she pictured him rubbing his face. ‘Els, I don’t want to argue. I just wanted some time to myself.’
She laughed. ‘Time to yourself?’
‘We’ve been over this before. Time at work doesn’t count as time to myself. You get your Fridays – what do I get?’
She’d wanted to ask what was so wrong with time with her – or point out how nice it would have been to wake up together for a change, instead of him going downstairs to find her half asleep and drooling on the sofa – but Noah’s demands for his breakfast had reached a level only dogs could hear, and she could hear Toby banging around in the kitchen and could only imagine the mess he was making getting the milk into his cereal.
‘Okay, have a good day at work, babe. Love you.’
This was all Karen’s fault. If she hadn’t mentioned seeing Adam with that girl, Eleanor would never have spent the rest of the day wondering if her husband had really been at the gym, or thinking about all the ways she could find out if he’d been telling the truth, ranging from calling the gym to say he’d lost his pass and had it been used recently (risky – they’d issue a new one and probably mention it to him) to pretending to be a police officer and asking to see their security cameras (she realised they weren’t fantastic ideas). The old Eleanor of just a week ago would never have moved practically everything in the house under the guise of cleaning to look for evidence of his affair, and she definitely wouldn’t have spent forty minutes on Google looking up phone-tracking software – just in case. She had to forget what Karen thought she’d seen and concentrate on not screwing up her marriage.
She could tell that Adam had been expecting an argument when he walked in that evening, but Eleanor had been too tired – and too scared of where it might lead – to oblige. The last thing she wanted to do was ask him outright if he was having an affair. What if he admitted it? Everything in their lives would be turned on its head, and she’d be forced to decide what to do about it. She didn’t feel ready for that tonight, perhaps not ever. And yet was she really the type of person to ignore her husband’s affair? Those women were weak, spineless, devoid of any character or backbone. Eleanor had never been like that. She abhorred people who lied and cheated; if you treated the person you were supposed to love that way, then what kind of person were you? Whenever she’d talked with her friends about cheating partners, she’d been the first to assert her opinion on the subject – if Adam ever cheated on her, he’d be gone. She felt almost embarrassed by that woman now; she’d known nothing of real life and of a marriage under strain. And suddenly life wasn’t so black and white.
They bathed the children and put them to bed with barely a word between them. As Eleanor left Noah’s nursery, she paused by the door of her elder son’s room and listened to father and son talking about Toby’s day at school. How had it been so easy with Toby and yet so hard with Noah? True, there were differences in their situation, but if anything their bond after Noah was born should have been stronger than before. Now they had a child who was both of theirs, something they shared together, without secrets and lies. This should have been simple.
The street outside was silent save for the occasional car pulling in and parking up at one of the other houses. Adam seemed more relaxed now that no row had been forthcoming, yet Eleanor felt him stiffen at a noise from outside the window.
‘What is it?’ she asked, sitting up. Adam’s eyes didn’t leave the TV.
‘What’s what?’
‘You heard something outside. It was in the bushes; I heard it too.’
Adam leaned over and pulled the curtain aside an inch, peered out into the darkness. ‘No one there. Probably a bird.’
‘It wasn’t a bloody bird. Aren’t you going to go and look?’
He pulled a face. ‘Go and look at someone walking past the house? What’s wrong with you?’
The words stung like a slap to the face. Not What’s wrong? but What’s wrong with you? As though all their problems could be traced back in a Freudian flowchart to the lunatic mother rather