by Tamar Cohen
So Dan wasn’t the problem. The problem was Sasha. She hadn’t answered her phone the whole of yesterday, and September hadn’t turned up for nursery this morning, leaving Lily inconsolable. Hannah sighed. Concentrate! She only had the three hours while Lily was at nursery to work, and this feature was due by the end of the week. Not that it was going to pay much. She’d be lucky if she ended up with £400 for something that would have taken her a week to write and research, but they really needed the money and, as Josh was always saying with a little pat of his behind, in a parody of the supermarket ad, ‘every little helps’.
Sometimes she wondered if they’d done the right thing choosing to wait until January for Lily to start primary school. Most of the other four-year-olds had just started in reception, but Sasha and Dan had persuaded them that, as the girls were both summer babies, it made sense for them to defer for a few months. At the time Hannah had agreed – Lily was still so young and she adored the little nursery attached to the main school. But now she couldn’t help thinking guiltily of all the extra time she’d have if Lily had started full-time school – all the extra money she could be earning.
Money. The perennial problem. When Hannah and Josh had first got together they’d both had major credit-card debts – Josh because of borrowing to fund his teacher-training course, which he’d never quite managed to repay, and Hannah because, well, when you’re in your twenties and living and working in London for the first time, you start to believe you’ve made it and that things can only carry on getting better and better. Then they’d bought this place. They could have got a whole house if they’d moved somewhere further out, but Hannah had been sold on Crouch End, with its coffee shops and boutiques and huge redbrick houses with ornate stained-glass front doors. So they’d mortgaged themselves up to the hilt for a flat they’d already grown out of. Hannah had been banking on Josh getting that promotion. She felt silly setting so much store by it, but she still found Josh’s lack of confidence infuriating. He deserved to be Head of English rather than bland old Pat Hennessey.
As always, thinking about money gave Hannah an acidic feeling in the pit of her stomach. She sat up straighter and refreshed her computer screen. Sharon Osbourne recently sprang to the defence of daughter Kelly, she wrote. Then she stopped. Sharon Osbourne didn’t have money worries, she supposed. Sharon Osbourne didn’t lie awake mentally moving money around or, more accurately, mentally moving credit from this place to that, borrowing from this source to pay off that bill and then from that source to pay off the first.
She wished she could talk to Sasha. She always had such a reassuringly blasé attitude to money. Of course, Hannah knew it was easy to dismiss money worries when you’d never had any yourself, but it still made her feel better hearing Sasha say, ‘Pah, it’s only money.’ Yes, she found herself thinking, that’s all it is. Anyway, what little she knew about Sasha’s past put the whole money thing into perspective. Sasha found her childhood too painful to talk about, but from the odd comment she and Dan had made over the years, Hannah gathered it had been beyond awful, despite her family’s wealth. You could have all the money in the world, she reminded herself primly, but it still didn’t buy you happiness.
The doorbell roused her from her meandering thoughts.
‘Hello?’
‘It’s me. Open the fucking door. I’ve totally miscalculated on the weather front and I’m absolutely freezing.’
She couldn’t remember the last time she’d been so relieved to hear someone’s voice. She flung open the front door and Sasha practically fell into her arms. Hannah was shocked at how fragile her friend’s shoulders felt under her fingers, as if her bones could snap like dry twigs. She’d lost weight in just two days, if that was possible. It was like holding a ghost.
‘I’m sorry.’ Even Sasha’s voice seemed to have lost weight, sounding fainter and less robust. ‘I shouldn’t have turned on you.’
‘No, it’s my fault. I should have told you straight away. I should never have promised Josh to keep quiet.’
The two women made their way into the living room and sat down curled up at opposite ends of the sofa.
‘Feels weird knowing Dan was probably right here just a few hours ago,’ said Sasha. Her face, Hannah now saw, was pinched like a pastry edge and there were greasy violet smudges under her eyes.
‘I can’t imagine.’
‘I keep thinking it’s all just a dream, you know, or some kind of misunderstanding and any minute he’s just going to rock up with his key in the door.’
‘Well, he has tried to come round a couple of times.’
‘No, he hasn’t.’
‘Really? I’m sure he said he—’
‘The thing is, though, I’ve been Googling this a lot and I do think this is just a phase Dan’s going through.’
‘You’ve Googled it?’
‘Yes, you’d be amazed how many forums and chat rooms there are for people whose husbands or wives have left them out of the blue. They call it being “blindsided”. Anyway, they all seem to think this is a stupid phase he’s going through. It’s called “being in the fog”. That’s why I’m feeling a bit better about it. So he had a fling with some bimbo? He’s not the first person to have a mid-life crisis. That isn’t to say I wouldn’t wring his bloody neck. Sometimes I feel I’d like to just . . . I don’t know . . . smash his smug face in.’
Sasha pounded her little fist into the sofa in demonstration and, despite herself, Hannah stifled a smile.
‘But the thing is, I miss the bastard,’ Sasha went on. ‘I miss him so much it’s like a physical hurt. I always said I’d never forgive a man who cheated, but the truth is she probably threw herself at him. Girls always do with Dan. You must have noticed that. And he was weak. So I’ve decided to take him back.’
Hannah’s face must have betrayed her confusion because Sasha went on, ‘I know you probably think I’m mad. But I’ve seen first hand what divorce does to families and I won’t let it happen to my daughter.’
For a moment, Hannah thought Sasha was about to open up about what had happened to her as a child, after her parents split up, but instead her voice rose as she repeated, ‘I won’t allow our family to break apart.’
By now Sasha’s dainty features had taken on an unfamiliar intensity Hannah found quite unsettling. She felt nonplussed. As far as she knew, it was Dan who’d left Sasha, and yet here was Sasha talking about forgiveness and taking him back. Had she perhaps missed something – a conversation between the two of them that neither had seen fit to disclose?
‘Anyway,’ said Sasha, her expression suddenly relaxing, ‘he doesn’t know it yet but he’s going to spend the rest of his life making it up to me in exotic holidays and extortionate jewellery!’
The laugh that followed came out more like a sob, and Hannah melted, realizing with a pang how strong her friend was having to be and how much it must be costing her to hold it together.
‘You’re doing so well, Sash. I’d be a basketcase if it was me. Oh shit!’ She had a sudden realization. ‘What’s the time? We’re going to be late picking up the girls. September’s at nursery, isn’t she?’
Now it was Sasha who looked confused.
‘September. You must have taken her in quite late. I waited ages to see if you’d come.’
‘Oh fuck!’ Sasha leapt up as if the sofa had suddenly burst into flames. ‘September! She’s in the car. I completely forgot. She was asleep when we left, so I carried her into the back of the car.’
Hannah held the door open while Sasha sprinted down the front path, reappearing a minute or so later carrying a very red-faced September.
‘Mummy left me,’ the little girl said, in the gulping voice of someone who’d been crying a long time.
‘I’m so sorry, darling. I’m a naughty mummy, aren’t I?’ Sasha had her head buried in her daughter’s neck as if she was trying to tunnel into her.
‘She’s a very naughty mummy,’ September told Hannah, gazing directly at her.
>
Only later on, when Hannah was on the way home from nursery (‘Seven minutes late, Lily was getting anxious,’ the head of nursery reprimanded her), did she start to think how very out of character the incident with September had been. Sasha was always so in control. That was her thing. How distraught must she be to forget her own child?
Later that evening, Hannah almost jumped with shock when she heard the key in the front door as she and Josh were settling down to watch Newsnight.
‘I forgot we had a house guest.’
Seconds later Dan appeared in the doorway, holding a bottle of wine in each hand. ‘I couldn’t remember whether you preferred red or white, so I got both. Do I win the prize for being the best visitor or what?’
‘Our best visitors always bring champagne and oysters,’ said Josh, getting up to fetch glasses from the kitchen.
Hannah, who’d been thinking about going to bed before long, felt a pang of annoyance. Things had been so emotionally fraught recently, she’d been enjoying relaxing with Josh and forgetting about everything else for a bit. But then she remembered Sasha’s gaunt face and September’s red-rimmed eyes and felt ashamed. Trying to talk some sense into Dan was the least she could do.
‘Have you spoken to Sasha?’ she asked, when they were all sitting down around the coffee table with a glass of chilled Sancerre in front of them.
Dan frowned. ‘I did go round there the day she found out about Sienna, but she wouldn’t let me in,’ he said, looking up as if seeking brownie points for effort. ‘And since then I’ve been so busy and I kind of thought she might need a bit of cooling-off time.’
‘So you haven’t bothered to contact her?’
‘I’m going to. Of course I am. I’m just waiting for the dust to settle before I talk to her about the next step.’
‘Which is?’
‘Well, me moving out on a more permanent basis.’
Dan said it as if it was the most obvious thing in the world, and Hannah felt the air going out of her as if someone had taken a pin and deflated her.
‘So you haven’t changed your mind then?’
Dan looked startled. ‘Changed my mind? No. If anything, the last few days have made me realize I’m definitely doing the right thing. I feel lighter, like a big weight has been taken off me. Being married was suffocating, you know?’
Hannah didn’t like the way he addressed that last comment to Josh, throwing up his hands as if hoping for agreement. Something occurred to her then.
‘You haven’t been seeing Sienna, have you?’
Dan’s big blue eyes widened, as if hurt. ‘No. I gave you my word. Like I said, the thing with Sienna was completely separate. I’m focusing on my marriage right now, and what’s best for Sasha.’
Since when did Dan start talking like a marital self-help book?
‘If you really want what’s best for her, you’ll go back to her. She looks absolutely awful.’
‘You’ve seen her?’
‘Yes, she turned up here today.’
‘How was she?’
For a moment, Hannah thought of telling him about the shadows under Sasha’s eyes and the look on September’s face when she was finally rescued from the car. But something held her back. Incredible to think that less than a week ago Dan would have been the first person she’d have gone to with any concerns about Sasha’s wellbeing, and now she just wasn’t sure. It bothered her more than she could admit, this realization that you could go from being a couple, a unit, to two individuals in the time it used to take her mother to marinade a good steak.
She shrugged. ‘She’s about how you’d expect her to be. The thing is though, Dan, she still thinks you’re coming back.’
Dan looked pained. ‘Obviously it’s going to take a while to sink in. I don’t expect her to accept it overnight, but you know . . .’ He gazed at Hannah with wide eyes, and she saw something in them that she’d never noticed before, a hardness glinting beneath the layers of navy and aquamarine like diamond wrapped in tissue paper. ‘I’m never going back.’
5
Josh found having a house guest even harder than he’d anticipated. It wasn’t that Dan was intrusive – they hardly ever saw him, and when they did he always seemed to be on the phone, long calls taken at the end of the garden, his shoulders hunched against the late-September chill. It was just that his presence in the flat was unsettling. Not just the physical evidence of him – the suitcase in the corner, from which faded T-shirts and jeans spilled out messily, the extra toothbrush and shaving stuff in the bathroom. It was also the change in the atmosphere, a sense of restlessness that stirred up the air in the flat, turning what used to be a relaxing environment into a place where you couldn’t sit down without feeling as if there was something else you really ought to be getting on with, another world outside your living-room window that was going on without you.
It was getting to the stage where he was almost relieved to be at school, where even the giggling of the Year Eight girls and the rudeness of the Year Eleven boys felt reassuringly unchanged and familiar.
During lessons, there was little time to think about anything other than whatever set text he was attempting to drum into the largely unreceptive minds of his pupils. ‘Not being funny, Sir, but why do we have to read the book when we could just go and see the film?’
Only at break times or, like now, driving home in their thirteen-year-old Golf that shuddered alarmingly up the hill towards Crouch End did his mind swing back to what was going on at home, and he’d find himself frowning as an unexplained knot formed in his stomach and his heart beat slightly faster than normal. When he tried to analyse what was making him feel so on edge, he found he couldn’t put his finger on it. It wasn’t that Dan ever got in the way, he was so rarely around, so why was his presence, or rather his absence, so unnerving?
‘Maybe you’re just jealous because he’s out being single and having fun while you’re stuck at home with me and Lil,’ Hannah had teased him the night before.
Josh had made a joke of it, pressing his nose up against the front window as if desperate to escape, much to the delight of Lily, who insisted on climbing on to a chair to push her own plump cheeks up against the cold glass. Now, though, he was starting to wonder uncomfortably if Hannah might not have hit upon something. Not that he was jealous of Dan. Josh didn’t envy his friend the late nights in crowded bars or wherever it was he was hanging out when he wasn’t in their flat. No, it was more than that – something to do with the sight of that suitcase in the corner, so compact and portable, and the way Dan breezed in and out without having to give any account of himself, and the whiff of fresh starts that clung to him. It was that sense of the future opening up. Josh felt, by comparison, washed up and overburdened.
In private, Hannah griped about Dan’s presence. She hated not being able to wander into the living room if she woke up during the night to sit down at the dining-room table and work in the T-shirt she wore to bed, or scroll through Twitter catching up on people’s news, and she resented the pile of clumsily folded blankets on the end of the sofa whenever they sat down to watch telly. But as Josh waited by the temporary traffic lights, gently revving the accelerator and hoping against hope that this wouldn’t be the day the Golf’s dodgy clutch gave up the ghost altogether, he found himself trying to view Dan through Hannah’s eyes. Yes, his presence might be inconvenient, but might not his new-found singledom also give him a kind of cachet, a sense of danger and alpha-maleness that had been better concealed when he was a safely married man? Josh could see how a man like Dan, clearly desired by other women, successful at work and suddenly back on the market, might be very attractive, particularly when he and Hannah were so bogged down in debt themselves. More chokingly, might not this clear evidence of Dan’s healthy sex drive throw the recent deficiencies of their own into sharp relief?
This jealousy that had crept up from nowhere was like a slow-acting virus you’re not even conscious of until your throat closes up and, wham, you find it
’s overtaken your entire system. It’s not as if Hannah had ever expressed the slightest interest in Dan. In fact, it tended to be Josh who would leap to his friend’s defence in the face of Hannah’s disapproval. She’d once said, ‘Dan is like cheap paint. Looks great to begin with, but give him a rub with a damp cloth and he’ll come off on your hand.’ Josh had argued on Dan’s behalf, but inside he’d glowed with pleasure at the unspoken inference (or so he liked to imagine) that he, by contrast, was a man of substance.
Turning into their road with its mishmash of Victorian and 1920s houses, many of them converted (badly) into flats, Josh’s heart sank when he noted the lack of parking places. Cruising past his house, he felt a twinge of anger when he saw Sasha’s SUV parked right outside in prime position. Couldn’t they have just one evening to themselves, free of drama? While Dan was the model house guest, hardly ever around and entertaining and largely discreet when he was, Sasha was the non-house guest from hell. In the ten days since she and Dan had split up, there’d hardly been a moment when Sasha hadn’t been there, either curled up on the sofa sobbing into whichever of Dan’s crumpled and frankly rank T-shirts she’d fished out of his suitcase, or else pacing the room on those tiny little legs that always looked to Josh as if they shouldn’t even be capable of supporting an adult body, ranting about mid-life crises and responsibilities (or lack thereof) while Hannah brought her cups of tea or glasses of wine, and Josh made endless rounds of fishfingers and pasta and pesto for the girls. It wasn’t that he begrudged her anything – it was just that he and Hannah and Lily had developed such an easy, pleasant routine and now everything was so . . . unsettled.
As soon as he walked through the door of the flat, he could tell it wasn’t one of Sasha’s good days. Or rather, not one of her less-bad days. The tension rose up to meet him as he lingered in the hallway, taking far longer than he needed to hang his jacket on the hook and fuss over an ecstatic Toby. He could hear September’s shrill voice coming from behind Lily’s closed bedroom door. ‘No, no. Not like that, Lileee,’ she said, stretching out the last syllable of his daughter’s name so that it hung gratingly in the air.
