‘Seb, the guy you met on the bike tour, he’s really become my right-hand man out here,’ he says. ‘He came to Salou with a backpack and some broken dreams like the rest of us, but I gave him a chance and now I’d trust him with the business to be honest.’
‘Enough for you to take time off?’ Fran asks.
Jake sucks air through his teeth. ‘I don’t know about that,’ he says with a wink. ‘But that’s more to do with me than him.’
‘Do you not go back to England to see your mum?’
‘Not very often. I usually pay for her to come out here.’
‘Maybe you should trust Seb to run things and go and see her for a while.’
‘Maybe I should,’ Jake replies, his tone suggesting that she shouldn’t push it any further.
‘It’s good to have people like that on your side though,’ Fran says, changing tack slightly. She wants to know what it is that makes Jake resist going back to England so much, but she knows if she pushes too hard he’ll clam up completely. She’s seen that happen before. He’s never really wanted to talk about his mum.
‘It is,’ he replies, pausing as the waiter clears their plates. ‘Who do you have on your side?’ he asks.
‘Lots of people,’ Fran says feeling suddenly defensive as though Jake is suggesting that Will isn’t on her side and without him who does she have? ‘Elizabeth for a start, my best friend Janine at home …’ She starts to count them off on her fingers.
‘None of them are family though are they?’ he interrupts. ‘You’re like me, Fran – no family.’
‘Will is my family,’ Fran says, suddenly defensive. ‘His family are my family. Besides, you’ve still got your mum.’
Jake makes a noncommittal noise in his throat and looks up at her. Fourteen years’ worth of words are suddenly heavy in the air between them and Fran wonders again what life would have been like if she’d gone back to London after her mother’s funeral. She doesn’t know how long they sit like that, staring at each other.
‘Would you like any desserts or coffees?’ the waiter asks nervously, hovering beside them, clearly not wanting to interrupt.
Jake orders a coffee without looking away from Fran, but Fran looks up at the waiter and goes through the dessert menu with him, ordering a chocolate gateau and some ginger tea.
‘So you’ll leave half your dinner but eat chocolate cake,’ Jake says, laughing. ‘You haven’t changed at all have you?’
‘Mum never used to let me have dessert unless I’d finished my dinner,’ Fran says with a smile, glad that the conversation has moved on to less serious subjects. ‘I always promised myself that would be the first rule I’d break as an adult.’
Jake smiles and sits back in his chair.
‘What stars are these?’ she asks, looking up at the sky. She thinks about the skies above the Old Vicarage. She wonders if Will is looking at these stars and thinking of her.
‘Well that’s Ursa Minor,’ he replies, pointing. ‘And that one’s Betelgeuse.’
‘Really? I thought Betelgeuse was red.’
‘I have no idea,’ he says with a soft chuckle.
They sit quietly for a while as Fran’s dessert and Jake’s coffee arrive.
‘What are you going to do, Frankie?’ Jakes asks after a while, looking at her over the rim of his coffee cup.
She concentrates on her cake; she knows she can’t look at him. She knows she should tell him everything. She knows she doesn’t want to.
‘Do you think you’ll go back to him?’ Jake presses. Fran wonders why he’s being so persistent. ‘Do you think you’ll ever forgive him?’
‘I don’t know. I keep thinking about that, about whether I’ll just spend the rest of my life looking at him and remembering what he did.’
She looks at Jake then and sees a shadow pass over his face, a look of understanding and sadness. She feels something tighten in the pit of her stomach.
‘Shall we go for a walk?’ he asks.
He drains his coffee and goes to pay the bill as she finishes her tea and cake. Together they walk down onto the sand and both slip off their shoes. Fran wonders how many serious conversations take place on beaches around the world – she’s had three herself in the last two weeks – as though the sound of the sea washes away the heartache and the sensation of the sand under bare feet allows people to start again.
They walk in silence for a while, almost touching, and then she senses his arm slide around her waist and it feels like the most natural thing in the world. He pulls her towards him and kisses the top of her head. His kiss feels so familiar, so safe. She looks up at him, straight into those grey eyes.
A voice inside her head is telling her to stop, to step away, but she can’t. They can’t take their eyes off each other. She knows already what it feels like to kiss him. He pulls her closer and when the kiss comes it is exactly how she remembers.
He feels so different to Will. His beard tickles and his kiss is firmer, harder. There’s a desperation in it – as though he’s trying to suck the air from her lungs. When his hand caresses her neck it feels rough, callused; nothing like Will’s smooth, gentle, electric touch. But these differences just heighten the experience and all the baggage of the last fourteen years melts away.
She is Frankie Sullivan again, the smell of Aramis surrounding everything she does. She is brave and beautiful and free and she never wants to be anyone else. As Jake deepens the kiss, the realisation hits her like a flash of lightning in her temporal lobe that she is still that girl. Deep down she hasn’t changed. Life is more complicated now, she has more responsibilities, she’s been through things she never thought she’d have to cope with, but underneath all of that she is still Frankie Sullivan and the only person stopping her from being who she used to be is her.
She knows then, as she kisses somebody who isn’t her husband, that she still loves Will more than she has ever loved anyone in her life, and she knows instinctively that – despite everything – he still loves her. She knows that ultimately Will is all she needs.
With that revelation, she summons up all her willpower and gently presses her hands against Jake’s chest, pushing him away.
‘I’m sorry,’ she says, dropping her head. ‘I can’t do this.’
‘Frankie …’ he whispers, apology in his voice. ‘I thought—’
‘There’s so much I haven’t told you,’ she interrupts. ‘So much I should have told you back in Tarragona.’
She feels his fingers under her chin as he tilts her head up towards him, making her meet his eyes. He smiles and she knows he understands, that he’ll listen. One thing Jake was always good at was listening. She should have told him right at the start, but she’d been too busy pretending to be the woman he used to know.
‘Shall we go and sit down?’ he says.
They walk slowly towards the nearest bench. It’s not until they are sitting that Fran realises that it is the same bench she had been sitting on when she told Elizabeth she was pregnant. She feels as though everything has come full circle. As though she has lived a whole lifetime in the last two weeks.
She watches as a couple about the same age as her walk past hand in hand. She wonders about their story, the baggage they carry with them. If she has learned anything over the past few weeks it is that everyone is fighting their own battle, that her struggle for perfection was always as impossible as finding hen’s teeth.
She begins to tell Jake things she hasn’t spoken about to anyone, things she and Will had kept to themselves, details they have never even shared with Will’s parents or Janine or Jamie. She finds that the more she speaks the more she wants to speak. She lets the words spill out of her, trying not to think about the fact that much of what she is saying is to the wrong man, nearly a year too late.
She tells Jake about the miscarriages, about how each one seemed to take a little bit of Will’s essence with it. About how she always felt she was letting Will down and could never truly be the wife he wanted. She tel
ls him about Will’s headaches getting worse and worse until he felt as though his head was being cleaved in two but that he never complained or put himself first. She tells him about how she thinks Will blames himself, but none of it – up until the affair at least – was his fault.
And she tells him about Oscar, about how long it took her to fall pregnant with him. She tells him about what happened afterwards and how it felt as though she’d lost her husband as well as her child, about how much Will had wanted to talk and how she hadn’t wanted to talk at all. She tells him about how they had been slowly starting to rebuild their marriage but that now she wonders if they’ll ever recover.
AUGUST 2015
Time became elastic. I didn’t know whether it was night or day; I didn’t know what day of the week it was. Will was with me all the time – we sat with Oscar together, we ate together, he stayed with me in the evenings until I fell asleep. I knew that after I dropped off he went back to the NICU and sat with Oscar for a bit longer before going home to shower and change. I had no idea when he slept, or if he slept. He looked exhausted and, although he told me he was fine, I knew his headaches were back with a vengeance. This wasn’t how his first precious days of fatherhood were supposed to be.
He wanted to be there for all the important times in the NICU – the feeds and the nappy changes that took place every three hours, regular as clockwork. Will was a man who had spent his entire career recording every minute of his time – he loved regularity and routine. He wanted to be there when the doctors did their rounds. He knew all the routines before I was even out of recovery. On that first morning, I watched as he took off his wedding ring and his watch, rolled up his shirtsleeves, washed his hands, and used the antibacterial gel. I watched as he helped me do the same.
And then Oscar was there, tiny like a little doll among all the machines and the tubes and the wires and the strange beeping sounds and the smell of disinfectant. He looked so vulnerable hooked up like that and I felt an overwhelming urge to pick him up, to hold him close, to keep him safe. But I knew he was in the safest place possible and that my womb had stopped being safe for him. I hadn’t been able to keep any of our babies safe. I’d let Oscar down, just as I’d let Will down time and time again.
It was impossible to imagine how such a small baby could ever grow up to be like his dad. Maybe I already knew that he wouldn’t. I watched Will with him, the way Oscar wrapped his tiny hand around his father’s little finger, and I saw the look of total and unconditional love on Will’s face. I didn’t understand why I wasn’t feeling that. All I felt was a huge sweeping sense of failure. That I’d failed once again to give Will what he wanted.
Will made friends easily and the NICU was no exception. He knew the other parents by their first names, knew when their babies were born, how much progress they’d made. We watched one morning, on the third day I think, as a couple and their daughter moved out of the NICU into the Special Care Unit – the next stop on the road to taking a baby home.
‘That’ll be us soon,’ Will whispered to me, always so full of hope. Will’s sense of eternal optimism always amazed me. But this time he was wrong. It was never us.
Oscar was still too tiny for us to hold, so we spent our days sitting by his side holding hands, as though our shared energy would help him survive – as though, if we loved each other enough, our son would find the strength to live. As if love was all it would take.
I remember Will’s parents coming to visit, and one day Jamie came. There was a lot of fraternal backslapping and whispered conversations that day. I felt as though there was something I wasn’t being told, but I was too tired to ask. My life seemed to swim in and out of focus – a combination of morphine dreams and breast pumps.
By the time I started to feel that sense of unconditional love it was too late. The same day that I came off the morphine and was able to walk down to the NICU on my own without a wheelchair or Will’s help, Oscar developed a potentially fatal bowel complication. It had come on very quickly, the paediatric consultant explained. It wasn’t uncommon in premature babies. Oscar was going to be put on a course of antibiotics.
After the doctor left, Will and I sat together in my room. I didn’t know how much more I could take. I didn’t know if I could face any more bad news.
‘Everything’s going to be all right, Fran,’ Will said, holding me against him, his fingers at the base of my skull, massaging my neck. ‘Oscar’s a fighter.’ But I could tell from the look I’d seen in his eyes that even he didn’t believe that, and I could tell from the set of the doctor’s shoulders when he had left the room that everything wasn’t going to be all right. I knew then that all those feelings I’d had right at the beginning were true. We were never going to be able to take Oscar home. We were never going to be a family.
Oscar didn’t respond to the antibiotics and the doctors told us in slow, grave voices that he was too weak to survive the surgery he needed. It took me a moment to realise what they were saying. It took me a moment to realise we were discussing withdrawing Oscar’s treatment, that we were going to allow him to slip away.
And it took me a moment to realise that the howling, keening noise I could hear was coming from me.
JULY 2016
Fran
She hears Jake exhale on the bench beside her and feels his hand find hers, squeezing her fingers.
‘I knew there was something,’ he says. ‘I knew there was something you weren’t telling me, but I didn’t …’ He stops, rubs his eyes with his other hand. ‘I’m so sorry.’
‘Please don’t,’ she replies. ‘Don’t be sorry. Besides, I should be apologising to you. I should have told you before now, but when you looked at me you saw the girl I used to be. You didn’t see the miscarriages; you didn’t see Oscar. You just saw me. When you looked at me you didn’t see a failure.’
‘You’re not a failure, Frankie.’
‘I’m pretty sure Will thinks I am.’
‘I’m pretty sure he doesn’t. I’m pretty sure he’s feeling as confused and devastated and messed up as you are.’
Fran doesn’t say anything. She keeps holding Jake’s hand and looking down at her feet.
‘When I look at you I still see that strong, confident woman I fell in love with all those years ago,’ Jake goes on. ‘What you’ve told me tonight hasn’t changed that. I bet it hasn’t changed for your husband either.’
Fran looks at him then, searching for the pity in his face, but is unable to find it.
‘What has changed you, and what is bound to have changed your husband too, is grief. You lost a child. It’s impossible for you both to come out of that unscathed. I’m not defending what your husband has done – I still want to kill him for hurting you – but grief changes people. You can never go back to being the person you were before. You must know that; you must have gone through it with your parents.’
Fran nods. ‘Is that how you felt when you found out your dad had died?’
‘I never knew him. But I’d always had this idea of him, you know? And this idea of how life would be when I found him. After I found out he’d died it changed everything. It changed me. I knew I’d never be the same again and I felt I’d let Mum down.’ He pauses, inhales. ‘Ridiculous really.’
‘It’s not ridiculous,’ Fran replies. ‘It’s just human. Is that the reason you don’t want to go back to England?’
He nods. ‘Having Mum here is fine – we’re on my turf. But if I go back there, I’ll just spend the whole time blaming myself for letting her down. I always thought I could make her happy if I brought Dad home somehow.’
‘One thing I’ve learned is that we’re not responsible for other people’s happiness,’ Fran says, thinking about how much time she’s spent worrying about whether or not Will is happy.
Jake doesn’t reply.
‘I blame myself for a lot of things too,’ Fran goes on. ‘I blame myself for refusing to talk about Oscar after he died and for not acknowledging that Will was in as m
uch pain as I was. And I blame myself for not being honest with him for years before that.’ She pauses. What she’s about to say she hasn’t admitted to anyone but herself.
‘It was always Will who wanted a family. I was never sure about it, but he was driven by it, almost to the point of obsession. In many ways I went along with it to make him happy, but he couldn’t stand the fact we couldn’t do it. I always thought I’d failed him, that he’d leave me for someone who could have children.’
Jake drops her hand then and, taking her shoulders in his hands, turns her towards him, looking into her eyes.
‘You do know that’s ridiculous,’ he says. ‘As ridiculous as me thinking I’ve let Mum down.’
‘Is it?’
‘Do you think that’s why he had an affair?’
‘Maybe, subconsciously. She’s a lot younger than me.’
‘You haven’t talked to him about any of this?’ he asks with surprise.
‘No.’ She pauses, licks her lips, looks away. ‘Like I said I only found out about the affair the night before I flew out here.’
‘But the two of you never spoke about your son,’ Jake says. It’s not a question, it’s a bald fact; but Fran shakes her head anyway.
‘Life is tough,’ Jake says. ‘None of us know how things are going to turn out. There are no certainties. We just have to make the best life we can.’ Fran hears him shift on the bench next to her, hears his breath. ‘I can’t believe I’m going to say this, but I think you should give your husband a second chance.’
‘But how can I trust him? How do I know he won’t do it again?’
‘You don’t,’ Jake replies. ‘But one stupid fling doesn’t make him a serial philanderer. We all have to make the best life we can and sometimes that means taking risks. You have to ask yourself if living without Will would make you happier than trying again.’
‘There’s something else too,’ Fran says. ‘Something else I haven’t told you. Something I haven’t even told Will.’ She takes a breath. ‘I’m pregnant again.’
The Things We Need to Say Page 20
