Abe waits as I turn, then walks in front of me, takes off his jacket and lays it on the ground. He sits and pats the space next to him. I sit.
‘Will you promise me it’s over?’
‘Oh, God, Ivy, you know I will. It was over even before it started. I never loved –’
‘Don’t.’ I’m scared he’s going to say her name and I don’t want to know it. I don’t even want him to say ‘her’. That’s an acknowledgement too far.
‘I don’t know what to say. You want to talk but you won’t let me say anything.’
‘Why did you let it happen?’ I ask him. ‘That’s all I want to know. I don’t want to know who or where. But I need to know why. Was it because it was easy, because you could, because you thought I wouldn’t find out? Or did you want me to?’
‘No – God, no, never. If I could have the time back, if I could spare you any of this …’
‘Were you thinking of leaving me?’
‘Not for a moment. The complete opposite.’
‘How can the complete opposite of leaving me be having an affair with another woman?’ I’m shouting now there’s no one to hear. ‘A part of you left me,’ I say, saddened by the veracity of my words. ‘A part of you left me years ago.’
He says nothing.
‘When did it begin?’ I ask.
‘Nine months ago. But I only saw her a few times. I mean, I saw her more but we only …’
‘Don’t.’ I’m trying to protect myself from details.
‘I’m sorry,’ he says. ‘But I have to try to explain, Ivy. It had nothing to do with you.’
‘Thanks.’
‘No. I mean, it had everything to do with you but not in a negative way, not in a way that reflects badly on you or the way you are. You’re a wonderful woman and I love you more than I could ever love anyone. I couldn’t even begin to be me if I hadn’t met you. You mean everything to me.’
‘Then why?’
‘Because of that, really. Because of the way I am. Because I’m scared of losing you. I always have been. Practically from the moment when I met you at the airport, I was scared I was going to lose you. Even before I knew there would be an us, I was scared of losing you, and then, when there was an us, and I knew that I could lose you, I was even more scared. Sometimes I’m so frightened of what the future might hold I can’t bear it. I can’t bear to feel what I feel for you. I was trying to run away from that feeling because it gets too much for me.’
Sometimes I think Abe’s life has been too easy. It was all happy families, when he was growing up: four siblings, big houses with sprawling gardens, foreign holidays and camping trips. He had his mother’s depression to cope with but he managed to reach his forties without losing anyone close to him – even his beloved tortoise, Fred, was still alive. His aunt Katrina was the first person he’d loved who’d died. He was scared of losing me because he didn’t know that when you were robbed of the people you cared for, you could carry on.
‘I’m scared too, Abe!’ I’m still shouting at him, but my words are carried away by the wind so I don’t sound as angry and upset as I feel. ‘Think what it’s like for me having to live with the knowing and the not knowing – knowing the children may have to live with it too. I was scared of loving you in case you couldn’t take it. I was terrified of falling in love with you in case you couldn’t carry on. But I let myself love you and I’ve continued to, even though these past few years you’ve been holding back from me. That hurt. I was already hurting before this. I’m hurting even more now.’
‘I’m so sorry,’ he repeats. ‘And it feels disingenuous to make excuses but please listen to me.’
‘Go on.’
‘I know it’s not an excuse, not a reason, but it’s the only explanation I can really give for behaving in a way that is inexplicable, even to me. I keep asking myself the same questions you are asking me now. Why did you do something that meant you risked losing the one person you love more than anyone in the world? And I do love you, more than anyone, more than the kids even. I’d be devastated if anything happened to you. I suppose I was trying to protect myself against the possibility of that hurt.’
‘But that’s what loving someone is,’ I say. ‘That’s what really loving someone means.’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘You open yourself up. You make yourself vulnerable to knowing that they will cause you hurt and pain, and that the more you love them the worse it will be. Do you think I don’t feel the same? Don’t you think everyone does? Everyone’s afraid of loving another person because they know that with the love comes loss, sorrow, pain, all of that – that’s part of it. Can’t you see it?’
‘Maybe. I don’t know. Perhaps other people are better at dealing with it than I am. It felt so right when I met you. You felt so familiar. I felt as if I was meant to be with you and I let myself go with it.’
‘I was the same.’
‘And for a while everything was perfect. You, me, the children, but at the same time, having it all, it just meant there was more to lose.’
‘I know,’ I say.
‘I thought you were going to die when you were in labour with Charlie and I couldn’t bear it. I really didn’t know how I would cope if anything happened to you.’
‘But it didn’t.’
‘But the fear is still there, all the time. The only way I could deal with it was to distance myself from you.’
‘And that helped?’
‘No.’ He shook his head sadly. ‘I was lonely. And that was when … I know you don’t want to hear and I know what I did was inexcusable and if I could do anything to turn the clock back I would.’
‘In another life,’ I say.
‘But there is no other life. All I can do now is tell you how sorry I am and make promises you may not believe.’
‘If you were lonely,’ I say, ‘you could have come to me. I love you, Abe. I always have, even now, even though I don’t really want to. I still do. Why would you want to throw that away?’
‘I didn’t. I don’t. Jesus, Ivy, I may not be explaining myself very well but the last thing I wanted – the last thing I want is to lose you.’
‘But you did something that made it a possibility,’ I say.
‘The possibility was already there,’ he replies. Then he asks the question. ‘Are you okay, Ivy? Not with this, obviously. I mean are you okay?’
‘Yes,’ I say. ‘I’m fine. It’s not that. It’s not what you’ve been thinking, if that’s what you’ve been thinking. If I’m going to get ill, it’s still only a possibility, and if I’m going to die of it, that’s a really distant possibility. But what you’ve done … that makes losing me a distinct and real possibility, much more than some far-off thing that may never happen.’
‘Please don’t say that.’
‘I’m trying not to. I don’t want to. But it hurts. It hurts so much.’ I start to cry and Abe puts his arm around me. I let him.
‘When the bomb went off. It was so close. It was like when you were having Charlie again but opposite. If I’d been a few minutes later, I could have lost you all. I knew then that it had to stop, that I couldn’t risk it happening. By the time I got home that night, I knew I was going to put a stop to it. But you already knew. I could see it as soon as I walked in. I’ve been trying to kid myself that maybe that wasn’t it, that maybe you were worried about your health, but deep down, I knew you knew.’
‘Did you? How?’
‘Because I know you. I always have,’ he says. ‘You’re a part of me, and if I lose you I won’t even be myself.’
There are a million more things to say and there is nothing more to say.
I put out my hand and lay it on his thigh. It’s quiet here but the quiet is punctuated by the sound of gulls, a strange squawking.
I turn my head as far as I can, like Charlie did at breakfast, and I spot them, a pair of mating gulls on the dune above our heads. They stop squawking when I look in their direction, then the fem
ale stares straight at me and dips her beak before they carry on, a flurry of ruffled feathers and sounds of contentment.
I look back at Abe and he laughs. ‘Can I kiss you?’ he asks, and I realize that is what I want more than anything.
I nod and his lips meet mine, tentative at first, but then it becomes more urgent. Our tongues explore each other’s mouth, tentatively, then with more confidence. We know how to do this. We know how to kiss, and we know how to touch each other, how to move our hands and explore each other’s body. I can feel Abe’s hand tugging the T-shirt that is tucked into the top of my jeans, so he can feel the skin underneath, and then it’s moving to the waistband and under, and only momentarily do I think, We can’t. Not here. Not on the beach.
But there’s no one around. We’ve not even seen a solitary dog-walker, and if we do? They can walk on past. We need this, Abe and I.
I stop his hand and glance around as I undo my jeans and pull them down to my ankles. Abe does the same and I feel him inside me, where he belongs. We are one person: one person with four arms and four legs and two heads who will, when this is over, remain together for a little while before moving apart, becoming two again. Two individuals or two halves who must be together.
‘Thank you,’ Abe says, rolling away from me, pulling up my pants and covering himself. ‘We should probably get back. Or the kids will be wondering where we are.’
I do up my jeans and we stand up.
Abe kisses me again. Then we walk back along the beach.
I shiver.
‘Are you cold?’ he asks.
‘Not really,’ I tell him. ‘I just had an enormous sense of déjà vu.’
For the next few weeks we carried on as if we were okay, as if we were going to be okay. Abe was trying. Really trying. He was solicitous towards me at home. He made sure he let me know if he was going to be late back from work and exactly where he would be. He told me if he had meetings scheduled, in case I tried to contact him during the day.
I tried too. I really tried. To trust him. To forget.
But I felt as if I was acting, playing a part in my own life. I went through the motions. I ate breakfast and dinner with Abe; I watched television with him in the evenings. We discussed the children and our days. And we made love. But it was always there, the knowledge, sharper now for my having acknowledged it. He’d let me down, broken the trust between us. I wasn’t sure I’d ever be able to trust him fully again. And that was eating into me, however hard I tried not to let it.
In the end, it was a tiny thing, which, had everything been fine, would have gone unnoticed that triggered my reaction.
It was a Saturday morning, just over three weeks since we’d driven to the beach. Abe had come home early from work the preceding evening, had picked up a takeaway and a bottle of wine on the way ‘so you won’t have to think about cooking’ and a couple of videos: Toy Story for the children to watch and Apollo 13 for us.
We had a pleasant evening. Minnie was so proud of herself for liking ‘spicy food’ and, while Charlie ate mostly plain rice, he was appreciative of the occasion. ‘It feels a bit like Christmas,’ he said, running his fingers along the edge of the foil containers as Abe unpacked a carrier bag filled with rogan josh and chicken tikka.
Minnie was asleep by the time Toy Story had finished, and Abe had to carry her up to bed, while Charlie congratulated himself on still being awake and not needing help getting ready for bed. ‘I don’t have to let Mummy undress me. I can do it by myself.’ But he, too, was asleep when I’d finished easing Minnie out of her skirt and tucking her into bed.
‘Another drink?’ Abe asked, patting the seat on the sofa next to him, when I went back downstairs.
Apollo 13 was ready to play. He’d brought the bottle in and set two glasses on the coffee table.
It was a good choice of film, for a couple still negotiating their way through the hurt caused by infidelity. It put the smallness of us and everything we do into perspective. What were our troubles compared to the possibility of being permanently stuck in space? And the alcohol took the edge off what I still felt so that I could curl up on the sofa with Abe and later, when we’d gone to bed, let his hands start the familiar exploration that signalled he wanted to make love, enough for me to respond to the prompts that were a part of our marriage and try not to allow thoughts of what he might have done with ‘her’ to obliterate the familiar sensations he knew how to arouse and produce.
I slept quickly afterwards, and slept in the next morning. It was nearly nine when I woke and Abe was already downstairs making the children breakfast.
‘I was going to bring you a coffee,’ he said, smiling at me when I went down to the kitchen.
I don’t know what it was about the way he said it, or the accompanying smile or just the normality of the scene that greeted me and the near normality of the night before, but all I could think, when I looked Abe, was that I didn’t know him. I didn’t really know him at all. Here he was, acting the part of the perfect husband and father, carrying on as if nothing had happened and, yes, he was trying, but he had no idea how hard it was for me.
‘I don’t want a coffee,’ I said, with an edge to my voice that made Minnie look up from her breakfast. ‘And do you have to let the kids put so much milk on their cereal? We’ll run out and they don’t even finish it.’
‘We’ll get more,’ Abe said, eyeing me warily.
‘That’s not the point,’ I snapped.
‘I know,’ he replied, resigned to the fact that our reconciliation was not a full one: whatever he did, however hard he tried, he was going to have to do more, try harder.
And I knew that, while I wanted to forgive him, was trying to forgive him, I still wasn’t sure if I ever would, not fully.
‘Ivy,’ he said, when the kids had finished and gone upstairs to get dressed, ‘I’m trying as hard as I can.’
There was a plaintive note in his voice that infuriated me, as if he expected me to feel sorry for him, as if I was the one at fault for not being able to wipe my mind of the knowledge and the thoughts that went with it. ‘Jesus Christ, you’re so fucking …’
‘What?’ he asked.
‘Selfish,’ was the best I could come up with.
‘And you’re never going to let me forget it, are you?’
An old school friend invited us to his wedding. I’d been to primary school with Billy Ross and kept in touch, mostly because he still lived in the same village, and until she died my mother had kept up with his. He was marrying someone who’d also been in our class, someone I vaguely remember him being soft on when they were five or six. I hadn’t known they still knew each other but Dad, who was still in touch with the Rosses, filled me in.
‘Apparently Beth’s family moved up north when she was nine or ten,’ he told me. ‘Then she turned up working for the same company as Billy. They’re both surveyors.’
‘It’s rather sweet when you think about it.’ I showed Abe the invitation.
‘Do you want to go?’ He read it. ‘It says no children.’
‘We could ask Kirsty to look after them?’ I suggested, unsure about a wedding but at the same time wanting an excuse to revisit a period of my life that had been more secure and safe than it had become not long after.
‘I’ll call her later,’ he said. ‘I’m sure she will if she’s not busy.’
Abe’s sister Kirsty lived in London. She was usually happy to babysit. She said she loved spending time with her niece and nephew.
‘And if it’s a problem,’ Abe added, ‘you could always go on your own and I could look after the kids.’
‘No,’ I said. ‘If I go, I want you to be there too.’
‘Good,’ Abe said, looking at me as if he understood this was important. ‘I want that too.’
It was strange being in the church we’d gone to as children, Jon, Cathy and I, with more faces from my childhood than there had been at my own wedding.
‘Ivy, you look well,’ people said to me,
as we arrived at the church. Some, lowering their voices, said, ‘I’m so sorry about your mother.’ Then, brighter again, ‘Is this your husband?’
‘Abe,’ he kept saying, putting out his hand to people from my past.
I don’t know that I’d have recognized Beth if I’d seen her anywhere other than there. I had a vague memory of a small, chubby girl with pigtails, but she was tall, slim and beautiful in an ivory wedding dress – and happy.
Billy’s face lit up when he turned to watch her coming down the aisle and taking up her position at his side for the ceremony.
I couldn’t help thinking back to our own wedding, seven years previously, as we stood up to sing a hymn, remembering how happy I had been then to have found Abe, to be marrying him, to be knowing that I would go through my life with this wonderful, kind, sympathetic man.
If I’d known then … I thought.
But instead of trying to push the thought away, as I did whenever the worst of them surfaced, I let it run its course. If I’d known then what I knew now, would I have married him? I found myself thinking and believing, really believing, for the first time since the night of the bomb, that, yes, I probably would, despite everything we’d been though, despite what we were still going through, I would still have married him.
I glanced sideways at Abe, at his profile, took in the look of concentration as he studied the order of service and the slight shadow on his cheek that always began to appear by early afternoon, even when he had shaved in the morning. And I marvelled that looking at him still stirred me in a way that no one else had or did.
Billy and Beth were saying their vows now. ‘To have and to hold,’ they repeated in turn after the vicar, ‘from this day forward …’
‘For better, for worse,’ said the vicar, as Abe took my hand and clasped it gently but firmly.
‘For better, for worse,’ Beth was saying, and I squeezed my husband’s hand in return.
London, 1987
For small creatures such as we the vastness is bearable only through love.
Carl Sagan, Contact
I tried the doorbell a few times but no one answered. So I sat on the hay bale that was placed incongruously against the wall of the house and took my book out of my bag, happy to read as I waited. I glanced every now and then towards the phone box on the corner, thinking, if no one turned up soon, I would try the number I’d called earlier.
Ivy and Abe Page 20
