She stared at him, unable to speak or move. The atmosphere was eerily calm, with none of the hysterics she might have imagined. The exchange that followed was delivered slowly, punctuated by uncomfortable pauses and punches of pure shock. It was as if someone had pressed the button on the remote and slowed everything down.
‘It’s been going on for a while.’ He filled the silence with words of self-incrimination and then he coughed, quite unnecessarily. A nervous cough and she was happy that he was nervous. A sound like a high-pitched note rang out in her head, clouding her thoughts.
‘But... but... I’m your wife. And I love you.’ She whispered the words, as though this cure-all that she’d been uttering in apology, lust, celebration and greeting since she was a teenager might make a difference. ‘We... we can get over this. We’ll work it out. Work harder. Things haven’t been easy, I know, but we can move on, Phil, we can go on holiday, maybe? I’ll get your mum to have the girls and—’
‘No, Rosie. I’m leaving you.’
And that was when the fear bit.
Rosie opened her mouth to speak, but no words came. She fought the instinct to throw herself on him, pin him down and keep him anchored to the place where he belonged, the house where he lived with his family. Instead, she pointed to the ceiling, eventually finding the words that her mind rummaged for among the jumble of confusion. ‘The... the girls...’ she managed, as if the two little children upstairs might be the glue that could make him stay. If not for me, for them, please!
His tears came then, as he nodded. ‘I know, but I’m not going far, I’ll still see them.’ He wiped his eyes and took a deep breath, as though the tears justified the words, proof of his own hurt. ‘It’s not unusual nowadays. They have friends in similar situations.’
His almost flippant justification floored her. ‘I...’ She tried but failed to speak. Please don’t do this! Please, please, Phil...
‘I’m going in the morning. I’ve already packed.’ He nodded towards the hallway, where his bags were waiting. She hadn’t noticed them, too preoccupied, as ever, with life, the kids and the next mini-crisis that needed attending to. I’m sorry, I’m sorry for not listening more...
‘It’s the woman in Mortehoe, with the two pools, isn’t it?’ She stared at him. ‘The one who was nice to me in the Spar. Geraldine.’
‘Yes,’ he confirmed, his eyes downcast.
‘But... but you said she was a pain in the arse, you said you could never kiss a mouth covered in lipstick—’
‘Please don’t do this.’ He shook his head, too embarrassed to have that conversation. Now he held up his palm, also in self-defence.
‘I saw her today. She looks...’ The words failed her. They were silent for a second or two.
‘I’m sorry,’ he whispered.
‘I don’t know what to do now. I don’t know what I’m supposed to do.’ She spoke aloud.
‘I am sorry, Rosie.’ He sounded cool, calm.
She wished he would stop saying that. Sorry was what you said when you were prepared to act to put things right; sorry was the first step towards making amends. But that wasn’t what Phil meant; he was just trying to make himself feel better, although it gave her a glimmer of hope that all might not be lost.
‘If you’re sorry, then don’t do it. We can... we can figure it out. We are married and we have two lovely girls and we can work it out, Phil, we always do. You’re my husband! You’re my family. I haven’t got anything else. I love you. I love you. And I forgive you, I do, but please don’t go.’ She slithered forward until she was on the rug. ‘I am begging you. I’m on the floor and I am begging you, Phil, not to destroy our little family. Please, please don’t do this to my girls, to me, please...’ Her tears came in a steady trickle.
‘Get up, Rosie. You need to understand, as harsh as it sounds, that those words don’t mean anything when there’s been a change of heart.’
And there it was, the silver bullet: he had had a change of heart.
He stood up, unable to meet her eye as she grovelled and begged, lying on the Lego bricks that were strewn all around. With her hand touching his ankle, she looked up at him. From where she lay on the floor he appeared very tall and powerful. He stared out of the window, seeming uncomfortable and... something else, an expression she recognised. It was irritation; he was irritated at having to have this exchange, offended by her collapse. And this made her feel ashamed. Once again, she wished that she could just disappear. She pictured Laurel smiling and yearned more than ever to fall into her arms.
Rosie stared at his distracted face, could see that he was already miles away – less than two miles, to be exact. A change of heart indeed. She realised then that it was too late; his love for her had drained away and been replaced by a new, all-consuming love, making theirs appear tarnished, unfit for purpose. When he pictured love, sex and a future, it was not her face he saw, but the Mortehoe woman’s, whose name had gone clean out of her head.
‘Are... are you going to come to bed with me?’ For the last time, Phil, for the last time!
He coughed. ‘I was going to sleep on the sofa.’
‘I need you to hold me,’ she managed, her voice faint, desperate and ashamed of her need.
Rosie clambered up, holding the side of the sofa for support. She swiped at the two Lego bricks that had stuck to her palms and trod the creaky stairs. She didn’t clean her teeth, wash her face or close the bedroom curtains. It was as if all her normal rituals had to be ignored in recognition of the fact that there was nothing normal about this night.
Still in her clothes, she crept into her side of the bed and laid her head on the pillow. Her thoughts were so numerous and noisy, it was hard to focus. There was a pain behind her eyeballs and no matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t get rid of it; the more she tried, the more it hurt. Her muscles were tensed and a ball of nausea sat in her gut. Staring at her husband’s pillow, she let hot tears run over her nose, along her temple and into the pale blue pillowcase. A strange mixture of numbness and panic rendered her silent, but she was screaming on the inside, her fear balled in fury, trying to escape.
Time was skewed. It might have been an hour, might have been three, but eventually she heard the familiar sound of his footfall on the stair treads as he made his way upstairs, granting her her last wish. He hesitated, first poking his head around the door, already a stranger in the room he had entered thousands of times. He had changed the rules and this was no longer his home. She blinked, taking in his form. The light from the streetlamp along the road sent his shadow leaping up the wall. She stared at the dark, smudged shape of him, knowing that after tonight, that would be all that remained.
She heard his loud swallow as he eased off his suede slip-on deck shoes and, still fully clothed, pulled back the duvet. The weight of him next to her, which had reassured her since the very first time, made her tears flow faster. She cried, missing him before he had gone.
‘Please don’t cry, Rosie,’ he whispered into the darkness.
‘I like you being my husband,’ she sobbed. ‘I never thought, Phil... I never, ever thought in a million years... Not us. I can’t believe it. I can’t believe it.’
She felt his hand snake along the mattress until it found hers and he gripped her fingers under the duvet, knitting them together, secretly, as if hers was no longer a hand he could hold. And that was how they stayed. She was sickened by how grateful she was for the contact, unable to process that this might be the last time.
She lay there trying to control her wild, disordered thoughts. In the background was a flickering movie playing on a loop. She saw the day that he came home on leave, remembered the way she had looked up from the table in his parents’ kitchen where she and Kevin were playing Uno and eating toast, recalled the way he had looked and then looked again, his double-take sending a frisson of joy right through her.
Her friend Kevin had dimmed, becoming as misty in her thoughts as the faded chintz curtains at the window. The only
thing that was bright and distinct was the dark-haired soldier. He filled her completely and it was still that way. She recalled his face, wet with tears, as he held his tiny, damp babies for the first time; recalled the way he had looked at her, as though she was something special, something so special that no one would ever want to leave her, not her mum and not him.
His face, scent, smile, voice were never far from her thoughts; every task she undertook, every decision she made had him at the heart of it and try as she might, she couldn’t conceive of a life where this would not be the case.
They spent the night side by side, hand in hand. She continued to cry silent tears, thinking of all the nights she had lain next to him, taking him for granted, all the early mornings she’d woken next to him, knowing he was there to nudge if she heard a noise or had a bad dream. It felt like her heart had been ripped from her body. Her sadness was all-consuming and she didn’t know how she was going to rise from the bed and face the day that was creeping far too quickly over the horizon.
Like a condemned woman, she lay listening to the sounds of the night. The drunken bleats of late-night revellers gave way to the chug of diesel engines in the early hours as the fishermen made their way to the harbour, where their boats bobbed in wait. The clink of the milkman’s deliveries and the shrill gulls who greeted the day with their tuneless cry – she wanted to rage at them all.
She took a deep breath, trying to accept what awaited her. Phil turned onto his side, mirroring her posture and they stared at each other, inches apart, both with their faces resting on hands in prayer position.
‘I don’t know what to do,’ she repeated, hoping that if she said it enough times, the answer might come to her.
‘You’ll be okay.’
‘I don’t want to be okay. I want you.’ She sniffed up her tears that spilled. ‘Please, Phil, I am begging you. Please don’t do this.’ She felt her face crumple again.
‘It’s already done. It was done a while ago.’ He blinked.
This was the piece of information that told her there was no point in begging any more. It was like running to catch a train that she’d only just been told had actually left the station ages ago; all she could do was stand on the platform, stare at the space where it had been and listen to the rattle down the line, hinting at its presence, now long gone.
‘What did you want to tell me?’ Phil asked. ‘You said last night that you wanted to say something.’
‘My mum died.’
He opened his mouth as if to speak, just as the bedroom door opened. For the first time in her life, Rosie felt intense irritation at the presence of her daughters. Please no, just five more minutes...
‘It’s funeral day,’ Naomi announced with a mixture of sadness and excitement.
‘Can I wear my party dress?’ Leona asked.
Phil let his eyes rove over his wife’s face, as if taking her in for the last time, then he leapt from the bed. ‘Of course you can!’
She hated his joviality, the eagerness to get things rolling.
‘Why have you got your clothes on in bed, Daddy?’ Naomi pointed at his shirt. ‘And you, Mum!’ She giggled at the sight of Rosie’s jeans, visible where Phil had flung the duvet back.
‘We were too sleepy to get our pyjamas on,’ he answered.
That’s your first lie to them today. How easily it slips from your lips. How many more to follow? How long have you been lying to me?
‘Mummy, your face is all balloony. Have you been crying?’ Naomi stared at her mum, her little fingers twisting the edge of her pyjama top, her mum’s tears the cause of her agitation.
‘Yes.’ Rosie coughed to try and clear some of the croak. ‘Yes, I have.’
‘It’s okay, Mum, I cried too. But we can bury them now and we won’t let it spoil our day.’
Rosie’s heart went out to her girls and their sweet natures as they ran down the stairs to go find their dead pets. She closed her eyes briefly, still feeling quite disembodied, and wished that their day wasn’t going to be spoilt; wished that their dad wasn’t going to leave. But she knew wishes didn’t come true, otherwise her mum would have collected her from school every afternoon and cooked her tea, they’d have had enough money to take the girls to Disneyland and Phil would not be casting her aside in favour of another. Geraldine Farmer. The name was now back in her mind, never to be forgotten again.
As she glimpsed her blotchy face in the mirror, she remembered the day he had taken the girls to soft play in Barnstaple. ‘That’s a bit of a liberty, phoning you on a Saturday. I mean, you’d think it could wait until Monday. What a cheek.’ She recalled the indignation she had felt on his behalf. You bloody idiot, Rosie.
Half an hour later, the family made their way out into the back garden and chose the perfect spot under the Japanese maple that thrived in the corner of their narrow plot. Phil dug down into the rich soil and placed the shoebox securely in its final resting place.
‘Goodbye, Moby.’
‘Goodbye, Jonathan.’
The girls cried, each clinging to one of her legs, as their dad loaded up the spade and patted the dirt back into place, cushioning Moby and Jonathan for their final sleep. Rosie stared, dry eyed, unable to think straight or get upset, unable to feel much. She did, however, cradle her girls to her, holding their heads in her hands and whispering ‘Ssshhh...’ into the air, as if that might somehow dampen their distress.
What followed next was quite unceremonious. There was no fanfare, no drama or swell of emotion. Naomi and Leona were entirely unaware that this was anything other than a regular day. Fully expecting to see their daddy sitting across from them at the tea table later, they waved him off, distracted by what was on the telly and the crumpets that their mum had toasted. Phil simply loaded his bags into the van, came back, kissed the girls one last time and almost ignored her, as if that might make things easier for all of them; it certainly spared him any embarrassment. He then stepped over the threshold and closed the front door behind him, walking out on twelve years of marriage.
And just like that, he was gone.
Rosie stared at the door long after he had shut it. It felt so much like any other day; it was hard to feel the full force of the situation.
With the girls settled in the sitting room, fed and watered and with the television for company, she trod the stairs. Carefully and quietly she locked the bathroom door behind her and climbed into the bath. Without the water to separ-ate her body from the cold plastic, it wasn’t entirely comfortable, but Rosie didn’t care. She rolled a towel and placed it under her head and there she stayed for an hour, maybe more, fighting the urge to vomit and shivering despite the warmth of the sunny summer’s day.
9
Rosie had been glad to see an end to the longest day and yet despite her exhaustion had only managed to sleep fitfully. The day had seemed to go on for ever. Zapped of all energy, she found it hard to look after the girls and resorted to sticking them in front of a DVD with the promise of pizza, giving her a few precious minutes to sit in the kitchen and cry. Her thoughts were jumbled. Her grief sat like heaped spaghetti in her brain, strangling all rational, coherent thought.
Then, as night arrived, she’d found herself swamped by fear, a new emotion to sit on top of the sadness. They had lived in the house for years, she was familiar with every square inch of it and knew practically every permanent resident in the town – heck, she could stand on the doorstep and holler, knowing that people would come running – but on her first night without him, she checked and double-checked the windows, secured the locks and drew all the curtains. She then lay in bed with a mist of worry around her. What if someone got into the house? What if they were burgled? How would she keep the girls safe? She missed the presence of her husband in a million different ways.
Closing her eyes, desperately hoping for sleep, she couldn’t stop images of Phil and Geraldine Farmer from floating into her mind. She pictured him and the super-rich woman who had sped by in her flash car, saw hi
m unloading his bags from the van, for which she was insured and had travelled in countless times, saw him dump them in a grand hallway that looked like something out of Downton Abbey before celebrating his new-found freedom by sipping champagne in one of her two swimming pools. She knew they would, of course, in the first throes of romance, have sex that night, knew that he would whisper to her the sweet words of courtship that had been rehearsed in her ear over a decade ago. These imaginings caused her physical pain. Her gut twisted with jealousy and longing. It was torture, but she couldn’t help it.
And now, after her first night alone, she lay awake in their bed, the imprint of him still in the mattress, his presence lingering on the sheets. Still in the jeans and T-shirt she had been wearing for forty-eight hours straight, she ran her hand over her pouchy stomach, feeling ashamed and disgusted that she had expected him to sleep with her when he had a well-kempt WAG-lookalike to rush off to. Did they laugh at me? Talk about me? This thought brought on another bout of sobbing.
Rosie pulled his pillow into her chest and that was how she stayed, clinging to the scent of him, an aftershave bought for the benefit of another woman. She felt desolate and desperate and if she looked towards the future she could see nothing but a big black hole of despair and loneliness. She didn’t want to see anyone, didn’t want to tell anyone. She simply wanted to disappear. And with this idea in her head, she thought for the first time about her mum, her dead mum, who had done just that.
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