12:31
An affair makes sense. Months before we got married, you were listless, distant, you didn’t seem to care about the details of the wedding, the honeymoon, you just went along with whatever I decided. The only thing that energised you was clearing out the front and back gardens, the only thing you asked from me was to help you build a greenhouse, and I confess, I was ecstatic carrying panes of glass, putting it together, watching you smile as you carried in seedlings because you never asked me for anything, because finally, finally, there was something I could do for you. I thought all that digging, raking, planting was you working something out of your system. I didn’t think it might have been someone.
And if I’m brutally honest, horribly honest, I wonder if you’re thinking of someone else when we have sex because you never look at me, you close your eyes, you shut me out, and even though I’ve never said anything to you, I don’t know how I’d bring it up, I think about it all the time, how at our most intimate, you’re not there, you’re gone.
50
Shirt
Then
How long he’s been standing there, I don’t know. He has stopped in the middle of the cow parsley, the umbrella blooms waving in the wind, the sun, a lucent orange through the pines, it would almost be beautiful, were it not for the tunnels of his eyes. ‘My stepdad,’ I whimper.
‘Shit.’ Alex sees him, jerks back. ‘Let me talk to him.’
I love him for that. But he can’t intercede for me, he doesn’t know the truth, I’ve never told it to him. ‘No. But come tomorrow at eight.’
‘I’ll try.’
‘Promise.’
‘I promise.’
I slide out of the truck. He reverses out of the clearing.
Then, it’s just Daniel and me, facing each other in the clearing.
He moves first. He cuts a path through the woods to the cottage, mowing down cow parsley, grass, dandelions. He rattlesthe door handle as he fumbles with his key. I wonder if this is another door that will surrender to his force but it springs open. He flings his gear down, rounds on me. ‘You said you’d never see him again.’
‘This is the first time!’
‘You said you never needed to!’
‘I don’t.’
‘I. Saw. You.’
‘That was just—’
‘Friends?’
My mind is splintering, equal parts panic and fury; I wouldn’t have to kiss Alex if I wasn’t pregnant with Daniel’s child and then I see that what I have with Daniel is a steel trap, sharp-toothed, jawed, always clamping round me. I turn away. ‘I don’t feel well.’
‘Now, you’re not well? When I’m here?’ He advances on me quickly now. His eyes are wild. ‘After you’ve spent the whole afternoon letting him do God knows what?’
‘I told you, I haven’t done anything with him—’
‘You let him kiss you! His hands were on your waist!’ He squeezes my wrist. I pull myself free. ‘Did you let him unbutton your jeans? Put his hands under your shirt?’
‘No!’
He grabs my collar, jerks me towards him, I’m bewildered by the power of his hands balling up the cotton at my shoulders. There’s an appalling series of sounds. Ripping. The pop scatter of buttons. A strangled noise from my throat. Thoughts spark, fly. I think of the gentle way he undresses me every day, how it is a courtesy, he could just as easily be doing this. I think that this is Mama’s shirt, she bought it from a vintage shop in Paris,she loved the blue and white ticking stripes, the thickness of the cotton. I think of what she would say if she saw me now.
He is holding my face between his hands, he is kissing me and crying and saying sorry,but then he stops because I am not responding, no part of me is moving except my hands, which flutter helplessly round the openness of my shirt.
‘Lolly?’
He pulls my shirt shut. Pats down a button that’s no longer there.