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‘Hi.’ A perfunctory glance and she returns her gaze to the television.
He waits for as long as it takes him to realise there is nothing more.
‘I’ll go and grab a few shirts then,’ he says eventually.Please don’t make me do this. Please.
‘Fine.’
How long does he stay at the door, staring at the back of her head, praying she will turn around, properly this time, and, with tears in her eyes, tell him that she can, after all, forgive him? He wants so badly to throw himself at her feet, promise her that they can get over this, but instinct tells him,shehas told him, that the moment is not now, and that it might be never. To ask for forgiveness now would be an insult.
And so he leaves her. Upstairs he packs some shirts, pants, socks and a spare pair of trousers, some toiletries – the banality of these items bringing an acrid taste to his mouth as he places them into a sports holdall – a holdall, for Christ’s sake. He returns downstairs to the still life that is his wife: transfixed or, more likely, determinedly fixing, her eyes on the screen so as not to have to look at her snivelling excuse of a husband.
‘I’m off then,’ he says brightly.
And then, at last, she turns. But what she has to say shocks him to the core.
‘Did you know Bella and Neil were trying for a baby?’
‘What?’ Matt drops his bag to the floor. ‘When did you find that out?’
‘Last night.’
‘Last night how?’
Her chin tips up. Her eyelids lower a fraction. ‘You were in bed. I couldn’t sleep. I texted Neil around midnight.’
‘Why?’
‘Because I needed to ask him about Jasmine recognising Mr Sloth.’
‘Oh, Ava.’ Sadness fills him.
‘Don’toh, Avame.’
He hears the steel in her voice.
‘Neil said he was waiting until the business got up and running,’ he says, trying to keep her off the topic of bloody Mr Sloth, the toy he wishes to God he’d thrown away.
‘Well, they’ve been having IVF.’
‘What?’ Matt reels. ‘Since when? Hang on, rewind, midnight? You were texting Neil at midnight?’
‘Actually, we met up. We walked up to the lock.’
He stares at her. Her chin is still tipped up, her eyelids still low. She is his wife; he has no idea who she is.
‘You were asleep,’ she says, a lacing of defiance in her tone.
He shakes his head, wills himself to stay calm, above all not to shout. ‘Neil didn’t have anything to do with Abi, you know that. You know it, Ava.’
‘I thought I knewyou, but I didn’t, did I?’
Touché. He closes his eyes, holds them closed a second, two.
‘The day before Abi disappeared,’ she continues, her face tight with tension, ‘do you remember, that Sunday, we told them I was pregnant? Well, the night before, they’d lost a baby. A pregnancy, you know? They’d been having IVF. And it happened again a few months later.’
‘Oh my God.’ Matt’s hand flies to his forehead. For a moment he cannot speak. Neil. His best friend. Whom he has known since he was eleven. ‘Why didn’t they tell us? I can’t understand why they wouldn’t tell us.’
She shrugs. ‘I don’t know. I’ve been thinking today that Bella did look rough that Sunday, you know, for her. I thought she was hung-over. I thought we’d offended them, maybe by not telling them, maybe they felt they’d been left to guess like strangers. And obviously, afterwards, they couldn’t have told us, not on the back of our happy news – it would have been awful. And I suppose after Abi, they felt we had enough on our plate. I mean, it’s not like I would have been much support, I suppose.’
