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My insides go cold.
I know Sam Macmillan. I’m friends with his wife Geraldine on Facebook. And I know for a fact that they’re away celebrating their twentieth wedding anniversary in Prague this week, because I’ve been gradually going green with envy seeing all the holiday snaps and still-so-in-love selfies.
‘OK,’ I say as I reach for his mug and retreat. I feel shivery inside as I head back down the stairs. I leave the mug on the kitchen table instead of putting it in the dishwasher and I stare out the French windows that lead to our small and slightly overgrown garden.
This is it, then.
Before now it’s just been a feeling, a sense that something isn’t right. That’s what I was going to tell Becca about today. Now I have something concrete.
I pick up my mobile and open the door to the garden, dial my best friend’s number. I know it’s usually all about Becca when we get together, but just for ten minutes I really, really need it to be about me.
‘It could be nothing,’ Becca says firmly. ‘It could be something really innocent.’
I take a moment to weigh her words. ‘Was it innocent when Grant kept turning his phone off the moment he walked through the door so he didn’t get any calls he couldn’t explain, or when you discovered he had an email account you didn’t know about?’
Becca sighs. ‘No. I wanted to believe it was, but it wasn’t.’
We’re both silent as we process the implication of what I’ve just told her – about Dan’s behaviour growing more secretive over the last couple of months. How he’s spending more and more time in the study. How he often shuts down what he’s doing if I enter. How he keeps meeting up with friends he hasn’t seen in years, but only every other Thursday night.
I close my eyes. I don’t want to go through this. I don’t want to be pulled apart at the seams, like Becca was throughout the discovery of her husband’s infidelity and their subsequent divorce. I don’t want Sophie to come from a broken home, even though she’s technically a grown-up now. She worships her father, even though she teases him about being a boring old fart. I don’t want her to have to know this.
Could I? Could I just close my eyes and pretend this isn’t happening?
‘What are you going to do?’ Becca asks, interrupting my thoughts.
My throat is suddenly swollen and I need to swallow before I can push any words out of my mouth. ‘I don’t know.’
I expect Becca to get all post-divorce militant on me, tell me to deck him one or go and take my best dressmaking scissors to his suits; but instead, she exhales loudly and says, ‘Oh, Mags …’
That’s when the tears start to fall. I wipe them away quickly with the heel of my hand. I don’t want Dan to know I’ve been crying when I go back inside. Stupid, I know. Why does this little secret even matter when there are much bigger ones eating away at the heart of our marriage?
‘You’ll get through this,’ Becca says, and her voice is both soft and full of confidence. ‘I know you will.’ We say our goodbyes, with Becca telling me to call her, day or night, if I need her.
I stand in the garden, watching the sun go down, and imagine her faith in me to be real. I let my mind play out what surely must be coming: the inevitable tears and accusations. The confession. Dan moving out. I fast-forward over it all, just alighting briefly on the main scenarios, then imagine what it’ll be like if I ever get to where Becca is now: stronger, happier, freer.
Maybe I’ll find a wonderful new man too.
My mind quickly drifts back to where it’s been going all afternoon: Jude.
Maybe we’ll meet again at the reunion. It’ll be too soon then, of course, too fresh and raw, but we’ll chat. We’ll keep in touch. He’ll text me now and again, just when I’m feeling most down. And then one day I’ll find him on my doorstep with a big bunch of flowers and I’ll just know I’m finally ready to have my own ‘glow’. Dan will be nothing but a distant memory.
I sigh, wishing it could be true, that I could jump forward to that moment in reality, not just in my mind, and that I wouldn’t have to experience all the in-between bits.
Don’t be silly, I tell myself. Things don’t happen just because you wish them, and I put my phone to sleep and walk back inside the house to cook Dan’s tea.
We sit eating our pasta. Neither of us has much to say. Dan keeps his focus on his plate most of the time, hoovering up the large portion I gave him – extra cheese on top – and while he eats, I look at him. I wonder who this is, who my husband has become.
You never really knew how to reach me, I tell him in my head. I always thought you’d figure it out some day, but now you’re not even trying. You’re probably too busy trying to ‘reach’ into some other woman’s knickers.
I chew my pasta and wish I’d cooked something that makes more of a crunch. Another thought creeps up on me, and then another and another.
What if it’s not just sex?
What if he’s falling in love with someone else?
What if he knows how to reach her, this mystery woman he must talk to on the computer?
Then I’ll rip his chest open with my bare hands and kill him.
The force of my rage stops me cold. I put down my fork.
I’m shocked. I thought my love for Dan was comfortable, like a bath you’re not quite ready to get out of, even though it’s well on its way to lukewarm. I didn’t know there was enough left to prompt such fury.
I get up and scrape my food into the composting bin, then dump my plate in the dishwasher.
‘Are you OK?’ Dan asks, pausing from his pasta-shovelling marathon.
My face feels so stiff I’m surprised I can answer. ‘Why do you ask?’
‘You didn’t finish your pasta,’ he says, his mouth still half full. I want to reach over and slap it closed. ‘It’s your favourite.’
No! I scream silently inside my head. It’s your favourite. Why can’t you ever remember that?
‘Wasn’t hungry,’ I say, then I leave the room. I want to slam the door but I don’t. I might as well have done, I suppose, because, a second later, Dan yells after me, ‘What the bloody hell have I done now?’
CHAPTER FIVE (#ulink_4abc2bb6-90e8-511d-9577-ab05ff1e9e0d)
What if …? becomes an itch I can’t stop scratching. As the days roll by, I find myself thinking about Jude all the time. In my mind he has mellowed with age, lost some of that youthful arrogance but is still ruggedly good-looking. He wears cashmere coats and Italian shoes, I imagine, as I kick Dan’s muddy trainers towards the shoe tidy and hang his windbreaker on a hook.
Safe bet? Hah! I put all my chips on Dan and yet he’s wasted almost a quarter of a century of my life. I think I hate him for it.
I haven’t done any more digging into his secrets, although I know I should. I won’t ask him if he’s banging one of the perky PE teachers at school and he’s not asking me if anything is wrong, even though we’ve hardly said more than a handful of words to each other in the last few days. I feel like I’m in a fog; everything is fuzzy and boring and grey. The only sharp thoughts in my mind are the ones I conjure up about Jude. Those are colourful and sweet and juicy. I want to live in that place, not even thinking about Dan. I am an ostrich and my head is firmly down the hole of my fantasies.
Becca comes into town on Dan’s ‘Thursday night with Sam Macmillan’ and we go for drinks. ‘Come on …’ she says, as we install ourselves at a table in the Three Compasses. ‘We’ve talked about it, now I think we just ought to do it!’
‘I told you,’ I say wearily. ‘I’m not following Dan. It would just be too … sad.’
I don’t want to be that desperate woman. I want to be her even less than I want to be a slowing fading, middle-aged empty nester, and that’s saying something.
‘Not Dan!’ she says, although she looks ready to be persuaded if I changed my mind. ‘I was talking about the reunion – it’s next week. Next Friday. Let’s go.’
‘On our own? What about Dan?’
Becca shrugs. ‘Someone mentioned in the Facebook group that they’d invited Jude.’
I study my large glass of Pinot Grigio. ‘Really?’ I haven’t told Becca about how he’s hijacked my every waking thought since we last talked of the reunion. It’s strange, I think. Becca tells me everything – Sophie calls her ‘the Queen of TMI’ – but there’s a lot I don’t tell Becca. I didn’t tell her about Jude asking me to run away with him, not back at the time and not even now. I also didn’t tell her I almost packed a bag and tried to track him down three days before my wedding.
‘You never liked Jude.’
She gives me a little one-sided shrug. ‘Maybe I was wrong about him. I was wrong about Grant, and we both might be wrong about Dan.’ I see her eyes glaze over and her jaw harden. She’s deep in thought. ‘Bastard …’ she mutters, shaking her head. ‘Just when I was starting to think not all men were cheating lizards, as well.’
I reach over and lay my hand on hers to comfort her, which seems topsy turvy but I get it. I haven’t been properly happy with Dan for five years. Maybe ten. But while Becca was stuck in her lousy marriage, she always held Dan up as the pinnacle of everything a good husband should be. She’s acting as if he’s let her down too. I don’t know if she’s ever going to forgive him for it.
‘Anyway, I think we ought to go.’
I take a long sip of wine to give myself time to think. ‘I really don’t know … Even if he’s there, he might just swan past me with his fabulous, ex-model wife. Or worse, he might not even remember me!’
‘You don’t know he has an ex-model for a wife,’ Becca says dryly, then her eyes twinkle with mischief. ‘You don’t even know he has a wife!’
‘You’ve lost your mind,’ I tell her. Not because she’s suggesting a bit of payback with my first love. Because she seriously thinks ‘done well for himself’ Jude would be even remotely interested in me these days.
‘Come on, Mags. This is you we’re talking about. You won’t be doing anything wrong. It’s not like you’re going to drag him out of there, get a room and have your wicked way with him, is it?’
While, technically, I know it will all be tame and above board if I bump into Jude at the reunion, I’m also aware how out of control my fantasy life has become in recent days. In my head I’ve done just what Becca said. Every time I think of it, my heart starts to race and I catch my breath. I feel like a teenager in the grip of her first boy-band crush. It doesn’t feel like ‘not doing anything wrong’. It feels as if I’ve already crossed a line I shouldn’t have done. I start to wonder if people who say that fantasises are harmless really know what they’re talking about.
A voice whispers in my head, Dan’s already crossed that line. Why not?
I don’t know that for sure, I reply.
Only because you’re too much of a coward to find out, the voice jeers.
I don’t have an answer for that, so I tune back into Becca on the other side of the table. ‘Please come with me, Mags?’ she says softly. ‘I really want to go.’ She shakes her head. ‘Stupid, really. I feel it’s something I need to do to put some of these ghosts behind me.’
I feel my resolve gently slipping. ‘Can’t New Guy go with you?’
She shakes her head, but doesn’t elaborate. ‘I really don’t want to walk into the room all by myself. It’s just … I’m not the same since Grant. He knocked my confidence.’
I know that. I’d watched, stood by helpless, as I’d seen him rob her of it bit by bit, unable to do anything but be a listening ear until she was ready to leave him and move on. I thought she’d done just that. I thought she’d bounced back.
I suck air in through my nostrils then puff it back out again. ‘OK. I’ll go.’
Becca lets out a huge sigh of relief and that’s when I realise this is what the constant badgering for me to go has been about all along. I feel awful I didn’t realise that before.
‘That’s it, then,’ she says, draining her glass. ‘It’s decided.’
When we’ve polished the rest of the bottle off, we book a cab to take me home and then drop Becca at the station and I give her an extra big hug.
‘Love you,’ she says and hugs me before I scramble out the car.
‘Love you too,’ I reply huskily, and then I close the door and watch the mini-cab drive away.
When I get back inside the hall light is still off. I dump my handbag on top of the shoe tidy and trudge upstairs, then I get into my pyjamas, slide between the cold sheets and try not to wonder why my husband isn’t home yet.
Dan and I don’t talk about it when we get up the next morning. I remember waking at 11.30pm and the bed was still empty, then again at 2am and he was there.
We waltz around each other in a practised dance as we have our breakfast – me passing him a knife from the drawer before he asks, him handing me the milk out the fridge so I can splash some in my tea. It’s odd that we know each other’s movements so well we can do this without thinking, while another part of me is wondering if I’ve ever known him at all.
We don’t talk about it in the evening either. Instead, we watch The One Show. When it’s finished Dan turns over to BBC Two. He doesn’t look at me, doesn’t ask if I mind, so I have to sit in silence and try to be interested in cacti for the next hour. By the time the credits roll, I never want to see another of the spiky little suckers in the whole of my life. ‘That’s an hour I’ll never get back,’ I mutter.
Dan clicks the TV off and turns his head to look at me. ‘If you didn’t want to watch it, you could have said.’
‘You could have asked. Once upon a time, you would have. Not just assumed. Not just taken it for granted.’
He frowns. ‘Bloody hell, Maggie. I told you I would have turned over.’
I shake my head. He just doesn’t get it. ‘You never think about what makes me happy any more.’
Dan lets out an incredulous laugh. ‘How did we get from a stupid TV programme to this?’
I exhale and look away. Oh, for a man you didn’t have to explain everything to with brightly coloured flash cards! We’ve been together for close to twenty-five years. He should know me by now. Suddenly, I’m very angry that he doesn’t.
That was the unspoken promise on our wedding day, I’d thought. That we’d grow old together, mesh our souls so tightly that we’d finish each other’s sentences, share that weird kind of telepathy I’d seen between my grandparents before they’d died. But Dan has never once completed a sentence of mine, and I seem to have to explain myself to him more than ever nowadays.
You were supposed to at least try, I wail inside my head. That was the deal.
I will him to understand me, but after looking at me for a few seconds, he huffs, picks up his half-empty mug and leaves the room. I slump down on my end of the sofa and cross my arms. Part of me hasn’t got the energy to knock this into his thick skull; the other half wants to follow him and pick a fight.
I collect my mug, swill down the last of my cold decaf and head for the kitchen, where I let him know, at volume, just where he can put his effing muddy shoes.
CHAPTER SIX (#ulink_252f5f28-2b0f-5e19-b7ee-1a2faeea416c)
1992
I stare at my face in the bathroom mirror. The young me. The wrong me.
‘Maggie!’ Becca calls again. ‘Are you there?’
I hear her walking into the kitchen, looking for me, probably. If I remember rightly, she has some juicy gossip to deliver about her night with Stevo Watts and she won’t want to wait. I screw my face up and close my eyes. No. That’s wrong. How can this be? How can I be here, now, and still … remembering. It’s not possible.
I turn the tap on and splash the cold water on my face, hoping it’ll wake me up, but all it does is cause freezing droplets to run down my neck. I shiver.
What do I do? This can’t be real. Can it?
‘Margaret Alison Greene!’ Becca yells, doing a passable imitation of my mother when she’s in a snit. It’s not quite perfect, though, because I can hear a smile in her voice. My bedroom door squeaks as she continues her sweep of the flat. I realise I can’t stay here in the bathroom, hiding. Eventually she’s going to find me.
‘Maggie?’ she calls and this time the smile is gone. Her footsteps get faster.
Don’t think about it, I tell myself. There’ll be time for answers later.
I nod at my reflection and notice that the young girl looks tense and serious, much more like the woman I’m used to seeing in the mirror, then I dry my face, take a deep breath and walk out into the hallway. I find Becca in the kitchen, making herself a cup of tea.
‘There you are!’ she says, grinning at me. ‘I was starting to think you’d been abducted by aliens!’
I just nod. I can’t seem to find my voice.
It was weird enough seeing Young Me in the mirror, but seeing Young Becca is even more surreal. I’m caught in the grip of déjà vu so strong that it makes my stomach roll.
‘God, are you alright? You look like you’re about to faint. Bad night, huh?’ She puts a hand on my shoulder then gives me a cheeky look. ‘Or should I say a really good one?’
