‘Well I don’t think any of us can claim that,’ Elizabeth replies. ‘Do you know what I did?’ she asks.
‘Well I know you had an affair – you told us the other night – but Will’s never told me any of the details, if that’s what you’re worried about.’
‘Shall we go and sit down?’ Elizabeth asks. She doesn’t know if what she has to say will help Fran, but she does wonder if it will give her some perspective.
They make their way towards a bench and sit, side by side, looking out over the sea. The only sounds are the waves breaking on the shore, the occasional ripple of voices and music from nearby restaurants.
‘Do you judge me for having an affair?’ Elizabeth says, breaking the silence.
‘No. But I’m not married to you.’
‘I’m in no position to judge, Fran, but what I do know is that having an affair doesn’t mean you stop loving the other person. From what I’ve seen, Will still loves you.’
‘Is that enough?’
‘Only you can answer that. It wasn’t enough for my husband, but our circumstances were very different.’
‘How do you mean?’
‘You and Will have been to hell and back over the last few years. That’s got to take its toll on a marriage.’
‘What happened?’ Fran asks, desperate to change the subject. ‘With you and Tony?’
‘I got bored. We’d had a happy marriage, no drama at all. But after my sons left home my life seemed empty so I went back to teaching. It filled a hole for a while but gradually Tony and I seemed to grow further and further apart. Then I met someone, another teacher. A much younger teacher.’
Elizabeth notices that Fran is staring at her. ‘How much younger?’ she asks.
‘The same age as my eldest son. A couple of years younger than you.’
Fran lets out a low whistle.
‘Don’t do that,’ Elizabeth says with a smile. ‘You sound like Constance.’
‘I bet she had a field day with this.’
‘Actually, she’s been brilliant. Hasn’t told a soul.’
‘So what happened?’ Fran asks again, then shakes her head. ‘Sorry,’ she says. ‘You don’t have to tell me.’
‘We got caught,’ Elizabeth answers, looking away from Fran. ‘We’d been seeing each other for about a year but we got careless. I had a feeling he was getting tired of me, ready to move on to another conquest, but I wasn’t ready to let go so I tried to spice things up a bit.’
Fran is wide-eyed now. There really is nothing like other people’s problems to help you temporarily forget your own and Elizabeth realises she is shocked. It makes her want to laugh out loud to think that she did something so shocking.
‘What happened?’ Fran persists.
‘We got caught having sex in the stationery cupboard at school.’
Fran lets out a snort of laughter. ‘Sorry,’ she says. ‘It’s not funny.’
‘Oh it is,’ Elizabeth replies. ‘What a foolish old woman I was.’
‘And your divorce is due any day now,’ Fran says, as she stops laughing.
‘Oh, Fran, my story is so different to Will’s. You and he had so much to contend with.’
‘You think I should forgive him? I don’t know if I can.’
‘I’m not saying you should forgive him,’ Elizabeth says. ‘But I do think you should talk to him.’
‘Not yet.’
‘Has this got something to do with Jake?’ Elizabeth asks. ‘Because I don’t think revenge is the best answer here.’
Fran sighs, slumps forward on the bench. Elizabeth had noticed the way Jake looked at Fran across the dinner table. She had noticed the way Fran looked back. She didn’t want to see Fran make the same foolish mistake that she had done.
‘I’m not going to pretend that running into Jake again today after all these years hasn’t been a wonderful surprise,’ Fran says. ‘And I’m not going to pretend I haven’t noticed how good-looking he still is, but I do still love Will you know. I just don’t know if I can forgive him, but …’ She trails off.
‘What is it, Fran? There’s something else isn’t there? You don’t have to tell me, of course, but if I can help in any way, you know I will.’
Fran leans back on the bench, hugging her knees up towards her chest, looking up at the stars.
‘I’m pregnant,’ she says quietly.
‘Does Will know?’ Elizabeth asks.
Fran shakes her head. ‘I only found out myself yesterday.’
‘So that’s why you’re not drinking?’
‘Do you think people have worked it out?’ Fran asks. ‘I really don’t want anyone to know.’
Elizabeth shakes her head. ‘They don’t know you as well as I do.’
Fran exhales.
‘Congratulations,’ Elizabeth says softly, her hand resting on Fran’s knee. ‘You must be delighted.’
‘Delighted, terrified, confused. I don’t think either of us were anywhere close to being ready to try again.’
‘It’s a good thing to focus on though.’
‘If this baby survives.’
‘You always have to have hope, Fran,’ Elizabeth says.
Fran looks away.
‘My intention for this retreat was forgiveness,’ Elizabeth goes on. ‘It was the first thing I thought of when you asked us to write something down in those notebooks and it’s what I’ve been trying to work on these last few days – forgiving myself for what I’ve done to my husband and my sons. I wonder if maybe you need to start thinking about forgiving yourself for whatever it is you blame yourself for.’
Fran still doesn’t say anything.
‘When are you going to tell Will?’ Elizabeth asks.
‘Not yet,’ she says. ‘I don’t know what he’ll say. I think he’d given up on ever being a father. For a while he even gave up on us.’
‘But surely he’ll be thrilled?’ Elizabeth presses.
‘Please, Elizabeth, just let me have this time. If you see Will when you get back, promise me you won’t tell him.’
‘Of course I won’t tell him,’ she says, putting her arm around Fran’s shoulders and drawing her close. ‘But am I allowed to be pleased for you?’
Fran nods, smiling. ‘I’m pleased too,’ she says.
Fran
To: [email protected]
From: [email protected]
Sent: Sat, 16 Jul 2016 at 23.37
Subject: Hello
Will
I know you’re expecting me to come home on Tuesday, but something has come up – you’d tell me it was an opportunity, and it’s an opportunity I need to take.
The yoga teacher in residence at the hotel has broken her leg and her replacement can’t get here for a couple of weeks. The hotel have asked me to fill in and I’ve said yes.
I know we need to talk. I have so much I need to say to you, so much I need to ask, but I’m not ready yet. I don’t know if we can get through this, I don’t know if we can work this out, but I do know that I still love you and I should have told you that before I left.
I will come home and I’ll let you know when. I promise to be back for Oscar’s birthday. But for now I need you to let me have this time, this space, for me. I need to think, to be by myself, to be away from the village and the memories.
Can you let me have that?
Love
Fran x
Fran reads the email again before she sends it. It doesn’t even come close to summing up how she feels but it’s as near as she can get. She knows she needs to talk to Will, but she knows she isn’t ready. She feels as though she has been given this extra two weeks as a gift. Maybe the universe does grant you what you need after all. She smiles to herself, thinking about the conversation over lunch on Thursday. Was that only two days ago? It feels like a lifetime. And she still doesn’t know what’s wrong with Katrin.
But if the universe is a benevolent being granting us what we need, why has it thrown Jake back into her life? She thin
ks about what Elizabeth said to her on the beach; she thinks about the way she caught Jake looking at her several times today. She can’t deny that it has been lovely to see him, that when he held her next to the café table earlier it had felt as though, for a moment, the intervening years had slipped away, the heartache erased.
When she and Elizabeth had returned from the beach, Jake and Amado had been chatting amiably in the atrium of the hotel. Amado’s eyes had lit up when he saw Elizabeth and Elizabeth had headed straight to him. As Amado led her away, his hand on the small of her back, Jake had raised an eyebrow at Fran. They’d chatted for a while until Jake asked if he could take her to Cambrils the following day.
‘It’s beautiful there,’ he said. ‘Much quieter than Salou and I know a fabulous little tapas place. We can go on the sea taxi, or even cycle if you fancy it.’ He grinned.
She was so tempted to say yes, to spend the day with him, to forget about everything and just be Frankie Sullivan for a while. But then she remembered Elizabeth’s words. She knows the attraction between her and Jake is still there and acting on that isn’t fair on Jake, or Will, or Fran’s unborn child.
Finding out she is pregnant has made her unable to deny that she still loves Will and while she isn’t ready to talk to him yet, she needs him to know that. She needs to give him some hope. She can’t promise that this will work out. She doesn’t know if she can ever forgive him or if she’ll ever be able to trust him, but together they have made a person again and while there is still hope, there is still love. She might not be ready to tell him about the baby, but she can tell him she loves him.
She doesn’t know, yet, if love is enough.
She places a hand on her still-flat abdomen. In another couple of weeks this pregnancy will be that little bit more established, that little bit safer. In another couple of weeks she’ll be that little bit further away from letting Will down again.
With her other hand she presses send on the email.
She hopes he’ll understand.
JULY 2010
I remember the day we first saw the Old Vicarage. We’d had another fruitless day of looking at houses and I was tired of pretending to like them. I don’t know why I pretended anyway – Will could always see straight through me. I heard him asking the estate agent if there was anything else.
‘Well there is another,’ the agent said, leaning on his car, his hands shoved in the pockets of his cheap suit. ‘But it’s a bit out of your price range.’
‘Our price range is flexible,’ Will snapped at him. I remember thinking that this house had better be the one because I wasn’t sure how much more Will could take.
We followed the estate agent across the border into Suffolk. I wasn’t sure I wanted to be this far away from Cambridge, but I also knew that Suffolk was where Will grew up, out in the middle of nowhere. I knew he wanted to give our children – the ones he was still convinced we would have – the same childhood he and his brother had enjoyed. Maybe this house would be the one.
Just before we got married, I sold my house and Will sold his flat and we just managed to buy a three-bedroom terrace in the centre of Cambridge. But I knew living and working in a city would become too much for Will in the end. He needed more space. He needed big skies and open fields and less traffic. He tried to hide how he was feeling; he tried to pretend everything was all right, but I knew it wasn’t. I bided my time, waiting for him to tell me what was wrong.
He was lying on the sofa with his head in my lap, nursing another tension headache, when he finally told me.
‘What’s really the matter?’ I asked. ‘This is more than just work stress. More than just … you know.’ I trailed off. I’d had three miscarriages in two years. I was tired of tests and hospitals and doctors telling us there was nothing wrong with us, that there was no reason not to start trying again as soon as we were ready. I was tired of being poked and prodded and asked endless questions and I knew Will was sick to death of it. All he wanted was a family: it hadn’t seemed a lot to ask.
‘It’s this house,’ he said. ‘This street. I don’t know if I can stand it any more.’
I didn’t say anything. I just carried on gently rubbing his forehead. He’d tell me in his own time.
‘Everyone here is so bloody perfect,’ he said eventually. ‘Perfect children, perfect lives, perfect sympathetic looks at us because we haven’t managed to have a baby yet.’ The doctors might keep telling us to keep trying, but it was hard to keep trying when we just kept failing. ‘Don’t you just fancy getting out of Cambridge, Fran? Not far – I’d still need to get to work; you’d still need to get to the yoga studio, but just somewhere quieter. Somewhere you can really rest, where we can start again.’
It was the idea of starting again that sold it to me.
And that’s how we found ourselves standing outside the Old Vicarage, holding hands one July afternoon.
‘This is the one,’ I said, really meaning it. ‘Can we afford it?’
He squeezed my hand. ‘Yes,’ he replied quietly, smiling. ‘Yes we can afford it.’ He kissed the top of my head.
‘Dare we hope?’ I asked.
‘Absolutely,’ he replied. ‘We’re going to have a whole brood of kids here. I’m going to teach them all to play cricket in this amazing garden, whether they want to learn or not!’
‘Let’s buy it then,’ I said.
There was no church nearby so I had no idea why it was called the Old Vicarage and from the outside the house wasn’t much to look at – grey, late Victorian, squat. But inside, the light was amazing and it had a huge open-plan kitchen and living area that I could only dream of obtaining in a house in Cambridge for under about a million pounds.
But it was the garden that sold it to us both, I think. While Will imagined playing cricket with our future children, I could see myself sitting out there watching them, drinking a glass of wine. It felt real, tangible, I could almost touch our children, see their faces. That house filled me with so much hope.
We thought The Old Vicarage was the answer to all our problems, but really that was just the beginning. We always thought we’d find the answers to happiness in an imagined future, in something outside of ourselves. That was our biggest mistake.
JULY 2016
Will
He closes his laptop and turns to look out of the window. He has spent half the morning trying to reply to Fran’s email, writing paragraph after paragraph and deleting them all. In the end, he’d opted for one simple line.
Take all the time you need. I’ll be waiting. I love you.
He needs her to know he is giving her the space she is asking for. He needs her to know that this is all on her terms, even though what he really wants to do is get on the next flight to Barcelona and bring her home, hold her in his arms again, and beg her to forgive him. He tries to ignore the voice in his head that wonders if she’ll ever forgive him.
Fran’s only been gone a week and already it feels as though every part of his life has changed. He still sleeps in the spare room, has done since the night she asked him to sleep there, unable to face the bed he’s shared with his wife since they moved into the Old Vicarage six years ago. He can’t cope with how empty it feels or the thought that this emptiness might be his future. He hasn’t cleaned up the bathroom either; he just closed the door on it, unable to cope with the mess he’d made.
A metaphor for his life really.
He hasn’t cooked a meal all week, relying on takeaways and junk he picks up from the petrol station on the way home from work. He hasn’t been to cricket practice and the thought of a match this afternoon, the thought of the questions, the backslapping, the other players’ wives serving the tea, is more than he can stand. All he’s done since she’s been gone is go running, go to work, and lie in bed unable to sleep, thinking about her and wishing he could change everything, wishing he could turn the clock back to last Halloween, wishing he could do anything to not have been the person who caused the extra pain he saw on her
face when she found out about Karen.
Unable to bear another day on his own he picks up the phone and calls his brother.
‘Will, are you all right? I’ve been trying to call you all week,’ Jamie says when he answers. ‘Are you ignoring me?’
Will doesn’t say anything for a moment. He doesn’t know where to begin.
‘Will, are you still pissed off with me about last Sunday, because I’ve been thinking about what I said and—’
‘No,’ Will interrupts. ‘No.’ He pauses again. ‘Fran knows anyway now; it doesn’t matter.’
‘About Karen?’
‘Yes.’
‘Christ, Will, I thought you weren’t going to tell her. What happened?’
Slowly, as though each word is having to be dragged out of him painfully, Will tells his brother everything that happened last Sunday and in the early hours of Monday morning. He tells Jamie about how he’d changed his mind and had decided to confess everything to Fran, that he needed to wipe the slate clean if they were going to start again. How she’d found out anyway and she’d left, refusing to talk to him, refusing to cancel the retreat, shutting him out again.
He hears Jamie breathing on the other end of the phone.
‘She couldn’t cancel, Will – surely you can see that?’
‘I can see that,’ he replies.
‘And she’ll be home on Tuesday,’ Jamie goes on. ‘Pick her up from the airport. Take it from there.’
‘She’s not coming home.’
‘What?’
‘She’s not coming home on Tuesday. She’s been offered another couple of weeks’ teaching out there and she’s jumped at the chance as far as I can see. Jumped at the chance to stay as far away from home as she can.’
Jamie doesn’t say anything for a moment. Will can picture him pressing the knuckle of his index finger into the point between his eyebrows, a familiar gesture he’s done since childhood when he’s considering what to say. Jamie always considers what he’s going to say and do, unlike his older brother who goes blundering into situations, usually without thinking about the consequences.
The Things We Need to Say Page 14
