As the door closed behind them, Cate stopped and caught her breath, suddenly aware of what she was doing. She’d turned quickly and headed home at a brisk pace trying to purge the wrongness from her psyche.
8
Roan passes Cate a red envelope across the table the following morning with a shy smile. ‘Don’t worry if you haven’t,’ he says. ‘It was just a … you know …’
She smiles and takes her own red envelope from her handbag and hands it to him. ‘Go us,’ she says lightly.
They open their envelopes in tandem, slightly awkwardly. Roan’s card to Cate is a Banksy. It’s a Band-Aid-covered red heart balloon from a wall in Brooklyn in New York. It’s beyond apt.
She opens the card.
There in his loose scrawl are the words: ‘Are you ready to take off the plasters yet?’
She glances at him across the table. A small laugh escapes her mouth. Her stomach knots and unknots pleasantly. She says, ‘Are you?’
He drops his head into his chest and then lifts it again. He’s smiling. ‘Totally,’ he says. ‘I have been for a long time. I just …’ He glances down at the card she’s just given him, with its bland inscription: ‘To my lovely husband, Happy V Day! Love, C x’. ‘I’ve been waiting,’ he says.
She nods. She’s confused for a moment about who exactly has been wearing plasters on their hearts, about who’s been healing and who’s been waiting. She’d thought it was the other way around. That she’d hurt him.
‘Shall we go for a drink tonight?’ he suggests. ‘Somewhere a bit shit maybe? Everything else’ll be fully booked.’
‘Yes,’ she says. ‘Leave it with me. I’ll think of somewhere a bit shit.’
After Roan leaves, Cate opens her laptop and starts work. She’s slightly unnerved by the interaction with her husband. Everything has felt so off-kilter since they moved here. Even her marital disharmony has changed somehow, shifted along a little to a place that she doesn’t quite recognise. She almost misses how straightforward it had felt in the months after her confession to Roan. Roan good. Cate bad.
But since moving to Hampstead she’s not so sure any more. Roan’s behaviour had been strange. For months. He had come home late and been distracted and impatient with her and the children. He had cancelled family plans at short notice, often without a reasonable explanation. He had taken whispered calls on his mobile phone behind locked doors and out on the street. There’d been something. Definitely. Something.
She picks up his card again, reads the words again. It’s virtually an admission that she had reason to be hurt too. But by what? By his harsh response to her behaviour? Or by something else? She closes the card and puts it upright on the table. As she works, her eye keeps being drawn back to it.
She’s too unfocused to work so she flicks screens to her browser and types in ‘pubs near me’. As she scrolls through, she’s aware of the clatter of the letterbox in the communal front door, the thump of mail hitting the doormat. She jumps to her feet, glad of the distraction, and goes to the hallway to collect the post. She removes the letters for the other residents of the house and takes her pile through to the flat. Most of them sport large white postal redirection stickers, obscuring their address in Kilburn. But one is handwritten and addressed directly to Roan, at this address.
She stares at it for a moment. The handwriting is feminine, the postcode is incomplete and the contents are stiff, clearly a card of some kind. It could be anything, she theorises: a money-off invitation from the local dry cleaner’s, some fancy window cleaner’s business card. Anything.
She leaves it on top of the pile on the kitchen table and goes back to her internet search for local pubs.
A message arrives on her phone. It’s from Georgia.
MUM. As if she was calling to her from down the hallway.
She sighs and replies. Yes.
Can you bring my form for the Geography trip? Like, now.
Cate rolls her eyes. Where is it?
Don’t know. Somewhere in kitchen.
Cate scours the kitchen, fans through piles of her own paperwork, finally finds it in the recycling bin. She smooths it out and replies to Georgia. FFS. Got it. I’ll bring it in now.
In truth she’s glad of the excuse to get out of the flat. It’s sunny out and she can pop to the shops on her way back. Plus she always gets a little thrill going through the door of her children’s secondary school, infiltrating the mysterious world they inhabit for eight hours a day.
She passes the tower block on her way to school, the block she’d seen Saffyre entering all those months ago, pulling the wheeled shopper behind her. She slows for a moment and gazes up. The sunlight glitters off the windows, reaching high up into the sky. She thinks again about the card that arrived this morning, the feminine cursive addressed to Roan, and she can feel it bubbling to the surface once more, the itchy, discomfiting feeling that had plagued her into doing the unthinkable things she’d done a year ago.
Quickly, she picks up her pace and carries on briskly towards the burgundy-clad walls of her children’s school where she’s buzzed in by a young woman behind a desk who smiles encouragingly at her as though Cate might be about to ask her something awkward.
‘For a student,’ she says, passing her the folded paper. ‘Georgia Fours in Eleven G.’
‘Oh, lovely, thank you. I’ll make sure she gets it.’
Cate’s eyes scan the foyer, searching out a hint of a child she recognises, a little something to take away with her. But it’s lesson time and there are no children around. She heads back out on to the street and breathes in deeply. She’s conscious of her heart beating a little too fast. She’s aware of everything feeling heightened and highly tuned as though there’s a frequency in the air that she’s only just become aware of.
In the supermarket she picks up avocados for Georgia, chicken goujons and a baguette for Josh, a litre of apple and mango juice that will be gone within thirty seconds of the children getting home from school. She picks up stock cubes and salt in a rare moment of remembering to get stock cubes and salt. She picks up butter and milk and a box of chocolate-covered honeycomb and pays using the self-service check out. There’s no one behind her in the queue so she scans slowly and calmly, her eyes going to the taxi rank outside; the same drivers are here every day, milling together on the pavement, a social scene of sorts. Then her gaze passes beyond the taxi drivers, towards the entrance to the Tube station where she sees a familiar figure heading inside. Tall, slim, a smooth dome of bare skull, a bag slung diagonally across his body, a pronounced ball-of-the-foot bounce in each step.
Roan, she says quietly, under her breath.
There’s her husband. In the shadowy secret moments of his life. It’s similar to the feeling of being in her children’s school. She pulls out her phone and calls him. It rings ten times and then cuts off. For some reason she pictures him pulling his phone from his pocket, seeing her name and putting it back in his pocket.
It’s midday. As far as she’s aware he doesn’t undertake out-of-clinic appointments. Maybe he’s meeting someone somewhere for lunch?
The fact that it is Valentine’s Day passes fleetingly through her mind and she finds herself picturing Roan in a trendy Soho restaurant, a single red rose on the table, a waiter pouring champagne into a flute for the beautiful young woman sitting opposite him.