Chapter 7 Freya
FREYA
Last night’s meeting has left me feeling hollowed out, spent from the willpower it took not to splay all my emotions into that damn circle of self-righteousness.
There was so much I could have said—so much I wanted to say—but every time I’d gone to open my mouth, I could feel Charlie’s eyes burning themselves into me, a warning not to reveal too much of what had brought us to that place for fear that the new lives we’ve carved out for ourselves would be upended.
But as much as we both pretend that we have a clean slate, nothing could be further from the truth.
Charlie tells me I need to put the past behind us and focus on the future, but how can I when the image of someone lying motionless on the road haunts my every waking thought?
He may well be able to outrun the chasing dragon by throwing himself into his new venture, but my conscience burns a thousand times a day.
Sometimes I ask myself why I stayed quiet.
Though that’s relatively easy to answer, because as selfish as it might have been, I didn’t want our perfect lives to end, and I na?vely thought that not acknowledging it would mean that we could carry on as if it had never happened.
But the question I struggle with more is how I could have stayed quiet.
What normal person could play happy families while another, just a few miles down the road, had been torn apart?
A much-loved husband and father had taken his dog out for a walk late at night, like he had almost every night for three years, reveling in the quietness of the London streets.
His wife had been quoted in a newspaper article as saying that it was the part of his day that he looked forward to the most. Having been immersed in the hustle and bustle of the city all day, spending nine hours at his desk in an insurance broker’s, and being forced to stand, cheek by jowl, on the overcrowded train back home, he loved the tranquility of that same city, just a few hours later, as its residents turned off their lights.
“He would go out for an hour, sometimes more,” she sobbed.
“I used to worry that he might be a target for gangs, or an opportunist looking to steal a phone, but I never imagined that a car would mount the pavement, and that the driver would leave him for dead. What kind of person would do that?”
I shudder involuntarily as Charlie comes up behind me and puts his arms around my waist.
“Are you making coffee?” he asks, kissing me on the cheek.
“Yes, do you want one?”
“I’ll get one to go,” he says, sitting down on the window seat to put his boots on. “I’ve got a supplier meeting at the restaurant early this morning, so I need to get a move on.”
I offer a tight smile.
“Are you going into the office?” he asks.
If by office he means Pauline’s second bedroom, then yes, I might.
It doesn’t have quite the same cachet as my old office in Piccadilly Circus, but it’s a start-up charity that Pauline has thrown herself into so wholeheartedly that I can’t help but offer my services in any way she needs, even though she still insists on paying me minimum wage.
“Every penny counts,” says Charlie, whenever I tell him I feel guilty. “We need to take all that we can get.”
That’s probably because he’s mortgaged the house to the hilt so that he could buy a dilapidated barn and convert it into a restaurant.
He was going to realize his dream at some point, but there’s no doubt that what happened in London has fast-tracked the natural process.
And while I don’t blame him for taking advantage of the opportunity, there’s a part of me that begrudges the fact that it seems to have been to my detriment.
I’ve given up my whole life in London, a life where I was worth something—where I was revered and respected—for this.
I look through the window of our farmhouse kitchen and out to the rolling meadows beyond, where white and purple snowdrops dance in the early-morning breeze.
This is what others dream of. A quintessential English village, where the only sounds you hear are the birdsong on the breeze and the babbling brook at the end of the garden.
People would kill for less. But I feel like I’ve stumbled into retirement forty years early, with nothing but church meetings and crochet patterns to occupy my time.
And a husband who I’m forever terrified will reveal his true self.
Because it will happen, I can feel it. Everything he’s hiding is bubbling away, getting closer and closer to breaking through the surface.
I can sense his struggle. I can see the effort he’s having to put in to keep pushing those destructive feelings down.
He doesn’t always manage it, though—and it’s invariably me who gets the brunt of his pent-up frustration, but I suppose it’s better that he takes it out on me than anyone else.
Because I’m the only one who knows how deep his bristling self-reproach is rooted.
Its far-reaching tentacles are entrenched in guilt, shame, and regret—all of which he somehow manages to mask.
But it’s the fear he can’t disguise. It’s the fear that makes him pull back from me—from our marriage—having convinced himself it’s the easy way out.
But I won’t let him push the self-destruct button on us.
We’re in this together and as long as he has my back, I’ll have his.
“I might do,” I say, pouring milk into his preferred travel mug. “There’s a couple of things I need to tie up before the weekend.” I shrug my shoulders. “Besides, what else will I do?”
“Okay, don’t forget I’m in London tonight,” says Charlie all-so-casually as he kisses the top of my head.
“London?” I can’t help but shoot back, the word alone eliciting such a wretched hollowness in the pit of my stomach that I think I might be sick. “You didn’t say.…”
He gives me a pitying look—one that says, But darling, I told you last week, you can’t possibly have forgotten?
“Didn’t I?” he says instead, wisely.
“What are you going to London for?” I ask as I attempt to quell the panic that’s rising in me—though why, I don’t know.
“It’s that black-tie thing,” he says, as if that’s enough.
It isn’t, and I look at him with raised eyebrows waiting for him to elaborate. “The charity ball with Tom’s work,” he adds. “We do it every year.”
It’s not an event I remember, but this time last year we were living entirely different lives.
Work and pleasure merged into one, the edges between the two blurred by the hours we kept, the parties we attended, and the drinks we consumed.
How we did it, I don’t know, but I’d give anything to go back there.
Charlie takes a sip of his coffee. “I’m going to stay over and head back first thing in the morning.”
“Oh” is all I can manage, as my head does a 360-degree spin of all the obstacles that stand in the way between here and tomorrow.
A full twenty-four hours in which life can play havoc.
The memories, the people he might encounter, the temptations …
every remote possibility is laid bare, and I meet myself coming backward in my futile efforts to thwart each eventuality.
“So where are you staying?” I ask.
“I’ll probably bed down at Rick’s,” he says. “I can’t justify a hotel, so I may as well take advantage of the few friends I have left.”
If it was meant to be a dig, he hits the right spot.
“Do you want me to come with you?” I ask.
“No,” he says, far too quickly. “There’s no point. Enjoy the peace and quiet with me out of your hair.” He looks at me with forced enthusiasm. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”
I watch the back of him as he leaves the room, stooping ever so slightly to get his six-foot-four frame under the oak beam of the kitchen door.
I don’t want him to go. I want to chase after him, jump up onto his shoulder, and attach myself like a desperate limpet, clinging on for dear life.
Because despite the shift in our relationship and the realization that we’re not the people we once were, Charlie is still my safest port in a storm.
Or maybe that’s what he’s made me believe.
“Let me know when you get there,” I call out, sounding like a neurotic mother.
“Will do,” he says, before the front door shuts behind him with a sobering ring of finality.
I slump against the kitchen counter with my hands clasped around my coffee mug, willing my mind to slow down, to shut off the incessant noise that is sounding a deafening cacophony inside my head.
What if he’s lying? Why wouldn’t he want me to go with him?
What if he’s not going to Rick’s? How will I find out?
What if he bumps into Frank? What if he drinks… ?
The questions are endless, and with no hope of definitive answers, I’m almost relieved when my mobile phone sounds, deterring me from the suspicions that are going around and around on a loop. Though when I see it’s my mother, my own rambling thoughts might well be the lesser of two evils.
I think about not answering it, but know that she’ll only keep calling until I pick up, so I might as well get it over and done with.
I wonder, as I so often do, how many other grown-up daughters feel like it’s a chore to speak to their mothers.
Are there actually women who go out of their way to spend time with their mothers out of love, not duty?
“Hi, Mum,” I chime, my tone perfected to make me sound like I’m in the middle of something.
“Oh, you’re busy,” she says, sounding disappointed. The point scoring has started already, and I immediately feel guilty.
I stifle a sigh. “No, I’m okay for a minute.”
“Well, I won’t keep you long,” she says as I go to sit down, knowing her long is very different to mine. “But I thought you’d want to know…”
She leaves it hanging there, to create a sense of drama, to elicit a reaction, to make my brain go into overdrive.
I already know that what she has to say is designed to cause me distress.
Her narcissistic streak thrives on being the bearer of bad news.
Her own happiness reliant on bringing everyone else down.
Especially me, it seems. Even as a child, if there was ever an opportunity to undermine me, she’d be first in line, always on hand to let me know my place, while elevating hers.
So misguided was she that her feelings were somehow more important than everyone else’s that she found it nigh-on impossible to stand to the side when someone else was taking center stage. Even when it came to my dad, who seemingly had to decide which of us to lavish his love and attention on.
If he ever attempted to praise me, she would be quick to dismiss my achievements. If he offered to take me shopping for a new dress, she would insist that I didn’t need one. Even when he was reading me a bedtime story, she would find a reason for him to stop.
“Our show’s about to start,” she’d shout up the stairs. “The dog needs taking out. There’s foxes in the bins. I think there’s someone in the garden.…” Her call for attention getting ever more desperate over the years.
My father would roll his eyes before declaring that it would be the last page, the pair of us doing little to stop ourselves from playing right into my mother’s hands and a minor role in the Anita Show.
And it seems that little has changed, because as much as I don’t want to give her the satisfaction of questioning her loaded statement, I can’t stop myself—and she knows it.
“About what?” I ask casually, as if it doesn’t matter.
“Well, it seems that your man is feeling better.…”
I shake my head, waiting for the pieces to fall into place. “My man?”
“Such wonderful news,” she goes on. “Hopefully they’ll be able to get a better understanding of what happened to him now.”
I grit my teeth, refusing to allow her precisely aimed bombs to reach their target. “I’m sorry, what are you talking about?” I can’t help but ask, swallowing my impatience away.
“The man who got hit by your car,” she says, as my vision blurs. “Marcus Harding. He’s out of his coma.”