The River Home : A Novel (2020)

by Richell, Hannah

  She wraps her hands around the mug Sibella has pushed towards her. The earthy scent of coffee rises up, familiar and a little comforting. ‘How do I accept this? How do I bear the pain? I don’t know how to do it.’

  Sibella sighs. ‘Acceptance is a door you can’t even see yet, Kit. It is a long way off. A hard-won process.’

  ‘It feels as if I’ve had blinkers ripped from my eyes. Death. It’s everywhere,’ Kit says, looking around again at the kitchen. ‘The wind shakes the trees and we fall at random.’ Her gaze fixes on the small, white animal skull. ‘Is there any point, to any of it?

  ‘I don’t know the answer to that. But what I do know is that where there is death and pain, there is life too – and love. It all goes hand in hand.’

  Kit looks again. She doesn’t know what Sibella is talking about. All she can see is the sheer pointlessness of it all. Why live and love at all, if all that comes from it is pain and devastation? She can’t protect Lucy. She can’t take the pain for her. She feels her failings as a mother as an acute agony.

  ‘I know you don’t want to feel this way, Kit. I know you want to change it. But if you deny the sorrow – the pain – then you deny the joy and love too. You can’t have one without the other.’

  Kit’s gaze fixes on a burst of colour across the room, a small rose bush in a basket on a side table, heavy with yellow buds about to flower. She turns her head and sees a butterfly passing at the window, fluttering up close to the glass until it slides away again on the breeze. Across the room, there is a photo pinned to the fridge, of Ted with his arms thrown around a grinning Chloe and May. As Kit looks more closely, what at first seemed a little macabre – the husks of inanimate, dead creatures and plants – now seem strange, almost beautiful, juxtaposed as they are with the living. One illuminating the other.

  ‘I don’t know how to get through today with a smile on my face.’

  ‘Lucy wants to celebrate with you,’ says Sibella. ‘Today is a day for life. Perhaps,’ Sibella suggests gently, ‘the day will feel all the sweeter, moving through it in the knowledge that none of us are here for ever. Just a lifetime, however long it turns out to be.’

  Kit leans back in her chair. Something in the other woman’s words chime. She closes her eyes and lets them settle. When she opens them again, she turns to Sibella. ‘It’s a shame, isn’t it?’

  Sibella tilts her head.

  ‘I think we could have been friends.’

  Sibella nods. ‘Yes,’ she says with a small smile. ‘I think so too.’

  28

  Andrew tells her as she is applying make-up in the bathroom mirror. He stands behind her and comes right out with it. ‘I know, Eve.’

  ‘You know what?’ she asks, her gaze flicking from his eyes back to the black kohl she is tracing across the lash line of her right eyelid.

  ‘I know about the affair.’

  Her hand stills, a small smudge of black where her fingers have jerked from their careful path. She places the pencil down on the edge of the porcelain sink and turns to her husband. ‘The affair?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Who told you?’

  ‘Does it matter?’

  ‘I suppose not.’

  ‘So you aren’t going to deny it?’

  Eve drops her head. ‘No.’

  ‘Why, Eve? Why him?’

  She sighs. When she has considered this moment – this confrontation – the peeling back of the truth of their relationship, it has always played out differently. In her mind, Andrew had always been red-faced and angry, raging at her with fierce indignation. And she would have been righteous and calm, explaining carefully how he had let her down, how she had needed more. But here they are and it’s Andrew who is calm, standing there, depleted and sad and all she can think is, ‘Yes. Why? Why him?’ She doesn’t have an answer.

  He perches on the side of the bath, his head in his hands. ‘I didn’t believe her at first. She collared me last night in the pub. I think she’s got a soft spot for him. She seemed most put out that he should be carrying on with you.’ He gives a hollow laugh. ‘She was angry that you should be there in the pub, dining with your husband and kids, while you were messing about with him. She said it was an insult. I thought she was crazy. I insisted she had got it wrong, but she swore blind she had seen you in the pub car park earlier in the week, kissing.’

  Eve’s stomach sinks. So it had been Stacey. She had been dreading the dinner, worried that she would give herself away in front of everyone, but in the end, it hadn’t mattered. The barmaid had done it for her.

  ‘I didn’t want to believe her. I was angry at her meddling in our business. But do you know what convinced me?’

  She’s not sure she wants to know, but she needs to hear him out. It’s the least she owes him.

  ‘I replayed the night in my head, and there was one moment that stuck in my mind. As we arrived at the pub, Ryan slid a glass of red wine across the bar towards you. You didn’t even have to ask him. Your favourite wine. Such a small gesture, but it spoke volumes. As soon as I remembered, I knew she was telling the truth. Don’t you think it was a bit much, us going there for dinner as a family – taking the girls, for God’s sake – to the pub your … your lover manages?’ He spits the last words as if they leave a bad taste in his mouth.

  ‘I’m sorry.’ Eve hangs her head. ‘I know how it looks, but it wasn’t my choice. It was Lucy and Tom’s. They wanted us to have the dinner there. I had to go along with it.’

  ‘Of course you did,’ says Andrew bitterly. He groans. ‘And now we have the charade of today to get through.’

  Eve nods. This, on top of Lucy’s bombshell news is the final straw. She sits beside Andrew on the edge of the bath, feeling utterly defeated. ‘I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.’ She reaches for his hand but he brushes her off.

  ‘How long?’

  ‘Not long. Weeks. No more.’

  ‘How many times have you slept with him?’

  ‘Once. Twice … nearly.’ She swallows at the sight of Andrew’s anguish. ‘Look, I don’t expect this to make you feel any better, but I was going to tell him as soon as the wedding was out of the way that it was over, that I didn’t want him. I didn’t want to lie to you any more.’

  Andrew gives a hollow laugh. ‘I don’t understand, Eve. We had it all. A beautiful home. Two great kids. I loved you. I thought you loved me too.’

  Eve looks up, into the face of the man she has lived with for the last eleven years. She sees the faded white scar on his cheek from the childhood bike accident he’d told her about on their first date. She sees the amber flecks in his hazel irises that shine in their daughters’ eyes, and the small crease between his eyebrows that forms when he frowns, that she knows will forge over time into a deeper cleft mirroring the one on his own father’s face. She knows this man and she knows that she loves him and she feels a terrible pain at what she has gambled and lost. He loved her. Past tense. She has destroyed something rare, something precious.

  Andrew seems to read the sadness on her face, because he reaches out and takes her hand in his. ‘It’s a big day. I know you’re processing what Lucy told you last night. I know we have to get through today as best we can – for Lucy and Tom, for our girls. But we need to talk. We need to … decide … how we … if we want to …’

  She nods. Part of her wishes he would shout. She wishes he would rage and scream, but instead, he is being so Andrew – so decent. It takes her breath away at how wrong she has got this. Ever since Lucy has shared her devastating news, she has wanted nothing but to draw him close, to feel his arms around her, to rest her head on his shoulder and close her eyes and have him tell her that everything will be OK. Instead, she has pushed him away – hurt him dreadfully – at the time she realises she needs him the most.

  He smiles, a small, sad smile. ‘You look nice. New dress?’

  ‘No.’ She reaches out and straightens the Windsor knot of his tie. ‘Crooked. That’s better.’ She frowns. ‘So this
was what you wanted to talk to me about last night?’

  ‘No.’ Andrew pulls something from his pocket. ‘I was going to give you this. I got it for you. Before … well,’ he shrugs, ‘just before.’ He hands her a small velvet box. Eve opens it to find a pair of beautiful, art deco diamond earrings. ‘I asked Jenny from the office to help me choose them. I wanted to get you something special, as you’d been working so hard to help everyone else these past few weeks but you know how hopeless I am at choosing jewellery. She looks a bit like you so I thought if they looked good on her …’

  Eve reaches out to touch one of the diamond earrings. Under the bright bathroom lights they glitter like fire.

  ‘I was going to apologise for being so caught up in my work and ignoring you and the kids. I was planning to tell you that I would try harder.’ Andrew’s face crumples. He buries his head in his hands for a moment, then seems to gather himself.

  If Eve had ever tried to picture the moment her marriage collapsed, she would never have imagined it like this, the two of them sitting quietly together in the bathroom, tears in their eyes, a pair of beautiful diamond earrings lying between them.

  She touches him on the arm. ‘Thank you. Not just for the gift. For today. For being so strong when I know you’d rather … you’d rather not go through this.’

  He stands. ‘I’ll go check on the girls. OK to leave in twenty minutes?’

  She waits for him to leave the bathroom before she sinks down onto the cool tiled floor, the earring still gripped in her fingers.

  29

  Ted can’t stop moving. There is so much to be done. Shoes to be polished. Shirt to be ironed. Bottles of wine and glasses to be unboxed. A bonfire to be built.

  After he’d dropped the trestle tables at the marquee, he’d stood in the lower orchard, surveying the pile of wood gathered for the evening’s bonfire. Not big enough, he’d told himself. Not nearly big enough. So he had spent the last forty-minutes dragging wood onto the pile from a huge stash of old storm-blown branches and logs cleared last winter and sitting stacked in a lean-to.

  It is hard work. Ted feels perspiration beading on his forehead and splinters stabbing his hands, but he tells himself if he keeps going, if he keeps building the pile, he will somehow remain in control of the situation – the situation he can’t bear to think about. One more branch, he tells himself, one more … to make everything better.

  Sibella had tried to talk to him earlier that morning. They had been lying in bed, listening to the birdsong, when she had gently tested the ground, asking him careful questions about the night before – about Lucy – and about his feelings. But he hadn’t been able to talk to her. He hadn’t wanted to think about it. He’d told her, too curtly, that there was nothing to discuss. He was going to do what Lucy had asked. He was going to celebrate the day and not dwell on anything sad or anything that he couldn’t control. He was going to forget it. That’s what he was going to do.

  ‘I don’t think that’s what she meant,’ Sibella had said, gently.

  ‘Don’t, Sib. Don’t press me.’

  Reading his fear and his anger, she had acquiesced with a gentle squeeze of his arm.

  He has just thrown a huge sheet of rotten timber onto the pile when he notices Kit walking through the long grass towards the marquee. Even at his distance he can see that she is bowed and pale-faced, dark shadows under her eyes. She carries a tray of glasses, stepping carefully over the uneven ground before disappearing inside the tent.

  Sibella had called to tell him about Kit’s early morning visit after he had dropped off the tables. ‘What did she want?’ he’d asked, alarmed at the thought of her there in their home. He hadn’t liked to think of the two women together, conversing privately, without him. The thought had made him deeply uncomfortable. Until another realisa tion had struck him: how terribly alone Kit must have felt, to come knocking at their door.

  He stands back to assess the huge wooden pile in front of him, then, with a sigh, he throws a last log onto the towering structure, dusts his hands on his shirt and makes for the marquee.

  Kit is arranging the glasses on a table in the far corner. She doesn’t hear him approach until he is a few feet away. She turns, startled. ‘Oh, it’s you.’

  ‘How are you?’

  Kit shrugs. ‘Fine.’ She eyes him warily. ‘You?’

  ‘Yes. Fine. Keeping busy. There’s a lot to do.’

  ‘Yes.’

  They stand in silence, the weight of all that is unspoken hanging between them, until Kit can’t contain her anguish any longer. She lets out a sob. ‘Oh, Ted.’

  Seeing her pain, Ted closes the gap and draws her to him. ‘I know, Kitty, I know.’ At the familiar sensation of her in his arms and the fragrance of her hair, Ted feels a tug of longing – for a time, a place, a woman he once knew.

  ‘It’s all wrong.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘How did we get it so wrong? How is this the place we find ourselves?’

  Ted closes his eyes, surprised to feel the stirrings of a warmth and connection to this woman – this fierce, frustrating, deeply complicated woman. ‘I don’t know, Kitty. I don’t know.’

  He guides her to one of the nearby hay bales and they sit quietly as Kit composes herself, Ted brushing at the bark and dust on his shirt sleeves.

  ‘We’re going to have to be strong, Kit,’ he says, eventually. ‘She’s going to need us. They’re all going to need us.’

  ‘I know.’

  Kit pulls at the loose tufts of hay beside her. Looking at her sitting there in her tired, depleted state, he is reminded of a different Kit, a young woman on the brink of exhaustion holding a wailing baby in her arms. Eve, he remembers. It would have been Eve. She had been such an unsettled baby, and Kit had been so miserable, until she had found release through her writing. The memory pierces his heart like an arrow. He feels an unspoken truth rising up and before he can stop himself, the words have left his tongue. ‘You were right, you know.’

  She looks at him, uncertainly. ‘About what?’

  ‘I was jealous: of your success, of the ease with which your words seemed to come to you. At the way your career took off. The stronger and the more successful you became, the more I felt empty and useless in contrast.’

  ‘It was never a competition, Ted. I never meant to make you feel that way. I wanted my work to ease your burden, not add to it.’

  Ted nods. ‘I know.’ He gives a dry laugh. ‘It doesn’t reflect well on me as a man, does it, to be so emasculated by my partner’s success?’

  Kits smiles. ‘Honestly? No. It doesn’t.’

  Ted laughs again. ‘You always were a straight-talker.’

  ‘Not that it’s got me far.’ She bites her lip. ‘I’m so afraid, Ted. It feels as though it’s all spiralling away from me. First you. Then Margot. Now Lucy.’

  He squeezes her hand, unable to find the reassurances she needs.

  Kit sighs. ‘You do know, don’t you, that I turned a blind eye to Sibella? For nearly four years I let you go to her. No questions asked. No ultimatum. I knew the kind of man you were. I knew the tighter I tried to hold on, the more you would seek release. I knew you needed the attention, the affection. I knew how unfulfilled you were in your work. I thought if I gave you that – if I let you have your freedom – that you would come back to me, eventually.’ She sighs and gives him a look of such deep longing that Ted feels something inside of him crack. ‘Maybe I should have fought harder?’

  Ted swallows. His heart feels so heavy he is not sure he can bear the weight of it pulsing in his chest.

  ‘It will always be one of my deepest regrets that perhaps you never knew how much I loved you.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Kit.’

  Kit nods.

  ‘I see now it was cruel. I should never have let it drag on for so long. For what it’s worth, Sibella never asked me to choose either. She understood about the girls – that I had responsibilities. But I had to make a choice. It wasn’t healthy.
For any of us.’

  Kit nods. ‘You did choose,’ she says softly. ‘You chose her.’

  He hears the pain in her voice and feels a twist of guilt.

  ‘Do you know what makes it even worse?’ she asks, after a long moment.

  ‘What?’ asks Ted, not sure he wants to know the answer.

  ‘I like her. I bloody like her.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Kit. I’m sorry for all of it.’

  She shrugs. ‘We are where we are. I suppose we focus on today, as Lucy has asked.’

  Ted nods. ‘It’s as good a place as any to start.’

  Kit pats his hand then, with a deep exhalation, pushes herself up from the chair. ‘Come on. You’re right. There’s a lot to do. Not least, you should shower and change out of those dirty clothes. Right now, you’re looking a little less like a father of the bride and more Worzel Gummidge.’

  30

  Margot has dragged the ironing board to the upstairs landing and stands in a square of sunlight in her underwear, pressing a pale blue dress. Lucy eyes her sister’s slim frame, her long legs, the startling ink tattoo curling up her left arm. As she lifts her head, Lucy sees the curse of a hangover in her sister’s pained expression and her red, bloodshot eyes. She doesn’t feel angry. Margot is here, and that is enough, today. ‘Will you help me with my hair?’ she asks.

  ‘Of course.’ Margot switches off the iron, slips into her dress and joins Lucy in her bedroom. She brushes her wild, blonde mane and Lucy closes her eyes, enjoying the sensation of the brush moving over her scalp, Margot’s fingers running through her hair. ‘So what are we going to do with it?’

  Together they fashion a loose up-do before Margot paints Lucy’s lips a vivid red, her hand only slightly steadier than Lucy’s own. She helps her into the red dress, fastening the zipper running along her spine. ‘You look stunning,’ says Margot, standing back to appraise her.