AllFreeNovel
Share Us
She didn’t like the vocabulary he was using, and Bruce would be the type to underplay it even to his own wife, to struggle on alone, equating seeking help with weakness.
‘You know you can talk to me about anything.’
‘I know, I know,’ he said. ‘Just let me sort it in my own way. Let’s not talk about it, please, because I’m on it.’
She nodded, but her senses were already up and arming themselves. She didn’t want to overreact but it was hard not to, especially when someone she’d once been close to had been swallowed up by the darkness of depression and she hadn’t seen it happening.
Shay pressed a Paul Smith shirt for Bruce to wear for dinner that she’d just taken out of its packaging. He’d been on a recent spend then, not that she minded. They didn’t have the sort of relationship where each had to account for what they bought with the money they’d earned.
The shirt was pale-blue and it fitted him perfectly when he put it on. He looked gorgeous and he smelled gorgeous – his usual Dior Sauvage, which complimented his skin chemistry to a tee. When she was helping him with his tie, she wanted to press her lips against his and kiss him hard, but she was afraid to bridge the distance. Now she knew what was wrong, she had to be patient, not make him feel inadequate. Orshouldshe kiss him, her mind argued back? Shouldn’t she be showing him she still loved him and wanted him? She didn’t know. This was the sort of question that cropped up on problem pages in magazines and she wished she’d read one recently and learned what the best course of action was.
They had another exquisite meal in the restaurant and a brandy and coffee to follow in the lounge. A pianist was playing old-style music of yesteryear, entertaining the guests who were mostly elderly. They didn’t go to many places where she and Bruce were the youngest, thought Shay as she sat and sipped her drink. Actually, they didn’t go many places these days full stop. Bruce looked relaxed and she envied him that, because she wasn’t. This weekend had been an expensive disaster and all she had to show for it was a big bag of cheese and a head full of anxiety. She’d hoped her batteries would have been recharged because she was close to flat, but they’d drained even more because she’d spent most of her time being narked with, then worried about, Bruce, and Paula had fly-tipped their mum’s neighbour problem into her brain. And there wasn’t a chance that her sister would say, ‘Shay, do stand back and let me deal with this.’
In the huge four-poster bed that night, with Bruce’s back facing her, she listened to his contented snoring andwondered why he hadn’t touched her, recognised her needs even if his own couldn’t be satisfied. Her brain rolled until it eventually found sleep and dreams took her back twenty-four years, where she turned left and back into the limousine instead of right and forward into the church.
Chapter 6
Bruce ate the equivalent of two breakfasts the next morning, making up for the one he’d missed. Shay didn’t feel that hungry but she chose eggs Benedict to keep him company. The egg yolks were sticky and orange under the creamy hollandaise sauce, the ham thick-cut and lean, the muffins toasted to perfection but every bite seemed to cling to the insides of her mouth as if she had forgotten how to swallow.
She’d checked her phone to find another six missed calls from Paula and a couple of angry texts demanding Shay ring her immediately. Paula, she decided, had got her mixed up with one of the minions who worked for her and she didn’t take well to being ignored. Shay, however, was annoyed enough to snub her sister’s foot-stamping. Plus, she rather hoped Paula had gained a little insight into what she had to do for their mother when need arose above and beyond putting out some tablets and making sure she ate a hot meal. Roberta wasn’t hard work to anyone with a bit of patience, she just required some routine, company, care and therein lay the problem because Paula had neither tolerance nor warmth.
They’d never really got on. Paula was seven years older, a cavernous seven years. She’d resented having her status as an only child revoked, been jealous of the attention a perfect, pretty baby had drawn. Then when Shay was eleven, Paula had gone on to poly and never came back home to live because after she’d graduated, she married her arsehole boyfriend Chris whom she’d met there.
Paula considered herself a bit of a lady and had reconfigured her past to accommodate her self-delusion, painting it and herself in portrait colours. Her 2:2 degree from Leeds Polytechnic had become a 2:1 at the university. Their mock-Tudor, three-bedroomed detached, on an estate with many more of the same was referred to as a ‘manor house’. Chris, with his string of failed business ventures, was a wildly successful entrepreneur. She’d even worked hard to drop all traces of her Yorkshire accent and round her vowels to such effect that she sounded as if she was auditioning for one of the posh parts onDownton Abbey. She had, however, worked her way up the ranks into a very important ‘proper job’ with holiday pay and BUPA and a bonus funeral plan. This gave her carte blanche to declare she had too much responsibility to the financial world to keep breaking off to take her mother for new glasses at Specsavers/a scale and polish at the dentist/a cut and blow-dry at Rita’s salon.
Paula would not have been able to stand having to repeat everything three times because Roberta insisted she was not deaf enough by half to have a hearing aid. And Paula would be driven up the wall by her mother’s repetitions, by her getting her words muddled. Her frustrations would be heavily weighted against the sadness that their mother, who had helped hundreds of children – and adults – through their Spanish, French, German or Italian exams, who readDostoyevsky and Pushkin in native Russian, couldn’t now remember the English words for vinegar, hedgehog and skip. Paula would avoid putting herself out for the woman who had put herself out for them, reducing a promising teaching career to home tutoring to fit around her family, protecting them from anything that would upset their stability when they were young, shielding them from their father’s infidelities, covering up his shortfalls, forgiving him over and over to keep them all together as a family.
Bruce made yet another trip to the breakfast buffet and Shay’s eyes followed him. He was head and shoulders above the little old ladies on either side of him. He had new stonewashed jeans on – Armani, an expensive pair she hadn’t seen before and they made his bum look lovely. When they’d first got married, they were so skint, the idea of him ever owning a pair of Armani jeans would have been laughable. But they’d laughed more when they were poor than when they had money in the bank.
They’d had a lot to deal with in their twenty-four-year marriage – mainly other people. They’d planned to have time to themselves before any children came along, but Sunny was a honeymoon baby and pregnancy was one of the happiest times of Shay’s life. Her son had been an easy birth despite being nine plump pounds and was smiling as soon as his mouth worked out how to curve. It was so easy she couldn’t wait to do it again but her second pregnancy turned out to be a much harder ordeal. Courtney had to be winkled out via an emergency C-section, nearly killing them both. She never seemed to sleep, either, preferred screaming to smiling. And thereby set the template for the rest of her life to date. If there was a tide to swim against or a reason to rebel, Courtney would – and did.
Shay was pregnant with Courtney when Bruce’s father decided he wanted to be part of his son’s life after being absent for most of it. They put him up in the spare room for a while because he had nowhere else to go but he borrowed money he couldn’t pay back, turned up drunk at the house at all hours, and ran up debts in their name. Just before he was pushed, he jumped, and buggered off back to the off-grid hole he’d crawled out of, never to be heard of again. Bruce’s hypochondriac mother was always in the background with her various aches and pains needing doctors or hospital investigations. She moved in with them when she became properly ill. Brenda Bastable idolised her son and grandchildren but didn’t extend the same pleasantries to the daughter-in-law who became her main carer. Fittingly Brenda died in her sleep still holding the little bell in her hand that she rang every half-hour to summon someone to her aid.
After Brenda died, they could enjoy family life as a four for a while before her own parents started falling to bits with increasing health niggles and their eventual divorce bombshell. Things were relatively stable at present but with Harry being very poorly and Roberta’s memory dissolving, the sands would shift soon enough. Plus Shay couldn’t quite trust that Courtney’s life would stay all quiet on the western front and then there were these irrational niggles about Sunny to contend with. Then throw into the mix Bruce’s recent disclosure. She wondered how her hair hadn’t blanched white overnight sometimes.
As Bruce walked back towards her with a plate piled with breakfast buffet food she smiled. Despite everything that had been flung at them, they were still together and that had to count for something. She didn’t want to be one ofthose couples who realised, when the kids had gone, that they had nothing to say to each other. She had to concentrate her efforts on making sure she was giving Bruce and her marriage as much of herself as she gave to everyone else. The years that lay in front for them had to be easier than those in their wake. They had achieved all they set out to do, had their nice cars and big house, his successful business, children. Now it was their time to enjoy the fruits they’d earned and she would make sure they did.
‘Have you actually left anything for anyone else?’ she asked him as he sat down. He smiled at her.
‘Couple of grapes and some Marmite.’
She poured him a coffee from the cafetière.
‘I’m so sorry I ruined this weekend, Shay. I know you did everything to make it special. I was thinking about it all as I was picking up my ham and cheese.’
She laughed at that. ‘I can’t quite see the correlation but I’m glad you appreciate my efforts.’
‘I do, I really do.’
He reached over the table, stroked her cheek with the back of his fingers. ‘I do love you, Shay.’ Again that overflow of emotion in his voice, sadness rather than tenderness. She chalked it up to the off-kilter weekend and said that she loved him too.
As Bruce drove home, a text came through from Lesley.
Hope you’ve had a nice anniversary. Fancy meeting for lunch? Tues? Got something I can’t tell you over the phone.
Shay texted back immediately.
Intriguing. Yes, I’m free. Tell me where and when x
