‘How to tell them …’
‘That you’ve betrayed us all, that you’ve destroyed our marriage in the seediest way possible.’ She’s surprised the words come so easily. But isn’t this always the way? That the truest things are often astonishingly simple.
Seb lifts his hands to his temples to squeeze either side of his head. ‘It’s the worst feeling, knowing how much I’ve hurt all of you …’
‘Save it!’ she says, holding up her hand again. His mouth makes her feel physically sick. ‘You found her online, presumably?’
Seb looks at her, alarmed by this sudden change of topic. ‘Um, no, it was at that awards thing, with Eddy.’
Albie had been unwell, and Anna needed to stay with him so Seb had hired a tux and gone as Eddy’s plus-one.
‘One of Eddy’s bosses showed me her website,’ he mumbles, like this was all against his will, and Rosie wants to punch him right in his disgusting, lying, sucking mouth, imagines the crunch as his teeth loosen against her knuckles.
They both look up as Greer cries, ‘Mummmmmyyy,’ from the living room, already making her way down the hall towards the kitchen. ‘Heath just pinched me!’
‘I didn’t! She’s lying!’ He’s coming after his sister, because that’s what big brothers do, but also because he needs Rosie to deliver on her promise, to prove that everything is OK. They only have this moment, she knows, to convince them, so Rosie does the opposite of what she wants: she moves towards Seb and whispers quickly, before the kids arrive, ‘Stay at your mum’s. I don’t want you here.’
She keeps her hand on his back so when their children burst into the room, the first thing they see is their parents holding each other but they don’t hear as she whispers to him, ‘I’ll never forgive you for this.’
Greer claps her hands, delightedly shouts, ‘You’re friends again!’ She presses her little body against Rosie’s back to join in the hug and Heath does the same, and Rosie didn’t hear Sylvie come down the stairs but she’s there too, staring at them, unsure, before breaking into a grin and piling on. The kids start laughing and Rosie knows then that they believe everything is healed, and the five of them stay like that, clinging on to each other in the kitchen, until at last Heath, his voice muffled, asks, ‘What’s for lunch?’
Chapter 10
Seb had been close to tears when he got back home from the restaurant, dripping wet, waking Eva who was asleep in the living room. ‘Have you seen Rosie, Mum? Is she here?’
That night he’d got away with telling Eva he and Rosie had just had a row, that everything would be fine. Eva didn’t believe him, of course, but it was late. When Eddy rang to say that Rosie was safe, Eva knew without asking that Seb needed to be alone.
‘Try to sleep,’ she said before she left.
Tonight, when he lets himself into her house, she’s sitting next to the flickering wood burner, a handmade quilt over her knees, almost as if she had been expecting him. As she slowly closes the book on her lap, clocks the overnight bag slung over his shoulder and turns her strong blue eyes on her only child, he knows that he’s going to have to tell her everything.
He sits down opposite his mum, pressing the heels of his hands into his eye sockets so he doesn’t have to look at her, and tells her a version of the truth. He tells her that they hadn’t had sex in so long, that Rosie seemed simply disinterested in their marriage, in him. He hears the pathetic whine in his voice as he says those words. He tells her what he told Rosie, that Abi’s website had fallen into his lap. He tells her how sorry he is, how much he regrets it.
He doesn’t tell her there were so many times he nearly turned back. How he was close to not calling Emma – Abi’s work name – from outside the cafe as she’d instructed him to do. Almost didn’t press the buzzer to the flat and almost didn’t walk up the flights of stairs to the tiny central London studio. But his body kept pushing him forward like it had already disassociated entirely from his brain. He’d noticed his wedding ring just before he knocked on her door. What a fucking cliché. He slipped it into his coat pocket and managed to smile back at the blonde woman who answered the door in a silk kimono. Her feet were bare, tattooed in complicated patterns. So different to Rosie’s; he couldn’t stop looking at them.
‘It’s your first time?’ she asked, still smiling, once they were both inside.
Seb tried to talk but just kind of spluttered and nodded, which made her smile more. He fumbled with the money which she took from him with ease, tucking it into her pocket.
‘It’s OK to be nervous,’ she said. ‘Would you like some fizzy water?’
He was glad to bookend the appointment with a shower, washing both the before and after Seb away so when he left the apartment he wasn’t sure who he was any more. He was just a man who in ninety minutes had replaced his desperate craving with something new, a dull ache he couldn’t name. As he waited for a train back to Waverly, the thought occurred to him that perhaps what he had just done wasn’t so bad after all. Emma was bright, kind and, yes, very attractive, but the whole thing was transactional. She was entirely attentive, but he knew that she didn’t have any more feeling for him than the basic affection she’d maybe feel for a cafe barista. Perhaps he could think of sex with Emma as a kind of physical therapy – relief for body and spirit. Something Rosie might not need but he did, like visiting an osteopath or getting some acupuncture. All the fierce moralizing about it was a waste of time, a cultural obsession that had surely caused a lot of harm and done little good. As an affair was a relationship – that meant being attentive to the subtleties of someone else, their smell, their sense of humour, their values, and sharing those same intimacies with that person – it would engage brain and heart. That was the difference, he told himself. That reasoning was what made him visit a second time.
But now, lying in the gloom of Eva’s spare room, he realizes it doesn’t matter what he thought about it. For Rosie, it wasn’t about Seb and his body, it was about her and it was about him, and now it’s about her friend. There is no justification or explanation that will change that. From her point of view, he has betrayed her in the most degrading way possible.
Seb wakes at four a.m., pulls on tracksuit bottoms and a faded T-shirt, lets himself out and walks home. The air is chill, and Seb starts to panic as he walks, picking up the pace, imagining getting home and finding empty beds, missing passports. As soon as he’s through the front door he takes the stairs three at a time, but there, of course, they are. Rosie and Greer fast asleep, Rosie clinging on to their daughter like she’s charging her own gravitational force, the one that will keep her from drifting away from them all entirely. He strokes Greer’s hair, and she stirs slightly before he goes to check on her brother and big sister.
He goes downstairs without turning on any lights, sits on the kitchen sofa and looks up how to delete the search history on his phone. He waits for his phone to finish deleting everything, all those women lurking in its synthetic memory, and where he used to feel a spike of excitement, he now just feels hollow.
Electronically cleansed, he waits for the first glimmer of sunrise before getting up to unload the dishwasher, put the kids’ porridge on, fold the washing, just about outpacing his despair with order and movement. He hears Greer laughing first, and then Heath grumpily shouting at her to be quiet. They’ll all be awake now. His hand shakes as he carries a mug of tea upstairs to Rosie.
Greer is sitting up in bed, her hair a tangled halo, a schoolbook in her lap. Rosie is lying on her back, listening.
He’s a shit.
‘Daddy!’
‘Morning, my loves.’ Seb watches Rosie turn to look at him, her hand shielding her eyes, weak protection against the morning light. Her face is creased with sleep. She looks exhausted, confused. ‘Let’s let Mummy sleep a bit more – why don’t you read to me downstairs?’