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I hate what you turn me into with your… your big trampling feet.
His big trampling feet. It is not the first time she has used this phrase. She used to get hysterical – before, when he let her down or insulted her without meaning to. Used to whip herself into a frenzy, accusations and disappointments and tears pouring out of her. It could come from nowhere. Once, one evening, she looked up from her magazine and asked him, ‘Hey, Sam. Which Hollywood actress do I most remind you of?’
An innocuous enough question. But he couldn’t answer, couldn’t think of a single actress, couldn’t understand, really, the point of the question.
‘Not sure.’
‘Come on! There must be one!’
‘Actually, I’m just reading,’ he made the mistake of saying. ‘You look like yourself,’ he added, when her face fell. Then, ‘Why would you want to look like someone else?’ Sensing rising tension, he tried to lighten the mood. ‘If you looked like someone else, how would I recognise you?’
She didn’t find it funny. He was patronising her, putting her down. She was only trying to make conversation; not every conversation had to be serious. And now she felt stupid, just stupid. Why did he have to always make her feel stupid?
‘It might be enough for you to sit in silence all evening,’ she went on. ‘But it’s not for me. Why don’t you start a conversation for a change? Why don’t you organise something for us to do, then we can talk about that instead of this… this quiet all the time? Just because I don’t read books about whales and white men and their problems every night doesn’t mean I’m not interesting.’
On it went. She ended up in tears, told him it was like trying to argue with a rock. He took it, hunched in his chair, as a soldier waits for bullets to fly overhead. At the time, he was unable to see where she was coming from. Now in the cold shell of the van, he can see that he was dismissive, and that he was dismissive alot.And that, for someone who had been dismissed all her life, his behaviour must have pierced the heart of her. Each time, he reminded her of his privilege. His class perhaps. His big, trampling, annihilating feet.
But if she ranted and raved, it was not from a lack of love. He sees that now too. That is not how you react to someone to whom you feel indifference. She loved him. If she hadn’t, she would have let him leave without a fight. They could have shaken hands and agreed to be friends. It is indifference that kills relationships, not rage. She raged at him because she loved him. She raged at him just now in the pub.
Does she still love him then?
The A35 takes him home; the van knows the way. It was true what Naomi said about his silence. Hedidretreat into himself those last months with her. Maybe he’d done it from the start. All these certainties he has held on to for over a year are crumbling. It is exactly as she said: he didn’t, wouldn’t talk, wouldn’t engage in the kinds of conversations she wanted to have.
But only because in those conversations he was always, always wrong.
His thoughts shake; his grasp on them loosens. She wasn’t like that at first, was she, full of rage and pride? No. Joy and mischief was what burst the seams of her, her infectious love of life.
‘Oh God,’ he says, to himself, to no one. He has believed so strongly, soabsolutely, thatshediminishedhimwith her sarcasm and her punishments, her disappointment when he failed to pick up on her telepathic demands, her excoriating text messages and public undermining. He has held on to these beliefs with the tightness of grip that can only come from a fear that they might not be true.
But now, after two brief encounters with her, he is full of questions: what if meanness was her last resort? What if, having been walled up in silence, every brick laid by him, these aggressions were her only way out? What if he truly failed her? His own gran didn’t change the locks the first timelazy, good-for-nothing Hugh spent all her housekeeping on booze, did she? Naomi didn’t become mean overnight, did she?
It happened over time.
Perhaps… possibly… probably as a response to him.
‘Oh God,’ he whispers to no one. He has ghosted her. Even when they were together, he was cold, froze her out when she got upset. And after it went wrong and he left, he cut her dead.
Are his own crimes any better?
No, he thinks. No, they are not.
At the roundabout, he takes the turning to Lyme, his sense of having been right to leave slipping with every bend in the road. He has the impression he is sinking, collapsing internally. If he’d only talked to her like she asked him to. If they’d got help as she suggested, as shealwayssuggested… and it dawns on him then, with an even heavier feeling pressing on the back of his neck, that he didn’t, wouldn’t go with her to see someone because he feared the therapist would take her side. That fear again: of being wrong.
How pathetic. How cowardly. How weak.
And now Naomi has his beautiful baby and will not let him into their life. It wasn’t out of spite or revenge at all. She doesn’t trust him, that’s what this is. She doesn’t trust him to be a good enough father. Somehow he will have to persuade her otherwise. If he can’t, he will have to find another way. Because broken heart or no, she has no right to keep his child from him.
CHAPTER 13
Black-eyed and hunched-shouldered as the day he left that bloody woman, her grandson returns to the house. Joyce spies him through the crack in the living-room door from her vantage point at the top of the stepladder. He has forgotten to take off his boots. She has called,Hello, is that you?and he has not replied at all.
She rests the tin of masonry paint on the top step and descends slowly, holding on with both hands. The urge to run and comfort him is all very well, but the last place she wants to end up is A&E, especially at the moment.
‘Sam? Samuel? Love?’
She finds him on the old chesterfield in the kitchen, head in hands. Naomi bloody Harper. She can feel it in her water. How she hates her, hates what that woman does to her grandson. Earlier this week, he was barely able to sit through dinner, gabbling excitedly about the grotto he and Miranda had found, showing her the photos on his phone, telling her how much he was looking forward to seeing Miranda’s drawings brought to life. Now look at him: all that inspiration drained away. It is as if he has lost the strength to stand.
‘You’ve seen her again then?’ she tries.
