really made an effort with Phoebe, laying down the law, what he expected of her, how he hoped to see her behaviour change, but also taking her out on her own, praising every little thing she did: ‘Your hair looks nice today/I like the music you were playing/would you like me to drop you off at the cinema?’
I, on the other hand, was staggering along, narrowly meeting my work deadlines, numb to all the barbed comments and insults Phoebe tossed my way. I no longer had the energy to remonstrate or to investigate where she might be compared with where she said she’d be. It was as much as I could do to manage not to run out of milk, toss some carrots and broccoli onto our plates and not rampage through the rooms sweeping every bit of wedding Waterford to the floor.
Throughout the last half of November when it was already getting dark and I knew I had only an hour to get my work done before the kids came home, my heart was so heavy that it wouldn’t have taken much for me to jump into the car and drive. I imagined headlines in the newspapers: Middle-aged Mum Disappears Without Trace. Sometimes I’d even take it as far as fantasising about what eccentric trail I could leave behind to make me more interesting than the stupid woman whose best friend had tricked her into becoming a mother to her husband’s son. Perhaps I could leave a note: Don’t bother looking for me. I’ve taken the pinking shears, the onion storage jar and *something* from the garage. I imagined turning up as a mysterious stranger in the Outer Hebrides, living in an isolated house on the edge of the cliffs, before remembering that when Patrick was away for work, the clematis flapping against the bedroom window had me leaping out of bed with my finger poised over 999.
For now, Patrick and I were existing like guests in a B&B, raising our eyebrows at each other in acknowledgement but avoiding any meaningful conversation. At night, we’d lay in bed, tension humming in the space between us. Occasionally I’d blurt out a ‘Had any thoughts about when or what you’re going to tell Victor and Phoebe?’ No matter how I tried to get the tone neutral, enquiring rather than accusatory, I couldn’t.
Patrick would sigh and mutter something like, ‘I don’t know yet. I can’t talk about this now, I’ve got a busy day tomorrow.’
And mostly, I’d limit myself to a sarcastic ‘Haven’t we all?’ but once or twice I’d pushed. ‘When will you be ready to face it? Or are we just going to be living in limbo waiting to see when the big man decides to own up to his mistakes?’
Patrick would either go really quiet and respond with a deflated, ‘I don’t know what you want me to say’ or his anger would escalate with mine, both of us hauling each other further up the ladder of spiteful blame. We hissed about cowardice, hypocrisy and any number of things that seemed a million miles from slipping my hand into his on our wedding day and feeling the ground steady under my feet. For several days after each brutal run-in, the bruise of raw emotion ached around us, another withdrawal from our stability bank, the creeping recognition that this wasn’t a spat about who’d loaded the dishwasher wrongly, who’d left the milk out, who’d put a red sock in with the whites. This was an issue that could sink us, and like Venice in November, we were running out of options to resist the rising water.
Some afternoons I’d ignore the emails chasing me for my upbeat prose on the latest eye cream and get out my old photos, as though those blurry pics of the four flatmates serving up great vats of chilli con carne would somehow shed a light on how we’d got from there to here. I’d always banged on about how the photos we had before digital cameras were so much more honest than everything we saw now: photoshopped, filtered, fiddled about with, inspected for double chins, half-closed eyes, the best angle. But now, I saw lies everywhere. Was Ginny doing the conga around our kitchen table with her hands on Patrick’s waist an excuse to hold onto him? Was he staring into her eyes in that photo of him cracking the champagne when she got promoted?
The album that nearly finished me off though was the one