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Once I’ve calmed down, I have a few thoughts I want to impart. Just a few. Then he can go.
“You’re telling me you pity-fucked me and decided that rather than open yourself up to potential pain and humiliation if things went wrong between us, you’d rather hurt me in the bleakest, most brutal way possible? Savagely leaving me in a hotel room when you knew I’d told people I wasn’t staying the night and was getting a taxi home. When you knew—”
I almost say it but don’t. When he knew that I was in love with him.
“You don’t understand what it’s like being me,” he says, almost choking, “you don’t know.”
“Oh, I think I do. I think Paul Barton comes first and he doesn’t put anybody before himself. I saw the wayGina” – I say her name like she’s vile – “slapped you tonight, and I understand exactly how she feels. You got a new phone number recently, was that to avoid her? Avoid telling her you were back? Does she know you also had someone out in Japan, eh?”
“How do you know about that?” he barks.
“Oh, I know about everything. Everything. Just not her age, it seems. You kept that tart away from your friends, didn’t you? Because you didn’t want them knowing you were seeing a thirty-odd-year-old woman who was probably desperate and would look past all your glaring failures!”
I stop myself saying more, though I’ve probably said enough. His eyes are full of fury and loathing even though he knows I’m right. He picks them so that he doesn’t have to answer back or face up to his responsibilities.
“Gina’s alright. She’s not a bad person,” he warns.
“And did she see me tonight?” I growl.
“No, she didn’t. She doesn’t know anything about you. She was just shocked to see me on the street.”
He’s disgusting.
I look across the room and straight into his eyes, red and shiny with desperation. “Paul, I don’t even know how you really feel or what you want. You know I want marriage and children but I have no idea what you want. Do you really want to be a teacher? Do you want to live around here? Do you like going from pillar to post? Is that all you know? Would you quit drinking for me? Would you?”
He stands up and puts his hand on his heart. “I know that a lot of my behaviour is because of drink. I wouldn’t do half the stuff I do if I wasn’t drinking, but I can’t help it. I can’t. You don’t know what it’s like, Lily. I grew up knowing that if there’s a problem, you drink, or if there’s something to celebrate, you drink, or if there’s a cold day, a sunny day, a windy day, you drink because drinking is what we do. And at weddings, birthdays, all that, you don’t even count the glasses in your hand, it’s a free-for-all. That’s how my own father brought me up, since I was a young teenager. If you wanna know why my brothers aren’t like me it’s because I was the one down the pub with Dad and they got to stay home, play computers, do their homework, do the dishes, while my chore was always to be by Dad’s side and bring him home, yet all the time he was pouring poison in my ears saying you can’t trust women, you can’t trust friends, you really don’t wanna work too hard because all you get for it is more of a headache… your mother hates me because I like to have a good time, your brothers weren’t planned and might not be mine anyway, your grandfather liked to hit me and smack me about… and all that loops round my head, constantly, no matter where I go. Japan, here, Spain, Germany… doesn’t matter where I am, he’s always with me. His disease is inside me, and I know that it’s a disease, and I know that it’s wrong to drink when I know I have a problem with it, just like him, but I have never, ever had anyone tell me how to cope with life. Never. Except to drink. That’s the only tool I’ve got to cope. Drink. That’s it. I don’t have anything else. This is all I am. This is what he made me.”
He turns his back, walks to the wall and puts his face in his hands, resting his forehead against the plaster.
I go into the bedroom, collect some spare bedding and leave it on the pull-out sofa.
Then I shut myself in my bedroom, pull the duvet over my head and cry, because I don’t know if I can ever get over this. I want to be free of this pain and I don’t think I ever will be.
Does he have the capacity to love me enough for us to get past this?
The tragedy is, he’s only ended up creating what he was trying to avoid in the first place – wrecking things between us, inevitably, by continuing to lie, drink and shag other people while in the throes of alcohol.
I want the man I marry to look at me and think I’m special, that I’m worth his time and energy, his fidelity and his love.
Truly, I’ve not got that from Paul.
Ever.
Except when we’re having sex.
And we can’t constantly have sex.
He needs to think of some other basis to build this on, or it’s over.
Simple as that.
Right now, it feels like only a miracle might eradicate my feeling of betrayal… and the worst thing, that it feels like I have to be sad and desperate for him to give a damn, because when I was happy with Ian, truly happy, Paul wasn’t anywhere to be seen in my life. He was off, wherever, no doubt not sparing a thought for me. He made the choice for us not to be a couple when we were teenagers and he made the choice to love me and leave me at Adam’s wedding.
I think it’s about time I made some of the choices.
Chapter Twenty-One
The next morning it’s like I’ve woken from a dream and last night never happened. I’ve had such a stuffy, deep, exhaustion-fuelled sleep that for a moment, I really believe it never happened. We didn’t argue and he didn’t cry and I didn’t feel broken in two.
