Your Roots Are Showing (4 page)

Around nine-thirty, James let himself in quietly and went upstairs without greeting her. After all that ear-straining, she hadn’t heard his car at all, and was only alerted to his presence by the sound of his feet on the stairs. For a while she sat on in the living room, waiting for him to come back down. When nothing happened after ten minutes, she had no choice but to follow him upstairs.

“James, what are you doing up here?” she called softly from the dark passageway. Maybe he was looking in on the children. Such little angels, when they were asleep. She would kill him with her bare hands if he woke them up.

“James?”

Was he going to punish her with the silent treatment?

But then, in a perfectly normal voice, he called quietly, “In the bedroom.”

And there he was, in the room where the children had been conceived, packing a suitcase very neatly and methodically. Even then she didn’t panic; after all, he was always going off on business.

But when he looked up, the expression on his face stopped her cold.

At that precise moment, she began to appreciate that the damage was far worse than she could ever have imagined.

“Do you have an early start in the morning? Is it Scotland again?” she asked in a scratchy little voice.

“No, I’m leaving tonight.”

“But — do you have to be on site at dawn or something?”

He shook his head. “No, I mean I’m leaving home. Leaving you,” he added for the sake of clarity, smoothing down an armload of silk ties to his satisfaction.

“
Leaving
? You mean, like — like walking out on me? What . . . because of that stupid e-mail?” She could barely talk at all now, her throat felt so tight. Why had she ever stopped noticing how beautiful he was, how smooth his skin, how excellent his teeth, how glossy his hair?

For a moment his hands stopped fussing with clothing and he took a piece of paper out of the breast pocket of his jacket. He hadn’t even removed his jacket, she registered with some remote part of her mind; he really meant business.

He’d printed the damned thing out. He must have been reading it over and over again. Already it had a grubby, much-fingered look.

“Give that here,” Lizzie gasped and snatched it out of his hands. Then, with amazing ferocity, she tore it into a million pieces — or at least ten. “It was a mistake, that’s all, just a stupid mistake . . .”

“Yes, of course it was, and you can explain everything, right?”

“Yes, and don’t make me sound so bloody predictable,” she hissed, remembering, but only just, to keep her voice down. “Look, I really messed up; I should never have written any of that down. You see, it means less than nothing!
Less
than less than nothing. It was just a rant — I was just letting off some
steam
, for God’s sake. Girls say stupid things like that to each other all the time, but we always know it’s nothing
serious
. And now you’re blowing it all out of proportion . . .”

“Lizzie, don’t try to make this my fault,” James said quietly. He was so calm, and that was the worst thing of all. “It’s all there, in black and white. I’m not sticking around where I’m not wanted. What’s the point?”

“Rubbish, James, it was the hormones talking. Nothing’s wrong with our marriage except I got all introspective and weepy at the wrong time of the month . . .”

James sighed and began moving steadily again between the closet and his suitcase. “No excuses, Lizzie. I’m just beyond all that now. The note couldn’t have been plainer. You want me gone. Well, I’m going.”

She began to see that he was rather angry but hiding it very, very well. Anger was good. It was closely related to passion, after all. Perhaps this was the moment for her big move.

She made a dive at his hand, trying to grasp it in hers, but it was impossible to wrestle him away from his socks and boxers. He fended her off gently and resumed his packing.

“Will you stop that flaming fussing about for a moment and
listen
to me?” she hissed through her teeth. He did indeed slow down for a moment, but held onto a bag of first-class airline toiletries to show that he wasn’t to be distracted for long.

“Remember how it used to be in the beginning?” she asked, as huskily as she could. (Why was husky supposed to be sexy? Surely it made a woman sound a bit masculine? Certainly it was hard on the throat.) “Remember when we were at it like rabbits, night and day, barely stopping for meals or even trips to the loo?”

James said nothing, his face still set against her.

“Well, look, I want it to be that way again. I really do.” In one fluid movement, she threw aside her robe and stood revealed in the plastic cling-wrap dress.

He gaped. Literally. Stood and gaped. Made no move to embrace her or rip the plastic from her body. Just stood. And gaped.

“Well, what do you think?” she asked nervously. “Personally, I thought I looked a bit like leftover chicken breast, but then you’re a guy — do
you
think it’s sexy?”

His face broke into a reluctant lopsided grin. “I’m afraid I’m forcibly reminded of raw sausage rather than chicken breast.”

“Sausage. We could work with that. Sausage could be — kinky.” Lizzie wriggled her encased body in what she hoped was a suggestive way.

For a glorious moment a light leaped in his eyes and he gave a quick, hastily suppressed guffaw. Okay, so he was supposed to be reeling with lust, not merriment, but laughter was definitely better than excessive gravity accompanied by nonstop automaton-style packing.

But the sudden laugh, ironically enough, upset all Lizzie’s best-made plans. From down the passageway came a familiar loud wail. Alex. Both of them knew there’d be no shutting him up without a parental visit. If they didn’t react quickly enough, he’d be on his scooter wobbling his way to their room.

“I’ll go,” said James.

When he returned about fifteen minutes later, Lizzie was under the duvet, the plastic wrap crumpled in the bin. She stared at her husband with beseeching eyes.

“Coming to bed?” she asked as lightly as she could, hoping they could turn it into a storm in a teacup even now.

But he shook his head, and she saw that he’d brought his shaving things and toothbrush from the bathroom.

“It’s no use, Lizzie,” he said. “It’s over. The light’s gone out for you. Let’s just be honest and do what we need to do.”

Lizzie felt her stomach twist in panic.

“ But — think of the children. You couldn’t possibly — leave the children?”

“I’ve done nothing but think of the children all day,” James said. “I think the best thing I can do for them is to leave immediately. Make a clean break. I mean, they’re still so little now, they’ll hardly notice.”

Lizzie opened her mouth to speak, but nothing would come out.

“Let’s face it, they don’t see an awful lot of me,” James said quietly. He sat down on the bed beside Lizzie but didn’t touch her. “This way, they may even end up seeing more of me than they did before, if I take them on weekend outings and things.”

Weekend outings. His mind was ranging far ahead. He had made the mental leap hours ago, she realized.

She stole a look at his profile. She saw then that he’d been crying at some point — perhaps in the dark room as he rocked Alex to sleep.

“James,” she whispered. “It doesn’t have to be like this. I don’t want you to go. I love you, you know I do. Please stay.
Please
!”

He shook his head. “I can’t do it, Lizzie. I can’t end up like Dad.”

“What do you mean?”

He kept on shaking his head. “Don’t pretend you can’t see it. Mum just about tolerates him but that’s all. It’s a joyless marriage, a farce. They should’ve had the guts to end it years ago. Anyway, just — just tell the children I’ve gone away on a business trip, for now. I’ll be in touch. We’ll sort things out.”

Then he stowed his toiletries, snapped shut his suitcase, and left, pausing only to retrieve his golf clubs from a closet.

She heard the front door close softly, then the car start up and creep away along the driveway.

She lay for a moment like a seal who’d been clubbed on the head. He couldn’t be gone. How could he be gone? He’d come back, he’d be back before sunrise. Of course he would.

Shivering, she dragged herself downstairs to lock the door, snuff the candles, and throw away the blackened mess that was still in the oven. The bottles of wine in the freezer she forgot about entirely, and by morning they had exploded.

He didn’t come back that night, and every time she spoke to him on the phone he remained firm in his resolve: they had to make a clean break. He wasn’t coming home.

But there’d been a moment when she’d had a chance of getting him back. If only Alex hadn’t chosen that precise fraction of a second to wake up and bellow, she could’ve explained things to him; could’ve made him understand that even though everything she’d written in that note was sometimes true, it was also
always
true that she loved him with a deep and unswerving passion that neither time nor resentment of his underpants on the floor, nor the ebb and flow of her body’s demands, could ever diminish.

In her starkly minimalist living room in Back Lane Cottage, Lizzie became aware of her guest, Ingrid, looking at her rather hard. How long had she been moping in her chair with the family photo pressed to her left breast? Really, if she was going to make a success of this new life, she had to get a grip.

She stood up. “To hell with tea,” she said. “Do you fancy some Chardonnay?”

Ingrid’s eyes nearly shot out of their sockets. They were getting a real workout today. “Wine?” she asked, snatching a quick look at her watch. “Well, it’s a bit early in the day perhaps — but why not, just this once?”

So Elizabeth Buckley, nee Indigo, and her neighbor, whom she’d met only hours ago, sat down with a bottle of wine between them at eleven o’clock in the morning. And because Lizzie lived alone, except for two uncritical three-year-olds who happened to be taking a nap at the same time, and because Ingrid’s daughter was at school and her husband was flying a passenger jet to Canada, no one was ever the wiser.

By noon, when the bottle was empty and an almighty wail had suddenly erupted from upstairs, Lizzie and Ingrid had decided that raising children was exactly like running an egg and spoon race in waist-deep water, that the government was made up of a bunch of self-seeking exhibitionists, that Jane Austen was the coziest novelist in the world, and that reality TV was a complete cop- out designed to save the BBC money and dumb down the population. Best of all, Lizzie hadn’t burst into tears even once.

By the time Ingrid had helped Lizzie make peanut butter sandwiches for the children’s lunch, it was fairly safe to say that an unlikely friendship had been cemented.

That afternoon Lizzie stood in her garden with her hands in the pockets of her raincoat, staring in fresh wonder at this place she’d so impulsively rented.

What on earth had she taken on? It wasn’t so much a garden she was assessing as a field, complete with rabbit holes and enormous patches of waist-high nettles. Also a fair amount of litter. The dying-away remains of daffodils were the only indication that anybody had ever done anything to the land.

For a moment, Lizzie simply stood in the steady drizzle, feeling a bit woozy from the wine and very bleak as she watched Alex and Ellie, in their all-enveloping yellow rain gear, run about on the so-called lawn. Who was she trying to kid? The garden was a mess, she was a mess, the house was a mess. And she, Lizzie, feeling about as energized as a hibernating snake, was supposed to push up her sleeves and sort it all out — in the knowledge that she might only be here for a short time anyway? Back to bed with a box of chocolates sounded like a better idea.

Then she gave herself a good shake. She couldn’t,
couldn’t
let the children assume it was normal to live like this, however briefly.

Right, she told herself, I’ll start on the nettles; they’re definitely the ugliest and most hostile things in the garden. The rabbit holes we’ll leave for another day.

Wasting no more time, she stamped off to the toolshed where she slipped on her brand-new gardening gloves and gathered up her brand-new fork and trowel. Nobody would suspect for a moment that she’d never gardened in her life. An excellent landscaping service supervised and supplemented by her mother-in-law had more than adequately taken care of that side of things at their house in Gloucestershire. Lizzie’s vague idea of starting a vegetable garden at Mill House had been unceremoniously nipped in the bud by Lady Evelyn.

Before Mill House, she’d shared a tiny, gardenless flat with her friend Tessa in Ealing Broadway. Before the flat, she’d been in student digs, and before that she’d lived at home, taking her mother’s gorgeous garden in Surrey entirely for granted.

She was amazed, now, at how quickly she was able to make real inroads on the thickets of nettles choking the flower beds that ran around the perimeter of the house. There was something strangely satisfying about pulling whole clumps of the tall green weeds out by their roots, and liberating a sparse sprinkling of seedlings that just might turn out to be plants and not weeds. Soon she’d built up an impressive pile of the prickly stuff and went off to fetch the rickety wheelbarrow from the shed.

“Don’t touch, don’t touch!” she called as the twins trotted up, determined to help her fill the wheelbarrow. “This is the nasty plant that stung you yesterday, Ellie, see? Mummy’s wearing gloves, only Mummy can touch.”

As she waggled her gloves at the children, a black-and- white collie suddenly bounded up out of nowhere and began jumping at her yellow hands.

“Madge, get
down
, heel,
heel
,” a furious voice called from the direction of the tumbledown garden gate.

Lizzie held her hands up above her head, but this seemed to excite the dog even more.

The twins were reacting predictably: Ellie yelling at the top of her lungs, presumably in terror, while Alex jumped about excitedly, shouting, “Dog, dog,
dog
!”

Out of the corner of her eye, Lizzie saw a burly figure vault over the gate.