7
It’s the day before Valentine’s Day and Cate is in her local shopping centre looking for a card for Roan. She won’t get him anything romantic. Indeed, there have been at least a dozen years over the preceding thirty when she hasn’t got him a card at all. Valentine’s isn’t really their scene. But something about the fact that they’ve made it to another Valentine’s Day, still intact in spite of everything that happened last year, makes her think that a card might be in order.
She picks up a card that has a drawing on the front of two stick figures, holding hands. The wording above their heads says: ‘Yay! We still like each other!’
She puts it back on the shelf as though it has scalded her.
She is not sure that she and Roan do.
Eventually she picks up a card that simply says ‘I Love You Lots’, with a big red heart. This is true. She does still love him. The love part is simple; it’s everything else that’s complicated.
It was this time, a year ago, Cate recalls, that she and Roan had nearly split up. It was just before the half-term. They’d thought that they might have to cancel a seven-thousand-pound holiday, that’s how bad it had been.
It was her fault.
All of it.
She’d thought Roan was having an affair. No, not thought, believed, with every fibre of her being, with no element of doubt, without having ever seen Roan with another woman, without having found texts from him to another woman, without having seen so much as a smudge of lipstick on a collar. She’d gone completely mad for a while.
For six months Cate had obsessively infiltrated all her husband’s most private spaces: his email account, his text messages, his WhatsApp, his photos, even his work documents. She’d pored over the terrible details of a psychologically scarred but very beautiful young girl, looking for something to back up her belief that Roan was having sex with her, shamelessly breaching the privacy of a child who’d thought that everything she’d said to her psychologist was shared in the strictest confidence.
Roan had found out what she’d been doing in early February. Or, rather, she’d had to confess to what she’d been doing after he came home from work and told her that he thought his new assistant had been going through his patients’ private records and even his email and his phone and that he was monitoring her and was prepared to report her if necessary.
She’d panicked at the thought of an official investigation and said, ‘It’s me. It’s me. It’s me,’ and started crying and tried to explain but made no sense, no sense at all because back then, for a few months, she’d been utterly, utterly mad.
She’d hoped for his arms around her after her confession, for his low, reassuring voice in her ear saying it’s OK, it’s OK, I understand, I forgive you, it’s fine.
Instead he’d looked at her and said, ‘That is about the lowest thing I’ve ever heard of in my life.’
Of course he had not been having an affair. He had just been working late, stressed, dealing with unimaginable horrors on a day-to-day basis, dealing with a new assistant who was not up to scratch, with a sick father. He’d also been trying to get fit by taking up jogging on an ad hoc basis, and constantly frustrated that there was never enough time to get into a routine. He was just, as he’d said, struggling, struggling with it all. And there she’d been, idiot that she was, snuffling like a pig through his private affairs, breaching his professional security, endangering his job, imagining the very worst of him, the very worst.
‘Why on earth’, he’d said, looking at her imploringly, disbelievingly, ‘would I be having an affair?’
Such a simple question. She’d paused and taken a moment to think about it. Why would he be having an affair?
‘Because I’m old,’ she’d said eventually.
‘I’m old too.’
‘Yes, but you’re a man. You don’t have a sell-by date.’
‘Cate,’ he’d replied. ‘Neither do you. Not to me. You and me, for God’s sake. We don’t have sell-by dates. We’re us. We’re just … us.’
He’d moved out for a few days after that. It had been her idea. She needed to clear her head. When he came back, he’d said, ‘I feel like we’ve lost our thread. Like we were in the zone and now we’re out of the zone and I don’t know how to get back into it again.’
And she’d said, ‘I feel the same way.’
There’d followed a few days of existential drama and angst and many discussions about the cancellation of the extremely expensive skiing holiday and how the children might take it and looking at insurance policies (there was no special clause for ‘unexpected marital discord’). Then two days before they were due to fly, they’d shared a bottle of wine and had sex and decided just to go on the holiday and see if it fixed them.
And it had, to a certain extent. The kids had been on good form, full of laughter, the sun had shone all day, every day, and the hotel they’d chosen had been jolly and full of nice people. They’d returned home a week later and both decided, subliminally and without further discussion, just to get on with it and forget that it had ever happened.
But still, it had. She had crossed lines and boundaries, she’d broken the trust between them and even now she still feels like a lesser person. Being a mother had given her so much command over the moral high ground, but in six crazy months she’d ceded her position entirely and to this day she still flinches under Roan’s gaze, scared that he’ll see through her façade to the insecure, pathetic core of her. She feels safer now when he doesn’t look at her, when he doesn’t see her. Because if he can’t see her then he can’t hate her. And he hates her. She knows he does.
Saffyre, that was the name of the patient whose private records she’d read through. Saffyre Maddox. She was fifteen years old at the time and had been self-harming since the age of ten.
One day during the madness of last winter, Cate had actually gone to Saffyre’s school and watched her through the railings. There she was, the girl Cate had been so sure was having an affair with her husband: tall, lean, flat-chested, her dark curls pulled back into a bun, her hands in the pockets of her black blazer, pale green eyes scanning the playground, almost regal. Not at all what Cate had expected. She’d watched as a boy approached the girl, playfully trying to engage her in some kind of banter. She’d seen Saffyre’s eyes drift over his shoulder and then she’d watched the boy fade away, go back to his friends, his good-natured demeanour that of someone who hadn’t expected much more than he’d got.
Then two girls had walked towards Saffyre and the three of them had fallen into step together, heading back to the school building.
Saffyre hadn’t looked like a girl who cut herself with unfurled paperclips. She’d looked like the Queen Bee.
The last time Cate saw Saffyre was a couple of months after they’d moved to the flat in Hampstead. She’d been walking down the Finchley Road with an older man and she’d been pulling a nylon shopping trolley behind her.
Cate had followed them for a while, her heart racing lightly with fear of being caught. The older man had a pronounced limp, and Saffyre stopped every moment or so to allow him to catch up with her before they both turned into an estate at the Swiss Cottage end of the Finchley Road and disappeared through aluminium doors at the bottom of a tower block.