The Ballroom Class (29 page)

‘Ah, wonderful!’ said Councillor York.

‘Yes, er, Eddie, I’ve been looking over those documents Nick sent over.’ Katie bit her lip. There was no point pretending she had prior commitments, since she’d known about that meeting even when she was only presenting one site. If she could move the meeting, then pulled an unheard-of sickie, she might just be able to make it. ‘I was wondering if it would be possible to move the meeting into next week? I don’t want to skim over what he’s done, and not do justice to that hard work.’

But Eddie was already shaking his head and sucking his teeth. ‘I hear what you’re saying, but I’m afraid not.’

‘We have a findings deadline too,’ added Clive Jenkins. ‘For capital investment applications.’

‘It’s a big ask, but if anyone can step up to the plate it’s Kate!’ Eddie slapped his desk, and she knew the twinkle in his eye was more of a glint of warning. ‘You’ll hit this one out of the park for us, won’t you?’

‘Do I have a choice, Eddie?’ she asked, with a metallic laugh.

Eddie’s face turned serious. ‘No.’

She shook her head and left.

You’ve brought this on yourself, Katie told herself as she flung herself back in her chair and called Jo.

‘I know what you’re going to tell me,’ said Jo when she picked up.

‘What?’

‘That you can’t come because of work.’

Katie squirmed. ‘Look, I had it down in my home diary, not my office one, and I’ve been moved onto this huge project at work, literally about an hour ago, and there’s no way I can take two days off now.’

‘Get someone else to do it.’

‘I can’t!’

‘Can’t you?’ Katie thought she could detect a chill in Jo’s tone. ‘That’s the kind of thing Greg would say. And I would say, what’s the point of being in charge of a team if you can’t delegate? Come on, Katie, you deserve a break as much as Hannah and Ross do! Just tell them!’

‘It’s not like I don’t want to go!’ she protested. And it wasn’t the break so much as the chance to be there with the kids, doing things with them, with no pressures or phones ringing. ‘I’m desperate to go, but this is the big regeneration project we’ve won, and I’ve only just been landed with the files for a meeting on Friday morning  . . .’

There was a telling pause at the other end of the line.

‘Well, I suppose it’s not like you’ve already promised Hannah you’ll be there,’ said Jo, and Katie could tell the implication was, ‘so you’re just disappointing her, not letting her down’. If she was trying to make Katie feel better, she didn’t succeed.

‘Is Greg going?’ she asked.

Jo hesitated. ‘Probably.’

That did make Katie feel slightly better, but not much, since Greg was the least hands-on parent since Darth Vader.

‘I can try to get there for Friday night,’ she suggested, scanning her diary for any meeting she could move. ‘I mean, the traffic will be awful and  . . .’

‘Do you want me to tell Ross?’ Jo interrupted her. ‘I mean, I know it ruins the surprise, but if he’s going to be bringing the kids on his own, he ought to know.’

Katie rubbed her temples, as she saw in her stupid diary that she and Ross also had their fourth marriage counselling session on Tuesday evening, and it was ‘talk about your family experience of married life’ time. No doubt Ross would get maximum mileage out of this with Peter.

Katie’s mind raced, trying to see what she might still be able to salvage. Maybe there was still a way she could make it into a treat for him and Hannah: pack their bags in secret, with extra little presents in, or something?

‘No,’ she said. ‘I’ll tell him.’

Hannah took the news better than Ross did. But then as far as Hannah was concerned, Katie’s bright-eyed travel-agent descriptions of pony-riding and indoor pool with slides outweighed the disappointment of Mummy’s absence, which was hastily glossed over, to the point where Katie wasn’t entirely sure it had sunk in. Ross noticed though. To give him his due, he did back her up with slightly fake excitement until Hannah had rushed off upstairs to try on her swimsuit.

As soon as she was out of the room, his eyes turned cold and tired, and he went back to picking up the Lego scattered liberally over the rug as if she hadn’t said anything.

‘Thanks,’ he said. ‘Really thoughtful of you.’

‘What?’

‘Another four days’ solo childcare but with waterslides. Are you sure you’ve got something on at work? Four days at home on your own sounds like a holiday to me.’

‘Ross, don’t start,’ she said, sinking wearily into a chair. ‘Of course I’m working. You can’t feel more angry with me than I am already, honestly.’

‘I don’t feel angry,’ he said. ‘It’s not like I expected you to be there. But next year? I’d like an afternoon off for my birthday present. Cheaper, and you don’t have to be there for that, either.’

‘Don’t!’ Katie looked up at him. ‘We’ll do something at the weekend, I promise. I didn’t mean this to happen, but it’s the biggest project I’ve ever run, and I couldn’t say no. But I really did want us all to go away together and have fun. Ask Jo – I’ve been planning this for ages.’

‘Jo’s coming?’

‘Yes,’ said Katie, seeing a ray of light. ‘So you will get some time off – Jo’s happy to look after the kids and there are crèche facilities so, you know, you can have a birthday drink.’

Ross’s face seemed to lose some of its tension, and Katie felt relief, followed almost immediately by a prickle of jealousy.

‘Well, if Jo’s going  . . .’ he said.

‘If Jo’s going what?’ she demanded.

Ross stared at her, and there was something in his face she didn’t recognise. ‘If Jo’s going, I might at least get a laugh. We all might.’

Katie felt stung. ‘And if I were there, you wouldn’t?’

Ross shrugged theatrically. ‘How would I know? You never are.’

‘Don’t be glib,’ snapped Katie, because she knew he meant it, and at that moment she hated herself more than she’d ever done in her life.

He said nothing, but dumped the Lego in his hands into the tub, and started on the half-finished jigsaws, his mouth a thin, tight line.

Katie watched him, unable to find words to break through the tangible sulk. That was Ross’s most hurtful tactic, she thought: that withdrawal of himself. Putting barriers of silence between them.

I suppose that’s what he thinks I do with work, she thought, miserably. Something that comes between us that he can’t understand or be part of. It’s all he’s got, his silence, and he knows how much it hurts me to feel excluded. We’re going to suffocate each other. Like putting a cushion over our marriage and smothering it to death.

In his beanbag chair, Jack’s round brown eyes moved from Katie to Ross and back to Katie.

‘I can take some time off next month,’ she bargained. ‘We could do something then?’

‘Oh great,’ said Ross. ‘We’ll move Hannah’s birthday. And mine. Doesn’t make much difference. I’ll still be a grown man who spends his days scraping play-doh off the sofa.’

Hannah’s feet came thundering down the stairs, and Katie pulled herself together with her very last shred of energy, just as Hannah burst through the door, her chubby arms and legs peachy-soft in her frilly red swimsuit, and her silky hair flowing round her shoulders.

‘Mumm-ee-ee!’ she yelled. ‘Look at me! I’m a mermaid!’

She did look like a mermaid, thought Katie, with a pang. Fragile and perfect and that hair – shimmering with golden light in a way hers never had as a child. And she wasn’t going to see her screaming with laughter as she splashed in the pool – how could Ross believe she
wanted
to put work first?

She’s forgotten I’m not coming, she thought, painfully. I’ll have to tell her again.

‘You look lovely!’ she said. ‘Now, are you going to help Mummy put Jack to bed while Daddy puts his feet up? I need a big girl to help me with his bath  . . .’

Katie lifted Jack out of his chair, and the sleepy heaviness of his body as he clung to her made her want to curl up with him and Hannah, just feeling them near her. She wasn’t sure she’d ever get out of bed if she did.

‘Yaaaaaay!’ said Hannah, still giddy with excitement. ‘Tell me about the pool again, Mummy!’

‘Is Greg coming?’ asked Ross, as she shuffled to the door, with Jack in her arms and Hannah clinging to her leg.

Katie turned back with some effort. ‘Jo doesn’t know. Work’s busy. He’s going to try. It’s not that easy, Ross. We can’t always do what we want to do.’

Ross turned away, so she couldn’t see his face. ‘Yeah, yeah,’ he said.

Ross’s sulk continued throughout the evening, while they watched television in silence, and through the night when his back, protected in the T-shirt he always wore to sleep in now, was turned to her even before she got into bed.

He kept it up through breakfast, where Katie had to field Hannah’s new questions about the pony-riding (names of ponies, colours of ponies, magical powers of ponies) and had subsided into a sullen antipathy by the time she came home the following evening, her brain numb after a day of disentangling lawyers’ letters about freeholds on the scabby, unloved precinct. She had tried to start conversations, about the new shops that were coming, or the phone call she’d had from Lauren, about whether the council hired out London buses for transporting wedding guests, but Ross was determined to punish her with disinterested grunts and dead eyes.

The thought of the counselling session on top of that was, Katie thought, like finishing a marathon and seeing there was an assault course at the end.

Peter looked particularly happy when they shuffled into the counselling room – not, Katie assumed, because he was pleased to see them. His eyes had a sparkle left over from a nice day, his beard was freshly trimmed, and he was wearing what looked like a hand-knitted Aran jumper.

‘New jumper?’ asked Ross, as he sat down.

‘Absolutely! Anniversary present from my wife!’ beamed Peter, smoothing it over his chest. ‘She made it for me herself.’

From the size of it, thought Katie, his wife must have been knitting it since they got married.

‘Congratulations. How many years?’ she asked, politely. Really, if relationship counsellors were going to pass judgement on other people’s stuttering marriages, they ought to post their own marriage certificate on the door by way of authorisation, like cabbies or beauticians.

‘Ten years,’ said Peter proudly, then added, seeing the expression on Katie’s face, ‘second time round for both of us. Which goes to show, it’s perfectly possible to find happiness more than once in your life. Now, let’s get started on you two, shall we?’

Katie wasn’t sure whether she felt consoled that if things weren’t going to work out with Ross, Peter would vouch for her desire to get out and start again, or faintly cheated that clearly he hadn’t followed his own advice and ‘worked on the good parts’.

‘Ross, why don’t you tell us about your parents’ relationship?’ Peter began, and Katie half listened as Ross described his dad, Julian, the local newspaper journalist, and his mum, Lynn, who’d done ‘all sorts – helped out in a school, run a café, whatever she could fit in around us really’.

‘And did they argue?’ asked Peter.

‘No more than usual,’ said Ross. ‘You know, the odd squabble.’

‘What did they argue about?’

‘Does that matter?’ demanded Katie.

‘Well, yes,’ Peter replied. ‘Sometimes it can show you what sort of arguing style you learned, what sort of issues trigger conflict  . . . Ross?’

‘Money, normally – my dad freelanced quite a lot, so Mum had to find part-time work to make up the difference. But we got by. I suppose it’s because of that that I’ve always known that you can manage, that things come and go.’

Katie realised Ross hadn’t really ever told her that. She thought his dad had always been full-time on the paper. As he talked, revealing flashes of his past she hadn’t seen before, a little of the old interest flickered, reminding her of the days when they hadn’t heard each other’s best anecdotes three million times.

‘But you had a happy childhood?’

‘Oh, yeah. I loved having Dad around,’ he went on, ‘because we used to go off for walks and adventures and stuff with him so I didn’t associate him being at home with money pressure for Mum  . . . I don’t know. Maybe that’s why I didn’t mind the idea of Katie going back to work and me staying at home.’ He paused and his open face darkened defensively. ‘One thing I don’t like about our arrangement is having to ask Katie for cash. It makes me feel  . . . like a beggar.’

‘What?’ demanded Katie. ‘You’ve never
ever
said that in all the time I’ve been working.’ She looked at Peter. ‘He’s never said that before,’ she repeated.

Peter shrugged non-committally. ‘That’s the point of counselling,’ he said. ‘People often feel able to say things here that are too hard to say at home. Can you explain that for Katie, Ross?’

Ross’s ears turned pink with effort. ‘It makes me feel like I have to account for everything I spend, and then you give me a hard time about a fiver here for a birthday present, or why do I need more money for swimming  . . . I hate having to ask you for money, Katie,’ he said, turning to her, his eyes full of hurt pride. ‘As if I haven’t earned it.’