Love Will Tear Us Apart

by Holly Seddon

  love will tear us apart

  Holly Seddon is a full-time writer, living slap bang in the middle of Amsterdam with her husband James and a house full of children and pets. Holly has written for newspapers, websites and magazines since her early 20s after growing up in the English countryside, obsessed with music and books. Her first novel Try Not to Breathe was published worldwide in 2016 and became both a national and international bestseller. Love Will Tear Us Apart is her third novel.

  love will tear us apart

  HOLLY SEDDON

  First published in hardback in Great Britain in 2018 by Corvus, an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.

  Copyright © Holly Seddon, 2018

  The moral right of Holly Seddon to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities, is entirely coincidental.

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  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  Hardback: 978 178649 052 0

  Export paperback: 978 178649 506 8

  E-book: 978 178649 054 4

  Printed in Great Britain

  Corvus

  An Imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd

  Ormond House

  26–27 Boswell Street

  London

  WC1N 3JZ

  www.corvus-books.co.uk

  For James, forever

  PROLOGUE

  ‘Are you sure?’ I ask, my hollow laughter fading into a wavering smile.

  ‘Deadly,’ he says. ‘Are you?’

  I undo my jeans. I wriggle out of them and they fall to the floor. He holds his breath so I take off my T-shirt as well.

  ‘Are you sure about this?’ he asks, and I don’t know if he hopes the answer is yes or no.

  ‘If not you, then who?’ I say, and unclasp my bra.

  ‘Always you,’ he says, and he pulls his T-shirt over his head. ‘Always you.’

  CHAPTER ONE

  November 2012 – Sunday night

  My husband used to get embarrassed by talk of how we got together. But once the story had been rolled around the dinner party table a few times to riotous appreciation, he seemed to flip position. He started to tell our story more often. He even added to it, ran his tongue over it, embellished and enlarged it. People are always fascinated the first time they hear it. ‘I didn’t know things like that really happened,’ they say. Or they laughingly tell their own tales, adding, ‘But I didn’t really mean it!’

  We’re beyond that now. Even a story like ours can feel stale, and we don’t have any new friends to tell.

  Stories change over time, just like the rest of us. ‘Time has a habit of ageing us,’ as Paul’s mum Viv used to say. And it’s not just the dogged chronology of putting one day in front of another, it’s the litter that those days scatter in our paths. The drip drip drip of post through the letterbox. The groaning repetition of school runs, after-school clubs and food shopping deliveries. The bittersweet climax that every holiday brings.

  And then there’s the big stuff.

  Harry was surprisingly easy. We waited a couple of years, then decided it was the appropriate time to try for our first baby. We had the regulation sex every other day for two weeks a month. By the end of the third month of ‘trying’, my breasts were tender and my belly was stirring with a gurgling nausea that all television shows ever had prepared me for. I knew even before I was ‘late’.

  Because conceiving Harry was so reassuringly textbook, and conceiving Izzy a few years later was so tortuous, there was even a brief time Paul worried that I’d conceived our son though an affair.

  While doctors assured us that secondary infertility was ‘very common’, especially with my medical history, for a while Paul became so certain of my infidelity that he stopped mentioning it, as if he was frightened that one day I would throw my hands up and say, ‘Yes, you cracked the case, he’s not yours. Now what?’

  When I look at my eight-year-old boy with his flutter of deep, dark eyelashes and a delicate stoop in his narrow shoulders, I know with absolute certainty that he is all Paul’s. And Paul must know that too, now. Our son barely resembles me at all. In fact, neither of our children inherited my red hair and pale skin. But if I take an impassioned look, I can see why Paul would be suspicious. There were others, early on. Bodies that weren’t his. And that’s all they were, bodies. At the time, I had no idea he knew. Maybe I’ve underestimated how many of my secrets he’s unearthed, while he’s watched me so carefully and closely for the last ten years.

  Perhaps he never really knew. Not the facts anyway: our onetime builder, fucking me dusty on the floor of the loft he’d just finished converting. A foreign exchange student I met on a doomed attempt to sign up for a master’s degree. A woman in a swimming baths, just once. Paul may not know, but he knows me. He knows me to my bones.

  Perhaps he knew it was an inevitability. But I stopped casting my net outside of our marriage as soon as we started to try for a baby. Then my body was Harry’s. A vessel in which he could grow and twirl around, kicking me into funny shapes and swelling my flesh in a way I was scared it wasn’t capable. Once he was born, I only had eyes for him. My body was more valuable than I’d known. It had higher purpose, not just something to be crushed against a near stranger.

  Now, even if I had those passions, I wouldn’t act on them. I would never give Paul a reason to cut me out of our family, to keep my kids from me, to start up anew with someone else. To do things that, until recently, I would have thought impossible.

  CHAPTER TWO

  1981

  Last night, I dreamed about days I haven’t thought about in years. I dreamed about the sticky, irritable summer of 1981. The summer we were eight and ten-twelfths. The summer Britain ran amok outside of the stifled air of Little Babcombe, our tiny Somerset village.

  The riots that year outraged my father, causing him to ruffle his Telegraph so violently I imagined it would crumble in his hands. Between imagining the IRA bombing our car to the Toxteth youths smashing our windows, I spent weeks convinced of imminent, newsy danger.

  When danger eventually came, it sounded like a whisper. I was sent out to play and barely heard it.

  My parents were locked in their own cold war by then, both retreating into their private bunkers. My father in his office, when he wasn’t flying to Eastern Europe, my mum dancing with friends at the Blitz Club and the Rainbow in her beloved London. There was a great deal of activity and quiet conversation about this going on among the staff at Greenfinch Manor, our family home, but I left it all behind to skim stones on the river, to make daisy chains or peel the cobweb layers of sunburn off my arms.

  The air sagged, crickets rubbed their legs together in protest and pollen clung to my eyes and hair. The roads were carpeted with squashed frogs and slow worms, their innards dragged by cars and baked into the tarmac.

  At the end of July, the whole country slipped inside to wave flags and wipe their eyes at the royal wedding. Most of their good cheer focused on Lady Diana Spencer, the doe-eyed nanny with impeccable credentials. Even my father joined my mother and the staff who were hovering in the lounge to watch the dress make its way into St Paul’s Cathedral, while I made my
way out of the side door and into my mother’s abandoned studio to play with off-cuts of fabric and glue sequins to my fingernails.

  By the beginning of August, I’d grown bored of skimming stones. I spent my days jumping from the climbing frame in the village recreation ground where the smell of the air was so strong you could taste the iron.

  Or I lay on my belly by the stream, shielding my eyes from the orange sunlight with one hand, daisies tickling me through my dress, daring myself to take a running jump over the water.

  One day, my gangly legs freed by summer shorts, I finally leaped. I cleared the stream easily, the water giggling below me. As I flew, I saw that the big rocks that had frightened me were just pebbles, magnified by the water. I saw tiny black minnows wriggling their bodies busily under mine, slipping downstream and out of view. I saw a reflection of my messy red hair fanning out from my crown like a cape.

  I landed heavily, the perfumed grass rushing up to meet me. I sprang around and leaped again without a pause, back the other way, heart pounding. And again and again, daring my legs to stride out further each time, to stay in the air for longer. With every run-up, I took a step back, the momentum keeping me flying with cartoon whirly legs.

  As I took my most daring jump, running up from the roadside to the stream, I felt my ankle twist under me, clicking like a cupboard door. I fell face first into the water, a slick black knob of a pebble bashing my cheek and narrowly missing my right eye. As I scrabbled out and crawled back up the bank, wet from chest to feet, I heard the thud of something in the grass behind me and rolled over to see two very thin legs coming into view.

  ‘You okay?’ Paul asked, squinting slightly as I got up onto my feet.

  ‘I’m okay,’ I said, wiping away my tears as if they were just stream water.

  ‘Where did you come from?’ I asked, suddenly angry and defensive in my embarrassment.

  ‘I was up in that tree,’ Paul said, lowering his eyes and pointing behind him with an arm that was more elbow than anything, drowning in a thin cotton polo shirt.

  ‘And what were you doing up there, spying or something?’ I’d cocked my hip to one side in a practised stance I’d seen on Grange Hill, watching it in secret with the sound down low.

  ‘No,’ Paul had huffed, turning to walk back to the tree.

  ‘What were you doing then?’

  ‘I was counting, if you must know.’

  ‘Counting what?’

  ‘Counting your jumps.’

  Paul and I met every day after that. Never formally arranging it, but each leaving home straight after breakfast and spending the day together, only returning to our separate houses, briefly, to bolt down sandwiches that had been laid out for us, or to pick up our bikes or a pack of cards or a ball. At nearly nine, Paul was my first experience of habitual friendship, and I his.

  Our children will never know the anxiety and pleasure of whole days and weeks yawning out to be filled, to be spent hiking through fields, making dens in hedgerows, swimming in the river. Parents with no idea or concern about where we might be.

  We were wracked with fear almost constantly. Fear of the punks with their crunchy sugar-paste hair painted bright green or magenta. The ones we’d seen in town that loomed seven-foot tall in doorways, fingers pinching hand-rolled cigarettes burnt down to the nub. Fear of the IRA, who we were convinced had planted bombs across Little Babcombe. We threw whole days into terrorist hunts, inching under cars on our backs like tiny mechanics, checking for explosives. Fear of returning to school, of the daylight folding away into lessons. Fear of no longer being together.

  Some time towards the end of the holidays, I was invited to have tea at Paul’s house. Before I went, my mum called me into her room and I sat up on her bed as lightly as I could, knowing she was still feeling fragile from the weekend. She brushed my hair so slowly I thought she’d fallen asleep a couple of times. She scraped each half into bunches, grimacing slightly as she grappled with the hair bobbles and set it all into place.

  ‘You look beautiful, Katie,’ she told me as she patted down my fringe and straightened the thick straps of my gingham dress. ‘Have fun on your date,’ she said with a smile.

  I scowled. ‘Paul’s my friend. That’s all. I don’t even like him that much.’

  ‘Oh, I’m only teasing. Have fun.’

  Paul’s house was so different to mine. Most of the downstairs space at 4 Church Street was taken up with the living room, with a small kitchen behind it and a smaller bathroom and separate toilet behind that. In the corner of the kitchen was a wooden table with a floral-patterned Formica top. Great play was made of pulling it out and lifting up the drop-leaf extension to make it a four-seater. Paul was wearing a thick round-neck jumper and was sweating around his ears and forehead.

  ‘I hope you like pizza sticks,’ Paul’s mum, Viv, said.

  ‘I’ve always wanted to try them,’ I answered honestly.

  Paul’s dad arrived home as the Findus French Bread Pizzas were being placed on the plates; a salad of dark green floppy lettuce, tomato wedges and egg slices sat in a bowl untouched, salad cream on standby.

  ‘What’s this in aid of, eh?’ Paul’s dad boomed as he came in, winking at Viv and ruffling Paul’s hair as my friend shrank into his chair.

  ‘I’m only joking,’ he turned his wink to me. ‘We’ve all been looking forward to meeting the guest of honour.’

  ‘I can’t remember the last time we had dinner in here,’ Paul’s Dad said, opening a can of Hofmeister as Paul looked close to tears. ‘We’d usually be watching the telly, wouldn’t we, Viv?’

  ‘Stop it, Michael.’

  ‘Let’s put on some music, Viv.’

  Paul swallowed and looked at his lap.

  ‘Do you like The Quo, Katie?’

  ‘I don’t really know, what is it?’

  Michael – Mick – found this hilarious. He crunched the sticky play button on the radio-cassette player. I heard the soon-to-be-familiar de-dun de-dun de-dun of every Status Quo song.

  ‘Does your dad not like The Quo then, love?’

  ‘I’m not sure, I’ve only heard him listen to music with no words.’

  The adults laughed.

  ‘It’s really boring,’ I added, enjoying the attention.

  The pizza stick had gouged deep scratches into the roof of my mouth but I wished I could eat one every day. The little pieces of bright red meat like gems; the brittle cheese like a gold lattice. A nice change from the food that was made for us by Mrs Baker, our housekeeper.

  I knew by then that Paul was ready for me to leave but every room held fascination. From the tiny WC and its sign, ‘If you sprinkle when you tinkle, be neat and wipe the seat’, to the beads hanging between the kitchen and living room. Photos of Paul coated every surface. I was fascinated by the videotape cases that had been made to look like old books. I wished my father’s old books had Disney videos hidden in them. Viv and Mick were delighted. Paul told me later that they didn’t even have a video player back then, they rented one for special events. They had recorded the royal wedding a few weeks before I visited. Mick had stood solemn-faced with his finger over the record button waiting for the exact moment the programme started as if it was his actual job.

  Paul’s dad was ‘a jack of all trades’ and his mum was a nurse. I only understood what one of those meant.

  When it was time to go home, Mick drove us.

  ‘It’s okay, I can walk from here,’ I said as his royal blue Austin Allegro reached the gates at the foot of my drive.

  ‘Are you sure? That looks like a very long drive.’

  ‘Oh, it’s fine,’ I said. ‘My father doesn’t like to open the gates to other cars.’

  Paul looked wounded but his dad seemed amused.

  ‘Thank you very much for having me,’ I added.

  CHAPTER THREE

  November 2012 – Sunday night

  I look across at my husband’s locked jaw, his thin black glasses pushed back into the groove
on his nose, his forehead bearing down on the road ahead. He’s wearing a light woollen sweater and dark-blue jeans. I can’t see his feet but I know he has tan brogues on. I’m wearing an oversize knitted T-shirt that I like to wear in the car as it’s so comfy. My favourite jeans hug my legs and I’ve slipped off my knee-high boots so I can wriggle my socked feet in the fanned warmth of the footwell.

  I watch Paul when he’s driving, it’s the most ‘zen’ he can be. He generally manages to tune out the bickering from the back, he doesn’t hear the radio, he claims to only hear me on the third try. I try, and fail, to imagine what is running through his mind. What is he planning, while I study him discreetly?

  His wrists are as slender as they ever were, the same wrists I see on Harry. Paul’s are now covered in a thick, dark layer of hair that wasn’t there when he was eight and isn’t there on Harry’s arms yet. The bones are the same though. I’ve grown to love those bones.

  ‘Mum, Harry just said I was a himp-oh-pot-oh-mose.’

  ‘You can’t even say it!’

  ‘Harry, why did you call your sister a hippopotamus?’

  ‘I didn’t.’

  ‘You did!’ Izzy trills. ‘Liar!’

  ‘I didn’t!’

  ‘You did!’

  ‘MUM!’

  ‘This is ridiculous,’ I say, and I refold my cardigan in my lap. ‘I’m not getting involved with this silliness.’

  Izzy starts to sob, quietly. When this doesn’t stir any kind of reaction, she grabs Harry’s arm and bites it, quick as a flash. Her baby teeth carve grooves in what little flesh there is.

  Harry yelps and Izzy smiles. Before I can say a word, Paul slams on the brakes and shouts, ‘Harry!’ at the top of his voice.

  ‘She bit him,’ I whisper to the side of Paul’s head.

  ‘He goaded her,’ Paul says.

  ‘It’s been a long journey,’ I say.

  ‘There’s no excuse for them going feral,’ he says back, without lowering his voice.