‘They don’t need our big bed, the way they were pawing at each other over supper, that was evident,’ I snapped. ‘Jesus, she was practically mounting him at the table!’
‘Oh, don’t be so dramatic. I know you said you didn’t want to give up our room, but you’re always the kind one, Clare. I’m sorry, I just assumed you’d say yes. But if you really don’t want to, then we won’t.’
‘I don’t.’
‘Okay, that’s fine, I’ll explain that to them.’
‘Them?’
‘Mum… and Ella. She was there when Mum suggested we swap.’
‘Great, how tactful of your mother to ask in her presence,’ I said. I understood why Joy had suggested this, she genuinely felt she owed them a wedding, a honeymoon of sorts, but I wished she hadn’t put us on the spot. She didn’t seem to be aware of the friction between Ella and I, but I wonder now if she was perhaps being a little mischievous? Did she guess I’d be wholly against a room change and wanted Ella to be aware of this too?
’You and I can still spend time together,’ Dan was saying, his forehead shimmering with sweat and exasperation.
‘I know, but can’t you see that by agreeing to it you’re suggesting their marriage is more important than ours? And if I then don’t agree to it, I look like a terrible, selfish person?’
‘You won’t look terrible,’ he sighed. ‘I just thought it was kind of Mum to suggest it. And who cares who was there when it was discussed?’ He said it in that classic way men see something hugely significant as irrelevant. It was too late for me to even begin to describe the female complexities, the betrayal of the girl code around this. ‘Clare, what do you want me to do? Mum’s asking me if I’ll give up my room to a worthy cause, you’re telling me not to. As always I’m trying to please everyone and end up pleasing no one.’
‘Your room?’ I said.
‘Our room… you know what I mean, stop tying me up in knots.’
We continued to walk slowly through the garden, and looking at the beautiful view, remembering that we were here in this lovely place thanks to Joy and Bob, I felt bad. Perhaps I should offer them the room; it might make Ella a little more pleasant towards me. After all, she was now in our family. For good.
It was all just such bad timing for us, and to be honest, being in the presence of a honeymooning couple was not what we needed right now. While we were attempting to heal wounds and work through the past, Jamie and Ella were looking towards a bright future. And Ella had landed on her feet with Jamie. He was more demonstrative and openly affectionate than Dan, and always seemed to put his girlfriends on a pedestal, hugging and kissing them in front of anyone and everyone. Dan was far more reserved.
Jamie and Ella were a constant reminder of what Dan and I once had, what I now missed. Walking through that beautiful garden in the dark, I realised this wasn’t a conversation about bedrooms – it was about me trying to make everything better again, to go back to how it had been before. Before Dan’s bombshell.
‘I’ve met someone,’ he’d said one evening, three months before, as I grilled fish fingers for the children’s tea. I’d guessed something was going on before then; he’d been short-tempered, not engaging with the kids, distant with me. I had told myself it was because he was tired, overworked, worried about the business – but in my heart I knew.
‘I didn’t mean for any of it to happen… it just…’ he’d said.
I’d stood by the grill, watching the bread-crumbed fingers turn from golden, to brown, to black. I thought I might die. He told me it started after Taylor’s Christmas party the previous year; she was the accountant. I recalled seeing her once in the offices, a keen, pretty, twenty-something in a navy-blue trouser suit, with shiny auburn hair. I remembered she wore glasses, she suited them, and I’d said to Dan, ‘It’s funny how names don’t fit people sometimes. I mean, bless her, she’s hardly a Marilyn Monroe, is she?’ He’d laughed and said people weren’t always what they seemed. I should have known then, but I didn’t. I was too busy working late shifts, giving patients their dinner and bed baths before coming home to three children who needed much of the same.
He never actually threatened to leave, but that’s essentially what an affair is – it’s implicit, it’s a let’s try this on to see how it fits. The threat was always there – it lay between us under the sheets, it waved across the restaurant at me when we tried to have what we optimistically called ‘date night’. That was Joy’s idea. ‘I think the youngsters call it date night,’ she’d said. ‘A nice dinner in a good restaurant, that’s all you need, a chance to talk through things,’ like it was a mark that needed to be wiped with a damp cloth.
I hadn’t meant to tell her. She’d popped round one afternoon – I was getting ready for a night shift, she was sitting with the kids until Dan got home. I was upset, she asked me if everything was okay and before I knew it, I was telling her all about Dan’s affair. I just needed someone on my side, and as she’d guided me through problems in the past, I trusted her. Joy was of course horrified, and particularly furious that it was with one of their employees.
‘Never trusted her,’ she murmured, a faraway look on her face.
‘It’s not just her – I don’t trust him,’ I said.
‘Look, she’s nothing, I promise you, she won’t be a problem,’ she’d said, brightening. ‘Get your hair done, buy a nice new dress and tomorrow night you’re off – I’ll babysit.’ As sweet as this was, I couldn’t help but hear the implication that had my hair looked better in the first place my husband might have kept his trousers on.
The following night she’d swept into the house like bloody Joan Collins, all bright lips and clipped tones. ‘Come on, you two, sort yourselves out, go to that new French restaurant in the village,’ she’d suggested, convinced that a good filet mignon would cure her son’s roving eye.
By the last of three date nights, we hadn’t actually ‘talked through’ anything, just bickered, Dan told me one of ‘our’ problems was that I wasn’t ‘spontaneous’ and that he needed more in his life ‘than just work and sleep’.
And I, who was exhausted from work and children and little sleep, had said, ‘Everyone wants more sometimes, Dan, even me.’
His response? ‘Why do you always have to make it about you, Clare?’
We didn’t stay for dessert, or coffee. We headed back early, telling Joy we were tired and wanted to go to bed. She gave me a sly wink at the front door, like she was the marriage fairy, assuming we couldn’t wait to rip each other’s clothes off. And when she left, we went upstairs together, as she’d hoped – but Dan slept in the spare room, and he’d been sleeping there since.
I wonder even now if he’s ever really been in love with me. I’m the mother of his children, I play my part in his life, I fit in with his family, his commitments. I’m his wife, the accepted and appropriate daughter-in-law on the cast list of the Taylors’ drama. But is that all I am to him?
I recalled Jamie saying earlier that his heart beat faster every time he saw Ella. It made me think, had Dan’s heart ever beat faster when he saw me?