Chapter 2
2
The hallway clock chimed and a peal of church bells sounded in the distance. But, to Fiona, it was all peripheral, as she struggled to understand her husband.
‘What? You mean you’re leaving for work?’
‘No, I mean I’m leaving for good.’
‘Where are you going?’
‘I’ve made arrangements.’
She blinked, his words hitting a fog somewhere between his mouth and her brain.
‘I don’t understand.’
‘I’m going, Fiona.’
‘You’re leaving me? Stephen, you’re not making any sense. What are you talking about?’
He pressed his lips together, as if he were deliberating the top-prize question in a TV game show. When he opened his mouth to speak again, it came out in a rush.
‘I can’t do it any more, Fiona. I can’t.’
‘You can’t do what?’
‘This. Us.’ He motioned between them. ‘Pretending everything’s okay. That this marriage works.’
‘This marriage does work.’
‘Perhaps for you.’
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’
‘What do you think it’s supposed to mean?’
Whether the question was rhetorical or not didn’t matter; she wasn’t answering it. Shaking her head, she tipped the glass and downed the rest of her drink in one go.
‘You can’t honestly kid yourself you like this, can you?’ he questioned. ‘We never see each other. We’re like ships in the night, traversing entirely different bloody oceans.’
‘Because we’re busy. We .’ She pointed back and forth between the two of them to ensure absolute clarity. ‘ We are busy people.’
Putting her glass down, she crossed the kitchen and sank onto the stool beside him. They’d had fights before, plenty of them. Almost always at a time when one or both of them had an important deadline coming up. That was it. There was something she’d missed. A conference, a big presentation, maybe a new line launch. It would be something she’d forgotten about, although she thought she’d checked both their schedules pretty carefully before booking the holiday.
‘We’re just tired, Stephen, that’s all. It’s been so busy lately, what with Joseph going off and you and me overloaded at work. It’s not a surprise we’re exhausted.’
‘I’m tired of being tired.’
He lowered his eyes to the counter. She looked at the face she knew so well: the pitted marks from childhood chickenpox, the scar above his eyebrow where he’d walked into a cupboard door after a rugby team night out. She knew every inch of it, yet now there was a greyness to his skin.
‘You’ll see,’ she said, brushing her hand across the scar. ‘After the holiday. After some time together, things will seem better.’
‘And then what?’ His eyes came back up to meet hers. ‘There’s no spark any more. No fun. If we’re not at work, then we’re sitting in the living room, on our computers, hardly even speaking to one another, pretending that’s what normal couples do.’
‘That is what normal couples do.’ She clenched and unclenched her fists. ‘You really want to do this? After all we’ve been through, you really want to tear this family apart?’
‘Joseph gets it. He understands.’
The words took a moment to register.
‘Joseph knows?’ Her voice was barely audible. ‘Joseph knew that you were going to do this?’
A look, somewhere between shame and determination, crossed his face.
‘I spoke to him on the way to the station.’
‘You did what?’ Her hands went to her head, her fingernails gripping her scalp as she tried to make sense of what she was hearing.
‘He understands,’ he repeated. ‘He knows what it’s been like.’
‘ What it’s been like? Am I missing something here? Have I been living in some parallel universe? Because, from where I’m standing, life looks pretty damn good for us.’
‘Fiona—’
‘The house, the cars… you’re delusional. You have to be.’ Trembling with a mixture of fury and disbelief, she paced from one side of the room to the other. ‘After everything we’ve done together. The life we’ve had. All the places we’ve been together.’
Her mind came back to the present. ‘We’re going away tomorrow. Everything’s booked. I’ve taken time off work. It’s our anniversary, for Christ’s sake! It’s our twentieth anniversary.’
For the first time, his face showed a modicum of sympathy.
‘I thought it would best to do it now. Give you a week away from people, so you didn’t have the pressure of going into work.’
‘Oh, how very thoughtful of you,’ she spat, staring at her husband as he fiddled with the strap of his watch, light reflecting off the glass.
‘Where did you get that?’ she asked.
‘What?’
‘Where did you get that watch? What happened to the one with the leather strap I bought you last Christmas? The Patek Philippe? Why aren’t you wearing that?’
Stephen pulled his jacket cuff down.
‘It’s just an old one.’
‘Show me.’
‘Fiona.’
‘Show me!’ She lunged at his arm, but he moved back out of reach, holding his wrist against him.
She dropped her hands and scoffed.
‘There’s someone else.’ She could feel the bile rise in her throat. ‘You’ve met someone.’
His eyes fell to the watch again. He traced a finger across the face and, for a fleeting moment, she thought he was going to deny it. Instead, he pushed his stool back from the counter and stood up. ‘Don’t do this, please.’
‘You’ve been cheating on me?’
He crossed behind her, to where the suitcases waited.
‘How long?’ She could hardly recognise her own voice now.
He licked his lips.
‘You owe me that much,’ she insisted. ‘Tell me. How long has it been going on for?’
Not able to meet her gaze now, he cleared his throat.
‘ How long? ’
‘About eighteen months.’
That was the moment her world fell away.
There had been a time in her life when she’d been a crier. Happy tears, sad tears, any emotional situation would elicit the same response; as a child, always erupting into floods at the slightest hint of reproach or injustice. When puberty hit, it had only become worse, earning her the label of over-emotional or unsettled . And while at university she’d got a slightly better grip on things, any form of confrontation would have her staring at the ceiling, desperately trying to blink away the tears before their escape ruined any chance she had of being taken seriously.
Then her mother got dementia.
When the person she’d loved and held dearest started calling her the most despicable and spiteful names under the sun, it became remarkably easy to ignore the unkind words of others. The cutting remarks from bitchy women or misogynistic men that she’d had to put up with in her first job were nothing compared to the blows her mother would deal out week after week. She became immune to it all. After a while, she didn’t even bother thinking up witty retorts to fire back. When she moved on to her next position, she quickly got herself the reputation of someone efficient and no-nonsense, a hard arse.
Stephen knew the truth, of course. He had never witnessed the blubbering wreck she could once be reduced to, but she’d told him about it. On their wedding day, she had smiled through, calm and poised, without the slightest risk of ruining her mascara. Only at the arrival of Joseph had she felt that familiar prickling in her eyes.
Even now, desperately wishing she could find a way of showing Stephen how he had ripped out her heart and squeezed it to a pulp in front of her, all she actually said was, ‘I think you need to go.’
The next morning, Fiona packed a suitcase. It was probably a sensible thing to do, to escape a place that was full of memories: where they’d met; their first house; the roads they’d walked down so often, fingers intertwined, as they’d made time in their busy schedules to grab a hurried lunch together. Getting out of the city would be the best idea, Stephen had advised her before he left.
In the end, that was the very reason she found herself standing on the train platform watching the 12.02 pull away without her. Stephen didn’t get to choose how she behaved any more, she thought, as people jostled around her. Not while he was behaving like this. That wasn’t how it worked. Grabbing her bag, she marched outside to a waiting taxi, pulled out her phone and called the one person she knew she could face talking to.
‘Fucking prick.’
Holly had always had a way with words. ‘I’m going to be half an hour, is that okay? I’ll come to you.’
‘I’ve got some work I can do,’ Fiona told her, having recounted the tale of the previous evening. ‘It’s probably best if I’m on my own for a bit.’
‘Like fuck it is,’ Holly replied.
‘Only if you’re sure.’
‘I’ll be half an hour.’
An hour and a quarter later, her best friend of nearly thirty years was at the door, with a bottle of gin and two tubs of ice cream.
Fiona smiled. ‘I guess you’d better come in.’
‘So, do you know who this other woman is?’ Holly asked, topping up Fiona’s glass yet again.
They were in the living room, where she and Stephen used to sit companionably, she’d thought, working on their laptops. It had always been her favourite room in the house, with its big bay windows and restored stone fireplace. She wished they’d found a better way of disguising the enormous television, though. After all, it wasn’t like they ever watched it.
‘Though maybe it isn’t another woman,’ Holly continued thoughtfully. ‘You know I always thought he was far too eager to please that boss of his.’
‘John Orbiten?’
‘Is that him? The one he’s always on the phone to? Maybe he’s lured Stephen with a promise of a lifetime of free yogurts and frozen food. You know how he loves his yoghurt. God, imagine them smearing it all over each other’s hairy chests.’ She shuddered and Fiona let out a snort of laughter.
‘I don’t think it’s him,’ she said, swallowing a mouthful of gin and tonic and trying to banish the image of her husband and John Orbiten wallowing together in a tub of Alton organic yogurt. ‘Though I wish I knew who it was. I swear, I’ve been racking my brains. I know a new partner moved into the firm last year?—’
‘He’s always been a bit power crazed,’ Holly added.
‘And his old secretary left to go to law school…’
‘The new secretary? No! Could you get any more clichéd?’
‘But then I keep wondering if it’s someone we know know. Like a friend. Remember Judith slept with Katherine’s husband that time?’
‘Yes, but Judith smells of Olbas oil. Stephen wouldn’t go for that.’
‘Well, he did go for someone.’
Their imaginations wandered as they sipped their drinks.
Smacking her lips, Fiona moved for the bottle again. She’d decided to abandon the tonic. It was only slowing down the inevitable. She needed to get drunk, inebriated to the point where she couldn’t remember her address, or her age, or the fact that her husband had been sleeping with another woman for a year and a half. However, with drunkenness came the inevitable hangover. At forty-six, she considered herself well past the age of coping with that. Her thoughts drifted back to Stephen’s bit on the side. She’d probably be too young to suffer a proper hangover, the sort that had you laid up in bed for forty-eight hours, craving salt-and-vinegar crisps and Diet Coke, and wincing at any sound above zero point four decibels.
‘Eighteen months,’ Holly mused, as if she were reading her mind. ‘That’s crazy. Eighteen months. That means he was seeing her when we all went to Judith’s birthday party last summer.’
‘Uh-huh.’ She had now abandoned the gin for a bottle of sparkling water. ‘And when we all went to Circus 21 for breakfast. And when we took Joseph to his leaving ball, and to pick up his A-level results. Not to mention the Alton Christmas party, and the massive fundraiser we threw for Stand up to Steroids or whatever that charity was called. I just can’t believe I wouldn’t have seen it, you know? You’d have thought I’d have spotted something was up. Some sign that things were amiss. We’ve been married twenty years, for crying out loud. What did I do? Where did I go wrong?’ She gulped the water.
‘It wasn’t you. It was definitely not you,’ Holly replied.
Fiona pondered. It was true she worked a lot. Probably more than average. But that was something Stephen had always admired about her. Encouraged in her, even. Just last year, when she was umming and ahhing about taking on the Lovett-Rose–Rosenberg wedding, he had been the one saying how good the extra publicity would be for her company. And he’d been so pleased for her when she did take it on. She gazed down at her hand, at the eternity ring he had given her as a congratulations gift. Was it possible a person could switch his feelings on and off that quickly? Surely not.
‘It must be something else. There must be more to it. Maybe this is a cry for help. Maybe the job’s got too much for him. Perhaps it was Joseph moving out.’
Moving across the room, she picked up the bottle of gin, refilled Holly’s glass and flopped down next to her. ‘You know what, the more I think about it, the more that’s what it has to be. A cry for help. Honestly, I don’t know why I even called you. He’ll probably be back tomorrow.’ This explanation was making her feel somewhat optimistic.
‘You think?’
‘I do. I mean, obviously, there’s something more going on here. Maybe he’s had a bit of fun sneaking around with someone. But I know Stephen. Whatever this thing is, he’s going to realise he needs me by his side for support. He’ll be back within a week. Sooner, I expect.’
Feeling more assured, she stood up from the sofa.
‘Do you want to stay the night?’ she asked. ‘The spare room’s all made up. It’d save you having to get a cab.’
Holly yawned, covering her mouth for only a fraction of a second before it ended. ‘Actually, if you’re okay, I should really head home. I’ve got a ton of deadlines next week.’ Then, as an afterthought, she added, ‘But I can stay if you need the company?’
‘Don’t be silly,’ Fiona replied, collecting up the empties for the dishwasher. ‘Go home. Get some sleep.’
‘But I’ll see you tomorrow? Or Monday?’
‘You really don’t have to mollycoddle me.’
‘It’s not mollycoddling, it’s called being a good friend. Besides, if you’re not busy with work or Stephen this week, it means we might actually be able to spend some time together.’
Fiona yawned now, breaking into a grateful smile partway through.
‘Well in that case, how can I say no?’
As the front door closed, a hush fell on the house.
‘He’ll be back,’ she said to herself. ‘Just you wait and see.’