Love Will Tear Us Apart

by Holly Seddon

  I don’t press the point but the number of daring rescues that have had to be staged for that stuffed animal is beyond a joke. Not to mention return visits to restaurants, shops, friends’ houses. She’s only spent one night without it in her four years, crying herself to sleep on our pillows as the morning light bled in. Paul had his PA arrange a courier to collect it from a ‘glamping’ farm in Suffolk the next day.

  Before we leave for the beach, I tuck the handwritten letter carefully into the inner lining of my holdall, pushed up against the anniversary card. I pull on my welly socks and Hunters, give up looking for my gloves, and join the family on the front step.

  ‘C’mon, Kate,’ Paul chivvies.

  ‘C’mon, Mum!’ Harry yells loudly, joining in.

  Izzy opens her mouth but closes it again. Her daddy ruffles her hair and pulls her coat up, stuffing her curls in so that her hood is bulging.

  The beach at Mousehole is an almost perfect circle. The harbour with a protective arm around the gold sand and cerulean blue water.

  Little fishing boats dot the beach in various states of undress. Some without sails, others with nets tossed over their sides like stockings. Paul breathes deep and talks about the ‘working beach’ and the ‘noble lifestyle’. Paul is a lousy swimmer and an even worse fisherman. As kids we used to go stick fishing and the only thing he ever speared was a dog shit bobbing downstream.

  Izzy and Harry busy themselves making a frozen sand castle, alternately blowing on their sandy gloved hands and moving closer to each other for warmth. I feel Paul’s tentative arm around my shoulders and let it stay there.

  I take about thirty rapid-fire photos on my phone while Paul tries to capture that one perfect shot.

  ‘Thank you for finding this place,’ he says, without looking over. His jaw is looser.

  ‘You deserve a break,’ I say, gently. ‘You work so hard.’

  He smiles, doesn’t disagree.

  ‘We still need to think about Saturday’s dinner, though,’ I say as we trudge along the harbour wall.

  ‘Let’s get lunch out of the way first, Kate,’ Paul says.

  ‘I just want Saturday to be perfect,’ I say, surprised by the swell in my throat.

  Paul looks at me quizzically.

  ‘Fish and chips?’ he asks the kids.

  ‘Yeah!’

  Sometimes, Paul will reminisce about the days that he and I would combine our coins and split a bag of chips. We’d walk around Little Babcombe, taking it in turns to carry the bag while planning our careers as a great writer and a great fashion designer. We’d shovel smooshy potato into our mouths, vinegar clearing our noses, grateful for the heat in our bellies. He was going to be a poet, a whiskey-soaked wordsmith. Me, fashion’s new wunderkind and a regular on The Clothes Show.

  Paul romanticises these moments more than I do. For him, they underline a certain ragged-trouser background that doesn’t tell my story in the slightest. My family was undeniably rich. But Paul hardly came from Dickensian poverty. His family was aspirational working class, they had a tumble-dryer and used sheets of Bounce. Their house was always warmer than mine and his mum was kind and gentle. And there.

  Perhaps pitching his start lower in the soil helps take the heat off the middling years where – not that I’d dare say it – Paul’s fortunes were redirected by me. The rest, he did himself.

  I’ve not been totally idle all these years, but it’s been an unsatisfying and vague kind of busy. Every itch I’ve had, Paul’s scratched it. The Indian head massage classes, the pottery, the Open University applications. He’s tried to keep me busy, supporting my every whim, presumably to stop me sinking into inertia. Back into inertia.

  As a result, I’ve gone three-quarters of the way to starting a fitness class for new mums, a dog-grooming business, a video yoga website. . . every project and plan, Paul has listened patiently, written the cheque, and never asked for a progress report. We’ve never discussed why the master’s degree didn’t go ahead in our early days of marriage, but he was unexpectedly home the afternoon I was walked back from the open day by another prospective student, a beautiful feckless French guy called Baptiste. As we stood too close and swapped numbers in the street, Baptiste’s kiss fresh on both my cheeks and my lips, Paul watched from the window. I pulled out of that course and Paul and I spoke with only stilted, polite words for days.

  The simple truth is that my grand plans are rarely my own ideas. Often I’ll overhear someone in a coffee shop talking about returning to uni or starting a kitchen table enterprise. Or I’ll read about someone in the Sunday Times Magazine, how they changed course in middle age to great fanfare and self-fulfilment. It’s the result that appeals, but I tend to fall on the journey. I’ve always been this way. Years and years ago I watched How To Get Ahead In Advertising a few days before the careers event at my uni and signed up to the TMC agency’s graduate scheme. Just like that. If my flatmates had wanted to see Indiana Jones instead, I’d have been on an archaeology course within days.

  It’s been a while since I started one of my projects but I fill my days. I drop the kids at school and walk on Blackheath or out through Greenwich and beyond, along the Thames. For hours, sometimes. I can spend a good while just picking up five items for dinner, and when I get home, I can spend another forty-five minutes rearranging the spice pots or fussing around the slow-cooker. My cleaner comes while I’m out, I don’t need to make small talk. And I spend an ungodly amount of time doing laundry. I luxuriate over it. I love the way the utility room smells when the tumble is at full tilt and the washing machine hits forty degrees. It’s so warm. It smells like mothers.

  ———

  Izzy is picking at her cod like it’s alien faecal matter and Harry has bolted his sausage and chips and is up on his knees, staring out the window. The chippy is surprisingly busy for a cold Monday in November. The only free table was right by the door. With every customer that comes in, we pull our coats tighter around us with pantomime shivers.

  I take one of Paul’s chips, catch his eye and smile. He’s negotiating with Izzy. ‘Just finish this little bit, c’mon Iz, you said you wanted what Daddy was having.’ Harry is rocking the back of his chair in boredom and I put my hand on his shoulder to stop him.

  Izzy still isn’t eating any of her cod and big fat tears have started to tumble down to her chin.

  ‘Can I have her chips?’ Harry asks and Paul grinds his jaw, glaring. ‘Go on then,’ he says.

  I couldn’t face a whole meal and I knew that Paul would have questions about a full plate untouched, so I said I’d pick at theirs instead as the portions looked large. He’s stopped arguing, but if he thinks he’s being subtle when he mentally tots up what I’ve eaten and gently offers more, he’s wrong.

  I nibble at a bit of Izzy’s cod batter. It’s nearly cold and feels tacky and thick between my finger and my thumb. It’s still delicious, but I can understand why a four-year-old wouldn’t enjoy it.

  The cod upset has put her off eating anything here but I know it’s only a matter of time before she pesters for a snack. We’re on holiday rules now so we’ll probably give her two.

  ‘Steady on, Harry,’ Paul says, the sides of his mouth turned down. ‘You’ll make yourself sick.’

  ‘I think he must be growing,’ I say. ‘He’ll be bigger than us soon.’

  I realise my mistake too late. Paul is sensitive about his height. Or, I suppose, about my height. He’s of average height and I’m the same height as him in flats – which I exclusively wear now – and many inches taller in heels.

  ‘Right, let’s get going,’ Paul says, standing up so his chair squawks on the tiled floor. ‘Don’t be a piglet, Harry.’

  Harry shovels as many chips into his mouth as he can, one-handed, while he stands up.

  ‘Harry!’

  ‘Come on, Harry,’ I say, peacekeeping. ‘Daddy said we were going.’

  Paul picks Izzy up and she cuddles into his chest and sniffs her fluffy cat deeply as if re
covering from a significant trauma.

  ‘What are we doing now?’ Harry asks.

  ‘I want to go home,’ Izzy says.

  ‘Well, we can’t go home home,’ I say. ‘But we can go back to the cottage and warm up.’

  ‘That sounds like a good idea, Mummy,’ Paul says. I hunch over a little and walk behind him, Harry at my side. He is definitely looking taller.

  I fumble with the keys to open up the cottage. The white light bursts out as we pile in and I yell pointlessly for the children to take their shoes off when all they want to do is get warm. I push the heavy cottage keys back into my pocket. The whole set is on one ring. Every window, the back door, patio and front. Two for the front. The weight pulls the waistband of my jeans down my hips. I could lock up everything I own and slip away. Instead, I pull the set back out, drop them noisily onto the hallway table, and take a deep breath. Five days to go.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  1983

  My room at Greenfinch Manor was on the corner near my mother’s and next to a guest bedroom that was kept permanently made and very rarely used. My room was large and sunny, with a huge wardrobe that ran across one wall and a basin in the corner that I wasn’t allowed to touch until I was old enough. No-one told me when that was, but at eleven I decided enough was enough and I moved my toothbrush from the peach-coloured bathroom down the hall to the green basin in my room without complaint.

  My room was very pleasant, but the room I remember most fondly was the guest room. A part of me would like to try to recreate it in our home in Blackheath but I can’t articulate exactly why that makes me nervous.

  I always called it the sunshine room, I’m not sure if that was a name handed to me or my own creation. My mother decorated it – or rather, she designed it and instructed some local tradesmen on how to decorate it. It had pale lemon walls, deep gold curtains and thick, black carpet. To me, it looked like sunshine over soil, although I now know it was in the Art Deco style. My mother had found a huge black antique traveller’s trunk with bright brass hinges, which sat at the foot of the bed like a blanket box. To the side of the bed stood a large, brass photographer’s lamp on three legs.

  The bed was tall and, in my memory’s eye, it was a good ten-foot wide, although of course it wasn’t.

  Sometimes, I would go to read in the middle of the bed, lying carefully so I wouldn’t leave a trace. I’d always loved the opening scene of Jane Eyre, although I’ve never finished the book despite trying several times. In the opening pages, Jane, ever so slightly grumpy with her dislike of long walks and being kept at a distance by the Reed family, tucks up in the window seat of the drawing room, shrouded by a curtain and snuggles into solitary reading in her red den. When I look back at myself, lying quietly in the sunshine room, reading The Secret Garden or The Ghost of Thomas Kempe, I romanticise it the way I did Jane Eyre. A lonely girl finding peace in a beautiful, private place. But that isn’t how it felt.

  As far back as I can remember, my family – my immediate unit of three – were like points on a triangle. Connected, part of the same shape, but kept at arm’s length from each other. My father, I guess he’d be the point at the top, my mother and I on opposing ends of the bottom. I adored my mother but I’m not entirely sure why. Perhaps that’s just the way we’re programmed. She was fun, full of laughter and naughty words, she was beautiful and kind. But no more kind to me than to her friends, probably less, really. She certainly dropped everything when they called. I never risked calling for her.

  My father, on the other hand, I saw as more part of the house than connected to a living, breathing group of people. I don’t know if this has just become an apocryphal tale that I tell myself, but I swear on my eleventh birthday, my father shook my hand.

  When it came to the actual logistics, the nuts and bolts of family life, we had a guy for that. Or to be more exact, we had a few guys and a woman. Mrs Baker ran the kitchen, cleaned the house and handled laundry. If all of us were home – which was rare – she sometimes got her husband to come and help. I would hear her chastising him from another floor, and imagine his gardener’s hands trying to fold sheets to her exacting standards. Ordinarily, Mr Baker would just take care of the grounds.

  I liked to imagine that Mr Baker was like old Ben Weatherstaff from The Secret Garden and that I was sour-faced Mary. That we would bond over the pruned bushes and he would teach me the names of the flowers as we mutually defrosted each other’s outer shells. Then he would introduce me to my very own Dickon. In reality, Mr Baker wasn’t a bit icy, he was very polite. But he had no interest in teaching me the names of the flowers and after bidding me hello in the garden, would patiently wait for me to go and play somewhere else so he could just get on with it.

  The Bakers lived in the Manor Lodge, an old gatehouse the shape of a fifty-pence piece at the edge of the estate. The drive no longer ran past their window, so the gatehouse was a toothless tiger, its many backs to the road, to the Manor itself and to the village. The front door faced towards the old disused gate and the church in the distance.

  When I was very little, I used to stay with Mrs Baker sometimes. I’d go for my tea and stay in the spare bedroom with a crocheted blanket and a clay hot water bottle in winter. The room had a little window seat, and I’d curl up with the Bakers’ unpredictable cat, Tabitha, and look back towards the Manor. I quite liked staying with Mr and Mrs Baker. I imagined that’s what staying with grandparents is like. My own grandparents were dead on my father’s side, and bitterly estranged on my mother’s. While the Bakers tired easily and put me to bed early, I also felt fussed over.

  As soon as I got old enough, Mrs Baker would babysit from the comfort of her cosy living room. She’d do a final bedtime check on me, her torchlight bouncing around on the drive as she trekked up to the big building.

  My father also had an occasional driver, Ted, and then there was Sid who lived in the village and could be called upon day or night for any kind of maintenance. Sid had been the maintenance man before my father bought the Manor so he seemed to come with the place. All of the staff were polite to me, polite in the way they waited patiently for me to leave them alone.

  Sometimes, if Ted was at a loose end waiting for my father, he would drop me to school in the big black car. As we crunched out of the drive and onto the village roads, he would ask me about the day ahead, the lessons I had and whether I liked my teachers (my answer, always, ‘no, they’re all mean’). Then he would smile and nod in the mirror and wait for me to finish before sliding up the driver’s screen. Then I would hear the muffled sound of the radio.

  Sometimes, my mum would take me to school in her old light-blue E Type Jag, the top down revealing the glorious navy-blue leather seats, slightly pockmarked from cigarette burns. She always drove too fast into corners and would laugh manically, buoyed on by my excitement. The car was a right-hand drive, which my mother never seemed fully prepared for. It was incredibly dangerous and I loved it. Despite the high speed, I would always be late because we didn’t leave the house until gone nine o’clock. My mother was not a morning person. Years later, even when she was ill and her whole body would itch from the medicine, making sleep almost impossible, she would still be unconscious in the morning.

  Generally though, I caught the private minibus sent around the villages by my school, included in the fees and no doubt a selling point in a rural area. Knees knocking together at the bus stop in winter, feet sticking to the tarmac in summer.

  I sometimes wondered what happened to the house while I was out at school. Such a big place, and it felt like I was the only bit of life in it. Did it sleep while I was out? A stone giant lying in wait, eyes closed. My father, if he was home, would sit so still at his desk he was like a corpse, propped up and painted, like a practical joke. My mother, for most of the day, would lie in bed, either sleeping or clunking the buttons on the big remote control to scan through the four channels of her boxy television on loop or flick through magazines until her eyelids were heav
y again. I wondered if they ate lunch together; it seemed unlikely.

  Occasionally in summer, my mum and I would eat lunch outside on the table, laid out by Mrs Baker. My father would be offered a plate but would stay in his office and pick from a tray. Even his eating was terse. In poor weather, a lunch would be laid out on the side in the kitchen and we could come in turn to take our food in safety, unwatched and alone.

  So much is made these days of ‘date nights’ and dinners as a couple. If ever the children are away or a babysitter is offered, the automatic thing to do is dinner. Increasingly fractious text messages relay back and forward as a restaurant is negotiated and an available table found, legs are shaved above the knee, good shirts are ironed. Paul and I do it, dragging ourselves out and struggling to hear each other over the roar of other diners, when really we’d both prefer to fall asleep in contented silence on the sofa after a take-away.

  But eating out is almost sacrosanct, protected by law. I heard about a pre-nuptial agreement in the upper echelons of our social circle that included both a date night once a week and a guarantee of sitting down to dinner as a couple and later a family, at least two nights a week. It had been knocked down from three, and was a sore spot. But back then, back in my childhood, the idea of my family eating together as a pleasurable, special thing was alien. Formal dinners were torture. And the thought of my mother and father choosing to dine together was laughable.

  I mean really, God knows why my parents got together in the first place. I struggled to imagine my mother – her long limbs, mane of hair, nervous energy and wild laugh – even sitting down to have a conversation with my father, much less falling madly in love with him. And yet they appeared to have had a wild passionate encounter that burned brightly enough for them to rush down the aisle.

  My mum, I can almost understand. Impulsive, even reckless. I could see her falling in love with the excitement of a whirlwind romance. And now to marry! And to fall pregnant on honeymoon! A love child! But not my father.