Precocious Page 10

  ‘There’ll be other times,’ he whispers, ‘other months. We have all the time in the world.’

  With a deep breath, I push him away.

  The next few days make it obvious I need to leave. The ‘non-baby’, as Dave has taken to calling it bitterly, has become a block between us, a boulder we can’t get around.

  ‘You knew what you were signing up for,’ I tell him. ‘I was clear from the start.’

  ‘Yes, but I never knew why. Maybe it would help me understand if I knew why.’

  ‘But you didn’t care! You didn’t ask then, and it’s too late to ask now. You’ve married me now – it’s not fair to ask me to change. Sold as seen.’

  I haven’t had to tell him about you. I’m glad, for selfish reasons, that I don’t have to say: ‘I’ve been having an affair.’ I don’t want to admit to myself that that’s what it is. That that’s all it is.

  We talked about it once, about how we would feel if one or the other of us were unfaithful. It’s only a suitable subject of conversation for a couple in the very early stages, when it seems the most remote possibility. It’s an ‘in the pub’ conversation, along with ‘what would be the first thing you’d buy if you won the lottery?’ and ‘which of my friends do you find most attractive?’ – another one that can only be had very early in relationships, and even then it’s risky.

  It was the classic debate: which is the worse infidelity, a one-off dalliance or an ongoing affair? A drunken, ‘it meant nothing’ fumble or falling in love? We’d disagreed, but amiably, because either seemed so unlikely to happen to us. To other people, but not to us, lacing our fingers together across the table in the pub, by the fire.

  Dave: ‘It would be worse if you’d fallen in love.’

  Me: ‘Nah, the one-nighter is worse.’

  ‘How’d you figure that?’

  ‘Because that would mean you’d risked everything we have for something that didn’t even mean anything.’

  ‘Yeah, but it’s just physical. It’s the heart stuff that really hurts.’

  When I do try to tell him how I feel, that too is selfish. An honest voice inside me lists my reasons:

  I want him to understand. To pity me.

  I want someone else to feel the great gaping loss that I feel, of loving and not being sure of being loved in return.

  I want him to leave me, want him to break us up.

  He’s not going to let me get away with that. He won’t let me get the words out.

  ‘I know what you’re going to say.’

  ‘Why do you always interrupt me?’

  ‘I know what you’re going to say.’

  ‘Maybe you don’t.’

  ‘I do.’

  ‘I don’t—’

  ‘You don’t love me anymore.’

  ‘You’re putting words in my mouth.’

  ‘I can say you don’t love me but I can’t hear you say you don’t love me.’

  ‘That doesn’t make—’

  ‘Sense? I know. So?’

  ‘But I do. I do—’

  ‘Don’t. Don’t say that either.’

  And that is all the talking.

  I’ve told him I’m going and that it’s ‘for the best’, but I’m not sure. His confused face says it’s not best for him. I divide my belongings into two sets of boxes: one for Mari’s, which is to be my ‘decoy home’, the place Dave thinks I’m going, the address my post will be redirected to, the home Dave will call if he needs me; and one for your house. I want to bring as few things as possible to yours because it is complete as it is. I don’t want to crowd you, at least not with things that hold traces of the life I had before.

  All my things are touched in some way by Dave. I can almost see his prints on them. But your prints are on me, and everything has changed, and no shower or bath can make me clean, now.

  There is a photo of the two of us at Aphrodite’s Rock in Cyprus. Dave is squinting in the sun, and we are clinging to each other as though afraid that the same foam that gave birth to the goddess of love might jealously snatch one of us away. When I look at photos of the two of us, from holidays when it was just us, I often try to remember who took them. Who Dave waved the camera at with ‘please?’ in his smile. Were they English? German? Greek? What did they look like? Why didn’t we ask their name? Someone we didn’t know pointed the shutter at us, snapped us, shot us. Some stranger created an image of us.

  We exist – together – only in someone else’s line of sight.

  I spend almost an hour cuddling Bella, while Dave waits upstairs.

  I hadn’t really thought about the fact that leaving Dave means leaving Bella. Taking her with me is not an option – I know how you feel, or rather don’t feel, about animals – and besides, Dave thinks I’ll be living in Mari’s little one-bedroom flat.

  When we adopted Bella, she looked more like a lamb than a puppy. Her fur, which would later grow long and golden, lay in white curls tight against her tubby body.

  Taking her home was the only time Dave ever criticised my driving.

  He sat in the back seat with her box beside him, one hand resting protectively on top of it, while she scrabbled around inside.

  Mostly he spoke to her, in soothing tones: ‘It’s alright, baby’, ‘Soon be home’.

  Dave has made his face vacant, that’s the only way I can describe it. He doesn’t really drink, never smoked, but he takes pills, sometimes. I downplay it, don’t think about it, because he downplays it.

  The first time I saw him do it, we were getting on a flight. We drove to Nice (hours upon hours of French motorway, wind skimming our hair through the sunroof, listening to Dave’s Genesis and Pink Floyd CDs on rotation) so it must have been Cyprus, I think that was the first time we flew together. To calm his nerves, he said. I was a little spooked but he was blasé about it. ‘It’s not always tranquillisers,’ he said, ‘not often even, mostly painkillers,’ as though this was okay.

  Dave put his back out at work. He was a get-stuck-in kind of manager, so even though he didn’t need to lug boxes in the storeroom, that’s exactly what he would do on delivery day, sleeves rolled up and beads of perspiration decorating his face and neck.

  Following this injury, when it became obvious neither rest nor physio was really working, he was prescribed strong painkillers. He’d just kept taking them, he said.

  They made him numb, and he liked it. As our marriage progressed, it became one of those facts: he had his pills; I was numb anyway.

  I remember thinking, and I think it now, how typical it was of Dave. Even his worst habit, the closest thing he had to an addiction, was legal and on prescription. Or at least, it used to be; I don’t know where he gets the stuff from these days. I can’t question him because he just gives me that pointed look that says considering the chemicals Mari and I ingested in our teens, I should keep quiet. Its purpose only to make him even more placid than he is by nature. I suddenly feel angry, and cruel, and pity him, and then I feel more angry at myself for feeling all of those things. It’s time to leave.

  I push my face into Bella’s fur, murmuring in her ear, just in case she can understand. ‘I’m sorry,’ I whisper. ‘I love you.’ She smells of grass, and warmth. She licks my ear, her snuffling breath covering my face.

  ‘Baby, baby,’ I coo, hugging her neck, tickling her tummy, stroking each paw carefully in turn. ‘Be good. Look after him.’

  Is this my idea of fair? I wonder. I get you, so I leave him the dog?

  I want him to shout at me. Beg me to stay, maybe, even though we both know I won’t. He is breaking me up with silence.

  As I wrench open the door to put the last box in the car, he appears at the bottom of the stairs. When he speaks, it is quiet but clear, and after so much silence hits me like a thunderclap.

  ‘Fiona,’ he says, ‘I’ll always be here.’

  nine

  Even when your life is on the brink of change, when nothing feels normal anymore, you still have to go and do the things that
normal people do. You have to go to work. You have to get in your car and make the familiar short drive, weaving in and out of lethargic traffic, in the knowledge that stuffed into the boot is a case, like a secret, and inside the case are the pieces of your world that you’re ready to transport to a new place, a new normal.

  I’ll bring my stuff over tonight. The message I sent you this morning, depressingly pedestrian. I wanted to add kisses or say ‘can’t wait!’ but it seemed wrong, somehow, like laughing at a funeral.

  Great. I’ll cook Chinese, you’d responded, and I’d wanted something else, expected more, but what?

  Our office is open-plan and I’m glad of the noise and distraction, the presence of others that means I have to work, or at least appear to, stabbing at computer keys, eyes fixed on the screen, making calls, scribbling notes in my diary. Surrounded by the usual chatter and activity, I can move through a day that looks to outsiders like any other, instead of The Day I Leave My Husband.

  It’s a standard office, white desks and black chairs, a study in monochrome uniformity and impersonality, but we have this embarrassing system whereby every time someone makes a sale, a bright yellow balloon is tied to their desk. I’m so industrious that by lunchtime there’s a bloom of them obliterating my view of the person opposite me.

  Dan, the facilities guy who occasionally mans reception, approaches my desk, pushes the balloons to one side and peers at me. In his disinterested monotone he announces: ‘There’s a visitor for you.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You’re not expecting anyone?’

  ‘I don’t think so.’ I flick through my diary, a superficial gesture since I know there’s nothing in it. ‘Who is it? A client?’ But clients rarely come to the office.

  ‘She didn’t say. Didn’t look like a client.’

  I feel a rush of relief at the word ‘she’ – for a moment I’d thought it might be Dave, making some grand gesture to persuade me against what I’m going to do. A huge bouquet, sad eyes, and everyone here would coo and tilt their heads and think I was heartless if I didn’t fall into his arms.

  ‘Old or young?’

  ‘Young.’ Could be Laura, or Mari? But they’d call, wouldn’t they? I stand up, straightening my skirt and tucking my hair behind my ears, and head for the lift with an irritated sigh.

  At the clicking of my heels across the marble floor of reception, the girl hunched on the visitors’ bench looks up.

  The young woman is about twenty-three or twenty-four, judging by her complexion, the way she is dressed and a certain awkwardness in her movements as she stands up. But her eyes look older. Her eyes, which were fixed on the floor, now swivel towards me.

  ‘Can I help you?’ I start to walk towards her, hugging a notebook to my chest.

  ‘Are you,’ she looks back at the ground as though reading my name from it, ‘Fiona?’ She swallows. ‘Fiona Palmer?’

  It’s a long time since anyone has used my maiden name, and perversely it brings an image of Dave swimming before my eyes. I can feel colour rising in my throat.

  ‘Why?’ I demand. What is this?

  ‘Are you?’ There’s desperation in her eyes. Hands stuffed in her jeans pockets, legs twisted over one another, she kicks at her own heel. She’s thin and fragile and for a second I’m afraid she might knock herself over.

  I nod slowly, then say, ‘Well, I used to be. Why?’ I look carefully at her eyes, pools of dirty grey water. ‘What do you want?’

  ‘You used to go to Our Lady of Compassion?’

  ‘Yes.’ I motion for her to step away from the reception area, into the quiet, narrow side corridor. I move to steer her by her skinny elbow but think better of it.

  ‘I need to talk to you,’ she whispers, ‘I need your help.’

  ‘What’s this about?’

  ‘Henry Morgan.’ She swallows and looks at me carefully. At the mention of your name, as always, my heart dances in my chest but there is something new there: fear. She starts to speak quickly, eyes searching my face. ‘Did he … were you taught by him? Have you seen him since?’

  ‘Look, I don’t know who you are, but—’

  Before I can say anything else she thrusts a piece of paper into my hand and starts to walk away, slowly, backwards, as though from a predator. As I unfurl the note she says,

  ‘Alice.’

  You’re in your conservatory, painting, when I arrive, letting myself in through the side gate. I stand in the garden for a moment, a small suitcase in my hand, watching you. You are stunning to me in your self-sufficiency. I’ve never seen anyone who looks so entirely comfortable in their own skin, or so pleased with their own company. Even my little bag feels superfluous to this scene, and I hold it behind me, willing it to shrink.

  Classical music is streaming from a digital radio in the corner; I don’t recognise the piece, but you know it, because you are softly whistling along. There is so much you know that I don’t; I wish I could climb into your brain and plunder it, taking out all the pieces that are there that would make me richer, make me more like you.

  A glass of white wine stands on the side table, droplets of condensation glinting in the late afternoon light. You are frowning with concentration, making broad, sweeping strokes with your brush; the easel looks like an extension of you, or a mirror, reflecting your brilliant white shirt, your wide-legged stance.

  I tap on the glass and you look around and break into a smile. There is a spot of paint on your nose, and one on your sleeve. Your hair is too long, the ends curling over your collar.

  ‘Hello, hello,’ you beam, opening the conservatory doors to me, and then you are lifting me up, suitcase and all, and holding me so high that your face is pressed into my stomach. I feel like a doll; I feel light as air. I laugh and run my fingers through your hair, resolving to cut it, but first, imagining washing it, sitting in the bath with you, or standing in the shower, hands full of soap, bodies pressed together.

  You put me down and kiss me, easing the suitcase from my hand. There is a rolling rhythm to our kisses that is missing from the staccato kisses I’ve become used to in marriage. Our kisses begin slowly, softly, then there is urgency, then one or both of us pulls away, then we start again, and there is a sense of moving higher each time. In our kisses I am always conscious of myself, and always trying to impress you.

  It’s not that the rest of the world, of my life, matters less when I’m with you; it’s that it actually ceases to exist.

  So when you whisk a blanket off the sofa and lay it on the conservatory floor; when you push up my shirt, dip your fingers in paint and trace them over my stomach, smearing me with your initials; when you hold my hands above my head and kiss my throat; surrounded by glass, and the illusion of open air, sunlight bathing our movements but with only the birds as witness, nothing exists anymore, not even myself. Only you.

  My closed eyes, my lips, my body become a hymn: only you.

  When I come to from a hazy sleep, wrapped in a blanket, stomach sticky with paint and sweat, the last of the sun is kissing the roses at the back and the front of the house is in gloom.

  You are industrious in the kitchen, your hands deep in some blood-coloured marinade, pulling out strips of meat and dropping them with a flourish into the sizzling wok.

  There’s an ice bucket; champagne; two chilled glasses.

  ‘For when you’ve unpacked,’ you grin.

  ‘Oh, and Fee?’ as I back silently out of the room. You hand me a flower, picked from the garden, its heavy head lolling on a delicate stalk. I cup it in my palm as one might a baby animal. Its petals are a perfect, blush-coloured pink. Woven around the stalk is a piece of Hessian string and carefully attached to it, a key. A front door key.

  ‘Welcome home, sunshine.’ You kiss me softly on the forehead and turn back to your cooking.

  It’s harder unpacking a few things in someone else’s house, than moving your entire belongings to an empty place. You have to work out where things fit; what the rules are around
here.

  I start with the clothes, because I know this is where I will struggle to make things look right. Your wardrobe is so masculine, and ordered. There is no place for my scarves and belts and cardigans. Neatly pressed shirts hang in blocks of white, grey, Oxford blue. Then trousers: I run a finger along their perfect creases. A jacket; a raincoat. And at the back, under wrapping that crackles to my touch, a tuxedo. When did you last wear that? I wonder. Who were you with?

  I feel as though I am finding out secrets, and with this thought comes an itch, an urge, that I try to put to the back of my mind.

  I have never pictured you ironing a shirt. The thought of it makes me laugh, but also feel sad. Your clothes, without you in them, look different. They could be anybody’s clothes. I think about the hours you must spend making everything so neat, only to then roll up your sleeves in that way you do, only to end up crumpled.

  Our colours clash. I try hanging up a navy blue shirt dress, the smartest thing I own; it makes the whole wardrobe look untidy. Taking it out again I turn to the drawers, looking for the one I know you’ll have left empty for me. I know the drill; I have done this before, after all. First there is a drawer, and a shelf in the bathroom; in time, possessions merge, the lines of two people’s histories blur and they meld, like their things, into each other.

  But each drawer in turn, from your balled-up socks to your folded T-shirts to your jeans laid out flat, one pair on top of another, one fold at the knee, right down to the predictable drawer left empty, each makes me realise how far away that day is.

  I hurriedly roll up my clothes and squeeze them in, underwear, shirts, pyjamas, everything, and press down tightly so I can close the drawer. I stand back and look. It’s as though I was never there.

  Now for the book shelves: some things we own are the same, and these are the things that make me smile. At first I leave my (invariably newer, less dog-eared) versions of books and CDs that you own too in the box, but then I take a couple out and put them on the shelf, just to see how they look.

  The Beatles’ White Album. Yours, and mine.