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‘Please go.’ She almost whispers it. ‘Just… go. I’ve told you about their problems, that’s all I intended to say, so now you know. I wish I hadn’t bothered with the rest. I knew you wouldn’t listen. You don’t want to listen.’
His eyes fill. He can hear the hum of the fridge from the kitchen, the soft out breath of his baby boy. Don’t speak, Matt. Just don’t say anything.
‘I’ll be at Neil’s,’ he says.
‘Of course you will.’ Default sarcasm. She has turned away from him, will think him cheap, of course, not to stump up even for the Travelodge. And she’ll be privately disgusted at their boys’ conspiracy.
‘Maybe we can talk tomorrow?’
‘I doubt it.’ She does not turn around.
He swallows what feels like a hard lump of air. ‘Ava…’
‘Matt. I’m begging you. Go. Please.’
Thirty-Two
Matt
‘Mate.’ Neil holds open his front door.
Matt steps out of the falling light into a house once familiar, now strange to him. It is over a year since he has been here. July, a barbecue on a Sunday afternoon. A flashing memory – Neil swinging Abi around and around by her arms as she laughed and squealed – hits him like a punch. It feels like a decade ago. It feels like yesterday. Ava was right: Neil and Bella have withdrawn. Much more than he’s realised.
‘You OK?’ Neil’s brow furrows.
‘Yeah, sorry, just feel a bit weird. I don’t know how I got through work today, to be honest.’
‘Yeah, course.’
The pause that follows is bulky and awkward.
‘Bel’s made up the bed in the back bedroom,’ Neil says after a moment. ‘There’s a clean towel. You can stick your stuff there if you want. Do you need anything else?’
‘No, that’s great. I’ll go and dump my bag. Cheers.’
Matt plods up the stairs, feet like rocks. The spare room is clean and smells of freshly laundered bedding. On the wall is a framed architectural drawing – his own, for a converted warehouse on the South Bank, his first big commission. Neil loved this drawing.
‘That’s art, that is,’ he said, shaking his head with pride.
‘Building it is the art,’ Matt replied.
Neil asked for a copy, insisted that he was serious. So, on his thirtieth birthday, Matt took it to be framed for him. Now he studies it a moment before sitting on the bed and letting his head fall into his hands, the weight of it threatening to topple him over. When he exhales, his breath is ragged. The last twenty minutes of his life have been amongst the worst, with the obvious exception of that day.
‘Mate.’ Neil is calling from the bottom of the stairs. ‘I’m having a beer – do you want one?’
‘Yep,’ he calls back. ‘Down in a second.’
He sighs into the damp palms of his hands. His feet are sweaty; his Marks & Spencer suit clings to his legs, his shirt wet against his armpits. He is alone in his friend’s spare room, sports holdall at his stinking, sweaty feet in the Church’s brogues that Ava bought him when he won a big contract, about three years ago now. Buy a better suit, she told him, she damn well told him – go to Aquascutum, she said. Or Armani. But he didn’t, didn’t spend the money, because, essentially, he must have known deep down that his high-street suit was good enough. When she bought him those beautiful shoes, he read pride, but what he reads now is hope, her hope that he would one day rid himself of the smallness she always saw in him, shake off the mediocrity and, with her love, become bigger, a bigger man. A better man.
A vain hope, as it turns out.
He wants to take his shoes off but he cannot stand the stink of his own feet, let alone inflict it on someone else.
He stands up and looks out of the back window onto Neil and Bella’s garden while he attempts to compose himself. That sunny Sunday afternoon, a little over a year ago, seems like the most impossible idyll. Ava sitting in the shade fanning herself with a place mat. He remembers he complained about a headache when they got home. He’d been running in the morning and had not drunk enough water – it was Ava who pointed this out with weary maternal indulgence, as she would whenever he didn’t take the most basic steps to look after himself. The way she looked at him then said: you are so childish, but I love you.
She loved him. Despite his limitations, she loved him. And now she doesn’t.
But he loves her. He loves her, even in her reduced state, because shewasextraordinary and he knows she can be that again. His love for her is still in the present. Hers is in the past. It ended yesterday.
