A Midlife Baby (The Midlife Trilogy #2)

Chapter 1

You have reached your destination.

Helen leaned forward to look out at the drab brick building across the drab grey car park. ‘You sure?’ she said.

‘It’s the sat nav,’ Lawrence muttered. ‘Of course it’s sure.’

‘Not the oracle then?’

‘The what?’ He squinted at the screen in the centre console. ‘This is it, Helen! This is St Stephen’s Wellness Centre.’

‘Right.’ Sitting very still, Helen stared straight ahead. Well then. Marriage guidance. Here they were.

She’d left the arrangements to Lawrence.

Weeks of pointless discussions since that magical week in Cyprus had worn her down.

So much so that, at times, she struggled to believe it had ever happened at all.

But it had.

She had been away for a week with her oldest friends, Caro and Kay.

She had met a marvellous man called Kaveh, and they had made love on the beach, the cold-warm waves of the Mediterranean tickling her toes.

Her From Here to Eternity moment that should have propelled her, rocket like, towards a whole new solar system.

Should have left her lighter and bolder and ready to reclaim her life.

And it might just have done, had it not come up against Lawrence’s granite-hard resistance.

Her husband was, after all, a man who had, literally, just climbed the highest mountain in the world.

For the first time in her life, Helen felt she was beginning to understand the tenacity this required, because although there was no doubt in her heart that her marriage was over, and she had said as much many, many times, she’d come to the conclusion that it didn’t matter.

It didn’t matter what she thought, or what she said, Lawrence would simply never hear her.

The irony! Just as she was preparing to leave him, she was beginning to understand him.

And so, unable to find a way around the impasse, she had conceded to this surprising suggestion of his with a resigned we’ll go if you think it will help.

But the emphasis had been firmly on the you and she’d been secretly confident that a man who had longer conversations with his Garmin gadgets than he did with her would never get around to making an appointment.

Except he had.

And when he’d presented her with a time and place it was like a little slap, waking her up to a fuller comprehension of how much he didn’t want what she did. D.I.V.O.R.C.E. Even so, the idea of Lawrence in counselling was preposterous. Like making a fidgety toddler sit through a quantum physics lecture.

Face as blank as a wall, she stared across the car park, at the inaptly named St Stephen’s Wellness Centre , thinking two things at once. First, the miracle required to save her marriage wasn’t going to be found in this two-storey paean to suburban banality, and second, why was it that a man capable of climbing the tallest mountain in the world couldn’t drive from one part of a small market town to another without the help of sat nav? She closed her eyes. How long had she been back from Cyprus? Too long. Far too long.

Lawrence took the keys out of the ignition, and they sat, silence ringing.

How sad, Helen thought, how sad. ‘So!’ And, with the kind of forced jollity she’d always used at the beginning of parents’ evening, opened her eyes, turned to her husband and said, ‘Shall we get it over and done with?’

‘Over and done with?’

‘Sorry. I meant… Yes…’ She was opening the car door, grabbing at the straps of her handbag. ‘I meant, let’s get on.’ And as she closed the door, the wind caught it, slamming it shut.

Inside they were greeted with a room so bland it had to have been designed this way. Boring everyone who had to sit in it into a numb submission. The walls and carpet were beige. The large central coffee table was empty. Around the sides of the room stood chairs with padded seats in a colour that was either blue or smudged green, so undecided was the final effect. To the right were three shut doors, with ugly, brushed-nickel handles and framed A4 signs. There was nothing to distract and nothing to do, except take a seat and begin an inevitable spiral of introspection. Helen smiled. The room was a triumph. Ten minutes waiting here, and you’d be more in need of therapy than when you’d walked in! Except… she turned, one of the doors was open, ever so slightly open.

Beside her, Lawrence checked his watch and nodded at the door. ‘Think this is us,’ he said, striding towards it.

‘Lawrence,’ Helen hissed. Sixty seconds in and she’d already skim-read the A4 signs. Lawrence, obviously, hadn’t. But then he never read instructions, and he never asked for directions. And he never stopped, so she could ask for directions. She stood watching his back, the hulk of his shoulders in his Alpine Trek shirt. She could, she supposed, tell him what the sign next to the partially open door said…

‘Oh.’

… or she could leave it, because the door had already been pushed open and Lawrence was already halfway across the threshold.

He stopped short.

Helen sighed.

She was thinking of that track in Wales, which despite her protestations, Lawrence had insisted was a scenic route back to the campsite they were holidaying at.

It wasn’t.

It was an access road to Craig Goch Dam.

And peering out of the Volvo window at the 150-foot sheer drop, her children Libby and Jack squealing in the back seat, Helen had experienced a strange out-of-body experience which felt every bit as real every time she remembered it, right down to the question she’d asked herself as she’d squeezed back against her seat and closed her eyes on the vertiginous view.

Was she woman or lemming? Even now, in this brutally bland room, she found herself gripping the strap of her handbag as the memory took hold.

Well, what was she? Cyprus had answered that question, hadn’t it? Or, more to the point, Kaveh had.

Allowing herself the briefest moment of Kaveh-shaped indulgence, her fingers loosened their grip and she watched as a few feet away Lawrence stood swaying in the doorway.

She sighed again.

Cyprus was over and she had to keep moving forward, no matter how hard the terrain.

Besides, she was, at the very least, curious.

She shrugged her handbag over her shoulder and walked across to join her husband.

Standing in the doorway, a head and a half shorter than him, she peered past his shoulder.

The room ahead contained a large spa-bed, strewn with balls of tissue and crumpled towels.

Behind stood an apparatus not so dissimilar from a portable oxygen machine.

Clear plastic tubes led up to a holding tank that… Helen’s eyes narrowed.

The contents of the tank were horribly fascinating, brown-coloured stew-thick liquid that she couldn’t stop staring at.

It was like passing an accident, you know you shouldn’t look and yet can’t do anything else but look.

Her nostrils caught up with her eyes.

The room smelt like their en-suite after Lawrence had been through what he called his daily routine (which was daily and was very much a routine).

All this she had time to process before a door at the back of the room that she hadn’t noticed opened up, and a young woman wearing the white coat of a therapist came in and said, with perfectly manicured eyebrows, ‘Oh?’

‘Oh.’ Lawrence mirrored. He too was looking at the sludge in the holding tank. He hadn’t, Helen knew, worked it out.

‘I think…’ One hand on Lawrence’s arm, Helen was already backing out. ‘I think we may have the wrong room.’

The woman smiled. ‘I think so too. This is colonic irrigation.’ From behind the door through which she had just come, a toilet flushed.

‘Colonic what?’ Lawrence barked.

‘Irrigation.’

‘Lawrence.’ Helen tugged his sleeve. ‘We’re in the wrong room.’

The toilet flushed again and for a moment they all looked at the closed door.

‘Sorry!’ Helen smiled and gave Lawrence’s arm such a hard yank he had no choice but to turn and follow her out.

Behind them the therapist closed the door.

‘What the hell is colonic irrigation?’ Lawrence said.

Helen looked at him. Where to start?

‘Mr and Mrs Winters?’ And from the other side of the reception room a voice saved her.

Relieved, she looked up to see a slight young man, clutching his mobile phone.

‘I’m Simon,’ the man said.

And she tried to smile. She really did. But Simon looked as if he’d just left sixth form, plus he was wearing a nylon sweater with a huge shiny iron mark across it. Hadn’t he checked in the mirror before he left the house?

‘Come on through.’

She lowered her chin. Lemming or woman? Woman , she whispered to herself. You’re a woman, Helen!

Smiling broadly (which seemed a little inappropriate), Simon placed his phone on the table next to a small black clock. 14.04. ‘So,’ he said and leaned forward to turn the clock to face him. ‘Have either of you had any experience of counselling before today?’

Helen didn’t speak. Simon was still looking at the clock and she wasn’t sure if she should wait until he looked back at her before she answered. Or was he waiting for her to answer so he could start the clock? Was that how it worked? ‘No, we haven’t,’ she ventured, smiling herself.

He smiled again and she had the distinct feeling that a box had just been ticked.

‘Mr Winters?’

‘Sorry?’ Lawrence jerked his head up.

He’d been fixated on and completely distracted by an ornamental stone cairn sitting on a sideboard across the room.

The only dressing in what was otherwise another fanatically neutral space.

The only dressing, that was, except for an artificial orchid at the other end of the sideboard, which immediately had Helen thinking of Marianne, the receptionist at the hotel in Cyprus, and then of course of Kaveh, again.

How, she thought as she shifted her weight on the cheap plastic chair, was she going to get through the next fifty-six minutes of this session? She wished she could see the clock face, at least count it down.

And then was glad she couldn’t.

It would be like the clock on the treadmill at the gym she used to occasionally visit, the smug little display she threw towels over so she couldn’t see that she still had 13:30 minutes out of 15:00 left.

She glanced up at Simon.

Did he ever feel the same? In his worst sessions did he ever feel like draping a tissue over his tiny clock?

14:08. 14:19. 14: 36…

‘What was the question?’ Lawrence said.

‘Counselling? I was asking if either of you have previous experience.’

‘Of counselling?’

Helen sighed.

‘Yes.’

‘No.’ Lawrence turned to her. ‘We haven’t, have we?’

Helen looked at him. A brief moment in which to wonder again at the compartmentalised manner in which her husband seemed to live his life. How on earth was he going to cope without her?

‘No,’ she said. ‘ We have never had counselling.’ What was the point of reminding him? Twenty-four years ago, after she’d laboured and delivered their dead son, Lawrence had carried on as if it had never happened, while she had just carried on. She’d had counselling then, and it had helped and she had told him, but all that was as lost to him as yesterday’s sunset.

Simon nodded. ‘Well first of all,’ he said, ‘I’m not here to tell you what to do.’

Good, she didn’t say. He seemed, Helen thought, to have grown in confidence in the last few seconds, as well he might, finding himself with two such counselling novices.

‘My role is first and foremost that of a listener.’

And at this, much to her surprise, Helen found herself nodding, enthusiasm opening her face like sun on a flower. A listener? That was exactly what she needed. All she needed! A listener would be great! Perfect! If she said divorce once and someone in the room actually heard, that alone would be worth the cost of the session.

‘So,’ Simon continued, oblivious. ‘I suppose you could say that my main role is to help you communicate.’ He paused. ‘How does that sound?’

Again, she nodded. It sounded fair enough. Doomed to fail, but fair enough.

‘I presume—’ Simon glanced from her to Lawrence. ‘That’s an issue?’

An issue? Helen looked down at her hands and smiled the smallest wry smile. Communication between them had gotten to the point where if she said up, her husband would hear down. If she said right, he’d go left. Maybe it hadn’t always been that bad, but it was now. And whose fault was that? She folded one hand over the other and stared at the floor. Once, many, many years ago, they’d had dinner with a French couple. The woman’s parents were English although they had lived in France for decades. What Helen had always remembered was that she had asked which language they used when they were all together, and the woman had turned to her husband and said, It’s a mix isn’t it? To which he had responded, with eyes as clear as a spring sky, I don’t know. Oh, don’t ask him, Helen had quipped, he’s never listened! How they’d all laughed! Oh yes, how funny it had been! And how hilarious (not) that for years now she’d been living the same situation without even noticing. What’s water? the goldfish once said. Well, yes! Lawrence and she had gotten through at least the last ten years swimming around each other without communicating anything beyond the quotidian fill of each day. A hybrid lemming/goldfish. ‘It’s an issue,’ she murmured. ‘Communication.’

Lawrence coughed.

‘Right.’ Simon too cleared his throat. ‘Well, I think then that we’ll start with a few questions about your relationship. Are we alright starting there? Lawrence? Helen?’ He made it sound like they were a couple of toddlers being talked down from the naughty step.

From the corner of her eye Helen glanced at Lawrence, his huge frame hunched in his cheap chair. It was too small for him. But everything in the room was too small for him, as it would be for a man who, a few short weeks ago, had been clambering vertical rock faces. He didn’t need this. Especially when, in the smallest pocket of her Russian-doll heart, she knew it wasn’t going to work. Because if what she had first said to him in Cyprus, and since repeated over and again, was true – then there was nothing to be done. What had changed in their marriage was her. And a snake cannot slip back into its discarded skin. A sheep cannot re-fleece itself. She had changed and she liked it and there was nothing this young man could do or say that was going to alter that. She glanced at Simon now, earnestly studying his blank page.

He had no idea.

The broken lines of communication that she really needed help with, that were really breaking her heart, were those between her and her children.

Jack was barely speaking to her.

The boy who had inherited both her sense of humour and her thick, dirty-blonde hair.

The child with whom she would sing ‘Knees Up Mother Brown’ to dry him off after a bath, the boy who (for one brief summer) had loved nothing more than to peg out washing with her left a room now if she entered it.

Yes, he still ate the food she prepared and wore the clothes she washed, but he’d get up and walk out when she came into the living room which, although she didn’t show it, was a fresh wound every time.

And Libby? Away at university Libby had been through cycles of grief and anger and was currently in a wise-elder advice mode.

The problem was Helen hadn’t asked for advice and Libby wasn’t her elder.

Had she said this? No, she’d held the phone at her ear and sipped her wine quietly and said nothing at all knowing that there was something unusually fragile about her daughter right now, the source of which – she couldn’t quite believe – was her Cyprus fling.

Cyprus, Cyprus, Cyprus… The memory had her lips curling into a smile.

Like she could still taste the salt on his skin.

The man was a god.