‘Look, it’s gone now… I’ll throw it away. If you don’t like it, I won’t wear it.’ She could hear the begging tone in her voice and she hated herself for it. She knew that he shouldn’t be speaking to her like this, she knew that his reaction was completely inappropriate, yet at the same time she could feel herself making excuses for him. She began to question her motives: had she been wearing it to make herself attractive to other men? Maybe he was right? She knew how stressed he got; she knew he was jealous. She could have kicked herself for failing to avoid another argument. She hated conflict more than anything and was always desperate to restore harmony to their relationship whenever Noah flew into one of his rages.
‘Come here,’ she pleaded. She could see tears in his eyes and despite herself her heart wrenched that she had hurt him. She took another step closer to him and pulled him in for a hug. ‘I’m sorry,’ she whispered. She pulled back and kissed his pursed lips, willing him to lose the rigidity of his stance, to relent. ‘I’m so sorry. There is no one but you, nothing I do is ever for anyone but you. But I promise, it won’t happen again.’
He stood in her arms, rigid as a block of marble. She kissed himagain, a tear rolling down her cheek. Just when she thought he was going to push her away, relief coursed through her as she felt him soften against her. He wrapped his arms around her and pulled her closer. Suddenly he was kissing her urgently, his intensity almost overwhelming. She breathed a sigh of relief. It was over, another black mood had passed. Each time it happened it was so unnerving, it took all her powers of persuasion to help him let it go. Sometimes it lasted for days, sometimes hours, sometimes a few minutes… the worst had been over a week. It wasn’t healthy, she knew that. She had never told anyone about it, not that she really had anyone to tell. Her old friends had given up on her years ago, having failed in their attempts to rescue her from the monopoly Noah held her in. She told herself it was an unfortunate character trait, she knew he had inherited it from his dad, that sometimes he saw red and lost control of his emotions. She felt she couldn’t really blame him for it, it was just the way he was. She remembered her mum’s advice, ‘You can only change yourself. No one will change for you. It must come from within.’
He ripped the shirt off her body, biting her stained lip a fraction too hard before kneeling down to kiss her breastbone, her stomach, then her upper thighs as he pulled her jeans down. She tried to forget what had happened as he removed the last of her clothes, to let the argument go and lose herself in the moment, but her body still felt flushed with adrenaline, in fight or flight mode. Eventually the sensations within her began to take over and thoughts of his aggressive behaviour disappeared as she became lost in his touch.
Afterwards he held her in his arms and stroked her hair as their breathing slowed.
‘I’m sorry,’ he whispered. ‘I’m sorry if I hurt you.’
She paused for a minute or two, allowing the weight of his apology to settle over them both, as if to mark its importance.
‘It’s okay,’ she said, lifting her head to kiss him. And she meant it. She knew that he wouldn’t have grabbed her like that if she hadn’t given him reason. She knew that he had told her before that he didn’t like her wearing too much makeup. If she could wind backthe clock she would never have put on that stupid lipstick, she never would have exacerbated his already fractious mood after a stressful week.
Helena would do anything for a peaceful life. She definitely wasn’t one of those people who enjoyed arguments in a relationship. She cowered away from conflict; it didn’t excite her or give her the thrill in the prospect of making up that she knew some couples could become addicted to. The more she got to know Noah, the more she knew how he worked, what he liked and disliked, what wound him up and what she could do to keep him happy. Every time he went nuclear on her she tried to console herself with the fact that it was another lesson learned, another thing she could avoid doing or saying in future. She hoped that one day there would be no more treading on eggshells, that there would be no more lessons left to learn. That Noah would finally be happy and content, all the time, without these horrible flashes of rage, for Raffy’s sake, but also, for her own. That she would finally stop feeling lonely when she was clearly no longer alone.
6
‘I’LL GO, YOUstay here and have a nice lie-in.’ Noah kissed her before sliding out from under the duvet, letting a puff of cool air into her warm and cosy cocoon. She stretched out across their double bed, spreading herself out in a star shape. She heard Raffy and Noah whisper outside the bedroom as he pulled the door to, then the sound of their footsteps as they went downstairs. She knew he would be at his charming best today after losing his shit so badly the night before, and she intended to make the most of it. If she had to put up with being wrenched by the hair and shouted at then the least he could do was give her a lie-in and spoil her for a day or so to make up for it.
Helena closed her eyes and willed herself to go back to sleep. Opportunities to lie in were almost unheard of – gone were the days when she’d wake naturally at nine or ten at the weekend.
Irritatingly, she found herself wide awake. Thoughts of yesterday’s argument flashed through her mind. A slideshow of similar incidents was building up in her memory bank, each as petty and vitriolic as the last. She wondered whether any of her friends’ partners were similarly temperamental, if that was the right word for it. Not for the first time she wished she had maintained even one of her friendships from her life before Noah, so she could actually talk to someone about all this. She wondered how many of the most charming men around, and women too, were secretly teetering on the brink of hysteria and rage with only the slightest and most innocent provocation. At times it seemed almost impossible to predict what might set him off. At other times, like last night, she could kick herself for having done something he would so obviously see as inflammatory. She wouldredouble her efforts to make him happy. She just had to try harder to keep the peace. She would make it her mission not to antagonise him. After all, she knew by now how to avoid irritating him. He had told her often enough.
He liked the ironing to be done a certain way, the cupboards to be immaculately tidy, the spices ordered alphabetically, his boxers folded, his socks paired correctly in the sock drawer. He liked his meals to be on time and freshly prepared. He didn’t like going out so they rarely left the house. He wanted it to be just the three of them at the weekend. He had banned Raffy from going on playdates, saying he didn’t want him at random people’s houses, somewhere he hadn’t been and with parents in charge that he hadn’t even met. Helena often felt sorry for Raffy that he wasn’t given the opportunity to socialise with his peers outside of school. Especially when he begged her to organise playdates, and she saw the look on his face as she quietly explained that, yet again, he was unable to go to a friend’s birthday party. But at the end of the day, Raffy was Noah’s son, not hers, and she respected his right to make these parenting decisions, to do whatever he felt best for his son, even if she didn’t always agree.
She often wondered whether it was nature or nurture that made Noah the way he was. His father had only been on the scene for the first seven years of his life, but they were such formative years. He was an alcoholic with a gambling problem, who had often been physically violent with Noah, his brother, and his mum. Eventually, when his mother had discovered he had used all their savings, all the inheritance from her parents, lying that he had put them in an investment fund until finally confessing it was all gone, she had kicked him out. It sounded like it had been a long and gruelling journey to get there, but he had eventually ended up in rehab. Noah had never spoken to him since the day his mother forced him to leave.
She cut him a lot of slack, she knew that, but she felt so much of his behaviour must be connected to growing up with a father like that, not to mention the grief he had felt losing Kate. The traumaof losing his wife so tragically and unexpectedly must really have affected his mental health. She knew he probably would have benefited, would still benefit, from some kind of therapy but she also knew that he was the least likely person to go. She let him off the hook more times than she should because of what he had been through. She often wondered whether she would be so patient if he didn’t have those excuses. Sometimes she wondered if it really had made a difference. What if he had been like this all along? But she was as sure as she could be that the anger he so clearly harboured inside was a result of his life experience just as much as his genes.
It was a strange twist of fate that both Helena and Noah had been grieving at the time that they met. Helena’s mother had died around the same time as Kate. She often wondered if her mum had somehow had something to do with that chance encounter. A year had passed in which life had carried on in its unrelenting way, but they were both heavy with emotion and sadness underneath the surface. Together they had helped each other to process what had happened. They had talked about Bridget’s sudden death from a brain aneurism. Brutal in its instantaneousness, she had died in the middle of the night. They talked about the loss of her father, who had died when she was thirteen, from pancreatic cancer. Unlike Noah, who had a younger brother, albeit one he was not at all close to, Helena had never had any siblings. For a long time after her father’s death, it had just been the two of them, Helena and Bridget. They had been about as close as a mother and daughter could be. Similar in more ways than Helena had often been happy to admit, they had been best friends, confidantes, wingmen for each other. Her loss had been felt deeply by Helena, and meeting Noah had taken on even more of a significance, filling the seemingly bottomless crater of her mother’s absence.
Kate’s death had been sudden and unexpected, just like Bridget, but Noah had had to deal with the added horror of telling Raffy that his mum was dead. He had been alone in a foreign country, with a one-year-old son. It was no wonder he was struggling. They had talked about the hideous process of telephoning relatives andfriends to pass on the news, organising funerals, sorting through possessions, the loneliness, the desperate, painful longing to see them again, the raw agony of grief. It had been comforting to know that they were in it together. To know that they could support each other through their pain as they began to learn to live with it. They understood in a way that others around them, untouched as yet by the death of someone so close, could not.
It was this that she reminded herself of when she felt disheartened, when she worried that her relationship was unstable. She reasoned with herself and made excuses, unwilling to contemplate the reality that she had chosen someone who could be so emotionally unavailable, so controlling. Who would choose those character traits for their other half? But she didn’t want anyone else. She had chosen him, for good and for bad. And with him, came Raffy, and for him she would put up with pretty much anything. The harder she had fallen in love with Noah, the more impossible it had become to even think of leaving. She couldn’t contemplate it. Her life was here now, she had given up her past existence. The old Helena was nothing but a distant memory. Her friends had drifted away, they had fought for her attention for a while, but she had been so completely under Noah’s spell that she had failed to make time for them, losing herself in her new-found domestic bliss. Helena had moved her entire life to be with Noah and Raffy and she knew that there was no going back, she had known it from the moment she had agreed to come to Hambleton with him. She had known that it was forever, and in truth there was nowhere else she would rather be.
Having given up on going back to sleep, she spent an hour or so reading in bed. After a while, Noah bought her up a freshly brewed coffee. Another peace offering.
‘Thanks,’ she said, looking up at him over the edge of her book.
‘Look Helena, I’m sorry about last night. I really am.’
‘Mmmm.’ She looked at him searchingly.
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ he bristled. ‘You know I am.’
She sighed, remembering her mission was to keep the peace. ‘I know.’
‘I’m under so much stress at the moment.’
‘I know you are.’
‘Work is really getting me down.’
She nodded.
‘You know how I can get…’ he tailed off.
