Missing You (2 page)

Right now, Sean would like to hurt her. He’d like to hurt Belle like she’s hurt him.

No, he doesn’t want to hurt her; he wants to convince her of his love. He wants to love her.

He doesn’t know what he wants.

He wants everything to be how it was four weeks ago, before she told him about the affair.

He wonders if this is really the end of their marriage. It can’t be. That would be inconceivable.

He turns back to the door. He has to talk to Belle, he has to make her realize; she doesn’t know how much he loves her, he hasn’t convinced her, and he will do
anything
for this not to be the end. He’s even proposed to let Belle see the Other if she wants to. Sean is prepared to wait for her; he is strong enough to put the thought of the two of them, together, from his mind for the sake of his family. She has been infected by her new lover, but sooner or later the venom will pass through her system and she’ll be herself again and she will come back to him.

Sean raises his fists to beat on the door, and then he hears a polite cough to his left and turns and sees their neighbour, Mrs Lock. She is attending to her dahlias, and is poised, watching, secateurs in one gloved hand. She gives the slightest shake of her head.

She knows. She’s heard the arguments. It is possible that, while Sean has been at work, Belle has gone into Mrs Lock’s kitchen and confided her troubles to the older woman, asked her advice over a pot of tea and biscuits.

‘I should give her a couple of days,’ says Mrs Lock in a kindly voice. She smiles, all grey hair and gentle, sorrowful eyes.

Sean drops his arms. He nods.

He loads his things into the car. But they won’t all fit so he leaves two bags at the end of the drive, beside the bins. Let the dustmen take them. What does it matter to him?

He wipes his face with his sleeve, gets into the car and starts the engine. He looks back at the house through the mirror, but the door doesn’t open. Belle does not come out to call him back.

He drives to the end of the road and then he sits there, in his car, his shirt sleeves rolled up to the elbows, his forearm resting on the edge of the open window, vacillating between tipping the indicator switch up and tipping it down because he cannot decide whether to turn left or right.

Sean’s face is wet with tears.

Left or right?

It doesn’t matter.

Either way, everything he loves will still be behind him.

two

Fen is up early, unloading the washing machine. She rests the basket of damp laundry on her hip while she looks out through the narrow window of the galley kitchen into the long, thin back garden, to the alleyway beyond, and on down the hill, just in case. Her heart is clenching. But nothing has changed. Nobody is out there; there are no unexplained shadows, no trampled plants and no cigarette smoke winding into the sky. Everything looks just as it did yesterday, except there’s maybe the slightest hint of green-turning-to-gold in the leaves of the trees.

Tomas has not come back. Not yet.

She unlocks the door and climbs down the steps that drop into the garden. She puts the basket on the grass, removes the strut to drop the line that stretches from the house to the gate, and shakes out the first pillowcase. The long grass is cold and damp beneath her bare feet. It brushes her knees, the moisture soaking into the fabric of her jeans. In the sky, seagulls wheel and caw. The sun is already casting shadows through the leaves of the big copper beech tree at the corner of the overgrown alley that separates the gardens on this side of the road from the gardens of the mirroring terrace. Fen holds a peg in her mouth while she struggles to arrange a duvet cover on the line. Next door’s little black dog is turning circles on her neighbour’s closely shaven lawn, looking for the perfect place to pee. Fen catches sight of its owner, Mr Tucker, watching the dog through his kitchen window. He smiles at Fen, and waves. She smiles, waves back. She tucks her hair behind her ear and smoothes the linen on the line.

If the neighbours knew the truth about her, they would not be so kind.

The grass in her garden, unmown again this year, has turned from lawn to meadow. Feathery heads pepper her jeans with seeds. She likes the straggly buttercups and the poppies, but not the nettles that clump beside the wire fence, nor the ivy that creeps along the wall, fingering at the window frames. A long-limbed, woody shrub with shaggy, purple flowers has seeded everywhere; it attracts butterflies and birds but is untidy. Pink-flowering weeds are growing out of cracks in the paving stones and even the stonework of the house.

Fen’s garden is not the worst. A little further down the hill an ancient Ford Escort is patiently rusting on a frame of bricks, its wheels long since gone; the Evans’ garden is a shambles of masonry, broken kitchen units and an old settee; and right at the bottom is the frail old widower’s garden, a jungle of sun-worn plastic ornaments, gnomes, signs and windmills.

One day, Fen thinks, she will make a real effort. She will get to grips with the garden, or at least clear a patch where she can lie out in the evenings, read a book and enjoy the views and the sun. Connor would enjoy the project and the neighbours would lend a hand. They are always offering to help, but Fen doesn’t like to take anything from them, partly because she is used to managing on her own and partly because there is so little she can do to reciprocate.

Fen picks up the empty basket and goes back towards the house. She pauses at the top of the steps and glances out over her overgrown garden. The bed linen wafts lazily in the early September sunshine and a grey squirrel hangs upside down, gorging itself on the bird-feeder. There’s still no sign of Tomas. That doesn’t mean he is not out there, somewhere in the city, looking for her.

Fen goes back into the kitchen and she locks and bolts the door behind her. When Tomas
does
come back, she does not want to be surprised. She wants him to have to knock. She knows what Tomas is like, and she doesn’t want him creeping up behind her, putting his hands over her eyes and holding her tightly.

He wouldn’t mean to frighten her but these days she’s less robust than she used to be; she scares easily and Tomas always used to go a little too far. He never knew when to stop. He did not have the instinct for self-preservation that prevents most people from doing dangerous things. He thought he was invulnerable. He thought they all were and, because he believed it, it was as if it were true. When you were with Tom you felt as if you could do, or be, anything and that nothing could hurt you. It was one of the beautiful things about him.

Sometimes, when Fen thinks about what happened to Joe that night, the night that Tom went away, she tries to present the facts in a different way. She does everything she can to convince herself that Tom was the one who was responsible. But it’s a lie. She, Fen, is to blame.

Her guilt is wrapped around her like a cloak she can’t shake off. She’s been wearing it for so long now that she cannot imagine herself without the weight of it, or the shame of it.

Every day of her life, Fen wishes Tomas would come back to her. He is the only person she could talk to, the only one who would understand how she feels, because he is the only one who knows the truth. Perhaps, together, they could find a way to live with their past and to reconcile themselves to what happened to Joe Rees. Perhaps things would be better for both of them.

Fen squeezes her eyes shut; she squeezes out her memories. Then she opens her eyes and looks about her, pulling herself back into the present. The kitchen is very small and the units are tired and old-fashioned, but it’s clean and bright and cheerful, especially when the sun shines through the window. The splashy artwork Connor brings home from school is Sellotaped to every available vertical surface; a photograph of him laughing so hard that he is falling off his chair is stuck to the fridge by a magnet; his new school bag sits on the counter.

Fen opens the bag and extracts Connor’s lunch box, takes out the previous day’s yoghurt-smeared detritus and rinses the blue plastic under the cold tap. It smells of banana.

She feels safe in Bath, she likes living in Lilyvale
.
It’s a small house, but it has a gentle, protective feel to it. She lived here for two months before Connor was born, and since then the two of them have been here for five winters and five summers, and in all that time their lives have been quiet. Nothing terrible has happened. Nobody has said an unkind word to Fen; people don’t stare at her in the street or put their heads together to whisper about her and her family when she passes by. There is no speculation, no accusation, no finger-pointing and nobody she has to avoid. She has no history in the city beyond the first of the winters. Only Lina knew her before she came to Bath, and Lina doesn’t know everything; and what she does know, she keeps to herself.

Fen dries her hands on the towel folded over the radiator, fills the kettle and switches it on. She checks the clock. It’s still early.

On the kitchen table is a postcard she’s going to put up in the window of the off-licence at the top of the hill. She has written in purple felt pen:

ROOM TO LET IN FAMILY HOME,

Crofters Road, Fairfield Park.

Would Suit Single Professional.

References required.

That sounds about right, thinks Fen, and she props the card up beside the cereal packet.

She checks the garden one last time, but it is still empty, and then she makes her tea and goes upstairs to wake her son.

three

He wakes before six, not because he has had enough sleep but because his bloodstream is pumping liquid anxiety. Sean’s breath is quick and shallow, and his nerves are on edge. He licks the inside of his mouth. His heart is a fierce hammer inside him; the sheet beneath his aching back is clammy with sweat. It takes him a few seconds to remember what is wrong, and when he remembers, he wishes he had not.

Everything is wrong.

Sean rolls onto his side and opens his eyes.

It is very dark in the room because of the blackout curtains. Sean is in a hotel bedroom, not a proper hotel, but a soulless, unstaffed place at the arse end of the motorway services.

He has been drifting. He has been staying in anonymous bedrooms in cheap hotels. Sometimes he sleeps in his car. He derives a masochistic pleasure from the loneliness of his existence. By punishing himself, he punishes Belle. It is perverse, of course, because she does not know that he finds himself in these miserable rooms, writing letters of increasing desperation that he has the sense not to send, drinking to the bottom of the bottle just to stop himself thinking about the Other and what he is saying to her, how he is touching her, what he is learning about her, how he is knowing things that only Sean was supposed to know.

Sean yawns. He sighs and gets out of bed. Then he takes a shower to wash away these dirty thoughts.

When he comes out of the bathroom with a white towel fastened around his waist, he draws the curtains, and in the concrete-grey daylight the room is as grubby and shabby as he had known it would be. There is a crack in the mirror, the upholstery on the chair is frayed and stained, and the television screen is dusty and marked with fingerprints. His clothes are piled untidily on the chair. At least he didn’t drop them on the carpet, which he knows from experience will smell of feet and commercial fabric freshener. There is an empty vodka bottle upturned in the waste-paper basket and several scrunched-up beer cans are scattered around.

Sean rubs his hair with the towel and then tosses it into the bathroom. He feels as if his entire self is one long, sore wound. His self-pity is humiliating but Sean has never been good at managing emotion. This was one of many personality traits that Belle cited as offensive. She said that any other man would have realized she was unhappy and would have done something about it, or at least discussed her feelings with her. He did not even notice that things weren’t right.

She blames him for her affair. Perhaps she has a point.

On some rational level, Sean knows that Belle is not wholly to blame for their situation. He did not notice her unhappiness and so she fell in love with a different man. There is no crime in falling in love. Falling is not a deliberate action when you have been pushed to the precipice, as Belle apparently was, by the fact that she felt entirely unappreciated by Sean and was convinced of his ambivalence towards her. She has told Sean a thousand times that she never meant to hurt him, and he believes she is telling the truth.

Still he
is
hurt. He believes his love for Belle is so deep and intrinsic that he doesn’t know how he can survive without her. She is everything to him. She is his reason for living. Whatever she thought, the truth is that he never took her for granted, not for one moment, ever.

Before, when he woke each morning, he would feel her presence beside him, her hand perhaps on the pillow beside his cheek, her hair, her sleep-soured breath, her precious little snores and sighs, and he would say a silent prayer of gratitude. When he went to sleep she was there, next to him; he could inhale the smell of her, see the way her hair tapered into silky down at the base of her neck; he could warm himself beside her lovely body, bask in the scent of the cream she used on her face. And he was amazed at his good fortune; he was astonished that a woman as wonderful as Belle could be married to a man like him. He imagined their future. He imagined more children, and although he loved the thought of these children, already, even before they were conceived, he looked forward to the time when they left home, and he could have Belle to himself. He thought they would travel. He imagined them, husband and wife, side by side on the deck of a ship, seeing a new continent take shape on the horizon in the sunrise, and he imagined how it would feel to share that experience with somebody to whom he felt so deeply connected. He imagined beaches, volcanoes, cities, seas, exotic hotels and savannah lodges, hired cars, tents, motels. The same life seen through two pairs of eyes, lovers, always, Belle and Sean, the perfect couple, the meant-to-be soulmates.