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‘I’ve been leaving work earlier some nights. Delia, please, can we …’ Paul put his face in his hands. Hands that had been in places she’d never imagined.
She looked down at her special anniversary dress with the dragonflies. She and Paul shared a home, a wavelength, a pet, a past. They were always honest, or so she thought. Any passing fancies on either side were running jokes between them, and could be admitted in the safety of knowing there was no real risk. There was leeway, trust, a long leash. Paul and Delia. Delia and Paul. People aspired to have what they had.
‘What’s she like in bed?’ Delia said.
‘Can we not …?’
‘Can we not be having this awkward conversation about all the times you’ve had sex with someone else? That relied on you, not me, didn’t it?’
She felt as if Paul had let an intruder into their lives, a third person into their bed. It was a total, bewildering, senseless betrayal from the one person she was supposed to be able to count on. Why? She didn’t want to question herself – it was Paul who should face interrogation – but she couldn’t help it.
Would it have been different if I’d been different? Made you feel less secure? Lost a stone? Gone out more? Gone on top more often?
‘When it started, it was like an out-of-body experience,’ Paul said, and Delia opened her mouth to say something about it surely being a very in-body experience, and so Paul rattled on fast. ‘It was disbelief at what I was doing, that I even could do it. I wasn’t looking for it, I swear. You and I, we’re so solid …’
‘We were,’ Delia corrected him, and Paul looked anguished.
‘And – I don’t know what happened. It was as if all of a sudden I’d crossed a line and there was no going back. I hated myself but I couldn’t stop.’
Yeah, they’d come back to that, the stopping, Delia thought.
‘What’s she like in bed?’ Delia persisted.
Paul squirmed.
‘I’ve never compared.’
‘Start now.’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Was she like me?’
‘No!’
‘So, different?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Better?’
‘No.’
‘Would you tell me if she was?’
‘… I don’t know. But she isn’t.’
‘Is this something you’ve wanted for a while?’
‘No! God, no. It just happened.’
‘It doesn’t happen. You make a decision to do something like that for a reason. I mean, other women must’ve come on to you and you’ve said no? You told me you did.’
‘I did. I don’t know why this happened.’
‘She was too attractive to pass up?’
Paul shook his head.
‘I didn’t see it coming I guess, and then somehow, when I was drunk, it was on.’
‘What were you going to say to her tomorrow?’
For once Paul looked nonplussed.
Delia quoted: ‘“She’s proposed and I don’t know what to do. Meet tomorrow?”’
Paul looked at the floor.
Right on cue, there was a tiny treacherous little mechanical hiccup from the direction of Paul’s discarded coat. They both knew what it was: Celine’s reply.
Six (#ulink_ca251e5f-8c86-50ee-8478-70abda62e39d)
‘Read it,’ Delia said, and Paul shook his head.
Delia felt a determined venom pulse through her veins. ‘Read it out,’ she said, steadily.
Paul pulled the phone from his coat pocket. She waited in case a look crossed his face that told her it wasn’t Celine, but she could see from his unchanging scowl of dread that it was.
‘I’m not reading this.’
‘If you ever want any trust between us again, read that text aloud.’
Paul grimly swiped the text open, jaw clenched. When he spoke, he sounded strangled. Delia knew she’d never forget the strangeness of hearing her fiancé’s lover’s voice coming through his. She could see him desperately trying to edit it and not quite having the time to do it and still make it sound natural.
‘If I think you’re leaving bits out, I’ll ask to see it,’ she said, hearing herself as if she was a stranger. The woman scorned wasn’t a role she ever thought she’d have to play.
‘Oh my God, you’re getting married to her? What does this mean for us? Can you …’ Paul looked over, beseeching in his shame, obviously hoping against hope that Delia would burst into tears and let him off the rest of it. She shook her head and willed herself to wait. He continued in a funereal whisper: ‘Can you get away tonight at all to call me? Speak tomorrow. Love you. C.’
Love.
‘How many kisses?’
‘Three.’
With a gasp, Delia felt the tears start, warm water that gushed down her cheeks and partially blurred Paul from view. Her nose started running too; it was a full face explosion of liquid. Paul made to get up and comfort her and she shouted at him to get away from her. Delia wouldn’t allow him to hug her, to make himself feel better. As if right now, he was the person who could make her feel better.
Delia rubbed at her eyes and when she could focus, she saw Paul was crying too, albeit in less of a fountain-like way. He wiped at his face.
‘I’ll end it. It’s over. It was the most massive, insane mistake …’
‘What were you going to say to her tomorrow?’ Delia said, in a half-sob.
Paul shook his head, looking sorrowful that he kept being asked all these tricky questions.
‘Tell me the truth, or there’s no point. If you keep lying, there really is no point any more.’
‘I was going to say we were getting married and it was time to finish.’
‘No you weren’t. You said you didn’t know what to do.’
‘I didn’t want to break it off in a text. I was building up to it.’
Delia cleared her throat several times, and mopped herself up as best she could with her bare hands.
‘I don’t believe you. I think you hadn’t decided what you were going to say to her. You don’t want to get married.’
Paul muttered, ‘It was a surprise, I admit.’
‘I can imagine you weren’t in the mindset when you were busy throwing your nob up someone else.’
Paul looked at Delia with bloodshot eyes.
‘How would you feel if I’d done this?’
‘Devastated,’ Paul said, without hesitation. ‘Gutted beyond belief. I can’t tell you this isn’t shockingly unfair and awful shitty behaviour, because it is. I hate myself for it.’
Yet – was Delia imagining that he sounded as if he was recovering, ever so slightly? Some of the Paul self-assurance had already crept back in. The worst had happened for Paul – Delia had found out. So now he was already repairing, while Delia was still scattered in a hundred pieces.
Parsnip waddled into the room. For the first time since they’d brought him home, Delia resented their dog; she’d cleaned up a lot of piss. Petting him was a way of easing Paul’s discomfort, breaking the tension.
‘I know it’s going to take a huge effort to get past this, but please tell me we can,’ Paul said.
Paul wasn’t leaving her for Celine? She hadn’t framed the question quite so bluntly until now, but it was the big question, she supposed. However, it dawned on her what he was actually asking. If I end it with Celine, promise me you’ll still be here? He didn’t want to be left with neither of them.
She wasn’t ready, not by miles, to decide how she felt. Especially as she didn’t believe that he’d planned to end it with Celine. That text spoke of uncertainty, tell me what to do, the same way he was asking her now.
Delia saw the light glinting on the unused flute glasses in her open bag. They’d never even used them.
Ten years together, laden with guilt, and he hadn’t indulged her enough to drink the champagne. I mean, maybe the guilt was why he hadn’t wanted a spotlight on the whole engagement thing, but that hardly made matters better.
‘I don’t know if we can,’ Delia said, standing up, stiff underskirt rustling. She felt like a painted panto dame. ‘I’m going to stay in the spare room tonight.’
‘You don’t have to, I’ll stay in it.’
‘I don’t want to be in our bed. Tomorrow I’m going home to my parents. You can meet Celine and tell her whatever you like.’
‘We can’t leave it like this,’ Paul said.
Paul honestly expected some sort of pledge from her? Delia feared this said something about Paul, and something about her too.
‘I don’t know who I’m with any more, so how can I know if I want to be with him?’
‘I’m still the same, I’ve just done something that makes me a huge arsehole.’
‘No, you’re not the same. You’re a traitor, who I don’t trust.’
Delia left Paul with Parsnip, thundered up the stairs, pulled her dress off and went to bed in full make-up and her new underwear. She didn’t cry again. She was numb, only partly functioning: as if a chamber of her heart was no longer pumping blood round her body. Joy Division’s ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’ looped in her head.
She realised perhaps that failing to set a date wasn’t about what Paul was waiting for. It was who.
Seven (#ulink_88670c3a-1b29-5846-ba8f-4c04a6f13bf6)
Ralph answered the door to Delia in a t-shirt saying Colorado Surf Club ’83, eating a floppy buttered triangle of Mighty White toast.
‘S’up,’ he said, grinning, and then remembered why his older sister was on the doorstep with a trolley case and puffy eyes. ‘Ehm. Are you … well?’
Delia smiled, despite herself. Ralph didn’t quite comprehend the subtleties of conventional interaction. Liberal, well-meaning teachers at their comprehensive had tried to get him diagnosed with this and that, so everyone could label it and feel better, but never succeeded. Ralph suffered from chronic Ralphness. It was a benign condition, in Delia’s view.
‘I’ve been better,’ she said, smiling, stepping inside and stretching up to make him hug her. Ralph bent his head in an awkward, touching way and circled her with his arms, looking like someone doing an impression of a hug they’d seen once in a Human Beings instruction manual.
Ralph was a mountain of a man, with Delia’s carrot-coloured tresses, worn haphazardly tufty.
A cruel onlooker might note that it wasn’t only the fact of Colorado being landlocked that’d prevent him being in Colorado’s Surf Club. Delia worried about his weight, but he worked in a chip shop and had never met a junk food he didn’t like, so it was a futile battle.
‘Mum’s at the allotment and Dad’s out back. Want some toast?’
Delia shook her head. She’d not eaten a meal since last night’s curry, so it was just as well that had been huge. Her stomach was now a balloon knot that tightened every time she spent more than a minute in contemplation.
‘I’ll put my stuff in my room,’ Delia said, fake-brightly, bumping her trolley case up the stairs, grateful her parents weren’t witnessing this sorry sight. The thirty-three-year-old wanderer returns.
She was supposed to be showing them an engagement ring.
‘How’s Parsnip?’ Ralph asked, to her back. Delia was glad she didn’t have to meet his eyes. Leaving wobbly Parsnip was a wrench. He’d been abandoned once and she’d promised him it’d never happen again.
‘Good!’
‘You could bring him, you know. He can sleep in my room.’
‘Thanks.’
Delia’s family lived in a semi in Hexham, a market town about twenty miles up the Tyne from Newcastle. Ever since she could remember, the house had looked like this; full of solid wooden furniture, patchwork and crocheted old throws, and rows of herbs in tubs that leaked earth along the windowsills. It was resolutely about function, not form, which was perhaps where Delia’s urge to prettify and home-make had come from.
It was welcoming and constant though. On the bricked mantelpiece, there was a framed photo of her parents’ wedding in 1971: her dad in giant chocolate-brown bell-bottomed suit, big ginger Open University beard. Her grey-blonde mum in that bowl cut that gripped the circumference of your head, and a post-hippy-era trailing veil with daisies.
Her family were … eccentric was the gentlest word, though Delia felt disloyal even using that. Paul used to sing the theme tune to Button Moon as they drove to visit, in affectionate reference to the fact her family home was its own planet, with its own customs.
Paul. Their team of two, that no longer existed. The stomach knot tightened.
