Our House

by Louise Candlish

  Of course, the plane landed smoothly, his the only body clenched in agony. He alone pleading with the gods for a reversal of fortune that can never be granted.

  Really, he should have known that escape was only prison by another name.

  7

  ‘Fi’s Story’ > 00:24:56

  It was a strange separation initially, five weeks of limbo over late July and the entirety of August. Of course, given half the chance I would live it again and again, appreciate it for the mildly disruptive interlude it was, but at the time it felt like a bleak stretch to be endured.

  No, I don’t mean the practical impact of our being apart. Though I worked in central London, a forty-five-minute commute that could take twice that on a bad day, and the school holidays added their usual complications, I had arrangements in place for that. My mother helped and there were friends on the street with whom I traded childcare.

  No, I mean emotionally. My aim was to break even, to stay sane.

  Bram was staying at his mother’s in Penge, awaiting my next move, his absence temporarily glossed over as far as the boys were concerned. ‘He’s away for work,’ I’d say. ‘We’ll see him on Saturday.’ When his Saturday visit arrived, it would extend to past bedtime and the boys wouldn’t know he’d left. In the morning, I’d say he’d had to get up early to go to the office. It helped that they were too busy cracking each other over the head with cereal bowls to question the deception, but, still, it wasn’t a sustainable tactic long-term.

  We cancelled the family holiday to the Algarve and stayed in Alder Rise, upon which the whole city seemed to have descended. Thanks partly to a feature in the property section of the Standard, couples clustered around estate agents’ windows to see what the damage was for a one-bed, a terrace, a status family four-bedder like the ones on Trinity Avenue. They rarely come up, the agents would say, though there was a rumour the Reeces at number 97 had just had a valuation.

  It was virtually impossible to park on the upper section of Trinity Avenue and I often forgot where I’d left the car.

  ‘This is the price we pay for our houses being worth so much,’ Alison said. ‘To complain would be unseemly.’

  (‘Unseemly’ was a very Alison word.)

  She was the first to visit when I let it be known that Bram had moved out. She came over with those stiff lollipop hydrangeas that dry so nicely. They’re hugely expensive – in Alder Rise you can only get them from the posh florists on the Parade.

  ‘Oh Fi,’ she said, hugging me. ‘Do you want to talk about it?’

  ‘There’s nothing to say,’ I said.

  Her sea-green eyes watered when she laughed – she was always wiping away smudges of make-up – but it was less usual to see them shine in sorrow as they did then. ‘Just tell me, do we have to choose between you?’

  ‘Of course not.’

  ‘No elaborate plan for revenge, then? Or even a basic one?’

  ‘Not every story has to be about revenge,’ I said.

  ‘True. But most of them are.’

  Okay, I admit there’ve been times when I’ve fantasized about Bram meeting his match, a woman who would run roughshod over him – albeit in a fashion that had no impact whatsoever on the wellbeing of the boys – but I’ve never come close to seeking direct retribution. I suppose I of all people knew he was his own worst enemy, a man with a self-destructive streak. If I waited long enough he would take revenge on himself.

  ‘You know, I remember seeing an old interview with George Harrison,’ I told Alison. ‘It was after his wife had left him for Eric Clapton and you’d be expecting him to be spitting feathers, but he was so calm and philosophical. He said he’d rather she was with a friend of his than with any old Tom, Dick or Harry.’

  She considered this. ‘He was probably stoned, Fi.’

  I made the little exhalation through my nose that passed for laughter during this unfunny time. ‘My point is I’ve released him. We’ve released each other. What I want now is to put the boys first and find a way to live in perfect harmony. Like that old Paul McCartney song.’

  ‘You mean “Ebony and Ivory”?’ Her eyes widened. She feared I’d been bodysnatched by a Stepford wife with a Beatles fixation. ‘Well, I’m not sure there are too many precedents for that in the history of marital breakdowns, but if anyone can do it, you can.’

  Like my parents, Alison had always adored Bram, seeming to understand instinctively that in spite of his drinking and his lies, the exhausting, cliffhanger nature of being with him, there was a goodness at his heart.

  ‘You’re staying in the house?’ she asked.

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Good. That’s the most important thing.’

  There were three hydrangeas, one for each of us remaining Lawsons, though I don’t think that had occurred to Alison when she bought them. She’d bought them because interior designers said you should always arrange things in threes. It was the rule of asymmetry, the same rule that made Merle dither constantly about having another child. Her existing duo neither matched nor contrasted. (‘There’s always the risk of a third,’ her husband Adrian said once, and I remembered it for the tone, as if he were talking about a world war, his borders to be defended by Trident.)

  ‘Just so you know,’ Alison said, as she left, ‘I would have chosen you.’

  *

  I’m sorry, do I sound a little too humorous? Was I not furious with the bastard? Of course I was. I despised him in a way you can only despise someone you deeply love. But I couldn’t bear to let him make me weak. It took strength to keep a lid on my anger, to put it on ice the way I did, and I was proud of that strength.

  Believe me, though, what I felt about the cheating was nothing compared with what I feel about the house. This is far worse. This is grief.

  Bram, Word document

  I don’t remember much about that interim period. It seemed pretty painful at the time, but then I had no idea how dark and disabling pain could get.

  It didn’t help that I was staying with my mother. I remember her attempts to advise, her reliance on the kind of Christian learnings that had felt outdated (if not loony) in my childhood and now, in twenty-first-century South London, were irrelevant to the point of gibberish. Suffice to say that the wisdom I had demonstrated fell short of my Old Testament namesake and I refused to discuss it with her – or anyone, frankly.

  I remember thinking that the boys were surprisingly unaffected by my absence, almost unflatteringly so. They accepted my weekend gifts of crisps and jelly beans as if their parents’ marriage had not imploded, as if the pleasure of posting Pringles through slotted mouths eclipsed any ill the universe could hurl at them.

  As for Fi, seeing me seemed to fill her with none of the anguish I felt – nor the anger I deserved. We even went to the park together, the four of us, one sweltering Sunday in mid-August. ‘Pistachio or salted caramel?’ she asked me at the ice cream counter in the café, as if she was acting the role of gracious host to a foreign exchange student.

  ‘You choose,’ I said, and there was the faintest arching of her eyebrows. You’ve chosen, I read, and your choice was the wrong one.

  It was an odd thing: the ingredients of her were just the same as before – blonde hair cut smooth to the collarbone, puppy-brown eyes with straight lashes, curves that drew the male gaze and yet were disavowed by their owner as excessive – but the flavour was different. It was as if she’d found a way to sugar-coat her sourness, to disguise her bitterness towards me.

  We strolled across the threadbare grass to the playground. The place was heaving with day trippers, half-naked twenty-somethings in those trendy sunglasses with blue lenses that looked better on the women than the men (or maybe I only noticed the women). There was even a queue for the swings.

  ‘Where did all these people come from?’ I said. I hadn’t been out of Alder Rise for that long.

  ‘Alison says this is the price we pay for our houses being worth so much,’ Fi said, and she somehow managed to
make it sound like self-sacrifice, as if this were the most trying issue she faced. Being a property millionaire.

  What about me? I wanted to whine. Living in Penge with a religious nut, sleeping on a blow-up bed with my head against a radiator! I’d been careful till then not to pressure Fi or make demands, but now the angst tumbled from me: ‘Speaking of which, we need to decide what to do about the house. I can’t stay at my mum’s for ever. If we really are splitting, then we need to talk about how we divide the assets.’

  Now there was emotion in her eyes. Pure alarm.

  I blundered on, both wanting to hurt her and willing her to take me back then and there and give me the chance never to hurt her again. ‘Have you been in touch with a solicitor? Or an estate agent? Are you waiting for me to?’

  ‘No.’ As two swings came free, she took half-finished ice creams from the boys and urged them to take their turns.

  ‘Fi,’ I began again, but she held up a dripping cone in protest.

  ‘Please. Stop.’

  ‘But how much longer—?’

  ‘Another week,’ she said. ‘Give me another week and I’ll have some suggestions for next steps.’

  Next steps: project management speak. The next steps would be to identify the deliverables, secure the assignees and nail down a time frame.

  ‘Okay,’ I said.

  ‘And Bram?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘We are “really” splitting, I just don’t want to be knee-jerk about it. I want what’s best for them.’ She turned to watch the boys swinging, hardly blinking, as if it were some new and hypnotic spectator sport – until I realized she simply couldn’t bear to look at me.

  Returning to my mum’s that evening, I remember thinking this is what it must feel like to be a condemned man awaiting news of his appeal.

  Condemned? I didn’t know how blissfully free I was.

  ‘Fi’s Story’ > 00:28:49

  Sorry about that little outburst – I’m fine now. My emotions are all over the place at the moment, as you can imagine.

  So, what happened next? It was Bram talking about dividing the assets, that’s what galvanized me into action. We’d put on a united front one afternoon for a family trip to the park, and I suppose it shouldn’t have been as much of a shock as it was when he asked what we were going to do about the house. That evening, I went to the window and stood for some time looking at the magnolia, always a source of consolation to me. It had blossomed early this year and we’d all gushed at its beauty; passers-by took photos on their phones and the boys climbed the lower branches to stroke the blossom, tenderly, as they might a newborn hamster, careful not to loosen any of the petals.

  I would never get this beauty and tranquillity somewhere else. Everyone knew that the property market exacerbated the hostilities of separation and divorce and that in London and its suburbs you could no longer expect to sell one large home and get two smaller ones in exchange. My work was reasonably paid, but I’d need to be headhunted by Saudi Oil & Gas to have any chance of buying Bram out of his half of Trinity Avenue.

  I thought, or at least tried to think, how it might feel to have those precious pink petals open for someone else next spring. No, it was unthinkable. It would split my heart with a violence no adulterous spouse could achieve.

  A ‘For Sale’ sign at our gate? Over my dead body.

  VictimFi

  @SharonBrodie50 She’s a bit intense, isn’t she? I don’t get how people are so obsessed with their houses.

  @Rogermason @SharonBrodie50 Money. At least she’s honest.

  8

  ‘Fi’s Story’ > 00:30:10

  Yes, the custody arrangements were crucial to the crime, I would say, because they gave Bram access to both the house itself and the documents he needed to sell it – not just the shared homeowners’ stuff, but my personal papers too. No, I didn’t think to keep them separate from his after we parted, though obviously that’s the first thing I would urge other women in that position to do. Keep your passport taped to your body, even when you sleep!

  Irony doesn’t begin to cover the fact that the solution I came up with was intended to let me keep the house. Bird’s nest custody, it’s called, and like all good ideas, it rang true from the very instant I heard it. I read about it first in the Guardian and then on parenting sites online; well past the experimental stage, it’s a US-originated arrangement growing in popularity. The way it works is that the children remain at all times in the family home and the two parents take it in turns to be there with them. ‘Off’ time is spent at their respective second homes or, in the case of tighter budgets like ours, a shared one. Some couples even manage without a second residence, using their parents’ spare room instead or the sofa of a friend.

  For Bram, the offer was less an olive branch than a whole sun-drenched Puglian grove.

  ‘Why?’ he asked me, not daring to believe my sincerity. ‘Why are you giving me this?’

  ‘It’s not for you,’ I told him, ‘it’s for the boys. I don’t want them to lose their home. I want as little to change for them as possible. You betrayed me,’ I added baldly, ‘but you didn’t betray them.’

  Of course, the internet had told me that not everyone bought into this interpretation, that many women insisted that by betraying the mother of his children a man betrayed them too, but I didn’t agree with the internet. Husband, father: the roles were linked, but they were still distinct. Whatever I’ve done as a husband, I’m not that person as a father. And he wasn’t. As I say, he was excellent, acknowledged by other parents as the one the kids gravitated towards, the one who built dens and treehouses (and playhouses) and who came up with Dodgeball Day and the Lawson Olympics and who assembled the street’s kids one Sunday to help him pull down a dead tree with ropes, when the other dads were probably lying low with their phones, trying not to catch anyone’s eye.

  ‘If you’re committed to making it work, there is no better set-up for the child,’ our bird’s nest counsellor told us.

  Except a happy marriage, I thought.

  Her name was Rowan and she was precise and courteous, modelling the painstaking niceties we would need to practise if our reconfigured union was to succeed. ‘Bird’s nest custody offers exactly what you would expect from a real bird’s nest: strength, safety and continuity for the chicks. With the best will in the world, it can be unsettling for them to shuttle between two homes, especially if those homes aren’t in the same area. This completely negates that disruption. In the best-case scenario, they’ll hardly notice anything has changed.’

  She guided us through the nuts and bolts – or twigs and feathers, as she joked. We would have a trial period in which I handled the weekdays and Bram most of the weekends. Handovers would be 7 p.m. on a Friday and noon on Sunday, giving us each weekend time with the boys. He would also visit on Wednesday evenings to do the bedtime routine. ‘It works best if you can keep separate bedrooms in the main house,’ Rowan advised. ‘It helps with establishing boundaries.’

  I’d already given this thought, grateful that the house’s size and layout suited our new purposes so readily. There would be no uprooting of the boys and no modification costs. ‘We can do that. We have four bedrooms, so we can use the spare for one of us and there’s a study downstairs that can become the new spare.’

  ‘You’re very lucky,’ Rowan said. ‘Some couples have to take turns in the same bedroom. You’d be surprised how many negotiations I’ve had involving who changes the sheets.’

  ‘You keep our room,’ Bram told me, ‘since you’re going to be there more nights than me.’

  Our room. Setting up new sleeping arrangements was one thing, adjusting the language of our home, our life, was another.

  ‘The trick is to think of both places as your home,’ Rowan said. ‘Your house is your primary home, the other place your secondary. No one has the greater claim to either, you are co-owners and co-tenants. Above all, you’re co-parents. Equals.’

  She showed us a diary a
pp she recommended. ‘This is where it all goes: who’s in the house, who’s in the flat, who’s away for work, who’s picking up from school. The clubs, the playdates, the birthday parties: all colour-coded.’

  As for the financial arrangements, they required little adaptation in the short term. Bram and I earned similar salaries, contributed the same amount to the joint account, from which we paid mortgage, utilities and all the kids’ expenses. This pooled figure would now increase to cover the rent on the second property in Alder Rise, most likely a studio or a room in a shared house, and left little to spare. For this reason, I suggested that the other expense, divorce lawyers, should be postponed for this trial period.

  ‘That makes sense,’ Bram said, and there was enough raw optimism in his tone for me to glance across at him.

  ‘You do understand we are separated?’ I said, struggling to keep the sharpness from my tone. ‘The divorce will happen, just not straight away. There’s no going back as far as I’m concerned.’

  ‘Of course,’ he said.

  Rowan watched, composed, thoughtful. ‘In some cases, a clean break in living arrangements is preferred. The way you’re choosing will inevitably bring a level of invasion of privacy because it’s not going to be practical to remove all traces of yourself every time you leave one property for the other. Are you certain that’s what you both want? Fiona?’

  I breathed so deeply I filled every recess of my lungs, and then I pictured the boys’ faces, their Lawson curly heads, and I nodded.

  Bram agreed with uncharacteristic earnestness. ‘Let’s do it,’ he said and his smile, unexpectedly self-conscious, made me remember why I’d loved him in the first place.

  VictimFi

  @LydiaHilluk Sounds a bit hippy-dippy, this bird’s nest idea.

  @DYeagernews @LydiaHilluk I think the opposite – it’s civilized, grown up. Sounds like it could work.

  @LydiaHilluk @DYeagernews Well, it obviously didn’t, did it?

  Bram, Word document