Seeing someone? You mean screwing someone?’
He was looking at her in total disbelief.
Tessa stirred the risotto.
‘Well?’
‘I don’t know what to say. I’m sorry.’
She watched the dawning realisation, as the penny finally dropped.
‘So while I’ve been working my arse off, you’ve been screwing someone behind my back,’ he shouted. ‘And now you think you can just stand there cooking supper in that passive aggressive way!’
She poured in a ladle of stock, locked on autopilot.
‘Who was he? Where did you meet him? Was it that online dating service for married people? Discreet encounters for bored housewives and desperate old men? Will I find your name listed on the dark web alongside all those civil servants?’
‘Of course not. I wasn’t looking for it, was I?’
‘I don’t know. I don’t know what you get up to while I’m at work providing for everyone! Who was it?’
He was leaning on the island now and Tessa squirmed beneath his interrogation.
‘Someone I knew from school. You don’t know him.’
‘What a cliché! Friends Reunited, was it? Thinking you can turn the clock back and you’re sixteen again? In your dreams! Look at yourself, you’re fifty and overweight and you don’t care what you wear. You’re not exactly love’s young dream, you know!’
She flinched at his accurate cruelty.
‘Facebook actually. He got in touch with me.’
‘Oh, that’s OK then, you were just the victim, nothing to do with you! I tell you what, I wish I’d got time to fool around on Facebook, hooking up with all my old girlfriends.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘You’re sorry!’
Matt was thinking now, she could see him processing the information.
‘Wait, I’ve got it. It was that bloke your mum was going on about, wasn’t it? The one who stood you up for lunch!’
Tessa nodded miserably, stirring the risotto.
‘And you gave him another chance. I don’t believe it. How could you?’’
‘I don’t know . . . I was flattered, I suppose.’
‘Flattered!’
She threw the spoon down and squared up to him.
‘Yes, flattered! You’re always telling me how useless I am, how I’m too fat to wear trousers, how bloody lucky I am to have you. Then John comes along and tells me I’m gorgeous . . . He wanted me to move in with him, that’s how much he thought of me. He loves me. Which is mo
re than you do!’
She should have done it, she should have made the break. She could be off with John right now, exploring the world, walking over the cloak he was laying at her feet. Instead of stirring a bloody saucepan and justifying herself. She’d had her chance and she’d blown it.
‘John, that’s the name. I thought your mum said he lived in America?’
‘He does.’
‘But managed to fly over to screw my wife.’
‘Don’t say that.’
‘Well how would you put it?’
‘It wasn’t like that. It was . . . romantic. Exciting.’
‘Oh, that makes me feel much better!’
He turned round and headed for the stairs. ‘I’m going out. By the way, there’s something I’ve got to tell you while we’re in sharing mode. I resigned today. The goose that lays the golden eggs has committed harakiri. Maybe you should have run off with lover boy because I’m no longer able to support you. Bye bye, gravy train!’
Tessa heard the door slam. She turned off the gas, dinner now seemed completely beside the point, then refilled her glass and sat down on the sofa with her phone. Force of habit compelled her to open her Facebook. John had already unfriended her and their messages had evaporated, disappearing into the ether. Gone were the days of love letters tied up in a ribbon, hidden in a drawer and discovered decades later by wondering grandchildren. She clicked on his timeline, he had a public profile – he was an open kind of guy! – and went through the photographs. The gardens of Le Manoir and Dursdale Hall were still there, he hadn’t got round to deleting them. Maybe he would keep them, she hoped he would, so she could always look at them and remember.
As she was browsing through them, a text came through.
I guess I was your midlife crisis. I love you.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
‘Don’t cease to be lovers because you are married. There is no need for the honeymoon to come to an end while you live.’
Blanche Ebbutt, Don’ts for Wives, 1913, p.17
Tessa was woken by her ringing phone, but by the time she’d fumbled for it on the bedside table, it had gone to voicemail. A missed call from Lola, what was she doing up at this ungodly hour? Then she noticed the time and sat up in a panic.
