The Trouble with Henry and Zoe (29 page)

‘Are . . .’ Zoe looks around the carriage, as if trying to decide on what level of a scene is acceptable in this confined space. ‘Are you
serious
?’ she says,
through gritted teeth, as if this is the only way she can contain her anger.

‘Zoe, let me ex—’

‘You’ve had weeks,
months
to explain.’

I nod at the woman beside us, furrowing my brow to suggest we should try to remain civil.

‘What, Henry? Am I embarrassing you?’

‘No, of cou—’

‘Because, talking of
embarrassment
. Did you think about
me
? You were going to just plonk me in the middle of it all with no knowledge, no warning?’

‘Zoe. I wanted to tell you. But it’s hardly, I mean . . . it’s not the kind of thing you just drop into . . . you know.’

‘What, that you left your fiancée at the . . .
God
, Henry. Fuck!’

‘Zo, please, it’s . . . it’s like you said about Alex. It just wasn—’

‘Don’t!’ And now any pretence at decorum has been abandoned. ‘Don’t you dare. Don’t you dare bring Alex into this.’

‘Zoe, I’m sorry. That was a really stupid thing to say. I just . . .’

‘Don’t,’ Zoe says quietly. She crosses and uncrosses her arms, looking increasingly uncomfortable and confined by her seat. She gathers up the empty cups and cans and tonic
bottles, slides out of the seat, and walks up the aisle in the direction of the bar. The woman beside me has been pretending to listen to music, but deprived of further spectacle, she turns up the
volume and goes back to her magazine.

The truth is out, revealed like a bad diagnosis, but it still needs to be discussed. It still needs to be explained and absorbed. We have two more stops before changing onto a provincial service
that winds through the hills and villages and fields of the Peaks for another two-plus hours. And no more secrets. I will explain and confess everything that happened between me and April. I will
tell Zoe how much she means to me, how much it frustrates the hell out of me that we only have a handful of weeks left, and that I was afraid to ruin the short time we had together. I don’t
expect to clear the air completely before we arrive, but I do think Zoe will understand. I’m not stupid enough to suggest as much, but I think she might even find it funny. After all, we
laughed like fools while Ben was banging on the church window and fending off Elaine’s family with a crucifix. Admittedly, Zoe’s laughter turned to tears, but that’s the point
– she was happy for them. Love conquers and justifies all. Doesn’t it?

The train rolls into the penultimate stop of this leg of our journey. The rain has intensified, and as passengers disembark, they run – hunched against the weather, coats pulled overhead
– towards the covered area in front of the ticket office.

Except for Zoe.

She stands impassively in the thrashing rain, her bag at her feet as she removes the red rose clips from her hair and drops them into a bin.

The guard blows his whistle, and a voice tells us this train is ready to depart, and where it is stopping next. I bang on the window and shout Zoe’s name, but either she doesn’t hear
or doesn’t care to respond. The windows don’t open so I bang on the glass again, hard enough to feel the pane vibrate under my fist. ‘Zoe! Wait, Zoe!’

‘Careful,’ says the woman next to me. ‘You’ll break the glass.’

And if I could, I probably would. The third time I hammer on the window, Zoe looks up. Like Elaine in
The Graduate
, she stares at me with catatonic incomprehension, but unlike Elaine, she
does not walk towards me. She turns away and walks slowly towards the ticket office.

The woman beside me rotates through ninety degrees, making it only slightly less difficult for me to get out of my seat, and she protests loudly as I jostle my way past her. The train is already
moving, and picking up speed as I reach the end of the carriage. The doors are of course locked, but the windows, at least, open. I shout Zoe’s name again, but she has already disappeared
from sight.

I’ve been jilted.

Three hours later, I step off another train and into the familiar pocket of hills that I have always called home. As if the clouds have followed me here from London, cold rain
bounces off the ground, filling the air with the vivid fragrances of grass and earth and open space. I take a deep lungful and set off walking. I have left messages:
I’m sorry. Can we
talk? I can explain.
But even if I could, Zoe isn’t picking up.

I called Rachel.

‘Henry, what a surprise, listen, I can’t talk right now because I’ve got my best friend on hold. Turns out her boyfriend is a lying tosspot.’

‘Is she okay?’

‘No, Henry, of course she’s not o-fucking-kay.’

‘Is she safe?’

‘Jesus Christ, don’t flatter yourself. Is she . . . she’s drowning her fucking disappointment and humiliation in gin and crying down the phone on a crowded train. So, good job,
panic over.’

‘Will you ask her to call me?’

‘No, I won’t. And she’s asked me to ask you to
stop
calling her. So, seriously, do you think you could just, like, leave her the fuck alone?’

‘Will you tell her—’

Rachel hung up.

When I walk through the front door of the pub, I’m tired, depressed, angry and soaked to the soles of my feet. You read about embezzlers and adulterers talking of the relief at finally
being found out. I don’t feel that, because for all the weight lifted from my shoulders, it feels like it’s been attached to my heart and my guts. This was always going to end, but not
now and not like this. If I could take it all back for another month with Zoe, then I would do it without hesitation. The truth has not set me free; it has simply brought my sentence forward.

The pub is decorated with red paper chains, red streamers and a lot of red balloons – forty if I had to hazard a guess. But no Smiths. I have never seen the barmaid before, and she looks
at me like I’m a vagrant when I ask after Clive and Sheila.

‘I’m Henry,’ I tell her.

‘The boy,’ she says in a mild eastern European accent.

‘Their son, yes.’

‘The one who’ – the barmaid sprints her fingers across the counter – ‘zzzipp!’

‘That would be me.’

She purses her lips, this girl who might be ten years younger than me, and shakes her head as if it’s all so fucking familiar and predictable. ‘Mother upstairs,’ she says,
nodding me through to the back.

I find Mum sitting on the sofa, about halfway through
Brief Encounter
, and making similar progress through a bottle of wine and a giant tub of Philadelphia cheese. She’s making
sandwiches, but judging by the mean pile of uneven triangles on the plate, she started on the wine before she began buttering the bread.

‘Hungry?’ I ask.

Mum looks up, surprised to see me. ‘Baby boy,’ she says, her voice damp with sentiment and chardonnay. ‘Come and give your mum a kiss. Then wash your hands.’

‘Why, where have you been?’

‘Cheek,’ she says, brandishing a cheese-smeared knife. The kitchen table is piled with mega-sized packets of crisps, jars of dip, and assorted tubs of variously treated nuts.

‘This for tonight?’

‘April and Bri are bringing the hot stuff,’ Mum says. ‘Wedges, sausage rolls, chicken satay.’

On the TV Laura and Dr Harvey are rowing a boat across a lake, any minute now Dr Harvey will fall in and Laura will bray her sharp, unconvincing laugh as he stands there, wicking water up his
enormous tweed trousers.

‘You’re wet,’ says Mum, after I’ve joined her on the sofa and filled a glass.

‘Fell in a lake,’ I tell her.

She raises her eyebrows at me, confused for a moment before getting the reference. ‘Very droll.’

‘I never found him that handsome,’ I say, nodding at the TV.

Mum shrugs. ‘Clean cut, I suppose. So . . .’ she turns to me, ‘. . . where’s Zoe?’

I shake my head. ‘Not coming.’

Mum sighs, turns back to the movie. ‘What happened?’

‘Told the truth,’ I say.

‘Well, that’ll learn you. Here, I’ll butter, you cheese.’

‘Got any cucumber?’

‘Listen to Mister Lahdedah. No, it makes the bread soggy.’

‘Where’s Dad?’

Mum sets her glass down with great deliberation; as if she is afraid it might fly from her hand.

‘What?’ I ask.

She glares at me, as if all my sins have coalesced into the last two seconds. ‘Like father, like son. Isn’t that what they say?’

‘Where is he?’

‘Well, son, that would be the million sodding dollar question.’

‘Jesus, Mum, what happened?’

‘What happened? You’re asking
me
what happened?’

‘Did you fight?’

Mum attacks a round of bread with the butter, applying it with such determination that she tears a hole in the slice. ‘That’s one way of putting it,’ she says, folding the
ragged piece of bread in half and taking a bite.

Laura and Dr Harvey are declaring their love now. ‘It sounds so silly,’ says Laura, and listening to their stiff clipped dialogue, I have to agree.

Mum picks up her glass, apparently confident that she can drink from it now, and not throw it against the wall. ‘Things happen in forty years,’ she says.

‘Things?’

‘No one’s perfect,’ she says, defying me to contradict her. ‘We all of us make mistakes, on both sides of the bed.’

Whether this statement is colloquial, elliptical or literal I don’t want to know, but I know my mum, and I can make a good guess.

‘Mum, I . . . whatever . . . when did . . .’

‘Forty years is a long time, son. Things happen, upstairs and down, and you walk on or walk away, understand?’

‘I think so, but I don’t really want—’

‘You forgive and forget, or do your best, at least. Maybe there’s a name you don’t mention, or a place, or a song, or a colour?’

‘A colour? How many mistakes have you made?’

‘See that silly sodding film,’ she says, sloshing wine out of her glass as she points violently at Dr Harvey. ‘She ends up with the husband, doesn’t she.’

‘Yes.’

‘And he knows, but he doesn’t rub it in, does he. He says—’

‘“Thank you for coming back to me.”’

‘Exactly, good boy. Because he wants to be with her, at any cost, no matter what mistakes she may have made.’

‘Mum, have you . . . made a mistake?’

Mum sighs, exasperated at my inability to follow this tangential confession or accusation. ‘Imagine, Henry, imagine your wife – if you ever manage to find someone to marry you,
which, well, let’s be frank, isn’t looking too promising – but imagine it came to your attention that your wife had been spending too much time with, say, a painter.’

‘An artist?’

‘Or a decorator. It doesn’t matter, but, yes, a decorator, for example.’

‘Okay.’

‘Well, in the interests of discretion and domestic harmony, your wife would most likely not make a big fuss in the future when the hallway needed repainting. Unless it really was in a
terrible state, in which case she might make subtle hints for a few weeks, then make herself scarce when the painters were in.’

Mum resumes buttering the bread, taking more care now, applying the spread evenly in smooth back and forth strokes. Laura is on the train back to her family now, staring out of the window in a
rapture of happiness, visualizing Dr Harvey in a tuxedo and herself in a ball gown and tiara, diamonds at her neck as they dance beneath crystal chandeliers. She imagines them attending the opera,
boating in Venice, driving an open-topped sports car, standing beneath the palms on a tropical beach. An altogether more pleasant trip than Zoe’s, I imagine. If she is visualizing anything
involving me, I suspect the scenario includes at least one sharp implement.

‘Can you turn that off, Mum?’

‘You’re right,’ she says turning off the TV. ‘He is a bit hard faced. Make a good psycho, but . . . anyway, what was I saying?’

‘Something about you and the decorator, I think.’

‘For example,’ Mum says, contemplating her perfectly buttered slice of bread, then sliding it over to me to fill. ‘And anyway,’ she says. ‘It was a long time ago
and forty years is a long time to be married.’

‘So where’s Dad?’

Mum goes to refill her glass. ‘Did he tell you what he was planning?’

‘When? No.’

‘For our anniversary.’

I point at the sandwiches on the table. ‘Aren’t we . . .’

‘We went into town yesterday,’ Mum says. ‘Just the two of us.’

‘That’s nice.’

‘It was nice. He shaved, wore a shirt, used his fork . . .’

‘What happened?’

‘Well, let’s suppose you and’ – snapping her fingers in the air – ‘Zoe.’

‘There is no me and Zoe, Mum.’

‘Well, we’ll get to that. But let’s imagine she found, for example, another woman’s earring down the side of the sofa.’

‘Mum, what are you saying?’

‘Can we just imagine, Henry?’ Her voice is rising and she’s getting very animated with the knife.

‘Fine.’

‘Thank you. So, what would be the very last
effing
thing you would buy Zoe for your ruby wedding anniversary?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Make a guess, Henry.’

‘Earrings?’

‘Thank you. Ruby sodding earrings. Not a ring, not a bracelet, not an effing sodding necklace, but earrings, Henry.’

And now it comes back to me: Dad whispering down the phone asking should he buy Mum a ring, bracelet or necklace? And me suggesting . . .

‘Friday?’ I say. ‘Are you saying he’s been gone since yesterday?’

‘God no, where would he go? Anyway, I didn’t say anything yesterday; didn’t want to spoil the day. It’s been f—’

‘Forty years, I know.’

‘And besides, there are, you know . . . expectations on your anniversary.’

‘Mum, please!’

‘What, you think young people are the only ones entitled to a bi—’

‘Mum! I get it, I . . . loud and clear.’

‘Good. And don’t expect me to apologize for being a woman, Henry.’

‘So,’ I say, after what feels like a suitable pause. ‘You dropped it on him today, didn’t you?’

Mum shrugs, scoops her finger through the Philadelphia and pops it into her mouth.