I hadn’t eaten much all day. At lunch-time, instead of stopping work, I’d foraged in my desk drawer for a half-eaten Mars bar that I’d vaguely remembered abandoning some days earlier. To my delight, I found it. I dashed off the paper clips and the worst of the fluff and, I must say, it was delicious.
So as I drove home I was hungry, and I knew there would be shag-all in the house. Food was a big problem for Garv and me. We subsisted, like most people we knew, on microwaved stuff, takeaways and meals out. Now and again – at least, before things had gone weird on us – when we’d cleared our backlog of ordinary worries, we’d spend a bit of time worrying that we weren’t getting enough vitamins. So we’d vow to embrace a new, healthier way and buy a jar of multivitamins, which we’d take for a day or so, then forget about. Or else we’d go on a mad splurge in the supermarket, pulling our arms out of their scurvied sockets lugging home heads of broccoli, suspiciously orange carrots and enough apples to feed a family of eight for a week.
‘Our health is our wealth,’ we’d say, pleased as punch, because it seemed that buying raw foodstuffs was an effective thing to do in itself. It was only when it became clear that the food had to be eaten that the trouble would begin.
Immediately events would set about conspiring to thwart our cooking plans: we’d have to work late or go out for someone’s birthday. The ensuing week was usually spent in edgy awareness of all the fresh fruit and vegetables clamouring for our attention. We could hardly bear to go into the kitchen. Visions of cauliflowers and grapes constantly hovered on the corner of our consciousness, so that we were never truly at peace. Slowly, day by day, as the food went off, we’d furtively throw it out, never acknowledging to each other what we were doing. And only when the final kiwi fruit had been bounced off the inside of the bin did the black shadow lift and we could relax again.
Give me a frozen pizza any time, far less stressful.
Which is precisely what I bought for that evening’s meal. I mounted the pavement, ran into the Spar and flung a couple of pizzas and some breakfast cereals into a basket. And then Fate intervened.
I can go without chocolate for weeks at a time. OK, days. But once I have a bit I want more, and the fluff-covered, lunch-time Mars bar had roused the hungry beast. So when I saw the boxes of handmade truffles in a chilled compartment I decided in a mad splurge of go-on-you-divil justification to buy myself one.
Who knows what would have happened if I hadn’t? Did something as benign as a box of chocolates alter the entire course of my life?
Garv was already home and we greeted each other a little warily. We hadn’t expected that this evening would be just the two of us; we’d been kind of depending on Liam and Elaine to dilute the funny atmosphere between us.
‘You just missed Donna,’ he said. ‘She’ll call you at work tomorrow.’
‘So what’s the latest?’ Donna had a messy, high-concept love life and, as one of her best friends, it was my duty to provide advice. But she often consulted Garv to get what she called ‘the male perspective’, and he’d been so helpful that she’d rechristened him Doctor Love.
‘Robbie wants her to stop shaving under her arms. Says he thinks it’s sexy, but she’s afraid she’ll look like a gorilla.’
‘So what did you advise?’
‘That there’s nothing wrong with women having hair –’
‘Right on, sister.’
‘– but that if she really doesn’t want it, she should say that she’ll stop shaving under her arms if he’ll start wearing girls’ knickers. Sauce for the goose and all that.’
‘You’re a genius, you really are.’
‘Thanks.’
Garv pulled off his tie, flung it over the back of a chair, then raked his fingers through his hair, shaking away the vestiges of his work persona. For the office his hair was Ivy League neat: shorn close at the neck and sleeked back off his face, but off-duty, it flopped down over his forehead.
There are some men who are so good-looking that meeting them is like being hit on the head with a mallet. Garv, however, isn’t one of them; he’s more the sort of man you could see day-in, day-out for twenty years, then just wake up one morning and think, ‘God, he’s nice, how come I never noticed him before now?’
His most obvious attraction was his height. But I was tall, too, so I’d never gone around saying, ‘Ooh, look at how he towers over me!’ All the same, I was able to wear heels with him, which I appreciated – my sister Claire had been married to a man who was the same height as her, so she’d had to wear flats in order that he wouldn’t feel inadequate. And she really loves shoes. But then he had an affair and left her, so everything works out for the best in the end, I suppose.
‘How was work?’ Garv asked.
‘Mostly awful. How was yours?’
‘Bad for most of the day. I had a nice ten minutes between four-fifteen and four-twenty-five when I stood on the fire escape and pretended I still smoked.’
Garv works as an actuary, which makes him a cheap target for accusations of being boring – and on first meeting him you might confuse his quietness with dullness. But in my opinion it’s a mistake to equate number-crunching with being boring; one of the most boring men I ever met was this gobshite novelist boyfriend of Donna’s called John – you couldn’t get more creative. We went out for dinner one night and he BORED us into the ground, loudly monologuing about other writers and what overpaid, meretricious bastards they were. Then he began questioning me about how I’d felt about something or other;
probing and delving with the intimacy of a gynaecologist. ‘How did you feel? Sad? Can you be more specific? Heartbroken? Now we’re getting someplace.’Then he hurried to the gents’ and I just knew that he was writing everything I’d said into a notebook, to use in his novel.
‘You’re not to be jealous about Liam’s flatscreen telly,’ I said to Garv, happy to pretend that his subdued mood was down to his mate having more consumer durables than him. ‘Didn’t it attack him? It might have to be put down.’
‘Ah,’ Garv shrugged the way he always does when he’s bothered, ‘I’m not bothered.’ (Though happy to discuss Donna’s problems with her, you’ll note his reluctance to talk about his own feelings, even when they’re only about a telly.) ‘But do you know how much it cost?’ he blurted.
Of course I knew. Every time I went into town with Garv we had to call into the electrical department in Brown Thomas and stand before said telly, admiring it in all its twelve thousand pounds’ worth of glory. Though Garv was well paid, he didn’t earn anything like Liam’s telephone-number wedge. And what with our high mortgage, the cost of running two cars, Garv’s addiction to CDs and my addiction to face creams and handbags, funds just didn’t run to flatscreen tellies.
‘Cheer up, it probably broke when it fell off the wall. And one day soon you’ll be able to afford one of your own.’
‘Do you think?’
‘Sure I do. As soon as we finish furnishing the house.’ This seemed to do the trick. With a slight spring in his step, he helped unload the shopping. And that was when it happened.
He lifted out my box of go-on-you-divil truffles and exclaimed, ‘Hey, look!’ His eyes were a-sparkle. ‘Those sweets again. Are they following us?’
I looked at him, looked at the box, then back at him. I hadn’t a clue what he was on about.
‘You know,’ he insisted skittishly. ‘The same ones we had when –’
He stopped abruptly and, my brow furrowed with curiosity, I stared at him. He stared back at me and, quite suddenly, several things occurred at once. The playful light in his eyes went out, to be replaced with an expression of fear. Horror, even. And before the thoughts had even formed themselves into any order in my consciousness, I knew. He was talking about someone else, an intimate moment shared with a woman other than me. And it had been recently.
I felt as if I was falling, that I would go on falling for ever. Then, abruptly, I made myself stop. And I knew something else: I couldn’t
do this. I couldn’t bear to watch the downward spiral of my marriage begin to catch other people and spin them into the vortex too.
Shocked into stillness, our eyes locked, I silently beseeched him, desperate for him to say something to explain it, to make it all go away. But his face was frozen in horror – the same horror that I felt.
‘I –’ he managed, then faltered.
A sudden stab of agony shot up into my back tooth and, as though I was dreaming, I left the room.
Garv didn’t follow me; he remained in the kitchen. I could hear no sound and I presumed he was still standing where I’d left him. This, in itself, seemed like an admission of guilt. Still in my waking nightmare, I was picking up the remote and switching on the telly. I was waiting to wake up.
2
We didn’t exchange a word for the rest of the evening. Perhaps I should have been shrieking for details – who was she? How long? But at the best of times that wasn’t my way and after all we’d gone through over the past while, I’d no fight left in me.
If only I was more like my sisters, who were great at expressing pain – experts at slamming doors, crashing phones back into cradles, throwing things at walls, screeching. The whole world got to hear of their anger/disappointment/double-crossing man/chocolate mousse missing from the fridge. But I’d been born without the diva gene, so when devastation hit me I usually kept it inside, turning it over and over, trying to make sense of it. My misery was like an ingrowing hair, curling further and further into me. But what goes in must come out and my pain invariably re-emerged in the form of scaly, flaking, weeping eczema on my right arm – it was a cast-iron barometer of my emotional state and that night it tingled and itched so much that I scratched until it bled.
I went to bed before Garv and, to my surprise, actually managed to fall asleep – the shock, perhaps? Then I awoke at some indeterminate time and lay staring into the blanket of darkness. It was probably four a.m. Four in the morning is the bleakest time, when we’re at our lowest ebb. It’s when sick people die. It’s when people being tortured crack. My mouth tasted gritty and my jaw ached: I’d been grinding my teeth again. No wonder my back tooth was clamouring for attention – making a last desperate plea for help before I ground it into nothingness.
Then, wincing, I faced the repulsive revelation full-on. This truffle woman – was Garv really having a thing with her?
In agony, I admitted that he probably was; the signs were there. Looked at from the outside I’d conclude that he definitely was, but isn’t it always different when it’s your life that’s under scrutiny?
I’d been afraid of something like this happening, so much so that I’d half-prepared myself for it. But now that it seemed it had come to pass, I wasn’t at all ready. He’d got such a glow on when he’d noticed ‘their’ chocolates… It had been dreadful to witness. He must be up to something. But that was too much to take on and I was back to not believing it. I mean, if he’d been messing around, surely I’d have noticed?
The obvious thing would be to ask him straight out and put an end to the speculation, but he was bound to lie like a rug. Worse still, he might tell me the truth. Out of nowhere, lines came to me from some B-movie. The truth? (Accompanied by a curled lip.) You couldn’t HANDLE the truth!
The thoughts kept coming. Could she be someone he worked with? Might I have met her at their Christmas party? I shuffled through my memories of that night, endeavouring to locate a funny look or a loaded comment. But all I could remember was dancing the hora with Jessica Benson, one of his colleagues. Could it be her? But she’d been so nice to me. Mind you, if I’d been having sex with someone’s husband, maybe I’d be nice to her, too… Apart from the women Garv worked with, there were the girlfriends and wives of his mates – and then there were my friends. I was ashamed even to have that thought, but I couldn’t help myself; suddenly I trusted no one and suspected everyone.
What about Donna? Herself and Garv always had a great laugh and she called him Doctor Love. I went cold as I remembered reading somewhere that nicknames were a cast-iron indication that people were up to high jinks.
But then, with a silent sigh, I released Donna without charge: she was one of my best friends, I truly couldn’t believe she’d do that to me. Plus, for reasons best known to herself, she was mad about Robbie the flake. Unless he was an elaborate red herring, of course. But there was one thing that convinced me totally that Garv wasn’t having an affair with Donna, and that was the fact that she’d told him about her verruca. In fact, she’d pulled off her boot and sock and thrust the sole of her foot at him so that he could see for himself just how gross it was. If you’re having a passionate fling with someone, you don’t own up to things like verrucas. It’s all about mystique and impractical bras and round-the-clock upkeep on hairy legs – or so I’m told.
What about my friend Sinead? Garv was so kind to her. But it was only three months since she’d been given the road by her boyfriend, Dave. Surely she was far too fragile for an affair with her friend’s husband – and far too fragile for any normal man to try it on? Unless it was her fragility that Garv liked. But wasn’t he getting enough of that from me? Why go out for broken crockery when you’ve got it in absolute smithereens at home?
Beside me, I realized that Garv was awake too – his fake deep-breathing was the giveaway. So we could talk. Except we couldn’t, we’d been trying for months. I didn’t hear the intake of breath that precedes speech, so I was startled when the ink-dark silence was violated by Garv’s voice. ‘Sorry.’
Sorry. The worst thing he could have said. The word hung in the darkness and wouldn’t go away. In my head I heard it echo again, then again. Each time fainter, until I wondered if I’d just imagined hearing it. Minutes passed. Without ever replying, I turned my back to him and surprised myself by falling asleep again.
In the morning, we woke late, and there was blood under my nails from scratching my arm. My eczema was back in force –I’d have to start wearing gloves in bed again if this continued. But would it continue? Again I got that falling sensation.
I busied myself with showers and coffee, and when Garv said, ‘Maggie,’ and tried to stop my incessant motion, I neatly sidestepped him and said, without eye contact, ‘I’ll be late.’ I left, carrying that empty, four-in-the-morning feeling with me.
Despite sidestepping Garv, I was late for work and the contract wasn’t on Frances’s desk by nine-thirty. She sighed, ‘Oh Maggie,’ in an I’m-not-angry-with-you-I’m-disappointed way. It’s meant to reach the parts a bollocking doesn’t and make you feel shitty and ashamed. However, I appreciated not being shouted at. Not the reaction Frances was looking for, I suspect.
I felt entirely lost, but at the same time unnaturally calm –almost as if I’d been waiting for a catastrophe and it was a weird sort of relief that it had finally happened. Because I had no idea how to behave in these circumstances, I decided to mimic everyone else there and immerse myself in work. Wasn’t it strange, I thought, that after such a dreadful shock I was still functioning as normal? Then I noticed I kept botching the double-click on my mouse because my hand was trembling.
For seconds, I’d manage to lose myself in a contract clause, but all the time the knowledge surrounded me: Something is very wrong. Over the years, like every couple, Garv and I had had our rows, but not even the most vicious of those had ever felt like this. The worst scrap had been one of those odd ones which had started out as a muscular discussion over whether a new skirt of mine was brown or purple, and had unexpectedly disintegrated into a bitter stand-off, with accusations of colour-blindness and hyper-sensitivity flying about.
(Garv: ‘ What’s wrong with it being brown?’
Me: ‘ Everything! But it’s not brown, it’s purple, you stupid colour-blind fucker.’
Garv: ‘ Look, it’s only a skirt. All I said was I was surprised at you buying a brown one.’
Me: ‘ But I DIDN’! It’s PURPLE!’
Him: ‘ You’re overreacting.’
Me: ‘ I’m NOT. I would NEVER buy a brown skirt. Do you know the first thing about me?’)
At the time I’d thought I’d never forgive him. I’d been wrong. But this time was different, I was horribly sure of it.
At lunch-time, I just couldn’t find it in me to care about my urgent piles of work, so I went to Grafton Street, looking for comfort. Which took the form of spending money – again. Unenthusiastically, I bought a scented candle and a cheapish (relatively speaking) copy of a Gucci bag. But neither of them did anything to fill the void. Then I stopped into a chemist to get painkillers for my tooth and got intercepted by a white-coated, orange-faced woman who told me that if I bought two Clarins products – one of which had to be skincare – I’d get a free gift. Listlessly I shrugged, ‘Fine.’
She couldn’t believe her luck, and when she suggested the dearest stuff – serums in 100 ml bottles – again I lifted and slumped my shoulders. ‘Sure.’
I liked the sound of a free gift – I found the idea of a present very consoling. But back at work, when I opened my present, it was a lot less exciting than it had looked on the picture: funny-coloured eyeshadow, a mini-mini-mini tube of foundation, four drops of eye-cream and a thimble of vinegary perfume. Anti-climax set in, and then, in an unexpected reprieve of normality, came guilt, which swelled big and ugly as the afternoon lengthened. I had to stop spending money. So as soon as I could reasonably leave, I hurried back to Grafton Street to try to return the handbag – I couldn’t return the Clarins stuff because I’d already tried the free gift – but they wouldn’t give me a refund, only a credit note. And before I’d made it back to the car, my eye was caught by yellow flowery flip-flops in a shoe-shop window and, like an out-of-body experience, I found myself inside, handing over my card and spending another thirty quid. It wasn’t safe to let me out.