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Rachel felt a slick of ice down her spine. ‘Oh,’ she began carefully. ‘I thought you were getting an income now? From the house in Antibes?’
‘Well, yeah. Kind of. But it’s low season. Bookings will be sporadic. And I still have to pay the cleaner. And the pool guy. Things will pick up next month. But this month, things are still tight.’
He slid a tray of prawns into the fridge. She noticed that they were the small, pink, cooked prawns, not the big raw pearlescent ones he always used to buy. She noticed too that he’d shopped at Tesco, not at Whole Foods as he usually did.
The sun sank down behind the cloud and Michael was normal-coloured once again.
‘What do you need me to do?’ she asked.
‘Well, I guess maybe we could start with paying me back for the shopping?’ He gestured at the food items on the kitchen counter.
‘Sure,’ she replied, trying not to let her concern show. ‘How much was it?’
He pulled a receipt from the bottom of the shopping bag and peered at it. ‘Twenty-six pounds.’
‘Sure,’ she said again, pulling a twenty and a ten from her purse and pushing them across the counter towards him.
He took the notes and slipped them into his back pocket. ‘Thanks, honey. This won’t go on for much longer, I promise you.’
It was something to do with a missing shipment of parts. They were worth, according to Michael, ‘not a million. But not far off.’ And he was required to pay for the missing shipment out of his own pocket. ‘All of my savings, Rachel. Everything.’
He’d cried and buried his wet face in her shoulder and told her that he was not worthy, that she could leave him, that he wouldn’t blame her, that this was not what she’d signed up for, less than she deserved. She had stroked his hair and soothed him and told him that she was not with him for his money, that she was with him because she loved him. She loved him. She loved him.
He’d been on a hair trigger ever since, determined to make her feel every single pulse of his self-loathing. He’d put his house in Antibes on to a holiday rental site and was toying with the idea of selling his Fulham flat and moving into Rachel’s Camden apartment. ‘It won’t come to that, I’m sure,’ he’d said. ‘It won’t. But if it did …’
She’d nodded. ‘Oh. God. Yes. Of course. Of course.’
Nights once spent deciding where to go for dinner were now spent at home deciding what to watch on TV. Even this was now fraught with tension as Michael explained exactly how much each streaming package was costing him per month.
‘What time do you want to eat?’
She glanced at the clock. It was six o’clock. ‘Maybe seven?’
‘You got it.’ He flicked a tea towel over his shoulder and pulled a saucepan from a cupboard, filling it with water from the tap.
In bed later that night, Michael clutched the duvet to his chest inside his fists and stared at the ceiling. They’d just got to the end of a very unsatisfactory sexual interlude, Michael’s penis growing flaccid every minute or so, having to be brought back to life either by Rachel or by his own hand and ending with Rachel on all fours and Michael thrusting soullessly for over ten minutes before ejaculating without any suggestion of enjoyment.
‘It’s the money thing,’ he said after a short, murky moment of post-coital silence. ‘It’s … I’m not used to this. I’m not used to being poor. I’m not used to having to take money from the woman I love. I’m just … I’m emasculated, Rachel. I’m fucking emasculated.’
Rachel looked at him thoughtfully. She wanted to remind him that he’d been having problems maintaining an erection since long before he’d lost all his money. He’d been having trouble maintaining an erection since their honeymoon, since she’d stupidly suggested extending their sexual repertoire. ‘That’s just silly,’ she said, knowing as the words left her lips that they were the wrong ones.
He turned sharply. ‘Silly?’
‘No.’ She flinched. ‘Not silly. Just—’
‘Fuck, Rachel.Fuck. Do you not see what is happening here? This isn’t silly. I’m fucking broke. I might have to sell this apartment. I have people – God, Rachel, you do not know what kind of people – breathing down my neck. And you – you get to swan off every day to your precious little studio, and make your prettylittle necklaces with your lovely daddy at the end of the fucking line ready to bail you out every time you go into the red and your lovely little mortgage-free apartment and – and youryouthand you have no idea, you literally haveno idea about anything, Rachel.You’re a fucking child.’ Michael ripped the duvet away from himself and stalked to the bathroom.
Rachel blinked slowly, to calm herself. She looked at his white naked buttocks pistoning angrily away from her. A voice inside her head was screaming at Michael. It was using foul language and it was telling Michael that he was an idiot, that he was an arsehole, that he was shit in bed and poor and old and that she hated him, that she wished she’d never married him, that she wanted her old life back, the one that didn’t involve tiptoeing around a middle-aged man’s fragile masculinity, bringing his flaccid penis back to life like a paramedic every night.
But she sucked it all back down inside her, lay silently on her back and waited for him to return. When he did, she tenderly wrapped an arm around him and said, ‘I love you.’
But even as she said the words, she wondered if they were true because she was pretty sure that love was not meant to feel this way.
‘I’m going to turn this around, Rachel. I promise. I am going to turn this around.’
She nodded, but said nothing.
It was safer that way.
