by Mason, Carol
‘Oh yes, I wanted to. I really fucking wanted to.’ He rubs a hand over his mouth, shakes his head again. ‘Jill didn't want a kid. Jill wanted a kid. Jill doesn't want a kid again. Jill loves kids. Jill hates kids. Jill cries because she can't have a kid.’
‘Well it was the same with you! I distinctly remember you saying there was far more to life than raising little snot noses. Those were your words. Then you even stopped going out with your mates because they were always on at you about when you were going to have kids, and they were all having kids, and kids were all everybody our age was talking about. Every man in the street with his baby… it was like walking over a minefield. But try getting you to open up -’
‘Yeah and you would have been so supportive wouldn't you. You go run off with a fucking Russian bloody lifeguard. Thanks. Thanks for the support and the sympathy.’
‘It wasn't like that!’ I yell as he walks back to the window again, stares out. ‘I gave you as much sympathy as anybody can give a brick wall. But what was I supposed to think? That because we couldn't have kids we were never going to have a normal marriage again?’ But maybe I could have tried harder. Maybe I should have found some other more effective, less emotional way to deal with Rob’s crisis. Did I give up more easily because the Russian came along? If he hadn’t, would I have fought harder?
‘Don't be ridiculous,’ he says calmly, doubtfully.
I put my hand on my chest and can feel my heart pounding into my palm. We’re just going round in circles. I don't even know what we're arguing about anymore.
He does a sharp intake of breath, moments pass, bringing the tension down. ‘So are you in love with him? This lifeguard? I mean, Jesus Jill.’
‘In love? How could you even think that? It was only… It only happened once.’
He holds up a hand. ‘I don’t want to know.’
But I know he does. Certainly some things. So I tell him. How we met, the coincidence of the note on my car, his having seen me before around the town. About Leigh and my loneliness. ‘This man made me forget myself, Rob. More than his good looks and anything else, he made me laugh. He made me light. And he looked at me as though the presence of my body in front of him was some irresistible tease. And I loved that. I was turning him on in a way that I couldn’t any longer do with the man I most wanted to. And until I could decide what to do with that pretty significant detail in my life, I allowed seeing him to somehow save me.’ It strikes me that I borrowed that particular piece of poppycock from Leigh.
He stands there, his back to me, in that I’m-not-listening-but-I’m listening posture, shaking his head from time to time. When I say the bit about him saving me, he groans. I think of us in Ikea, him singing me his little song, and I mourn that little song, because I know he’ll never sing to me again. ‘I never meant for it to happen Rob. You won’t believe that but it’s true. It was just… I don’t know how I got in his car.’
He huffs. His hand goes to his face. He seems to wipe his eyes.
‘You have to forgive me. I have to know we’re not over.’ Over. The word kills me. I bawl from the bottom of my lungs.
He turns, looks at me, and there are lines on his face that were never there before. Lines I’ve put there, and tears in his eyes. And I hate myself for making a big guy cry. ‘My God Jill were things so bad between us? Had you totally given up on us?’
‘I don't know. I don't know how I felt then Rob, because I'm just so overwhelmed with how I feel now.’
Passion. Sex. How trivial it all sounds now, against what I’m standing to lose.
‘Why did it only happen the one time?’ he asks, after a long sad study of me. ‘If I’m supposed to believe this.’ He perches on the windowsill and I can’t believe how handsome he is with the sun backlighting him. I cannot lose this man.
The urge to vomit returns. ‘I don’t want to talk about it, Rob. I don’t think I can.’ My voice is barely a whisper.
‘But I want to know. Why weren’t there more times?’
I rub my eyes. That tawdry little flat comes to mind, and him banging into me the way he did, the way that Rob never has, like you see them do in bad porn. I nip the bridge of my nose. ‘Because it was terrible! He was like some monster.’ Part of me can’t believe I’m telling my husband about revolting sex I had with some middle-aged lifeguard.
‘But five minutes ago you said he was a nice man.’
A small sob reverberates out of me. ‘I thought he was.’
He’s staring at me hard. ‘He was nice to me, so I thought he’d be nice. I was attracted to him so I assumed it would be good… But it was awful Rob. I wanted to stop it but he was just so carried away. I think I told him to stop…’
Do I? How can I not remember the exact details?
‘By the time I realised… it was too late.’
I look at him and wonder how a man who is standing still can suddenly seem to stop moving. ‘What’re you saying?’ A look passes his face, a stunned, sad, gentle humanity. ‘That he raped you?’
Just for one second I think, is he going to forgive me if I say he raped me? We hold eyes. My heart hammers with the adrenalin of another lie poised on my lips. But he wasn’t a rapist. He was just an insensitive lover. And I was the wrong person to be trying to have an affair. I shake my head.
His face hardens. ‘So it was just bad sex.’
I remember the shock of his private parts touching mine, his mouth on my breast, a strange man trespassing on Rob’s territory. ‘I know Rob that this will sound like the strangest thing in the world, but I am probably the only woman I know who would take a lover only to get down to it and lie there wishing it was her husband making love to her instead.’
He looks at me curiously.
‘You see, I wanted to feel wanted. But when it came down to it. I only wanted it to be you.’ It should somehow make me less unfaithful, but it doesn’t.
He sinks down on the edge of the bed, with his back to me. ‘So I take it there was no mugging. You made that up.’
I nod. ‘I left my bag at his place.’
He processes this then sniggers. ‘So the phone… when I rang, it was him who answered?’
I shut my eyes. ‘Probably.’
‘Him I reported to the police? That’s why you were so upset about it?’
I nod and he says Fuck again. Then there’s silence. Then he says, quietly, ‘What a fool you’ve made of me.’
I have.
‘I trusted you.’ He says it so innocently, frankly, vulnerably. ‘If there was one person in this world I’d have said wouldn’t have it in her to do this, it would have been you Jill.’ He shakes his head in quiet disbelief, almost laughs.
We don’t say much after that. Rob lies down on the bed, on top of the duvet, the sunken shadows under his eyes seeming to darken the more I stare at them. I remember my mother once saying that marriage is a series of tests. How’s he going to stand up to this one? I curl up at his feet, feeling bled of all energy. We stay like this, me waiting for what is going to happen next, vacantly watching the red numerals of the clock click over as though they’re the last moments of my life. I am praying for a stay of execution.
‘Rob,’ I eventually say, startling him from his thoughts. ‘I have to know what you’re thinking. Talk to me. Will you tell me what we're going to do?’
He stares, unblinking, at the ceiling. Then his eyes slide to mine. ‘Well, what are you going to do is more the question.’
I struggle to sit up. His face has a ruthless sadness to it that panics me. ‘What d’you mean?’
‘Well,’ he says, with an almost flippant finality. ‘Obviously you’re moving out.’
Chapter Eighteen
I have to keep pinching myself as I load my car with the six boxes and three suitcases that contain everything that’s ‘mine’ and not ‘ours’. ‘Make sure you’re not here when I get back,’ Rob said as he went off to work with his dog.
I’m moving in with my parents for now. Until I can think
how to get him back. But it won’t be easy. Rob may be a bit more sophisticated than your average northern male, but like all hard working men whose grandfathers were miners, Rob is a no-messing bloke. Once he’s made a decision, he rarely goes back on it. In ten years of marriage, I can’t think of a time when he has.
We’ve already agreed to sell the house. He says he wants to get on with his life! ‘What?’ I asked. ‘You mean try to meet somebody else?’
‘Maybe. Or maybe you’ve put me off women. Maybe I’ll be just fine on my own. Me and the dog.’ He gave Kiefer’s collar an overzealous rub.
I stand on the curb, fish in my pocket for my handkerchief, look back at my house and am hit with an overdose of separation anxiety. I don’t blame him for wanting rid of me. I’d be the same if the shoe were on the other foot. But the point is, it’s not. And I’m not feeling very fair and square and noble right now. I go back inside and plonk myself on the sofa. I look around at our sparse but solid furniture that Rob made, the bare rectangles on the walls where the framed photos of us used to hang until I packed them to take them with me. Taking them down felt like emptying a house after a death. No, I think, Jill and Rob live here. Not Rob on his own. Not some other lover who might move in and have the luck we didn’t.
‘I love you,’ I told him, after our terrible fight.
‘I love you too,’ he said. ‘And I’m sure that, in a way, I always will. But Jill you’ve sickened me. My pride won’t let me be with you anymore.’
If he’d said he didn’t love me, I would have felt this situation had hope.
I hug a cushion and try to squeeze those horrible words from my brain. I will make him change his mind. And if he never fully forgives me, I’ll make do. It's a small price to pay to go to bed with him, wake up beside him, live my life alongside him as he lives his.
‘You’re still here,’ he says, when he comes in and finds me attempting to put together a tuna fish salad. I’ve unpacked the photos and hung them back up again. ‘I can’t go,’ I tell him. The dog pads over to me and slurps a tongue up the backs of my legs.
Rob rakes in the cupboard and opens a can of salmon as though defiantly showing me that he’s not about to eat anything I’ve touched. I abandon slicing cucumber, and sit down and watch him eat the un-drained fish that he’s just dunked on a plate, complete with bones and skin. Kiefer’s two moist, black, twitching nostrils are pushed under his elbow.
‘Go,’ he says quietly when I follow him upstairs to bed. I try to snuggle him but he rounds his spine, pushing me away. ‘Please Jill. Just leave me alone.’ His tone is angry. When I don’t he flings the duvet off, grabs his pillow, storms into the spare room, locks the door.
I spring out of bed, rifle in the wardrobe for a wire coat-hanger. Many a time Rob will pick the lock when I’m on the loo. His idea of being funny. I go to the door, and jiggle the end of the wire in the handle. ‘Shit,’ he says when I go in. ‘If you’re going to do this, I’m leaving.’ He gets up, storms back into our bedroom, starts filling his sports bag.
I follow him. I cling on to the doorframe, feeling close to collapsing. I see him being available for somebody else the second he walks out of this door. Falling in love again. Replacing me. ‘Don’t leave me.’ I cling to his shoulders as he zips his bag, recognising that I’ve lost every last thread of my pride. He stands there, clearly not wanting to go—because there really is nowhere for him to go, except to his mother’s, and I can’t see him doing that and having to explain everything. He abandons the bag, takes hold of me and gently shoves me out of the room and locks the door. I bang on it for a bit, ashamed at my appalling behaviour, but relieved too, that he has changed his mind. Then I suddenly feel so exhausted. I slump to a heap on the floor.
In the morning, I wake up still in the same position, sore all down my right side. I can hear him in the shower in our en-suite. When I try our room door, he has unlocked it so I go in. His bag is on the floor. I go into the bathroom, sit on the toilet lid watching his moving silhouette through the glass door. When he comes out, he towels off, as though I’m not there. I sit across from him in the kitchen as he eats his Rice Krispies. The air has a sad, silent understanding to it. I’ve been bad. This cold-shoulder treatment is my punishment. I have to weather it because I’m praying that forgiveness will be the silver lining to this storm.
On his way out, he turns and fixes me with a frank, unforgiving face. ‘Jill, if you're not gone before I get back, I’ll just move out myself. Your choice.’
‘My God, you really do want rid of me.’ I don’t know why it’s taken until now for me to realise it.
His eyes hold mine over his shoulder before he disappears out of the door. ‘I want rid of you, yes.’
Those words, they engrave on my heart as I drive through to Sunderland. I switch the radio on as I swing off the roundabout and head toward the Board Inn, and Linda Ronstadt is singing “Blue Bayou.” I don’t even notice the traffic light. I sail right into the back of a red Toyota. I register the clench of metal, the slight throw of myself forward. The driver, a middle-aged chap with a big gut, is out of his car, having words with my unresponsive face through the glass. As I wind my window down, he mumbles something about having to get to hospital because his wife has just gone into labour. I look at his belly, catch words: damage, insurance, phone number. He waggles a pen and paper at me. My lack of reaction flusters him. I mechanically take his pen. Before he cocks a leg into his car, he looks back at me and shakes his head as though he thinks I’m nuts. Then off he drives to his wife and new baby. I realise I've just given him Rob's and my number.
When I get to my parents’ bungalow I put my big dark sunglasses on like a fallen Hollywood starlet. My dad opens the door, does a double take. ‘Good God, are you going on holiday, or is this your impression of Ray Charles?’ I peel my glasses off so he will see that I have been crying. ‘Gaw!’ he says. ‘What’s happened to you?’
‘Everything,’ I tell him. But I’d never tell him what. My dad has some pretty old-fashioned ideas about women behaving like ladies. His ladylove looks up from the telly when I walk in the sitting room. ‘Hello sweetheart,’ she says, in some mental twilight of detached recognition. I want her to stand up, hold me and make everything better. But with her pretty, transparent gaze she feels gone from me. Elizabeth Mallin might be sat here but she’s just a shell in which my mother doesn’t live anymore.
And that about characterizes the next little while. We are shells in which we don’t live anymore. I try to settle into the clutter of the spare room among all the old furniture that my parents brought with them from their last much bigger house. I sleep in my old single bed, the one I slept in when I dreamt of meeting a man like Rob. My first night I wake up and it’s dark and I don’t know where I am. I struggle to sit up and smack my head off a wall that I’m not expecting to be there. As I clutch at the pain, it dawns on me why I am here, and I fill with plainspoken loss. I peer at my watch in the moonlight. Four a.m. Will he be lying there like me, besieged with grief for us, wanting to run to me, forgive me and take me back? Somehow I doubt it.
My first morning, I come out of the bedroom to find my parents having a fight in the hall. My mother is trying to get out of the door with four carrier bags filled with clothes. My dad has her arms in his grip and there’s a tussle going on.
‘She’s packed her bags and she says she’s leaving. She said she’s going to stay with her mother in York.’
My mother breaks free of his grasp and reaches for the front door handle and I immediately rush to stop her.
‘It’s locked,’ my dad tells her, patiently, but like he’s reasoning with an imbecile. ‘You can’t go anywhere Bessie. I’ve got the key.’ But my mother keeps rattling away at the handle, like a tormented prisoner who has found a window of opportunity to break out. ‘Bessie,’ my dad calmly strokes her hand. ‘Come on now love. Come on. Settle down.’
‘You brought her here!’ my mam turns and fixes me with her gaze, that is today, un
fairly lucid.
‘She thinks you’re my girlfriend,’ my dad explains.
‘Tramp!’ she spits at me with sharp contempt. ‘Can’t keep your own man so you want to take somebody else’s!’
I throw a hand to my mouth in shock. ‘That’s it! I’m calling the doctor! We can’t go on like this! This is mad! It’s a madhouse in here!’ I fight the urge to cry. I should be coming down on one of their sides, but it feels like I’m coming down on my own.
‘Don’t be coming here and ordering us about! If it’s a madhouse it’s our madhouse so go home, we don’t want you here.’ Then he looks at me, shocked, apparently. A purplish colour rushes over his face. ‘Oh I’m sorry lass. You know I didn’t mean that.’ He wraps my mother in a big cuddle. ‘They’ll take her away from me!’ he wails, and my mother stares out at me, across his shoulder, quietly triumphant.
When she settles down, I manage to get my dad to at least let me ring the doctor. I phone the health centre and they send Dr. Reilly, a good-looking young man with smiling eyes and red hair that looks steam-rolled straight. ‘Irish,’ my dad whispers. ‘Don’t they have room for him in Ireland? How old do you think he is, thirteen?’ Dr. Reilly says that the last entry on my mother’s file was in 1976. ‘That’s because our family doesn’t believe in doctors,’ my dad tells him. The doctor asks my mother her name. And she tells him, ‘Elizabeth. Or, Bessie, as my husband calls me.’ She gives my dad a fond smile. ‘Makes me sound like a black Labrador’. The doctor looks at me, sceptically, as if to say, You’re sure there’s something wrong with her? My dad looks at me as though to say I win. Dr. Reilly gives us some pills to supposedly calm her, and an emergency phone number. He tells us that, of course, the very best thing would be for my mother to be admitted to a home where they can take proper care of her. ‘Yeah, right lad,’ my dad takes hold of him—one hand on the seat of his pants and the other on the scruff of his neck—and frogmarches him out of the door, then down the garden path. He runs him so that the doctor stumbles with ‘cartoon’ legs, trying to keep up. ‘Go push your prescriptions on some other poor unsuspecting bugger.’ Free of my dad's clutches, the doctor fleas to the safety of his car, turning only once to catch my apologetic expression, and giving me a thin, aghast smile.