The Things We Need to Say

by Rachel Burton

  ‘Look at it from her point of view,’ Jamie says after a moment. ‘Finding out that you’ve cheated on her, on top of everything else that you two have had to deal with over the last few years. Wouldn’t you want some time away? Some time to think? It doesn’t necessarily mean she’s left you, or that she’s never coming home.’

  ‘All I want is to be with her,’ Will replies. ‘All I want is for her to come home now. I can’t stand being on my own any more.’

  ‘Well you probably should have thought of that before you got yourself in this sorry mess.’

  Will says nothing, gritting his teeth, the headache that has been behind his eyes for days suddenly tripling in size. He can’t remember the last time he didn’t have a headache.

  ‘Look, Will,’ Jamie says more gently, breaking the silence. ‘Why don’t you come out here, stay for a few days?’

  ‘God,’ Will says quietly. ‘That would actually be bloody wonderful.’

  *

  Jamie is sitting on the wall at the bottom of the lane as Will swings his silver Audi into his parents’ estate. Jamie jumps down off the wall and Will slows down as his brother gets into the passenger seat.

  ‘You look like shit,’ Jamie says.

  ‘You don’t look too hot yourself,’ Will replies, turning his gaze back on to the road to drive up the lane.

  ‘What a bloody mess we both are,’ Jamie says, rubbing his face.

  ‘What do you want to do?’

  ‘Now or in general?’ Jamie asks.

  ‘Now. I think I can only cope with now,’ Will replies.

  ‘Go and park behind the stables; we’ll grab some beers and walk down to the back paddock. Get drunk, just like old times.’

  ‘Sounds like a plan,’ Will says with a smile, his shoulders relaxing for the first time all week.

  Jamie has been living back with their parents since he separated from Izzy. Will doesn’t really know why his brother chose to do that rather than rent a flat in Cambridge or Newmarket while waiting for the divorce and house sale to go through. He suspects, though, that like him, Jamie can’t stand the thought of being alone. That was the thing about boarding school: you grow up without any privacy, constantly looking forward to the day when you can be alone but never handling it well when it happens. Will still doesn’t know how he got through those four years of living alone after his first wife left him, before Fran came along. He can’t go back to that.

  Once they’ve parked the car, Jamie takes a box of beers from the fridge in the barn and hands Will two deckchairs. ‘Carry these,’ he says.

  ‘What are these for?’ Will asks.

  ‘I don’t know about you, bro, but I’m forty-five and I really don’t fancy sitting on the grass for any length of time any more.’

  They walk down to the paddock together slowly, both lost in thought. Will thinks about all the times they’ve come down here before over the years: the first time they got drunk together one summer on a bottle of whisky stolen from their father, how Jamie had been so sick that Will thought he was going to die. Later, when they were older, they used to have parties here, inviting everyone from the nearby villages. Will had lost his virginity in this paddock the summer after his A Levels.

  They put up the deckchairs, sit down, and each open a beer.

  ‘What happened, Will?’ Jamie asks, looking out across the fields, under the big Suffolk skies. ‘Why did you do it?’

  Will looks out across the fields too, the fields filled with memories of cricket and endless summers, of innocence long since gone. He knows exactly what Jamie is asking; he just doesn’t know how to answer.

  ‘I honestly don’t know,’ he replies quietly.

  ‘Did you love her? Were you going to leave Fran?’

  ‘God no, I’d never leave Fran.’

  ‘Then why? You know how scared Fran had got about you leaving her.’

  ‘I was never going to leave her. I tried to tell her that but the more obvious it became that we weren’t going to have a baby the less inclined she was to believe me.’ He pauses. ‘I don’t know why I did it. Karen was just there, she made it pretty clear how she felt, and—’

  ‘Jesus, Will, people flirt all the time. People find people who aren’t their partners attractive all the time. You aren’t meant to follow it through.’

  Will turns his head to look at his brother. ‘Is that what happened with you and Izzy?’ They’d never talked about it; Jamie had never wanted to talk. Sometimes Will felt he was the only person in the world who ever wanted to talk about anything.

  Jamie shakes his head. ‘Izzy and I just fell out of love,’ he says. ‘I don’t know what happened. I just slowly came to the realisation that I didn’t love her any more.’

  ‘Do you think that makes it easier?’ Will asks.

  Jamie shrugs. ‘I’ve no idea. Nothing about either of our situations is easy.’

  ‘I do still love Fran,’ Will says. ‘I love her as much as I ever did, more maybe.’

  ‘Does she still love you?’

  ‘She said so in her email, but she doesn’t know if that means we can work it out. It might not be enough.’

  ‘Then you have to make damn sure it’s enough. You have to fight for it, if it’s what you want. You have to start thinking about the future.’

  Will sits with one ankle crossed over the opposite knee, holding his empty beer bottle between his fingers, looking out towards the horizon as though the answers to his problems are there.

  His childhood memories of this place are invariably happy. Like his brother, he loved being home from school for the holidays and growing up out here in the wilds of Suffolk they were at liberty to maraud as much as they pleased, as long as they remembered to lock the gates behind them and not scare the sheep. They fought all the time, constantly vying for the alpha male role until the day, when Will was fifteen, he pinned Jamie down in the barn under the hay rake. They had an understanding from then on.

  Until today. This afternoon it feels as though the tables have turned, as though Jamie is the oldest, the alpha, and Will has fallen somehow, has let everyone down.

  Jamie opens two more beers, hands one to Will. ‘What happened that night?’ he asks quietly. ‘The first time you went to Karen’s house?’

  ‘Fran and I had a fight. A huge fight. I walked out on her.’

  ‘Had it ever happened before?’

  ‘Had I ever cheated on her before? God no. I’m not Dad.’

  ‘Had you ever walked out on her before?’

  ‘Once,’ Will replies, slowly turning his beer bottle in his hands. ‘I wanted IVF; she didn’t. I tried to push her into having it. I couldn’t understand why she wouldn’t try anything to have a baby.’

  ‘Really?’ Jamie says, surprised. ‘You couldn’t understand? Wasn’t it obvious to you by then that she’d had enough? Wasn’t it obvious that three miscarriages was all she could take?’

  ‘In hindsight yes, of course it was obvious,’ Will replies grimly, his jaw set, his headache returning. ‘But I’d become obsessed with it by then.’

  ‘Why, Will? Why couldn’t you let it go? You must have realised that Fran only did all of this for you, to make you happy. That tells you how much she loves you, although God knows why.’

  ‘I did let it go though, in the end,’ Will says quietly. ‘When she wouldn’t have IVF, when nothing else was working, I did realise what a strain it was putting on her, on us. It was something my secretary said in the end – you know Janine? Fran’s friend?’

  Jamie nods.

  ‘She made me realise what I was putting Fran through, how scared Fran was. She made me realise that Fran was more important than anything else. So, I did let it go – and that’s when she fell pregnant with Oscar.’

  ‘She did seem genuinely happy then,’ Jamie concedes. ‘I hadn’t seen either of you that happy for years, I’ll admit.’

  ‘It was the best it ever had been. There were all these wedges between us – the miscarriages, the IVF –
and it was as if they all disappeared when she was carrying Oscar. But we weren’t strong enough to cope with what happened; the cracks were still there. And that night, the night I walked out, the night I went to Karen’s, I did something else.’

  ‘What did you do, Will?’ Jamie asks.

  Will puts his beer down and stands up, his hands in his pockets. He walks over to the fence and leans against it, his back to his brother. When he starts speaking Jamie has to lean forward in his chair to hear the words.

  ‘I wanted to clear out the nursery,’ Will says. ‘I wanted to dismantle the crib and give away the clothes and toys to somebody who needed them because we sure as hell didn’t. She wouldn’t do it though – she wanted everything to just stay the same.’ He stops, presses his fingers into his eyes. ‘I felt that she should have been starting to feel a bit better then, starting to want to move on – I just wanted my wife back.’

  ‘There isn’t a timescale on grief, Will,’ Jamie says gently. ‘It had only been a couple of months.’

  Will turns around, looks at his brother. ‘I know. I know. I just wanted it all to go away. I couldn’t stand how it made me feel. I couldn’t stand how it was making her feel. I should never have shouted at her, should never have forced her to do something she didn’t feel ready to do, but I couldn’t bear knowing the nursery was there behind the closed door like Miss Havisham’s bloody wedding breakfast.’

  ‘I don’t understand,’ Jamie says. ‘Why would you want to do that so early? Why would you want to clear everything out when you’d pushed so hard?’

  ‘I’d given up. When Oscar died I felt as though a part of me died too. I was completely defeated. I couldn’t do it any more. I wanted everything to just disappear so I could start again.’

  Jamie stands up then, walks over to his brother. ‘What happened, Will?’ Jamie asks, his brow furrowing. ‘What did you do?’

  ‘I should never have walked out on her.’ Will is almost in tears now. ‘I should never have gone to Karen’s.’ He pauses. His breath shudders. ‘I should never have smashed up the nursery with my cricket bat.’

  Remembering that night makes Will feel sick. Destroying the nursery had always felt like the ultimate betrayal, more so than sleeping with someone else. He destroyed everything they had ever hoped for that night and he had a feeling Fran felt the same, even now, even after she had found out about his affair. He hears his brother step towards him, feels his arm around him. He rests his forehead on Jamie’s shoulder and waits for this surge of grief and despair to pass.

  ‘I don’t deserve her,’ Will says as he starts to calm down, pull away, go back to his seat. He picks up his beer as Jamie joins him.

  ‘You really don’t,’ Jamie replies, with a sly smile.

  ‘She’s always been so forgiving, so understanding about everything. When I came back from Karen’s that night, she’d cleared up the nursery. It must have broken her heart to do it. She didn’t even ask where I’d been.’ He pauses, draws from his beer. ‘What am I going to do? How am I ever going to make it up to her?’

  ‘You lost a child,’ Jamie says. ‘I can’t imagine what that feels like. It breaks my heart that I don’t live with my kids any more, that I only get to see them every other weekend – but at least they’re here – alive and well and up to mischief. I don’t know how either of you got through the last year. It’s not really much of a surprise that one of you broke. It’s not much of a surprise to me that it was you.’

  ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

  ‘She’s much stronger than you, Will. Maybe it’s all the yoga, I don’t know, but you’ve never been able to cope with failure.’

  ‘I don’t know what to do any more, Jamie.’

  ‘Show her that you’re still the man she fell in love with.’

  ‘The man she fell in love with would never have done those things,’ Will says, leaning his forearms on his knees, another empty beer bottle dangling from his fingers.

  ‘Only you and Fran can decide your future,’ Jamie replies quietly. ‘Neither of you are the people you used to be. You have to learn to accept that everything has changed, that you might never be a father. Can you live with that? Is that enough for you?’

  ‘Fran has always been enough. I know how I’ve behaved doesn’t exactly make that look like it’s true, but she has.’

  Jamie nods, opens two more beers. ‘Then you have to give her the space she needs and let her decide what she wants to do. After that, together, you work out where you go from here.’

  Fran

  She leads her group of disparate yogis through a series of backbends on Sunday morning. Like the twists they’d done a couple of days earlier she is focusing on opening out the shoulders, the chest, the heart.

  ‘The body’s natural response to danger is to curl up into a ball,’ she says, thinking about how she lay in bed for days after Oscar’s funeral, curled up like a hedgehog, refusing to speak, refusing to be touched. She wonders now how that affected Will, what that did to their marriage. ‘Think about how you respond to something that embarrasses you or scares you,’ she goes on. ‘Backbends are the exact opposite of that – they open us up to the world. They’re the ultimate power pose!’

  She lets everyone relax out of locust pose, a strong backbend performed from a prone position.

  ‘OK,’ she says. ‘Let’s try that again.’ She smiles to herself as she hears Constance groan. ‘Let’s see if you can do it this time without squeezing your bums so much. Try to use the muscles of your back.’

  ‘I don’t have any muscles in my back,’ Constance grumbles.

  Despite her complaining, Fran watches Constance soar into her backbend along with Elizabeth and Katrin and David. Molly and Joy seem less willing, less ready to feel fearless. Fran thinks about how she can help with that.

  ‘We’re going to try it one last time,’ she says, as she hears more grumbling from Constance. ‘And this time I want you to try to do two things for me. Firstly, I want you to smile.’ She notices everyone lift a little higher as soon as she says that. ‘And then I want you to think about the thing you’d like to do most in the world that you’re being held back from by your own fear and, just for a second, imagine what it would feel like to let that fear go.’

  There they go, Fran thinks. Everybody’s flying now!

  ‘Well done, everyone,’ she says as she leads them into child’s pose to stretch out their back muscles. ‘It takes a lot of courage to open up like that. So your homework for today is to see if you can carry that courage off the mat too.’

  And Fran’s homework is to let go of her own fears about what the future holds. She has to let go of fear and start feeling hope. She’s done things that scare her before. She can do them again.

  *

  ‘When we think about the things that scare us, the things that we want to do if only we could find the courage, how do we feel?’ Fran asks the group after their yoga practice that morning.

  ‘Frustrated!’ Joy shouts out. It’s the loudest she’s been all week. Fran is delighted for her. It feels as though she’s really getting this, really making some progress.

  ‘A feeling of being stuck,’ Molly says. ‘Not knowing what to do for the best, or what decision to make.’ Molly has come a long way this week as well.

  ‘There are so many frustrations in life,’ Fran says. ‘Some of you have probably experienced frustration in a yoga class when somebody takes the space in the studio where you usually put your mat, or when a cover teacher walks in and you weren’t warned about it.’

  Nearly everyone in the room nods, smiling sheepishly.

  ‘So before we finish for the morning, let’s try something that you can use any time you like to help you when you feel frustrated or stuck,’ Fran goes on.

  She asks everyone to find a comfortable seated position – she waits for Joy to fetch herself a chair as she’s uncomfortable on the floor. It had taken Fran a day or two to persuade her that, as far as she was concerned, sitting
on a chair wasn’t a problem.

  ‘Take a few breaths,’ Fran continues. ‘Slowly become aware of your posture; release your shoulders, straighten your spine, open your chest. As you begin to notice your breath slow down and lengthen, start to imagine the breath moving through your body. As you inhale, imagine the breath moving from the soles of your feet to the top of your head. As you exhale, imagine the breath moving from the top of the head and circling back to the soles of the feet.’

  Fran watches them breathing slowly and after a moment or two she starts to see it: the thing she loves the most about her job. She starts to see them soften, their shoulders drop, their jaws relax. Slowly, one by one, she starts to see them smile – and they light up as though surrounded by warmth, like the Ready-Brek Man.

  As they do Fran feels herself lighten, the worries and fears of the future falling away. She knows it might be temporary, but for the moment she is able to remind herself that whatever happens, she will always have this.

  Afterwards they rush off – to the pool, to sun loungers, to the beach. But Katrin lingers, waving Molly off, telling her she’ll catch her up.

  ‘Can I ask you something?’ she says when only she and Fran remain.

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘How did you do this? How did you change career and become a yoga teacher?’

  Fran puffs out her cheeks and sits down on the floor, gesturing for Katrin to join her. She hates this question.

  ‘I didn’t really see it as a career change,’ she says. ‘When I did my yoga teacher training I was only working part-time as a secretary and we’d started trying for a baby. Not that I had much of a career path before that either.’ She smiles. She’d never really known what she wanted to do when she grew up. ‘After I finished teacher training I taught one or two classes a week and it just grew naturally from there. It’s not exactly a lucrative career though, if that’s what you’re thinking, especially not at first.’

  ‘How did you manage?’

  ‘I was in the very fortunate position of not needing to earn a salary,’ Fran says. This is the bit of the conversation she hates; she’s always been slightly embarrassed by that. She tries to ignore the flash of doubt in her mind about how she’ll support herself and her baby if love isn’t enough, if Will doesn’t want her any more. She’s supported herself before. If she has to, she can do it again. The real question is, does she want to?