‘Never too busy for you two.’ I tried to remember which bed I had sat on the previous evening and chose the opposite. Felix smiled shyly, his gaze flicking to a point above the bed where he had stuck a drawing on the wall. I was about to expostulate, Felix, the wallpaper, when it dawned on me that Felix’s drawing was of a large cat with black and white stripes. Underneath it he had written ‘My Lost Cat’ in blue crayon.
When they were asleep – Felix curled up on his right side, Lucas spreadeagled over the bed – I turned on the nightlight and left them to dream.
Then I found myself slipping upstairs to the spare room where the white roses in the painting appeared to leap out of their dark background. I searched through Nathan’s shirts for his notebook.
On 21 January, three days ago, he had written, ‘Is it better not to care?’ and yesterday, ‘I feel that I don’t really exist. I look in the mirror and I am not sure who I am looking at.’
I closed the notebook, and only then saw the yellow Post-it note stuck to the front. ‘Private,’ it said, in Nathan’s handwriting.
That made me smile. If the notebook was private, why did he not hide it more securely? Answer: he wished me to read it. It was a challenge and I took it up. I went downstairs, found a pen and wrote underneath: ‘Talk to me, Nathan?’
The candles I had placed on the table guttered. Nathan ate the organic fillet steak slowly. ‘Not bad.’
Not bad? Every mouthful had cost a fortune. I swallowed the final piece as if it was gold dust and said, ‘One day I’ll learn to cook.’
Nathan uttered a snort midway between laughter and derision. ‘It’s not you, Minty’
Upstairs, there was an eruption. Despite the direst warnings, the twins were swapping beds, as they did most nights. Nathan cocked an ear. ‘It’s fine,’ I reassured him. ‘Tell me what’s happening at Vistemax. I talked to Gisela yesterday and she said Roger’s ultra-preoccupied. I thought you’d had a good year?’
Nathan pushed away his plate. ‘A big libel suit,’ he confessed. ‘It was an article in Weekend Digest about bungs for football managers. It’s likely to cost Vistemax, and it happened on my watch.’
‘But not your fault.’
‘Not directly. My responsibility, though.’
‘You should have told me.’ The kitchen was quiet. ‘Journalists,’ I murmured. Since leaving Vistemax, I had lost track of what went on in the company. Nathan, however, swam with ease though the numbers and strategy. ‘You should have said something,’ I repeated.
Nathan shrugged.
The silence had become that of two people who were not communicating on the same level. On this point Successful Relationships was firm and clear: it was a situation that should be sorted.
‘I’ve bought you these,’ I heard myself say, and handed him the bottle of multi-vitamins I had picked up in my lunch hour.
He tossed the bottle from one hand to the other. ‘Thank you, Mother Minty.’
He changed into an old shirt in a washed-out blue that he had had since the dawn of time and refused to throw away. In the candlelight, the colour deepened. My skirt, a deep black, now gleamed bluish. One of the candles flickered and went out. Nathan leant forward, nipped the wick between his fingers and said, with regret, ‘Minty, you shouldn’t be spending your life watching me.’
‘It has been a bad day.’
He blew on smoked fingers. ‘Yes, it has.’
‘Nathan…’ The words trembled on my tongue. What is your ‘secret grief’? But I already knew the answer. Nathan’s secret grief was Rose and the past… and so was mine.
‘Take one of those vitamins.’ I reached for the bottle and unscrewed the lid. ‘I’ll take one too.’ I held a pill between my thumb and finger. ‘Be a good boy’
Nathan observed it for a second or two. ‘Later,’ he said.
I should have pressed on: Let’s discuss your diary. Let us, together, sort out what is making you unhappy. But the expression that had settled on his face meant that my words aborted. It was not so much impatience and distaste, although those were mirrored in his face – and I was unsure whether they were directed at himself or at me – it was his obvious, disturbing, detachment. Nathan had removed himself from the kitchen, and I had no idea where to.
I tried again: ‘Nathan, I know I shouldn’t have read what you wrote, but we must talk about it.’
‘What?’ With effort, Nathan refocused on me. ‘Actually…’ He stopped.
‘Nathan, I want to talk to you about… the diary. About what I read.’
‘No,’ Nathan cut me off. ‘I don’t want to discuss it. It’s silly, and very private.’
‘But…’ The obvious question was, why did you leave it for me to read? However, I had learnt that most things in our relationship were not straightforward and I had to pick my way through the maze.
‘I said I didn’t want to discuss it.’
‘If you feel like that.’ Suddenly I had lost interest in exploring my husband’s psyche. I shoved back my chair and got to my feet. If I’d had three magic wishes all three would have gone on summoning back the old Nathan. I could never have the young one, but I would dearly have liked to reclaim the version who had swash-buckled into my life and said, ‘Let’s escape.’
‘Nathan, can you pass me that saucepan?’ I busied myself running hot water and swishing in washing-up liquid.
‘Sure.’ If he was surprised at my change of mood, he was not going to remark on it. ‘But there is something…’
The sound of the doorbell shot through the house. Nathan started. ‘This is what I should have mentioned.’
I stiffened, but said coolly enough, ‘You’d better go and answer the door, then. Hope it hasn’t woken the boys.’
‘But…’ Nathan was alight with an excitement and dread I couldn’t place. Then he shrugged. ‘OK.’
He went into the hall, and I heard voices, then the front door closing.
Nathan led the visitor into the sitting room and I wiped my hands, tucked my hair behind my ears and went to see who it was. Nathan whipped round as I walked in, a curious smile hovering at the corners of his mouth. ‘Look who’s here.’
But a sixth sense had already told me.
Rose.
This was the encounter that provided material for any late-night demons, any restless dreams, for the chill of a dawn catechism when I asked myself what I had done in taking Nathan. My first impulse was to laugh: it was ridiculous that Rose should be standing there. Then my knees drained of strength.
‘Rose.’ I held the back of a chair for support.
‘Hello, Minty’ She held out a hand. ‘You’re looking well.’
She was dressed simply but expensively in jeans and a tweed jacket nipped in at the waist – slimmer than she appeared on television. She was tanned and her hair was glorious: long, highlighted and silky. She was barely recognizable as the woman I had known in the office, wearing a grey skirt and black jumper that bagged in all the wrong places. ‘Literature, Minty,’ I pictured her saying, as she did in those days, ‘is full of stories about tension between servant and master.’ Her hair would have been bundled up any-old-how, and her lipstick was always too pink. There’s a short story about a pair of sisters who were so in awe of Cook that they never dared go into their own kitchen. They spent most of their lives fearful and thirsty’
Then, Rose had hovered between wryness and laughter. This Rose did too. There was no hint of bitterness, only a polite interest as she took in the changes to the sitting room.
Terrific, I thought. We end up where we began. Where once I had observed this room through Rose’s eyes – painted a pale dove grey, the sofa and chairs arranged close to the window – Rose was observing it through mine: a cream-yellow paint wash, the sofa and chairs pulled closer to the fireplace. She was probably concluding, as I had done: That woman does not understand this room.