Your Roots Are Showing (6 page)
But Lizzie could make a list of her own virtues — good at synchronized swimming, good at dancing, good at writing silly verse for children, good at understanding what people really meant when they were saying something entirely different, good at changing nappies, good at making up jokes (but not at telling them), getting better at cooking, better than most English people at French — and no matter how many items she added to the list, she knew she’d never be able to walk around with one tenth of Tessa’s bullet-proof self-confidence. As it happened, Tessa’s pushiness had stood Lizzie in good stead on many occasions, and she didn’t begrudge her it at all. In fact, most of the time she wished she could borrow it.
The sound of Tessa setting coffee mugs down on the table brought Lizzie out of her reverie. Just coffee, no cakes, she noted with disappointment. Never mind, she’d buy herself a big sticky bun afterwards — she’d enjoy it more if Tessa wasn’t watching her eat it.
Tessa plonked herself down beside Lizzie and took an experimental sip of her latte. “Mmm, lovely. Not too hot. Now Lizzie, out with it. Why on earth have you turned up out of the blue in Sevenoaks? It’s not like you to expect me just to drop everything at a moment’s notice. What’s going on?”
Lizzie felt her stomach tighten and her mouth go dry. Time to go public.
“Tessa, I’ve been in Sevenoaks about ten days already. You see, I . . . I’ve moved here. I live here now.”
Tessa choked and Lizzie silently handed her a paper napkin. While Tessa was mopping up, Lizzie stumbled on with her story, glad not to have her friend’s frank eyes on her.
“Yes, I’ve taken a house in Back Lane, it’s called Back Lane Cottage, and I’ve managed to enroll the twins at a nursery school in Chipstead. Today’s their first day, so I’m a bit stressed out. Ellie was bawling when I left, but I phoned and they said she’d settled down fine. I must say, it’s going to be bliss having the two of them away in the mornings again. I’ll be able to get something done for a change. I’m determined to finish my children’s book.”
Tessa held up a hand. “Stop, Liz, stop, for God’s sake. You’re babbling. You’ve got to start at the beginning because I’m just not understanding anything you’re telling me. What do you mean, you’ve moved here? Why didn’t you let me know you were coming? And why do you keep saying ‘I’ all the time, not ‘we’? Where’s James, for God’s sake?”
“So — so James hasn’t been in touch with you guys at all?” Lizzie was stalling for time. Even though James was an old friend of Tessa’s husband, it was quite clear that Tessa hadn’t heard a word about the state of affairs chez Buckley. Tessa shook her head. “Okay.” Lizzie licked her lips. “James is, well, I think he’s at the manor, but he may be away on a business trip. He’s not living in our house. Nobody is right now. We’re talking about putting it back on the holiday rental market.”
Tessa simply gaped at her.
“The thing is,” Lizzie said haltingly, “the thing is, Tessa, James and I have . . . kind of, split up.”
“You’ve split up? Oh God. Oh shit. Oh, Liz, I’m so sorry. Was it another woman?”
Lizzie felt a flash of irritation. “No, it was
not
another woman, thank you very much. As a matter of fact, James didn’t end it. I did. Well, kind of, anyway.”
Tessa was shaking her dark head so hard she was in danger of dislodging her hair grip. “
You
ended it?
You
? But — but why? Why on
earth
would you do such a thing? The last I knew, you worshipped the ground he walked on.”
Tears filled Lizzie’s eyes and she felt her mouth going into the upside-down horseshoe shape she’d come to dread in her children.
Immediately Tessa put down her coffee and began to pat her on the back. “Oh Liz, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. You must’ve had your reasons. I’m sure they were damn good ones. Look, here’s a tissue. Just take a deep breath. You’ll be okay.”
After a moment or two Lizzie had her voice back under control. Sniffing only a little, she offered her sorry explanation.
“The thing is, Tessa, the main problem, you see, is — well, I’ve, sort of, gone off James a bit. Well, not so much James — more just the bedroom bit with James. And, well, the whole marriage thing just started to pall. I think it all started when I was pregnant, and it just carried on getting worse and worse after the twins were born. It got to a point where I was sleeping with my elbow out so he couldn’t roll up next to me.” Lizzie’s face was bright red with the embarrassment of confessing this stuff, but she really needed to make Tessa understand. Tessa had always been so good at sorting things out, and Lizzie needed her help now more than ever before.
Tessa’s eyes were wide with amazement, and she was probably biting her tongue to stop herself from bursting out with, “You’ve gone off the bedroom bit with James
Buckley
? Are you insane?” but she managed to hold her peace. Not expecting such self-control, Lizzie paused for comment, but Tessa simply wiggled one hand to indicate she should go on with the story.
Lizzie took a deep breath. “Believe me, it’s not as if I didn’t make an effort. I’d try to psyche myself up to get into the mood, but somehow I never really could. So then I just concentrated on — on putting on a good show for James, so that he wouldn’t suspect anything. It was a bit exhausting, to be honest, but I thought if I could just keep it up long enough, then things would eventually get back to normal.
“The problem was, things never got back to normal because, well, because I kept feeling this huge, I don’t know, resentment, I suppose — this big, black, angry feeling — and it was all aimed at James. You see, I had to change my life
completely
once the babies were born — no more career, no more sleep, no more free time — but James didn’t have to change his in the slightest little bit. And he still couldn’t pick his own bloody clothes up off the floor!
“Then — then I sort of sent an e-mail to James about — everything. Well, the e-mail was really supposed to go to Janie, but I sent it to James by mistake. And it was all about how I’d rather clean out the sock drawer than sleep with him, and how I wished his business trips would last longer. I think I even said that life would be much easier if he just, sort of, disappeared.”
Tessa made a choking noise. Her eyes were so wide they would have popped out if she’d been a Pekingese. When the power of speech returned to her, she said in tones of wonder, “You sent him an e-mail like that? By
mistake
?”
“Yes, yes. Don’t gawk at me. I was sending an e-mail to Janie, just to get some stuff off my chest, but somehow I managed to zap it off to James instead. It’s easily done, you know, just the click of a mouse.”
Tessa was shaking her head. “My God, Lizzie. I can’t believe it! What a bloody nightmare. You poor, poor thing. You must be kicking yourself into next week!”
Lizzie’s eyes began to mist up and her chin to wobble again. She hastily took a sip of coffee to give her mouth something to do other than turn into an upside-down horseshoe, but her lips wouldn’t cooperate and next thing she knew she had coffee dribbling down the front of her lake-blue sweater.
Tessa reached for Lizzie’s hand, which was frantically rubbing at her sweater with a paper napkin.
“Don’t worry about the sweater now,” she said firmly. “I’ve got a book about how to clean practically anything. Just get back to your story. So you sent him this e-mail, and then what?”
“Well, then he came home and packed his suitcase and left.”
“
Left
? What, just like that? No discussion? Didn’t you try to stop him?”
“What do you think? Of course I tried to
stop
him. I wrapped myself up in plastic wrap and cooked a romantic dinner and tried to lure him into bed, but it didn’t work. He just seemed too . . . sad for that sort of thing. Since then we’ve talked on the phone quite a lot, and he still thinks we’re better apart.”
Lizzie said this last bit quickly, not wanting to dwell on the awful, abject phone calls, with her begging him to give things one more chance and him listening in deafening silence and then saying things like, “I’m not going to flog a dead horse, Lizzie.” Or, “I’m pretty sure that ship has sailed, Lizzie.” Or, “What’s the point of trying to paper over the cracks?” She’d never realized he had such a rich storehouse of clichés at his disposal.
Tessa was looking at Lizzie in horror. “
Plastic wrap
? Okay, let’s not even go into that. I just can’t get my head around all this. I mean, surely it takes more to bust up a marriage? One stupid misdirected e-mail? I can’t
believe
he thinks you’re better apart. What about the children? What about Mill House?”
Lizzie was dabbing at her sweater again, as if her life depended on getting the brown stains out. “We agreed that he should have the twins every second weekend or so. As for the house, we’ve both just pulled out and left it. James is staying with his parents — when he’s not traveling all over the country for work, that is. So now he’s got this model of a bad marriage in front of him the whole time, just to keep him focused. You know how his parents more or less ignore each other? Separate suites? Separate safaris in Kenya? He thinks
we’ll
end up like that if we stay together. Anyway, he’s mentioned finding a place of his own, a bachelor pad.”
Her voice broke on the word “bachelor” and she was crying, using the coffee-stained napkin to mop up her tears. Women at other tables were staring at them now, some shaking their heads, presumably in sympathy although very possibly in disapproval at the unseemly public disturbance.
“You were right, Lizzie,” Tessa said. “This place is too crowded. I just want to know one thing — why didn’t you stay at Mill House? Surely he didn’t turf you out? I mean, how will you pay the rent here? Will you go back to work? Wouldn’t it have been better to carry on there, until something definite happens?”
Such as divorce, Lizzie knew she meant.
The effort to answer this “one” question helped Lizzie bring her tears under control. “No, of course he didn’t turf me out. I decided to go of my own accord, but he thought it was a good idea. To be honest, I was gambling on him begging me to stay. Shot myself in the foot, really. Anyway, he’s told me to keep using the joint account. I was glad to be out of there, in the end. It was horrible in the village, with everybody pitying me, and all the old biddies whispering about me in the shop before my back was even decently turned. But the worst thing was bumping into his folks all over the place.”
Tessa gave a sympathetic shiver at the thought. “How did
they
take it, then?”
Lizzie pulled a face. “His mum is saying ghastly things about me to all her ghastly chums. She crosses over to the other side of the street if she sees me coming. His dad is being so kind in that funny, sarcastic way of his, it makes me want to cry. When he heard I was going to move, he came round to the house and told me not to do anything silly. He said, ‘He’ll be back, don’t worry. Boys will be boys, but he’ll come to his senses.’ He thinks James is having an affair, of course.”
“What about James? Did you keep bumping into him too?”
“No, I didn’t see him except when he came to take the kids out. It was horrible, knowing he was so close by, holed up in the manor. He might as well have been on the moon. As I said, after about a week of pure hell it dawned on me that one of us had better make a first move, and it might as well be me.”
“But why here? I mean, I know you’ve always said it’s a nice sort of town, and you like the Kentish oasts and whatnot, but isn’t it a bit far away from Laingtree?”
“Where else would I go? I can’t go home to my parents — that would be too pathetic. And Janie’s in Australia. So that left you.”
Tessa’s face softened. “You came all this way to cry on my shoulder?”
“That’s right.” Lizzie gave a watery smile. “Also, I don’t want to make things too easy for James. I want him to have to get in his car and drive for bloody hours to see the children. He can just sit stuck in traffic on the M25 and have a good long think about what he’s throwing away.”
Tessa squeezed Lizzie’s hand. “Yes, I can see what you mean,” she said. “The M25 on a Saturday morning would make anybody sit up and think. Oh Lizzie, why on earth didn’t you come to me straight away?”
“Need you ask? How could I tell you over the phone? It’s just too . . . well, it’s unspeakable, really. Especially if you’re not face-to-face with the person. That’s why I haven’t told my parents yet. Or Janie, for that matter.”
Tessa gaped.
“You haven’t told your family? What — that you’ve split up with James? That you’ve moved? Which?”
“Either, as a matter of fact. I’m just working out the best way to do it. I’m thinking I should load the kids up and drive to Guildford for lunch some Sunday. That way I could explain things properly. Phone calls just seem so . . . brutal. And then Mum could pass the news on to Janie. She calls from Sydney once a week.”
Tessa was shaking her head. “Lizzie, you can’t go on like this. Come on, you need to gird up your loins and make a clean breast of it
now
, not ‘some Sunday.’ ” She stopped and gave a short bark of laughter. “Blimey, loins and breasts all in one breath. I must be ovulating. My advice to you, girl, is to go home, get on the blower, and get it over and done with. Your parents are great. They’ll understand. They’ll give you some moral support. And so will Janie.”
On that rousing note, Tessa slid back her sleeve and looked at her watch. “Oh my God, we need to get going. I should be back at Boots already. Look, Greg and I are supposed to be off to France for the weekend, but I’m thinking maybe I should cancel. I’m not sure you should be alone right now.”
Lizzie stood up and smiled, a big genuine smile that lit up her swollen, red-eyed, woebegone face so that she looked almost like her old self for a moment. “No, you go off to France. Have fun. I’ll be fine, honestly. I feel better already.”
L
izzie was counting on her parents to notice that something was wrong the minute she stepped out of the car in Guildford. Her father would spot her from the kitchen window and know by the set of her shoulders that something bad had happened. He’d hurry out with the baster still in his hands, and she’d dissolve into tears in his arms. Or her mother would be in the front garden, weeding, and she’d straighten up quickly, hand flying to her mouth in shock. “Lizzie,” she’d cry. “For God’s sake, what’s the matter?”
