I was barely aware of the door closing behind her. I was too busy tugging Nick’s hand away from Ethan’s jaw, which was mashed against the kitchen wall, while his whole body slumped in an attitude, not so much of passive, but of insolent resistance.
‘… So you can fuck off back to whatever hole you’ve crawled out of and don’t even think of coming back here till you’ve cleaned up your fucking act, apologized to our neighbours and stopped being a fucking little…’ He stared into Ethan’s eyes and Ethan stared back, stony with contempt, ‘… fuck-up!’
Nick seemed to remember himself then, giving Ethan’s chin a final token shove and stalking out of the room.
Ethan gave a strange, contemptuous laugh, which quavered, halfway through, into a sob. A skein of snot drained out of his nostril and onto the floor, as if a tap had been turned on.
‘Darling, please…’
I took a step towards him and put out my hand but he recoiled, throwing me a wounded glance, before slamming out of the back door.
I ran round the other way to collect his boots from the living room and yanked the front door open.
‘Ethan!’ I called, my voice hoarse with tears. ‘Here, at least take your…’
But he continued walking away from me down the path, the only sign he’d heard me at all his raised middle finger.
Nick was clearing the tea things away from the table when I returned.
‘I thought we could have chilli for dinner,’ he said, his manner casual, his tone placatory. ‘There’s some mince in the freezer and it’d save going shopping.’
You’re a reptile, I thought.
‘I’m not hungry,’ I said. My head was still reeling at what had just happened.
‘Oh, come on,’ he wheedled, ‘you will be later. You love my chilli, you know you do.’
He took a step towards me and made to catch hold of my hand. I jerked it away.
‘How could you do that?’ I hissed, my throat constricting with rage. ‘How could you physically abuse our son? And humiliate him? You know he’s left now, don’t you? Probably for good.’
There was a beat in which Nick registered and then even seemed to savour my anger. I held my breath.
‘Him humiliated?’ he whispered furiously, his face so close to mine that I could almost taste the tannin on his breath. ‘What about me? I’ve never felt so ashamed. And as for that poor woman…’
‘Yeah, ’cause that’s what this is really about, isn’t it? Imogen. Lady of the Manor. No one must upset her highness, must they? You care more about what she thinks than you do about your own son. Then again, she’s your type, isn’t she? Blonde, clever, posh.’
‘For God’s sake, Karen, let it go…’ He was looming over me now, I could see spittle glistening on his top lip; see the tiny hairs sprouting on his perfectly sculpted jaw. In that moment I hated him.
‘It’s nothing to do with Imogen,’ he went on. ‘She’s happily married and so am…’
Our eyes met and his voice trailed off.
‘So are we…’ he finished, flatly. ‘Or we would be if you weren’t so fucking keen on holding a grudge. One mistake, I made, one. One. And Christ, have I paid dear for it. You in hospital, everybody hating me, my son hating me, your pots smashed to smithereens, the fucking neighbours… the gossip…’
‘The gossip?’ I repeated incredulously, ‘The gossip? Is that all you cared about? What people said? Jesus Nick, the stakes were a bit higher for some of us. Or didn’t you notice?’
He stepped back from me then and cast a despairing glance at the ceiling, as if this were exactly the sort of irrational stuff he had come to expect from me.
‘Oh Karen,’ he said, shaking his head sorrowfully. ‘You really can’t see it, can you?’
‘See what?’
‘How it looks from planet Earth.’
‘I don’t know what you mean.’
‘It’s your reputation I’m trying to protect, love, not mine…’
I shook my head as if to clear it of a mist.
‘It’s you who needs the fresh start. The clean slate. We’ve come here for you. That’s why it’s so…’ He lifted his hands as if in supplication.
‘So… what?’ I said warily.
‘So disappointing, when you shoot yourself in the foot like this.’
‘Like what?’ I shook my head, baffled.
‘When people reach out to you. Kind people, good people. Like Imogen. Like Min and Ray – and all you do is throw their goodwill back in their faces.’
‘That’s not true – I’m trying to make friends with people here. I am…’
‘Oh, really? Is that why you bawled Ray out in his own kitchen…?’
‘I didn’t mean to, I was worried. I said I was sorry…’
‘And why you just treated Imogen like something you found on the sole of your shoe? Not to mention standing by simpering while your waster of a son humiliated her…’
I saw then what he was doing: turning everything inside out and upside down; making me the crazy person and him the arbiter of reason. It would have worked, too, if he hadn’t invoked Ethan. But I wasn’t so far gone that I couldn’t see how messed up it was for a father to pin his son against the wall and choke him; or, when the son has left the house – perhaps for good – to start discussing what’s for dinner like nothing has happened. And that’s why I started to scream.
18
‘… So we’re splitting up. I’m sorry to spring it on you, and I’m really sorry I had to do it in this Godforsaken hole… but I couldn’t have you back to our place because we’d all have been walking on eggshells.’
I could hardly believe what I was hearing but Jude stared at me levelly from across the table, her expression one of weary resignation. If her crying was done with, the signs of her heartbreak were still very much in evidence in the persistent blotchiness of her carefully made-up face, the inch of regrowth in her immaculately dyed hair and in her general air of defeat.
‘Jude, I’m so sorry.’
She was right it was a Godforsaken hole – a sushi chain on the rain-lashed High Street in Reading. I had been halfway to London before Jude’s phone had stopped going to voicemail and I was able to tell her I was on my way to her place for gin and sympathy. In my discombobulated state it had taken me a while to understand what she was telling me – sotto voce and half in code, because she was still at work and she didn’t want everyone to know her business – but eventually I’d understood that for once my rock and helpmate was, herself, in need of support.
Nick had endured my screaming for all of thirty seconds. He’d made a token effort to calm me down, but when I’d pushed him away, he had stalked off upstairs and I was left pacing back and forth, fists clenched, muttering to myself like a madwoman. For a moment I’d felt that itch of destruction again; actually caught myself scanning the room for something to smash. And then I remembered where such behaviour had led me last time and the effect it had had on Ethan – concern for whose welfare had been the very thing that had sparked this rage in the first place – and I stopped myself. I had a hasty and nerve-wracking hunt for my bag, worried for a moment that I had left it in the bedroom and would have to endure the ignominy of storming in and searching for it with Nick looking on, but then I found it, spewing tissues and receipts next to the sofa. Piling them on Nick’s pristine mid-century coffee table as a token insubordinate gesture, I zipped up the bag and left.
Jude gave me a jokey ‘Aw shucks’ shrug, as if her bad news were just one of those things and the pathos of the gesture broke my heart. I put my hand across the table and covered hers, noticing as I did so, the pale indentation made by her absent wedding ring.
‘Don’t you bloody start!’ she said, frowning fiercely into my brimming eyes. ‘I’m looking to you for a bit of backbone.’
‘I know, I know. I’m sorry,’ I smiled, sniffed and pushed my tears back into the corners of my eyes with my fingertips. ‘It’s just… I don’t know… if you and Dave can split up…’
> ‘Are you kidding me? You wouldn’t have stayed with Dave for two weeks, never mind twenty-five years. No one would. He’s a fucking nightmare.’
She was right. I’d have been out within thirty seconds of Dave starting his wedding speech. The guests had all howled with laughter, me included, as he insulted everyone from his mother-in-law to the maid of honour – Jude’s half-Indonesian line manager from work, whom he’d nicknamed ‘Dusky Denise’ – to Jude’s Jewish relatives, to his own brother, recently diagnosed with ME, whom Dave congratulated on going into ‘remission’ for long enough to enjoy a three-course dinner and a free bar. He’d insulted Jude, too, of course – calling her a ball-breaker and a feminazi, and insisting that she had, nevertheless, begged him to marry her; wearing him down with repeated proposals, until he had eventually capitulated. He’d claimed it would be Jude carrying him over the threshold, not the other way round, but that – you know – a man had to do what a man had to do, and the upside was she’d do anything in the sack, even… yeah, that.
It had been hilarious but also bizarrely touching because no one doubted, even as Dave slagged her off and Jude cut her eyes at him, that they were crazy about each other. Their first dance was to ‘Truly Madly Deeply’ by Savage Garden and for all that they began with a lot of mugging and silly exaggerated waltz-moves; by the end of the track they were smooching with their eyes closed as if they were the only two people in the world.
To be fair, I’m not sure Dave had had it so much easier over the years. Jude could be spoiled and competitive and sometimes shallow. She had a wardrobe like a supermodel’s, but never anything to wear. She’d book the swankiest of restaurants and roll her eyes if you under-tipped. She could bitch for England – I knew for a fact she had bitched about me – and although I’d probably deserved it, I still cringed at the betrayal. But when I’d had my breakdown she’d stepped up. She had visited me often, in Chalford House, bringing copies of Grazia, expensive toiletries and illicit cigarettes. And instead of talking in the hushed compassionate voice that other visitors adopted as soon as the lobby doors slid closed behind them, she used the same frank, gossipy tone as if we were lunching in Selfridges. We would speculate about the sex lives of the nurses and lay sportsmen’s bets on the rehabilitation prospects of the other ‘clients’ and she would beg me to slip her half a Fluoxetine to help get her through another weekend with Dave. For the time she was with me, she made me feel as though it was me that was sane, and the world that was mad. She had been there for me, and I knew now, looking at her across the table, her face drawn, her eyes bloodshot, her manicure a fortnight overdue, that the time had come for me to return the favour.
‘So you’re absolutely at the end of the road then…’ I said, tentatively. ‘You don’t think it’s worth trying—’
‘Don’t you dare say “counselling”.’
‘Yeah, I suppose… Dave and counselling…’ We both winced.
‘He’s so fucking stubborn,’ she said bitterly. ‘Stubborn and repressed. I hate that he must have been unhappy for months – years maybe, but he never told me. He just battened down the hatches and carried on making terrible jokes and letting me believe it was just a mid-life crisis.’
‘So there’s definitely no one else?’
‘I wish there was,’ she said, and then, remembering, bit her lip. ‘Honestly Kaz, I know it was a huge deal for you that Nick was unfaithful, I get that, but at least the fallout brought him to his senses…’
I thought of the cosy scene I had witnessed earlier in the day – Nick flirting for England, Imogen lapping it up. He had not struck me as a changed man.
‘… But if there’s no one else,’ Jude continued, ‘if Dave’s not gay and he hasn’t found religion and he doesn’t want an open relationship or kinky sex or even a trial separation, well there’s no hiding place, is there? It’s not about what he does want. It’s about what he doesn’t want. And that’s me!’ She pressed her fingertips against her mouth and I thrust the condiments tray out of the way and grasped her other hand tightly.
‘Come on,’ I said, ‘let’s get out of here. We need a drink.’
‘All right, ladies?’ A man in a black nylon sports jacket, who had been propping up the bar in The Chequerboard pub, turned and leered at us as we walked in.
‘I told you we should have found a wine bar,’ I muttered to Jude. The man leaned across the bar.
‘Can we have some service here please, Michael?’ he called into the gloom, seeming to relish his status as the pub’s sole regular.
‘What’ll it be, girls?’
‘We’ll get our own, thanks’ said Jude.
‘There’s no strings attached, if that’s what you’re thinking,’ he said, his eyes nevertheless lingering appreciatively on Jude’s legs.
‘Strings?’ Jude gawped.
‘Leave it, Jude,’ I murmured.
Jude turned to the barman, a lad of no more than eighteen with a wispy goatee and a lot of freckles, who was by now awaiting our order.
‘Sorry,’ she said, with a polite smile, ‘could you remind me what year this is?’
He looked slightly taken aback.
‘Er… Two thousand and nineteen?’
Jude shook her head, as if to rid herself of a hallucination. Mr Smooth, who had by now grasped that his largesse was unwelcome, even if he still hadn’t worked out why, gave his newspaper a contemptuous rattle and retreated behind it.
Jude turned to me.
‘Gin and tonic…?’
I’d left the Renault parked up in the town, hardly thinking in my eagerness to escape, of a return journey at all, let alone one the same evening. I wouldn’t be calling Nick for a lift that was for sure. Still there were always taxis…
‘Make them doubles,’ I said.
We installed ourselves at a table on a carpeted platform behind an ugly balustrade and after clinking glasses and sipping our drinks, stared dolefully at the frosted glass window pane, etched in mirror-writing with the phrase STIRIPS & SENIW.
‘So, you’re staying at Anita’s?’ I said.
‘Yeah. She’s away with work quite a lot, and it’s handy for the Northern Line.’
‘I’m surprised Dave let you move out, when it was him who…’
‘I wanted to. I couldn’t stand the atmosphere. He was being so fucking nicey nice all the time. Like we didn’t know each other. Like we were never even married…’ She pressed a finger to the bridge of her nose and drew in a great shuddering breath. ‘Sorry. I’m fine. I’m fine.’
‘It’s OK not to be fine,’ I said. ‘This is huge. I shouldn’t think you’ll be fine for ages. What is it they say? A month for every year you’ve been married. Something like that.’
‘Cheers,’ she said, with a bleak smile.
‘No, I mean…’
‘I know what you mean.’
‘So are you… seeing anyone?’
‘Seeing anyone? Already? Are you nuts?’
‘No, I meant… therapy.’ I mouthed the word as though it were inherently shameful.
‘Ha! ’Course I am. I can’t make him go but I’m damned if I’m getting divorced without making a massive fucking hole in the joint bank account.’
‘And is it… helping?’ I raised my eyebrows hopefully.
‘It’s going a long way to explain why Dave might have wanted to leave me, if that counts. Turns out I’m quite fucked up.’
‘Oh, Jude, don’t say that! You’re a wonderful person. You’re kind and generous and funny and smart and loyal. You shouldn’t blame yourself because you and Dave have decided—’
‘Dave’s decided.’
‘Because the two of you have… grown apart.’
Jude looked at me gravely while we both weighed the cliché and then burst into slightly hysterical laughter. At last, when we’d calmed down I turned towards the bar.
‘’S’cuse me, Michael,’ I called. ‘Can we get some shots over here?’
‘So now it’s your turn,’ Jude said, when
I had finished enumerating all the ways in which she would be better off without Dave in her life and we had toasted each of them with tequila.
‘My turn to what?’ I said warily.
‘To tell me why you’re here.’
‘Why I’m…?’ I must have looked alarmed.
‘I’m not talking metaphysics, I’m asking why on earth you jumped on a train at teatime on a weekday, when you didn’t even know I was splitting up with Dave. I know I’m nice, but…’
I looked at her. Why had I? It all seemed very hazy now. Compared to the cold hard reality of a pending divorce, my row with Nick seemed suddenly petty, my rage an overreaction.
‘Oh, I dunno,’ I said sheepishly. ‘Nick and I had a fight. I walked out on the spur of the moment. Just to teach him a lesson really… it all seems a bit silly now.’
‘What happened?’
‘Honestly, Jude, compared to what you’re dealing with, it’s not even worth—’
‘I’ll be the judge of that,’ she said. She settled back in her seat and looked at me expectantly.
‘OK, well, I’d been out for a walk, with this new friend Cath – you remember, the—’
‘Lesbian.’
‘God, you’re as bad as Dave… oops, sorry.’
She cast me a baleful glance.
‘Yeah, so anyway I’ve been out with Cath and I get back to find Nick in the kitchen, cosying up to Imogen Gaines, you know, the posh woman whose chutney I…?’
‘How could I forget?’
‘Anyway, I walk in and they’re looking guilty as fuck. She’s totally coming on to him and he’s like the cat that got the cream.’
‘What’s she even doing there?’
‘Oh, she needs some big strong chaps to help put up this marquee for the Auction of Promises.’
I saw Jude suppress a smile.
‘I know, anyway Nick’s lapping it up. He’s fancied her ever since we all did a pub quiz together.’
‘Says you.’
‘No really, she’s just his type. You know what a snob he is and Imogen and Douglas have got this massive house. I don’t know if they actually are gentry, but they certainly carry on like Lord and Lady Muck. Well, Douglas is all right, I suppose. I quite like him actually, if you leave his politics on one side, but she’s fake as anything. She acts like she’s this dizzy Alice-band wearing debutante, but she’s actually hard as nails. I got this question wrong about Van Gogh at the pub quiz and she was all like, Oh well, I’ve got a degree in art history, so…’
The Move Page 16