Chapter 19 #2
‘This looks amazing,’ Ritchie gushed as Zoe finished putting the food out.
‘It’s only Sunday roast.’
‘Yeah, but you know I love your Sunday roast. I’ve missed them. Microwave lasagne just isn’t the same.’
‘You can cook.’ Zoe took a seat and poured herself some more wine.
‘I can’t be bothered. There doesn’t seem like much point when it’s only me. All that work and cleaning up and nobody to share it with.’
‘I think it’s important to keep some standards, and looking after yourself with good food is one of them. Cut corners where you like, but not with what you eat.’
‘I appreciated how you used to make sure I ate well, like when I’d come home tired and go for a pack of instant noodles from the cupboard and you’d be like, “Even if you want to eat those, at least stir-fry some vegetables or chicken to go with them!” You were right, of course.
I was definitely healthier when I lived with you. ’
‘You look fine.’ Zoe reached for the potatoes and spooned some onto her plate.
‘You look amazing. This place must suit you.’
‘I suppose it must. Thanks.’
‘I mean it.’
Zoe looked up and gave a tight smile. ‘OK. Thank you.’
‘So your neighbour…’ Ritchie said as he grabbed the bowl of carrots. ‘His wife’s preggers?’
‘Billie’s his daughter.’
‘Right. How old is she?’
‘Twenty-three…I think. It’s hard to keep track of all my mums, but she’s about that.’
‘He doesn’t look old enough to have a girl that age.’
‘I’ll tell him you said that – I’m sure it’ll make his day.’
‘So he pops over now and again to let you know about her?’
‘More or less. I mean, he’s a neighbour, so sometimes there are things happening locally that he tells me about.
He’s friends with my landlord as well, so there’s the odd occasion where I bump into him at Daffodil Farm too.
’ Sensing an inquisition and determined to head it off, Zoe changed the subject to one she knew Ritchie would be keen to discuss.
‘How’s the job hunt going? Any progress since I last spoke to you? ’
Zoe mentally buckled in. She knew from experience this was going to be a lengthy conversation, but while Ritchie was occupied on this, he wouldn’t be quizzing her about areas of her life she wanted to keep to herself. As she poured gravy over her meal, he began.
‘Not really. I mean, there’s this guy…you remember Blakey from the pub?
He knows a man who knows someone who works for the engineers on Fawcett Street.
They want someone for turning or cutting or something.
I dunno. I’m way overqualified for it. I might apply anyway and take it if nothing else comes up.
I’ve got my name down with all the employment agencies, but they keep finding things that are miles out, and I don’t see why I should spend hours driving every day.
My redundancy package will be all right, though I did want to go to Bali, you know, and there’d be enough in there.
Foster, who goes to the footie, buys and sells on that clothes website, makes a bit on the side – he reckons I ought to do that.
But can I be bothered with that? I ought to do a couple of years on the dole.
I mean, I’ve paid my dues over the years, and I’ve never claimed, and there’s people who’ve never done a day of work in their lives scrounging off my tax … ’
Zoe had stopped listening. She hadn’t meant to, but she was finding it hard to concentrate because Alex’s face at the front door as she’d thrown his flowers to one side kept swimming in front of her eyes. She would have to go and apologise, as soon as Ritchie was gone.
She chewed slowly, running the conversation through her mind.
Should she try to explain why she’d done it?
But how could she when she barely understood it herself?
She could pretend it was an accident, a slip, but she didn’t see that washing either because it was a very deliberate action, and he wouldn’t buy that excuse for a minute.
Perhaps the wisest course of action was to gloss over it, pretend it hadn’t happened and never mention it.
Perhaps he’d forget and they’d simply move on.
She supposed in time he might, but the look on his face told her otherwise.
And she’d know what she’d done, and she wasn’t sure she’d be able to forget it.
She knew she’d feel guilty every time she saw him for a long time yet.
Maybe she’d misread the situation. What if he hadn’t even noticed? Zoe only thought he had.
She suddenly became aware of a gap in Ritchie’s conversation and smiled vaguely at him. ‘How’s the chicken? I put half a lemon in it.’
‘It’s great,’ Ritchie said through a mouthful.
‘I saw Ellen from the newsagent’s at the end of the road where our first house was, and she said another factory near us was laying off as well.
It’s bad. You know what it is, don’t you?
It’s all this stuff being made in the Philippines and Taiwan and China and all these other places where people are earning pennies.
There’s no way we can compete with that.
No wonder this country is on its arse. What do they want?
Do they want us to work for pennies? Is that the only way around it?
You know, if I lived somewhere like that, I’d be a high-up manager with my qualifications.
It’s an insult, the jobs I’m expected to take.
I wouldn’t get out of bed for the wages of some of them… ’
Zoe nodded, but she’d stopped listening again. She glanced towards the window to see that the weather was dry and the sky promised that it would stay that way. She might be able to catch Alex at his excavation site if Ritchie didn’t stay too late.
‘It’s hard for you to understand,’ he continued, Zoe doing her best to pay attention again.
‘Because you’ve got a job that will never get rid of you.
People will always have babies, so you’ll never be out of work.
This redundancy has made me think – imagine how we’d have been up shit creek if we had?—’
He stopped dead, suddenly silent and awkward. ‘Like, I don’t want to say it, but you know what I mean. I’d never wish for what happened, but I’m relieved, in a way…Oh, shit, Zoe. I didn’t mean it like that.’
Zoe reached for her wine and knocked the remaining half of the glass back in one go. ‘I know what you mean. I suppose it would have been hard if we’d had a child and you’d lost your job, but we’d have found a way to manage.’
‘I didn’t mean that to sound the way it did.’
‘I know you didn’t,’ she replied stiffly, pouring some more wine into her glass. ‘You’re right, silver linings and all that. I was devastated at the time, but hey, at least we don’t have to feed our son on end-of-day bargains from the market because you lost your job, right?’
‘Zoe,’ he said quietly. ‘I always said we could try again. For another baby, I mean.’
There it was. Zoe was forcibly reminded of the very reason why their marriage had fallen apart after she’d lost her baby.
Because he didn’t understand what she was going through.
He didn’t understand that you didn’t just make another baby to replace the one you’d lost. He’d never seen their unborn child as a complete person as she had.
To him, the baby had been an abstract bump, one day there, the next gone.
Zoe had since realised that, in a way, neither of them were wrong or right in the way they’d viewed it, only different.
She couldn’t see it from his perspective, and he couldn’t see it from hers.
In the end, the two views had been so incompatible, so utterly beyond reconciliation that they’d both agreed the only thing to do was split.
‘But you didn’t want one,’ he added. ‘You said you didn’t want that.’
‘There’s no point in going over this again,’ she said. ‘Not now. What’s past is past.’
‘I had thought…’ he said, moving to take her hand across the table. She slipped it from his grasp and put it in her lap. ‘I always thought we might get around what happened and we might try again.’
‘I know you did, but I always told you that wasn’t going to happen.’
‘But you were happy to see me. Like today. You invited me.’
‘Because I thought you might need a friend. Because I care about you.’
‘I care about you?—’
‘I’m not sure it’s the same. I’m not sure you understand what I’ve been saying this whole time. We’re almost divorced and I’m not going to turn back now. We agreed it wouldn’t work.’
‘We said it wasn’t working, but we didn’t say it never would.’
‘I did. I thought the divorce was saying that too. You agreed to it.’
‘I know.’
She got up and brought the roasting tin to the table. ‘Do you want some more chicken? There’s loads here.’
‘Yeah,’ he said in a dull voice. ‘I’ll have some.’
He looked up at her as she scooped up a leg and put it onto his plate. ‘Why did you ask me to come here today?’
‘I told you why.’
‘That’s not it. I thought…’
‘You thought wrong. Sorry, Ritchie. It was only friendship.’
‘Are you seeing someone else?’
‘You think just because I say no to us getting back together there must be someone else?’
‘I don’t know. You tell me.’
‘There isn’t.’
She went to put the roasting tin back on the worktop, and when she returned to the table, he was smiling. She stared at him, not daring to ask why. He’d been so resentful, almost angry only a moment ago, and now he looked as if he didn’t have a care in the world.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I’ve been totally out of order. It means a lot to me that we’re still friends and we can still do stuff like this, and I don’t want to ruin it. Please scrub the last ten minutes and let’s start again.’
‘I can do that,’ Zoe said. At least, she wanted to.
‘Tell me about the village,’ he said. ‘What’s it like? Are there any village weirdos? There must be, right? Anyone with six fingers married to their sister?’
Zoe rolled her eyes and tried not to let his comments rile her.
It was the kind of flippant stereotype he’d always made jokes about.
He could only change so far, and as she didn’t have the energy to fight him on everything, she had to pick her battles.
‘Sorry to disappoint you, but everyone is perfectly normal and very nice.’
‘You’re telling me there’s nothing strange going on? These tiny places are always a bit backward, aren’t they?’
‘Only on TV.’
He paused, studying her for a moment. ‘You’ve changed.’
‘Of course I have. I was married and living in Manchester, and now I’m single living out in the countryside. I’m bound to have changed.’
‘I haven’t.’
Zoe considered his remark before she nodded. ‘I think you might be right.’
‘I don’t mean it as an insult,’ he said. ‘You’re different. I wonder…’ He shook his head. ‘Never mind.’
Zoe was beginning to see what a mistake it had been, inviting him over for lunch.
Perhaps she was giving him hope for something more, and that hadn’t been her intention at all.
And as always when they were together, she wasn’t comfortable with the direction their conversation kept taking.
What was worse, there was a part of her that still cared for him more than she ought to. One or two moments of weakness…
She shook herself. She wasn’t a teenager; she was a grown woman with common sense and self-control. She picked up the wine, stared at it for a moment, before putting the bottle down again and reaching for her glass of water. Better to be safe than sorry.