The Marriage Mender (12 page)

I shook my head.

‘What?’

‘I just don’t think that’s the approach to take with Josh. We’ve got to support him through this, not ban him from seeing her. It will turn him against us, if we do.’

‘There you go again,’ said Chris, throwing his hands up into the air. ‘Assuming we can do this with some kind of softly, softly approach. Look where that got us, Ali. She’s already ruined Christmas. I’m not having her spoil another single day in any of our lives.’

He walked past me, his eyes burning dark, his breath hot. I heard him go upstairs. The bathroom door clicked shut. He was going to bed. Without me. On Christmas night. That was where we were at. I could have gone after him. Tried to reason. Tried to smooth things over. But I knew Chris well enough to know that it was pointless. I had to let him burn himself out. I would try again tomorrow, when the embers might just be cool enough to touch.

I got up and wandered into the lounge. All was dark apart from the lights on the Christmas tree, it being completely oblivious of the fact this was far from a twinkly house tonight. The unopened presents lay under it. Ours to Lydia. Lydia’s to the rest of us, apart from Matilda, of course.

I knelt down next to the tree and found the present with my name on the gift tag. It was soft, very light. I peeled off the tape at one end and pulled out the contents, opening the layer of tissue paper. It was a scarf. One of those delicate alpaca wool ones from the designer shop in town. They were expensive. I knew that. It was why I’d never asked for one, though I’d often admired them through the window. And Lydia, of all people, had bought one for me. I held it up to my face, the softness of the wool
immediately soothing. I had no idea what I was going to do with it. I didn’t see how I could wear it, not with Chris knowing where it had come from. I slipped it back into the wrapping paper and resealed the tape.

I was about to go when I noticed Chris’s name on the gift tag attached to the present next to it. I picked it up. The one downside about LPs was that you could never really disguise them when wrapping one as a present. I held it in my hands for a moment, knowing I shouldn’t. But also knowing that, come the morning, Chris would probably put it straight in a bag for Oxfam. He certainly wouldn’t open it.

I peeled the tape back and slid the LP out. It was
The Division Bell
by Pink Floyd. He already had it, I was pretty sure of that. But I also had a vague recollection of him saying it was a replacement for one he’d lost. I opened up the gatefold sleeve and carefully slid out the record. It was made of marbled blue vinyl. I didn’t know much about these things but I knew enough to know it was likely to be pretty rare. It was only as I went to put it back in the wrapping paper that I noticed the note inside. Written on a sheet of spiral-bound notepaper was the message – ‘Returned to its rightful owner – with apologies for the long loan!’

I slid it back inside the wrapping paper and hastily sealed the tape. It was a fragment of history. Of their shared history.

She was trying to put right wrongs from the past. Or, at least, she had been. Until the present had got in the way.

* * *

I woke early the next morning, before Matilda’s usual alarm call, anyway. Chris was still asleep next to me. It took me a moment to realise it had been a sound which had woken me. A sound from downstairs.

I got up, grabbed my dressing gown and crept out of the room, pushing the door gently to behind me. I poked my head round Matilda’s door. She was asleep, curled up tight in a ball hedgehog-style. Josh’s door was shut tight. I didn’t want to risk opening it in case I woke him.

I heard the noise again. A whining, almost whimpering sound. I went to the edge of the banisters and peered down into the gloom. I saw the figure immediately. Sitting on the front-door mat, legs bent in front of him, forehead on his knees, his body shaking as he sobbed.

It was Josh.

I ran downstairs, knelt down next to him and pulled him to me. He was cold. He’d been outside. He still had his parka on.

‘What’s happened?’ I asked.

‘She’s gone,’ he mumbled.

‘Who’s gone?’

‘Mum.’

‘Gone where?’

‘I don’t know,’ he said, looking up, his eyes red and puffy. ‘I went to her flat. I wanted to give her my Christmas present. I never got a chance yesterday. I knocked loads of times but there was no answer. The guy below her came out. Said she’d left yesterday evening. That she’d been carrying a suitcase.’

‘Did she tell him where she was going?’

‘No. I’ve been texting her all the way back, but there’s no reply. She’s left me. She’s done it again.’ He broke into a fresh round of sobs.

I held him tighter to me. It was only then I realised he was clutching something.

‘What’s this?’ I asked.

He handed it to me. A heavy pewter photo frame, and in it a photograph of Lydia and Josh together. His arm draped casually around her shoulders. Both of them beaming.

‘It was her present to me. She took it on her mobile,’ he said. ‘And it’s all I’ve got of her now.’ He threw his arms around me and clung on tight.

He was a little boy again. Throwing his arms around me for the very first time. And I felt the same combination of intense love and fear. Fear that this person expected so much of me. And that I might not be able to live up to those expectations.

Chris came to the top of the stairs, obviously woken by the noise. ‘What’s happened?’ he called out.

‘It’s OK,’ I said. ‘Lydia’s gone. She’s left her flat.’

Chris came downstairs. ‘You’ve been round?’ he asked Josh.

‘Yeah.’

‘Jesus Christ.’

‘Leave it,’ I said to Chris. ‘He’s upset enough.’

‘Yeah. Because of her. Because it wasn’t enough for her to hurt him once.’ He took hold of Josh’s shoulders. ‘It ends
here, OK?’ he said. ‘We forget the whole thing. And we get back to how we were before.’

There was another cry. This time from upstairs.

‘Mummy!’ Matilda called. ‘I’ve wet the bed.’

I jumped up and ran upstairs. Knowing that how we were before was going to be a very hard place to get to.

I went into our bedroom and she was on her laptop looking at this video of Daniel Radcliffe – you know, him from the Harry Potter films – doing some photo shoot. He was wearing a vest top and sweatpants, and there was this lingering close-up shot of him smoking and blowing it out. All seductive, like. She was moving the cursor back to the beginning and starting again.

I have no idea how many times she’d done it. When she saw me, she went bright red and snapped the lid down.

It would have been easier if I’d found her watching porn or something. Not fucking Harry Potter.

My eyelids opened before either the alarm clock’s intrusion into my slumber or Matilda’s noisy entrance into our bedroom. They’d been doing that a lot lately. Pretty much since the start of the year. It was as if I was still on edge. Still expecting a crisis to erupt at any moment. Still listening out for the sound of my family imploding.

The house was quiet, though. All was peaceful, except for the sound of the clock on the bedroom wall ticking. Marking the passage of time: seconds, minutes, hours – and now days and weeks – since she’d gone.

I was relieved. I’d have been lying if I’d said anything different. We were all relieved. All of us apart from Josh, anyway. But none of us could show our relief for fear of adding to his hurt. And he was hurting. Not in an
obvious, anguished-cries-from-the-bedroom kind of way, but in an achy, hollow, empty way.

I couldn’t talk about it to Chris, of course. Because he was still hurting too. And even the mere acknowledgement that Josh was mourning the loss of his mother would have been enough to intensify that. So it wasn’t mentioned. She wasn’t mentioned. She had been airbrushed from our lives.

But the person who had done the airbrushing had missed some vital clues. Some obvious ones: the photo of Josh and Lydia on his bedside table; the puppets, which Matilda still played with on a regular basis; the Pink Floyd LP, which had been restored to Chris’s album collection silently by me and which, if it had been noticed, had not been removed; the alpaca scarf wrapped in tissue paper in my top drawer, which couldn’t be seen, although I knew it was there. Other clues were not so obvious because, although the marks she had left were indelible, they were not all visible with the naked eye.

I turned to look at Chris, lying next to me, head on one side. He even looked more peaceful in his sleep since she’d gone. I was glad of that, of course. But also sad that Lydia had simply been shoved back in the filing cabinet marked ‘the past’. She was too important, what had happened was too important, never to be revisited again.

I sighed, sat up and swung my legs out of the bed, immediately reaching for my dressing gown and pulling it around my shoulders. I padded across the floorboards to the window and peered through the gap in the curtains. January stared back at me. Cold and mean and hard.
I wondered where Lydia had gone. Whether she was looking out on a very similar January landscape or whether her view was now of somewhere else. Somewhere urban. London, maybe.

And most of all I wondered if she’d gone for good. Or whether this was simply a lull before a further storm.

* * *

Josh was the first one to arrive downstairs for breakfast. That never used to happen much either. I suspected that he too found a deep sleep harder to come by these days.

‘Morning, love,’ I said. ‘Is it a beans on toast kind of morning?’

He nodded, a half-smile on his face. That was it, really. It was as if he was on a permanent dimmer switch.

Chris arrived in the kitchen, his hair still wet from the shower. ‘Morning,’ he said, his lips fleetingly brushing mine as I walked past him with a saucepan of beans.

‘Art mock today, isn’t it?’ he asked Josh.

‘Yep.’

‘Should be a good one for you, then.’

Josh shrugged. ‘Yeah. I guess so.’

Chris poured himself some coffee and cereal and sat down.

‘Do you want some toast?’ I asked.

‘No, thanks. I’m fine.’

I nodded.

We had turned into one of those families who talked but didn’t really say anything.

* * *

‘She seems more her old self,’ Debbie said as we walked down the lane, Matilda regaling Sophie with the details of her latest puppet show as they dawdled behind us.

‘Yeah, she’s getting there. At least the bed wetting’s stopped now.’

‘How about Josh?’

‘Still not good,’ I said.

‘Does he talk about her?’

‘He can’t, really. Not when Chris or Matilda are around. I’ve tried a few times, when it’s been just the two of us. Asked if he’s heard anything from her. All he does is shake his head and change the subject.’

‘Maybe that’s fine, maybe he wants to put it behind him.’

‘It’s hard, though, because I know he’s hurting and he won’t let me in. He used to be so close to Chris too, and yet this whole thing has driven a real wedge between them. Neither of them will admit that anything’s changed. But it has.’

‘And what about with you two?’

I shrugged, trying to compose myself before I answered. ‘We’re OK.’

‘You used to be a hell of a lot better than OK.’

‘I know. That’s what makes it so hard.’

‘Can’t you talk to him? Tell him how you feel.’

‘He won’t let me. It’s like he wants to pretend the whole thing never happened. Only it did, and it’s not going to go away. Sometimes I think he …’ My voice trailed off as I swallowed hard.

‘He what?’ asked Debbie.

‘Doesn’t love me any more,’ I whispered.

Debbie reached out her hand and squeezed my arm. ‘Don’t be a daft bugger. He adores you.’

‘Those things he said on Christmas Day.’

‘Heat of the moment stuff. People come out with all sorts in traumatic situations. You should hear what some women call their blokes when they’re giving birth.’

‘Yeah, but I bet they take it all back afterwards. At no point has he said that he didn’t mean it. The things he said about me meddling in other people’s business have been left there, hanging in the air. Hanging over us.’

We walked on in silence for a bit.

‘When did you last go away together?’ asked Debbie. ‘You know, just the two of you, actually away for a night or two.’

I thought for a moment. ‘I can’t even remember,’ I said. ‘Probably not since Matilda was born.’

Debbie stared at me and shook her head. ‘What would you say to a couple who came to see you at work and told you that?’

‘Yeah, I know. But it’s different when it’s you.’

‘Well, it shouldn’t be. Practise what you preach and all that. Book a weekend away. I’ll have Matilda to stay. There’ll be no excuse not to go, then.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘Yeah, I wouldn’t say it otherwise. It’ll do you both the power of good. You deserve a break after the past few months.’

‘Well, it is Chris’s birthday in a couple of weeks, though he doesn’t normally bother with birthdays.’

‘And I do believe it’s Valentine’s Day too,’ said Debbie.

‘Yeah, although as you know, he’s not really one for that either.’

‘It doesn’t matter. Just do it anyway. He’s not going to complain about being whisked away for the weekend, is he?’

‘No, you’re right,’ I said, giving Debbie a hug.

‘Why did you do that?’ asked Matilda, catching up with us.

‘Because that’s what you do to friends, isn’t it?’ I smiled at her.

Matilda nodded and gave Sophie a huge hug.

‘Just don’t complain when she keeps Sophie up all night talking and attacks you with a sock puppet in bed at seven in the morning, will you?’ I whispered to Debbie.

* * *

Jayne had lost weight. I could see it in her face as she walked into my room behind Bob. She was wearing a sober navy two-piece. Bob was in a jacket and tie. They were of the last generation who would be concerned with looking smart when going to see a counsellor.

‘Good to see you both,’ I said. ‘Come and sit yourselves down.’

Bob still wore the expression of a man who was at a loss to understand what had happened to them. Jayne, as ever, appeared to be on the verge of tears, even before we began.

‘So,’ I said, as they settled into their seats, ‘how did it go over Christmas?’

‘It was fine, thanks,’ said Bob.

I was aware that, in the spirit of fairness and solidarity, I should probably confess to them that however bad their Christmas had been, it wouldn’t have been as much of a disaster as mine. I didn’t, though. Somehow I thought it would undermine my credibility.

‘Now, tell me really, what was it like?’ I asked.

Bob looked down at his hands. ‘It were lovely to see Cassie. To have her staying with us and that. But very difficult too, you know. Because of what’s about to happen.’

I turned to Jayne.

Her bottom lip was already trembling.

‘And how did you feel about it, Jayne?’ I asked.

‘It were like Bob said. Bitter-sweet, I suppose you’d call it.’

‘And were you able to support each other through it? To keep talking about how you were feeling?’

It was Jayne’s turn to look down at her hands.

‘Jayne finds it difficult,’ said Bob.

I looked at him and nodded. Wanting him to know that his chivalry was not lost on me.

‘Jayne, is there anything more Bob could do to help you feel able to talk to him?’

She shook her head. ‘Bob’s done nothing wrong. I just don’t really see any point in talking about it. It’s not going to change owt, is it?’

‘No, but it might make you feel better. It might make Bob feel better too, to know that you’re able to share your feelings with him.’

She shook her head again. ‘Some things are best kept inside,’ she said. ‘I’d only upset myself and him.’

I nodded, unsure where to go from here. I wanted to take a tin-opener to her. But even if she’d let me, I still wasn’t exactly sure what I’d find inside.

‘And how long is it until Cassie goes now?’ I asked.

‘Three days,’ said Bob.

‘And did you talk about when you’ll next see her?’ I asked.

‘She’s going to try to get over in the summer. If her and Nigel’s work allow it, like.’

‘And you still don’t think you’ll be able to go and see her? Because of the flying thing.’

Bob shook his head.

‘Have you ever sought help with it?’ I asked.

‘No,’ he said. ‘It’s just not for everyone, is it? Being cooped up in a metal box in sky like that.’

Jayne said nothing. She appeared to be biting her lip very hard.

‘OK,’ I said, ‘so what plans have the two of you got for the next six months?’

‘Well, Bob’ll be out on golf course when weather allows it,’ said Jayne. ‘And I’ll be busy with WI.’

‘And what about together?’ I asked. ‘What things will you be doing together?’

They both looked at me blankly. Jayne fiddled with her bracelet.

I made a mental note to get that weekend away booked.

* * *

‘What’s for tea?’ Josh asked, bounding into the kitchen that evening and pinging Matilda’s headband.

Matilda laughed rather than complained. I suspected that, like me, she was simply pleased, and more than a little surprised, to see him in such a good mood.

‘Macaroni cheese,’ I replied.

‘Yay!’ said Matilda, who would have quite happily lived on the stuff.

‘How did art go?’ Chris asked as Josh sat down at the table.

‘Yeah, pretty good, I think.’

‘You’re on the home straight, now then. Just history and music to go.’

‘Yep. Shame they’re not the real things, mind. Then I wouldn’t have to go through it all again in May.’

‘You’ll be fine,’ I said.

‘I’ll be brain dead by then.’

‘You’ll have a massive long summer holiday to get over it, though,’ said Chris.

‘I might get a summer job.’

‘You can give me a hand at the studio, if you like,’ offered Chris.

‘What, and you pay me the minimum wage for being your lackey?’

‘Less of the cheek, please,’ said Chris.

He was smiling, though. As I was. He glanced across at me. I shrugged. Whatever had prompted the dimmer switch to be turned up a little, I wasn’t going to complain.

‘You could give it a try-out on Saturday, if you like,’ Chris continued. ‘I’ve got two family portraits in and lots of stuff to edit on the Mac.’

‘Sorry,’ said Josh, ‘I’ve got plans.’

My stomach tightened a little. Josh hadn’t had plans on a Saturday afternoon since Lydia left. Not now Tom was seeing Alicia all the time.

‘Oh,’ I said. ‘Anything interesting?’

‘Might be,’ he replied. The colour rose in his cheeks.

That was when I realised. It wasn’t Lydia. It was a girl.

‘Anyone I know?’

‘Not really.’

‘Maybe someone I’d like to meet, though?’

‘God, what is it with you?’ said Josh.

He didn’t mind, though. I could tell that by the expression on his face. He wouldn’t have mentioned that he had plans if he’d minded us knowing what they were.

‘What’s her name?’ I asked.

Josh rolled his eyes at me. ‘Caitlin, if you must know.’

‘Who’s Caitlin?’ asked Matilda.

‘Josh’s girlfriend,’ replied Chris.

‘She’s not my girlfriend,’ said Josh. ‘She’s a friend.’

‘Who happens to be a girl,’ said Chris.

‘Have you kissed her?’ asked Matilda.

‘No,’ laughed Josh.

‘Well, she isn’t your girlfriend, then. She’s only your girlfriend if you kiss her and hold her hand and it makes the birds sing and stuff.’

I shook my head. Disney princesses had a lot to answer for.

‘Is she in your year?’ I asked.

‘No, she goes to Crossley’s.’

It was the grammar school in Halifax. The one Josh hadn’t wanted to do the entrance exam for.

‘Oh. So how do you know her, then?’

‘She’s a friend of Alicia’s. She plays violin in the Calderdale Youth Orchestra. She’s dead good.’

‘Cool,’ said Chris.

‘And don’t ask me what her parents do and all that stuff. Cos I don’t know, and I don’t care,’ said Josh.

‘That’s fine,’ I said. ‘So where are you going Saturday?’

‘To the cinema. The new one in Halifax. She wants to see
Les Misérables
.’

I glanced at Chris. His face had much the same expression as mine. Josh had gone for someone with a bit of culture. We must have done something right, after all.

‘Good first date material,’ said Chris.

‘It’s not a date.’

‘Of course not,’ said Chris with a wink. ‘Just a friend, eh?’

‘Unless you kiss her in the cinema,’ said Matilda. ‘And if you do that, you’ll have to marry her.’

Josh rolled his eyes and tucked into his macaroni cheese. I caught Chris’s eye and smiled. He smiled back.