Same Time Next Week

Chapter 48

Steve was sitting stiffly on the edge of the sofa, large as life, his suitcase beside him and some carrier bags full of more clothes. He looked like a tableau vivant , one for which an artist would have had a whole gamut of titles to choose from: The Prodigal; The Homecoming; The Reject; Cheating Wanker with Tail Between Legs.

It was obvious this wasn’t just a flying visit for fresh underwear, but the big homecoming moment was not how Mel had imagined it being over the weeks. She didn’t dive on him crying with relief; she didn’t throw her arms around his neck in gratitude that he had picked her above Chloe-scented Chloe. Actually, she felt as if someone had jabbed her with a stun gun and suspended her ability to emote.

‘I’ve come back,’ said Steve, jutting out his chin.

‘So I gather,’ she said.

‘Do you want to talk?’

‘I’ve wanted to talk since you left,’ Mel replied. Now he wanted to, it would happen.

‘Well, sit down then,’ he said. His tone was a bit off, but that was because he was out of step, on the defensive, his guard up against any unexpected reactions on her part, she guessed. They hadn’t been in this situation before, so they’d have to feel their way out of the maze they’d found themselves in. She wondered if Pat was having the self-same conversation with Chlo.

Mel sat down on the armchair and waited, and considering he had requested they talk, Steve hadn’t said a word. The silence was sucking all the oxygen out of the room. If she hadn’t punctured it herself, their lungs might have imploded.

One word that hung in the air like the single note of a funeral knell.

‘Why?’

He must have rehearsed in his head what his spiel was going to be, she thought, but still he took his time to deliver his answer.

‘I don’t know. Opportunity, maybe; boredom, the feeling that life was passing me by. I haven’t analysed it. It was a mistake and I’m sorry. I’m really sorry, Mel. Can you forgive me?’

He stood up and held out his arms like Christ the Redeemer in Rio. She stood up and moved into them and those extended arms closed around her.

‘I’ve missed you,’ he said.

She looked into herself to work out what she was feeling and she wasn’t sure if she’d gone over to him just then because she wanted to, or because she didn’t want to leave him standing there like a lemon.

Over her shoulder he could see her cards standing up on the display cabinet.

‘I’m sorry I missed your birthday. I’ll make it up to you.’

He released her and walked over to them, picking them up one by one and reading them. Then he saw the sex kit tin and opened it up.

‘Who bought you this?’

‘One of the girls at work.’

He lifted up the spanky paddle to see what the lettering spelled, then replaced it, closed the lid, his nose wrinkled with distaste.

‘So… do you want to pick up where we left off?’ he asked.

‘Do you?’ she threw the question back at him, because she honestly didn’t know. They’d been with each other for thirty years. They had a forever house together, joint savings, pensions. And yet she didn’t know.

‘Of course I do or I wouldn’t be here, would I?’

‘Who finished with who?’ Mel asked.

A pause. A very telling pause, before he said, ‘I finished it, if you must know. I wanted to come home.’

‘I don’t know how to go forward,’ Mel said.

‘We’ll just have to go through the motions and eventually we’ll get back in the groove of it,’ he said.

‘We can try,’ she replied, wondering why she wasn’t feeling the swell of jubilation she should be feeling, only a soupcon of smugness that she’d won him back, because he’d picked her over Chloe, her lure was the stronger. And yet also a strange smack of disappointment that she wouldn’t be able to sit and watch her box set and scoff the giant bag of sweet and salty popcorn.

Something was bugging Amanda about that newspaper article featuring the duped pensioners. She was probably being really stupid but her intuition wouldn’t allow her to let it go. She got out her laptop and pulled up the Scopesearch report she’d paid for. She was allowed three searches for her tenner. Her mother lived at 3, Winter Place. The people who held the perpetual barbecues lived at number 5. She requested a search of that property, to read that it had been sold, in January, for four hundred and ten thousand. Amanda went cold. The properties couldn’t have been mixed up, but why was it saying that her family’s home had also been sold in January this year, and for less than the smaller one next door. She went onto Zoopla to find exactly the same price information. Number 3, Winter Place had been sold four months ago, and it had been sold for far less than its market value.

Her mind was sparking like a Catherine wheel, making connections between facts: Bradley sending her choice parts of the will; the power of attorney; her mother naming him as next of kin; the his and hers brand-new Audis on his drive and his Miele appliances; sandwich shops and Turkish cosmetic surgery that he said had come to him from a loan and his father’s money; his absolute refusal to entertain the mere idea of selling their mum’s house so she could have a bungalow.

Because he’d already sold it?

He was a total arse but he wouldn’t. He wouldn’t.

Her hands were shaking as she reached for her phone to confront him and find out. She was about to press the connect symbol but stopped herself, because did she really think he’d confess on the spot? She needed to take a breath. She needed to keep biting her lip so she could get her own way with giving her mum the send-off she’d been looking forward to. And then, if he’d done what she thought he had, she’d have his knackers in a blender.

How did you put a broken marriage back together? Mel wondered if they had a department for that in the repair shop where Sky worked. Small pieces carefully glued back into place so the cracks didn’t show, like a smashed favourite flower vase. But even if they were more or less invisible, you knew they were still there and it wouldn’t hold water any more. It wasn’t the same vase, it had to be seen as a different one, isn’t that what Pat had told her, and that it would never be the same again? There was no rewind button to take it back to the moment before it was trashed.

They’d ordered a Chinese for two and were eating it at the table with a bottle of wine. She was sitting in the chair where she’d had only a mouthful of birthday cake before Pat had leaned over and kissed her. She gave her head a rattle to shoo the memory away because it wasn’t helpful when she was supposed to be on the first step of the rebuilding-their-marriage path. This ‘going through the motions of living again as husband and wife in the hope of picking things up where they left off’ might have been easy for Steve, she thought, but he hadn’t been the one who’d been crushed by a steamroller and somehow had to reconstitute himself from the pancake of questions and anguish and shattered bits of heart and ego he had become.

Mel couldn’t just pretend that all that was required to fix the hole he’d blown in their relationship was a quick piece of netting over the top, because the hole would still be there unless she packed it with the answers she needed to hear from him. How did it all come about? When did they decide to run off together? What had he told Chloe about her? Did they go out to restaurants together? Did they hold hands? What was the sex like? Pat had said he owed her those answers. He owed her some of his own discomfort if it helped to assuage her own.

She forced herself to swallow the boiled rice that was just rolling around in her mouth, unenjoyed, before she dropped the first of her many questions.

‘Why did you come back?’

‘I told you, because I missed home.’

‘Home – or me?’

He tutted. ‘Both.’

And she thought, why didn’t he say, I missed you, of course. I wanted you, not her. He was making it sound as if she was just part of a list of comforts: 55-inch TV, wet room, Sunday roasts, big armchair, Mel.

She picked up a crispy wonton and listened to the thoughts in her own head, trying to connect with her feelings.

Why isn’t he on the floor, on his knees, begging for your forgiveness, Mel? Why isn’t he telling you he loves you and is going to do everything in his power to make you forget this ever happened?

That’s what she would have done, had she been him. She wouldn’t have pulled out a takeaway menu from the drawer and said, ‘Let’s have a banquet for two.’

‘Why di—’

He cut her off impatiently. ‘Let’s not do this post-mortem thing, Mel, please. I’m here, aren’t I? So we don’t need to talk about it. Whatever has happened, has happened.’

‘But I need to talk to make sense of it,’ she said. ‘You lived it, you know what happened but it’s all a big blur to me. You owe me.’

‘Then there’s no point in us even trying to go forward, is there?’ he snapped back.

Her throat felt constricted. She was chasing him away again as soon as he’d got here. She shut up and drowned the next question cued up in her throat with a large glug of wine. She’d have to just stumble through this landscape, blind and uninformed and heal alone, with the aid of any stray sticking plasters she came across. And how long would that take?

She bit down on her wonton, feeling as lost and panicky as she had when she couldn’t get hold of him the night he’d left her, as if she were standing on a rug that might be pulled from under her at any time. How could she live like that?

As they were clearing up the plates, he turned from the dishwasher and said, ‘You hear about these mid-life crises but you never think it’ll happen to you. I just wish…’ He waved his next words away, but she had to know what he wished: that he hadn’t been such a prick? That she’d forgive him? She pressed, needing to hear it, needing to see his knee bending before her, even a little, to show he was putting her feelings above his own.

‘Okay then, I just wish you hadn’t forced me to go to that school reunion when I’d said I didn’t want to.’

She couldn’t speak. She might have encouraged him to go to it, but she hadn’t bundled him through the door of a building where he’d bang his old girlfriend in the bogs before the night was over. Her face must have said what her mouth couldn’t, because he scowled at her.

‘Don’t look at me like that, Mel. It can’t have been all my fault. There must have been something wrong with us for my head to be turned. What I’m trying to say is that maybe we both need to work at it, right? Let me go find something for us to watch on the telly.’

As Mel was putting a tab in the dishwasher she felt the heat of anger begin to cauterise her sensitive nerve endings. She let herself recognise it, that she had a right to it, as Pat had told her she had because her feelings were valid. Steve couldn’t stick a spoon in her life and stir her all up and then expect her to stop swirling the moment he walked in through the door. How dare he be the only one to dictate the terms of their reconciliation. She’d always considered she had a happy marriage, but having a few weeks outside it had been an eye-opener. It wasn’t just him who had a new shape: so did she, and it was bigger than the one she’d been pre-his school reunion. She’d joined a rock band, she’d found friends, she’d had her heart tickled by a postman who had made her feel worthy of being desired. She had expanded beyond the rigid box of her relationship with Steve and it wasn’t going to be easy for her to fit back into it either.

Steve announced he was tired just after ten. Mel imagined that he wanted to get to bed and wake up to their familiar normal. Except the old normal had gone for them both. Could they find a new normal? They’d have to for this to work.

He brushed his teeth with the toothbrush that was sitting in the glass by the sink, still waiting for him like a faithful hound because he’d forgotten to take it with him. He climbed into bed, she slipped in beside him and thought how odd it felt that he was there again, as if nothing had happened. Except it had.

‘’Night,’ he said. ‘Tomorrow’s a new day, right?’

‘Yep,’ she said, knowing he meant that today is the carpet that everything will be swept under.

‘Do you want me to give you a kiss?’

‘If you like.’

She felt him shuffle towards her in the dark and then suddenly stop dead. She heard him sniffing. Then he said:

‘Is that bloody aftershave I can smell?’