Whatever You Love (13 page)

*

When Rees was born, it was payback time. It began with the trouble I had feeding him. He wouldn’t latch on if his life depended on it – which it would have done were it not for the joys of formula milk. I developed mastitis and had to take antibiotics. Oh, and he screamed all night. It was only then I realised what a mistake I had made in having our easy baby first. ‘God,’ I said to David one evening, ‘I had coffee at Sally’s house this morning.’

‘Mmm…’ he murmured, wiping down the hob, while I sat on a high kitchen stool, a wide-awake little Rees in my arms. I launched into my tale with some enthusiasm. This sort of story was what filled my day at that point in our lives.

‘I was trying to feed him, you wouldn’t believe how smug that woman is…’ The youngest of Sally’s four children, Willow, had just gone up to Reception with Betty and Sally was incredibly broody. She had watched me trying to feed Rees at her kitchen table and made one suggestion after another. By the time she said, ‘Have you tried lying flat on your back with him across your shoulder?’ I had been ready to scream. The harder I had tried to get Rees to latch on, the more frantic he had become. I was sweating profusely – Sally’s kitchen was overheated, I had just had a hot drink and both breasts were full, the pads in my nursing bra sodden with warm milk. In the end, Sally had almost snatched Rees from me and walked around her kitchen with him on her shoulder while I removed my zip-up fleece, took deep breaths and tried to calm down. Rees, meanwhile, had become more and more hysterical. By the time Sally handed him back – unwillingly, for it was admitting defeat – he was beetroot-coloured.

‘Honestly,’ I burbled to David, as he stood with his back to me, attending to a boiled-over, dried-hard crust of something on the hob, ‘someone should explain to that woman that childrearing doesn’t have to be a competitive sport. It’s only because she’s got nothing else going on in her life, that’s why she’s so obsessed with being helpful. And then, when I did finally get him latched on, she tried telling me that…’

I told this story to David in the same way I told him all my stories about my day with Rees, with an air of cheery desperation to which he never responded. I was trying to re-conjure his fascination with Betty when she was a newborn, our shared joy at that time. But by then, Chloe was on the scene.

*

Chloe arrived in our lives before Rees was born, before he was even conceived, when Betty was four years old. David had just been promoted and was Chief Designer. He didn’t design pens – their designs were set in stone – he designed the machines that made the pens, the cutters and pressers and enamellers. As far as I could work out, being Chief Designer meant he did less designing, rather than more. It meant he got dragged into endless managerial meetings with the men who decided how many other men and women lost their jobs because of his improved designs for the machines. David was a draughtsman at heart. What he liked was spending hours over huge wooden boards with lots of very sharp pencils resting in a line in the groove across the top. When he got promoted, he spent more time with the men in suits and less time with the sharpened pencils. Chloe was his replacement, hired from a rival firm.

I knew. I know everybody says that with hindsight but I did, I had a premonition. David came home from work two weeks after his promotion and said, almost as soon as he was in the door, ‘The new me started today.’

He was standing in the hallway, flipping off his shoes. I had come from the kitchen to greet him, as I still did in those days. Betty usually flung herself at his legs but a favourite cartoon was on television and she was settled in front of it.

‘Oh, yes?’ I said, and even then, even before I knew his replacement was female, I felt something in my stomach.

He passed me, on the way into the kitchen. ‘She’s called Chloe,’ he said, over his shoulder.

I followed him. He went straight to the bread bin and tossed back the lid.

‘I’ve made chicken,’ I said. ‘What’s she like?’

He paused for a fraction too long. ‘Okay, nice. Her CV is amazing. I’m dying to talk to her.’

I walked past him, to fill the kettle. While my back was turned, he added, ‘Might take her to lunch tomorrow.’

I could have written the rest of the story there and then, that very evening.

My suspicions began as quickly as the affair but it was six months before I confronted him. It says something for David’s wilful guilelessness that, throughout that period, he continued to have his phone bill itemised. I can still recall the sickening sense of trespass I felt, the dread, as I extracted those bills from the cardboard file he kept on a shelf in the box room – your spouse’s personal paperwork: pornography for the distraught. The rhyme we were taught in General Science, I remembered it then, as I stopped halfway through the bills to close the door on to the landing, even though I was alone in the house at the time.
Little Johnny took a sip/But now
he’ll sip no more/For what he thought was H2O/Was H2SO4.
How many lies can you tell in six months? At a conservative estimate of one a day, that’s nearly two hundred lies, each one a droplet:
drop, drop, drop
.

I rang the number that appeared with suspicious frequency on the bills, in such a shuddering fury that I didn’t take the precaution of withholding my own mobile number before I dialled. Why should I? I had nothing to hide. The phone went straight to voicemail.
You’ve called Chloe Carter’s mobile phone.
Please leave a message after the tone
. Somehow, even knowing her full name was painful. She was not a phantom Chloe. She was Chloe Carter. Examining the bills, one after the other, I knew that what I had suspected was true – David and Chloe’s affair had begun very soon after that first lunch. There was no extended period of flirtation or wary skirting of each other, I was certain of that. That wasn’t David’s style. I recognised the pattern of calls; the short ones when he broke off hastily for some reason – he was forever ringing when he was on his way from one meeting to another – I remembered how frustrating I had found that, in the early days. Then, the long ones: fifty- six minutes was the longest. How easy it is to spend fifty-six minutes talking in the early days of a relationship. It goes by in a flash. You have talked of nothing at all.

*

And so, late that night: an ambush. The setting was our bedroom, with its mushroom-coloured walls and the satin cushions I insisted on, which David always hated. (In revenge, he hung a tasteless watercolour above our bed.) The protagonists: David and I, with a bit part for our daughter. The scene opens with the heroine, myself, waving a mobile phone bill in her husband’s face. Cue an aria of denial.

Exhaustion adds a special edge to a couple’s shared hysteria. His admission, when it finally came, was defiant, but after a further hour of tears and bellowing, Betty staggered in from her bedroom in her blue spotted pyjamas, hair awry with static from her pillow, demanding tearfully that we tell her why we were doing ‘that shouting’. She wanted me. I was a limp, sodden rag. David carried her back to bed and I can only presume her softness as he settled her was what finally undid him. Without meaning to, she and I had played the nice and nasty policemen in David’s interrogation. When he came back into our bedroom, I looked up at him. I knew my face was dissolved in misery, never a good look. I didn’t care. I was devoid of pride. ‘Is it over?’ I asked brokenly, choking on the threat implicit in my words. ‘Are you going to stop seeing her now? Is it over?’

It was half past three in the morning. We had been arguing for nearly four hours. His shoulders drooped. ‘Yes,’ he said, and covered his face with both hands. ‘It is, it is. It’s over, okay, I’ll tell her, it’s over.’

If I had asked him at that moment if the moon was made of blue cheese, he would have sworn on bended knee that it was, that it always had been and always would be, until the end of time.

*

David was always sincere; that was what made him so hard to resent. He would think a thought or feel a feeling and out it would tumble from his mouth, like jelly beans from one of those bar-top sweet dispensers, tumbling in coloured curves, unpackaged and immediate. ‘She just seems so vulnerable, somehow,’ he said to me once when, out of sheer masochism, I demanded he explain what had attracted him to Chloe. ‘Sort of vulnerable but brave, a bit like you were, I suppose, coping with your mum and never having had a dad, and she’s like that although it’s a very different situation, sort of fragile but just incredibly clever at the same time.’ It was like being lacerated with a broken bottle. ‘She’s incredibly good at design, much more intuitive than I was. She should be earning twice what she is.’ I saw that he had completely forgotten who he was talking to, chatting to me as if I was a mate, as if I expected – let alone wanted – honest answers to my questions. ‘She’s had a really tough time actually, dreadful family. It’s amazing she’s got such a good sense of humour.’

Another time, when I was ranting about her perfidy, he rounded on me and said, in a tone of voice quite chilling in its calm and logic, ‘Look, if you met Chloe in a pub or something, you’d like her, honestly, you two have lots more in common than you’d think.’

‘We’re both fucking you, you mean.’

‘Apart from that,’ he replied with a patient sigh. ‘You even…’ he was going to say something he thought the better of – unusual for David to stop himself, so it must have been quite spectacular in its tactlessness. ‘You both lost your dads when you were young.’ Chloe was half Irish. When David had told me this, my heart had sunk. I could picture their sneering conversations about English-English people all too easily. Chloe’s father had died when she was a toddler, although her mother lived locally and there were various siblings around up north. In the previous weeks and months, I had prised far more information out of David than was good for me. I even knew she was allergic to tomatoes. I was glaring at him.

‘We even what?’

‘You both like going for walks on the cliffs…’ he concluded, a little lamely, and turned away, point made.

Not after that, I didn’t.

At that stage, I had no idea why he was so determined, in the face of my justifiable disdain, to win me round to the idea of Chloe being a nice person. At that stage, I still thought of her as a storm to be weathered rather than climate change.

For a few months he and Chloe stopped having sex, I think, although I am sure there were still many strained lunchtimes at work when they met and clutched hands beneath the pub table. It was probably this period that did for me, in retrospect – I should have turned a blind eye, let it burn itself out. Instead, I made myself into an obstacle, something as devoid of personality as a concrete paving slab.

*

He moved out for a while, to a one-room flat above a pub in Eastley, so that he could ‘think about what’s best for all of us’, but Betty’s bewilderment and misery were so obvious that after four months he came back. His return filled me with optimism. I began to think the worst was over. At that stage, I still believed I held the advantage, that it was only a matter of time.

*

The first phone call came one morning. David was at work, Betty at nursery. I was on my knees before the open door of the freezer. I had removed the drawers and was chipping at the furry lining of ice inside the cabinet with a blunt knife, a job I found satisfying out of all proportion to its actual worth. The phone was on the floor beside me. I had just extracted a slab of ice and was holding it, ready to lob it up into the sink. I put the knife down and answered the phone. I should have put down the ice. ‘Hello?’ I said. ‘Hello…? Hello…?’ There was a brimming silence. ‘Who is this?’ Meanwhile, my other hand grew wet and numb as the slab of ice defrosted on my palm. I hung up, put the phone back on the floor, lobbed the ice, continued with my task. I dismissed it, that first time, trying to pretend I didn’t know it was the start of something.

The phone calls came in fits and flurries after that: sometimes several a day, sometimes nothing for a week. When I had withheld numbers barred from the landline, they started coming through on my mobile. I couldn’t bar withheld numbers from that as David’s office and Betty’s nursery numbers were both automatically withheld via their respective switchboards.

The rows I had with David about these calls were the most bitter of all and marked the final unravelling of our relationship. David swore blind it wasn’t Chloe. ‘She says she isn’t doing it and she wouldn’t lie about something like that,’ brow furrowed, expression all earnest. ‘She isn’t like that. She’s very honest and actually a really nice person.’ I was incandescent. I didn’t need him to tell me what she was like. I knew what she was like – she was a woman who had an affair with a married man who had a small child. That was what she was like. As the situation deteriorated between David and me, he even accused me of imagining the calls, or making them up.

I knew what she was doing. It was a cheap trick, designed to make me look hysterical and paranoid in David’s eyes, and in that, wholly effective. She was prowling round my home, scratching at the door. She was telling me,
you may have got
him back for now but I know where he is and I haven’t given up
. It was then – and only then, I swear – that I began to hate her.

The letters were later, I think – yes, they came later.

*

Then I pulled my trump card – well, in truth, it was not so much my trump card as the last card in my pack, my final bid to keep my family intact. During a brief period of reconciliation with David, one Friday night when we were both drunk and feeling uncharacteristically sentimental, I managed to fall pregnant with Rees.

*

Rees bought me another year. I knew David was seeing Chloe during my pregnancy but I kept up the pretence that I didn’t. Perhaps I thought that if I tried long enough and hard enough to turn us into a happy couple with their second child on the way, I would somehow be able to do it all on my own. For a while after Rees was born, David tried – the fact that Rees was such a difficult baby bought me more time than I would have otherwise had. David was not so callous that he was going to walk out on me during those early months, when the only way we stayed on our feet was to take it in turns to do the night shift.

He was never a louse. Had he been more of a louse, our marriage might have survived – I might have been able to turn a blind eye but no, he didn’t sleep with women unless he told himself he was in love with them, I knew that. He loved her. He loved her all the more because he couldn’t have her. He couldn’t have her because of me. The logic of it all was so simple, so ordinary, it made me weep.

*

‘Each unhappy family is unhappy on its own. Happy ones are all alike. Or something like that.’

‘What?’

‘I think it’s Russian,
War and Peace
. Maybe it’s Jane Austen.’

‘God, Jane, you’re so pretentious.’

Jane looked unhappy.

I was in a queue at the supermarket when I overheard this conversation. Jane, a woman I did not know, was ahead of me in the queue, with a friend who was holding a baby. There was some hiatus at the front, a customer disputing the till receipt, something about it saying on the sticker it was two for four pounds, not £2.69 each. The people immediately behind the unhappy customer were sighing, glancing at each other, but I wasn’t in any particular hurry that day and anyway I was intent on listening to the two women in front of me. The one holding the baby must have been Jane’s close friend, or maybe older sister, as she was criticising her intently. ‘You always do that…’ she was saying irritably, joggling the baby up and down.

‘Always do what?’ Jane responded wearily.

‘You know. Books.’

‘Well I like him, what am I supposed to say?’

‘I know that. That’s bloody obvious. I just think you’ve got to get to know him, that’s all. All that glowing and beaming. It’s no good, you’re in cloud cuckoo land.’

‘You’ve just forgotten.’

This enraged big sister. She leaned in towards Jane, across their shared trolley. ‘I haven’t forgotten any of it, all right? I’m just being realistic. I know what that’s like, all of it, all that snuggling up on the sofa in front of the TV. I did it, all right? I’m not that old. It’s like that for everyone. Lasts about, what, maximum three months?’

The queue began to move. Jane, clearly offended, made no reply, and pushed their trolley an inch or two further forward. She turned to one side and I saw that her eyes were wide with the effort of not appearing too angry – or perhaps she was trying not to cry.

Tolstoy.
All happy families are alike but each unhappy family
… How did I know that? I had never read any Tolstoy. Then it came to me. I remembered the quote from a pub quiz I had done a few years back. I wanted to lean forward and tell them but suspected I would get a mouthful from big sister. She didn’t look like the kind of woman you messed with in the supermarket queue.

Out in the car park, loading my bags, I had just heaved the last one into the boot when –
three months
, common as muck, according to that woman, all that lovey-dovey stuff. Not realistic. Not what you should base a life’s decision on. Three months was how long David and I had been going out with each other when we had that scene on the cliff. Maybe that was it. Maybe that explained everything. I slammed the boot lid down, then stopped, resting on my knuckles, head down, breathing. I thought of how he had dangled me over the edge that day, how beneath the playfulness of the gesture there was a real, confused kind of anger. I had felt it and thought it the resistance of a man who did not want to face the truth of his feelings – he loved me, it was frightening him. When he held me over the cliff and made me look down at the chopping waves beneath, I thought he was showing me, and himself, what our lives would be without each other, the bleakness awaiting us if we did not seize this moment. How wrong I was. He was angry with himself for making the wrong decision, even as he was making it – and angry with me for making him do it.

This was the worst of Chloe. She made me re-write my whole relationship with David, re-interpret the smallest of actions and gestures, even ones that occurred long before she came into our lives. When he held me over the cliff and made me look down at the waves, I thought, there in the supermarket car park, he wasn’t showing me our lives apart, he was showing me our lives together. He was showing me what was coming, the cold brown water awaiting me when I was no longer his precious love object, when he would be ready to let me go, drop me over the edge.