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Perhaps it’s because we grew up together. He was, quite literally, the boy-next-door. Our parents owned adjoining semis on Kennedy Road, a cul-de-sac in what an estate agent would no doubt call a ‘leafy’ part of West Sussex. My parents bought Number 17 when my mother was newly pregnant with me. Three months later, Tom’s parents moved into Number 19.
My mother wasn’t sick then. There are photographs of her and Tom’s mother showing off their baby bumps together in the back garden. In some of them, my mother’s even smiling.
We were born two weeks apart in June 1982, just as the Falklands War was coming to an end. We went to the same nursery school and we were inseparable. Even when we moved up to primary school, and Tom made friends with other boys, he stayed loyal to me.
I spent more time in his house than mine; his mother, Amy, showed me more love and care than my own indifferent, sometimes hysterical, mother ever did. Amy fed me when my parents neglected to, and gave me a lift home from school when my father was drunk and my mother had taken to her bed with ‘nerves’.
Our bedrooms were separated by a thin partition wall, through which I’d hear Tom playing retro hits by Blondie and The Cure well into the small hours. Sometimes I’d touch my palm to the wall and almost feel him breathing in the bed on the other side.
I wasn’t like other teenage girls. I didn’t care about the things they cared about: boys, clothes, approval. I couldn’t afford to let myself care about anything. If I allowed myself to feel, the emotion uppermost would berage.
Rage at my father, a violent narcissist who took pleasure in reducing my mother to a cowering wreck with his fist and his words. Rage at my mother, for letting herself be used as a punchbag and coming back for more again and again.
Rage at my own powerlessness.
In the absence of feeling, I’d do almost anything to force a jolt of emotion. I climbed higher up the chestnut tree to shake down conkers than any of the boys. I scaled a mobile phone mast for a dare. When I was thirteen, I sneaked out of the house in the middle of the night to climb the fence into a nearby railway yard, so that I could run the roofs of the trains parked in the sidings just for the hell of it; a fall into the gaps between carriages would have broken my neck. I hung onto the rear bumpers of passing cars on my skateboard to get a lift up the hill to our road. I was fearless, a daredevil, the leader of the pack. And Tom was my wingman.
Then – and now.
He never asked what I used to get up to when I disappeared, sometimes for days at a time, in the early years of our marriage.
We called these absences my ‘prison breaks’. Afterwards, when I returned to him, the restlessness that fuelled me would be sated for a while. Without me ever having to discuss it with him, Tom understood.
Six years into our marriage, I was the one who put motherhood back on the table, because I wanted to please him.
And I was curious. A child was the ultimate challenge.
Tom’s only condition was that my prisonbreaks must stop. As a mother, I couldn’t disappear for days on end. If I was to teach discipline, I must practise it.
We agreed that when the need became too strong, when the stresses and frustrations of ordinary life drove me to act out, I would limit myself to day trips and ensure I was back by nightfall. And I would tell him afterwards. Not in so many words, but with my mementos. He knows he can trust me. And so I never stray too far outside the lines.
The key to our marriage has always been honesty. My loyalty to the truth is the bedrock of our relationship. If he ever asks what I do when I’m not with him, I will tell him.
He never has.
chapter 03
tom
My wife’s very much an acquired taste. Even people who like Marmite rarely eat it out of the jar. She’s very …intense. Very focused. She likes to think she lives in the shades of grey betweenrightandwrong, but the truth is, her moral world is very black and white.
You’re either with her or against her.
She’s not the psychopath she thinks she is. She loves fiercely and furiously, but she doesn’t wear her heart on her sleeve. She’s had to fight for everything she’s achieved: the child of an abusive drunk doesn’t easily climb out of the pit. Her fists are still raised against a world that tended to hit first. She doesn’t always follow the rules – or even the law – but she has her own personal code of honour, and she sticks to it. Sheneverlies. And she’s loyal to a fault. If she decides to fight your corner, she’s all in – whether that’s what you want or not.
To be honest, a little of Millie goes a long way. But she’s a taste I’ve been hooked on for forty years. Back in the day, Victorians used to take arsenic regularly, using it as a tonic and an aphrodisiac. Who knows: maybe my addiction will kill me in the end.
I watch her now as she gets ready for bed, smoothing some kind of goo onto her flawless skin with deft upward strokes. Millie Downton is the woman Ishould not have been able to get: a nine to my four. Her thick gold hair is twisted up into a loose knot, and she’s wearing a plain white T-shirt and white cotton underwear. The soft glow from the bathroom light makes her look seventeen again. We’re the same age, forty, but she looks a decade younger than me. She’s in excellent shape, thanks to daily cardio and strength-training. She has an orthodontically perfect smile, a full mouth, and wide eyes that shift in shade between dark honey and black coffee, depending on her mood. If you were casting her in a movie, Rosamund Pike would be a good choice.
She catches my eye in the mirror as she snaps the lid of her lotion bottle closed. ‘Did you have fun this afternoon?’ she asks.
I took our son to visit the Holocaust Exhibition at the Imperial War Museum. It’s not recommended for children under fourteen, but Peter said his class is doing a block on it later this term. ‘Fun isn’t the word I’d use,’ I say.
‘I’m sure Peter enjoyed it.’
I can’t tell if she’s making a crack about our son or not. Even after loving this woman for four decades, I still don’t often know what’s really going on inside her beautiful head.
My lovely wife would be quick to acknowledge she isn’t easy to live with. She has rules for the children, rules for me: breakfast and dinner together, always. No shorts when we go out to dinner, even in Greece, even in August. Three peremptory strikes against each family member’s friends, no questions asked.
