The Loving Husband (2 page)

Why hadn’t she looked at the clock’s numerals when he came in, to know now, how much time had passed? Had she even opened her eyes? She remembered the red light of the alarm, she remembered how deep the dark in the room had been otherwise. She remembered holding herself under as she came, burrowed still in sleep as she lay on her side with Nathan’s weight still behind her and pushing. She remembered thinking, this is the trick, the trick is just to stay quiet, to stay inside, eyes closed, and then she came, with an exhalation
.
She’d let go, drifting into sleep. She remembered the exact weight of his hand on her.

Fran stood thinking a moment as the act’s ripples spread, the consequences,
had they, had he, what about
… and then she opened the door.

Even in daylight stepping out here took a conscious effort to keep the spirits from dipping: the sheer emptiness of it made her head ache, the uninterrupted flatness. At night it was different, it seemed less empty, it harboured pockets of deeper dark, the outbuildings, a line of poplars, a distant grain silo. Landmarks that by day were dwarfed by the wide, bleached, lovely sky, invisible in the night they still seemed to cluster, they offered places of concealment.

Emme had come out to look for an abandoned doll one evening and had run back in whimpering about funny noises and Nathan had looked up from the sofa. Fran hadn’t been able to see his eyes that time, the light reflecting off his reading glasses, she couldn’t have said if he was being accusatory because he had said nothing. And then there’d been a noise from upstairs, Ben in his cot stirring, and she’d run out of the room.

The cold was clammy, coating her face in the dark, and she pulled the coat round her. It smelled of him, of Nathan. She stepped carefully, still uncertain, in the dark; her balance felt off. One hand holding the coat together, the other one reached out into the darkness, her hand flapping stupidly, to stabilise her. She should have brought a torch.

The yard was cluttered, she had to step carefully or she’d trip. She moved past the shed. There was a faint orange glow far off to the side that revealed the line of the horizon, but it wasn’t sunrise. A February sunrise would be more than five hours off, it was the lights of the town, miles away but low-lying, and the light it shed went a long way on the endless flat windswept plain.

The barn loomed. The farmer had kept chickens in it, a battery shed. You could smell it from the back door then, and even Nathan’s face had turned stony. The estate agent had stood with his back to it as if to bar their way. In the car on the way home Nathan had said, his eyes on the road,
It’s prefabricated, there are people who take them down for you, take them away and put them up somewhere else.
Fran had sat stiffly in silence in the passenger seat, trying not to see it, even though she’d been the one that had insisted. A single bulb swinging and the chickens’ eyes red, a thousand of them and more. The smell had been indescribable.

No one had come to take it away yet but Nathan had taken down the walls, to let air blow through it, trying to get rid of the smell. Now it loomed, a roof on girders – she walked inside. What was she afraid of? She didn’t know. Something.

The air was still contaminated with decades of chicken shit and entrails and she held her arm across her face, the rough wool against her mouth. She looked up in the dark, her eyes must have made some small adjustment to it because she could make out the structure’s concrete rafters. She’d stood here next to Nathan as he contemplated them, that time when she told him she was pregnant again although she’d felt he must know. Wondering what he was thinking, his face pale, upturned. A builder contemplating a structure, estimating concrete’s stress levels. Now, she realised she was holding her breath. She made herself scan the roof space, straining her eyes and seeing nothing. She walked on across the powdery dirt floor, out of the back of the barn.

This was what she was afraid of. The yawning space, the black distance: it stopped her. It upset Nathan to see her panic, she had to control it. His face tense, fourteen weeks into the first pregnancy, to see her eyes wide outside the room where they’d scan her, to see her arms stiff by her sides on the high hospital bed. And after Emme was born, when she ran breathless to her cot in the middle of the night to make sure she was alive, she’d heard Nathan make a sound under his breath. And now they were both on their own in the house behind her, a four-year-old and a three-month-old, in that house that should feel like home but still made her heart clench in her chest as the light faded around it every night. She’d left the door unlocked, anything could happen, anything. She turned round but the barn obscured her view of the house and quickly she turned back to the horizon.

There was something there.

Something like a snake, something darker than the dark, it was just in front of her. She couldn’t see it, she couldn’t hear it, didn’t know if it was under her feet or it was about to flap in her face but something was there. She couldn’t move.

Far off, a car’s headlights swept the plain, a lone bush was illuminated, the black furrows of a ploughed field fanned out, grasses on the edge of a drainage ditch – a something else. She saw herself, or a mirror image of herself, across the fields, a figure silhouetted like a scarecrow in an old coat on their edge. Then the car’s lights moved on, casting long low shadows away to the horizon and gone, only not before she’d seen what was at her feet.

There was something in the ditch. In one sweep of the light she took in a shoe. Then the length of him, head down, and she dropped to her knees.

He was in the ditch.

With his knuckles bandaged and a bright graze to his forehead, that first time Nathan had walked into Jo’s crowded kitchen and looked straight at Fran it was as if he already knew her.

Jo’s kitchen had also been her front room, and the door that Nathan pushed through opened straight off the street, the flat being one floor of a London cottage barely big enough for Jo, let alone eight of them elbow to elbow round a fold-out dining table, but Jo was nothing if not ingenious, and London was London. Magazine publishing at the level Jo and Fran inhabited didn’t support anything but cramped, unless you went out beyond the furthest reaches of the tube.

Straight away Jo was on her feet, explaining to them around the table (a cousin of Jo’s; one of her exes and his wife; a girl from a different magazine; a foreign guy; none of them Fran’d seen before or since) how she knew Nathan. Or how she’d met him at least, as it turned out Jo barely knew him at all, he’d been hauled in to make up the numbers after a terrible speed-dating evening he’d been to for a bet and Jo for a joke (or so she said). Then she was exclaiming over his injuries, and as he explained them (he’d come off his moped, it was new and he wasn’t used to it, ‘I’m a menace,’ he apologised, ‘but no one else got hurt’) all the time he kept looking at Fran, ducking his head in that shy way she somehow already recognised and without thinking she had shifted at the table to make space for him beside her.

It had been a month since Fran had broken up with Nick and it had still been raw, heading over to Jo’s that night in the wet London dark, negotiating streets and buses alone. Lugubriously, someone (Carine on the problem page, with her poker-straight hair and obsessive-compulsive shoe collection) had said to her, you have to give it a year, even if you’re the one who ended it, until he’s not the first thing you think of when you wake up. And as Nathan held her gaze from Jo’s front door Nick was abruptly shifted from the centre of her imagination, the place he’d occupied for nearly two years, out to the periphery. Tough.

So sidelined was Nick, so suddenly, that she’d forgotten about the roses, twenty a day since she had turned to him at the door of his newest place, a cavernous warehouse club space in east London and said,
I’ve had enough of this
, and walked away. Pale roses – nothing as obvious as red for Nick with all the hours he’d put in on the design of the clubs – but there they were when, coming back from Jo’s that first night with Nathan behind her she pushed her front door open, in vases and buckets and jars, on the sink and the breakfast bar and even up on the sleeping ledge.

Nathan had taken her home on the moped, a spare helmet in his box, shrugging, sheepish. ‘Someone always needs a lift,’ he said, and she had marvelled at his organisation. And she’d asked him up, stone cold sober. She didn’t want to say goodbye to him, it was as simple as that. He’d made her smile, he’d loved a book she’d loved, she’d seen him watching her mouth move as she spoke, making her breathless. ‘Are you sure?’ he said, smiling as she put her key in the lock and asked him. ‘I mean, yes, please.’

At her shoulder in the doorway she’d heard Nathan make a sound, almost a laugh, and the first thing she’d done – before she got time to get nervous or to wonder, was it too quick, she hardly knew the guy – was to lift them one bunch after another from their water and dump them, dripping, in the bin.

‘You’re not a ballerina in your spare time, are you?’ was all he’d said, holding open the plastic sack for her to drop another bunch in. ‘They throw these on the stage.’ She had laughed, being not at all the ballerina type, not tall or wiry but compact, with inconvenient breasts – and with one hand on the place where her hip flared from her waist, he had ducked and kissed her, quick and dry and shocking.

‘He’s a change for you, isn’t he?’ said Jo, eyeing her over a cup of coffee the next day in the newest café in the streets below the office block, a crowded place with wooden benches outside. The rain from the night before had cleared and the day was sparkling. Jo had nudged her out from in front of her screen at midday, wanting the news. ‘He’s certainly not a Nick, is he?’

‘You mean, he’s not flash,’ she said, and it warmed inside her, her new secret. ‘No. Nathan’s not flash.’

She had felt the beginnings of a blush, then, pushing the thought of Nick back where it belonged in the past. Nathan came from the real world, where you got up and went to work every morning, and he wasn’t flash. In the dark, he had been different too. In her bed. He was quiet, he was methodical, he was determined. It seemed to her he had a plan that involved working her out, what she liked. ‘This?’ he said on that first night, stopping, lifting his head, waiting for her to respond. She was used to something wilder, more headlong, something that knocked the breath out of her: Nick had even left bruises, sometimes. She liked this, being made to wait as he circled her, keeping his distance. She sipped her coffee in the sunshine, under the rinsed blue sky, hugging her secret.

‘Is that maybe just as well, though?’ said Jo, still eyeing her tentatively. ‘At this point. I mean, it’s not like you’ve ever had it easy. Give yourself a break. Someone decent.’

‘Huh,’ said Fran, still thinking of him, then looking up. Registering, almost with a sigh, what Jo was talking about. ‘Yes. Maybe.’

Because Jo came from a background as settled as they came, one brother, one sister, her mother a nurse, her father a solicitor, mortgage long since paid off, the lawn cropped to velvet and tomatoes in the greenhouse. They still came to London to take Jo, thirty-four, out to a restaurant on her birthday, and although she grumbled, Jo seemed to like it. But Fran had never known her father, although her mother had told her they met at art school and he’d ended up – she’d said vaguely, when Fran had asked, aged twelve –
In India, or somewhere.
Gentle and sweet and hopeless, Fran’s mother had died of pneumonia (self-neglect, the doctor who came to sign the certificate had said angrily) in a rented bedsit in Brighton when Fran was twenty-one.

What Jo meant, sitting on the hewn wooden bench in new London sunshine, was perhaps it was time for a safe pair of hands. ‘He said he was a builder?’ Jo had relaxed into sharpness now, grilling her.

‘Something like that. Project manager. He runs building sites.’ He had talked to her about his job, lying back on her pillow, watching her get up, walk into the kitchen. ‘All over the place, but he’s based in London. He seems very … practical.’ Her thoughts wandered to his long-fingered hands, the safe pair of hands.

She’d cut herself, halfway through chopping an apple. He’d been there even before she’d known she made a noise, a gasp caught in her throat. He’d been out of bed and behind her, and he’d reached round and taken the knife out of her hand. ‘Where’s your first aid kit?’ Smiling at her blank expression, never having had a first aid kit, taking her hand between his to examine it. ‘Sit down,’ he’d said. ‘Let me.’

Of course it didn’t stay like that, not exactly. She wasn’t stupid, she knew relationships had to change, had to develop. Babies changed things.

Five years, and they had rushed past Fran in a blur while she tried to grapple with it. Opening the door to a new flat, a different house, Nathan working, working, working – away for days then home too tired to talk. A baby, slick and red in a midwife’s hands and Fran watching Nathan’s head turn to her in the delivery room, watching for his reaction.