Nathan stared straight ahead. ‘You read my notebook, didn’t you?’
‘Yes.’
‘You shouldn’t have.’
‘Perhaps not.’ I could hear the sound of many doors banging shut in Nathan’s head. ‘Nathan, we should make time for a discussion.’ I can’t pretend that I said this with urgency and conviction, but I thought I should try.
‘Not here.’ He jerked his head at the back, where the twins were making their favourite aircraft noises.
‘Of course not. What do you take me for?’
We halted at traffic-lights, and the occupant of a small Fiat shook his fist and pointed to the poster on his back windscreen: ‘4 X 4? Y?’ The lights changed. Nathan drove into Lakey Street and parked. ‘Minty, the notebook was private.’ He rubbed his forehead. All the same, I detected a frisson of… relief? ‘I can’t trust you not to pry.’
‘What, Mummy?’ interrupted Lucas. ‘What, Mummy?’
‘Maybe you can’t.’ I left it like that, swung out of the car, released the twins from captivity, and exhumed spare clothes, toys and the books without which Felix never went anywhere. Thus burdened, I walked up the path behind my husband and sons.
A little later, Nathan said, ‘I need some exercise.’ He had changed into a pair of worn corduroys and a checked shirt with frayed cuffs.
I was unpacking the twins’ toys and working out what to give them for supper. A walk? Take the boys, will you?’
‘I think I’ll have a go at digging the garden.’
‘Digging the garden?’ Wooden engine in hand, I whirled round. ‘You haven’t done that for years.’
‘All the same,’ Nathan stuck his hands into his pockets, ‘I think I will.’
The twins’ football sessions had turned the lawn into a Slough of Despond. I watched Nathan pick his way across it and haul a fork out of the garden shed. From the set of his shoulders, he was perfectly happy, and it was a fair bet that he was whistling. He began to dig under the lilac tree and, after a while, earth was piled beside him.
Half an hour later, I took him a mug of tea. The dark was galloping in, it was chilly and Nathan’s shirt was damp with sweat under the arms. He wiped his hands on his trousers. ‘Good girl.’
‘Why the interest in the garden all of a sudden?’ The question was redundant because I already knew the answer.
He drank some tea. ‘It used to be beautiful.’
‘You’ve been thinking of Rose,’ I accused him, ‘haven’t you? You’ve been talking to her. That diagram I found in your diary. Was it for this garden?’ I gestured at the broken fence, the tangle of grass, the leafless lilac. ‘“Height. Route. Rest.” Was it for here?’
‘Don’t, Minty,’ Nathan said heavily. ‘We don’t discuss Rose. Remember?’
‘About the diary -’
‘Forget it. It’s mine. Private.’ His brows twitched together.
‘Are you all right?’
‘Fine.’ His finger beat a tattoo on his chest. ‘Bit of a pain. I ate too much.’
In chapter three of Coping with Life Strategies (currently beside my bed), the author recommends cognitive behavioural therapy for tricky problems. If a bad thought recurs to the point of damaging one’s well-being, it’s best to avoid it, using thought-evasion techniques. Weary to the bone with marriage, I bent down and plucked a trailing white root from the pile of earth, and let it dangle from my fingers.
I thought hard of Paradox’s Monday agenda. I conjured up the Chinese figurines, whose days were numbered in the dining room. I thought about the fish pie I had taken out of the freezer for the twins’ supper.
Failure.
I turned back to Nathan. ‘Why on earth did I believe you when you said you came to me with the sheet wiped clean?’
I should have kissed him, and prevented him answering. Regrets are a waste of energy, I should have pointed out, stopping his mouth with that ungiven kiss. I should have talked about anything but this.
Nathan wiped his upper lip with the back of his hand, leaving an earth moustache. ‘There’s no point in fighting over something you can do nothing about, Minty.’
I gave up. Memories do not obey commands. You cannot pronounce that the past is in the past. It is in the present with you, dug in.
I left him to it.
I went inside, fed the children and put them to bed. Then I gathered together my notes and files and went up too. On the kitchen table I left a Post-it note: ‘Get your own supper.’
5
‘Hey, Minty.’ Barry’s summons was issued via the internal phone. ‘We need you.’
I was flicking through the daily papers, the phone between shoulder and neck, a pose I found useful for suggesting that I was engaged on top-whack activity. Lately I had noticed that my shoulder and upper arm were stiff and ached. Nathan laughed when I explained why and murmured that he’d missed a trick.
‘Can you wait while I answer this call, Barry?’
‘No,’ he said. ‘OK.’
The message was unmistakable. When I arrived at his office, Gabrielle and Deb were ensconced on the supersized sofa, wedged so far back that their feet were barely touching the floor. From his desk, Barry loomed a telling couple of feet over them. He was in a leather blouson jacket and chinos. A white silk evening scarf was draped round his neck, and when he raised his arm, a red Kabbalah wristband was prominent. His eyes were sharp and intelligent. He held up a green plastic envelope and kicked off: ‘There’s a mass of stuff in here about middle age. What is it? Who is it? The girls agree that it’s worth a look, but will it pull together?’ Without a mitigating shred of irony, he handed the dossier to me. ‘The consensus, Minty, is that this one’s yours.’
Gabrielle and Deb exchanged a look. ‘Gabrielle and I don’t feel we know enough,’ Deb pointed out.
A small but significant note sounded in my head. ‘And I do?’
I could choose any number of metaphors to explain the transition from imagining you’re one of the girls to knowing you’re not. Depending on my mood, they would make me laugh or weep. In this case I would decide which later.
Deb shook back her long, wavy hair – very North London, Pre-Raphaelite hair – and the gesture suggested (it was intended to) unfettered vision and youthful boldness that knew exactly where it was heading. Gabrielle focused on Barry, who, as usual, was pretending not to notice.
‘I sense possibilities here.’ Barry was passing me the baton. ‘I think you could deal nicely, Minty’
I skimmed the first paragraph of an article from the New Statesman. ‘ The social and cultural emphasis of youth has resulted in a neglect of the middle years. We have more than sufficient cultural and financial data on youth and, to an extent, on the old. But what do we know about the important phase between the two?’
An urgent phone call took Gabrielle out of the room, which released Barry for proper thought and the ‘creative’ discussion that followed. Was middle age defined by behavioural habits? (Avoiding danger? Inability to sleep in? Caffeine intolerance? Regular checking of the bank balance?)
Deb tapped a Biro on her clipboard. ‘I wouldn’t know.’
Barry dropped a small rocket. ‘Or is it when people discover, or rediscover, faith?’
‘Good heavens!’ She sounded appalled. ‘Really?’
Barry retracted. ‘Perhaps not. Maybe middle age is defined financially, when the mortgage is paid off.’
Deb swept back her hair and anchored it with a hand, exposing her smooth, unlined forehead. ‘Middle age is forty?’
‘Fifty.’ Barry was firm.
‘Oh? OK.’ She sounded now as though she’d never heard of fifty. ‘You think?’
Not once during this exchange did either Barry or Deb look fully at me.
‘Minty, have a word with your friends.’ Barry closed the meeting. ‘People who know. What do they think about middle age?’