by Claire Sandy
Truthfulness was a habit they fed, a muscle they kept warm. Fern had never doubted Adam, until the day she’d asked, offhand, if they knew anybody with the initials P.W.
Without asking why she wanted to know – which, to newly neurotic Fern, had been suspicious in itself – Adam thought hard. He thought so hard it was as if he was acting a part in a play: ‘middle-aged man thinking hard’. ‘Aha!’ he’d said finally. ‘We do, Fernie. You remember. Percy, um, Waddingsworth . . . ington.’
‘Percy.’ Fern had repeated slowly. ‘Waddingsworthington.’
The name had squatted between them like a toad. Fern knew there was no living human named Percy Waddingsworthington. She’d given Adam ample time to break, to open up, to be honest about P.W.
You used to tell me everything. Part of Fern had to believe that Adam would come clean. That they would reclaim that sunlit stretch of land where they used to live, where there was trust.
The soup burped, bubbling like lava, calling Fern back to the present. She switched off the iPad and took up her ladle.
Other soups, other times; Fern recalled the excellent broccoli and Stilton they’d been sharing when the first Roomies royalty bank transfer had landed with a ping! in their account. Stunned by the noughts, they’d immediately booked a holiday; Tallulah had been unamused that their annual fortnight in a Welsh caravan had been traded in for a boring old Caribbean spa resort.
It had been pea and mint the day Adam suggested, ‘Why not send Ollie and Tallulah to better schools?’
‘You mean fee-paying ones? Why?’
‘Because we can. I bet Lincoln Speed sends his kids to private schools.’
‘Lincoln Speed can do what he likes with his tribe.’ Each year brought the firebrand actor another child by a stripper or a reality star; they looked just like him, all seven of them. ‘He’s not my first choice to consult on family matters. There’s a Vine of him snorting coke off a cat.’
‘OK, OK, forget Lincoln.’ Adam had taken to referring to the actor by his first name; Fern had taken to pretending not to notice. ‘But doesn’t it stand to reason they’d get a higher standard of education in a private school?’
Fern had conjured up Ollie’s glistening new sixth-form block, Tallulah’s sprawling low-build academy. ‘They’re happy at school, Adam. They have friends and they’re doing well. Why get them beaten up by a better class of bully?’
She’d won that round – all marriages are more or less boxing matches – but Adam came in with a killer punch that put her on the ropes.
‘At least let me get you a cleaner,’ he said.
Biting her tongue at that ‘get you a cleaner’ (was she really the only one of the family who liked to live in a clean home?), Fern let him rattle on.
‘This house is too much for you. You’re looking knackered lately.’
More biting of tongue; at this rate her tongue would be lace by the time they finished their soup.
‘Fern, this is a big place for one person to manage. Admit it. You could do with some help.’
‘What’s stopping you helping?’ Fern had noticed a subtle change in Adam since the money started rolling in. He did less about the place, his attitude suggesting that such a breadwinner shouldn’t have to worry about trivialities like clearing the table. Or am I imagining that? She certainly wasn’t imagining the fact that Adam called a workman in to cope with every little odd job that cropped up in their ageing house. Seeing Adam up a ladder, in his oldest jeans, paint in his hair, had always given her a discreet thrill – you man, me woman. As if he’d speared a mammoth just for her.
‘You’re stopping me.’
‘Me?’
‘Forget it.’ Adam had waved his spoon. When he realized that wasn’t going to happen, he’d said, with a sigh, ‘If I wipe down a worktop you tell me I’m using the wrong cloth. If I pour out Coco Pops for Tallie you tell me they make her hyper. If I make the bed, the pillow arrangement offends you.’
There was no credible defence. ‘You win. We’ll get a cleaner.’
Evka interviewed well (although Adam may have been as impressed by her less-is-more approach to clothing as he was by her references), and she’d turned up on time twice a week for the last three months. As yet, no cleaning had been done. A statuesque Slovak, Evka was prone to many ailments, all of which prevented her from lifting a can of Mr Sheen. They didn’t seem to stop her trying out Fern’s face creams, however.
The minestrone had been a disaster. Fern remembered stroking her new marble worktop and grumbling to Adam that the recently bought range hadn’t improved her soup-making skills.
‘I like the funny little pasta bits,’ Adam had said loyally.
‘There’s no pasta in it,’ Fern had said anxiously.
‘Oh.’ They’d giggled in unison as they seated themselves at the new table by the new dresser. The kitchen had been transformed and Fern still pinched herself every morning, as if fairies had come in and pulled down the gloomy Ikea cupboards Adam had put up, badly, twenty years earlier. These tasteful, efficient fairies had installed cream-painted bespoke carpentry. Artfully lit, it was like the kitchens Fern drooled over in interiors magazines, but thanks to the cookbooks and dented wooden spoons and homework strewn all around, it was homely as well as magnificent.
Fern had warned, ‘I’ve only got ten minutes or so before my next client.’
‘Anyone I know?’ Adam could see his wife’s customers tramp around the side of the house from his studio window. He’d painted the sign – ‘FERN’S BEAUTY ROOM’ – and installed the glazed door below it.
‘Old Mrs Allen. Massage.’
‘And will old Mrs Allen actually pay?’
‘She’s lonely, Ads. She doesn’t feel a human touch from one week to the next, except for mine.’ Fern worried about her customer, who seemed thin to her. Sometimes the massage ended with a bowl of leftover soup.
‘We could eat a leisurely lunch together every day if you gave up your job.’
Fern wasn’t sure she’d heard him properly. ‘Eh?’
‘It’s not as if we need your income any more.’
Fern put down her spoon, pondering the differing definitions of ‘need’. She needed her clients; didn’t they need her? The measured response that she meant to make to Adam’s casual insult to fifteen years of hard graft came out, well, not measured. ‘Haven’t you been listening all these years? Or are those impressive ears of yours full of wax?’
Adam had tugged at his hair, his eyes telling Fern that this was a low blow; he was self-conscious about his ears, and that comment undid two decades of sterling work along the lines of Nobody notices them except you, silly! ‘I do listen,’ he’d said, matching her intensity. ‘But maybe I stopped round about the eight hundredth anecdote about some pensioner’s aromatherapy.’
When he’d roared off in their new, sleek car, Fern had shouted from the porch, ‘Do you need that car, Adam?’ and he’d honked the horn in reply. Two short, rude, easy-to-decipher notes.
Possibly the first couple to chart the decline of their relationship via the medium of soup, they’d started disagreeing about small things, then bigger things, then fundamental things. The butternut soup hit the wall before they’d even tasted it. Something snapped in Fern when Adam produced a pile of estate-agent brochures.
‘But you love Homestead House!’ she’d said, instantly regretting throwing her lunch at the new paintwork.
‘But it’s . . .’ Adam had shrugged, wiping soup out of his hair.
‘It’s what?’ Fern’s volume control knob was broken; everything came out as if she was standing on an opposite river bank. ‘Go on! What is it?’ Surely the man could understand that this house was a metaphor for them? ‘Adam, we had our babies here. Homestead House has sheltered us. When my dad died it was quiet around us, and when your brother needed to recuperate he came here because we had space. Not having a mortgage meant you didn’t have to take a soul-destroying office job when Ollie came along. It meant you could buil
d up your jingle business and—’
Adam had cut her off, his hand slicing air as he made his points. ‘Every time I mend a hole another appears. Damp. Rot. Subsidence. When I sleep I dream of B&Q. I’ve watched our friends buy sensible semis while we’ve been shackled to this . . . this hungry mouth! And by the way,’ he’d said, coming in close, the snarl on his face making him almost unrecognizable, ‘haven’t you been listening to me all these years? Writing jingles is a soul-destroying job. I used to write songs about you. Now I write about toilet roll.’
Fern had shut her mouth abruptly. She’d never seen Adam’s career in that light before. Perhaps I haven’t been listening. A ravine opened up in the new limestone flooring. Their intimacy, something she’d taken for granted, seemed paper-thin. ‘Is every part of your life so terrible that you have to fix it or change it or whitewash it?’ she’d whispered.
‘Don’t twist my words,’ he’d said. ‘You always—’
‘Nobody always does anything,’ she’d shouted, that faulty volume knob cranked up again.
‘You stole that line from Sex and the City.’
‘No I didn’t,’ said Fern, twice as annoyed to be rumbled. ‘Should I have liposuction?’
‘You what?’ Adam had looked at her blankly but warily, the way he looked when she mentioned periods.
‘Or a bum lift? Why not just replace me with a more up-to-date model?’
‘One that didn’t shout so much might be nice.’
‘Charming.’
‘One that didn’t fit me into her life after the kids and her job and feeding Boudicca.’ Adam was on a roll; not a roll that Fern particularly liked. ‘Sorry. That was a bit . . .’
‘It was very,’ she’d corrected him.
Unaccustomed to arguing, they were amateurs. They went too far, too fast. The day Fern made chicken soup, Adam irritated her by mentioning, yet again, how Ollie’s accidental conception had derailed his rock-star ambitions.
‘Oh for God’s sake, Adam!’ she’d snapped. ‘You weren’t Mick Jagger!’ Fern was tired of Adam revising the past so he was his generation’s lost icon. ‘You minced about in shiny trousers. Some nights the band outnumbered the audience.’
‘We got a four-star review!’
‘In the local free paper. Written by the drummer’s dad.’
‘He said we had potential.’
‘He got your names wrong. Even his son’s.’
‘The truth is, you don’t know how far we could have gone!’ Adam had paced, roused by this alternative biography. ‘We might have ended up colossal! I could have been Sting!’
‘Well, Sting is Sting,’ Fern had pointed out. ‘Being Sting is kind of taken.’
‘Don’t be so bloody flippant. You know what I mean. You loved our gigs!’
‘Yes, I did. I really did.’ That was true; the dizzy glamour of nights long gone flared in her mind. ‘But then it was time to stop doing that, to live differently. We weren’t kids any more. It was time to think about a family.’
‘I had years ahead to think about that!’
You were twenty-five, she’d wanted to shout. Hardly an adolescent. Instead she’d murmured, ‘Are you saying you regret Ollie?’
‘How could I ever say that?’ Adam’s eyebrows had done a jig. ‘It’s just that he wasn’t planned, he was an accident, so—’
Something that had been stretched and taut inside Fern for eighteen years finally snapped with a resounding twang. ‘For Christ’s sake, Adam, haven’t you worked it out yet?’
‘Worked what out?’
It was too late to backtrack, to grab her words from the air between them. Until she’d blurted it out, Fern hadn’t realized how corrosive her secret had been to keep. ‘Ollie was no accident.’
Adam had gone white, his boyish sun-kissed face suddenly old.
They hadn’t shared lunch that day.
Fern would have given a great deal – certainly the cursed Roomies cash – to take back her outburst. She tried to broach the subject, but Adam cut her off each time by the simple tactic of leaving the room.
Fern had known within half an hour of meeting Adam (in a tower-block lift, en route to a party, both of them skinny in de rigueur Nineties black) that they would make babies. And not just any old babies; these babies would be top-quality little humans.
After seven years together, years in which she’d studied and worked two jobs at a time while Adam had strummed and gigged and arsed about in rehearsal rooms, Fern had begun to dwell on these potential, theoretical babies. Queasily, she’d intuited that they could remain theoretical for a decade or more if Adam kept chasing rainbows. She knew – knew – that Kinky Mimi wouldn’t hit the big time. At their best, they were so-so, a bit of fun. Even the other Mimis saw the band for what it was: a hobby. Only Adam had stars in his lovely brown eyes, uncreased in those days, and sparkling with love and lust for Fern.
So she’d given baby-making a gentle push. A helping hand. Fern had looked the other way, whistling, and let clever old Mother Nature do her thang. Egged on by girlfriends who assured her that women did this ‘all the time’, Fern swore herself to secrecy. Adam must believe it was fate that threw little Ollie into the mix, not the blister pack of pills that Fern threw away.
One lunchtime, cock-a-leekie cooling between them, Adam had torn apart a bread roll and said, ‘We have to talk.’
‘Uh-oh.’ Fern’s jokey reaction was replaced with panic. He’s serious. ‘About what?’
‘What do you think? This. You and me.’
‘Right,’ said Fern, slowly. They’d never had a ‘state of the nation’ summit. No problem had ever threatened their comfortable status quo. ‘Why not start by telling me why you barely talk these days?’
‘It takes two to make a silence.’
Dead air had lain between them for weeks, broken only by banal necessities such as ‘What time will you be back?’ or ‘Let the dog in.’
Fern said, ‘I’ve been afraid to open my mouth. You’re so aloof.’ This was the moment to introduce the mysterious P.W., but Fern held back. I’m not sure I can take the truth. ‘Like you’re pissed off, simmering about something.’
‘And why’s that, d’you think?’
‘I never answer sarcastic questions, Adam.’
‘If you found out that your family life was based on a lie, if you discovered that the person you trust more than anybody had deceived you for years, would that make you feel chatty?’
‘Are we talking about Ollie?’
‘Yes.’
Taking in Adam’s grim mouth and tense shoulders, Fern could have regrouped, could have imagined herself in his shoes for a moment. Instead, worn down by the sullen atmospheres and tired of his disenchantment with the house and their life, Fern picked up her weapons and went on the defensive. ‘It was a long time ago!’
‘What difference does that make? How many other lies have you told?’
‘None. I don’t lie to you.’ That was a lie in itself; all partners lie to each other. Without the occasional ‘You look great in those jeans’, the divorce rate would be one hundred per cent. ‘Something had to give, Adam. We were coasting. You were messing about with Kinky Mimi and—’
‘Messing about?’ bristled Adam.
‘Yes,’ said Fern, adamant. ‘Messing. About. Ollie isn’t the reason you’re not playing the O2, Adam.’
‘Thanks.’
Balling her fists, Fern counted to a number somewhere north of ten. Adam’s tendency to retreat into a school-marmy, insulted persona provoked her into saying too much. ‘Look, in the grand scheme of things, our family life is surely more important than anything else. Wouldn’t you rather have Ollie than a gold disc?’
‘There you go again. Putting it like that. That’s not the point. You robbed me – yes, robbed, Fern, stop making that face – of my ambitions. You tied me down. I had no say.’
‘Just like it takes two to make a silence, it takes two to make a baby, Adam.’ Fern sagged; the picture Adam drew of
her was unappealing. She’d be furious if a girl schemed Ollie into fatherhood. ‘I was wrong, maybe, I don’t know, I was a different person back then, young, a twit, but I didn’t want to tie you down. We wanted the same thing, ultimately. Or so I thought. I didn’t realize that having children with me was so unappealing.’
‘Christ, do you have a master’s degree in twisting people’s words?’ Adam made a visible effort to calm down. ‘This isn’t working, is it?’
‘No, it’s not. We’re terrible at arguing.’ Relieved, Fern held out her hand to cup his face, but she’d misunderstood.
‘How could it work when it started with a lie?’
It was the marriage that wasn’t working, apparently. Fern was grateful that Adam turned away; it took a moment to wipe the shock from her face. Even this pointed at the truth of Adam’s pessimism; when did I start arranging my face for my husband? Without thinking, she blurted, ‘So. What now? Maybe we should separate.’ The S-word was a nuclear deterrent. A suggestion so absurd that the mere mention of it would bring Adam back to his senses. Please love me again was the contradictory subtext.
‘Do you really mean that?’ Adam was unreadable, defiant, fearful, but somehow triumphant.
Chilled that he hadn’t shot her down, what could Fern say but a haughty Yes? In that moment she meant it; you made me push the button, you coward. Adam laid a bear trap and Fern ambled into it; the separation was officially her suggestion, despite it being her greatest fear.
‘If we’re going to do it,’ he’d said, ‘we should do it quickly. Cleanly.’
Feeling like an embarrassing knick-knack that had to be swept out of sight before visitors arrived, Fern had nodded. ‘Can’t be quick enough for me.’
They’d stared at each other then. In retrospect, Fern would pinpoint this as the juncture when it was still possible to stand down, to dismantle the grinding gears of the separation.