His response was slow in coming. ‘I’d like to go back to then too, when I was three stone lighter and you were fun – remember fun? When I had the energy for great sex, and you had the inclination. And when you were much nicer to me too.’
‘I am nice to you!’
He scratched his chest. ‘You are, but that’s the issue, I guess, love. You’re nice to me in the way you are to anyone else, but you used to be . . . you used to be . . .’ He looked up and his mouth moved, but no words came. ‘I don’t know.’
‘I used to be what?’ On some level she wanted to hear it, like expelling a splinter or spitting out poison.
‘I don’t know what the word is, Bess. I don’t know how to describe it.’ He shook his head. ‘What I do know is I haven’t time to sit down and analyse it right now – time and my foreman wait for no man, as the saying goes.’ He laughed drily.
She watched him leave the room and remembered her husband, when the gold band on her finger had been shiny and loose, crawling up under the duvet, kissing her foot, her leg, mad for her and so in love, like she filled him up, like she was enough. She swallowed the lump in her throat, knowing she had felt that way too. It had been enough. But they had started married life as a couple heading out hand in hand on a great adventure, joint captains at the prow of their ship – now it was as if they were tethered, but slightly adrift, bobbing on a vast, endless ocean without direction and on a lilo that was slowly deflating. And the hiss of escaping air filled the quiet moments when words were wanting.
It was impossible not to think of Jake and Daniel, intoxicated with the first flush of love and all the expectations of the newly wed. Their faces had split with joy as she and Mario waved them off on their honeymoon only a week ago. Their wedding had been a hastily organised and intimate affair at the local registry office, followed by a party for their nearest and dearest, here in their modest home in St Albans, where they had drunk Prosecco and danced barefoot on the kitchen floor until the sun came up.
And of course she was happy that Jake was happy, but how she wished she could go back to when Natalie lived in her pink-themed bedroom, running home from school to fret over homework or boys and Jake lived in his own pink-themed bedroom, running home from school to fret over homework or boys. How she had loved sleeping with her children just along the hallway, calling out when they needed her. And the four of them, sitting at the kitchen table, passing the ketchup, laughing over silliness and feeling in those moments like they were safe behind their front door, where just being together meant they kept the real world at bay. It was all she had ever wanted, a life she loved.
It was as if, when the kids were young and at home, she had recreated the happy home of her childhood with Philip and her parents around their breakfast table, her mum fussing, her dad going along with it all and with love – deep, unshakeable love – as their glue. But now Jake was a married man and Natalie a busy woman and they had homes of their own, which were slick, grey, glossy and uncluttered. Homes where she had no hand in the decor and no say in bedtimes or what food was put on the table.
Chutney jumped from the mattress and followed Mario into the bathroom along the hall. Bess, like Chutney, had no choice other than to listen to him pee. She sat up, swallowing the bitter tang of nastiness on her tongue, caused by teeth that needed cleaning and, she suspected, not helped by the crumbling molar at the back of her mouth on the right.
The sound of Mario’s footsteps now going down the stairs and the pit-a-pat of Chutney following drew her from her thoughts. She took her time, swinging her legs over the side of the bed and reaching for the pink fleece dressing gown that her daughter had put into the charity box a year or so ago. Bess, having retrieved it, had been wearing it ever since. It might have been the summer, but she liked the snug feeling of the soft fleece on her skin.
The bathroom floor was pleasantly cool under her feet. Staring at the bowl of the toilet, she wondered how it could be so hard for Mario to remember to pull the chain. When confronted, he said it was environmentally preferable and that there was no need to unnecessarily waste water.
‘What a load of old bollocks!’
She touched her fingertips to the thin wisps of straggly hair that constituted her eyebrows. Daily, she stared at the high arches and wished she had never plucked them, especially now that full, youthful brows were all the rage – whatever had she been thinking?
‘You look old, Bess,’ she whispered, pulling her skin this way and that, watching it bag and sag beneath her touch and patting the small pouch under her chin. It was rare for her to study her face in this way, preferring not to be reminded of how she looked.
‘You coming down, Bess?’ Mario yelled from the kitchen.
‘Yep. Coming.’ Bess pulled her hair into a scrunchie and went downstairs, hoping coffee might lift her mood.
Mario stood by the kitchen sink, beaming. He pointed to a large cellophane-wrapped orchid that stood proudly in a fuchsia-coloured pot on the draining board.
‘Happy birthday, love.’
‘Ah, thank you. I didn’t know if you’d remembered.’ She walked forward and kissed him quickly on the cheek, feeling the graze of whiskers beneath her lips.
‘Of course I remembered!’ He pointed again at the plant.
‘That’s . . . that’s lovely. Pretty.’
‘I got you a card, a really, really nice one, but I’ve lost it.’ He shook his head.
From anyone else, she might think of this as a poor excuse for not having bothered, but for Mario, who daily lost his car keys, a shoe, his glasses, the newspaper . . . she knew it was most likely to be genuine and that the card would be stashed somewhere safe and unpredictable, like in the fridge, on a shelf in the garage or in the space by the side of the telly where old magazines liked to gather.
‘It’s got a duck on the front.’
‘Oh! A duck?’
‘Yes, Bess. A duck.’
‘No doubt it’ll turn up.’ With a duck on the front. She didn’t confess to feeling a little indifferent as to whether it surfaced or not, picturing something garish, cartoon-like and very, very yellow.
Her phone buzzed with a text alert.
HAPPY BIRTHDAY MUM! LOVE YOU! SEE YOU LATER X
‘Ah, it’s from Nat, bless her.’ She put the phone face down on the tiled countertop and opened the back door. Chutney popped his head out into the sunny morning and looked back at her as if to say, Do I have to? ‘Go on, Chuts, go and have your wee and then I’ll get your breakfast.’ He waddled out reluctantly.
‘I love the way you think he knows what you’re saying.’ Mario grabbed the ham sandwiches he’d made the night before from the fridge and put them in his red plastic lunch box, as he always did. It meant he didn’t have to leave the building site to grab lunch and could get more hours in each day. He worked hard, always with one eye on his monthly bonus.
‘Actually, he knows exactly what I’m saying! He talks to me properly when we’re on our own.’
‘Is that right? So what does he have to say?’ he asked, with the twitch of a smile about his mouth that she fixed on, knowing what he was thinking: This is more like it . . . the old Bess . . . the funny Bess . . . He clearly missed her; what he failed to grasp was that she missed her too.