Whatever You Love (14 page)

Now I knew what Aunt Lorraine had meant: the price I had paid. David was a man who liked a gesture. He thrived on drama. He was the sort of man you should have an affair with but never marry – but even those sorts of men have to marry someone and David had married me, precisely at the stage when we should have split up. Then, along came Betty, and we had the passion and the newness of a baby. But once that was gone, and we were just a couple with a child like any other couple…

The re-interpretation didn’t stop there.

*

David had taken the kids to the playground while I was shopping. When they all got back, I was sitting at the kitchen table. Bags of shopping were heaped on the table, and the floor. It was a winter’s afternoon, grey outside and gloomy in our low- ceilinged kitchen but I hadn’t turned the lights on, although the central heating was blazing and the frozen vegetables in one of the supermarket bags were starting to defrost, the bag already sitting in a puddle of water. A two-litre carton of milk had destabilised another bag and yoghurt and butter from the same bag was spilling out, as if the groceries had decided to creep out in their own, hesitant fashion and observe their new environment. I was sitting at the table in the half-light, sobbing copiously. David was first into the room, holding Rees who was sleeping on his shoulder and didn’t see me. Betty was in the hallway, kicking off her shoes. As he came in, David flicked on the light, saw me, took one look at my face, flicked the light back off and turned to the hall. ‘OK,’ I heard him call merrily to Betty, ‘I said TV if you were good and you’ve been very, very good!’

After he had got the children settled in the sitting room, he came back into the kitchen, where I was still sitting in the gloom. He put the light back on but didn’t look at me. He filled the kettle and flicked it on, then began picking up the shopping bags from the floor and putting them on the counter top. I watched him, stared at him, a piece of crumpled kitchen roll twisted between my fingers. I blew my nose. He lifted the bags up two at a time. When he had finished, he opened a cupboard door and began to unload the shopping. He did it methodically, as he always did, starting with the tins, and then putting the fresh stuff, eggs, cheese, fish, in a neat pile next to the fridge. He paused over a packet of gnocchi. I thought, he’s trying to work out whether it came from the refrigerated cabinet or not.

‘Did you fuck Abbie?’

He stopped, put down the gnocchi, said softly without looking at me, ‘What now, Laura?’

I half rose, my legs trembling, and repeated in a loud voice, ‘I said, did you fuck Abbie? What do you mean what now?’

‘So,’ he said, opening the cupboard door next to the one he had just filled and putting the packet of gnocchi in it. ‘Who is Abbie? Some friend of yours I’ve never met? The girl in the café I supposedly looked at about three years ago?’

‘Abbie! You remember Abbie! Large breasts, just your type. Carole’s friend.’

He had continued unloading the shopping but now he stopped and turned to me. When he spoke, it was in a tone of quiet desperation. ‘You’re asking me to remember some girl who knew some girl that I had some insignificant relationship with at university a decade ago?’

‘It wasn’t insignificant to Carole!’

He turned and closed the kitchen door, even though the television was blaring loud enough for the kids not to hear us. He wheeled round. ‘Are you out of your mind?’

I spoke with icy fury, enunciating each syllable in a descending register. ‘Did. You. Fuck. Abbie. Simple question. Yes or no?’

‘Of course I fucked bloody Abbie!’ he exploded. ‘Half the sodding engineering school fucked bloody Abbie! Happy now?’ He opened the fridge door then slammed it shut again.

‘While you were going out with Carole?’

He crashed his fists against his forehead and made an
aargh
! sound. His eyes were clenched tight shut.

‘Just another simple question, darling,’ I spat across the kitchen table. ‘Or do they all blend into one? Were you still going out with Carole when you fucked Abbie, or is it that hard to remember?’ He turned to go, grabbing at the door handle.

I was shaking with triumph. ‘That’s right! Go on!’ I shouted after him. Then I turned and picked up a small jar of Mayonnaise Light from one of the bags on the table and hurled it. The kitchen door closed behind him as the jar of mayonnaise reached it and sailed straight through the glass panel without a millisecond’s pause in its trajectory.

*

Later, on my hands and knees, I cleared up the broken glass and mayonnaise with a dustpan and brush. David was putting the kids to bed upstairs. ‘Silly Mummy threw something for a joke! Look what she’s done!’ I knelt on the wooden floor, sweeping carefully. The jar had broken apart in large shards so there were two types of glass mixed in with the cream-coloured slime. Even that seemed symbolic. Which glass was I – the thick, jagged pieces of the jar, or the small, brittle shards from the panel in my kitchen door – and which was she? We were unmistakably incompatible, yet bound up together by the same oleaginous mess.
Fuck
, I thought, exhaustedly, I am tormented by metaphors. They have infested my home like the nits Betty brought back from nursery – just when you think you’ve got rid of the little bastards, you find another one. Why does mayonnaise go translucent when it gets warm? Am I the only one who finds that sinister?

I started to laugh, there on my hands and knees, at the stupidity of my own behaviour and the predictability of its result. At that point, David descended the stairs, slowly. I sat back on my heels and looked up at him, smiling wanly, as if I expected that he too would appreciate the idiocy of what was happening to us. He looked down at me without expression. I was tired, contrite, and seeing the funny side: he was just tired.

*

Then there was Betty, Betty and her uncomplicated love. No matter how much re-writing I did of my relationship with David, Betty could not be re-written. She was her own story. Chloe couldn’t lay a finger on her.

My life as David’s wife was only a fraction of my life. My life as Betty’s mother, her and me together, that was the fabric, the meat of it. We had sailed into an ocean I remembered; Chinese boxes made of paper, rainbow writing, a strict moral conservatism accompanied by a belief that the police were there to arrest naughty children as well as bad grown-ups. One afternoon, we were walking to the shops, me pushing Rees in his buggy and Betty walking alongside, we passed a constable who nodded at us. I smiled back. When we were safely out of earshot, Betty glanced backwards, looked down at her infant brother and pronounced, ‘He looks ashamed.’

I was so surprised I stopped and looked down at Rees, who was sitting gazing around with the same impenetrable thoughtfulness as always. I carried on walking, glancing at Betty. She had a self-satisfied expression on her face, and I realised that she was pleased with herself for using the word, for applying it. It didn’t matter whether it was appropriate or not. She had come across it, in a book or during a lesson, been told its application to wrongdoing, and was now trying it out for size, seeing how it felt when she had said it.

Another time, she pronounced, as she and I were waiting for Rees to wake from a Sunday afternoon nap at home, ‘Mummy, if we lost Rees, we would weep and weep and weep.’

I was so startled I burst out, ‘Oh, don’t say that!’ but she didn’t respond, just carried on whatever colouring task she was engaged in at the time. She wasn’t talking about the possibility of anything really happening to Rees, she was just experimenting. She knew the word ‘cry’. Now she was trying ‘weep’. Real loss was no more than a concept but words were like extra fingers that she grew each day. They had to be wriggled about to see how they worked.

At the bottom of the stairs one morning, before school, she stopped me in the action of buttoning her coat so that she could fling her arms around my neck, pull me down towards her at an awkward angle and whisper passionately in my ear, ‘I love you
too much
.’

‘I love you too much too,’ I replied, holding her, cosy and complacent. Even when I was at my lowest depths over David, especially then, there was comfort in her physical form, in the compact, clinging shape of her; what a package of a person she was. This was what I loved, more than anything, and this could never be taken away from me. So what if I had only succeeded in borrowing David from himself? He had left me with this, and there would be years and years of this, these embraces.

*

Rees was fourteen months old, a fat toddler, bumping and beaming everywhere he went like a tiny comedian of the old school, when David came to me one evening as I was sitting watching television. Our daughter, our solemn little Betty, was in year one at school. She and Willow were already best friends. There was a girl called Ariana who was giving them some bother, trying to get between them. We had just had the hall painted, to brighten it up. We wanted to replace the cheap frosted glass in the door but couldn’t afford it.

The children were asleep upstairs. They had gone down without fuss, for once. I had a casserole in the oven. I had uncorked a bottle of wine. It was a Friday night, our favourite night of the week in years gone by. I was waiting for David to get changed before I served up dinner.

He came into the sitting room, sat down beside me on the sofa, and took one of my hands between his. He looked down at our entwined hands and said, ‘I know things have been really difficult for you, the last couple of years, I do. I know you think that I’ve been completely selfish but really, I really do know that it’s been very hard for you too.’ I turned to him, smiling, and felt a rush of love for him. That hurt me afterwards, that, for a second or two, I believed it was affection rather than guilt that made him take my hand between his two so tenderly. I thought that he was going to go on to tell me how sorry he was for all the pain he had caused. Perhaps he was about to suggest that we go away for a weekend together, just the two of us, that he had spoken to his sister who had occasionally offered to have the children overnight. Is there any limit to the self- delusion human beings are capable of? It is like a desert that stretches as far as the eye can see.

I stroked his hair – it was always a bit dry and fluffy unless he combed it properly. There was still plenty of it, though prematurely grey. In the mornings, it was the sort of hair that could be described as a shock. It suited him, though, a touch of the mad professor, even in his business suit. He had changed into jeans and pulled an old brown T-shirt over his head, rumpling his hair on the way, so I reached out a hand and, gently, with the backs of my fingers, stroked his hair back from his face and said, ‘I know, love. I know you know. I know you never meant to hurt me.’ Let’s not call it naivety. Let’s call it idiocy. What else could have made me use a line straight from a Country and Western song? Blind, stupid and blind – but above all, stupid.

His head was still bowed. I bowed mine slightly, in an effort to get him to look me in the face. ‘Hey,’ I said gently. ‘It’s okay. I’ve made Moroccan lamb.’ It was an idiotic remark. I think something inside me was beginning to realise the seriousness of this preamble and was trying to keep the conversation on the domestic, the mundane. I have always used food as code, as signal to those I love. I’m good at it. They get the message. I had the sound on the television down low until I was sure the children were asleep. Dimly, in the background, the studio audience for the quiz show I had been watching broke into thunderous applause.

I rose slightly, to go to the kitchen and pour us both a glass of red wine, but he kept my hand firmly in his, so that I would remain seated.

There was a moment’s silence, then the knowledge of what he was about to say came crashing down upon me, as hard and wide as a ceiling collapse during an earthquake, like our whole house coming down, for indeed it was. I pulled my hand out from his – forcibly as he resisted – rose from the sofa and began to back away from him. He looked up at me, his face open and his gaze pouring pity.

I do believe that at that moment I went, temporarily, quite mad; mad with the humiliation of it, mad with the knowledge that after years of battling and with the children as my unknowing foot soldiers, I had still lost.

*

It was never going to be a civilised separation. I don’t do civilised. What followed was ugly – had someone described it to me before, I would not have believed how ugly it could get.

The first anonymous letter came two months after David had left the family home, as the lawyers put it, and set up house with Chloe. Dear Laura – the intimacy of that opening. It made me wonder about the word dear. You are dear to me. Oh my dear. Dearie dearie me. Its use seemed far more sinister than a simple Laura would have done.
Dear Laura, I wonder just what
you think you are gaining by all this
…

David and I were not on speaking terms, at that point. We communicated by email and text only, using the minimum amount of words that allowed us to make arrangements for him to see the children. He knew there was no point in getting smart with me on that score, although that didn’t stop him trying, in his angrier moments.

The letter arrived on a Tuesday morning. Betty was at school, Rees at nursery – he had just started three mornings a week as I was due to go back to work on a part-time basis soon. After I had dropped him off that morning, staying for a few minutes to make sure he was settled, I had gone to the supermarket then waited at the shoe repairers, so by the time I got back, it was almost time to go and pick him up. As I came in the house, three plastic bags on each arm, I kicked the door closed behind me and picked up the post, noting the plain white envelope with my name handwritten on the front. It was my first name only, no address or stamp, so it must have been hand delivered. The only other item was a note in a brown envelope from the health centre, about Rees’s inoculations.

I dropped both items of post in the plastic bag that contained the shoes I had just had re-heeled and went down into the kitchen. I put the bags on the table. I turned the kettle on. I unclipped my hair clip because a section of hair at the front had fallen out and was annoying me, then went and stood in front of the fan oven, which had a glass panel that doubled as a mirror for the purposes of inserting clips in one’s hair. I re-clipped. While I performed these self-consciously mundane actions, the letter in the handwritten white envelope was glowering away in the bag, like the grey-hot embers from a coal fire. I knew in the same way I knew when Chloe started work at David’s office, when I answered that first phone call: there are things we know in our brains and things we know in our bones. I’ve learnt to trust the bones.

Eventually, the bones sat down at the kitchen table and pulled the bag containing my newly heeled shoes and my post towards me, delicately, as if it was a box of chocolates I had been saving as a treat. First of all, I pulled out the paper bag containing my shoes and took them out – they were the smart court shoes I only ever wore for job interviews, the ones with the kitten heels and little silver bows. My silver shoes: I’ll never wear those shoes again, I had thought as I handed them over to the man behind the counter. I was going through a phase of smartening up my clothes in the sad, brave way that people do after their spouse has left them. Half a dozen saggy or bobbled jumpers had gone down to Oxfam. My silver shoes, the ones I never wore, had been reheeled.

I put the shoes on the table to prove to myself that I didn’t believe in bad luck. After that, I took out the envelope from the plastic bag and held it in my hand for a moment or two, turning it over as if I expected answers on the other side and pulling a face when the other side revealed nothing. I examined my hand-written name, which gave away only that the author had neat, sloping writing. The envelope was the self-adhesive sort and firmly sealed. The letter inside it was typed.

I couldn’t quite believe it, so I read it again and, once I was over the initial shock, gave an open-mouthed exhalation, small but vehement, of amazed satisfaction. It was the babbling quality of the letter that gratified me so much, the way that almost every sentence pretended reason while oozing spite of the most uncontrolled kind. I read it for a third time.
A Friend
? Who did she think she was kidding?
I feel sorry for you
? That was playground-level insult. And what about the veiled threat in
you and the children will suffer
, not to mention the disloyalty to David?
He is a bit of a coward
. And this was a woman who David had told me, more than once, was an exceptionally gifted graphic designer. The mad tone might be deliberate, of course, to make identification difficult. I could already picture David holding the letter and saying, ‘Chloe would never have written this. She isn’t like that.’ If so, then she was less mad than she seemed but more manipulative than I had given her credit for. My God, I thought, she
really
hates me. I went to the fridge and cracked open a beer, even though I never drink during the day and Rees needed picking up from nursery in twenty minutes – it was a symbolic beer.
She hates me
. I felt a wild desire to celebrate. I had got under her skin in a way I had never imagined. Here was I, thinking she was all happy and triumphant with my husband, and all along she had been obsessing dementedly about me every bit as much as I had been about her. I should have realised when the phone calls started. I had thought of them as something meant to get at me, rather than a symptom of her own distress – but this letter was unmistakably distressed in its bitterness and incoherence. I nearly punched the air.

I think what surprised me most was that she didn’t sign it.
A Friend
. From everything David had told me, I wouldn’t have said that anonymity was Chloe’s style, but his refusal to believe me over the phone calls had already proved he was hardly a reliable character witness where Chloe was concerned. If she was as calm and pleasant a person as he liked to make out – in comparison with his fruitcake of a wife – then I would have expected a letter from her to consist of a long, carefully assembled collection of phrases in which she laid out, point by point, why I was being so unreasonable. What I got was barely coherent.

A Friend
. Was that sarcasm, or melodrama? Perhaps, and only perhaps, that was the point at which I started to get over David.

*

Dear Laura
. The next letter was signed, but only with an initial. Like the first, it was hand delivered, but this time I was in the house when it arrived. It was around the same time of day, a week later. Chloe must have guessed I was at home as my car was parked outside and it was such a gloomy day I still had the hallway light on. I could have been looking out of the front window as she tripped up the steps to my front door but, as it happened, I was upstairs in Betty’s bedroom, pulling clothes she never wore from mangled tangles in her chest of drawers. I heard the letterbox. It makes a clatter.

I had been in all morning, so I had already picked up my post. As I came down the stairs, I saw the white envelope immediately. It was the sole item on the mat but for two pizza parlour leaflets which had arrived earlier. I picked the envelope up, turned it over again, looked at my name written in the same neat hand on the front, then went straight to the sitting room window. I looked up and down the street but it was empty. There was no fading sound of a car engine and we live in a quiet side street. She must have come on foot. It crossed my mind that I had a fifty per cent chance of guessing which direction she had come in and could probably catch her if I ran but instead I walked slowly back out to the hallway, and sat down on the bottom of the stairs. This second letter didn’t have the shock value of the first but it was disturbing to think that only minutes earlier, this woman that I had never met, the architect of all my recent misery, had been at my front door. 

This letter left me feeling less triumphant than the first. It worried me that the mad tone was so exactly replicated, for that suggested it was genuine. Unpalatable as it was, I could not rule out the possibility that this woman would, one day, be a part of my children’s lives. Why ‘E’? So far, I had refused to let Betty and Rees meet Chloe but if David didn’t come to his senses, then they would. I had comforted myself with what Sunita and Maurice at work had told me. ‘Look, love,’ Maurice had said, over a drink in the pub one evening. Maurice enjoyed being the only man in our office. There was nothing he loved more than dispensing male wisdom to us women and we played up to it no end. ‘Thing is,’ he said, sipping his cider and slowly folding a beer mat between his plump fingers, ‘there’s no chance this new bird of his is going to go the distance.’ Sunita had nodded, ‘He’s right, you know,’ she said, nodding at Maurice, nodding at me. ‘The affair that breaks up a marriage never survives, you know, all that guilt and tension, not exactly a good starting point, is it? Sooner or later he’ll dump her and go off with something completely different.’

At this point in the conversation, there had been a silence during which Maurice and Sunita exchanged looks and silently acknowledged that I might not find this an entirely comforting thought.

I agreed with them though, which was lamentably arrogant on my part. I just couldn’t believe that David would stay with a woman knowing his association with her had caused me so much pain. I had already written the narrative of their relationship in my head, successfully removing my own desires from the picture and concentrating on the story of them. He would dump her for someone else, I had decided, after a long period of arguing about his guilt and regret over the break-up of our marriage. By then, it would be too late for me and him, of course. When he asked if we could try again – and he would do that before he had actually left Chloe – I would explain very gently that I simply didn’t love him any more. He would be devastated.

I had even fantasised about how gracious I would be to Chloe’s replacement, one day, about how we might get to bitch about Chloe together. ‘God, Chloe was a nightmare,’ this unknown woman would say to me, several years in the future. ‘She was so manipulative. I can’t believe David left you for her. He must have been mad.’

But – and I couldn’t accept that it was any more than a ‘but’ – if that didn’t happen, or didn’t happen soon enough, then at some point, I would have to tackle David about these letters. I would have to lay out the ground rules for Chloe’s association with my children.

I was so intrigued and baffled by ‘E’, that I missed the implications of the penultimate sentence.

*

David and I remained on non-speaking terms for several weeks more. When he came to collect the children, I would stand at the front door and watch them trip down the steps and run down the path to him. He stayed at the gate. Then one Sunday, inevitably enough, came the occasion when Rees, still young enough to be clingy, refused to go with him, running back and throwing his arms around my legs. As he tried to clamber up them, monkey-like, I bent and picked him up and looked at David, who was holding Betty by the hand and standing waiting. I began to say, ‘It’s okay, Rees can stay,’ when I saw the look on Betty’s face. Her lower lip was in a precarious downward curve. If they both refused to go with him, I knew I would be held to blame.

David kept his face expressionless as I walked down the steps to the path, holding Rees on my shoulder. When I got close to him, I said, ‘So what have you got planned this afternoon?’