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Clare nodded, following Mara’s gaze to the black SUV parked on the dirt road behind the house. She reached for Mara’s shoulder and squeezed it.
‘Chin up. It’ll be all right,’ she said, her voice loud over the wind. ‘Things will improve. I promise.’
What a cliché, Mara thought.His assistant.He couldn’t even be bothered to go farther than his own office to find love – although, knowing Gideon, she doubted that love was really the motivation. In twelve years of marriage, he’d told her he loved her twice. Once on their wedding day, and once when the twins were born. DutifulI love yous. Contractual, obligatoryI love yous. No excess.
She should have known. She should have seen it coming. But she hadn’t.
Sometimes life takes the tiller and steers the boat over the falls, her mother Abby would have said; she had been the one who told Franny the story of Annie Edson Taylor, the first woman to survive going over Niagara Falls in her woman-sized barrel.No point trying to steer upstream.Abby had been fond of boating, rivers and waterfalls as life metaphors.Mara had tried tosteer the boat of her marriage upstream, as Abby would have said, against the cold tide of Gideon’s disinterest in her for so long that, now, as the boat hurtled them towards oblivion, she felt a kind of strange calm. It was good not to have to work so hard anymore.
Sometimes, life takes the tiller, rips it off and stuffs it down your throat, Mara ruminated, mocking her mother’s soft Cornish accent in her own head, then feeling instantly guilty. None of this was Abby’s fault.
Life wasn’t a boat ride. Or, perhaps, you thought you were sailing peacefully down a river on a yacht, but in fact, you were plunging over a deadly waterfall at a hundred miles an hour with your rat bastard of a husband standing at the top, waving you goodbye. Annie Edson Taylor had at least made her own barrel and stuffed it with pillows.
Still, she had the car. Gideon had taken pains to point out its impeccable service history and recent MOT as he handed her the keys, like he was doing her a favour. Like he wasn’t kicking her out of her own home and moving his – she searched for the right phrase in her mind, but all she could come up with wasfancy woman– well, hewasmoving his fancy woman in.She is fancy, ergo, I am not fancy, Mara thought.
She stifled the impulse to laugh, because she knew it was the kind of wild laughing that would lead to tears, and she couldn’t break down in front of the children.
‘Come on, let’s look inside!’ she shouted.
The weather was turning and it was going to rain any minute; at least if they looked inside, they’d be able to shelter for a while and then she’d drive them back to the little hotel they were staying in in St Ives, along the North Cornish coast from Magpie Cove. She had enough money to stay there perhaps a couple of months while she put the house up for sale, and then, as long as it sold fast enough, she could buy somewhere small for her and the twins. She missed St Ives: her house, like many, sat on steep hills overlooking the pretty harbour which twinkled at night with the lights from the yachts and fishing boats; you could enjoy plump oysters and a glass of champagne in the evening at one of the modern harbour restaurants, watching the stars come out and the moon rise. Or, from the raised deck of her old house, which sat above an ample garden, she could watch the boats coming in and out with a cup of coffee between the school run and whatever else she had on that day.
Any new place she bought wouldn’t be fancy, not like their house on Cedars Avenue, one of the most desirable streets in St Ives, with its double garage and top-of-the-range kitchen, but at least it would be hers. Like Annie Taylor, she could at least make her own barrel.
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