Regretfully he shook his head.
‘She paints in the naive style. I’ve only seen her work on Pinterest but I love it.’
‘Does she do exhibitions?’
‘The only ones I’ve found are in a Serbian town called Jagodina. I’ve emailed to see about buying prints but they probably don’t understand English, and I’ve tried ringing but no one answers the phone.’
‘Maybe it’s closed.’
‘Things happen on their Facebook page. I can’t understand the language but the dates are current.’
‘But your artist must have a website?’
‘Swear to God, she doesn’t. She mightn’t even be still alive. But one day I’m going on a road trip to the Jagodina place.’
A flash of resentment sparked in me. All my holidays were picked to please the girls and Hugh – mostly the girls, to be fair – and everything got prioritized over what I wanted.
There was never enough money for Hugh and me to go on weekend jaunts to European cities. Very occasionally one of us would be sent to an appealing work spot and the other would tag along for a day and a half at the end.
But the one time we found ourselves with some spare money, due to an unexpected tax rebate, and I’d asked Hugh straight out if we could visit the museum in Jagodina, he’d said, ‘I’m sorry, babe, I just can’t get excited about Serbia. The thought of spending money on going there when we could spend it instead on Marrakech or Porto …’
‘You okay?’ Josh was watching my face.
‘Yes.’ No way would I ever complain to him about Hugh.
Josh changed the subject by enquiring about my clothes, so I told him about Bronagh, and as I spoke, he watched me avidly, the admiration in his eyes contrasting with the granite set of his face.
All of that attention was seductive and, call me pathetic, it was pretty cool to see myself as an interesting woman dressed in one-off vintage and whose favourite artist wasn’t a predictable pick but some low-key Serbian. The reality, of course, was that I was hard-up and badly educated, but everything is about presentation.
At the end of the lunch I said, ‘So we’ve managed to get through an encounter without me propositioning you. Progress.’
Another proper smile. Then, ‘Proposition me any time you like.’
‘Ha-ha-ha-ha.’ I blushed – and he noticed.
‘Amy …’ He touched his knuckles to my hot face.
‘Gotta go.’ I scarpered.
Since then we’d had lunch three more times, always on a Tuesday, always in the same place, always with me doing most of the talking and him watching me as if I was the most interesting woman alive. His questions were about things that nobody else usually asked me.
I tried turning the tables and grilling him, but he offered up a lot less than I did. All the same, he admitted a few things: that he loved the sea, that his most favourite place in the world was the Northumbrian coast; that he suffered from early-waking insomnia; that he rarely cried but when he did it was usually triggered by a news story about wounded children – ‘That little boy in the ambulance in Aleppo did my head in. When you’ve kids of your own, you personalize everything.’
Things went a bit awkward with that remark, reminding us both of our other lives, where we had children and spouses.
Derry was the only person I told about the lunches and she wasn’t impressed. ‘How would you feel if Hugh was meeting a woman the way you’re meeting Josh Rowan?’ she asked.
I squirmed. I’d be deeply wounded, deeply, and worried sick. ‘Nothing has happened,’ I said. ‘Nothing is going to happen. It’s just harmless flirting.’
Except there was nothing harmless about it. I wanted to stick my fingers in my ears and la-la-la-la-la-la away the truth that emotional infidelity was a thing. Maybe not as bad as actual carnal-knowledge infidelity, but still bad.
‘I’ll tell you what you’re doing,’ Derry said. ‘You’re easing yourself into a thing with him by Normalizing the Abnormal.’
I knew that phrase, which had originated in addiction circles; it meant that a person didn’t go to bed one night perfectly healthy and wake up the following morning a full-blown addict. Instead it was something that happened in stealthy increments. A person took a single daring step away from the correct course, and only when that no longer felt aberrant did they take another. Once again, they waited for the shame and fear to settle, and when it did, they were emboldened to take one more step, all the while moving further and further off the righteous path.
‘Nothing is going to happen,’ I repeated. ‘Hey! Would you like to see pictures of him?’ I was already reaching for my iPad.
‘No. Amy. Get a hold of yourself. Listen to me, this isn’t Josh Rowan’s first rodeo. Soon you’re going to have to move this forward. I don’t know the man, but I can tell you one thing. He’s not in this for the hand-holding.’
‘We haven’t held hands. We don’t hold hands. We don’t even air-kiss hello.’
‘Men like to fuck things.’
‘Ah, Derry!’
‘You and him aren’t any different from anyone else considering an extra-marital fuck-fest.’ She was being deliberately brutal. ‘Seriously, Amy, don’t try dressing this up with talk of special connections or irresistible attractions.’
That plunged me into despondency because, yes, it’s what I had been doing.
‘Can I ask why?’ she said. ‘Is it Hugh? Is he being … I don’t know, not there for you?’
‘It’s not Hugh.’ I was adamant. ‘Whatever this is, it’s all on me. Could I be bored of monogamy?’
‘It’d be entirely out of character if you were. But all of this is out of character. Could it be your age? Maybe your body knows the decline has started and is urging you to have one last hurrah.’
‘I don’t know … The best I can tell you, Derry, is that I just want something for me. I want one part of my life that no one else can have.’
I felt as if I couldn’t call my soul my own. The girls blithely took my possessions without asking – even my shoes were lent to a friend of Neeve’s – and my time was colonized with careless disregard: the girls issued orders to be dropped here and picked up there without anyone ever asking if it suited me.
With Hugh, our chronic sex-deficit dogged me so badly that my favourite way of unwinding – which was to lie in bed with my iPad – just made me feel guilty. Well, guilty, then resentful, when he arrived and made vaguely lecherous noises about joining me. I’d be thinking, For the love of God, I’m so burdened, can’t you just let me lie here and monkey-brain online from article to article and be unfettered for a short while?
Derry looked thoughtful. ‘You work really hard.’
‘I’m always tired. And I’m always worried. I’ve a near-constant pain in my stomach – it’s there so much I almost don’t notice it. There’s never enough money. There’s never enough time. And nothing I do is ever enough. My house is always manky. I never reach my ten thousand steps on my Fitbit. If I pull off a success in work, it counts for nothing because we still don’t have enough business. I worry about Neeve, I worry about Sofie, and I despise myself for whining when I’ve enough to eat and we’re not at war, but …’
‘Mmm.’
‘And anything I do as a treat – drink, smoke, have a popcorn binge at the cinema – just makes me feel guilty. Listen, will you tell me how it was for you?’
Derry had been in an eight-year relationship with a man called Mark when she started a covert thing with someone else. The new man – Steven – was married.
‘It was shit,’ she said. ‘Lying to Mark, well, the guilt was exhausting, and being Steven’s sordid secret felt super-shame-y. And I felt even more shame-y about poor Hannah.’ Hannah had been Steven’s wife. ‘I never wanted to be that woman, the home-wrecker, the husband-stealer, and you’re a lot more sappy than me, so you’d find it much tougher.’
‘But there must have been good bits because you wouldn’t have done it otherwise?’
&nbs
p; ‘Yeah, but, it wasn’t real. Like, I’d wait and wait and he’d finally text and then I’d be high with happiness. It was like a drug. You know, it is an actual chemical – dopamine.’
I knew about dopamine. Again, Psychologies. The simple explanation is it’s a chemical the brain produces in response to certain stimuli and it makes you feel nice. And, yes, whenever Josh emailed me a dancing dog or a painting of a Slavic village scene, my mood soared.
‘Whenever Steven texted, I’d get a hit of dopamine,’ Derry said. ‘Or the anticipation of our next meeting could keep me buzzing for days.’
Yes. Looking forward to those Tuesday lunches was thrilling, nervy stuff.
She sighed. ‘I think I was simply addicted to relief. And look at how it played out for me.’
She’d left Mark; Steven had left Hannah; Derry and Steven went public. They’d lasted less than a year.
‘Is that what you want?’ Derry asked. ‘To tell Hugh? To leave him? To set up home with Josh Rowan?’
Jesus. The thought seized me with hair-standing terror. I didn’t want that at all. No. Josh Rowan was just a fantasy thing. ‘All I want is to feel that a hot man is mad about me. What’s so wrong with that?’
‘Be careful, Amy,’ Derry said. ‘You’ve a lot to lose.’
‘Derry, how do relationships survive when one person has a fling? Even if they don’t get found out. Is something lost? It has to be, surely?’
‘Of course. Innocence. Trust.’
‘But is it naive to expect unsullied records? Should people just accept that, in any long-term thing, ruptures will happen and you just have to live with them? Like scars on a body, or flaws in a hand-woven rug. Like, one in three women in middle age have an affair.’
‘I think you should stop seeing him.’
‘I can’t stay away from him.’
‘Dopamine.’ She was dismissive.
‘We only have lunch.’
‘So stop it.’
‘I don’t want to.’
‘Dopamine.’
I stammered, ‘All I want is some harmless fun.’
‘Harmless fun?’ Derry shook her head wearily. ‘Buy yourself a trampoline.’
47
Sunday, 16 October, day thirty-four
‘Will there be drink at this party?’ I ask, and Kiara, Neeve, Sofie and Jackson promptly dissolve into howls of laughter.
‘Will there be drink at this party?’ Neeve repeats, in a trembly old-lady parody of my voice.
‘Oh, Mum!’ Kiara is in convulsions.
Primly, I carry on scrubbing the hob. What’s so funny?
‘Of course there’ll be drink at it!’ Kiara sings.
It’s every parent’s wish that their children be independent. But I’m not sure I like them acting as if I’m some dithery dinosaur, who needs to be shepherded through the modern world.
While we clean the house, we’ve been discussing a Hallowe’en ‘social’ that Kiara is going to. It’s two weeks away but already she’s planning her outfit. It was just after she said, ‘Derry probably has a dress I can borrow,’ that I uttered my hilarious line about drink.
‘You know there’s always drink at “these things”,’ Kiara says. ‘You’ve gone so strict.’
‘When you’re not showering us with cash,’ Sofie adds.
That’s as may be but I’ll tell you something, it’s hard suddenly being a lone parent. It’s almost like having to relearn everything from scratch. It isn’t enough simply to carry on as I always have, because Hugh and I shared the role. Between the two of us, we applied the rules and rewards in a smooth two-hander, and now that his presence has been wrenched abruptly away, the responses that once felt intuitive no longer do.
‘There’ll be boys too.’ Kiara is teasing me but now I’m worried. Is she sexually active? How sexually active? Should she go on the pill? Sofie is on the pill, she has been for a year, and that conversation – instigated by me, about how sex is an expression of tenderness and love – was so hard I took to my bed afterwards. A similar conversation with Kiara should be easier because she’s so much more open.
But is it too soon? She’s never had a boyfriend, not one that Hugh and I know about anyway, plenty of friends who are boys, but maybe this is the time for that talk and what does Hugh think?
‘That’s my fifteen minutes done!’ Neeve steps away from the ironing board.
‘You only did twelve.’ Jackson looks at the stop-watch.
I stop scrubbing the hob – these rings of burnt-in food are more resistant than hardened lava – and look at the clock. ‘It was only twelve.’
‘Yeah!’ Kiara says.
‘Twelve,’ Sofie says. ‘But you go. I don’t mind ironing.’
‘Freak,’ Neeve says, with affection.
Everyone has preferred household tasks – I’ll happily do the oven, Jackson does the bathrooms when he’s here, and Neeve enjoys mopping the floor – but as ironing is so unpopular, we each have to take a fifteen-minute slot.
I still don’t know if Sofie is officially living with us again. She’s here several mornings a week and shows up most evenings to do her homework, but she disappears for two or three days at a time, sometimes to Urzula’s, sometimes to my mum’s. It’s messy, it can’t be good for her, but I’m just her aunt.
If only there was someone I could unburden myself to, but being with people is difficult. Even though Posh Petra is stressed and miserable, she’s one of the few people I can relax with. Yesterday we went for a walk, just the two of us. I didn’t want to go and neither did she, but she said it would be a good thing – ‘Nature, oxygen, all of that. Make a change from me drinking myself into a stupor.’
‘And me.’ Actually, I haven’t been drinking myself into a stupor. I mean, I’ve been drinking a bit, just not too much because it makes me feel even lower the day after. But I was demonstrating Emotional Contagion, something that’s been observed in the animal world – they do it to strengthen bonds. (Yes, Psychologies again.)
We went to some forest or other where Petra stared into the fast-running river, like she was considering throwing herself in, then said bleakly, ‘I wish I’d had an abortion.’
‘No, Petra, please don’t!’
‘I do, Amy. I wish I’d had it. I nearly did.’
I knew. We’d back-and-forthed on it for a couple of weeks, before she’d decided her unexpected late-in-life pregnancy and children might be a blessing.
‘Women are allowed to regret abortions,’ she said. ‘What about those of us who regret not having an abortion?’
‘Petra, maybe you should go to the doctor. Maybe get some tablets.’
‘Cyanide? For me or for them?’ She’d produced a mini-bottle of red wine from her bag. ‘Want some? Please say no.’
‘You okay, Amy?’ Sofie asks.
I’ve frozen, like a mannequin. ‘Oh … ah, yes, grand.’ My hair is damp with sweat from scrubbing the hob.
‘Where’s the rubber gloves?’ Jackson asks. ‘I’ll do the downstairs loo now.’
The rest of us shudder and he laughs at us.
‘Tie up your hair, boo,’ Sofie says. She produces a hair-bobble and tenderly twists Jackson’s super-lustrous locks into a top-knot. They rub their noses together and giggle.
‘Oi!’ Neeve says. ‘No PDAs.’
‘There they are.’ Kiara finds the Marigolds for him, flings them into the basin of cleaning stuff, then pauses in the act of handing it over. Suddenly wistful, she says, ‘I wonder if Dad’s thinking about us. I wonder if he’s missing us.’
My heart contracts.
‘Yeah, right,’ Neeve says. ‘Missing this.’ She indicates the five of us, attired in sweatpants and T-shirts, sporting red faces and limp hair. ‘Who’d want a tropical paradise when you could be cleaning a fridge?’
They all laugh, even Kiara.
The doorbell rings and we pause in our tasks to look at each other with mild alarm. Who the hell calls around to people’s homes on a Sunday morning?
‘Probably Maura,’ I say.
‘Why?’
‘Just … because …’
‘Yeah, Maura be like,’ Neeve says, and the three of them squeal with laughter.
I try hard to keep up with their speak, but the precise meaning of that sentence eludes me. And I’m not asking, not so soon after they’d mocked me for the drink question.
Walking down the hall, I’m praying that if it isn’t Maura, it won’t be some ‘concerned’ neighbour.
To my great surprise, standing in the chilly mid-October morning is Sofie’s skeletal mother. ‘Urzula, hi,’ I say. ‘Er … come in!’
She passes me a bin-liner. ‘Is Sofie’s stuff. And the stuff of that Jackson boy.’
‘Oh? Ah …’ What the hell? Is she kicking Sofie out?
‘Urzula, come in, do!’ We’d better talk about this.
‘She is difficult girl.’
I don’t want Sofie hearing any of this so I pull the door closed behind me, and step outside. ‘No, she’s not.’
‘She is very difficult girl.’
‘No, Urzula, she’s a sweetheart.’
Urzula switches focus by giving me a once-over, her expression a mixture of scorn and distress. ‘Amy. I am dietician. Believe me when I say mini-Magnums are as satisfying as big Magnums.’
I don’t know how to respond. Insults aside, this is patently untrue.
And I realize something: I used to think that the line dividing sane people from insane people was entirely black or white – sane or not-sane – with no grey area. But suddenly I see now that the grey area is enormous. It spreads far and wide and into every part of life. Mad people aren’t just those poor souls confined to locked wards. Mad people are everywhere, living among us, masquerading as non-mads. Mad people are in positions of power and influence and sometimes get their own TV show on UK Living, shaming fat people into being less fat. (At least temporarily: one article I read said as soon as those people escaped from Urzula, most of them ate more than ever.)
‘I love Sofie,’ I say. ‘I’m delighted she’ll be living with me again.’