Everything and Nothing (13 page)

The baby started to cry and so Margo picked her up and began to feed her. Ruth remembered the feeling and it surprised her with an internal tug. ‘No, I don’t believe we have. It’s been tough, but most things that are worth achieving are tough, don’t you find?’

‘Tough how?’

‘Oh, you know, renovating a house this size is a nightmare. And then starting a business has so little to do with what you’re making and so much to do with banks and loans and scary men telling you you’re mad.’ Margo laughed and Ruth realised she was being conned again.

Ruth looked at her notes. She could write this article with her eyes closed. She probably didn’t even need to interview Margo. ‘So how did you come up with the idea for the soap then?’

And there you had it. Give up, give in, get back onto dry land. Ruth sat back and let Margo educate her on the finer details of plant condensing and sustainable packaging.

By the end of an hour Ruth was desperate to leave, but she was also dreading seeing Christian, so it was a nice surprise to see him laughing with Charlie as she left the house. She didn’t let her guard down though as you could never tell with Christian, his moods could flick like a light switch so she wasn’t sure exactly what she was in for as they drove out of the farm. But his smile stayed in place.

‘God that was classic,’ said Christian.

‘Classic how?’ Ruth was rooting in her bag for Hal’s bottle as she spoke.

‘I don’t know what Margo told you, but her husband is one fucked-up man. He hates her.’

‘Don’t be ridiculous.’

‘I’m not, I swear I’m telling you the truth. It was hilarious. He’s got fags and whisky hidden all over that farm. He’s angry as hell.’

‘Angry at what?’ Betty was kicking the back of Ruth’s seat.

‘At her self-satisfied crap, most likely.’

‘You didn’t even talk to her.’

‘I didn’t have to. Christ, she looked vile.’

Ruth knew this was a moment in which she could agree with her husband, they could have a good laugh and that would be that. But that was never that with them. Something about his judgemental attitude or maybe his pleasure at someone else’s distress caught at her. ‘She wasn’t that bad. God, at least she’s having a go at making it better.’

Christian snorted. ‘At making what better?’

‘Life.’

‘You do know that her father bought them that farm, don’t you? She’s loaded. She made him give up his job and jack it all in to live on a farm and make shit soaps that will never make any money.’

‘You talk as if he’s got no free will. He could have said no.’

‘No, he couldn’t. You know what it’s like.’

Ruth turned to look at her husband’s strong profi le. ‘What are you saying? That all you poor men have to do everything to keep us women happy because we’re all so deranged?’

‘No, Ruth. I was talking about Charlie and Margo. He said they went on holiday a few years ago and she cried every day and refused to get out of bed until he agreed to leave London with her.’

‘So you think it would have been better for them to stay in London, working hard, never seeing their kids?’

‘Not necessarily, but I don’t think they have to go and play at being the perfect Swiss Family Robinson when they obviously aren’t.’

‘Unlike us.’ Ruth could hear the pitch of her voice rising like a scale. Christian, she realised, was sure that he had heard the right story. More than sure; he hadn’t even questioned it. Ruth on the other hand was always painfully aware of what was going on behind the words. She sometimes conducted entire conversations feeling like a puppet talking to another puppet, imagining what the other person was really thinking about as they showed their public face. Christian believed people were as they seemed. He hadn’t yet worked out that everyone had a front, that they all wept at their kitchen tables and picked their noses in front of the telly.

‘Fuck, what’s eating you?’

‘Daddy said fuck,’ said Betty from the back.

‘You’re eating me,’ said Ruth. ‘With your sanctimonious crap.’

‘Bollocks. You’re angry because you didn’t get the real story.’

Ruth always felt there was a tipping point in every argument: at one moment she was sitting on the edge of a cliff and in the next Christian was dangling her over it. Her face flushed and her heart beat faster. ‘Don’t you dare tell me whether or not I got the story.’

‘Oh, come on, Ruth, don’t tell me she told you anything more than a few soap recipes?’

Tears scratched at Ruth’s eyes, she could feel them forming inside her. ‘That is so patronising.’

Christian laughed. ‘But true, right?’

‘If you must know,’ she said, ‘I got the story our readers want. They don’t want to know about her failing marriage or the fact that Daddy pays for everything, they just want to hear about a plucky woman who’s done what they all dream of. They’ll only half read it anyway, sitting at their desks during some depressing lunch hour or with one eye on the kids in the park. They want to feel that things are possible, not that they aren’t.’

Christian tried to take her hand. ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to make out that what you do isn’t good.’

She shook him away. ‘Well, you did and anyway you’re right. What I do is shit, like what you do is. All you and I do is feed meaningless crap into people’s lives. Moving pictures and easy words to take away the pain.’

‘Bloody hell, you think about things too much.’

‘Don’t be absurd. You can’t think about anything too much.’

Betty started to whimper in the back. ‘I need a wee, Mummy.’

Ruth ignored her. ‘And I don’t know why we bother anyway. I doubt it’s worth all the bloody sacrifice.’

‘Shit,’ said Christian, pulling the car into a service station. ‘You’re asking some big questions.’

Ruth turned to see a wet patch appearing on her daughter’s trousers as they came to a stop. She felt so tired with the way they interacted she could have lain down in the car park and slept. Even breathing seemed a chore. ‘Yes, maybe I am,’ she said. ‘I just can’t find any answers.’

Agatha hated days on her own. Really hated. She became too aware of herself and the fact that she was capable of anything, that she was not necessarily in control of her actions. Her head felt bigger or maybe just fuller when she was alone. Like someone had emptied a pint of water into it, shifting her off balance and blurring her senses. She would watch herself doing something and feel disconnected to the experience. As she buttered her toast she realised that it was entirely possible for her to use the innocent-looking knife to cut deeply into her wrists, letting the blood spill onto the clean kitchen floor.

Agatha had often wondered how hard it would be to pierce human flesh. When the children fell over their skin seemed to peel away so easily, exposing their inner selves so red and raw. But Agatha knew enough about the human body to know that these wounds were mostly superficial, that to really get into the body you had to get through seven more layers of skin and then you’d only reach muscle and fat which in turn could be hiding a bone before you came into contact with any of the life-giving vital organs.

Harry had been fat; Agatha reckoned that even a very sharp knife would have taken a lot of cutting. He would have screamed out in pain. The children screamed out in pain when they just grazed their knees and Agatha had noticed how this letting of tears seemed to somehow take away the pain, like it released something inside them. The Victorians had believed in making you bleed to take away illness. Harry had never used a knife on her, although his weapon of choice had often felt sharp. He had made her bleed many times but he had never made her cry. At the time it had felt like one important victory she had won against him, but now standing in the Donaldsons’ kitchen with the blunt kitchen knife clasped so tightly, she wasn’t sure if it had been.

Christian called Sarah on his way to work on Monday morning. He told himself that he needed to speak to her again to find out more about the abortion, but he doubted this was true. He had thought a lot about the abortion, but he couldn’t comprehend what it had been like for her. He felt sorry for her and saddened by a loss which wasn’t his to feel, but it wasn’t any of this that made him pick up the phone. It wasn’t the awful visit to the farm or the madness of Ruth’s over-reaction on the way home. They’d even had sex that night which had been loving and giving and made him feel warm towards her for the whole of Sunday. It wasn’t really anything.

Sarah sounded too knowing when she answered the phone, like he was predictable and it had only been a matter of time before he rang. But he’d gone too far now and he felt he didn’t have any other choice than to get on with whatever it was he was doing. Which was what exactly? After the phone call, as Christian reached his gleaming offi ce and said his easy hellos, he wondered what he was after. He didn’t want another affair, really he didn’t. But somehow he wasn’t prepared to let Sarah go yet either.

He turned on his computer and the screensaver of his wife and kids popped up as it always did. His own face was reflected over theirs asking too many questions. In trying not to become some sad married man had he simply become some sad shitty married man? He couldn’t put his finger on what it was that was missing or even what would make it better. He had tried drinking too much or having the odd line of coke, but the kids made hangovers pretty much impossible. He had tried fucking a young woman but the pain he’d caused Ruth had been too hard to bear. He supposed that he could still buy a motorbike and kill himself going too fast down a motor-way, but that seemed pretty pointless.

Christian had nothing but contempt for people who talked about giving it all up and moving to Cornwall to open a café. Their visit to the farm on Saturday had only confirmed his suspicions about these types of people and yet it had also left a nasty taste in his mouth. He wouldn’t want to be Charlie, so seething in his own anger that Christian wouldn’t be surprised to one day read in the paper that he’d killed his whole family. But still he remembered exactly what the man had said and the sentiment chimed uncomfortably close to what he thought himself.

‘They’re never happy, women,’ Charlie had said as they’d sat in the barn, taking turns to swig from one of his many hidden whisky bottles, both sucking on fags.

‘When Margo flipped out, I tried to see the bright side. I told myself that it was pretty pointless going into work every day when we didn’t need the money, leaving the kids with all these ghastly girls who hardly spoke English, and I thought, Yeah, why not? Let’s give it a go. But then we get down here and within bloody seconds Margo’s all like, So what shall we do now? She was pregnant again then, by the way, and the house was a tip so we were supervising builders and dealing with planning and everything, but still she was like, What next? And I thought, What next? What bloody next is that we might relax and live a bit. I said to her, For God’s sake, we’ve both made enough money, you’re going to inherit a fortune, why don’t we kick back for a bit and see what happens? But she couldn’t. Oh no. What would everyone think? she actually said that. What, I said, all those fucking tossers who boast about their cars and Spanish villas who we’ve left behind in London? Who cares what they fucking think? And she was all outraged. I hadn’t realised, but she liked those people, she still wanted them to be our friends. So she set up the stupid soap business that costs us more to run than we make, but still inane magazines like your wife’s come and interview her about it and take photos of her with all four kids and everyone’s, like, God she’s so amazing, look at her perfect life. It makes me fucking sick. Doesn’t anyone tell it like it is any more?’

Sarah told it like it was this time. They met in a café which overlooked the big lake in Hyde Park and she had tiny red spots high up on her cheeks. ‘I am not going to be fucked around by you again, Christian,’ she said as she played with her cappuccino.

‘No, you’ve got it wrong . . . ’ he started.

‘Got it wrong how?’ He noticed that her eyes flicked with anger in the same way Ruth’s did and he was floored again by the sensation that nothing was ever going to be different and he was never going to escape himself. ‘Got it wrong that you want an easy affair?’

‘I don’t want another affair.’ Which was true, but about as far as he could get.

‘Oh, so you’re going to leave Ruth and the kids and set up home with me then?’

‘Is that what you want?’ Christian felt as though he had lost his footings and that the lake had somehow flooded the café. He hadn’t meant to say any of this, but he hadn’t bargained on anyone else being in control.