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Bella and Taylor are already waiting by the frontdoor, their hair caught up under matching black beanies, rucksacks hitched over their narrow shoulders.
‘You’re leaving too?’ I exclaim. ‘What about your fish and chips?’
‘I’m not hungry,’ Bella says.
Tolly comes running down the stairs. ‘Wait for me!’
Louise ruffles her son’s hair. ‘You want to come back with Mum, darling? We can snuggle up on the sofa together and watchCoco– d’you fancy that? Or would you rather stay here with Caz? I’m sure she’ll find something for you to do.’
Tolly leans into his mother’s legs. He’s four years old; it’s no contest. ‘I want to be with you, Mummy.’
‘Bella, I thought you wanted to come with me to that cool antique market tomorrow morning,’ I say, trying to keep the note of pleading from my voice. ‘They do some great steampunk jewellery. You’ll love it.’
She shrugs, twisting her thumb ring round and round with her fingers. I don’t know what Louise said to her when we were out of the room, but it was clearly enough to send her back into her shell again.
Andy opens the car door for Louise with a casual familiarity that twists the knife in my heart. ‘I’ll text you, Caz, let you know what’s happening. I’ll be back in an hour; two, tops.’
I watch Louise get intomycar withmyhusband, feeling like I’ve been mugged. How does the woman do it?
He still hasn’t texted three hours later, when I finallytuck Kit into bed. I throw the uneaten fish and chips in the bin, hating the feeling of insecurity that gives me sick butterflies in my stomach. I know my feelings around Louise aren’t rational, but I also know how torn Andy was, shuttling back and forth between the two of us for a year before he finally left her. We’re married now, we have a son of our own, but how can I besurehe won’t go back to her again?
I wait till ten, determined not to look needy and jealous, but finally I can’t stand it anymore and text him. When he doesn’t respond after twenty minutes, I text again, and then finally, at eleven o’clock, I give in and call him.
He doesn’t pick up.
Chapter 13
Louise
Andrew and I haven’t been alone with the children like this in more than four years. It should feel awkward, but, oddly, it just seems comfortable and familiar. I glance over my shoulder: Bella and Taylor are glued to their phones, and Tolly is drowsing against the headrest of his car seat, his eyelids already fluttering closed.
‘You didn’t have to drive me home,’ I say, as Andrew navigates the narrow road towards Petworth. The rain is coming down even more heavily now, and I’m glad he’s the one driving, not me. ‘I’d have been fine getting a cab.’
‘I told you, you’re keeping this car,’ Andrew says. ‘We never use it anyway. You should have had it in the first place, instead of the Honda. We’re in London most of the time and it just sits here outside the house. Anyway, the kids spend far more time with you. I don’t know why we didn’t think of that at the time.’
Min thought of that. My divorce lawyer thought of that. God knows, my mother made her feelings on the subject clear. But the problem with the adversarialnature of divorce is that once lawyers get involved, even the most reasonable of people dig in their heels and go ten rounds over things they don’t even want. Andrew didn’t like the Range Rover. He always thought it handled like a pig, and lectured me frequently on its gas-guzzling consumption. He only fought me over it because, by that stage, we were fighting over teaspoons.
I can’t just blame Andrew for our clichéd descent into divorce hell. I was hurting, and grieving, and my life had been turned upside down. I fought dirty, too. I made life more difficult than it need have been when it came to the children. I’m not proud of it, but access to Tolly and Bella became my weapon of choice, as money was his. It reflects badly on both of us.
Andrew turns into our rutted lane, splashing through deep puddles that would’ve swamped my poor Honda. Even before we reach the house, I can see the damage to the porch. One support is bending alarmingly outwards under pressure from the gravid ceiling above it, which sags as if pregnant with some alien life form. I pray to God it’s just the porch that’s threatened, not the kitchen itself.
Andrew leaps out into the driving rain. ‘Bella, take your brother inside,’ he shouts, scooping our dozy son out of his car seat and handing him to his sister, who shields him from the deluge as best she can as she and Taylor stumble towards the house. ‘Louise, do you have anything in one of the outbuildings we can use to prop up that porch column?’
‘Nothing really strong enough,’ I shout back, barely able to hear myself over the torrential downpour. ‘Maybe one of the old horse jumps?’
We run towards the back of the property, past the vegetable garden, to what was once a paddock, long before we bought the house. I’m already soaked through to my underwear, and even though it’s not cold, I’m shivering so hard my teeth are chattering. The paddock is waist-high with weeds now, but some of the old jumps and poles are still there. We heave one out of the clinging weeds, wiping off dirt and worms. The rain makes it slippery, but between us we somehow manage to heft the horse jump around the cottage and onto the porch.
It feels both strange and completely natural to be working in tandem, as if the last five years had never happened. No wonder Caz has fought so hard to prevent a situation like this. Some visceral sense must have warned her that the pull of familiarity, the habit of love that’d lasted more than a decade before her intervention, was more lethal than passion could ever be. Especially when it wasn’t the death of that love, but her deceit and manipulation, that split us apart.
We look so bedraggled and pathetic by the time we get inside, we both start to laugh. ‘I think you left a sweater or two upstairs,’ I say, squeezing water from my hair onto the flagstones. ‘Let me take a look while you go into the attic and check out the roof.’
I don’t need to look. I know exactly where Andrew’s clothes are. When he left so suddenly that awful nightfour years ago, a week after Tolly was born, he took only the clothes that suited his metropolitan, sophisticated new life with a glamorous blonde on his arm. Expensive black jeans, cashmere sweaters, designer sportswear: the clothes I’d noticed gradually creeping into his wardrobe over the preceding twelve months. He abandoned the Aran sweaters that had been part of his life with me.
I dig into the back of my cupboard now, pulling a pair of jeans and a plaid shirt from the top shelf. I pause and stroke the soft flannel for a moment. A part of me always knew that one day, he’d come back for them.
As I come back out onto the landing, Andrew emerges from the walk-in attic, brushing dust and plaster from his hands. ‘It’s the same spot,’ he says, referring to the old leak in the roof our surveyor pointed out sixteen years ago. ‘It’s going to need more than a patch this time. The tiles have had it. The slate’s so soft, it crumbles as soon as you touch it. That whole section needs to be replaced.’ He rakes his hand through his wet hair in a gesture so familiar my heart clenches. ‘I’ve moved the soggy insulation, which is adding weight to the ceiling you don’t need. Fingers crossed it’ll hold till we can get outside and sort it out.’
I hand him his dry clothes. ‘Do you want a hot shower? Your lips are blue.’
