Chapter 46
SHE LEFT AN HOUR later. Suddenly, having dreaded the moment she would be forced to leave, she wanted to get home and have the conversation with Mungo.
Having Googled flight times, she threw her clothes into a bag. Everything else would be shipped back by the movers: recipe books, dresses, old prints of the C?te d’Azur that had hung in the dining room, memorable pieces of china, mugs and bowls, the marble Buddha, the tiger’s tooth; the collection of a life that Maggie didn’t want to be thrown away by strange hands as if they meant nothing.
‘Love you,’ Jamie told her, as she reached for her seatbelt. ‘Text me when you get to the airport?’
‘My phone’s dead.’ She’d found it but the battery had gone, which meant she was going to have to navigate the route to Nice by memory.
‘Fine, ring me when you get home.’
She crunched down the drive and only got lost twice, then flew through check-in and to the gate all the while rehearsing what she was going to say to her husband.
It wasn’t just that she didn’t want to go to another fertility clinic, she knew, as the plane flew over northern France. It was that she didn’t want to go to another clinic with him . She didn’t want to be married to him. Mungo had spent a fortnight not speaking to her because she’d always agreed with him on this subject. But she couldn’t give in any more. That was her decision.
She’d been unhappy for so long, attributing the unhappiness she felt to their fertility problems because that was easier than blaming their relationship. It would be all right when she was pregnant, she’d thought every morning. It would be all right when they had their baby. Now she understood that it wouldn’t be, that a baby would only exacerbate the simple problem: they had once been in love and now were not.
She rolled sentences around in her head.
‘Mungo, if we’re honest, we haven’t been happy for a while …’
That was probably too much to kick off with.
‘Mungo, it’s not you, it’s me.’
Definitely not. And also, it was a bit him.
‘Mungo, I slept with someone else last night and I’ve realized we need to go in separate directions.’
Not that. She wouldn’t mention Gray.
‘Mungo, I cannot spend the rest of my life with someone who corrects people when they mispronounce our surname.’
Probably not that either.
She ran through Gatwick and onto the train, then a bus, willing it to go faster through the Sunday traffic to Battersea, watching families stroll back from the park from the top deck, hand-in-hand, laughing. It was a sight she’d winced at before, so tender at her lack that she avoided the park on weekends and stuck to the weekdays when it was full of commuting cyclists and old men smoking by the bandstand, but now she felt anxious to get home, to free them both.
‘Mungo?’ she said, as she pushed open their front door.
It was strange being back. Familiar and alien at the same time. There was a pile of junk leaflets on the hallway table and Mungo’s suit jacket slung over the banisters. Through the kitchen window, she could see the pink azalea in their garden had come out.
‘Mungo?’
She proceeded upstairs to his office on the first floor, following the sound of blaring trumpets on Radio 3.
‘Mungo?’ she tried a third time, and he turned around from his desk.
‘Hi,’ she said, and felt another spasm of nerves, as if she was introducing herself to a stranger.
‘You’re back early,’ he said over the back of his chair, making no move to stand up.
‘My phone battery died so I couldn’t ring, but … I wanted to get back today, I wanted to come back early.’
‘You did?’ His face lifted, and he came towards her, reaching for her hands. ‘Oh, Maggie, darling, I’m so glad. I knew you’d come round and I’m sorry I’ve been off for the past few days but I really do think, now you’re back, now you’ve had a break, we have to carry on, and I’ve got the details of that other doc—’
‘Mungo, stop.’
He frowned at her unusual sternness.
‘I’m sorry, I should have been clearer. I’ve come back early to talk to you, to say that …’ she paused and swallowed, ‘to say that I’m not sure there’s enough of us left.’
His frown gave way to a bewildered stare. ‘What?’
‘We’ve tried, Mun, we’ve tried for years . And I don’t just mean for a baby, I mean us.’
‘Magg—’
‘But it’s not making either of us happy,’ she pushed on, ‘and the past few weeks have given me the space to see that.’
‘So … so … so you’re suggesting we give all this up?’ He released her hands and flapped an arm around the room. ‘We give up this house, our life, everything we talked about?’
‘I’m allowed to change my mind, Mungo,’ she replied quietly, hating how childish it sounded. But did a promise they made to one another seven years ago have to bind them forever? She thought back to the advice Jamie had given her about decisions in France. She’d made the decision to marry Mungo for various reasons – for safety, for security, for approval, because he was original and kind and she loved him, and she believed they wanted the same things. But now they wanted different things, and she could make a different decision.
‘I think you need to give it some time,’ he replied, and she almost laughed because he sounded like a parent offering advice. ‘It feels to me like you’re making a hasty, emotional decision after an emotional time away. You’re not in the right frame of mind to make any major life changes.’
‘Right,’ she said firmly, with a flash of temper, ‘so I’m rational enough to start another round of IVF, in your eyes, but I’m not rational enough to make a decision about our marriage?’
‘Yes,’ Mungo replied, before yelping, ‘No! No, that’s not what I mean. You’re twisting my words. Look, listen …’
‘Which one?’ Maggie asked coldly.
‘What?’
‘Do I need to look or listen?’
‘Oh, for goodness’ sake. Look, why don’t we give it a week? You’re back now, back from your holiday and you need some tim—’
‘ Holiday? Mungo, my aunt died and I went to sort the hotel out. A holiday is where you lie on a sunbed drinking pi?a coladas for eight hours a day.’
‘Well, still, you’ve been away, gallivanting with Jamie, and I’ve been stuck here, wondering about our next steps, trying to work out our future, and now you say you don’t even want that future. It seems funny timing, Maggie, that’s all, and I don’t think we should decide anything now. What I’m going to suggest we do is have dinner, and I’ll open a bottle of wine, and we can talk about our options in a calm and sensible manner, and give it a few da—’
A wave of exhaustion almost made Maggie’s knees buckle. Suddenly, she couldn’t stand to be in that room any longer, in their house, where they’d made so many plans that hadn’t worked out. She needed to get outside, away from him.
She looked up sadly. ‘I can’t do this, Mun. I don’t want to be told what to do. I don’t want to be in this marriage because it isn’t working out for either of us, and one of us has to be the first to admit it.’
‘Maggie!’
He shouted after her as she hurried downstairs, picked up her overnight bag from the hall and slammed the door behind her before remembering, yet again, that her phone was out of battery.
No phone, and no desire whatsoever to go to her mother’s house and explain the situation. But there was somewhere else she could stay for a while.
With a sigh, she walked back to the bus stop and waited for one that was heading east.