Four months before Catherine
And I am home. Leaning back against the front door, inhaling the smells of this house of mine, something bacony that Sam must have cooked for supper, fresh paint and coffee grounds, and mud from the stream.
In the sitting room I don’t bother to turn on the lights, but lie down on the sofa, faded blue and uncomfortable but ours, and instantly reassuring with Daisy’s discarded trainer socks balled up in one corner, a half-drunk mug of tea on the floor beside it.
Joe’s Adidas Superstars, a birthday present, kicked off at right angles, one face up, the other on its side.
Thousands of pieces of Lego in a bright blue plastic box.
DVD cases opened up, their discs spilled out across the floorboards.
It says a lot, this room.
It tells me that Sam, fanatical about returning discs to cases and mugs to the dishwasher and dirty socks to the laundry basket, is losing his grip.
I lie in the darkness picturing what must be happening down at the lake.
You’ll be talking to the police and perhaps there will already be a cluster of journalists there.
I imagine you trying to console Harry with his insurmountable grief; I think of Alexa and Rachel, swamping him the minute he was hauled off the boat, even Jack on standby, arms folded across his chest: the five of you as impenetrable in tragedy as you are in everyday life.
But mostly I think of you, your face, as I told you the truth about why I’d left.
I replay this moment again and again, the words I’d held in for so long a haemorrhaged jet of poison.
I see your face, shock first, then immediate withdrawal.
You couldn’t get away fast enough.
I chastise myself for my selfishness, telling you this while you were dealing with Ling’s death.
But I also see that there was no other way.
The drowning of that sweet girl has left us with nothing but endings.
I don’t expect to sleep, not tonight, not with Ling and Harry and you, always you, pressing against my mind.
But I wake a few hours later, cold and sore from my blanketless, pillowless night, to Daisy’s shout, ‘Mummy’s here!
’ and so there is no warning, none at all, just my small pyjamaed daughter and Sam, standing in front of me, long brown legs with their fine covering of black hair.
‘I didn’t hear you come in.
’
‘Why did you sleep here, Mummy?’
It’s hard to answer with her arms around my neck, my face pressed up tight against her hard little chest. And then I realise I can’t answer, as the trauma of last night – the drowning, Ling’s death, your face as I told you about Jack – crowds my brain.
No room for anything else.
No words, no voice.
‘Catherine?’
‘Mummy? Mum!’
Daisy sounds urgent, frightened.
She needs me to speak.
I snap myself back to the present.
I shift her to one side.
‘You’ve gone all brown,’ I say eventually, gripping one skinny sunburned thigh.
‘Look at your legs.’
Daisy pats my face with her small hands; she traces her forefingers lightly over the skin beneath my eyes.
‘Your make-up has come off,’ she says.
‘Your mascara.’
Daisy is a make-up fanatic, or rather she will be the moment she is allowed.
I can imagine her aged fourteen or fifteen, glued to YouTube videos, learning how to create the perfect smoky eye.
She knows the contents of my paltry cosmetics bag better than I do myself; she also knows that in my world mascara is a rare event.
‘Where did you go last night?’ she asks.
‘I went to a party with Liv.’
Now I look up to find your name is between us, stamped into the burn of Sam’s stare, the stiffness of his shoulders, one a little higher than the other, his neck tilted, mouth pinched.
We have always been able to communicate with our eyes, Sam and I, and even as I’m answering Daisy’s questions – ‘It was in Somerset, not far from here … The house of someone we went to university with a long time ago’ – he is telling me that I have done the one thing he always dreaded, and I am telling him, hand clamped around the thigh of my small daughter, that he did this to us too, remember, not just me, but him, him and Julia, him and his one-night love affair.
‘So this was Lucian Wilkes’s party?
’
There you are again, your name in the air like the fire particles from a sparkler, at least to me.
‘Yes.’
This yes, this single affirmation, is to Sam and me something much more.
Yes, I slept with him; yes, I love him; yes, it is as bad as – perhaps worse than – everything you have ever feared.
But there are things Sam doesn’t see.
You probably hate me.
I doubt I will ever see you again.
‘I’ll make some tea,’ Sam says, quiet, flat voice, and I watch him walk away, the squeak of bare feet on bare boards, through the open doorway that leads into our bright new show-home kitchen where the sun glows from all the surfaces, turning everything white gold.
Joe arrives in the doorway, bare-chested, one strand of sleep-spiked hair sticking straight up, last year’s navy-blue pyjama shorts, which now finish well above the knee.
‘Mum!’
He loiters at the door with a self-conscious smile.
‘Come here!’
I stand up and he runs straight into my arms, and I allow myself a few seconds of breathing him in, hair that smells of the sea, skin that smells of sleep.
‘When did you get back?’
‘Very late last night.’
‘I missed you.’
This is so unexpected, so unlike him, that I feel my chest tightening, the threat of sudden hot tears.
‘Can we have pancakes, Dad?’ Joe asks.
Pancakes are Sam’s speciality, our celebratory breakfast for birthdays, for homecomings, for cheering ourselves up at the end of a holiday.
They will be the last thing he’ll feel like making.
‘Sure.’
I watch him walk over to the fridge and take out milk, eggs, butter, then flour from the larder, stooping to find my mother’s chipped beige mixing bowl from the cupboard.
Sunday morning in the kitchen, children in pyjamas, husband making pancakes, hallmarks of our past. It looks the same but it feels very different.
Any moment now, surely the kids will pick up on the silence, weighted and ugly with things not yet said.
‘Want to check on the stream?’ Joe asks Daisy, and I find myself smiling in spite of the unspoken gloom.
The stream will be the same as it was yesterday and the day before, the same as it was when we first moved in.
‘Pancakes will be ready in ten,’ Sam says, his first words for a while, and they disappear together through the French windows, running the length of our long, sloping lawn, her curls flying, his legs skinny and brown in his too-short shorts.
Sam spins around. The look on his face.
‘Why the fuck did you let this go on so long, Catherine? You’ve always wanted him, why did it take you so long?
’
‘That’s not true.
’
‘You married me because you couldn’t have him.
It’s so fuck-ing bor-ing.
’
‘You don’t understand.
’
‘Oh I do. I’ve been married to you for thirteen bloody years, I know how you’ve mooned about, wishing I was him or he was me, wishing your whole fucking life away, and never mind the fact that we’ve got two kids and I’ve spent years, literally years, trying to make you happy.
’
Sam is not a swearer; it’s one of the things I’ve always liked best about him.
The anger in his face frightens me.
‘It’s over, Sam.’
‘It will never be over.’
‘Sam. Please. There’s something I need to tell you.
A girl died last night.
A friend. I was there when it happened.
I was there when she drowned.
’
‘What?’
‘Last night at the party. She was called Ling. She jumped into the lake and she never came back up.’
‘Let me get this straight. You’ve got a new friend called Ling who I’ve never even heard of and last night she died?
’
‘It was horrific, Sam. She’s Harry’s wife – she was, I mean.
She was the loveliest, sweetest girl you could imagine and they’d been married less than a month.
’
Perhaps it’s the mention of Harry’s name – Harry, Lucian, for Sam always a toxic association – but I watch his face paling beneath the suntan, the anger rushing back in.
‘You’re all broken up about some girl you just met?
And right here, right now your marriage is unravelling?
What’s wrong with you, Catherine?
What the hell is wrong with you?
’
He turns away from me and I am left staring at his back, an enemy in my own kitchen.
There is nothing for me to do except creep away.
Upstairs, I run a bath – our family bathroom with its map-of-the-world shower curtain and Daisy’s fruit-scented potions scattered around the rim – and sit in the hot water, knees hunched, thinking hard.
The relief of being here again in the comfort of our world, safe in this place where good things happen, where pancakes are made and streams are celebrated and baths are pungent with kiwi-scented bath foam.
I am free to cry now for the girl who has died, the desperate end to her fairy tale and the searing conclusion to ours.
‘Did you ever love me?’ Sam asks, straight off, once the kids are finally in bed, our first chance to talk.
‘I still do.’
He shrugs this off as if it’s nothing.
‘Why did you leave him, tell me that. Why did you put us both through all of this?’
‘Was “all of this” so bad? Two children, the years in London?’
‘You slept with him, didn’t you?
Do you think that makes us even?
’
‘No, I don’t think it makes us even.
Yes, I slept with him.
I’m sorry. It wasn’t revenge, if that’s what you think.
’
There’s a bottle of red wine on the table, opened but so far untouched.
Now Sam grabs it and pours himself a glass.
He knocks back a couple of inches, his hands shaking.
‘Fuck, Catherine. Fuck. Maybe I hate you.’
‘What about Julia? What about her? We haven’t even talked about that.
’
‘Because Julia doesn’t matter and you know that.
I don’t love her, I never did.
It was a mistake and I regret it and I’m sorry, of course I am.
I was an idiot. But it doesn’t change anything, not really.
You are all I ever wanted, stupid, na?ve bloody fool that I am.
’
I reach out to try and take his hand but he snatches his away.
Another fast gulp of his wine.
‘Be honest, you don’t really care about Julia.
And it’s freed you up, hasn’t it?
It’s not like you lost any time in tracking him down.
’
‘I didn’t mean this to happen,’ I say again, and he clicks his tongue, irritated.
‘Yes you did. In your head you did. You think I didn’t know what you were thinking all those times we saw something about him in the papers, or when Liv or I mentioned him and you’d go deathly quiet?
’
It’s true. I remember those times, my private agony, or so I thought, when Liv and Sam said your name, Lucian, Lucian Wilkes, and expected me still to breathe.
‘Are you in love with him?’
He asks this like he’s stabbing little letters of hate into the air.
And here it is, my chance to put things right.
I’ll tell the truth, part of the truth, the only part Sam wants to hear.
‘I love you, Sam. I always did. Despite what you think. Despite everything.’
I see him looking at me, and somewhere very distant a light comes on in his eyes.
Hope, that’s what it is.
A faint blue flicker of hope.