Best of Friends (35 page)

In the kitchen, Abby sank gratefully back into her chair. Tom had been so friendly and normal. Was it too much to hope that things could get back to the way they’d been before?

Tom got up and began to clear the table, stacking dishes in the dishwasher. Abby watched, happy to have someone else tidy up for once. He’d changed out of his work clothes and was now dressed in an old sweatshirt and jeans. Out of the shirt and tie he wore to work, he looked younger, more like the man she’d married. He worked too hard, she sighed, up late correcting, and worrying about the new extension and the school’s exam performance. They hadn’t arranged a holiday this year and the plan had been to wait until summer to see what the finances were like, and book then. Jess would need a holiday too when her Junior Cert was over. They could take a cheap fly-drive to Florida, perhaps …

Tom’s voice broke into her musings. “Abby, I’ve been thinking. When Jess has finished her exams, it would be better if I moved out.”

Abby couldn’t quite believe she’d heard him correctly. “What?” she said.

He kept stacking the dishwasher and she realised that he hadn’t been doing it to help: he’d been doing it to give him something to do while he dropped this cataclysmic news. “I’m moving out. I don’t want Jess to know yet, obviously.”

“You can’t be serious?” She was stunned.

“I am.” He snapped the dishwasher shut and turned to face her, leaning against the worktop. He hadn’t done the risotto saucepan, Abby thought wildly, then wondered why that mattered. Who cared about the saucepans now?

“What else can I do?” Tom demanded. “Sit here and let you think it’s acceptable to sleep with someone else? Play the househusband you want me to be? It’s not enough that you rub my nose in your success, I’ve got to agree to an open marriage too. I don’t want that sort of marriage, Abby.”

“Neither do I,” she cried, but he ignored her.

“Call me old-fashioned but I liked things the way they were before, and now that everything’s changed, we can’t ever move back.”

“We can,” begged Abby. “We could get counselling and you could learn to trust me again, please. Please. I’m so sorry, Tom. I never meant this to happen but we can start again. I thought we had,” she added softly.

“They might say you can start over in magazine articles, but it doesn’t work like that in real life,” he said. “Can you imagine us ever making love again without me thinking of him touching you?” He clenched his fists until the knuckles were white. “You touching him … I can’t think of anything else. It haunts me.”

Abby realised that she’d had no idea how much Tom had been hurting. She thought he’d been getting over it, that his pride had been dented as much as anything. Now she understood that she’d underestimated the effect of her thoughtless act. He was devastated by her betrayal. She felt ashamed to have imagined that he’d just come to terms with it and move on.

“Please understand, Tom, it meant nothing. It’s you I love and it’s you I’ve always loved. I was so stupid and lonely. You know we haven’t been getting on, and—”

“Oh, so it’s all my fault now, is it?” demanded Tom.

“No,” said Abby, thinking that Tom’s coldness towards her had certainly contributed to her misery, but knowing he wouldn’t see it as an excuse for her adultery. “But you weren’t exactly interested in me. I felt like your mother or your sister,” she added. “We could be brother and sister for all the excitement in our marriage.”

Tom looked as though he might explode.

“I’m not using that as an excuse,” Abby went on hurriedly. God, was she making things worse? “I was lonely, that was all. I thought having someone else flatter me would make me feel happier or younger or something, but it didn’t.” She wanted to explain it as openly as possible, hoping he’d understand.

“You wanted to feel younger and flattered?” he said incredu-lously. “Is that supposed to be an excuse? Can you picture me jumping into bed with someone else because I felt old and neglected? Is that how little you valued what we had, that you’d abandon it for such stupid reasons?” He spat the words out.

“I
do
value our marriage, please believe me,” she pleaded. “As soon as it happened, I knew it was a mistake. I hated myself for betraying you. Please listen to me, Tom!”

He didn’t answer.

“And if you go, we’ll never be able to get through it.” Abby felt the strength she’d had earlier slip away. She would plead with him, she’d do anything to stop him leaving. Didn’t he care that this would destroy Jess too? “Please, I beg you, please don’t go. Let’s try to work this out.”

“I can’t,” he said flatly. “I didn’t want to involve Jess and I thought I could deal with it, but I can’t. Like I said, Abby, I’m an old-fashioned man and when my wife sleeps with another man, my instinct is that something precious has gone and can’t be replaced. If more modern men can cope with that, then good for them. I can’t. And for the record, I never saw you as my sister, right? I thought we had a marriage; we don’t anymore.”

“But we could try and get over this … can’t we? Won’t you ever be able to forgive me?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “I wish I did. Right now, the answer is no. I don’t want to talk about it anymore. We don’t want Jess to find out now: she needs to concentrate. But you had to know. I didn’t want you to think that everything was all right because we shared one meal together.”

He left the room abruptly. Shell-shocked, Abby sat and stared into space.

She didn’t know how long she sat there blankly. It was only the phone ringing that broke through her catatonic state.

“Abby, sorry to call so late,” said Katya, her assistant, breathlessly. “The kids were sick and I totally forgot to tell you that
House Today
rang me earlier. They want to do a big interview with you for the cover of the magazine, to coincide with the new series. They like to work well in advance, so if we do it now, it’ll be on the cover of the September issue, which comes out at the end of August. Imagine! They want to photograph you at home because they’ve heard you’ve got this terrific house. I said we’d get back to them because we don’t want to seem too eager, but, Abby, it’s fabulous!”

“Yes, great,” said Abby, on automatic pilot.

“Now ideally they’d like Tom and Jess too, but I said you didn’t involve your family in photos and they understand that. I mean, you have to have some privacy, don’t you?”

“Of course,” murmured Abby, wondering how she was going to manage the interview. How could she talk blatantly about her happy marriage and how her family came first when her husband wanted to move out? She couldn’t. It would be hypocritical.

“They’d like to do the shoot on Thursday or Friday of this week if possible. How does that sound?”

Abby thought about it. If she could save her marriage, keep Jess from finding out how close her parents had come to splitting up and erase the pinched, thin look from her own face by Thursday, then that would be fine. Otherwise, it would make the sorriest cover story
House Today
had ever seen.

“I’m a bit tied up this week,” she fudged. “Jess is doing her exams. Can you check if they’ll consider waiting for a couple of weeks?” It was the only excuse she could come up with.

“OK,” said Katya cheerily. “I’ll phone them tomorrow and see. Bye.”

Abby looked at her watch. It was half seven. Where had the time gone? She washed the risotto saucepan and left it on the drainer. Then she pulled a cardigan over her shoulders and wandered out into the garden. It was such a lovely evening, she thought as she walked, deadheading a rose here and there, admiring the peonies in their full-bodied pink beauty. She stooped to touch one, thinking that they were strangely old-fashioned flowers. Who’d planted them here?

Before she and Tom had bought it, Lyonnais had been owned by a developer who’d had great plans for knocking the old house down and building an apartment block in its stead. He hadn’t got planning permission and had sold the house on to the Bartons. But before him, who’d owned it then? Who’d lovingly planted the peonies and tended the high-walled herb bed where rosemary towered over clumps of thyme? Who’d searched out the armless stone goddess that peeped out coyly from behind the ivy? Had a happy family lived here and laughed here, growing up and old together?

The wonderful garden had always calmed Abby, but of late she hadn’t felt any comfort when she looked out at it. There had been too much going on in her life, too much anxiety. The garden represented her hopes and dreams when she, Tom and Jess had moved in. She’d imagined happy barbecues on the terrace, lazy sunny days spent on a lounger with a book in her hand and her family around her. Nine months ago, Lyonnais had symbolised a glittering new life for the whole family, but now it seemed as if those dreams were a thing of the past, and looking at the garden only highlighted the loss. If she and Tom divorced, this house and the garden would have to go. Another casualty of her stupidity.

Yet this evening, strangely enough, and despite the awareness that she might soon have to consider selling it, the calming quality of Lyonnais worked its magic. As Abby walked in the evening light, she felt the bizarre peace of having had the worst finally happen. Tom wanted to leave her. She was no longer scared out of her mind that he would. The fear had become reality. It was a nightmare, but somehow she would just have to cope.

She picked a piece of lemon balm and crushed it between her fingers, releasing the heady scent. Life would go on. She and Tom would separate. She would have to deal with it. This garden had, she guessed, certainly seen life’s ups and downs: births, deaths, marriages, arguments, love and the death of love. Still the flowers bloomed and the herbs sent their fragrance into the evening. The cycle of life went on. Abby dropped the crushed leaf to the ground and went back inside.

eighteen

D
unmore experienced the hottest June on record. People who’d planned continental holidays began to regret not staying at home because the temperature hit the eighties every day. Proud gardeners watched glumly as their cherished lawns turned dry and scorched under a hosepipe ban, and the local garden centre sold out of parasols. People with children bought paddling pools and sat with their own feet in the cool water, while the electrical shop in the square had a run on electric fans. The Italian family who owned both an ice-cream parlour and a pastel-pink and blue ice-cream van made a fortune, enough to send the whole family to Florida for a month at the end of the summer.

Tom Barton, tied up with the school building works, found that he didn’t have much time to look for a place of his own to rent. He viewed a couple of flats and a minuscule town house in Dunmore, but there was nothing he liked within his price range. Abby, who was working hard shooting the remaining seven
Declutter
shows with Mitzi and Linzi, and organising the hour-long talk she was giving at the Ideal House exhibition, was relieved when he did not leave Lyonnais as quickly as he had indicated.

Jess, having finished her exams and broken up from school for the summer, helped Delia with the Richardson boys, for which Steve insisted on paying her, and she also found a couple of evening babysitting jobs, so that, together with an advance on her birthday money from her mother, she saved up enough to buy a new mountain bike. A sleek metallic blue and grey, it could climb hills effortlessly and meant she didn’t have to bother getting the bus on the days she helped out at the animal refuge.

She could also cycle to Oliver’s house on the other side of Dunmore, although she didn’t tell her parents about that. Oliver was her secret. They were just friends, really, she told herself, so it was nobody’s business.

Never mind that Oliver had kissed her. That had been incredible and not at all like she’d imagined; it had felt right, and somehow she’d known what to do. They held hands a lot too.

Because Oliver was working with his dad in the family’s market garden business, and because Mum was so nosy and wanted to know where Jess was every single second of the day, they didn’t have that much time together. But when they did see each other, Jess, despite the trouble at home and her sadness at Sally’s illness, felt happier than she had for a long time. Oliver liked her—no tits, train tracks, glasses and all.

At the end of the first week in June, Erin and Greg moved out of Cat Pee Towers and into their new apartment, where they felt immediately at home. They decided to leave the walls as they were painted until they knew what colours would suit, and Erin found she loved the peace of clean white after the hectic shades of the rented house. The only room they changed was the nursery, and they had great fun looking at wallpapers and borders featuring teddy bears, shy rabbits and loud cartoon characters. Erin veered between wanting and not wanting to know whether the baby was a boy or a girl. The knowledge would be handy when it came to decorating the nursery, she pointed out, but on the other hand it would be a wonderful surprise to find out when she gave birth. Greg, who was daily delighted by how her belly was swelling, said he’d prefer to wait and why didn’t they decorate the room yellow? They could always add pink or blue curtains and blankets afterwards.

The one thing Erin hadn’t tackled was the search for her family. There was so much to think about, what with the move and her pregnancy, that it was easy to procrastinate.

Lizzie Shanahan got a stern letter from the bank about her overdraft and realised that she’d have to earn some more money somehow or she’d be in deep financial trouble. The cost of Debra’s wedding was spiralling, and Lizzie was too proud to admit to Myles that she was struggling to pay her part of it. She scanned the jobs notices in the papers, but found nothing she was qualified for that would earn her any more money than she did already. Besides, she loved working in the surgery and it would break her heart to leave. Then, a tiny box ad caught her eye, telling her she could make a fortune selling beauty products at house parties. That was something she could do in the evenings after her day job.