‘I have to remain in London, what with the business, so you must make notes on my wife’s state of mind.’ Walter smoothed his rapidly retreating hair. ‘Keep me informed of her moods. Appetite. Quality of mothering. I’ll expect your absolute discretion, of course. My wife mustn’t find out.’
Rita’s mind had raced. First, if she left, where would she go? How would she live? Nan had died a few months earlier – not a bad case of indigestion, after all – and the council had reclaimed her bungalow. She’d been determined to give Nan a proper send-off, and a gravestone. The cost had wiped out her savings.
And she couldn’t bear the thought of walking away from Jeannie, Hera and Teddy when they needed her most. It’d be like giving up on them. Or saying, ‘I can’t help you any more,’ even though she’s sure she can – she knows about grief, the way it scars you, not on the skin but the soft suede of the soul inside. (And how it is to grow up different, like Hera, the one who doesn’t fit.) So, yes, surely better she ‘report’ on Jeannie this summer, fudging whenever necessary, than some strict new hire, she reasoned. Even this morning it felt like the right decision. But now that they’re here, enclosed by these sombre, looming trees, in a spot so remote it feels like they’re the last survivors on the planet, she’s no longer sure. Her mouth is dry and metallic. It tastes of betrayal.
‘Rita?’ Jeannie touches her lightly on the arm, interrupting her spiralling thoughts. Jeannie’s voice is thick with the morning’s medication, the reason Rita’s driving. (‘Funny. I see halos,’ Jeannie observed, over Claridge’s flawless poached eggs at breakfast.) ‘Are you ready?’
‘Oh, yes! Sorry.’ Rita’s cheeks blaze. Her conscience lies too close to the surface.
‘Well, let’s get this bloody awful thing over with, shall we?’ Jeannie whispers grimly. Rita nods and grapples with the gear stick. Forcing a smile for the children, Jeannie says, in a loud, bright voice, ‘Well, hello, Foxcote! This is exciting. Come on, Big Rita. Drive in.’
2
Sylvie, Kensal Town, London, now
I heave the last cardboard box from the house to the car, hands on the bulging base so bits of me don’t fall out into the street and cause a scene. I glance back at the house, my eyes stinging. Is this it? My family home, like the marriage I’ve stuck with for so long, finally excavated of me?
My married life has been bookended by removals boxes. Arrivals and exits. Whoops and sobs. When we first moved in, nineteen years ago, I was five months pregnant, a busy make-up artist with a carry-on case always packed, ready to easyJet off for a shoot abroad at short notice. I didn’t own a salad spinner. I’d never changed a nappy. My engagement ring – antique gold, pea-green emerald – had belonged to Steve’s great-aunt and made me smile every time I looked at it. The wedding would happen after I’d lost the baby weight (not all of it). I’d wear an ivory lace vintage dress and T-bar shoes, just the right side of Courtney Love. We’d dance to Pulp’s ‘Common People’. We’d be married for ever.
I couldn’t have imagined this street changing either.
Cheap for Zone Two, it was home to a kebab shop, a resident loon, who shouted abuse at lampposts, and a thriving drugs den. The front doors were painted a council rust-red. Now those doors are mostly sludgy shades of charcoal-grey. The kebab shop is a much-Instagrammed florist, selling dragon-red dahlias. There are five Sophies living on the street. Probably fifty juicers. If we had to buy our house now, we wouldn’t be able to afford it. We? That mental slip again. Keeps happening.
I say, ‘Goodbye,’ under my breath. I’ve been moving boxes out of the house into my tiny apartment for the last month, tentatively, while Steve’s at work. Now it’s done, I feel elated. But my heart aches. I can’t shut it as easily as the front door. So many memories remain in that house, stored like sunlight in a jar: Annie’s ascending height marks pencilled on the bathroom wall; the baby-pink rose we planted to mark the grave of Lettuce, Annie’s rabbit; folders of tear sheets, editorial magazine work I did when starting out, well over twenty years ago, happy to be cool rather than properly paid. I’ve no storage space now. No garden either. And way too many bills to settle on my own.
A trial separation, Steve still calls it. He didn’t believe me when I first told him six weeks ago either. We were eating prawn linguine in a chippy silence. I’d been away that week, working on a countrywear catalogue shoot in the Highlands, involving lots of corduroy, shivering models and driving rain. Steve had forgotten the bin day – crime A – so we’d be stuck with the recycling for another two weeks, and the bin was stuffed full already. But really it was about something else. Other layers of rubbish built up in our marriage. (Crimes B–Z).
I watched Steve decapitate a prawn with his fingers, humming under his breath. His face – the angular dark brows, the childhood BMX scar on his chin – was so familiar it was like I couldn’t see him. ‘What have I done now?’ he said, not looking up at me.
I put down my fork. The words just tumbled out. ‘Steve, I can’t do this … us … any more.’ A moment passed. Steve blinked rapidly. He waited for me to apologize or blame my hormones. The music shuffled on to Lou Reed’s ‘Perfect Day’. Normally we’d quip about the irony. We didn’t. It felt like nothing would be funny again.
‘But I love you,’ Steve stuttered, floored. And at that moment – 8.11 p.m., 19 June – I knew he meant it, he really did, but also that he couldn’t imagine life without me, which is not quite the same. Then I thought about our eighteen-year-old daughter Annie, out in Camden celebrating finishing her last A-level exam, sweetly oblivious, and I burst into tears. What was I doing?
Love. Stability. An unbroken home. The moment Annie slid into the world, unfathomably precious, I’d promised her all of this. I didn’t mourn my lost freedoms, even though my career soon shrank like cashmere in a hot wash. I could no longer travel or work late into the night. I was exhausted. Even my feet were fat. But there was no getting around it, I was also deeply, shockingly happy, maybe for the first time in my life. My magnetic north had flipped. So, yes, I’d get motherhood right. That was all that mattered. I’d give Annie absolutely everything I had.
To this end, I’ve done my very best to forget about Lisa from HR – early thirties, balayage-blonde, spilled her negroni on my best Isabel Marant dress at Steve’s office Christmas party – and, I’m 55 per cent sure, the woman he plays doubles with at the tennis club – and other encounters I’ve sensed but not been able to prove these last few years.
If you learn as a kid how to bury painful things – for me, everything that happened in a forest long ago, the sort of questions that’ll stop my mother dead in her tracks, with a coronary grimace – you get pretty bloody good at blocking things out. And keeping secrets. Only secrets don’t go away completely, it turns out. Like moths in a wardrobe, they nibble away, hidden, before you notice the hole.
As Annie’s schooldays drew to a close earlier this summer, I felt an internal shift, one I hadn’t expected. Like a gear change on my bike, a strange freewheeling feeling, then a clunking into place. A little voice in my head started to whisper: You’re forty-six years old, if you don’t leave now, when? What sort of example are you setting for Annie anyway? She’d want you to be happy.