Blackwater - By Conn Iggulden Page 0,10
lips pressed tightly together so that all the blood and colour had gone out of them. I’d never seen her so shaken and, ridiculously, I found it cheering, so that I almost bounced up those stairs to bed. Before she had the shower running, I was asleep.
CHAPTER FOUR
OF COURSE, SEEING ME sitting there with a bloody nose put Carol in a difficult position. The truth is a strange thing, in case you’ve never been forced to contemplate its twists and turns. It doesn’t matter how bad something is. If you don’t admit what’s going on, if you don’t say it aloud, it can be forgotten. It can be managed. It can be ignored. I remember the first time I heard someone joke about ‘the elephant in the room’. They meant something that everyone tried to ignore, but who could ignore an elephant? You can take it from me that after a while you hang your clothes on the trunk like he was part of the furniture. You can get used to anything, and as long as you don’t actually die, all pain goes. All pain goes. Think of that the next time you think you can’t stand it. Think of me. If you don’t ask about Bobby Penrith, it’s always an accident. Even if you know, you just don’t force the words out into the open.
You’ll appreciate that Carol could hardly wake me up, throw her arms around me and announce that her affair with Denis Tanter was at an end. It was the thing we never mentioned any more, after all. The fact that she rested her head on my pillow was meant to be something I didn’t question.
Perhaps because I could feel a tooth wobble when I woke, I just wasn’t in a good mood. It must have been twenty years since I last found myself wiggling a loose tooth with my tongue, and it didn’t improve my temper. She’d brought it into our kitchen. The old rules were useless until Denis Tanter was out of our lives.
Like it or not, certain things had to be said, no matter how much I hated to do it. I washed myself carefully, looking at the bruises in the long bathroom mirror. I was not a sight to inspire confidence. Even though I felt angry, I looked afraid. Worst of all was the fact that she didn’t come back all through the afternoon.
I started thinking she had confronted Denis and tempers had flared. My imagination went a little peculiar for a while. I rang her work because I had to ring someone and ask where she was, though I hated doing it. Every time, I could see their little sly grin on the other end. I was the husband who couldn’t find his wife. Have you ever noticed you can hear someone smile on a phone? If you say the same words twice, but smile the second time, you can hear the difference. When you’re asking where your wife is, you don’t want to hear that change. It starts the brain working fast enough to hurt.
Carol had taken the afternoon off, and there was something in the girl’s tone that enjoyed the fact that I didn’t know. I had to work to keep my voice level and steady as I put the phone back in its cradle, gripping it hard enough to make my hand shake. As I put it down, it rang, making me jump.
I could hear Carol breathing, fast and shallow.
‘I told Denis Tanter to leave us alone,’ she said, without even a hello. ‘He’s gone.’
‘What about you, though?’ I replied, shoving the phone against my ear as if I could press her closer on the other end of the line.
‘I need a few days away, Davey. Work is all over me and I just need a break, a chance to take a breath.’
‘Where will you go?’ I asked, knowing she wouldn’t tell me. It didn’t matter. What mattered was that Denis bloody Tanter had lost her and I was filled with a savage joy. I could hear the weariness in her voice. If she had been going to him, she would have had that brittle excitement that marked the beginning of all her affairs. To leave ‘us’ alone, she’d said. There were times when I did love her, no matter what else I felt. I pressed the phone so hard against the side of my head that it began to hurt.
‘I just need a few days away from