He snapped at her three times during the short but fraught trip from the airport to the motorway. He complained bitterly, not for the first time, about the fact that she’d chosen, once again, to book flights to Marseilles when Nice was a much more convenient destination. She’d told him four times that the fares to Nice were double those to Marseilles, but he hadn’t been listening. This was the new dynamic. No more softly, softly from Andrew, no more tip-toeing around her.
Natalie concentrated on the map, she tried not to get things wrong. The car was insufferably hot from hours of standing in an unshaded car park; the blast of cold air from the air conditioning seemed to have little effect other than to make her hands cold, leaving the rest of her overcooked, sweat trickling down the nape of her neck and into the small of her back. Now that they were on the motorway and there wasn’t much direction to give, silence weighed heavily, oppressively, on all of them.
Or perhaps the others hadn’t noticed, perhaps it weighed only upon her. In the back seat, the girls, plugged into their phones, sat in identical, mirrored poses: heads leaning against windows, gazing out onto the parched scrub, expressions somewhere between boredom and disdain. They hadn’t wanted to come. Two weeks in the French countryside with
nothing to do
? No
television
? Not even a
swimming pool
?
Andrew, as was his wont of late, took their side. Privately, of course. They don’t need to come, he’d said, they can stay with your mother, or with friends. Natalie got upset: is that it then, we don’t have family holidays any longer? The girls do their own thing? They’re about to turn thirteen, Andrew, not eighteen. They have a whole lifetime to go off by themselves. She got tearful and he got pissed off, but in the end he conceded the argument.
She didn’t win them as often as she used to. And even when she did, he no longer took defeat gracefully. This was the way things had been for six months, since their last visit to France. Things had turned around: now he was the angry one, and she was conciliatory. It seemed extraordinary to Natalie that after everything they’d been through, that one weekend could shift the balance of their interactions so seismically, change their relationship to each other so fundamentally.
It was just one thing on top of another, she supposed, all concertinaed together: her outburst on the day of the storm, the night he spent with Lilah, the fight they had the next day, after the doctor came.
When he’d first arrived back, she’d been so happy to see him she’d run out to greet him in the snow. They’d held onto each other for a long time, and he seemed happy to be back with her, too, although there was a little stiffness in the hug, and he was first to break away. Then Jen collapsed and everyone started panicking, Andrew especially, as though he were somehow the cause of it.
Jen was fine. It was just low blood pressure, which isn’t all that unusual in pregnancy. As Natalie pointed out quite a few times, not that anyone was listening. But once the doctor came and saw to her, everyone calmed down. Jen went straight to bed, and Dan left, saying he needed to make a start on the journey to Paris, which obviously wasn’t true because why would you leave at four in the afternoon when it was getting dark and there was snow on the roads when you had an eight- or ten-hour journey in front of you? He just wanted to get away from them all. Lilah and Zac went up to bed, too, so Natalie turned on the radio in the kitchen as loud as it would go so they wouldn’t have to listen to their sex noises. Andrew turned it back off.
‘Jen’s trying to sleep,’ he said crossly, glaring at her as if she were a particularly thoughtless child.
‘I know, I just… didn’t want to have to hear… Lilah.’
‘Oh, grow up, Nat,’ he said. ‘It’s just sex.’
Just sex. She let it go, she made them both some sandwiches which they ate in front of the fire, plates balanced on their knees. It had started to snow again, nothing like the night before, but still falling thick and steady.
‘I wonder if we’ll be able to leave tomorrow,’ Natalie said. ‘The snow, I mean.’
Andrew shrugged. ‘Perhaps we’ll have to stay another night. We could go down to the B&B if necessary. I imagine Jen is probably keen to be rid of us.’ He looked up at Natalie as he said this; there was something in his face, a look of disappointment that she hadn’t seen before.
‘You’re angry with me,’ she said softly.
He shrugged again. ‘Did you apologise to Jen?’ he asked.
‘Yes. We spoke last night. It’s all right.’
‘Is it really,’ he said, looking away from her now, staring into the heart of the fire.
They finished their sandwiches in silence. Natalie took away their plates once they were done. ‘I am sorry, Andrew,’ she said. ‘I made a mess of things.’ He shrugged,
again
. She was getting a little tired of this. ‘I’d had too much to drink,’ she said. ‘We all had…’
‘Yes, but you were the only one standing in the middle of the room yelling accusations at people,’ he said flatly.
‘I was trying to show them…’ Her voice broke a little, she cleared her throat. ‘I wanted to help you, to show them that it’s not fair, this guilt you’ve borne, it isn’t yours, it shouldn’t be…’
‘Of course it should be, Natalie,’ he snapped, voice raised. ‘This constant need to absolve me of all guilt is ridiculous. It’s tiresome. Do you honestly think it helps me when you excuse what I did? It doesn’t matter what Lilah did. It matters what
I
did. I was behind the wheel, I was driving too fast, I was over the limit. Christ. It was my fault. The fact that you…’ He tailed off suddenly.
‘That I what?’
He got to his feet and turned away from her, stood in front of the window. Natalie couldn’t tell whether he was looking out at the snow or at his own reflection. ‘The fact,’ he said quietly, ‘that you are a “fucking cripple” as you put it, and that I have a shit job, the fact that I’m clearly such a total disappointment to you, that is my fault. It isn’t Lilah’s. The fact that Conor is dead, that Jen is alone, these things are my fault. It doesn’t matter what Lilah did.’
‘Andrew,’ she said, standing behind him, reaching her hands around his waist. ‘You’re not a disappointment to me, you could never be.’
‘Well, you certainly made it sound like I was, Nat. You made it sound like you were ashamed of me. I never realised until yesterday that you think our life is small, that it’s less than it should be, that
I’m
less than I should be.’
‘Andrew…’
‘Let me finish! It’s shocking enough to discover that the woman you love thinks like that, but to discover it in the way I had to, with everyone watching, with Jen watching, with Dan watching? That was unconscionable.’ Natalie rested her head against his back, she started to cry. He didn’t comfort her, he disentangled himself from her arms.
‘I don’t think that, I don’t.’
‘Well, in that case, Nat, you shouldn’t have said it. And if you don’t really think that, then I believe that the only possible reason you could have for saying it is that you wanted to hurt Lilah as much as you possibly could, you wanted to twist the knife as hard as you could. Do you think that was necessary?’ He moved her, gently but firmly, out of his way and walked to the doorway.
‘Wait…’
‘I’m going to check on Jen.’
She sat alone, in front of the fire, feeling wretched, utterly adrift. She’d never seen him like this before, not with her. They’d had minor bust-ups, but she’d never seen him disappointed in her. She felt as though she’d lost his respect. She felt as though she deserved to lose it. And she felt that there must be something else wrong, something other than the things she’d said the day before, because when he’d got back to the house, he’d seemed pleased to see her, as though she was forgiven, as though they would be all right.
She could hear laughter upstairs. Lilah. How was it that she managed to let everything roll off her so easily? Everything Natalie had said to her, the way she’d been exposed yesterday, she just shrugged it off and carried on as if it were nothing. As if nothing had consequence. It rankled with her.
There was something else, too. Something he’d said in the kitchen an hour or two ago. It was like a bug, it had burrowed under her skin and it was crawling around under there, making her itch. Oh, grow up, Nat, it’s just sex. Just sex.
By the time Andrew came back downstairs, offering to make her tea, a very small attempt at reconciliation, the itch had got to the point when it needed to be scratched.
‘What happened last night?’ she asked him. ‘At the hotel?’
His shoulders rose and fell, he exhaled slowly. ‘We got to the B&B, went to the room, they brought us some food, we went to bed. We were both pretty worn out,’ he said.
‘You didn’t talk?’
‘Of course we talked.’
‘About?’
‘Ah, Natalie!’ He threw his hands up in the air. ‘We talked about a lot of things.’
‘Me?’
‘Yes, you, she was really upset about what you said.’
‘Oh, poor Lilah.’
‘Yes, poor Lilah. Jesus. She’s been through a hell of a lot, Nat.’
‘
She’s
been through a lot? What has she been through? What has she lost? Can you hear her up there, shagging and laughing? She doesn’t give a shit. She only ever thinks of herself. I can’t believe you’re defending her.’
‘I’m not defending anyone, Nat, but I think you’re being unkind…’
‘What happened last night? What happened?’
‘Hey, hey.’ Natalie turned around. Zac was standing behind her in tracksuit bottoms and a T-shirt, his hair sticking up at the back. ‘Could you keep it down, yeah? I think Jen’s trying to sleep.’
They simmered in silence for a few moments, but the argument wasn’t over.
‘You’re not going to tell me, are you?’ Natalie whispered at him. ‘You’re just going to leave me to wonder…’
‘Oh for Christ’s sake, Nat. I shouldn’t have to dignify this…’ He broke off, shook his head. He was bright red in the face. He got to his feet and walked towards the doorway. ‘I think it’s time we went to bed, don’t you? This isn’t getting us anywhere, we’re both tired, and you’re in pain, I can see that…’
‘Don’t use my pain. Don’t make excuses for me. And don’t tell me what you see when you can’t even look at me.’
‘I can see when it’s bad, Natalie. I’ve lived with you through this for sixteen years…’
‘Oh, congratulations,’ she said, her voice cracking. Something inside her broke, it just twisted and broke. ‘You’ve lived
through
this? Through what? This is my life, I’m not living through it, I’m just living it. And there you are, rising above, being good, taking all the hits, playing the martyr. I am tired of feeling like
I
am your penance, Andrew, like I’m the price you had to pay for what you did.’
She’d never seen him look at her the way he did that night, she never wanted to again.
They left the next day. They didn’t speak on the journey to the airport and they barely spoke on the plane. The second they touched down in England they started dealing with practicalities, picking up the girls, shopping, Christmas. They never talked about that fight again, they just left everything unresolved. They let life carry on, a new life, a smaller one than they’d led before, darker, with sharper edges.
But that bug was still there. It lived under her skin, burrowing away, keeping her awake at night. She might always have to live with it, there was nothing she could do about it now. She couldn’t ask him and she couldn’t ask Lilah. Not because Lilah would be angry with her, or because she wouldn’t answer, but because she would. Lilah might tell her the truth, and then what? She couldn’t be angry with her now, she couldn’t hate her. There wasn’t time.
They arrived at the house around five, the sun still high in a pale blue sky, the heat showing no sign of abating; if anything, it seemed to have intensified. The lawn was parched, faded to a pale yellow. The grey stone walls reflected the light, and from outside the interior of the house looked inky black, cavernous. Who knew what lurked within?
‘Is this it?’ Charlotte asked. Natalie, reapplying lipstick, caught a glimpse of her daughter in the sun-visor mirror: her face was set in the same disdainful expression it had worn since the airport. Andrew looked over at her, raised his eyebrows. His expression said I told you so. They shouldn’t have brought the girls.
They clambered out of the car, stretching legs and arching backs, breathing in the scent of summer. Natalie was hit by a rush of nostalgia for the French house as it once was, as they had known it way back then. It was the smell of the rosemary and lavender, the sound of bells somewhere, the buzz of insects in the flowerbeds. She looked over at Andrew and he was smiling. His smile faltered just a touch as the front door flew open and Dan appeared, beaming and suntanned in board shorts and a T-shirt, his arms thrown open in a gesture of welcome. The genial host, the lord of the manor.
Natalie had expected Andrew to be delighted about Dan buying the place, but in fact he wasn’t. It made him uneasy, for some reason. When Jen first rang him to tell him that Dan had offered to buy the house, he laughed it off.
‘It’ll never happen,’ he said to Nat over dinner. ‘You know what he’s like. When we saw him at Christmas he was talking about the Italian Riviera, remember, or was it Costa de la Luz? And next week it’ll be Croatia, or an island in the Caribbean or something.’ Then when Jen rang and said it was all finalised, contracts exchanged, money in the bank, he was pissed off. ‘He’ll ruin the place,’ he grumbled. ‘There’ll be plasma screens in all the rooms, skylights in the roof. A bloody hot tub. Just you watch.’
There were no plasma screens in the living room or the kitchen, and no immediate evidence of a hot tub. Dan did seem to have had a speaker system installed, because Natalie noticed that you could hear the strains of Adele wherever you went. It was very tidy and very clean, tidier and cleaner, Nat thought, than when Jen had been staying here. Nat wondered whether he’d got himself a maid.
Dan looked well, too, tanned and slim. He pressed cold drinks into their hands and fussed over the girls, going into charm overdrive, telling them how lovely they looked, just like their mum. The pair of them looked happier than they had since Heathrow; meeting the film director was pretty much the only thing they’d been looking forward to about this trip.