After Ever After (16 page)

As I return to the kitchen I glance at the microwave. It’s just after five. Ella will be out now for at least an hour until I wake her for tea and a bath. Fergus won’t be home until God knows when – ten at the earliest going by recent times. That’s five long hours watching TV, drinking tea or wine or both, waiting.

Gareth shuts the kitchen door behind him and stuffs his muddy overalls into a plastic bag, his wet hair plastered to his face.

‘Could have done without that rain shower,’ he says, a wry smile on his face. It had come down out of nowhere. No spitting or darkened clouds to warn us. One moment the sky was bright with a few scattered white fluffy clouds and the ground was dry under our feet. The next moment it seemed as if someone had upturned a bucket on the garden and the mud had squelched and sucked under my feet as I ran inside with Ella. I’d expected Gareth to follow me, but instead he’d stood in the heavy rain, illuminated by the afternoon light, letting it drench him. Eventually I’d stopped looking at him and taken the now sleeping Ella to her cot.

‘Won’t get finished until tomorrow now, and look at the state of me!’ he says now, pausing and looking up at the dark sky. ‘Supposed to meet a lass later, too.’

‘Oh really?’ I say, with half a smile. ‘What poor victim have you got lined up tonight then? Anyone I know?’

Gareth shakes his head and begins to fill the kettle. The fact that he doesn’t ask permission to do so gives me some kind of pleasure.

‘You don’t know anyone, do you?’ he says mildly, and I have to reflect that it’s almost true, except for Clare from the One o’Clock Club, who I’ve now seen at two meetings and promised coffee to sometime soon.

‘So, is it serious?’ I enquire, taking my steaming cup of instant coffee. He’s even remembered my one sugar.

Gareth sits astride a stool, his hand wrapped right around the mug, the tips of his fingers still red from the sudden drop in temperature.

‘There’s no need to get jealous, love.’ He laughs.

‘You wish,’ I tell him, shaking my head in mock despair.

‘Yeah, I do!’ He smiles at me over the top of his coffee cup. ‘No, it’s not serious, she’s nothing special. But what can I do? Women love me. It seems only fair that I give them all a chance to sample some of this good stuff!’ He has a self-deprecating smile as he says it, but every other line of his posture shows that he believes every word he says.

‘It must be hard,’ I say breezily. ‘All these women after you. Don’t you ever get tired?’

Gareth grins and lowers his eyes and seems to look inwards as if remembering something or someone, some recent memory.

‘Nope,’ he says simply. ‘Some things feel too good to get tired of.’

He stands suddenly and presses the palm of his hand into the small of his back, emptying his coffee cup and putting it the sink. ‘I’d better be off.’

I look at the clock. It’s still only five-thirty.

‘Why don’t you stay?’ I say impulsively. ‘For tea. There’s this huge steak and red wine pie that’s going to be past its sell-by date if I don’t eat it tonight, and Fergus will probably eat in the office.’ I assume that he will; he hasn’t actually called me today at all, but for the last three nights that is exactly what he’s done.

Gareth pauses, his bag on his shoulder.

‘What about my date? Do you want me to stand her up?’ he asks bluntly.

I feel the colour rise in my cheeks. I’d forgotten all about his date in the space of a few short seconds.

‘Oh yeah, oh well, not to worry. I’ll see you then.’ I smile at him and get up, making myself look busy in the hope that it’ll hide the fact that I feel foolish. Gareth drops his bag with a clatter and sits back down.

‘All right then, you’re on. Got any booze?’ I hide my look of relief as I look into the fridge and reach for a bottle of wine. I wonder briefly about his nameless date – if she’ll be waiting for him somewhere, wondering where he is – and then I open the wine.

I can’t seem to catch my breath for laughing, and I pick up one of Fergus’s brocade cushions and shove it into my mouth.

‘Stop it!’ I gasp. ‘You’ll make me wake up Ella!’ And although it’s just after seven and Ella should have had her bath and tea by now, I’m not ready just yet to start being a grown-up again. Gareth is sitting on the floor, his legs stretched out in front of him, his head resting on the seat of Fergus’s chair.

‘So I said to him, no matter which way you look at it, it’s your pig in your bed, what do you expect me to do about it?’ He grins and polishes off his glass of wine. ‘I got fired, of course, but it’s a good story.’ At that point his mobile chirrups into life. He briefly scrutinises the display and rejects the call, slipping it back into his pocket and pulling himself into a kneeling position. He grabs the remnants of our second bottle of wine off Fergus’s coffee table and begins to walk on his knees towards me.

‘Want some of this …?’ he asks, waggling his eyebrows.

‘Ah, a man on his knees, just the way I like them.’ I hold out my glass to him and tip back my head as the room swoons slightly around me.

‘Hiya.’ Fergus stands in the living-room doorway looking from Gareth to me. The room comes to an abrupt halt and I sit up, pushing my hair off my face. Gareth sits back on his heels, putting the bottle of wine on the floor.

‘Hiya! You’re home early,’ I say, not sounding as delighted as I meant to, as I feel, after the initial shock. Instead, I feel like I used to when I called a sickie into work or when I was very little and got Mum’s make-up out without her permission. I stand up rather unsteadily and go to him, putting my arms around his face and kissing his stubbled cheek. ‘I thought you weren’t going to be home for hours.’

Fergus shrugs and breaks free from our embrace. Looking into his eyes I’m relieved to see that he’s exhausted, not jealous or angry with me. Relieved and a little disappointed.

‘So, how’s the garden going then?’ Fergus extends his hand to the now standing Gareth.

‘Getting there, mate, yeah. Start getting the plants in, lawn down and all that.’ Gareth jams his hands into his pockets. I’m sure he’d like to get out of the room, but Fergus is still positioned in the doorway. ‘Um, so, anyway, best be off.’ Gareth nods at him to step aside, but instead Fergus turns around and walks out of the room to the kitchen, calling after him, ‘Are we having that pie for dinner, it smells ni— Oh, you’ve eaten.’

‘I’ll see you later then,’ Gareth says, winking at me as I open the door for him.

‘Yeah, and thanks for staying, I mean, and missing your date,’ I say, glancing over my shoulder.

‘Oh, no worries.’ He steps out into the rain-freshened air. ‘I’m only about an hour late. I reckon she’ll still be waiting.’ And he’s already pulling out his mobile as he opens his van door.

I look down the road, the promise of a warm spring evening sparkling on the damp pavements, and feel some kind of regret as I close the door and go back to the kitchen.

‘I wish you’d told me you weren’t going to be busy today. I could have got a sitter, we could have gone out maybe.’ I go to lean on the fridge as Fergus examines the contents of the freezer with a scowl on his face.

‘We are still busy, but I managed to get through a lot and I thought I’d come home on time for once.’ He straightens his back with a beer in his hand, opens the can and takes a long drink straight from it. ‘You sound like you’d rather I was late.’ His tone is slightly defensive and I instantly climb down from my own slightly antagonised position. Fergus in one of his rare dark moods. I’ve learnt over the last year that with Fergus you can’t make a direct reference to it; you can’t, for example, ask him ‘What’s up?’, because if you do you’re nagging him or refusing to let him have his space. Instead you have to sort of placate him on a general level and sometimes whatever it is that is bothering him will come out and sometimes it just won’t.

‘Don’t be daft,’ I say, going to him and putting my arms around him. ‘I’m just surprised to see you early, that’s all. It’s great. I’ll order you a Chinese and we can talk.’ I kiss his tightly closed lips and open the freezer, looking for something to microwave for him, sensing that the very last thing he wants to do today is talk to me. ‘Do you want another beer?’

Fergus shakes his head and looks at the work we’ve done on the garden closely for a moment before turning his back on the window dismissively.

‘Where’s my girl?’ he says, a shadow of a smile on his lips. ‘I think one of her smiles is just what I need right now!’

‘Asleep,’ I say, wondering if one of my smiles will do. ‘She went to sleep after playing in the mud. One minute she was all thrashing about and shouting, the next snoring her head off.’ I produce the smile. ‘She’s so funny.’

Fergus half laughs, but it doesn’t look as if my smile has the right ingredients to lift his mood, at least not tonight. Right on cue, Ella’s cries echo down the stairs as if the end of the world is imminent.

‘Oh well,’ I say. ‘You order and I’ll sort her out.’

Fergus glances at the menu I hand him, drops it back on the worktop and then disappears into the living room without another word.

It’s taken me over an hour to get her back to sleep, and it’s almost nine when I join Fergus, still clutching on to the faint hope that we might talk – I don’t really mind about what, but just something that requires real words and proper sentences. He’s staring blankly at the TV, not watching some cop drama. I pause for a moment in the door frame and decide what to do.

I sit beside him and lay my head on his shoulder. He doesn’t acknowledge my presence. I know I should let him be from Mars and sit in his cave or whatever it is, but something about this mood seems different and, as a girl, I feel obliged to pester him about it until he either reveals what the problem is or accuses me of interfering and nagging.

‘What’s up?’ I say casually, eternally optimistic that it might just be that easy. Fergus ignores me, his attention rapt in the plot of an advert he’s seen at least a million times before.

‘Fergus? I said, what’s up,’ I repeat, faintly annoyed. The talent he has for not acknowledging my existence these days is truly a remarkable one, one that makes me want to kill him, but a remarkable one nevertheless. Maybe on the planes of the Russian steppes early man had to develop this talent to cut out all surrounding distractions to hunt mammoths or something. Now, a few hundred thousand years later, there are no mammoths, just millions of really annoyed women contemplating murder. After deliberating over which to prioritise, the sofa arms or his wife, he turns to look at me, somewhat reluctantly.

‘Ha, yeah, I know!’ he says, hopeful that it will suffice.

‘I
said
, what’s up? Is there anything up?’ My carefully constructed conciliatory tone has completely evaporated.

‘Nothing, nothing’s up. I’m fine. Just watching telly.’ He puts his arm around me and stares at the screen again, clearly deciding that that will be enough to end my interrogation. I watch his profile for a moment, pursing my lips. Never go to bed on an argument, Camille always says, and I agree with her. It’s just that sometimes you have to get the argument going before you can get over it and go to bed.

‘You seem annoyed about something. Was it Gareth?’ I finally voice my anxiety. I mean, I know and Gareth knows we only play flirt, but my tired and overworked husband might not.

‘Who? Oh the gardener, why would he annoy me?’ Fergus shakes his head. ‘I’m not annoyed,’ he lies. ‘Can I watch this now?’ He gestures at a car ad.

I sigh and sit back in the chair. Unlike me, Fergus doesn’t seem to see the cathartic benefits of airing his problems. I know that two train journeys, a day in an office and all the responsibility he has is tiring, and I know that sitting at home dandling a baby on my knee and turning on the dishwasher shouldn’t be, even though it is. I just want some time to talk to him, some time to be listened to, some time to … exist for him.

‘Well, I’ll go and tidy the kitchen, okay?’ I say, hoping he’ll pick up on my rare offer to be domestic, a last ditch bid for attention, and come and sit with me. His gaze doesn’t leave the TV and I’m fairly sure he hasn’t heard me.

‘Okay,’ he says. As I stand up from the sofa, his arm flops heavily down as if he’s forgotten I was there at all.

For a moment I stare at the kitchen wall as if I can see Fergus on the other side of it. It’s not his fault, I tell myself. He’s got a lot on his plate. He’s too tired to realise that we never talk any more, or even just gossip and joke like we used to. I just have to give him some time to himself, and at the weekend we can be together properly, that’s if the whole thing doesn’t fly by in what seems like two hours, most of which he’s asleep for. I tip the remains of the pie into the bin, decide that’s enough cleaning for one night, and get out a packet of biscuits instead, eating two as I settle down to call Dora.

I listen to the ring tone for a very long time, waiting for her answer-machine to click on, not expecting her to be in. I am just about to hang up when she picks up the call, sounding a little breathless.

‘Yes?’ she sounds irritated.

‘Dora, it’s me,’ I say apologetically. ‘Were you asleep?’ I can hear her sigh.

‘No, not exactly. I was in bed though.’ There’s a short pause in which she is inevitably lighting a cigarette. ‘I hope this is an emergency. I hope Fergus has fallen under a train and you need to borrow something black or something because I was halfway through a pretty good shag.’ She sounds cross, but I know that she isn’t. Besides, Dora once told me that she’s never actually enjoyed sex, she just does it a lot because it seems polite. She was laughing when she said it, but I don’t think she was lying.

‘You should have just let it ring!’ I say.

‘I was letting it ring! But it kept on and on, putting me off my rhythm, and I thought it might be you and I didn’t want to miss you.’ I hear a muffled voice in the background.

‘No, no. I have to take this call, it’s an emergency. I’ll be with you in a bit. Have another beer.’

I laugh.

‘Not the love of your life then?’ I ask her.

‘Christ no. Nice shag and everything, but about as much personality as a block of wood. That’s the trouble with these NA types, they think the fact that they’ve been stupid enough to get themselves addicted to something makes them fascinating, but really it’s the only thing they’ve got to talk about and it’s fucking boring.’ I laugh again, picturing Dora, more than likely naked, taking a drag on her fag. And then something occurs to me.