A year ago, she couldn’t face letting him know that she didn’t want sex. She couldn’t deal with his disappointment, didn’t want to have to reassure him again and again that it wasn’t him, that it really was her. She couldn’t face how sweet she knew he’d be about it. So instead, she’d let him have sex with her. She’d ignored the deadening feeling and forced herself to put on a show for him, sighing like she couldn’t hold her pleasure in, rubbing her weary breasts, telling him she was about to orgasm when really she felt hollow. She told herself it was just a little white lie, a necessary one, because that was what they both wanted, wasn’t it? He’d had his orgasm believing she’d had hers, and they’d cuddled and then her body was her own again. At least for a few hours until the kids woke up.
The next time, a couple of weeks later, when Seb had started stroking her again, something had happened. The deadening feeling wouldn’t be buried. Her body refused. Her body felt like a great iron door, locks fully engaged. She simply could not comply any more. She could not satisfy Seb’s needs to the detriment of her own, no matter how much she loved him. She tried, she really did, to lie there, but it felt like she was abusing herself. There was no way. She leapt away from Seb’s touch. He’d known that something wasn’t right.
‘It’s OK,’ he said after listening to her, ‘let’s just hold each other.’
They did just that, the first and second time, and then what could she do? She started lying. She’d heard Greer call out, she’d tell him, she had her period, a headache, the prolapse from the three births had returned, she simply didn’t want to. That’s when the rowing started. Quiet, bitter words, knifing each other from both sides of the bed. Continuing until one would leave to curl up on the spare mattress in Sylvie’s room. The next morning Rosie would always regret the things she’d said, but at the time there was a kind of heady joy, a release, in telling Seb he was a self-centred narcissist, a pathetic, fucking typical man. It almost felt good to hear Seb shout back that she was messed up and needed help. It made them more real somehow. Seb would always apologize first thing the next morning with a coffee, a quick kiss, and they’d promise to talk about it properly, to get help, counselling if necessary. But sex never felt so important in the daylight hours and Rosie never liked the look of the counsellors Seb contacted, so the issue slipped again and again.
It wasn’t, Rosie told herself, such a big deal, was it? Lots of couples were the same, weren’t they? She couldn’t imagine buttoned-up Vita and Patrick having sex. Anna had made Rosie think she and Eddy were always doing it but maybe that was just what Anna wanted people to think.
And besides, didn’t Rosie show Seb intimacy in other ways? She liked a cuddle on the sofa, enjoyed feeling his feet curl against hers under the duvet, but the problem was that the cuddle would always lead to his hand down her top, his foot would start stroking her leg. What she offered, what she felt she could give physically was never enough. She’d never been abused or suffered any childhood trauma but felt like her whole life her body had existed for other people, never for herself. She’d begged Seb for the time to figure out her new relationship with her body. She’d told him she was in some kind of transition that she herself didn’t fully understand yet. It was true, but it was also true that Rosie had no energy or time to try to figure out what kind of metamorphosis her body was going through and what to do about it. And all the while there was Seb pushing and whining.
Last week Seb had said, ‘I don’t want to be in a sexless marriage, Ro.’
She looked at him then, imagined his disappointed dick creeping back into itself, and she had an overwhelming urge to kick him hard between the legs because after everything her body had done for him, for their family, how fucking dare he keep whining for more?
So, she said the thing she knew would upset him more than any kick, the thing she’d said to him many times already.
‘Do what you like, Seb. I really don’t care.’
Rosie has never said anything about the problems between her and Seb to anyone. Even thinking all this next to Abi, sitting on Barry’s bench, feels like a betrayal. Abi’s eyes are closed and Rosie wonders where she’s gone. Whether Abi, like Rosie, tries to swim away from the dark water within herself. Feeling Rosie looking, Abi opens her eyes, smiles sleepily before she glances at her watch and says with a groan, ‘Urgh. It’s quarter to three. We should get going.’
It’s slow progress walking home with all the kids. Anna and Albie join them for a short while, Anna telling Abi about all the other restaurants in Waverly before PLATE and why, in Anna’s opinion, they failed. Heath and Sylvie bicker and Greer cries for an ice cream, Abi placating them all with a macaroon as Rosie trudges behind, a donkey beneath the kids’ coats and bags, any lightness from her walk with Abi already evaporated. Things settle as soon as they’re home. The kids all thump up the stairs as Abi follows Rosie into the kitchen extension.
The extension had been completed before they bought the house five years ago. It wasn’t done well, in Rosie’s professional opinion – the kitchen is now divided in half by two supporting pillars which the previous owners presumably hadn’t been able to afford to replace with steels. The extension has a sofa and armchair at one end and the big oven at the other, with French doors leading to the garden in the middle. The older half houses the large family table, sink, fridge and the rest of the kitchen units. It creates a feeling of two distinct spaces, the pillars obstructing the view of the rest of the kitchen from the sofa and vice versa. When they bought the place, Rosie had started saving to remove the pillars and to put a skylight in the extension roof, but the increase in the cost of living and Greer’s nursery fees have emptied the pot.
Upstairs, the girls are clattering about; Abi glances up, smiles at the sound of them laughing. Heath’s up there too, playing with his Lego, while Sylvie can be heard occasionally bossing the younger girls about.
Abi looks around at the framed baby photos of the kids, the drawings and calendars on the fridge. ‘Anna seems interesting. Her energy’s … lively.’
Rosie is opposite Abi, standing by the oven, pouring pasta into a pan of boiling water. ‘Yeah. I mean, I love her, but she can be exhausting …’
‘Hmmm,’ Abi says, like she wants to say more but chooses not to. Rosie glances round as Abi picks up a framed photo from the bookshelf behind her. It’s from Seb and Rosie’s wedding day almost twelve years ago. It’s a close-up of Rosie in flattering black and white, Seb out of focus, slightly behind her. Seb likes the photo because you can’t see the silver scar that runs from his nostril to his upper lip. He was born with a cleft palate and had corrective surgery as a baby. In the photo Rosie looks like she’s about to explode with laughter, but she can no longer remember what was so funny; maybe the photographer had asked her to laugh.
‘What a gorgeous pic,’ Abi says, peering closer. ‘You look so happy.’
‘Yeah,’ Rosie says, turning back to the pan, ‘it was a long time ago.’ She shakes her head. ‘That came out wrong’ – thinking she should explain – ‘we’ve just been together for a long time.’
It’s over fifteen years since they met at a friend’s party in London. They didn’t have the ripping-clothes-off, breathless, can’t-live-without-you kind of falling in love that Anna describes having when she met Eddy, but rather a slow, gentle tumble. A dignified dawning that they wanted complementary lives; a strong, dedicated relationship, children, security. Seb, who had grown up with all those things, wanted to replicate what he’d had. Coddled in the rolling hills of Waverly with strong, dynamic Eva at the helm and his kind, steady older dad, Benjamin, as second mate. Rosie, in contrast, had grown up in Stoke Newington with her two present but distant academic parents and older brother, Jim, who moved to Hong Kong ten years ago and whom they still haven’t visited.