The Things We Need to Say

by Rachel Burton

  Fran had signed up for yoga teacher training. She was terrified. But she was forced to look inside herself and face that fear. To learn to stand up in front of a class of people and share with them the thing she loved most in the world. Will always knew she could do it and eventually she believed she could as well.

  Together they could do anything. Or so she used to think.

  As the plane flies over the Pyrenees towards Barcelona – somewhere so full of memories and that cycle of hope that came to nothing – she didn’t know how she was meant to feel. She didn’t know what to do with her sadness; she didn’t know where to put it. There was the sadness for what Will had done, but also the sadness for what had happened before, the dreams they had shared that had been torn apart.

  She looked out of the little plane window at the mountains below her and blinked back her tears. Crying always made her feel stupid.

  Will

  He stands up and walks over to the medicine cabinet looking for the painkillers he’d hidden in there last summer, vowing to stop taking them by the handful. He’d meant to start seeing the osteopath again, to start looking after himself, but he’d just never got around to it. Looking after himself had stopped seeming important.

  But he can’t cope another second with this headache pounding behind his eyes. He’d lain awake all night in the spare room, his jaw clenched, feeling the headache suck the life out of him. And now Fran has gone and he’s damned if he’s going to put up with this pain. In half an hour the sweet release of codeine will take him.

  He finds the pill bottle at the back of the bathroom cabinet and swallows two dry. As an afterthought he takes a third and puts the bottle back, closing the cabinet door and looking at himself in the mirror. He sees his father looking back and closes his eyes. He can’t stand the way he is looking more like his father as he gets older. He can’t stand the way he’s started acting like his father, despite every effort he’s made to be a better man, a kinder man, a better husband.

  A better father if he’d been given the chance.

  He opens his eyes and looks at himself again. The years of headaches, the years of medication, the years of heartache are taking their toll now. No matter how far he runs, how well he keeps himself in shape, how much cricket he plays, he can’t stop time.

  Perhaps it is too late to try again. Perhaps it always has been.

  He hadn’t seen Karen again for several weeks after that first time in the shop. The next time he’d bumped into her he’d apologised for being so rude the first time they’d met. They had chatted for a while and Will was glad of the company, glad of the distraction. Karen had made him smile and it had been nice to smile again.

  It took him longer than it should have done to realise that she was flirting with him. She was nearly twenty years younger than he was and it massaged his ego to think someone so young could find him attractive.

  But the flirting had turned from harmless fun to what seemed, to Will, to be a full-on seduction – and to his shame he’d found himself reciprocating. Sometimes she would ask him to help her out in the house, things her husband would have done for her if he hadn’t left. He would always remind her that he was married, that his wife wasn’t well. Flirting was one thing, consciously going over to the house of the woman who was flirting with him was quite another.

  But by October he’d felt as though Fran should be feeling better, that by then things should be changing. He had given up all hope of the life he had planned and the only way he could move on was to let go of the past. He had wanted his wife back and he couldn’t understand why she hadn’t wanted the same thing. He should never have shouted at her, never have tried to force her to do something she wasn’t ready to do.

  He had told Fran the truth when he said he hadn’t planned to go to Karen’s when he’d walked out on her that night. He hadn’t known where he was going. He wondered sometimes, if he could do everything all over again would he do things differently?

  He had been shaking when he arrived on that night last October, and soaked through from the rain. He hadn’t even stopped to put on a coat. Karen had fetched a towel and poured him a glass of wine and he’d told her about what he’d done, the argument he’d had with Fran, how he’d walked away. They stood in Karen’s kitchen facing each other, leaning against opposite countertops. He’d talked; she’d listened. He’d told her about everything that had happened that summer, everything that had happened over the last seven years, about how he felt his heart would never heal, about how he felt as though his marriage was over.

  When he’d finished they both stood in silence. He had stared at her as though he couldn’t believe he’d said so much. But it had felt good to talk; Fran never wanted to talk. It was months later that Will realised, too late as it turned out, that Fran just hadn’t been ready and he hadn’t had the patience to wait for her. He’d betrayed Fran in so many ways that night.

  He never thought he’d cheat on his wife, but when Karen walked over to him that evening Will had thought she was going to kiss him and he didn’t think he was going to stop her. Instead she had dropped to her knees in front of him. He was hard before she’d unbuttoned his jeans.

  Just before he came he’d caught sight of his reflection in Karen’s kitchen window and remembered the fragment from the Shakespeare play he’d studied for A Level flashing through his head.

  Foolish fond old man.

  Afterwards, as he’d done up his jeans and swallowed the rest of his wine in one gulp, he hadn’t been able to look at her. She’d turned her back on him to make it easier. She’d finished her own wine as though to take away the taste of him.

  ‘I have to go,’ he’d said. ‘I shouldn’t be here. I don’t know what I was thinking. I have to get back to my wife.’

  As he’d walked home in the rain he told himself that he would end it there. He hadn’t, and he would never forgive himself for that.

  He still doesn’t know why he did it, why he went that first night or why he went back. He was desperate for someone to hold him, to tell him that everything would be all right. But he hadn’t realised until it was too late that the only person who could do that was Fran. All Will had ever wanted was Fran. A life he hadn’t planned on was infinitely better than a life without Fran. He should have told her that every day.

  Standing now in Fran’s bathroom, in front of the mirror, he slowly starts to pick up the bottles and jars of creams and gels and liquids that Fran keeps on the shelf above the sink. He feels the weight of the blue glass in his hands and is suddenly overcome with the sense of the irreparable nature of the damage he has caused. Anger and frustration rise up in him like fire and without knowing what he is doing he throws the blue glass jar at the mirror, listening with satisfaction to the sound of glass shattering glass. He throws another and another listening to the sound that splinters the claustrophobic silence of the house. He used to be one of the best spin bowlers in Suffolk; every jar hits home.

  When he’s done he stands, breathless, listening to the vestiges of the shattering noises echo around the house. When he looks up he catches sight of himself in the broken mirror once more.

  Foolish fond old man.

  Fran

  As she sees her suitcase travel towards her on the luggage carousel, Fran steps forward to retrieve it. She barely has the energy to drag it towards her and pull it through customs. Will wasn’t the only one who hadn’t slept the night before. She had lain awake for most of the night, turning everything over in her mind. Part of her wishes she hadn’t found out, wishes that Will had played cricket the day before, that it hadn’t rained, that he hadn’t forgotten to take his phone out with him when he went for a run. But part of her knows it was inevitable that she found out, that she never had a choice.

  She is tired and hot and feeling a little nauseous, but she knows she needs to pull herself together. She knows she needs to be at her strongest over the next few days, both for herself and for the people coming on the yoga retreat. She thinks about t
hem as she wheels her suitcase out into the main concourse of Barcelona airport – of Elizabeth and Constance and Katrin and David, regulars at her yoga classes in Cambridge, and of the friends they will be bringing. She already feels a sense of support at the thought of seeing their familiar faces the next day.

  She stops to buy a bottle of water using the euros that Will had brought home for her on Friday night. Friday night seems like a lifetime ago, when Will was still the man she could trust with anything, when they still had each other. She thinks again about how they had planned this trip together, covering every eventuality. It was the first thing they had done together since the previous summer. She remembers sitting at Will’s desk as they booked her tickets and sorted out her travel insurance, and thinking how together they could find a new kind of normal, how they could be happy again if they wanted to be. But now she doesn’t know what’s going to happen any more.

  She realises she is standing in the middle of the arrivals hall of a busy airport getting in everyone’s way as she drifts off into memories. She has these moments a lot these days, as though she is watching her life from the outside, as though she has become slightly disconnected from the world.

  When her mother died she’d felt as though everything had changed. Their bond had been special and when it disappeared Fran felt as though her safety net had been taken away. As though her lifeline back to the mothership had been severed and she had been left drifting in space. But since last summer she feels more like the mothership, sitting motionless and calm while life carries on around her, just outside of her reach.

  Fran feels closest to the person she used to be when she is teaching yoga – and that’s why she’s here. To try to find out what it is to feel alive again, try to remember who she is.

  She had been feeling more alive in other areas of her life recently though, hadn’t she? On Saturday night when Jamie came round for dinner, she laughed in a way she hadn’t done in a year and on Sunday morning when she woke up in Will’s arms, she had felt as though they could start again. It was that longing to start again, that need to get her old life back, that had brought Fran so close to walking away from the taxi this morning, from almost allowing Will’s touch to guide her home.

  She felt as though she had woken from a deep sleep, like the fairy-tale princesses of her childhood imaginings, and now instead of the numbness she had grown used to over the last twelve months, she could feel everything.

  Yoga had always taught her how to sit with her feelings, to help her remember that everything passes in the end and that sometimes a sensation is no more than a sensation. Right now she can’t imagine these feelings ever passing, but she knows, deep down, that over time the feelings would become less raw, less intense.

  Up until yesterday she had been feeling so hopeful again, as though she and Will could find their way out of this. But now, with the future so uncertain, everything feels raw again.

  If she really wants to remember who she is, she needs to do it alone, because she might only have herself to rely on now. She knows she’s strong enough to do it. She knows she’s done it before.

  But finding out about Will’s affair has reminded Fran of all the cracks that were developing in their marriage, cracks that had started as tiny threads years ago after her first miscarriage when she began to feel afraid. Afraid that she couldn’t give Will the one thing he wanted, afraid that she had waited too long, afraid that one day – if she couldn’t do it – he might leave her for someone younger, someone more fertile. Someone like Karen.

  She wonders if it had started to become too much for him. She always thought they were equals, that they held one another up, that she looked after him as much as he looked after her.

  Getting the partnership, the role Will had taken that led to his meeting Fran in the first place, was everything that was expected of him by his family, but Will had found it stressful, sometimes unbearably so. The early, heady, honeymoon days of their relationship had been marred by the stresses of Will’s job. He worked long hours and was plagued by tension headaches. Fran would look after him, cook his favourite meals, massage his temples, let him lie down in the dark with his head on her lap quietly, doing nothing, just being there for him.

  She’d asked, once, if he ever regretted taking the job. If he ever felt it was too much.

  ‘The job’s hard,’ he had said. ‘But I don’t regret taking it. If I hadn’t I wouldn’t have met you and meeting you was the best thing that ever happened to me.’

  Fran wonders if Will still thought that. She tries to remember the last time she had been able to find the strength to be there for him. Their marriage had shifted gear after her first miscarriage. She wonders if it became a place where Will did all the looking after and if perhaps he’d got tired of that.

  As she walks through Barcelona airport she remembers the last time she was here, over six years ago. She and Will, on their way back to England, wrapped around each other and holding a secret, trying again. Their whole marriage seems to have revolved around an endless cycle of trying again and holding secrets. Some of those secrets turned out to be ones that they didn’t share.

  Fran thinks about her own secret, the one she holds so tightly that she barely shares it with herself.

  She doesn’t know what will happen to either of them now. But she does know that she has to focus on herself, on being strong, on the retreat. She takes a deep breath and rolls the cold bottle of water over her hot brow, letting the water droplets fall down her temples. She swallows down another wave of nausea and heads towards the taxi that waits for her.

  JULY 2005

  We’d been together just over four months when Will took me to Paris, his favourite place on Earth. He booked first-class seats on the Eurostar and I wound myself up into a ball of anxiety about travelling on a train in a tunnel under the sea. By the time we got to Dover we’d drunk half a bottle of champagne and as the train entered the tunnel he kissed me, distracting me from my fears. By the time we arrived in Calais, all I was interested in was getting to our hotel room.

  He had found a boutique hotel in Montmartre. Our room was tiny but beautiful and from the window you could see the marshmallow outline of Sacré Coeur against the horizon. When we arrived we fell into bed before the door had barely closed behind us.

  I loved Paris because he did. I loved watching him show me his favourite places, telling me stories of the times he’d been here before. He never mentioned the fact that most of those memories would have been made with his first wife. I tried not to think about it.

  Most of all I loved watching him speak French. I’d had no idea how fluent he was and for some reason it made me love him even more. When I mentioned it he shrugged.

  ‘I did languages at A Level,’ he said.

  ‘But not at university?’

  ‘My parents thought law would be more useful.’ There was an edge of resignation to his voice. I was beginning to understand that what his parents thought was often hard to argue with. I’d never asked what they thought of me.

  He asked me to marry him as we sat on a bench by the Seine. I was talking about something else – I can’t even remember what now – and he seemed distracted, as though he wasn’t really listening. He cut me off mid-sentence, grabbing my hand and putting something in it.

  ‘Stop talking for a minute, will you?’ He smiled nervously. ‘Sorry, I just …’ He took a breath, looked away from me. ‘Open the box,’ he said.

  The little black leather box he’d given me contained a ring, a solitaire diamond on a white-gold band. I looked from the ring to him.

  ‘Will you marry me?’ he asked.

  ‘I didn’t think you’d want to get married again,’ I said, still holding the ring box, still staring at it.

  ‘Of course I want to get married again, Fran. I want to marry you, I want to have babies with you, I want to grow old with you. I’ve never felt like this before.’ He put his hands on my shoulders, turning me towards him, looking into my eyes. ‘
Please say yes.’

  I wrapped my arms around him then, as the breeze fluttered in off the river, cooling the humid July evening. I felt the solidity of him, the way he made me feel so sure. This was everything I had ever wanted, the rescue from my loneliness that I’d never dared hope would arrive.

  ‘Of course yes,’ I said quietly. ‘I want all those things too.’ Even when I said the words I wasn’t sure if they were completely true, but I was sure I wanted him.

  We sat there together for a while, arms around each other. Jazz was floating in the air towards us from one of the nearby cafés.

  ‘I’d ask you to dance,’ he said into my hair. ‘But we know how badly that turns out.’

  The next day I lay in bed, staring at the ring on my finger, the early morning sun glinting off the diamond. I couldn’t believe how lucky I was. I couldn’t believe this was happening to me.

  ‘Where do you want to get married?’ Will asked. I’d thought he was still asleep. I turned my head to look at him.

  ‘I don’t know. I’ve never really thought about it!’

  ‘Really?’ He seemed surprised. ‘I thought all women thought about that sort of thing.’

  ‘Not all women, Will,’ I said, rolling onto my stomach so I could look at him. I felt his hand trace the bones of my spine.

  ‘Well do you want a big church wedding, a marquee in my parents’ garden?’ he asked.

  ‘Is that what you had last time?’ I didn’t want it to be like last time. I didn’t even really want him to think about last time, but I had to know.