Chapter 14
FOURTEEN
ANNA
I only used the baby monitor the once to spy on Laurel and Gray.
When I’d first suggested buying one, he’d reacted with fury, but once I pointed out that if I could see when he was awake, I could come up and ask him if he needed anything, rather than him having to summon me with a text, he saw the sense in the idea and reluctantly agreed.
Laurel seemed to think it was nothing out of the ordinary, either, nor even realise that I’d made her aware of its existence as a kind of warning.
Although, to be fair, the first time she came to see Gray she looked as wide-eyed and frightened as Bambi in the thunderstorm, like I was going to kick her out of the house or spit in her coffee.
I couldn’t help spending a second taking in her appearance – seeing what I was up against. She was shorter than me and petite.
She had dark brown hair with a few threads of grey in it.
She was wearing faded jeans, a baggy sweatshirt and no make-up.
Her hazel eyes were wide and wary, and the freckles were standing out on her pale skin, and I felt almost sorry for her.
Not too sorry to listen outside the door, though.
After I let her in, I’d turned to go back downstairs when I heard that shout of laughter, and it stopped me in my tracks.
I hadn’t heard Gray laugh like that in ages.
So I stepped silently back towards the bedroom, avoiding the one floorboard that creaked, and waited.
I couldn’t hear anything more at all. It was like they were doing silent breathing exercises in there or something.
It was that thought that made me wonder whether I’d been expecting to hear sex sounds. I felt my face flame and turned and hurried quietly away, feeling grubby and ashamed.
The second time she came, I left them to it. I didn’t offer her coffee again; I didn’t even show her up to the bedroom. I just said hello, gestured towards the stairs and told her to call me if he needed anything. She stayed for about an hour and a half, then appeared in the kitchen.
‘He’s asleep,’ she said, ‘so I’ll be off. Thank you, Anna.’
I nodded and said goodbye. There was no point in asking when she would come again; she’d arrange that with Gray, and Gray would inform me. That, it seemed, was the way it was going to work.
Then, on her third visit, something snapped inside me. Again, I could hear no sounds from upstairs. Gray hadn’t sent her down to fetch him a glass of iced water or the banana ice cream he was currently craving, although he never ate much of it. They were just there, in that bedroom – doing what?
Hating myself, I picked up my phone and tapped through to the app. The sound was turned down, but I could see them both, lying fully clothed on the bed in the sunshine that streamed through the window, Laurel’s back against the pillows where mine used to rest before I moved out to the spare room.
Gray was doing something with his hands, twisting them into an unfamiliar shape.
Were they communicating in sign language, I wondered, conscious that I might be listening in?
But Gray didn’t know sign language, and Laurel wasn’t looking at his hands.
As I watched, she turned to him and said something.
They both laughed and his hands dropped.
Then Laurel raised her hands, and there was more of the twisting, more of the staring.
Suddenly I got it. They were making shadow animals on the opposite wall. With a fresh surge of self-loathing, I turned the sound up, just in time to hear Gray say, ‘It’s a cock and balls,’ and their laughter ringing out.
I could barely bring myself to say goodbye to her after that.
I just opened the front door and let her out, ignoring her thanks.
I stood and waited while she walked away, her stride swinging and athletic, across the square and towards the main road, where I presumed she would be getting a bus or the Tube to wherever she lived or worked.
But I didn’t go back into the house. I picked up my keys, called up to Gray that I was going out and he should text me if he needed me, and walked the short distance to Imran’s newsagent shop.
I wanted a cigarette. And not just one – lots of them.
I hadn’t smoked for almost seventeen years, not since I’d found out I was unexpectedly pregnant with Lulu.
I’d knocked the habit on the head right then – surprisingly easily, thanks to being as sick as a dog – and had never been tempted to take it up again.
I wanted to smoke now. I wanted to feel that first harsh hit of nicotine make my head swim, to exhale the smoke in a long ribbon and watch it furl in sunlight before disappearing. I wanted to light a second fag as soon as the first was finished. I wanted to…
Then it struck me. That shit gives you cancer, Anna. The thing your husband’s busy dying of. Do you want your children to have no parents, when as it is they’re going to have just one?
So I bought a disposable vape instead, pointing randomly at the display behind the counter, ignoring Imran’s curious gaze. Then I walked back to Damask Square, but instead of letting myself in through my own front door, I knocked on Orla’s, three doors away at number five.
She took a while to answer, but just as I was about to give up I heard her hurrying feet and the door opened.
‘Anna. My dear. Is everything all right?’ She was wearing an apron over a cream silk shirt and turned-up jeans, and there was flour on her hands and a smudge of it on her cheek.
‘Everything’s fine. Well – fine-ish. I’m sorry – I’ve interrupted you. I just wanted to…’
‘You’re interrupting nothing,’ she assured me. ‘I’ve just put the bread on to prove. Come in and I’ll wash my hands.’
I followed her through to her kitchen, which was at the back of the house as mine was, only on the ground floor rather than the excavated basement.
The doors were open to the garden, and the scent of damp grass mixed with the yeasty smell of bread dough.
In the patch of sun that fell through the skylight, her two cats, one tabby and one tortoiseshell, were dozing.
‘Would you like a cup of tea?’ she asked, scrubbing her hands at the sink. ‘Or something to eat, as it’s almost lunchtime?’
‘I… Please don’t go to any trouble. I guess I just wanted someone to talk to.’
‘In that case I shall open a bottle of wine,’ she said. ‘The sun’s over the yardarm, as they say. Unless you’re driving anywhere?’
I shook my head. ‘The kids are making their own way home from school. It’s Thursday – the one day they’ve got nothing on.’
‘Then that’s settled.’ She opened the fridge and took out a bottle of rosé, following it with a block of cheddar. She took glasses from a cupboard, bread from the bread bin and a bowl of tomatoes from the countertop, and put everything out on the table. ‘This is the best I can do, I’m afraid.’
‘It’s wonderful.’ I sat down and she poured wine into our glasses. ‘Thank you. I feel – it’s a lot. You know.’
‘I know.’ She raised her glass and took a sip. ‘How are you, Anna?’
It was typical of Orla to ask that instead of what everyone else asked: How’s Gray?
I said, ‘I feel like I’m drowning.’
She didn’t say anything in response, just tilted her head and waited for me to carry on.
I gulped my wine and sucked furiously on my vape pen, coughing at the first puff before getting the hang of it.
Then I started talking and found I couldn’t stop.
I told her about Laurel – about Gray’s affair.
She was the first person I’d told; to everyone else – my sisters, my friends, the mothers of my children’s friends – I’d spoken about Gray’s illness, his terminal diagnosis and all that went with that, but not about the other thing.
I couldn’t put into words why not, but as I spoke to Orla I realised.
‘It’s like it’s all my fault,’ I said. ‘He cheated on me and now he’s sick. He’s going to die. It’s like I failed him twice. Failed at everything. I couldn’t keep my husband faithful, and now I can’t keep him alive.’
‘You know that’s not how it works, Anna. Of course you do. Marriages are complicated. Men do things they shouldn’t. Women too, but…’
‘But mostly men. And now I feel – I feel like I wasn’t enough. Not only me but the kids too. How could he have risked it all for that? For her?’
‘Because he didn’t feel like there was a risk,’ Orla said gently. ‘Or he didn’t think at all.’
‘I guess.’ I could hear my daughter in my voice – an almost teenage petulance. ‘But that’s how it feels.’
‘I understand that,’ Orla said.
‘And there’s another thing. She’s coming here. Coming to our house to see Gray. He insisted. He said he’d move into a hospice otherwise. So there was nothing I could do.’
‘That sounds unimaginably hard.’ Carefully, Orla poured more wine for us.
‘And the worst thing… The worst thing is, she makes him so fucking happy. I can’t bear to see him like that with her.’
The tabby cat stood up from the floor, stretched luxuriantly, then hopped up on to Orla’s lap, butting his head against her hand. She stroked him, her fingers almost disappearing into the plush coat.
‘You know,’ she said slowly, ‘this isn’t the same at all. But I think perhaps in a way it is. Do you remember my Maud?’
I did, of course. For the first fifteen years Gray and I had lived at Damask Square, Orla’s black cat had been a permanent presence, stalking along the garden fences on the hunt for squirrels, terrorising Augustus and occasionally letting out blood-curdling howls in the street at night as she told an invading fox where to go.
‘Who could forget her?’ I said.
Orla smiled. ‘She was a character. One of the things she used to do was wake me up in the morning for her breakfast by pricking my face with her claws. I’d be asleep and I’d feel her paw on my skin, cool and gentle at first. Then she’d extend a claw and I’d feel red-hot pain.
Often there’d be blood on the pillow when I eventually got up. ’
‘Ouch.’ I grimaced in sympathy. ‘But you still loved her.’
‘With all my heart. And after she was gone, for quite a long time, at least until I got these two, I’d find myself waking up with the sense that something was missing. Even though at the time, if you’d asked me, I’d have said I hated her clawing my face.’
‘Love hurts, right?’
‘Sometimes it does. But the other thing is, if I could have her back for just one day, I’d be jumping out of bed first thing to feed her. I’d do anything she wanted.’
I sighed and gulped some wine. ‘Okay. I get what you’re saying.’
‘I’m saying it clumsily,’ she admitted. ‘But, Anna – what’s coming in the months ahead will be hard. If you give yourself cause to feel guilt as well as all the sadness and… everything else, it’ll only be harder for you. It’ll only make things worse.’
‘You’re right. I know you are. It’s just – I feel so angry.’
‘Of course you do. You can’t always control your feelings. But you can’t control Gray’s either. And, Anna…’
‘What?’ I asked when she stopped, leaving a silence for me to fill.
‘Gray’s a complex man. You know that better than I do, of course. There will be reasons why he’s acted the way he has. That’s not to say it’s excusable, but it might be understandable.’
‘What reasons could there possibly be?’ I demanded.
‘Okay, our marriage wasn’t perfect. But whose is?
I’ve put the effort in. I gave up work to sort out our house renovation and raise our family.
I put up with him working crazy hours and then going out and getting plastered afterwards.
I supported him when he went on that massive health kick and lived on chicken breasts and fizzy water for months.
I encouraged him when he took up cycling, even though it meant him swanning off for hours every weekend and leaving me with the kids. I never…’
I trailed off. I’d been going to say, I never resented it.
But I had, and I knew that Orla would be able to hear that in my voice.
And Gray would have resented me resenting him.
Contrast that with the unconditional adoration he’d presumably found in Laurel, and – well. I’d got what was coming to me.
‘Good men don’t go running off after other women just because they’re a bit bored with their wives,’ I finished lamely.
‘I’m not trying to justify what he’s done. But I wonder whether, in time, you might come to understand it. And in the meantime…’
I nodded slowly. Of course, she was right.
I was going to have to accept Laurel’s presence. That, and make sure that whatever total sum of happiness was left in my husband’s life would at least come partly from me and the kids, and not all from her.