Paddy was always capable of watching, calmly and quietly, without getting bored or distracted. In the early days, it had given me time to feed Ted, those long sessions that newborns need, sucking and sucking, the regular rhythm of his little mouth, Paddy breathing slowly next to me, feeding on TV.
Now, after school, I spent my afternoons as a kind of waitress, and I didn’t mind it. Maybe it reminded me of the times I did actual waitressing, and coffee-making, and floor-sweeping, for money. I liked those jobs, the simplicity of them, the way they made me feel so tired I became transparent, completely open to the world. Tiredness was different when nothing was expected of me: it was a pleasure, sliding into a leather booth after work with my colleagues. Drinking so much I could hardly see.
I made the boys’ snacks with the skills I learned back then, laying the pieces of bread on the counter in rows, spreading the butter all at once. I remembered my old boss at the sandwich shop, telling me how the butter formed a barrier, so the fillings wouldn’t leak. They were always very stressed, those bosses, and I floated under their feelings, blank-faced, lazy. I felt a bit like that now, delivering the sandwiches to the boys on the sofa; Jake was always telling me I shouldn’t feed them there, that it would attract vermin. And he was right – I had started to hear scratching in the walls, or the floorboards: I could never figure out where it came from. I spread out cloths on the boys’ laps, put the sandwiches down, told them not to drop crumbs.
I was going back into the kitchen when my phone rang. It made a kind of quiet bleating, easy to ignore, but I moved towards it with something like urgency, thinking of Jake, wondering what train he was on. I had become used to the worst-case scenario, the 7.15, the children already in bed, his supper under a plate, the house and me alone, waiting for him. But I still hoped for the best, for the 5.45, for his burst of outside-world energy, just as the bath was running, as the dishwasher needed to go on. Daddy for bedtime, I would grin at the boys when we heard the particular blast of the front door, and their cheeks would rise up with joy.
I say that I was thinking of Jake, and his train, when I heard the phone ring, but I know it is possible that I am only inserting that now, as a perfect contrast to what followed. I missed the call – it seemed to ring so briefly – and saw that it was an unknown number on the screen. A collection of numbers instead of a name always seemed hostile to me, the sign of people ringing for money or favours. I turned the phone over, reached into the fridge for a packet of chicken, switched the oven on. It started again, the lamb-like building of single high notes, so close to my hand now, no ignoring it. I turned it over, saw it was my voicemail, lifted it to my ear.
~
This is it: the last moment. The children are watching television. The sun has gone, the garden nothing but rectangular darkness at the back door. I look at myself: I look at her.
She turns the dial, the oven is on, back-lit as a theatre, a wave of hot breath. The phone, lifted. She doesn’t know. She knows hardly anything. Her skin is clear, unlined: she is only midway through her thirties. Not beautiful. Not exceptional in any way. But she has this: her lack of knowledge, stretching from this moment into forever, hers.
~
3
After the beep at first there was nothing, then a deep intake of breath, like the noise someone makes before sighing. Then there were the words, less like words than atom-crushers, some scientific experiment altering the composition of the universe, the plastic-wrapped chicken I held in my hand, the cooker, the sink, the radio.
This is David Holmes. I am the husband of Vanessa Holmes. I thought you should know . . .
A gulp here, or a swallow, something too guttural to hear over the phone, the inner, liquid workings of another person’s body.
Your husband – Jake, Jake Stevenson – is sleeping with my wife. He is – I found out today. I thought you should know.
He said that twice: he thought I should know. The way he said it – even with the splits in his voice, the way it was balancing, like an adolescent boy, between high and deep – it seemed significant. Well thought out, as though he knew that knowledge was important in a marriage, that it was correct. He was careful to use surnames, for everyone. To make it official. He had a serious, professor’s voice, maybe that was it. I have always had a weakness for listening to academic men, for believing what they say. I trained in the art of this at one point.
And so when I heard him say those words, the first thing I did was nod, very quickly, and put the chicken down.
4
I imagined how a woman in a film would react, on receiving this news. She would shake: I held out my hand, to see if it was shaking. But my hands have always had a slight tremor. I watched my fingers, their individual movements, separate creatures twitching in the kitchen lights.
The TV continued in the next room, pulsing on regardless. When I was a child I was disappointed to realize that television would not keep me safe: I had thought of it as an intelligent presence, able to sense danger. But then I saw a police reconstruction of a murder, and the woman was dead on her sofa, the TV talking over her head.
Please can I have a drink, Mummy! We had taught the children to say please, but had not taught them to come into the kitchen and pour water from a plastic jug set at a low height. We had not done this, and yet we blamed them, rolled our eyes at each other whenever they called out to us, their servants. When I was alone it was easier to be a servant, to lose myself in this particular pattern of movement, from cupboard to sink, sink to hallway to their thirsty faces. People complain that women lose themselves to motherhood, but aren’t so many of the things we do an attempt to lose ourselves? I never minded the practical aspects much: the fetching and carrying, the work of the hands.
I started the dinner. I could only make a few dishes, simple things mostly. I had a whole shelf of recipe books, like most people do, and I cooked from them, occasionally, in a new-year burst of good intentions, or a sudden inclination following a dream. But these recipes never stuck, however simple. This is what stuck: a chicken breast, sliced into sections, each part lowered into a bowl of seasoned flour. Even seasoning the flour felt fancy, the faith that salt and pepper would somehow cling to the white powder and make some difference to the taste of the chicken. Cooking always seemed mysterious to me, the art of the unseen.
As I sliced the chicken, I noticed that it had changed, the fibres of the meat altered, more granular, the skinless surface almost opalescent. I am a woman whose husband is having an affair, I said to myself in my head, as though these words would make some difference to reality. Then I said them out loud, wanting to taste the phrase under my tongue, to pass its particular rhythms through my lips. I said her name.
Vanessa. The first times I saw her: laughing at our Christmas party. A soft handshake at a work do, then later: straight backed, clapping. A neat suit jacket, her hair tucked behind her ears. Where did she buy those jackets? I imagined that she had a personal shopper, someone who presented her with racks of almost identical jackets, described their subtle differences of tailoring. Vanessa Holmes. A raised eyebrow, plucked to a wisp, the tail of a tiny animal.
I noticed that I felt sick; I noticed this as you would notice that a book has fallen from a shelf: impartially, at a distance. When I was offered pethidine in labour with Paddy, they said it wouldn’t take away the pain, but it would make me care about it less. You’ll see it there, said the midwife, but it won’t matter to you. It appealed to me, this separate pain, but there was no time to take the drugs, as suddenly Paddy was coming, and the choice was gone.