The Rose Petal Beach (20 page)

‘We can’t do this to the children,’ Scott says, ‘without knowing we tried
everything
to make it work.’

I think of telling the girls that Mama and Dad wouldn’t be living together any more. That they wouldn’t see both of us every day from now on. I can’t imagine the look on their faces, the horror that will slowly dawn on them that their family is over. They have friends with divorced parents, who have two homes and who are fine. They are happy, healthy, thriving. But did they get that way instantly? How did they feel in the first few weeks, days, hours? How did they manage to make sense of it? I conjure up Cora’s face, how she will shut down, stiffen her lips and knit her forehead together in a frown; I picture Anansy’s face, how her eyes will widen and her mouth will open as she starts to breathe fast and anxiously. Can I really do this to them without trying everything first?

‘Let’s go for couples counselling. Find a way to talk to each other about this, find out how we can fix it.’

I think about the girls growing up and finding the understanding that I walked away without trying counselling, without giving their father the chance to put things right.

‘Tami, I will do anything to put this right. Anything. Just tell me what you need from me and it’s yours. Anything.’ He pauses. ‘Even if we can’t make it work, let’s at least go to counselling to find a way to split up amicably. Please, we can’t end like this.’

‘Why now?’ I ask him. ‘Why now after you said no again when I asked you for the second time last year to go to counselling?’ I suggested counselling again even after his reaction the first time
(‘Don’t be stupid, Tami. Why the fucking fuck should I fucking pay to fucking talk? People pay me to talk, not the other way around. Counselling, like gambling, is a fucking mug’s game. You should know better, you really should.
’) because his behaviour had reached new lows and I couldn’t stand it. A stark realisation hits me between the eyes: but of course he was being awful, of course he’d graduated from subtle put-downs to overt ones, of course he’d increased his preening – that was when he started unpicking the thread of our marriage with his affair.

‘I, erm, I wasn’t being … I had a different mind-set back then, I was—’

I raise my hand to stop him. I don’t want him to carry on, we both know why. Anything else he says will just sound like trying to explain it away. Not only the affair, the behaviour that went with it.

‘Things are different now,’ he says. ‘I want this to work. I know it’s going to work.’ He says that as if he can just erase the past few days of hell, the past eighteen months or so of his affair, the last four years of appalling, entitled behaviour by sheer force of will. He can’t, of course, but I want to try for Cora and Anansy, to spare them any unnecessary pain.

‘OK, I’ll give it a try. But I’m making no promises. We’re just going to find someone and see if it might help us.’

His body visibly relaxes. ‘Oh thank God,’ he says. ‘Thank you. I know we can make it work, I know we can.’ His hand moves towards mine, wanting to slip his fingers between mine. I jerk my hand, my body, backwards away from him. The bruises of the things he said in the street are still there, on my skin, not visible to the naked eye, but still there. Still painful to the touch. My words don’t seem to have hurt him, he has brushed them off and thinks it’s normal for us to have said those things to each other, that we can rebuild something after all that. For someone whose character was assassinated not even an hour ago, he seems remarkably fine.

‘Right, OK, I think we can class this an emergency. I’ll be fine to take time off work this week or next week. Hopefully they’ll have someone this week. Just let me know what day, what time and where and I’ll be there.’

I blink at him, wondering if he is serious. He can’t be, can he? He must surely be pulling my leg.
Surely
. I say nothing, my eyes wandering idly over his face.

He is silent. I remember something I should have said to him earlier: the man I married would never have treated me like his personal assistant at best, his servant at worst.

‘I’m not arranging counselling,’ I state. ‘Why would I when I don’t even want to go and, more importantly,
I wasn’t the one who had an affair
.’

I watch as the realisation dawns on his face and his eyes slip shut in regret.

‘Nice sense of entitlement you’ve got going on there, Scott,’ I say.

‘Don’t do that,’ he says sharply.

‘Don’t do what?’

‘Don’t be snide. If we’re going to work this out, we have to at least try to be kind to each other, be understanding until we can get ourselves a counsellor who can help us communicate better.’

He’s right, of course. But it still niggles. Maybe that’s why we need counselling so it doesn’t feel wrong to try to be kind to him.

‘You have to give up the porn,’ I say.

‘Pardon?’

‘You said you’d do anything and I want you to give up the porn.’

Scott’s tensed body is telling him to refuse, to deny me this request. ‘Right. OK, all right. I’ll stop watching it.’

‘And delete all the files you’ve got saved. On your PC, laptop, iPad and mobiles.’

His head nods as if in contemplation but he doesn’t make eye contact.

‘Is there a problem?’ I ask.

‘No. No. There’s no problem. I’ll do it. Of course, I’ll do it.’ Scott’s dark eyes stray to my hands, laced together in my lap. I’ve noticed him staring at my hands a lot these past few days. ‘And you have to put your wedding ring back on.’

I may not wear it, but I keep it with me every day. I put it in my pocket and if what I am wearing doesn’t have pockets, I slip it into my bra. I like to have it close, even though I don’t wear it. When we were first married I could hardly wear it for more than a few hours because it irritated the skin on my finger. I had to keep taking it off and putting it back on until my hand got used to the
metal constantly rubbing against it; until my body got used to being married. As it is, around the base of my ring finger there is a smooth, darkened band of skin from where the ring won its battle to be worn permanently. There is a band of skin that I’m not sure will ever properly fade so I will always be reminded of this marriage, whether it works or not.

‘Don’t push your luck,’ I say to him.

His reply is a small nod.

My fingers curl tightly into my palm, the jagged edges of my picked-apart nails digging in and stopping the tears. The shock is wearing off, the numbness thawing throughout my body. And all around me I can feel the thread of my past, the tapestry of the history of my one true love and marriage being unpicked, undone and callously rewoven.

Two weeks have passed.

Two weeks where we are more fragile, but putting on a front for the girls. Beatrix comes over every three or four days, trying to take the tension out of us being together. Scott is back at work and I have the house to myself during the day.

Scott is trying. He takes the girls to school every day now, he is home for dinner with them and he helps with the bedtime routine. He washes up after dinner, he puts on the laundry, he hangs it out before he goes to bed, he cleans the bathroom on the weekend. He checks the fridge and cupboards to see what is missing and picks it up on the way home. Every other day when we are eating dinner he Hoovers the house. He is here. Present. No more texting or emailing on his phones when he’s sitting at the table or with the girls. He focuses on them and them alone. He is the model husband and father.

I hate him for it almost as much as I hate him for the affair. He knew what he should be doing, he knew how removed he was from us and yet it took the end – virtually – for him to be here again. For him to return to his family rather than sending the shell of himself home every night.

Right now, we’re going to the doctors for a check-up with Anansy who has an ear infection. Scott is here and he is coming with us. Normally he wouldn’t have been here, let alone come with us. Obviously, this is when the inevitable happens. We don’t live in the biggest place in the world, and she clearly isn’t going to hide away, like I would if I had done what she has done.

Mirabelle is coming towards us on the road. Seeing her is a trip
back to the messages, to the passion and the lust, to the images of them together that have snagged themselves into my mind like those little plant spores with hooks and barbs that snare themselves on your clothing and you can only remove by picking them off individually. These memories will not go away by themselves, they will need to be plucked out one by one and destroyed.

Mirabelle – her name pools nausea at the back of my throat – is on our side of the road. As if she hasn’t betrayed me and condemned Scott, she was about to walk past our house.

Scott and Mirabelle both falter and then pause in the step they were both about to take when they see each other. What must it be like, being confronted by your lover now the person you were betraying knows?

Unaware of what is going on, Anansy screams, ‘Auntie Mirabelle!’ before darting off towards her. She throws herself at Mirabelle’s legs, encompasses them with her arms and squeezes. ‘Auntie Mirabelle, where’ve you been? I’ve missed you so much.’

I knew they liked her, but not this much. They saw her regularly because she would often drop by for coffee over the weekend, when Scott was out at the gym or some kind of trade fair where he’d pick up business contacts. She would sit with them and play with them, and chat with me afterwards. Our lives were so much more intertwined, interwoven, than I had thought. It will take some time to unstitch her from my life, from our life.

Mirabelle’s face, adorned with far too much foundation and eye shadow and eyeliner in an attempt to look normal, creases with a smile. She lowers herself to her knees and takes Anansy in her arms. I want to rip my child away from her. I want to scream at her to get away from my daughter.
How can she try to ruin our family then hug my child as if nothing is wrong?
I can’t do that, of course, without scaring Anansy and alerting Cora that Mirabelle is something to do with the tension in the house.

‘Hi, Aunt Mirabelle,’ Cora says, moving closer shyly until she is near enough for Mirabelle to reach out and tug her into the hug,
too. The urge almost overwhelms me this time, and I actually step forwards to rip them away. Then I stop. The look on her face is so bereft. I remember once asking her if she wanted to have children.

‘Me? Children?’ she said and smiled that secret smile of hers, the one that would sit on her lips the second she was about to become mysterious.

‘Yes, you. Do you want to have children?’ I repeated, determined not to be put off.

‘Want to? Maybe. Need to? Yes.’

‘What does that mean?’

‘It means I feel the need to have children. And if you’re asking because you can see I’m not exactly relaxed around your children even though I adore them, I just, I get scared I’m going to break them, I suppose.’

‘Most people get over that after the newborn stage.’

‘Yes, but for me, it’s a never-ending fear. You can break children without meaning to. I don’t just mean physically, either.’

Mirabelle does not look at Scott. Since my step forward, he is behind me and possibly looking at her, I do not know. Is he staring at her and reminding himself of what they had, what they did, how they fitted together in their desire for each other? Is he wondering if he has made the right choice?

‘I hope you girls are being good,’ she says.

‘We are,’ they chorus.

‘When are you coming to our house again, Aunt Mirabelle?’ Anansy asks. ‘We can’t play special tea on the beach without you.’

‘Yes,’ Cora adds, ‘and you have to bring your rose petals so we can play properly.’

‘We’ll see,’ Mirabelle says.

‘In other words, no,’ Cora says.

‘Did I say no?’

‘Yes. “We’ll see” is adult speak for no. Everyone knows that.’

‘Why don’t you want to play with us?’ Anansy asks, affronted and aghast.

‘I do, I do, it’s just, I’m really busy with work right now and I don’t have time to come over to play. It’s not that I don’t want to, it’s I don’t have the time.’

Like Scott, she lies so easily. They slip from her tongue as if untruths are nothing to be afraid of. As if they don’t live on your shoulders and stain your soul.

‘I will come over soon, I promise.’ Lie. A lie on a promise.

‘Please do,’ Anansy says, saddening her eyes, and evoking a straight-mouth smile of yearning.

‘Yes, please do,’ Cora says, feeling no shame in copying her sister’s expression.

Enough. Enough, enough, enough.
I take another step towards the three of them. ‘Come on now, we’ve really got to get going,’ I say to the girls.

‘Awwwww,’ they both intone at the same time.

‘Now, come on girls, you can’t keep your mother waiting.’ For a moment, I think she is going to look up at me because she has mentioned me, but she doesn’t. I want her to. I want to see what shame looks like, I want to see what lives in the eyes of a liar. I want to see her. With care and attention, she straightens the collar on Anansy’s jacket, and tucks one of the stray locks of hair from Cora’s plaits behind her ear. ‘You be good, as I know you are.’

She brings herself up to her full height, and focuses completely on the girls, does not raise her line of sight from them at all. ‘I’ll see you soon, gorgeous ones,’ she says with an air of finality that twists a little in my stomach.
Where is she going?

‘See you soon,’ Cora says.

Anansy raises her hand to her mouth and kisses her palm then ostentatiously throws the kiss towards Mirabelle. She catches it in the palm of her hand. ‘Thank you,’ she says. ‘I’m going to put this in my pocket and keep it for when I feel sad. Is that OK?’

Anansy grins and nods.

‘Bye,’ she says, grins at them both again, before pulling her Mulberry bag – the twin of mine – onto her shoulder. She does not
look at me or Scott, not even a glance to acknowledge she knows we’re there. She steps off the pavement and hurries herself to the other side before carrying on with her journey.