‘You want someone to tell you what to do?’
‘There we are, you see. You just did it again.’
Karen sits back, widening the distance between them. ‘I don’t think it’s you, Lydia, okay? Is that what you’d like me to say?’
‘Not if it’s not true.’
There is a pause. ‘I always tell the truth. There’s no point to this otherwise.’
Lydia nods and mirrors Karen’s posture, sitting back on the sofa, exhaling as her body relaxes. She reaches up and puts her hands behind her head, undoing the knot that holds her hair in place before securing it again. She catches Karen’s eye as she sees them for the first time: a smattering of dark bruises patterning the pale flesh beneath her arms, round and neat; perfectly set apart at the distance of fingertips. Josh’s fingertips.
She lowers her arms quickly and looks away, waiting for Karen to skirt past what she has just seen; knowing that she won’t. She doesn’t.
‘Did Josh do that to you?’
‘It’s nothing,’ she says, smoothing the short sleeves of her dress as she avoids eye contact with the counsellor.
‘You’re bruised. It doesn’t look like nothing.’
When Lydia doesn’t speak, Karen presses her further. ‘How did you get them?’
She falters on her answer, allowing her cheeks to turn to flame under the heat of Karen’s attention. ‘Oh, you know how it is. Play-fighting with the kids, that’s all.’
She realises the impact of her choice of phrasing. Karen doesn’t know how it is: she doesn’t have any children. She might have had them, once, but the opportunity was stolen from her.
‘You wanted this hour alone, Lydia,’ Karen says, her face softening. ‘There was a reason for that.’
‘I just want to know what you make of Josh.’
‘It doesn’t matter what I make of him. What matters is whether you want to stay in your marriage.’ Karen looks at Lydia’s arm, the intention in her words obvious.
‘Do you think I should?’
‘I can’t answer that for you, Lydia. I can listen and I can advise you. I can’t tell you what to do. No one can do that.’
‘Josh gets angry, you know that. I just wanted to see you alone to … you know … I think you understand me, don’t you? You understand the situation I’m in.’
‘I think I understand,’ Karen admits.
‘Despite everything, I still love him. I think you understand that too, don’t you?’
Karen doesn’t respond to the question, giving her the answer she needs. They sit in a silence that feels heavy in the room, as uncomfortable as though Josh is there with them once again, his unnerving presence felt even in his absence.
‘Explain to me how Josh makes you feel,’ Karen says eventually.
‘Angry,’ she admits. ‘He makes me feel like nothing. When I’m around him, I feel as though the colour is drained from everything and there’s nothing to look forward to, but when he’s not there, I miss him. It’s like a need, does that make sense? It’s as though he’s a part of the air. I can’t breathe when he’s gone.’
She watches Karen’s reactions to her words play out on her face: the curl of her lip at the corner, the tilt of her head, the furrowing of her brow as she tries to comprehend something she obviously has yet to understand.
‘He suffocates me,’ she continues. ‘I feel as though I’m living the wrong life. I could have done so much more.’
‘You’re still young,’ Karen tells her. ‘You can do whatever you want.’
‘That’s not true, though, is it? It’s a nice idea, but that’s all it is. I’m trapped. By him. By our past.’ She stops and smiles, though there is no happiness in the expression. ‘I made promises,’ she says with a shrug.
‘Does the idea of being on your own frighten you?’
She shakes her head. ‘Not at all. If anything, it’s quite an appealing prospect.’ She leans back against the sofa, presses her head against the cushion. ‘But I can’t do it. I could never do it.’
‘Why not?’
She hesitates. ‘My vows. Don’t they mean anything?’
‘Vows are important,’ Karen says, ‘of course they are. But you’re important too, Lydia. And unfortunately, not everyone stands by the vows they make.’
‘But if he makes a mistake and I walk away as a result of it, doesn’t that make me as bad as him?’
‘A mistake?’
She watches as Karen’s gaze falls back to her arms, and to the sleeves that cover the bruises she has seen. She knows what she’s thinking: they were no mistake.
‘Marriage should be fulfilling,’ Karen tells her. ‘I’m not suggesting it’s always easy – that would be unrealistic – but it should make you feel better about yourself, not worse.’
‘And when it doesn’t?’
‘You have to decide what’s best for you.’
Lydia leans to the floor and picks up her handbag and jacket, slinging both over her arm. There is nothing more that can be achieved here today.
‘I have to make this work,’ she says. ‘I need to stay for the children. They’re the most important thing, aren’t they?’
With this, she knows the session is finished. Because after everything else that has happened, she knows that this is the one thing Karen won’t be able to argue with.
‘You’re no less important, Lydia.’
‘You’re right,’ she says, standing. ‘I know you’re right.’
Karen’s face says she doesn’t believe Lydia will take action. The counsellor doesn’t know her at all.
Nine
Karen
The day after my one-to-one session with Lydia, I am at the front door saying goodbye to a couple of clients when a delivery van pulls up on the other side of the street. The driver gets out and takes something from the back of the van before crossing the road and heading for my house.
‘Karen Fisher?’ he asks me, glancing down to double-check the address on his delivery note.
I think I manage to nod, but I find myself unable to form words; my voice is lost somewhere deep within me, my throat constricted at the sight of what he holds out towards me, his arm outstretched as he waits for me to take the bouquet of flowers from his hand. It is a bunch made up of the same flower, dozens of them gathered together and tied in a narrow white ribbon that is stark against the deep purple of the petals. Violets.
My eyes scan the bouquet for a card, but there doesn’t appear to be one. ‘Is there a note with them? A message?’ My voice is shrill and panicked, and the delivery man gives me a strange look. ‘I’m just wondering who they’re from,’ I add, trying to calm the quivering in my voice.
The truth is, I don’t need a note. I know who they are from, and yet, of course, I don’t.
‘Sorry,’ he says with a shrug. ‘I just do the deliveries. Have a good day,’ he adds, already turning to go back to his van.
I look down at the spray of purple flowers in my hand as the pounding in my head builds to a crescendo. When I look up, Lydia is standing in front of me, having approached so quietly that I didn’t hear her arrive.
‘Can we talk?’ she says. ‘Please.’
I glance along the pavement, as though half expecting to see Josh, though I know she wouldn’t have brought him here with her, not today, not after what happened last night. She called me this morning to find out whether I had any free time to see her this afternoon, and I didn’t need to ask whether she meant alone.
I feel the bunch of flowers shake slightly in my hand, their petals trembling as I try to steady myself, and I tell myself that I am overthinking things. There will be an explanation for this. I will call the florist – the name is on a tag at the bottom of the cellophane – and they will be able to tell me who sent the flowers. Taking a deep breath, I try to reassure myself that everything is fine.
‘Beautiful flowers,’ Lydia says, stepping towards me. ‘Is it your birthday?’
I stare at her for a moment too long before ans
wering. ‘No.’
Despite already knowing that she would come here today, I feel the same way I did when I saw Josh alone on the street, the same desire to turn and hide clutching at my insides, Sean’s voice still resonating in my ear. Before speaking with Lydia yesterday, thoughts of the couple’s online absence and the emails that have landed in my inbox consumed my brain, overshadowing anything else I might have been able to focus on. After seeing her, all I could think about was the bruising on her arm. All I could focus on were the things I know her husband has done to her.
Now, in the aftermath of what happened last night, my hesitance at welcoming her into my home is marked with something different, something that feels more personal than I know it should. Though she owes me nothing – not even an explanation – it feels as though Lydia has deceived me.
I go to an art class every Tuesday evening in a church hall not far from where I live. I’ve been going for a while now, after it was suggested I take up something creative as a form of therapy after Sean died. I was sceptical at first – despite having recommended art and writing as therapy to countless people during my career, I was for some reason adamant that there was nothing either could offer me in my grief – but there were people there I got on well with and it came as a pleasant surprise that painting was something I wasn’t disastrous at. What was initially intended to be a trial run of a month or so turned out to be something I enjoyed and decided to try to pursue and hopefully improve at.
For the past year or so the evening has ended with a visit to a nearby pub with the tutor and a few of the other women from the class. We don’t stay long – everyone has children or partners to get home to – but that extra hour out delays having to come back to this empty house and the silence that fills it; a silence I listen to in the long hours of each sleepless night, awaiting the arrival of yet another alien morning.
It was the turn of one of the other women to get the drinks in, and I went with her to the bar to help her carry them back to the table. We made small talk about that evening’s session and the pieces we’d produced; we had been working on self-portraits for the previous few weeks, our efforts to capture a version of ourselves in oil causing much hilarity when it finally came to sharing the finished products. Both balancing trays laden with glasses, we headed back to the far end of the pub, where our group had found the only vacant table that was left. I was mid sentence when I saw Lydia, my ramblings about a potential title for my unintentionally abstract self-portrait brought to an abrupt stop. The glasses on my tray tinkled against one another as my hands shook, steadying themselves in time to stop me from dropping the drinks. I thought at first that I had mistaken a stranger for her, a woman who looked very much like her but wasn’t. She was wearing her hair differently, loose down her back; in the tightly knotted bun in which she usually wears it, I hadn’t realised she had so much hair or that it was so thick. She was turned slightly away from me so that she didn’t notice me at first, and it gave me enough time to absorb the details of what I was seeing without being caught in the act of gawping.
She was sitting in a corner booth of the pub, her legs pulled up onto the bench on which she was seated. She looked glamorous in a way I hadn’t seen her before, her face made up, smoky-eyed, and her body language seemingly carefree. She was wearing a short leather skirt that had risen where she sat, her legs covered in sheer tights that revealed the shapeliness of her thighs. The fingers of her left hand rested on the stem of her wine glass – her engagement ring glittering beneath the soft lighting – and her head was tilted to one side, her hair cascading down her back in heavy waves. Her other arm was looped around the shoulder of a man: a man quite obviously younger than her; a man who was definitely not her husband.
Thankfully, the conversation around my table was in full flow, the other women discussing the denouement of a television show that had been aired the night before. Their detailed analysis of the show’s final few moments meant that none of them had noticed I had been distracted, so I was spared the awkwardness of having to find a lie to replace the truth of what had taken my attention from our table.
I watched as Lydia laughed at something the man said, as she leaned towards him and whispered in his ear. Unable to tear my eyes from their corner of the room, I watched as they kissed. It was long and lingering; she pressed her body into his, pushing him against the back of the bench. I felt like an intruder, as though I had entered a moment far too intimate to be played out in the corner of a busy bar, and yet I continued to watch as she pulled away from him, said something else, then turned to see me looking directly at them. Her face changed in an instant as her eyes met mine, and I stood hurriedly, knocking my thigh against the table and sending a wine glass toppling.
‘I am so sorry,’ I said, scrabbling in my purse for a five-pound note. ‘Please,’ I added, passing the money to the woman whose drink I’d spilled. ‘Get yourself another.’
‘Are you okay, Karen?’
I don’t know which of the women spoke to me; my hearing was distorted, as though my head had been submerged in water. With the background sounds of the pub muted to a distant hum, a tinny white noise filling my head, I ignored the question and took my coat from the back of my chair, desperate to just be away from the place. Lydia made no attempt to follow me, for which I was grateful. I left the pub alone, welcoming the pinch of cold night air that nipped at my face; glad to be away from the claustrophobic atmosphere inside the building.
There was one thing I felt certain of: when she looked my way and her expression changed, Lydia was already aware that I was there. She knew I had been watching her.
And now here she is, standing at my front door, more than likely ready with explanations and excuses. And here I am, clutching a bunch of violets from an unknown person I know wishes me nothing but ill, and unable to explain quite why I feel so deceived and let down by this woman standing in front of me, a woman I still hardly know. Yesterday, I pitied her. Today, I feel as though she has betrayed me, as though I am the one to whom she has been unfaithful, and I’m not quite able to explain why the betrayal stings me so personally.
I open the front door but offer no invitation to her to enter.
‘Karen,’ she says, apparently aware that I am unlikely to be the first to break the silence. ‘Can I come in?’
‘You lied to me.’ Even I am surprised by the abruptness of my words. Lydia looks pained, affronted, but these reactions only serve to heighten my frustration. Just what game are she and her husband playing? They appear to be one thing, only to show themselves as something else. I’m not in this job for the money, though I obviously need to earn a living. There are plenty of people prepared to pay for marriage guidance counselling: honest people who admit their flaws and face their problems head on to attempt to overcome them; people I am able to help because they allow me access to do so. But I can’t help Lydia while she’s lying to me, and I wonder why yesterday’s session didn’t seem the perfect opportunity to tell me of her affair.
I would have understood, wouldn’t I?
Damien presented a classic form of the love-bombing I described to Lydia yesterday, having done everything I described to her and more. I was just a teenager when we met – I had never known my father, and my relationship with my mother was strained at best. Having spent much of my childhood loveless and alone, I quickly became infatuated with this man who lavished time and attention on me, so much so that I would have done anything to please him, even when those things meant sacrificing my own happiness. I was young, I had no other experiences of adult relationships; as such, I was impressionable and naïve enough to believe everything that happened between us was normal.
The change in Damien and in the way he treated me seemed gradual at the time, but in fact it wasn’t; he was a different person within a matter of months. And yet I realised much later, too late, that he wasn’t different at all. He was who he had always been, and it was I who was changed.
If Lydia had told me that she
had sought affection from another man, I would have understood it completely.
‘I’m sorry,’ she says. ‘Really, I’m so sorry. The pub last night … I never thought I’d see anyone I know in there.’
It strikes me as an odd thing to say: not that she is sorry for her infidelity, but that she is sorry she has been caught in the act. It is the sort of comment I might expect from Josh. I don’t know why I am surprised by it, though. She isn’t the first person to be unfaithful to a spouse, and she certainly won’t be the last. If what I saw of her bruised body during our last meeting is anything to go by, it is perfectly understandable that she has sought comfort and affection elsewhere.
‘I love my husband.’
‘Do you?’
He is physically abusive to you. You are having an affair. These are not the things that equate to love.
More things I cannot bring myself to say, though they should be the only words that need to be spoken. Yesterday, I told Lydia that I always tell the truth. The ironic thing is, this declaration of honesty was a lie. I knew I was lying and so did she; if I had told the truth, I would have spoken it to her yesterday. If I always told the truth, I would be telling it now, loudly and repeatedly, as many times as it might require her to hear it.
I think back on what I saw when she was here just yesterday: the bruises that stained her skin and the fear I witnessed in her eyes when she spoke of what her marriage is like behind the closed doors of the family home. I think of Josh and what happened when he turned up here unexpectedly. Can I blame her for her infidelity? Isn’t it natural that a woman in her situation, abused and mistreated by the one person she believed would care for her no matter what, might seek affection and kindness in the arms of another man? It was something I myself longed for, though I never brought myself to do it.
Not for the first time this week, my brain takes me away from this house to a place I have imagined so frequently in my recent dreams. I am twenty-three years old, pregnant but not yet aware of it. It is a hot July day and I am wearing a sundress, lemon yellow and dotted with tiny birds, their outstretched wings taking flight across the swell of stomach that I won’t notice for another month or so. I am beautiful in my own way, but I don’t recognise it yet: I have never known it and I won’t know it for quite some time to come, once the beauty has already begun to fade and is bidding me farewell.
The Divorce: A gripping psychological thriller with a fantastic twist Page 13