Authors: Rowan Coleman
N
atalie stood outside her house with Freddie and wondered.
Now that she had decided to go and see Jack, perhaps she should just go and see him before she decided to do something equally decisive but entirely different, like joining an order of silent nuns in the Outer Hebrides.
Nobody knew Natalie better than she knew herself, and she was well aware that she was prone to backing out of things that were likely to be difficult and require effort.
She had improved a lot since Freddie had come along, that was for sure. Because there was no way you could tell your midwife eight hours into labor, “Actually, I don’t really like this very much anymore. Can I change my mind and have a cup of tea instead?”
And tempting though it might be to leave your caterwauling baby on the neighbor’s doorstep in a basket with a note pinned to his romper suit saying, “Sorry, have discovered I prefer sleeping to motherhood,” the evolutionary impulse to protect your child,
even if he or she is breaching the rules of the Geneva Conventions by keeping you up for twenty hours straight, always outweighs the desire to give them away.
Freddie had been fed and changed at Meg’s. He was happily asleep in his buggy and it was quite a warm afternoon. She
could
go now.
But for some reason, as she looked up at the dark windows of her house, she felt she ought to go in and say hello to her mother. It was a similar sort of evolutionary impulse, Natalie supposed, as she let herself in and parked the buggy in the hallway, to the one that kept her loving Freddie no matter how difficult he was being. As much as she wanted to pretend she was not related to her mother and that the woman had not single-handedly messed her up almost completely, she still couldn’t quite stop worrying about her. But unlike her maternal instinct, her daughterly one had no practical application at all and it was also most inconvenient.
The house was silent.
“Mother!” Natalie called out. “Mother, are you out?”
She looked around the hallway. This time her mother’s heeled boots were at the foot of the stairs. Her bag was on the telephone table and her coat on the end of the banister, despite Natalie telling her repeatedly that she should hang it in the closet in the hall.
So if Sandy had gone out, she’d done so without any proper footwear, money, or her coat. But then again if she had been drinking, anything was possible.
Natalie looked at Freddie, sleeping so peacefully in his buggy, and decided to leave him there for a moment rather than risk waking him.
Her mother was not in the kitchen, although there were two cigarette butts ground hard into the patio outside the kitchen window and another stubbed out in her window box. There was a full
cold cup of tea, slick with that gooey lipgloss she insisted on wearing, and—surprise, surprise—an empty tumbler, still reeking of whisky.
Natalie sighed and sat down for a moment on a stool to consider the evidence. Her mom had always been a bit of a lush. She had always been fond of a drink, always had a gin and tonic in hand when Natalie got home from school, telling her she just need a little something to “take the edge off.”
But Natalie was fairly sure Sandy had never drunk
quite
this much. She hadn’t been drunk all the time she had been here, admittedly. She had been totally sober when Natalie left her with Freddie, Natalie was sure of it, because apart from anything else she was a different person then. A person who listened and seemed to care.
It was true, though, that almost as soon as Natalie got back, Sandy cracked open another bottle. Didn’t real alcoholics drink constantly? They didn’t stop for a few hours to be responsible, did they? So she couldn’t be a real alcoholic, could she?
Natalie didn’t like the direction her thoughts were going.
Should she worry about it? she wondered. Making an active decision to worry about her mother was difficult. She knew Sandy would not be remotely grateful that Natalie was worrying about her, and if anything she would behave even worse just to irritate her. Whenever Natalie had tried to intervene in the past, Sandy had always accused her daughter of being ashamed of her, of thinking she was better than her mother and of trying to bully her into being a person she was not.
Of course, all these things were true, but that didn’t mean Natalie wanted to invite the endless hassle that was inevitable if she tried once again to sort Sandy out. Sandy always told her she didn’t need sorting out. It would be so much easier just to believe her.
After all, it wasn’t as if Natalie didn’t have a few tricky situations of her own to sort out right now.
She looked up at the ceiling. Her mother was probably sleeping off her afternoon session in the guest bedroom. She decided that she’d better go and check on her and then think about going to see Jack. Or possibly vacuuming the stairs. The stairs really needed vacuuming. She hadn’t done it since 2004.
Sandy was not in her bedroom. There was evidence that she had been there, though. A whisky bottle with the cap off sat on the dressing table, and the bed was crumpled, the pillows stained with makeup. With a huff of irritation Natalie went to check her own bedroom, sure that her mother, like an aged Goldilocks, had decided to try all of the beds for size.
But Sandy was not in there either.
And then Natalie thought of the one place she had yet to look.
She pushed open the bathroom door. Sandy was lying awkwardly, twisted like a broken doll, by the toilet.
Natalie stood for a second, frozen, as she stared at her mother’s pale face in the gathering twilight. She caught her breath and for a heartbeat she thought that Sandy was dead. And then the body on the floor groaned.
“Oh, Natalie, good. Need water, feel sick. Tummy bug.”
Carefully, Natalie hopped over her mother’s haunches and emptied out the toothbrush mug to fill it with water from the tap. Crouching, she hauled Sandy up into a sitting position and propping her against the wall, handed her the mug. Sandy took a sip of water and pulled a face, like a child drinking alcohol for the first time.
“Ohhhh,” she groaned, rubbing at her eyes with her knuckles. “I must have eaten something bad.”
She looked so frail, old and small. Natalie wanted to hate her because it was so much easier than caring, but for now at least, her sense of anxiety was greater than her anger.
“You didn’t eat
anything
,” she chided her mother. “That was part of the problem. That and the almost half-bottle of whisky that you drank.”
“Eggs,” Sandy said, holding her head as tenderly as if it were one. “I ate eggs, I think. Oh God, I feel bad.”
Natalie got up and sat on the edge of the bath.
“Drink that water,” she said. “If it stays down, I’ll put you to bed.”
“Thanks for looking after me, darling,” Sandy said, belching out the last word on a whisky-sour breath.
“Mom…” Natalie hesitated. Saying something would make her get involved. Did she really want to be involved? Then again, did she really have any choice? She couldn’t pretend that this wasn’t happening, because it wasn’t as if Sandy was safely tucked away in Spain, out of sight and mostly out of mind. She was here paralyzed on Natalie’s bathroom floor, leaving her no option but to get involved.
“What, love?” Sandy replied, keeping her eyes tightly shut.
“You’ve been drinking a lot since you got here.” Natalie tried to sound casual, as if she was merely passing comment. “A bit more than normal. Do you drink this much in Spain?”
Sandy opened one eye and directed it at Natalie.
“I like drinking,” she said. “It takes the edge off.”
It wasn’t the answer that Natalie was hoping for.
“Mom, you’re going to kill yourself,” she said, unable to skirt around the issue any longer because that would take patience, and where Sandy was concerned Natalie had none.
“I’ll be dead soon enough anyway.” Sandy’s voice sounded hoarse and sore. “I’m over the hill now, past it. And what have I
got? I haven’t got anything. You hate me. Freddie won’t remember me.” She waved her hand in front of her face as if swatting away an invisible fly. “I like drinking, and I don’t care if I die a few years earlier because of it.”
“
I
care,” Natalie said. “I don’t want you to die a drunk, Mom. I want you to sober up and die the nasty old witch that I know and love.”
Sandy made an odd noise in her throat which Natalie thought might have been laughter.
“But that’s exactly it, don’t you see?” she said. “You don’t love me, do you? What’s the point when your own child doesn’t love you?”
Natalie didn’t speak for a second. The last thing she wanted was for this conversation to turn into a shouting match, an argument about who loved who the least and who was the hardest done by. It was essential that she got Sandy just to think about what was happening to her.
“Look,” Natalie began. “It’s not about how much I love you. There’s no excuse to turn yourself into”—she gestured at the pile of woman in front of her—“this mess. One thing about you, Mom, was that you always had style. Where’s the style in lying drunk on the bathroom floor at four o’clock in the afternoon? And anyway, I do quite love you sometimes.”
“I never did anything right,” Sandy said flatly, tipping her head back against the wall and looking out of the window. “Not in my whole life, not one thing right. I left home too young. If I hadn’t, I could have got some qualifications and a good job maybe, I was always very good at school. But I couldn’t stand my father. I couldn’t wait to get away from him, the old bastard.” She took a sip of the water and Natalie thought she’d forgotten it wasn’t alcohol.
“If I’d got a job maybe I would have met a nice decent man, to
have a proper family with. But I was too pretty. I was so lovely then, Natalie. There was no one to touch me. All the men wanted me and I wanted them to want me.” Sandy sighed as her chin flopped forward onto her chest again. “It didn’t last, though. I was already fading when your father got me pregnant. He didn’t want me, he didn’t want me at all. He already had a wife who was younger and prettier than me. I loved him though, your dad. I think he was the only man I ever loved and at least he gave me you.”
Natalie thought about her three-minute meeting with her father all those years ago and decided that he was not a man who was worthy of anybody’s love. But she had never told Sandy about her trip to find her father, and now was certainly not the time.
“I had to work hard for you, Natalie,” Sandy went on when Natalie didn’t reply. “Hard to keep a roof over our heads, you in clothes and shoes—you were always growing and I always wanted you to look nice. I wasn’t going to have anyone say that my child didn’t look as good as the next. I’m sorry we moved around a lot. I kept on messing things up and having to move on. But I always tried to do the best for you. I got that wrong, too, didn’t I?” Sandy became tearful. “A whole life based on what? So-called friends who come and go when things get tough, no real home, love, and a daughter who ‘quite loves me sometimes.’”
“Maybe that was a bit harsh,” Natalie offered. “Let’s say I always love you but often find you annoying. Mildly annoying. You have to admit that to come home to all of this
is
mildly annoying.”
Sandy drained the last of the water out of the toothbrush mug.
“Can I go to bed now?” she asked.
Without speaking, Natalie put her hands under Sandy’s arms and hauled her up, guiding her out of the bathroom as carefully as
she could. Once in Sandy’s room, she dropped her fully clothed onto the bed and pulled the quilt over her.
“Mom, there’s no point in talking anymore right now. You’re still drunk and you’re all maudlin. But we need to discuss this properly tomorrow. I’m not having an alcoholic as my son’s grandmother. We’ll sort something out, get you some proper help, get you back on your ridiculous high heels, okay?”
But Sandy was already snoring.
M
eg woke at just after seven that evening. She knew that her body needed hours and hours more sleep, but as soon as she opened her eyes her mind began to go over and over everything that had happened to her in the last few days, trying and largely failing to find a solution to it all. She remembered that she had asked Frances to tell Robert to bring the children back after tea, and a wave of anticipation and dread ran through her almost simultaneously.
Well, she still had some time to get herself together before he came, Meg thought. She didn’t want him to see what a mess she was. She could have a shower and get changed, at least.
As she dried herself, Meg looked around her bedroom. Her and Robert’s bedroom. Nothing had really changed in here and yet everything had. There was still his jacket on the back of the chair. His forgotten watch, his last birthday present from her, was still on the dressing table. And there was still the impression left by
his head in the pillow on his side of the bed that had remained unmade for several days now.
Meg wound her bath towel around her and picking up the pillow shook the lingering memory of Robert’s shape out of it entirely, before replacing it. She sat down at the dressing table and began to brush the tangles out of her hair. It was still mainly auburn, but with a sprinkling of gray that was gradually becoming more and more dominant. Robert was always on her to have it tinted, but she liked the silver interspersed among the red curls, and she felt that like the fine lines around her eyes they were part of the story of her life, a story that had always been happy until now. Perhaps it was because she didn’t dye her hair that Robert had looked elsewhere.
Suddenly there was a movement behind her, and clutching her hand to her chest Meg whirled round.
Robert was standing in the doorway. He looked at her in her towel and then looked away again, as if he couldn’t bear the sight of her. Meg forced herself to sit up straight.
“I’m sorry,” Robert said. “Frances said that she’d bring the kids in an hour, that as they were all settled I should come and see you alone. She said we needed to talk and I thought she was right.”
Meg hugged her arms tightly around her.
“You’re early,” she said, at a loss, confused by the feeling that her own husband in their bedroom of eight years seemed like an interloper. “Can you wait downstairs, please?”
To be so cool and so disconnected from Robert was the most difficult thing that Meg had ever had to do. As much as she hated him for what he had done to their family, as much as she loathed him, he was still the one she most wanted to see. He was the one she instinctively wanted to run to and fling her arms around and ask for comfort. When she saw him, all she wanted to do was to climb into bed with him, curl up in his arms, and go to sleep.
Robert hesitated by the door.
“Megan,” he said plaintively, taking a step or two forward. “You look beautiful.”
“Robert, please,” Meg said, every nerve in her body fraught with conflict.
“But I just want to try…” And before she knew it he was in the room kneeling in front of her, his hands on her bare shoulders, his lips on her neck.
“No!” she cried, snatching herself away from him. She stood and took a couple of steps back toward the window. “You just can’t,” she said, unable to articulate exactly what she wanted to say. “It’s just not that easy, Robert.
“Go downstairs,” she pleaded when he didn’t move. “Please, Robert.”
Robert stood up, at a loss, unable to fathom what had happened. He looked awful, unshaven, with dark puffy eyes like he hadn’t slept properly for days, and had perhaps even been crying. She was horrified to discover that the thought of him lying awake at night weeping pleased her.
“Look, just go downstairs and wait for me there,” she commanded.
He left the bedroom and hurried down the stairs, and Meg braced herself to hear the front door slam shut, certain he would walk out on this humiliating situation. But it remained silent.
When she came down, she found Robert sitting in his chair in the living room with the TV on and Gripper sitting at his side gazing up at him, as he stroked her, with the kind of unquestioning adulation that Meg imagined he craved, especially now.
As soon as she appeared, Robert switched the TV off and stood up.
“I’m sorry,” he said, nodding at the set.
“Why? It’s your house,” Meg said. “It’s your TV. You pay for it.”
“No.” Robert looked abashed. “I mean, I’m sorry about before, upstairs. About trying to…I just want things to get back to normal between us, Megan. To be how they were before all this happened.”
Meg nipped at her lip. “Before you had an affair for several months with another woman you claim not to care for, you mean?” she asked him archly.
“I thought we were going to talk, not throw accusations,” Robert countered defensively. “Frances said you weren’t dead set on ending the marriage. She said there was hope.”
Meg shrugged. “I want there to be hope, Robert,” she said, her voice calm and clear. “But then I remember that when you were unhappy with me, instead of coming to talk to me about it, instead of trying to work on our problems and make everything right, you thought that having sex with some tart would solve everything. And when I remember that I feel a lot less like giving our marriage another chance.”
Meg looked at him standing there in a crumpled shirt and a pair of Craig’s trousers that were too short for him, and turning on her heel she walked smartly into the kitchen, Gripper close at her heels. She didn’t know how long it would last, this controlled feeling of calm and composure that was keeping her steady, but she knew she had to use it while it was there, before she crumbled again.
Robert followed her into the kitchen.
“I was confused, Megan,” he said, hovering by the sink as Meg took a wineglass out of the dishwasher. “That thing with Lynne…I didn’t mean it to happen. We had this drink after work one night and I knew she fancied me.” He shook his head
and shrugged. “And…it felt good to feel that way. To feel
wanted
. You hadn’t shown an interest in me like that for months…”
“What, since you got me pregnant with Iris, you mean?” Meg asked him sharply.
He paused, moistening his drying lips and taking a breath.
“Even then it wasn’t exciting between us—you know it wasn’t. It was just…routine. You were always so tired all the time with the kids…”
“Please don’t tell me you had an affair because I was too tired to have kinky sex,” Meg warned him. “And I didn’t think it was routine. I thought it was caring, gentle, loving. I didn’t realize I was so dull.”
“No, that’s not what I meant,” Robert said, with some frustration. “It’s much more complicated than that.” But he seemed unable to explain what the complications were just then.
“It was only meant to be a one time thing with Lynne,” he said instead. “But she was so into me. I liked it. I liked the way she made me feel. It was hard to give it up. I didn’t want to.”
Meg took an opened bottle of wine out of the fridge and poured herself a glass. She did not offer Robert one as she sat at the kitchen table. She had to remain cool, she told herself. She had to keep detached.
If she could listen to everything he was saying as if it wasn’t about her, her husband, and her marriage, then she would be all right, she could keep control. And she had to keep control, because if she fell to pieces here, she knew that Robert would step in to put her back together, and she knew that she would gladly let him do it. And then he would have everything he wanted without having to fight for it. Meg knew if she didn’t make him fight for his marriage and his family, if she didn’t make him see just how much he really wanted those things, then he might give them away again all too easily.
“Did you think about what you were risking giving up by being with…her?” Meg asked him stiffly. “Or didn’t you care? Did you just want an excuse to give us up?”
Robert sat down heavily at the other end of the table and patted his thigh, a gesture that would normally bring Gripper straight to his side. But although she shifted on her bottom, she did not leave her place beside Meg. Meg took an odd sort of strength from Gripper’s behavior. Even Robert’s adoring dog was on her side.
“I didn’t think,” Robert said, letting his hand fall against his leg. “It seemed that our lives were so separate. I honestly didn’t think you’d find out. And I always meant to end it, Megan. I never meant to leave you and the children.” He frowned and pinched the bridge of his nose. “I
thought
she knew that but…she thought differently.” He leaned back in the chair, his shoulders slumping like a man utterly defeated.
“That night, when I came home and I saw you sleeping on the bed—you looked so amazing, Megan. God, I wanted you so much and it was incredible, don’t you think?” Meg made her face remain impassive, even though her body remembered all too well. “It was just like it used to be,” Robert continued. “No, better than it ever was. And it wasn’t just the way you looked—it was you. It was being with you, close and intimate again, that made it so amazing.”
Meg shook her head. He was saying everything that he must know she wanted to hear, but she knew that Robert was good at that. He could make any individual feel special and important, that was his talent.
“Look.” Robert watched her intently. “I don’t know what happened or why it happened, but everything suddenly clicked back into place, and I’d decided that night that it was over between me and Lynne. I swear to you.”
Meg made herself remember the text she had read on his phone.
“You’d just come from seeing her, hadn’t you?” she asked, to remind them both of why they were sitting there.
Robert nodded. “Yes,” he admitted.
“You came from her bed to mine,” Meg stated sharply.
“No”—Robert hesitated, clearly weighing up the risks of what he was about to tell her next—“I didn’t sleep with her that day. She invited me over to her place for lunch. She made a big fuss when I said I didn’t think I’d be able to make it. I was weak, I didn’t want her to make any trouble either at home or at work—so I went. When I got there, she told me she had booked tickets for the five o’clock showing at the cinema. I could have left, if I’d tried harder I could have left and been on time for you. I knew you were waiting for me, I knew you would have cooked and dressed up. But I found excuses not to leave Lynne even after the film had ended. She thought it was because I wanted to be with her, but it wasn’t. It was because I couldn’t bear to come home to you and look you in the eye and lie.”
“Until you knew I’d be asleep,” Meg confirmed, wondering what inner unknown part of her was keeping her sitting in her chair erect and in control.
“Yes,” Robert admitted. “But then I came in and you looked”—he half smiled—“very sexy in all that getup, but more than that, you looked so vulnerable and beautiful. I looked at you lying on the bed and I knew I didn’t want to leave you. I knew I wanted to be with you more than ever. I made my mind up right then, before I woke you, to end it with her.”
“So if you were so sure it was over between you, then why were you with her the next day, kissing her in front of everyone?” Meg asked him bitterly, as a spark of anger flared within her. “You know, it wasn’t until later that I realized probably the whole of your office knew what was going on. I went in there with two of your children and they were all either laughing at me or worse,
pitying me. Can you imagine how humiliating that feels? To be chatting to your receptionist while you were carrying on with
her
in the lobby. A very unusual way to end an affair.”
“Lynne made it difficult,” Robert said, unable to meet her eye. “When I said I thought it was time to call it a day, she got all hysterical. She threatened to come round here and confront you. I didn’t want that. I was trying to preserve our marriage, not destroy it! I was trying to let her down gently so that she wouldn’t rock the boat.”
“You’re a coward,” Meg said quietly.
“Pardon?” Robert, genuinely surprised by what he thought he’d heard.
“If what you said is true, then you are a coward, Robert. You would have carried on sleeping with her even though you say you love me so much, just because you were scared of getting caught out. Gutless.”
Meg had never spoken to Robert that way in all of the years they had been together, and he stared at her as if he was looking at a woman he no longer knew. Maybe he was, Meg thought; she felt like she barely knew herself anymore.
“I am truly sorry for what I’ve done to you, Megan,” he said. “But please ask yourself, is it worth throwing away everything we have because of it?”
“Have you asked yourself that question?” Meg said.
Slowly Robert shook his head.
“Well, I have,” she told him. “I’ve asked it about a million times since all this happened and the answer is—I don’t know yet, Robert.”
She took a large gulp of wine and Gripper pushed her cold muzzle under her hand in a gesture of what Meg thought of as solidarity.
“For us to continue to be married, I’ll have to forgive you.
Completely forgive you—and I don’t know if I can do that,” Meg said dully.
Robert nodded. “I understand,” he said. “But I swear I’ll never let you down again—I love you, Megan.”
“You’d have to prove that to me,” Meg said. “You’d have to never get bored or fed up about proving it to me every day, until one day I feel I might be able to trust you again.”
“I won’t,” Robert assured her. “Not if you give us another chance.”
“You’d have to leave your job,” Meg went on. “In fact, you’d have to never go back to it.”
This time Robert hesitated.
“Okay,” he said. “But to leave so suddenly won’t look good. It might be difficult to get another job. It might mean less money.”
“Then we’ll sell this house,” Meg said. “We’ll get a smaller place, take the kids out of their schools. They can go to the local primary, I hear it’s very good.”
“If you’re sure,” Robert said. “Then we’ll do it.”
“It’s the only way this is going to happen,” Meg told him. “If it happens.”