Dad had been in the Army, so if he thought Leo was brave then he must be.
Mum walked beside his bed, holding his hand and smiling at him. It wasn’t her big, big smile, but it was the one she only gave to him. She didn’t smile at Dad, or Grandpa, or Grandma or Nana Mer, or Aunt Cordy or Amy or Randle or Ria like that. Not ever. It was his special smile.
At the doorway to the room where they were going to operate, they stopped.
“I’ll be right here, waiting for you,” Mum said, bending over him. “I’ll make sure they’ve got your Jell-O and ice cream waiting for when you wake up, OK?”
“OK.”
She kissed his forehead, she kissed his right cheek, she kissed his left cheek. She stroked her hand over his face. Still smiling her special smile.
“Goodnight, beautiful,” she said.
Leo, age 7 years and 5 months
CHAPTER 40
T here’s still time for him to make it. If he comes running through this airport right now and throws his baggage at the check-in woman and she checks him in in record time and we run to Gate 15, we’ll make it.
But he has to arrive now. Right now.
I turn on the spot, scanning the crowd, the holidaymakers, the business travelers, the cleaners, the people dropping people off, those waiting for others to show up. They all have a purpose, they all know where they should be. They all know where they’re going.
They aren’t like me, stranded by a no-show husband.
I hit the redial button on my mobile, and it clicks straight to voicemail. He always turns his phone off when he’s driving. Or maybe he’s on the tube. So he must be on his way.
He was going to get the train here. I drove here after yoga and parked in a long-term car park so we could drive home when we got back from holiday. Thinking about it, I should have taken the bags, but for some reason it seemed more logical for Mal to take them. And now neither he nor they are here.
I hit the redial button again.
Voicemail.
“Mal, I have no idea where you are, but you had better have a damn good reason why you’re not here right now. In fact, that reason had better end with ‘And so I’m lying in a hospital bed, bleeding,’ otherwise I am finding new uses for your balls.”
Knowing him, he received a call from work—heaven knows the thought of him not being there for five days plus two weekend days had been enough to send a few people at his office into a tailspin. And he probably tried to sort out whatever problem it was, which made him late for the airport.
I hit redial again.
Voicemail.
It’s too late now.
Gate 15 is closed.
We’re not going to get our holiday. Our fresh start, my chance to make amends, is currently waiting for takeoff with neither of us on it.
“You bastard,” I say to his voicemail. “You absolute sodding bastard.”
Eerie.
That’s how the house feels when I get home. We were meant to be away, so everything has that extra layer of clean, that extra formality of tidiness. All the appliances apart from the fridge-freezer are unplugged. In the center of my body, fear flowers. Our luggage isn’t here.
There is no message on the answering machine.
I dial Meredith’s number, but there is no answer. She never turns on her mobile despite the number of times Mal tells her to. Victoria wouldn’t know anything.
I try Mal again. Voicemail.
I shouldn’t have left those messages, I think as I sit on the brow of the third stair, my mobile in my hand.
I’m shaking. I have been since I walked in here and the coolness of a truly empty house swooped down upon me.
I have a very strong feeling that I am never going to see Mal again.
CHAPTER 41
H e leans against the kitchen counter, his shirt tucked into his black pinstripe suit trousers, his top button open. The buttons on his shirt, I notice, are covered, and dice-shaped silver cufflinks hold his cuffs closed at the wrist. It’s an expensive shirt. I do not know why this impresses itself upon my mind, but it does.
Silence slides between us like a sharp knife slicing into tender flesh, carving away even the hush of our unsynchronized breathing.
He is in my house. My home.
I inhale his presence. It is odd, so different from the way Mum, Dad, Cordy and Aunt Mer changed the energy of the house when they first arrived. They were here to help, and that is what they filled the house with. Cordy has gone home because Jack was called away to cover a flight unexpectedly, and the others are now in a hotel.
Mal is here to get to know his son. He understood about not coming in when I stopped off at the hospital earlier, but now he is here and the energy in the house is slightly frantic. Forced. An unexpected sense of urgency surrounding us. We both want him to get on with it. Although we’re not really sure how it will work, but the urgency hangs here. The need for him to go be there. Start.
His hands move first. His left hand reaching out, cupping my cheek, as the familiar-unfamiliar warmth of his skin spreads slowly through my body. And his body moves next, his other hand sliding around my shoulders, drawing us together, sewing up the long years that we have been apart by crossing the short distance between us.
Without thinking, my eyes slip shut and my body melts against his. Easy. Simple. My arms move around him and draw him close, trying to seal up all the tiny spaces that still gape between us.
It’s still there, that unique place in the world where we fit together. If we do not think about everything else, everyone else, we fit here, so close we could be one.
I step away first. Push him back slightly and step out of reach. This isn’t what we do anymore. I may sometimes hate his wife, but I’ll always be more hurt by what he did. Because he did it. He could do it. I can never forget that.
“The spare room is all made up, but I’ll go find you some clean towels,” I say, avoiding eye contact. His right hand goes up to finger the spot behind his ear. Leo did that. Does that. Rubs hard at the lump behind his ear, then runs his forefinger slowly over it. Usually he does that when he is trying to get something—a go on the PlayStation when he knows he is not technically allowed to play on it; the chance to climb into bed with Keith and me on a Sunday morning; a trip to the park even though it’s raining outside.
“I’d better, erm, call Stephanie,” he says, “she will have been waiting at the airport.”
I hate her name being said in my house. It is an irrational thing to be upset about, but I hate it all the same. It puts her here, makes her real in my life. “Yeah, sure,” I say, the words choking in my throat.
I’m at the door, just moving through the doorway, when he speaks again, low and even. “How long should I say I’m staying?”
I do not turn around. What he is asking is how long I think Leo has left. When I think our son will be leaving.
“However long you want to,” I say, before I walk on, when I should have said, “However long it takes.”
CHAPTER 42
A ll my good makeup, my limited-edition perfume, my best outfit and my most expensive underwear (the stuff that you pay more for the less there is of it), Mal has it all.
Fifty miles away in Brighton. And he doesn’t know when he is bringing it back. My plan to re-seduce my husband, to “become a creature like no other”—I read that somewhere, I can’t remember where—has spectacularly backfired.
“But what will I wear?” I ask him, cringing at the whine in my voice.
“The curtains from the spare room for all I care,” he replies. I don’t blame him. I am being a brat because it is easier than saying to him I want to be there. That I am terrified of what will happen to Leo and I want to be there to help as much as I can. He’d have to tell me no, and I cannot stand to hear that.
“Are you sure you can’t just drop my stuff home and then go back?” Ask any red-blooded man, behaving badly is so much easier than admitting you’re vulnerable and afraid of something. Beha
ving badly or having sex.
“Do you want me to hang up on you?”
“No.” I sigh. “So, will you be staying at Nova’s the whole time you’re there?” I actually want to ask how Nova is. How she is coping. But it would sound disingenuous. Mal doesn’t know that after she was gone from our lives I regretted more than anything what I had done. When he was crying all the time over losing her as his friend, I began to see the pair of them clearly. Yes, they probably had been in love, but Mal needed Nova in a way he would never need me. She was his foundation, the underpinning of who he was; like scaffolding erected around a building under renovation, she kept him up, she kept him going.
Because of her, he had the strength to be who he was to me. I wasn’t as jealous about that as I thought I would be, because that part of it wasn’t about the love I was scared of, that was about habit.
In the months following what I made him do, I began to see that. I can look back now and see why she had been so important to him when we first met. Why he talked about her all the time. He needed her to listen to him. No one, I realized, listened to him like she did. I couldn’t, I hadn’t been there in the past. When his mother wasn’t capable of listening to him, when his father wasn’t there to listen to him, when his sister wasn’t old enough to listen to him, when there were no real friends to listen to him, Nova always was. She praised, she congratulated, she sympathized, she disapproved, she told him off, she simply listened.
Many people don’t realize how important it is to be heard. I heard him, I listened to him, but I wasn’t a habit. Without Nova, he began to curl into himself, like the blossoming process in reverse. All the petals, the parts of him I knew, began to shrink away from me—almost as if he didn’t have the confidence any longer to be himself. It wasn’t simply that he was angry with me, he was, but it was that he had lost his footing, lost all semblance of who he thought he was, and was spending all his time holding himself together.
That was why he cried all the time, that was why he didn’t intentionally touch me for more than a year after she was gone from our lives. He had lost himself when he lost her.
She needs him now, and I want him to be able to be there for her without thinking that I might have a problem with it. But I cannot say that. I am not able to say that to him.
“I’ll be finding a hotel tomorrow,” he says tartly. “Is that all right with you?”
“I was just asking,” I reply.
“Look, I’m going to go. I don’t know why you’re being like this but it’s doing my head in. I’ll talk to you tomorrow or something. Hopefully, we’ll both be in a better frame of mind.”
“Hopefully,” I echo. “I love you.”
“Hmm-hmm,” he replies and hangs up.
The house is so empty.
It’s too late to go to the gym. It’s too late to call anyone to ask them over or to meet me for a drink. It’s too late to call Mal back and tell him I’m sorry, and that I’m coming to support him.
I sit on the stairs looking around at my hall, realizing that it is far too late to tell the truth and to make it all better.
CHAPTER 43
I knew I’d find you here,” Mal says over the storming waves.
I thought he had gone to sleep hours ago. After I had shown him to the room Cordy and I had shared a few days ago, I couldn’t sleep.
Couldn’t rest.
Mal was in my house, which made everything seem final, as though Leo’s health, whether he would wake up, was hurtling toward one awful, inevitable conclusion.
While I’d lain in bed, staring at the ceiling, waiting for Keith’s next text, I had started to wonder if Mal being here would have a miraculous effect. Would bring Leo round. Or if this, what was happening with Leo, was part of some big grand plan to bring Mal and me back together. To reunite us.
At which point I, the great believer in destiny and all that is out there, had known that I was going crazy and had thrown aside the covers and climbed out of bed. I could walk off the crazy thoughts on the seafront, I’d decided. I didn’t walk far, just ended up sitting on the dark green iron bench, remembering the times I would sit here in the dead of night with my newborn baby and cry.
It is spectacular here at night. In the dark, in the stillness, when all there is around is a night sky and tiny, blinking pinpricks of stars. It’s not like looking out of the window or at a picture—stand here and it’s like standing on the edge of the world and feeling it carefully wrap itself around you to stop you falling off. It folds itself in front, above, behind, scooping you up to become part of its hugeness. I came here because I could become lost in the vastness of everything. There is no room for crazy thoughts.
“Why did you think you’d find me here?” I ask him as he lowers himself onto the bench beside me.
“I heard the door go and I saw your car was still there, so I guessed you’d head for the beach.”
“I had a sudden urge to see that sign.” I nod toward the KEEP OFF THE GROYNES sign that sits on dark green railings (the color of the railings revealed if you were in Brighton or Hove: aqua blue-green for Brighton; dark green for Hove). “It described my love life for so, so long and I needed reminding of it.”
I am not looking at him, but I feel the energy around him warm up as Mal smiles.
“How you doing?” he asks gently.
People are going to ask me that a lot in the coming weeks. And what am I supposed to say? A half-truth like “Bearing up,” which will make them feel better? Something closer to the truth such as “Falling apart,” which will make them try to make me feel better? Or nothing at all, allow them to make up their minds for themselves and leave me to feel what I feel without having to factor them into the equation. “How do you think?” I ask him.
“Stupid question.”
“Yes, it was.”
The waves fill the quiet between us, crashing almost violently against the pebbles and then racing away again.
“I’m sorry,” he says.
I’m sorry.
I’m sorry.
I’m sorry.
It is carried over the waves, filtering out into the majestic expanse of the sky. I’m sorry.
“Is that it?” I ask once the words have dissolved in the air around us. I spin slightly to look at him. “Truly, is that it? No big emotional confession, no heartfelt plea for forgiveness dressed up as an explanation?” I shrug despairingly at him. “Maybe a spot of self-flagellation at my feet? Don’t I at least deserve a few tears and globules of snot as you sobbingly say that?”
Naturally, he doesn’t respond, and I spin back on my bum to look at the sea. It’s a much better view. Better, uncomplicated. “You know, anything less than something you’ve put your back into is, quite frankly, an insult.”
“God, Nova, if you knew how sorry I was—”
“I would what? Forgive you? Feel bad for you? Just so you know, in case there is any lingering doubt, you are not the be-all and end-all of my life. Especially right now.”
Mal’s demeanor beside me relaxes suddenly. “I just replayed what I said,” he says, “and now I can hear what a wanker I sounded like. Sound like. I abandoned you, I abandoned our son, and now I think two words are going to change everything. Make it better.”
“I suppose it’s a start,” I reply.
“No, it’s not. It’s pathetic.”
My eyes slip shut and I squeeze them tightly together as I massage my temples. “I said self-flagellation, not self-pity. Christ, Mal, do we have to do this now? Couldn’t it wait until some other critical moment when we should be talking about something deep and meaningful and then it all comes out how sorry you are, how I’ve never managed to hate you properly, how our friendship forged so long ago in pain and joy is unbreakable, so I have, in my heart, already forgiven you? Can’t we just wait for all that to come up at the appropriate moment in the script rather than forcing it now?”
I feel his face soften in a wry smile. “I forget that you’re a psychologist and yo
u don’t fall for the things people say as easily as they think you do.”
“It’s not from being a psychologist, it’s from knowing bullshit when I hear it.” I inhale; the salt in the sharp, cold air shoots through me, quick and delicious, tinglingly painful.
“I think about you every day,” he reveals. “And I think about him. Leo.” That’s the first time I have heard Mal say his son’s name. It sounds strange, unnatural somehow, because it’s the last part of his own name and he rarely says that. “Some days it gets so bad I want to jump in my car—even in the middle of the working day—and come down here and see you. Sometimes to watch you, sometimes to throw myself on your mercy.”
He is telling me that he didn’t live happily ever after having erased me as much as possible from his life. I—we—were there somewhere, niggling away at the back of his conscience. That sort of thing can weigh heavily on a person’s happiness. Their life.
“Nova, if at any point in my life up until eight years ago someone had told me that you and I wouldn’t talk every single day and we’d have a son that I never see, I’d have told them they were insane. How could we not—”
“Don’t say it like I had any choice in the matter. That you didn’t make a decision that I was forced into accepting.”
“OK, how could I ever do that—”
“Tell me why,” I interrupt as I turn to him. “Tell me why you did it. Because all this chat about thinking about me every day means nothing really. Tell me why.”
“I told you, we changed our minds.”
“That’s an excuse you came up with,” I say. “I need to know the reason. I have never known the reason and I need to know.”
His defenses come up in an instant: he sits up straighter, his body, once fluid, now rigid and poised to deflect an attack; his eyes as hard as brown diamonds, his face an unreadable mask.
Shaking my head, I glance away. “Until you can tell me why, the real reason, Malvolio, we have nothing to talk about on this matter.”