Chapter 10
Seb had been close to tears when he got back home from the restaurant, dripping wet, waking Eva who was asleep in the living room. ‘Have you seen Rosie, Mum? Is she here?’
That night he’d got away with telling Eva he and Rosie had just had a row, that everything would be fine. Eva didn’t believe him, of course, but it was late. When Eddy rang to say that Rosie was safe, Eva knew without asking that Seb needed to be alone.
‘Try to sleep,’ she said before she left.
Tonight, when he lets himself into her house, she’s sitting next to the flickering wood burner, a handmade quilt over her knees, almost as if she had been expecting him.
As she slowly closes the book on her lap, clocks the overnight bag slung over his shoulder and turns her strong blue eyes on her only child, he knows that he’s going to have to tell her everything.
He sits down opposite his mum, pressing the heels of his hands into his eye sockets so he doesn’t have to look at her, and tells her a version of the truth.
He tells her that they hadn’t had sex in so long, that Rosie seemed simply disinterested in their marriage, in him.
He hears the pathetic whine in his voice as he says those words.
He tells her what he told Rosie, that Abi’s website had fallen into his lap.
He tells her how sorry he is, how much he regrets it.
He doesn’t tell her there were so many times he nearly turned back.
How he was close to not calling Emma– Abi’s work name– from outside the cafe as she’d instructed him to do.
Almost didn’t press the buzzer to the flat and almost didn’t walk up the flights of stairs to the tiny central London studio.
But his body kept pushing him forward like it had already disassociated entirely from his brain.
He’d noticed his wedding ring just before he knocked on her door.
What a fucking cliché. He slipped it into his coat pocket and managed to smile back at the blonde woman who answered the door in a silk kimono.
Her feet were bare, tattooed in complicated patterns.
So different to Rosie’s; he couldn’t stop looking at them.
‘It’s your first time?’ she asked, still smiling, once they were both inside.
Seb tried to talk but just kind of spluttered and nodded, which made her smile more. He fumbled with the money which she took from him with ease, tucking it into her pocket.
‘It’s OK to be nervous,’ she said. ‘Would you like some fizzy water?’
He was glad to bookend the appointment with a shower, washing both the before and after Seb away so when he left the apartment he wasn’t sure who he was any more.
He was just a man who in ninety minutes had replaced his desperate craving with something new, a dull ache he couldn’t name.
As he waited for a train back to Waverly, the thought occurred to him that perhaps what he had just done wasn’t so bad after all.
Emma was bright, kind and, yes, very attractive, but the whole thing was transactional.
She was entirely attentive, but he knew that she didn’t have any more feeling for him than the basic affection she’d maybe feel for a cafe barista.
Perhaps he could think of sex with Emma as a kind of physical therapy– relief for body and spirit.
Something Rosie might not need but he did, like visiting an osteopath or getting some acupuncture.
All the fierce moralizing about it was a waste of time, a cultural obsession that had surely caused a lot of harm and done little good.
As an affair was a relationship– that meant being attentive to the subtleties of someone else, their smell, their sense of humour, their values, and sharing those same intimacies with that person– it would engage brain and heart.
That was the difference, he told himself.
That reasoning was what made him visit a second time.
But now, lying in the gloom of Eva’s spare room, he realizes it doesn’t matter what he thought about it.
For Rosie, it wasn’t about Seb and his body, it was about her and it was about him, and now it’s about her friend.
There is no justification or explanation that will change that.
From her point of view, he has betrayed her in the most degrading way possible.
Seb wakes at four a.m., pulls on tracksuit bottoms and a faded T-shirt, lets himself out and walks home.
The air is chill, and Seb starts to panic as he walks, picking up the pace, imagining getting home and finding empty beds, missing passports.
As soon as he’s through the front door he takes the stairs three at a time, but there, of course, they are.
Rosie and Greer fast asleep, Rosie clinging on to their daughter like she’s charging her own gravitational force, the one that will keep her from drifting away from them all entirely.
He strokes Greer’s hair, and she stirs slightly before he goes to check on her brother and big sister.
He goes downstairs without turning on any lights, sits on the kitchen sofa and looks up how to delete the search history on his phone.
He waits for his phone to finish deleting everything, all those women lurking in its synthetic memory, and where he used to feel a spike of excitement, he now just feels hollow.
Electronically cleansed, he waits for the first glimmer of sunrise before getting up to unload the dishwasher, put the kids’ porridge on, fold the washing, just about outpacing his despair with order and movement.
He hears Greer laughing first, and then Heath grumpily shouting at her to be quiet.
They’ll all be awake now. His hand shakes as he carries a mug of tea upstairs to Rosie.
Greer is sitting up in bed, her hair a tangled halo, a schoolbook in her lap. Rosie is lying on her back, listening.
He’s a shit.
‘Daddy!’
‘Morning, my loves.’ Seb watches Rosie turn to look at him, her hand shielding her eyes, weak protection against the morning light. Her face is creased with sleep. She looks exhausted, confused. ‘Let’s let Mummy sleep a bit more– why don’t you read to me downstairs?’
‘This book is boring.’ She throws it on the floor as she starts to shuffle off the bed. ‘Can we play witches’ school instead?’
‘We can play whatever you want.’
While Greer is cutting out a green frog for her cauldron and Heath is flicking through a magazine at the table, Rosie comes into the kitchen. She’s showered, perfumed, dressed for work and is moving quickly. The Monday morning panic snapping at her heels, she’s already fighting the brand-new week.
‘Where’s Sylv?’ she asks Seb, her voice crackling with tension.
‘She’s not down yet.’
Rosie tuts and turns to the bottom of the stairs. ‘Sylv, you up?’
Sylvie shouts something indecipherable back, which makes Rosie tut again. Seb moves to the kitchen door. He asks quietly, ‘I thought maybe we could not go to work today?’
She looks at him, but he can tell she can’t see him; she’s blind with anger. ‘Why?’
‘I was thinking we could talk…’
She looks like she wants to spit in his face. ‘I don’t want to talk.’ She pushes past him, reminding Heath, ‘Sweetheart, it’s Monday, you’re supposed to be in your football kit, remember?’
Sylvie finishes her geography homework at the kitchen table while Seb changes into work trousers and a shirt.
The thought of staying here, his betrayal everywhere, fills him with more dread than going out into the world.
He’ll go to work. He loads the dishwasher while Sylvie looks up facts about volcanoes on his phone.
‘Oh, you got a new message, Dad. Auntie Anna says, “Seb, we need to talk…”’ she reads before he clumsily snatches the phone, knocking her hand too hard.
‘Ow, Daddy!’ She flinches dramatically, rubbing her arm, his phone clattering to the tiled floor. He picks it up but doesn’t read the message from Anna, lets it rest on top of the other unread messages and calls from Eddy.
‘Sorry, Sylv.’ His hand is shaking as he comes towards her, reaching to touch her, but she pushes him away before leaving to walk to school.
When Seb opens the front door, their neighbour Martin is shepherding his daughters along the bumpy pavement on their pink bikes.
‘Morning, Seb!’ Martin says, smiling from his crouched position next to his youngest, who is balanced on stabilizers at a precarious angle. ‘Good weekend?’
Seb manages to nod and say, ‘Fine, thanks, Martin. You?’
Martin grimaces and says something about his in-laws before he stands up straight and shouts at his elder daughter, ‘Jessie, I asked you to wait!’
Seb gratefully turns left, away from Martin, taking the longer route to school.
He isn’t walking alone for long before Vita calls his name. ‘Sebbo!’ She crosses the road towards him, her son, Luca, silently following.
Seb looks at the squirming kid first. ‘Morning, Luca,’ he says while Vita arranges herself on Seb’s arm.
‘So, how was it?’
Seb, blank, replies, ‘How was what?’
‘PLATE!’ Vita squeals while simultaneously rolling her eyes.
‘I’m so jealous you got that reservation, but Anna’s always so on it, isn’t she…
’ And while Vita witters away, they greet other parents.
Seb scans their faces, and he is relieved to notice that nothing’s changed.
Some, like Vita, perform friendship; others are slightly formal.
The world is turning, just as it should, but no one else apart from Seb seems to notice the strange new tilt.
Mrs Greene is already at her desk and, like every morning, she stands to slide open her little glass doors fully as soon as she sees Seb. ‘Morning, Mr Kent,’ she says, smiling. She’s not once called him Seb.