Ordinary Miracles (25 page)

I listened to these details with a fiery fascination. I’d never heard Bruce being so open in his life. In fact I didn’t realise he was capable of it. I’d been waiting for an explanation and here he was trying to offer one. And even though I frequently felt like interrupting and shouting ‘Nonsense!’ I didn’t because, beneath my resentment, I could see it wasn’t nonsense. It did all piece together in a way.

I felt something small and scared stir inside me. Forgive
ness? Maybe. Certainly a kind of hope. I’d seen glimmers of another Bruce – almost a stranger. He seemed to be
offering something different. Something deeper. Part of me
wanted to fling it back in his face and watch him wince.
But another part was grateful, and a bit guilty too. Because
it wasn’t all his fault. It wasn’t. Maybe this period in our
marriage wasn’t just the sandstorm it seemed – gritty and uncomfortable – obscuring only a desert anyway. Maybe it
could lead to something else entirely.

Or was this just another mirage?

We were both exhausted when we left that room. I felt far
too drained to manifest any serious attempt at rage. So many
cats had been let out of the bag they were almost swarming at
our feet. I thought another feline might be easier to mention
in the circumstances.

‘Katie thinks she may be a lesbian,’ I said.

‘I know,’ said Bruce.

‘How long have you known?’ I asked.

‘For quite some time.’

We trudged forlornly towards Bruce’s car. He was about
to give me a lift home. Then I started to smile.

‘What are you smiling at?’ Bruce asked.

‘Just the look on that poor woman’s face when I said Avril
was a farmer who collected seaweed.’

‘Yes. She did look extremely bewildered, didn’t she…
especially when you mentioned the bit about espionage.’

And then we both burst into laughter.

We laughed so much that tears came to our eyes.

Chapter
18

Someone on the radio
is talking about a survey of British
housewives. If offered a choice between a free £25 shopping
voucher and sex with their husbands many of them would,
apparently, choose the voucher. I can see their point. After all,
sex with their husbands will probably be on offer again, but the free £25 voucher may not be. Still, this does not placate
the men who have phoned into the radio programme. They
sound decidedly miffed.

I’m listening to the radio in my kitchen. Not Charlie’s kitchen. My kitchen. Bruce is still working in America and I told him I’d pop in and keep an eye on the place from time to time. It’s not safe to leave a house empty these days. That’s what Bruce says anyway.

Once I got here there didn’t seem any reason why I shouldn’t stay – just for a couple of nights. Now I’ve been here for two weeks. I went back to Charlie’s the other day to collect the rest of my stuff, it didn’t seem fair to leave it scattered around his spare room, and anyway some of the clothes needed to be dry-cleaned.

Charlie didn’t help me carry my bags to the taxi. He was in the sitting room and had his headphones on – probably listening to some recording he’d just done. He didn’t seem to want to talk at all, but I really couldn’t leave without saying something.

I tapped him on the shoulder. He looked
at me and said, ‘I’ll be with you in a second.’ He sounded
very business-like.

He wasn’t with me in a second actually. It was more like
thirty. I was just about to say ‘I’ve got a taxi waiting, Charlie’
when he took his headphones off and swung around to face
me. He was on a swivel-chair.

‘So you’re off,’ he said impassively.

‘Yes. Yes I am.’ I could feel my lower lip quivering a bit.
I looked down at my shoes.

‘Have you said goodbye to Rosie?’

‘Yup.’

‘She’ll miss you.’

‘I’ll miss her.’ I was making a big effort not to cry. My
voice sounded clipped and small.

‘Let me know how things go.’

‘Of course I will.’ I hadn’t meant the departure to seem so final. I’d hoped I could come back to Charlie’s if I needed to.

‘I’m really, really grateful, Charlie.’ I didn’t want to look
in his eyes but somehow I had to. They looked so sad. Like
my own probably. Why on earth was I doing this?

‘I – mmmm – I’ve got a taxi waiting.’

‘Well then, you’d better go.’

‘Yes, yes. I’d better go.’ Was this to be it then?

‘You’ve been so good to me, Charlie.’

Charlie gave a philosophical shrug. ‘Well, that’s what
friends are for.’

I must have looked like a small kid standing there, bewil
dered, waiting. Charlie stood up and patted my shoulder.

‘Come on, I’ll see you out.’ We walked slowly to the front door.

‘Can I have a hug?’ I hadn’t planned to say it but I had
to. Part of me was already in his arms – bathed in that light,
right feeling I get when he’s near. I so much wanted him to understand. I so much wanted our goodbye to be good. I couldn’t bear us not being friends – Charlie and me.

But then he looked at me so tenderly that I got scared. Terrified really. I knew he was seeing through me, seeing parts of me I didn’t even see myself. I knew he knew something that I didn’t want to – and I didn’t like it at all.

As he put his arms around me I froze. Ordered myself not to
feel. Our hug became awkward and formal. We pulled away quickly from each other, embarrassed. I knew Charlie was hurt – very hurt. I didn’t have to look at his face, I could feel it – misty and baffled between us. Sharpening into something angry too.

‘So long then,’ he said tightly, as I got into the car. Then he swung the door closed with unnecessary force.

‘So long, Charlie.’ I was looking up at him apologetically but he wouldn’t meet my eyes.

The taxi driver started up the engine then. As we crunched our way down the gravel drive I turned round to wave, but Charlie had already closed the front door. Then I slumped miserably back into my seat hoping the taxi driver wasn’t one of the chatty cheery ones.

Actually he was of the sullen, pissed-off variety which came
as something of a relief. He asked me where I was going, but not why. Just as well because I’m not sure I could have told him.

That goodbye haunted me for days after I got back here. Part of me still seemed to be skulking around Charlie’s driveway hoping for a retake. I kept wanting to phone him, but I really didn’t know what I’d say. I didn’t want to mislead him because the truth is, I think I do want to give my marriage another try. I mean, you don’t just walk away from twenty years without a backward glance
– even if you sometimes feel like it. And there’s Katie to
think of too.

After an initial blast of angst and misery I’m getting used
to being home. Even before the bad goodbye it was getting a
bit tense at Charlie’s, and anyway this is my house. I should
never have had to leave it in the first place. If I’d stuck to my
guns I’m sure I could have got Bruce to leave instead. I was
in such turmoil at the time I just wasn’t thinking straight.

The neighbours have been most welcoming, but they’re also curious. I haven’t given them too many details. I don’t
want them to think it’s patched up between Bruce and me,
though it seems it may be. Of course our marriage won’t be
the same as it was, but I don’t want it to be the same as it
was. I think we may be more open with each other – more
truthful.

Mrs Anderson across the street frequently knocks on my
door to ask if I’ve seen her tom-cat, Tibby.

‘He keeps straying. I don’t know what he’s up to,’ she says.
And as she lingers on the doorstep I know she’s hoping for information about my own recent wanderings. ‘Tibby,’ she
tells me, ‘hasn’t been the same since a female cat he was very
fond of teamed up with a Burmese.’

I can’t get used to how quiet it is here. Of course I was
often alone in this house in the past, but the knowledge that Bruce and Katie were going to return soon surrounded me. The rooms feel different now that there’s only me in them.
The emptiness seems to get bigger at night. I’m not in the
house all the time myself. I go out to work sometimes –
for a day or two here and there when the secretarial agency
rings or when I’m needed to demonstrate some product in
a supermarket. When I return from these outings the house
feels quite different. It feels like a refuge instead of a space.
A space I expand into to fill my own vacuum.

How busily my house and I have conspired to fill that
vacuum over the years. Now I’ve my familiar things around
me I see how hard we’d been working and it seems to me she’s
okay – the woman – myself – who chose this wallpaper, these
carpets and fabrics, these ornaments. This life.

She did choose this life, though at the time it seemed
something that just happened. That’s where we differ, she
and I. I see the choice. The decision. I see it could all have been
quite different. I no longer have the sanctuary of blaming
Bruce for hijacking me and making my life so often seem like
foreign tarmac glimpsed fearfully from a grounded airplane.
But if I have, at times, been my own terrorist, can I also be
my own liberator? That’s what I need to know. Maybe being
my own confessor is a start.

The happiest memories I have of this house are connected
with Katie. I remember how she used to rush in from school
and run upstairs to her room, two steps at a time. She’d put on her jeans and a sweatshirt and then one or two of her
friends used to call around and they’d all giggle a lot in her
room. I liked their giggles. I’d often stop what I was doing
just to listen to them.

Of course they sometimes played music too loud or hogged th
e phone, and then I’d have to take a stand. And through it
all there was a sense of really making a difference. Of being
needed.

All through my life I’ve had this sense of people needing
things from me.

‘Do you ever ask yourself what you need from them?’
Susan said when I told her this.

‘I suppose I must,’ I replied. ‘But their needs always seem
to be more urgent – more obvious somehow.’

‘You’d better wise up on that one, or you’ll get their needs and your own mixed up,’ she said as she reached down and
scratched Rosie’s back. We were in Charlie’s back garden.
‘I mean look at Rosie,’ she continued. ‘She doesn’t agonise
about any of this stuff – do you dear?’ Rosie closed her eyes
blissfully as Susan scratched her. ‘If we stood between her
and a bucket of turnips I don’t think she’d be in any mood
to negotiate.’