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‘You’re so beautiful, Shay. I’ve never said it to you enough, have I? What a truly lovely person you are – inside and out.’
Her first instinct was to dismiss his words as a wind-up, dash them away, but that look in his stunning blue eyes implied he really meant them and they came from a very deep place.
‘Thank you.’ She wasn’t sure what else to say. It had been a long time since he’d given her a mushy compliment.Actually, she wasn’t sure when the last time was. He wasn’t exactly the gushy type.
‘I don’t want to talk about them when we’re here to celebrate our anniversary,’ Bruce went on. ‘I don’t want to talk about anyone but you and me.’
There was a shine of tears in his eyes. Or maybe it was all the alcohol he’d drunk making a bid for freedom.
‘Yes, you’re right,’ she said. ‘It’s too easy to get distracted.’ She cut a piece of steak; it was perfection. She chewed it until it was gone, and then opened up her mouth to ask what he thought about Courtney working in a shop now but stopped it just in time. It was ridiculously hard to talk about things that didn’t expand into a wider circle of friends, kids, work…
Bruce surprised her by ordering a sweet. He never had dessert usually. Shay wondered why he’d asked for a giant slice of cake when all he did was pick at it in between large glugs of wine from the second bottle. She could tell he was getting a bit hammered but that was fine. She wanted him to let his hair down, plus it might unloosen his inhibitions, which, in turn, would unloosen hers.
After dessert, she ordered a coffee; he had a brandy, which he necked like a shot then ordered another – a double this time.
‘You okay?’ she asked him, starting to wonder if he was trying to anaesthetise himself.
‘Yes, fine. It feels like ages since I had a good drink and this’ – he lifted up the brandy balloon – ‘isverygood stuff.’ His words were slurring now. ‘Have one with me. Go on, let’s sit in the lounge and mellow.’
‘Okay. If that’s what you’d like us to do.’
Bruce waved over a waiter, gave him an order for two doubles.
They went into the lounge, sat on a beautiful antique sofa in front of the massive unlit fireplace. The waiter followed with the brandies and Bruce hurriedly downed the one he had carried through with him to start on the new one. He was travelling fast from a bit tipsy to totally bollocksed. His eyelids had started to droop and he’d settled in a weird angle against the corner of the sofa, like an abandoned Victorian doll.
‘So, we’ll get up tomorrow and have a lovely breakfast and then mosey around the village, that work for you?’ she asked him. She’d checked out the area before she came and there were shops, a pub, nice walks, a cheese factory.
His brow creased in an attempt at concentration. ‘Yep,’ he replied eventually. ‘Let’s just…’ he flapped his hand like a seal’s flipper ‘… see where we are when we are.’ This seemed to make perfect sense to him. He leaned forward, scooped up a few complimentary Japanese crackers from a bowl on the coffee table, then pressed his back into the sofa again.
‘Isn’t this great?’ he said, smiling like a benign, well-dressed, arseholed scarecrow. It might have amused her at another time but now, it narked her a little because it crossed her mind that he might be deliberately sabotaging any possibility of intimacy by drinking too much. Then she felt mean for that thought: it wasn’t a trait of hers to think the worst of someone before the best.
She watched his eyelids drop completely down and she pondered in the silence if she had changed as much as he had in the years since they’d met. In looks, neither of them had, really; both were still easily recognisable from theiryounger selves. But yes, she reckoned, they’d both changed a lot, not just him.
For her twenty-year-old self, just being with Tanya and Lesley was enough. She didn’t want to open her heart to anyone, she’d just wanted to go dancing and get ratted and snog people with whom she had no intention of taking things any further. But then Tanya had met someone and fell hook, line and sinker and Lesley met Morton and though their friendship never broke, it had stretched and changed to allow for new priorities. Shay was the last of them to meet her life partner and maybe that had its part to play in softening her resistance to Bruce’s cheeky persistence when, in a nightclub, he wouldn’t take no for an answer. He had a killer grin, eyes like a Caribbean sea and a cracking line in patter. Tanya used to say they were the best-looking couple she’d ever seen and then would pretend to stick her fingers down her throat. She and Bruce used to laugh loads together in those days; she couldn’t remember when they’d stopped.
He’d worn a black suit to their wedding, similar to the one he was wearing now. Yellow tie, to match her bridesmaids’ dresses and all the flowers. Tanya looked stunning in her frock, Lesley looked like one of those dolls that sat on a bog roll. She couldn’t think of that day though without recalling her mum waiting outside the church to give her the eleventh-hour option of pulling out.
‘I’m asking you before it’s too late, do you want to marry this man? Do you love him?’
And she’d answered yes because she did love him. But she hadn’t told her mother that she loved him enough to chase a boy called Jonah Wells out of her thoughts, out of her heart, because that would have been a lie; though she’d tryand keep on trying, because she couldn’t have Jonah Wells and that was that.
The sound of Bruce snoring pulled her abruptly out of her memory pool and she leaned over and nudged him. He stirred; looked around him, the way drunk people do trying to remember their bearings. Time for bed, she reckoned. Time for sleep. Not time for scraps of pants and long-overdue sex.
Sure enough, when she came out of the bathroom after brushing her teeth, Bruce was laid out on the bed in a fully-dressed crucifix, dead to the world. She left him there and slept alone on the day bed in the corner.
Chapter 5
Shay was awoken the next morning by the tortured sound of retching coming from the bathroom. A flush, then Bruce emerged, looking on the dead side of white.
‘I feel shit,’ he said, clambering into the giant bed, holding his head. ‘I think it must have been something I ate last night. I’ll be okay after a little sl…’ Then he tumbled back into sleep with the ease of someone falling off a chair.
There was no way Bruce would rally this morning and she had the gut feeling that if she so much as mentioned the word ‘breakfast’ he would be hanging over the bowl again by the time she’d got to the ‘t’. Shay lay in the narrow, single daybed staring up at the ceiling, trying not to feel cross or resentful but failing dismally. She gave up the ghost of enjoying a lie-in, showered, dressed and went downstairs for breakfast by herself. A maître d’ showed her to a table set for one because she hadn’t even attempted to lie that she’d be joined by her husband. He laid a complimentary newspaper down for her to read then waved over a waitress who took her order for coffee and told her to please help herself to any of the continental breakfast items laid out on a long trestle tablewhere nothing had been omitted. There was every kind of fruit, seed, yoghurt, bread, cereal, ham, or cheese one could imagine. Bruce would have loved this, she thought, battling down the vortex of annoyance spiralling inside her.
The à la carte menu was a foot long and included everything it was possible to have for breakfast: from a full English to grits, huevos rancheros, Caribbean French toast, steak, kedgeree, warm waffles. She chose poached eggs, crushed avocado on rustic bread with a side order of buttered potato scones. Then she lifted up the paper with a pretence of reading it while she spied on other guests. There was an old couple – he very tall, she tiny with a hunched back – by the cereal station. He was dressed casually but smartly in short-sleeved shirt and slacks, she had pearls at her throat and pink lipstick that extended beyond the lines of her mouth. She watched how the man filled up two bowls and carried them because the old lady’s hands shook and she listened to how he spoke to her: ‘If you don’t like it, I’ll come back and get you the cornflakes, darling,’ and something inside her warmed at the tone of respect and love in his voice.
That’s what she wanted to have in her marriage and it wasn’t there but it should have been because it had been promised to her. For all their plans, for all the flannel Bruce had given her, she had ended up in exactly the sort of relationship her parents had (give or take the serial adultery) where the man went out to work and earned the bread and the woman was left to do everything else and it was a skipful of duty more than he had to fulfil. It wasn’t ‘his thing’ to go and see the kids perform in school plays or meet the teachers at parents’ evenings. And he worked so hard during the week, surely he should be allowed to ‘blow off steam at the weekend watching a football/rugby/cricket match with thelads’. Even Morton had never missed watching Little Mort perform in the school pantos, even if he was usually cast as the back half of a horse and not seen until he took his bow at the end. At least with her dad, when push came to shove he’d changed, lifted his share of the family burden and more onto his shoulders; but Bruce never had. He’d left everything to her unless it involved electrics or a lawnmower.
He’d said all the right things to her in their courtship; they’d planned to lump all their dreams together and then lump all their energy together to make those dreams come true. They were both united in wanting a family, a big house, his own business, a good job for her, nice cars, savings, a villa in the sun. They’d started out walking a path at the same pace but somehow she’d slipped behind him and couldn’t catch up because she’d to stop so many times to pick up rubbish that had fallen in her way or navigate around obstacles that had risen up to hamper her. He’d carried on, without a break in his stride, not caring to look back, assuming all was well. Somehow they’d become two people who shared a house, kids, a duvet, but not laughter and lazy Sunday breakfasts in bed any more and she didn’t know where or when that had started and why they’d let it go on. Now the kids had flown the nest and her mother was relatively free of ailments, her father looked after as best he could be, this should herald a time to get her and Bruce back on track. Time for the bread slices holding the sandwich to peel away and let the filling breathe. Before it was too late.
