Chapter 4
MARGOT
Margot was making a shopping list and planning the meals for the week.
She liked to be organised before going to the supermarket, otherwise she’d wander aimlessly up and down the aisles and have Perry ask why she’d been out for so long.
It was amazing how a businessman as busy as he was had the time to keep tabs on his wife using text messages, the app on his phone, and the doorbell security camera as well as the never-ending questions.
It sounded ridiculous that she didn’t have a life outside this house apart from an online club.
It wasn’t as if the housework, the shopping, the admin tasks and what remained of her parenting duties now the boys were adults took up every hour of every day.
But, Perry had made sure she’d been kept so busy with all of those things over the years that the very few friends she’d had fallen away one by one.
Trinny, her closest friend from mother’s group when Sebastian and her son, Marty, were a couple of months old was the only one she was still in touch with, but even then Trinny was busy running a bridal gown business in Edinburgh and they barely got time to catch up on the phone let alone meet up.
Bethany, the mum she’d hit it off with the most after Alistair was born – the boys were born so far apart that the first group had already disintegrated and Trinny had returned to work five mornings a week – called now and again and they’d met up once a fortnight for a long time.
But that had faded away too with Bethany’s mother needing care and Bethany relocating to North Wales.
Tonight, Margot was determined not to miss book club. She was desperate to see her friends again and feel that little bit less alone, and she especially looked forward to seeing Howard, who had been so kind to her.
The first time she and Howard had talked about her marriage, she hadn’t intended to share her secrets with him.
They’d been chatting normally, mostly about his bookshop, when she’d suddenly jumped up and disappeared off the screen.
She’d thought she heard a noise upstairs but it must have been the trees outside in the wind or the washing machine on its spin cycle because there was no sign of Perry when she checked.
She’d gone back down to the basement but trying to act nonchalant hadn’t fooled Howard.
‘You look like you’ve seen a ghost,’ he’d said to her.
She was still shaking. It wasn’t like she was doing anything wrong, but Perry liked to keep her close.
He didn’t like her doing things without him or away from the house, and if he knew she was in an online world with people he hadn’t vetted, he definitely wouldn’t approve.
He would put a stop to it like he had her tennis and any shopping spree that was solo and too far away from home.
He often went out with her, suddenly able to be away from the office, or he invented something that desperately needed seeing to at the house when she’d still been at the stage of inviting friends over, which felt like forever ago now.
‘The wind here is terrible,’ she told Howard that night.
‘The trees are bashing the windows. And the washing machine is on late. There’s not normally any sound when I’m down here for book club.
’ She’d been reading and lost track of time, which was why the washing was on, because Perry wouldn’t be happy if he didn’t have the appropriate shirt to go with the right suit in the morning.
Howard wasn’t fooled, however, and asked her what was really going on. ‘Are you okay, Margot?’
Despite her best efforts her face betrayed her and all of the stress, the build-up of her feelings of failure, the misery inside her marriage, came to a head. ‘Actually, no. I’m very much not okay, Howard. And I haven’t been okay for a really long time.’
‘I’m a good listener,’ he’d said to her kindly. ‘And it’s just the two of us at the moment.’
The invitation was like an open door to a whole new part of her, being able to tell someone how she felt.
‘This is your time, Margot,’ Howard had said after she told him everything.
‘This book club is an adventure for me, but it sounds like it’s an escape for you.
And we are friends, all of us. We are here when you need us.
Never forget that your life is your own, nobody else’s.
Nobody has the right to take from you the way your husband seems to.
’ She knew all of this of course, but hearing a friend say it felt different.
‘Don’t lose yourself because of someone else,’ he’d finished.
He hadn’t made her feel silly for not leaving, or told her to simply walk out.
Somehow he’d understood just how hard it was for her.
They’d been interrupted then by Faye appearing on the screen, and another book club had got underway.
Perry came into the kitchen now while she was still making her shopping list. He had a late start at the office after an early morning meeting in his study.
He spotted the postcard from Sebastian on the kitchen bench and picked it up, but he put it down without reading what it said.
‘Nice to see Sebastian is still bumming around in New Zealand.’
She didn’t contradict him, or remind him that their eldest son was working hard over there. It just wasn’t worth it.
When Perry went into the hallway, she picked up the postcard and read it again.
The wording on the back was short and to the point, as it had to be with the limited space – a quick update of things he’d seen that week.
Sebastian’s phone calls were few and far between, but she loved that he sent a postcard every couple of weeks from wherever he was.
This wasn’t the first from New Zealand, but it was a different picture – the first had been a photograph taken at dusk showing the lights of a small town with water nearby and mountains in the background whereas this one was of Lake Wakatipu, which was stunning.
The image had her wanting to pack her bags and travel, something she’d never done solo because she’d never had the chance.
And not for the first time she yearned for that degree she’d missed out on, the year in America she would have experienced as part of it.
She fixed the postcard beneath a drawing pin on the pinboard so it was on display with the others. Seeing them all warmed her heart every time she looked at them.
‘There are too many bloody cards on that board.’ Perry was back and now and frantically searching the kitchen, moving on to checking the windowsill behind the curtains.
She ignored his remark about the postcards because she knew what he was looking for.
‘Your laptop is in the butler’s pantry. On the shelf behind the sink,’ she said.
‘I had to move it while I cleaned the inside of the windows.’ And the table, the floor, the backs of the chairs. She was nothing if not thorough.
He disappeared into the pantry but the next thing she heard was him roar a swear word that made her jump.
He came out, red in the face. He snatched up the tea towel she’d just changed and hung on the handle of the oven.
‘What happened to the bloody plumber?’ He wiped the front of his shirt vigorously.
She could only assume he’d not leaned over the sink carefully enough to reach the shelf behind.
The issue with the tap hadn’t been sorted yet so water kept pooling around the sink.
‘This is a priority!’ His arm shot out beside him, his fingers splayed, indicating the direction of the problem in the pantry as if she didn’t already know.
‘He’s due at midday today.’ She wanted to point out that plumbers were busy, and sometimes other people were a bigger priority, but Perry would never understand. He liked things to be done his way, right away.
His temper was another thing that had ramped up since they got together.
He shouted often, whether in frustration at something that had happened, something he had done, or something she had or hadn’t done.
He was never violent towards her, but he didn’t have to be.
The way he behaved made her world smaller by the day and slowly she’d shrunk into the background.
He put the strap of his laptop case over his shoulder while still swearing about his shirt and the ‘bloody water’ and the ‘incompetent plumber’. He gestured to the pinboard she was standing beside. ‘Time to thin that out.’
She said nothing, just stepped away as he muttered, ‘The boy could’ve had a proper career.’ The age-old argument reared its ugly head again. ‘They both could.’
Sebastian had a career. It just wasn’t the one Perry had wanted for his eldest son. And so did Alistair, but Perry didn’t like his choice either.
‘They’re both happy,’ she said without looking at him. She didn’t usually argue the point, but when her sons rather than her were being criticised, she couldn’t stay silent for long.
‘Yeah, well, happy doesn’t pay the bills, does it.’
He’d probably heard that sort of thing as a boy from his own father.
Had it really encouraged him or had it ever made him feel so down about himself that he wanted to run away?
Just like their sons had done. They both lived far away from home and Sebastian had put as many miles between them as possible.
She was just glad that her boys had each other.
They got on well and always had done, despite the age gap of nine years.
She never wanted them to lose that connection.
Perry had accused her many a time of mollycoddling them and babying them rather than turning them into proper men.
But parenting was the one thing she did her way and she’d kept strong on that.