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“Awful. Needy clients, uncooperative software, ridiculous deadlines.”
Hugo sat down heavily on one of the kitchen chairs. “What’s for supper?”
“Oh!” cried Sarah, suddenly remembering the casserole in the oven. Snatching up the oven gloves, she tore open the oven door and hauled out the heavy dish. The damage was confirmed as soon as she lifted the lid.
“I’m sorry, it’s a bit – well, dry.” She peered into the pan, the heat from the desiccated food scorching her skin. “I’ll make some more gravy, then it’ll be fine.”
Hugo got out his phone and started scrolling through it as Sarah struggled to redeem the food. Stirring the gravy pan vigorously, she could feel her annoyance preventing the lumps from melting. He hadn’t asked her anything about herself. There had been a time when he had been as interested in her work as in his own, but that time seemed to have been swept away by a tidal wave that had left only indifference in its wake.
“I’ve got the chance of a really good piece,” she announced, keeping her voice steady and calm. “An article about cork production.” She placed the casserole dish on the wooden mat she had put ready.
“That’s great, darling, well done.” Hugo had put his phone on the table but he was still looking at it, either reading a message or expecting one.
Sarah plonked her wine glass hard down, slopping a few blood-red drops onto the table. “Isn’t it good? I think it’ll be really interesting.”
She paused, rubbing at the spilt wine with her fingertip. “The only thing is – as I said, it’s about cork. Portuguese cork.” She realised that she was speaking unnaturally fast, as if getting the words out quickly would confuse Hugo into agreeing. “So – I’ll have to go there for a few days. To Portugal. I’ll have to go to Portugal.”
She gulped a mouthful of wine and dished out the reinvigorated casserole. “I’m sure mum will come and help with the kids,” she added, scrutinising Hugo’s expression for clues as to his likely reaction.
“Oh,” was his only response. He seemed stunned, lost for words. His tired eyes struggled to change focus from his phone to her. “Have you already agreed to it? Then we’ll manage. Somehow.”
His expression conveyed an inner disbelief that this would be possible. He rubbed his hands across his thick eyebrows, causing the hairs to stand awry. He was only forty-two, a couple of years older than Sarah, but his reddish-brown curls, once so thick and wiry with an exuberant bounciness that had entranced and delighted her when they first met, were thinning. Not only was his glorious trampoline hair now more like a flattish mat, but also the creases under his eyes had deepened to match the furrows etched into his brow. These things could not have happened overnight, but Sarah realised with a jolt of shock that it was the first time she had noticed them.
“More or less.” She passed a plate to Hugo and then considered her own, half-heartedly forking up a small mouthful. “I’d really like to do it,” she added.
“It’s a done deal, then, isn’t it? Nothing further to discuss.” Hugo looked back at his phone and began jabbing at the keypad at top speed.
“Fantastic,” Sarah replied, relieved that he hadn’t put up more of a fuss about the difficulty of juggling the business and childcare, but also angered by the fact that this was the sum total of his interest in her work. And in her. Neither worthy of his full attention even for only a few minutes. She breathed in deeply and willed for Ines’s spirit.
“Hugo, could you put that thing down while we’re talking?” He hadn’t asked for any details about the article, let alone congratulated her on being offered it. “Don’t you want to know anything else about what I’ll be writing about, where I’ll be going?”
“Sorry. I just had to reply to that one urgently.” Hugo pushed the phone a few inches away from him on the table, but didn’t take his eyes off it.
“Was it really something that couldn’t have waited for five minutes?”
“I’m keeping a lot of balls in the air at the moment with the new clients we’re taking on. I don’t think you realise the pressure I’m under. It’s not all about you, you know.” He smiled lopsidedly, as if aware of the need to soften the tone of his words.
Sarah, unable to see the joke, traced her finger slowly and deliberately around the rim of her wine glass. I think the problem is that it’s so rarely about me, were the words that swirled around inside her head, but that she didn’t say. And Hugo wouldn’t have been listening anyway; the mobile had begun to dance around on the table with a dull, thudding sound and he immediately picked it up and walked over to the back door to get a better signal.
A flash of razor-sharp fury ran through Sarah like a flame along a fuse. She should have challenged him about the way he took her for granted. She had a sudden urge, barely suppressed, to seize his phone and throw it into the dirty dishwater in the sink.
Then, as she sat listening to the dripping tap that had needed mending for ages, and the distant rumble of Hugo talking to whoever it was about whatever it was that was so important, her anger slowly dissipated. If she acted like a doormat, it was hardly surprising if she got treated like one.
She cleared away the dishes and then went into the sitting room to do a bit of half-hearted tidying up. Ruby’s collection of Russian dolls was spread out across the rug, serried ranks of mothers, children, babies, conscientiously arranged in size order. Sarah stacked them up, infant inside child inside teenager inside parent inside babushka. Lining them up on the shelf beneath the television, she contemplated how they regarded her with their sightless eyes. She pushed her finger against the end one, just hard enough to cause it to topple and fall, and watched as it knocked over the next one, and the next.
Hugo came in. “What on earth are you doing?”
Sarah shrugged. “I’ve got no idea.” She looked down at her watch. “It’s time I got to bed, anyway.”
“Oh.”
Hugo stepped over a couple of cushions that lay discarded on the floor and a heap of Lego spewing from an overturned box and negotiated his way to the sofa where he sank down, clutching the TV remote.
“Night, then.” He turned the TV on and began flicking through the channels.
“Night.”
Sarah left the room and went upstairs, remembering to take the journal with her. She had taken herself aback, she acknowledged to herself as she undressed, by sticking her neck out and committing to the trip. She knew, had known for a long time, that she needed to make some changes to her life. Going back to Portugal, where so much that was life-changing had happened in the past, would be the start.
Getting into bed, she turned on the light and began to read.
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