by Libby Page
When she arrived home he could tell she was angry before he even saw her. She closed the front door firmly and threw her keys on the sideboard with a rattle. When she appeared in the kitchen, her coat still on, her face looked pale.
‘Bad day at work, honey?’ Harry said, reaching to pour the wine into a glass for her.
‘Every fucking day is a bad day at work,’ she said.
Despite their early, detailed conversations about their jobs (what projects they were working on, who was going for a promotion, how they felt about their team leader’s managerial style, how they might do it differently one day) as time went on, Jennifer talked to him about work less and less. He assumed she was happy there – she had worked in the same company for the past fifteen years and had worked her way up.
He didn’t know what to say so he handed her a glass of wine. She put it down on the table, next to a cold mug of tea that he had been drinking while he was cooking, but which he had forgotten about.
‘Can’t you put your things away?’ she said, picking the mug up and pouring the tea down the sink, ‘You’re as bad as the boys sometimes.’
She opened the dishwasher and pulled out the top drawer. She paused, her hand and the mug raised above the dishwasher shelf.
‘For fuck’s sake Harry,’ she said, slamming the mug down on the counter, ‘I’ve told you a million times not to put any plates on the top shelf, things don’t get washed properly when you do that. And then they have to be cleaned all over again, and it’s a total waste of time. I’ve told you so many times. Why can’t you get it right? Why can’t it be right?’
She was shouting, her hands gripping the edges of the dishwasher. Suddenly she pulled the entire drawer out, lifted it and threw it towards Harry. Mugs and glasses lifted out of their slots, Harry leapt out of the way and the drawer came crashing down at his feet with a terrible splintering sound as crockery and glass smashed across the floor. He felt his head spinning, fear that he hadn’t felt since he was a child rushing through him. He looked down at the smashed mess, thinking what could have happened if he hadn’t moved in time. Jennifer stood by the dishwasher, staring at the floor. She started to cry quietly.
‘It’s OK,’ he said, even though he wasn’t OK, his whole body was shaking and he felt nauseous, ‘It’s OK. I’m sorry.’
She stared at the floor for a moment longer and then turned and left the room, her footsteps climbing the stairs and disappearing into the bathroom. Once she was gone, he stood surrounded by broken glassware and china and started to cry too. Tears slid down his face and his body shook. He thought about his parents – about how much he wished he could call them or get in a car and drive to them and let himself be held like they held him when he was a child. But his father didn’t believe that men should cry, and the thought of him knowing what just happened and understanding the sheer terror that Harry felt while it did so filled him with shame. He had been frightened of his wife for a long time, he realised, although she had never done anything like this before. Admitting the thought even to himself felt like too much – he couldn’t imagine ever telling anyone else. Men don’t cry, and men are not afraid of their wives.
He quietly cleared up the mess, rescuing the few pieces of crockery that weren’t broken and wrapping the rest in newspaper and throwing it in a bin bag. He spotted a smashed china bowl by the sink, one that Ben had painted and given to him when he was six or seven, and nursed the pieces in his hands, putting it aside in case he would be able to fix it (although deep down he knew it was hopeless). Then he took the bin bag filled with crockery and newspaper-wrapped glass straight outside, not wanting to leave it in the house where it would remind him of what had happened. He didn’t want the boys to see that bag, even if they wouldn’t understand what was inside or why. He made a mental note to go to IKEA next week to pick up new glassware and plates and then he sat and ate dinner alone while he listened to the sound of the bath filling upstairs.
Later that night as he climbed the stairs, he heard Jennifer talking on the phone in their bedroom. The door was ajar and he paused on the stairs, listening. He wasn’t sure who she was talking to, perhaps her sister, or a friend.
‘I hate my life,’ he heard her say, ‘Is this really what it’s all about? Doing a job you despise, day in day out, sleeping with the same person forever, looking after three children who completely consume your life? Sometimes I think I hate them too.’
He walked quietly down the stairs again so that she could finish her phone conversation undisturbed. He had heard enough.
Harry started going to the gym. First, he went just once a week, but before long he went there most nights, either on the way home from work or much later in the evening when the boys had gone to bed – he would say goodnight to them and then silently collect his gym bag and leave. He found it strange that these solo visits made him feel less lonely than he did at home. He loved running on the treadmills and hearing the thud and puffs of the runners around him, feeling like they were all in the same race, even if their machines were set to different paces. In exercise he found a comfort and a way to exhaust his body so that daily life was somehow more manageable.
‘Daddy’s started “working out”,’ said Jennifer to the boys, putting air quotations around the term ‘working out’. It was true that Harry had never really exercised before in his life and didn’t exactly look like a gym-goer when he first started. He didn’t even really own exercise gear – only a pair of old trainers he used for gardening, a pair of tracksuit bottoms that were for the same purpose, and a T-shirt he usually wore in summer.
‘It’s because he’s having a mid-life crisis,’ added Jennifer, ‘We’d better keep an eye on Daddy – he might buy a sports car next!’
Harry had wondered whether Jennifer was right. Maybe he was having a mid-life crisis. But his crisis had been going on for many years. A ‘crisis’ sounded like a tipping point or a singular, dramatic event. His was just life.
The second time he visited the gym, he bumped into Chris. They were a little awkward together at first, having only ever spoken with their wives present. But then one day Chris asked Harry to join him for a cup of tea in the leisure centre café after they’d finished. Harry happily accepted. They gave each other updates about their jobs (Chris was an estate agent), their wives and their children. They discussed in detail the benefits and drawbacks of the leisure centre gym and their favourite equipment.
Thinking about Chris now as he holds Martha’s hand and looks at the new wedding band that encircles her fourth finger, Harry knows he should feel guilty. Chris had started as just an acquaintance, more Jennifer’s friend than his, but at the gym they formed their own friendship too. Harry has never had many friends, but for a while he would have counted Chris as one of his closest. So he knows he should feel sorry that he ended up marrying his wife. But he can’t. Happiness, he has found, has a miraculous way of rubbing out the unsavoury parts.
When Harry finally decided to leave his wife – or, more accurately, decided to act on the decision he had made years ago – things happened strangely quickly. Word got out among the group of his and Jennifer’s friends that their marriage was ending. A few weeks later, Martha called. Harry picked up the phone and assumed she was calling for Jennifer. He was still living in the house – Jennifer had said he could stay for as long as it took him to find an apartment and organise his things, an act that he found unusually generous but that made him feel constantly on edge as though something terrible would be coming in exchange any moment.
‘I’ll just get Jennifer,’ said Harry, but Martha interrupted him quickly.
‘No, no, I actually wanted to speak to you. Can you talk?’
Jennifer was upstairs and Ben, their youngest, had moved out just two months ago, leaving Harry and Jennifer on their own.
‘Yes, I can,’ Harry replied.
Martha hurriedly told Harry that she had heard his
marriage was ending, but instead of giving her sympathy she asked if he might meet her to talk sometime.
‘You see,’ she said, ‘I think my marriage is over too. And, well, it would be good to talk to someone else about it. Someone who is going through the same thing. I haven’t told Chris yet, or any of my friends. I didn’t know who else to talk to.’
Harry agreed to meet her for a coffee the following evening. They met near Harry’s office in west London, far enough away from Martha’s work to have no chance of bumping into Jennifer. Harry chose a Caffè Nero near the office – it felt impersonal enough for a meeting with a woman he had never spent time with outside of their dinner party foursome. When he arrived she was already there, her almond eyes darting around the café. When they landed on his face she broke into a smile that made him feel warmer than he had in a long time.
With Martha, he found that conversation flowed easily. At their dinner parties he usually spoke mainly with Chris, leaving the two women to talk about gossip at work or the plans that the new CEO had just unveiled, dissecting them in detail and sharing their opinions in a heated but affectionate manner. But in the café his entire attention was given to her. She spoke in a low but determined voice, each sentence seeming considered, peppered with pauses where she scrunched her eyebrows as though searching for a moment for the perfect words to express herself exactly. He didn’t mind these breaks in conversation – silence seemed just as easy as talk with her – and when she did find the words she was after they often surprised Harry by their astuteness, by their way of perfectly conveying her feelings. He then felt immediately guilty for being surprised and for overlooking this woman for so many years.
She spoke about Chris’s affairs, saying matter-of-factly that she had of course known about them for years, but that the most recent one – a fling with a friend of their twenty-year-old daughter Annabelle – had finally signalled to Martha the end of their marriage.
‘I know I should be feeling sorry for myself,’ she said, ‘But strangely this time I simply pity him. That girl has made him a fool – of course for her it was just a frivolous fling. She ended it a month ago, but he won’t leave her alone. He says he is in love with her. He has made himself ridiculous, and despite all the hurt he has caused me over the years, it’s this that has made me finally decide to leave him. I simply cannot continue to be married to a man whom I pity.’
Martha told him that Annabelle didn’t know about this affair, or any of the previous ones, and she was doing her best to keep it that way. She had even visited Phoebe, Annabelle’s friend and Chris’s now former lover, to calmly explain that Annabelle should be kept out of it all, and that if Phoebe did that, Martha would do her best to get Chris to stop contacting her.
Harry watched Martha and saw the strength in this gentle-looking woman and felt something inside himself relaxing. They decided to meet again the next evening, and then the next. On their third meeting Harry told Martha about Jennifer, finding himself admitting for the first time the truth of his marriage and his constant state of fear. She listened so intently that he felt himself speaking more freely than he ever had – her serious expression somehow legitimised every fear he had felt over the past decades.
‘She does her best to hide it at work, but I think she’s a very unhappy woman,’ Martha said after Harry had finished speaking and once she had taken one of her long pauses. ‘I expect one day she will look back and deeply regret the way that she has treated you. But you cannot live the rest of your life wondering if or when that might happen. Life is frankly too short.’
Harry has never known how Jennifer found out about their meetings, but when he came home that night he found a suitcase and two overnight bags packed and piled by the front door. Jennifer was waiting for him, sat on the stairs.
‘So, you’ve been having an affair with that bitch from Accounts then?’ she said.
Harry stood in the doorway, not taking off his coat.
‘I don’t know what you mean,’ he said, ‘Who are you talking about?’
‘Martha Wright!’ Jennifer shouted, ‘I should have known! I saw the way you look at her when she’s here for dinner. How could I have been so stupid. Right under my nose, over all these years!’
‘I have been for coffee with Martha three times,’ Harry said, trying to stay calm, ‘Three times, all after you and I both decided this marriage was over. I have not been having an affair.’
‘I don’t believe you,’ shouted Jennifer, ‘You’re a liar and I want you out of my house.’
Harry found he simply didn’t have the energy to argue, so he left. He checked into a Travelodge and stayed there until he found a flat two weeks later, back in Whitechapel. He and Martha continued to see each other, and eventually, a year later, she moved in.
By that point, Harry hadn’t seen his sons in months. Jennifer convinced them, and all her and Harry’s friends, that Harry had been having an affair. Harry has tried phoning his sons, now all living away from home, to persuade them their mother wasn’t telling the truth. But they don’t want to speak to him.
His life now includes only Martha. One evening shortly after she had moved in they were sharing the dregs of a bottle of prosecco, her legs draped over his on the sofa.
‘You know, Harry,’ she said softly, ‘I don’t believe Jennifer ever really thought you and I were having an affair.’
Harry had tucked a strand of her grey-blonde hair behind her ear as she continued talking.
‘I really don’t. But it gave her something to legitimise her behaviour, to make her feel less of a bad wife, and a bad mother. I expect she couldn’t bear the thought of you telling the boys what she was really like. Our made-up affair saved her.’
Harry had felt anger rising inside of him. He had lost his sons, his friends, his home, everyone, all to protect Jennifer’s own vision of herself.
As though Martha could sense his rising rage she had kissed him softly on the forehead and then rested hers against his.
‘But it doesn’t matter now, does it darling?’ she said quietly, ‘Because you and I have saved each other.’
As Harry looks across at her in the café, this woman who has brought so much happiness to the later part of his life, he remembers her words and smiles from that night. He doesn’t need his old friends. He doesn’t need anyone. All he needs is her.
Mona
‘Can I get you anything else?’ Mona asks the couple by the door. They are still sat together with their suitcases; their plates now empty apart from a few crumbs.
‘What do you think?’ asks the woman, ‘We’ve still got a bit of time.’
At this she turns to Mona.
‘It’s just like Harry to get us here several hours early for our train to the airport!’
She shakes her head and rolls her eyes but in an affectionate way. Harry smiles and pats her knee.
‘We wanted a leisurely afternoon though, didn’t we, Martha? Start the honeymoon early. And any chance for a nice bit of cake and some people-watching is worth taking, I think!’
‘Maybe another Earl Grey then, please,’ says Martha, ‘And another coffee for Harry.’
Mona returns a few moments later with the drinks, steam drifting above the mugs as she places them down. She watches them both for a moment. Their warmth and affection with one another is something she always desperately wished for between her own parents when they were still together.
She smiles at them and then heads back to the counter, joining Sofia as office workers wait for the coffee that acts like a bookend to every working day. A man loosens his tie and checks his phone. Next to him, a woman in a smart shift dress and trainers looks intently at the cakes in the glass stand. Mona serves her and when the queue is at a more manageable level Sofia returns to waiting on the tables, leaving Mona at the counter facing the door.
‘What would you like?’ she says, reaching the fin
al customer in the queue, a young woman with a tired face and a heavy-looking laptop bag slung over one shoulder. She wants a macchiato and Mona turns to the machine, her back to the room. When the drink is made and she swivels round to hand the coffee over, she nearly drops the cup. Because behind the customer the café door is opening and Mona immediately recognises the man stepping hesitantly inside.
‘Here’s your coffee,’ she says, trying to hide the shake in her voice and in her hand. She will not let him see her shake or falter.
The customer turns to leave, the man stepping out of her way to let her past, his eyes fixed on Mona.
‘What the hell are you doing here?’ she says sharply when he reaches the counter. She folds her arms across her chest and is aware that Sofia has turned to look at her. Mona nods at her, indicating she has things under control – she hopes that she has, for now at least. She turns back to the man, who is holding his hands up in front of him.
‘I don’t want to fight, Mona,’ says Jaheim, his cheeks flushed, his brown eyes full of concern that makes Mona feel nauseous, ‘I just want to speak to Hannah. I thought she might be working today.’
‘Well, she’s not,’ replies Mona. She can’t believe the cheek of him, coming in here after everything that happened. What would he have done if Hannah was working here? Cornered her in public and at her workplace so she was forced to speak to him? Made her upset in front of customers, in front of her colleagues? Mona feels rage burning inside her. Before Jaheim came along, Hannah was focused on her career and she and Mona were closer. Before him, everything was fine.
‘She won’t answer my calls,’ says Jaheim sheepishly, looking at the floor and then up at Mona, his hair flopping in front of an eye. His face has a boyish look to it that she knows Hannah found endearing but Mona finds sickening. She notices that although Sofia is still serving the tables she is also looking up frequently, looking at Jaheim closely, clearly listening to the conversation.