Chapter 6
‘I’LL GO, YOU stay here and have a nice lie-in.
’ Noah kissed her before sliding out from under the duvet, letting a puff of cool air into her warm and cosy cocoon.
She stretched out across their double bed, spreading herself out in a star shape.
She heard Raffy and Noah whisper outside the bedroom as he pulled the door to, then the sound of their footsteps as they went downstairs.
She knew he would be at his charming best today after losing his shit so badly the night before, and she intended to make the most of it.
If she had to put up with being wrenched by the hair and shouted at then the least he could do was give her a lie-in and spoil her for a day or so to make up for it.
Helena closed her eyes and willed herself to go back to sleep. Opportunities to lie in were almost unheard of – gone were the days when she’d wake naturally at nine or ten at the weekend.
Irritatingly, she found herself wide awake.
Thoughts of yesterday’s argument flashed through her mind.
A slideshow of similar incidents was building up in her memory bank, each as petty and vitriolic as the last. She wondered whether any of her friends’ partners were similarly temperamental, if that was the right word for it.
Not for the first time she wished she had maintained even one of her friendships from her life before Noah, so she could actually talk to someone about all this.
She wondered how many of the most charming men around, and women too, were secretly teetering on the brink of hysteria and rage with only the slightest and most innocent provocation.
At times it seemed almost impossible to predict what might set him off.
At other times, like last night, she could kick herself for having done something he would so obviously see as inflammatory.
She would redouble her efforts to make him happy.
She just had to try harder to keep the peace.
She would make it her mission not to antagonise him.
After all, she knew by now how to avoid irritating him. He had told her often enough.
He liked the ironing to be done a certain way, the cupboards to be immaculately tidy, the spices ordered alphabetically, his boxers folded, his socks paired correctly in the sock drawer.
He liked his meals to be on time and freshly prepared.
He didn’t like going out so they rarely left the house.
He wanted it to be just the three of them at the weekend.
He had banned Raffy from going on playdates, saying he didn’t want him at random people’s houses, somewhere he hadn’t been and with parents in charge that he hadn’t even met.
Helena often felt sorry for Raffy that he wasn’t given the opportunity to socialise with his peers outside of school.
Especially when he begged her to organise playdates, and she saw the look on his face as she quietly explained that, yet again, he was unable to go to a friend’s birthday party.
But at the end of the day, Raffy was Noah’s son, not hers, and she respected his right to make these parenting decisions, to do whatever he felt best for his son, even if she didn’t always agree.
She often wondered whether it was nature or nurture that made Noah the way he was.
His father had only been on the scene for the first seven years of his life, but they were such formative years.
He was an alcoholic with a gambling problem, who had often been physically violent with Noah, his brother, and his mum.
Eventually, when his mother had discovered he had used all their savings, all the inheritance from her parents, lying that he had put them in an investment fund until finally confessing it was all gone, she had kicked him out.
It sounded like it had been a long and gruelling journey to get there, but he had eventually ended up in rehab.
Noah had never spoken to him since the day his mother forced him to leave.
She cut him a lot of slack, she knew that, but she felt so much of his behaviour must be connected to growing up with a father like that, not to mention the grief he had felt losing Kate.
The trauma of losing his wife so tragically and unexpectedly must really have affected his mental health.
She knew he probably would have benefited, would still benefit, from some kind of therapy but she also knew that he was the least likely person to go.
She let him off the hook more times than she should because of what he had been through.
She often wondered whether she would be so patient if he didn’t have those excuses.
Sometimes she wondered if it really had made a difference.
What if he had been like this all along?
But she was as sure as she could be that the anger he so clearly harboured inside was a result of his life experience just as much as his genes.
It was a strange twist of fate that both Helena and Noah had been grieving at the time that they met.
Helena’s mother had died around the same time as Kate.
She often wondered if her mum had somehow had something to do with that chance encounter.
A year had passed in which life had carried on in its unrelenting way, but they were both heavy with emotion and sadness underneath the surface.
Together they had helped each other to process what had happened.
They had talked about Bridget’s sudden death from a brain aneurism.
Brutal in its instantaneousness, she had died in the middle of the night.
They talked about the loss of her father, who had died when she was thirteen, from pancreatic cancer.
Unlike Noah, who had a younger brother, albeit one he was not at all close to, Helena had never had any siblings.
For a long time after her father’s death, it had just been the two of them, Helena and Bridget.
They had been about as close as a mother and daughter could be.
Similar in more ways than Helena had often been happy to admit, they had been best friends, confidantes, wingmen for each other.
Her loss had been felt deeply by Helena, and meeting Noah had taken on even more of a significance, filling the seemingly bottomless crater of her mother’s absence.
Kate’s death had been sudden and unexpected, just like Bridget, but Noah had had to deal with the added horror of telling Raffy that his mum was dead.
He had been alone in a foreign country, with a one-year-old son.
It was no wonder he was struggling. They had talked about the hideous process of telephoning relatives and friends to pass on the news, organising funerals, sorting through possessions, the loneliness, the desperate, painful longing to see them again, the raw agony of grief.
It had been comforting to know that they were in it together.
To know that they could support each other through their pain as they began to learn to live with it.
They understood in a way that others around them, untouched as yet by the death of someone so close, could not.
It was this that she reminded herself of when she felt disheartened, when she worried that her relationship was unstable.
She reasoned with herself and made excuses, unwilling to contemplate the reality that she had chosen someone who could be so emotionally unavailable, so controlling.
Who would choose those character traits for their other half?
But she didn’t want anyone else. She had chosen him, for good and for bad.
And with him, came Raffy, and for him she would put up with pretty much anything.
The harder she had fallen in love with Noah, the more impossible it had become to even think of leaving.
She couldn’t contemplate it. Her life was here now, she had given up her past existence.
The old Helena was nothing but a distant memory.
Her friends had drifted away, they had fought for her attention for a while, but she had been so completely under Noah’s spell that she had failed to make time for them, losing herself in her new-found domestic bliss.
Helena had moved her entire life to be with Noah and Raffy and she knew that there was no going back, she had known it from the moment she had agreed to come to Hambleton with him.
She had known that it was forever, and in truth there was nowhere else she would rather be.
Having given up on going back to sleep, she spent an hour or so reading in bed. After a while, Noah bought her up a freshly brewed coffee. Another peace offering.
‘Thanks,’ she said, looking up at him over the edge of her book.
‘Look Helena, I’m sorry about last night. I really am.’
‘Mmmm.’ She looked at him searchingly.
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ he bristled. ‘You know I am.’
She sighed, remembering her mission was to keep the peace. ‘I know.’
‘I’m under so much stress at the moment.’
‘I know you are.’
‘Work is really getting me down.’
She nodded.
‘You know how I can get…’ he tailed off.
He looked sheepish, the grooves under his eyes shadowed. She hoped he had had an awful night’s sleep too. She had been tossing and turning, replaying their fight over and over in her mind.
‘Look, it’s okay,’ she smiled. She wanted to tell him that he needed to talk to her when he was angry, that he needed to recognise when he was out of control of himself and take himself off to calm down.
She wanted to tell him that he needed to see a counsellor, or a therapist, but that would set him off again.
She would rather move on and have a nice day, putting the argument behind them. Yet again.