Marriage and Other Games (28 page)
He looked at her warily as he sat down.
‘Hi,’ she managed, her eyes roaming his face to discern what emotion he was feeling. He just nodded. She was surprised to see he looked well. His hair was cropped close to his head. He looked lean and muscular, and his shoulders seemed broader. Somehow when she’d imagined him in prison he’d been small and shrivelled. This guy looked tough, like a survivor. Someone not to be messed with.
‘So - what made you come?’ His voice was flat.
‘Didn’t you want me to? Isn’t that why you sent the . . . ?’
‘I thought maybe we should talk. Discuss the future.’
She nodded. She hadn’t expected him to be hostile. She’d expected him to be relieved. Grateful, even, that she had come to visit. She put her fingers on the table between them, drumming them nervously.
‘So . . . how is it?’
He raised an eyebrow.
‘Fucking shite. Fucking boring. The food sucks. The conversation isn’t exactly stimulating. And the décor’s dire, as you’ve probably noticed.’ He gave her a hard look. ‘Oh. The gym’s not bad. That’s the one bonus.’
For a moment she wanted to snap back that it was his own fault, not hers, that he was in here. That he had had a choice. And the choice he had made was his. But she guessed he’d had plenty of time to reflect on that. This wasn’t an opportunity to rub salt into his wounds. She’d done enough of that. This was about giving them both the chance to move on.
She cleared her throat. ‘I thought perhaps we should talk about . . . um, a . . . divorce.’
Again, the eyebrow went up and he gave her a twisted smile.
‘Let me guess. Unreasonable behaviour?’
‘I haven’t really thought about it.’
‘I suppose you just want it over and done with as quickly as possible. After all, it’s not like you can screw any money out of me, is it?’
This was horrible. Why was he punishing her like this? She felt tears stinging her eyes and she looked up at the ceiling, as if by defying gravity she could stop them falling.
‘Ed . . . Please . . . It doesn’t have to be like this.’
‘But this is exactly the way it is. I fucked up. You couldn’t forgive me. End of marriage. End of story.’
She felt as if the rug had been pulled out from underneath her. She hadn’t expected to feel so drawn towards him when she saw him. And she hadn’t expected him to be so hard. She felt ashamed. She had thought she had all the cards, but it seemed she had none.
She stood up.
‘I can’t deal with this.’
‘Oh, lucky you,’ he snapped back. ‘You can run away.’
‘Why are you being like this?’ As she spoke, she knew she sounded childish, whiny.
‘I’ve had time to think about things. And I don’t think I deserved the way you treated me. OK, so what I did was wrong. Fair cop, as they say. I did the crime, so I’m doing the time.’ He spoke disparagingly. ‘But look at all these other women . . .’
He indicated round him. There were couples in intense conversation, some chatting animatedly, some looking into each other’s eyes. But Charlotte was surprised to see there was no hostility between the other couples in the room.
‘A lot of these guys did far worse than me. But their women have stood by them.’ He put a finger to his lips, feigning an attempt to remember something. ‘What was that old cliché again? For better, for worse . . . ?’
Charlotte sank back down into the chair.
‘So . . . what are you saying?’
Ed stared back at her. His eyes were dead, devoid of emotion. He’d never looked at her like that before.
‘I’ve got nothing to say.’
She reached out a hand to touch him. This was unbearable. But he put up a warning hand, speaking in a mockney accent.
‘No bodily contact, sweetheart. This is prison, remember?’
She pulled back her hand quickly.
‘So,’ he went on. ‘Shagging anyone yet? Is that why you want a divorce?’
Charlotte felt a sudden surge of anger. Who did he think he was? Bloody Ray Winstone? Maybe he’d been brainwashed by the other prisoners. Maybe he thought he was some misogynist hard nut. What the hell was going to happen to him when he came out? She felt totally confused.
‘I’m trying to rebuild my life,’ she said, keeping her voice as steady as she could. ‘After you managed to take everything I’d got away from me.’
They stared each other out for a moment.
‘After I was arrested,’ he said, his voice dropping almost to a deadly whisper, ‘you said thank God you hadn’t got pregnant, because you wouldn’t want a monster like me fathering your child. Well, I would just like to say the same,’ he went on, ‘because I wouldn’t want any child of mine having such a hard-hearted bitch for a mother.’
Charlotte recoiled from the harshness of his words. She got to her feet once again, her legs shaking.
‘I didn’t come here to be spoken to like this.’
‘Then why did you?’ he snarled back.
‘I don’t know,’ she managed to reply. ‘I just thought we could talk.’
‘We had all the time in the world to talk. Before I got banged up.’
‘Maybe I wasn’t ready then.’
‘Well, maybe I’m not ready now.’
She looked at him for a moment. The angle of his cheekbones that she had always loved to stroke. His nose, slightly broken and bent. His jaw, his neck . . . She felt an immense urge to reach out and touch him, as if her fingers might be able to impart what her words couldn’t.
‘I better go.’
He turned away. She thought she caught the glitter of tears in his eyes. So he did still care.
‘Shall I come again?’
He shrugged.
‘See you, then. Maybe?’ she ventured again.
‘See you . . .’
He didn’t look at her as she backed away from the table, and then turned to walk towards the door. When she reached the exit, she looked round. He was sitting, staring down at the table with his head in his hands. All around him the other prisoners and their wives chattered and laughed as if they hadn’t a care in the world.
If Charlotte thought she had hit rock bottom before, she was wrong.
The journey home was terrible. She veered between wild sobbing to teeth-clenching fury. She had to stop twice at a service station to pull herself together, comfort herself with a hot chocolate, splash her tear-stained face with cold water. And all the while she questioned herself. Had she been wrong to be so judgemental? Should she have stood by Ed?
No one else had ever suggested that she should. It had been a given, that they should separate. But then, she hadn’t talked to that many people about it. Mostly Gussie and her husband, who were staunchly protective of her. She had been too ashamed to bring it out into the open and discuss it with anyone else.
Maybe what Ed had done had been an aberration. Maybe the stress of the past few years had caused him to make his huge error of judgement. Just because it wasn’t his body going through the treatment didn’t mean he hadn’t suffered the pain and grief as much as she had. Perhaps she should have empathised with him more - put herself in his position, instead of judging him. As an alpha male, he must have felt emasculated, demoralised, powerless to change their situation, and when an opportunity arose - an opportunity he had thought was bullet proof - perhaps it was no wonder he hadn’t been able to resist.
Was she shallow and disloyal? For a moment, she wondered what would have happened if it had been the other way round, if in a moment of desperation she had embezzled the charity funds. Would Ed have stood by her?
She looked at herself in the service-station mirror. Her eyes were bloodshot, her skin blotchy. She looked terrible. As she met her own gaze, she had her answer.
Ed would have stood by her till the end.
She rushed into the loo to be sick again. All she could taste was sour shame. She leaned against the wall of the cubicle. It was too late. The damage had been done. She had felt the hostility rolling off Ed. His dead eyes. His flat voice. There had been no indication that he wanted to make things right. She was no longer the woman he would go to the ends of the earth for. It was over.
On the way back into Withybrook she stopped at the petrol station outside Comberton to get some milk and bread. Fitch was there, filling up his red Land Rover Defender.
‘Hey.’ He gave her a wave. She didn’t feel like talking, but she knew it would be rude not to after he had been so friendly, so she stopped for a second.
‘Hello.’
‘Are you OK? You look exhausted.’ He looked at her, concerned.
‘I just feel a bit peaky. I think it’s all the paint fumes. I haven’t stopped all week.’
He pushed the petrol nozzle back into its holder.
‘Why don’t you come down to the Trout for a drink later?’
‘Oh . . . no, I don’t think so.’
‘It’s always a good laugh on a Friday. The shoot’s been out, so it’s stuffed with beaters and gamekeepers filling their boots. They’re quite entertaining.’ He dug in the pocket of his combats for his wallet. ‘I haven’t got the girls till tomorrow. I could do with a night out.’
He looked at her hopefully.
Charlotte hesitated. The choice was to sit in all evening crying into her soup and going over and over the horrible events of the day. Or to go out with Fitch and have a few drinks, maybe meet some new people. She wasn’t sure if she felt strong enough for idle chit-chat after what had happened. But he had been so kind before, and he obviously wanted company.
Fitch shrugged, walking off backwards towards the kiosk to pay.
‘It was just a thought.’
‘No - wait. I’d love to come. Just give me a couple of hours.’
She needed to lie down for a while, then have a hot bath. Press a cold flannel to her face to bring down the puffiness. Eat something - apart from the morning’s toast and two hot chocolates nothing had passed her lips all day.
Fitch smiled, and the warmth of it was reward in itself.
‘I’ll bang on your door at nine.’
The Trout was bursting at the seams. The shoot had been out all day, tugging their forelocks and kowtowing to the bankers and magnates and entrepreneurs who thought they could swoop into Devon for the day in their helicopters and Range Rovers and take ownership. Little did they know that the serfs who looked after them gave not two figs for who or what they were, and put two fingers up as they left, happy that the vast amount of money they had spent during their day’s sport sustained the local economy. If someone was misguided enough to pay thousands of pounds for the privilege of shooting a bird too dumb to get out of the way, they deserved to be ridiculed. It was a contest as to who was more stupid: the shooters or the shot.
Now, however, after a day’s hard physical exercise and the strain of being pleasant to people with more money than sense, the beaters and the gamekeepers were letting their hair down. Red faces and green clothing were de rigueur; the beer flowed. The gamekeepers’ wives, who prepared the lavish lunch in the shooting lodge and organised the beaters, held court in one corner, now resplendent in cleavage-revealing sparkly tops and jeans. Norman behind the bar took orders for plates of ham, egg and chips to be sent out. Acres and acres of ground had been covered today on foot in the biting November air and appetites were sharp.
Fitch pulled Charlotte through the throngs to the bar. She had managed to revive herself: a half-hour nap, a big bowl of porridge with banana and maple syrup, followed by a wallow in the bath and ten minutes carefully applying her make-up had made her look and feel almost human. She was glad she had just put her jeans back on, as high fashion clearly had no place in the Speckled Trout.
Other books
Lizzy Harrison Loses Control by Pippa Wright
Little Boy Blue by Edward Bunker
Following Love by Celeste O. Norfleet
Brontës by Juliet Barker
UNTOUCHABLE (Siri's Saga Book 1) by Klide, Jessika
Hot as Hell by Unknown
Crossing the Line by Eaton, Annabelle
Cosmopolitan Girls by Charlotte Burley
Red Country by Kelso, Sylvia
