Saint Kate of the Cupcake: The Dangers of Lust and Baking (27 page)

He paused, letting the reality of the situation sink in. The boys liked their school and friends, and to rip them out of it and have their parents split was a lot to ask of them. They would be able to deal with it, but no one wants their children to have to bear that if they can find a way around it. My income added a significant amount, but it was not regular or enough to cover all the school fees as well as living expenses, and it had the potential to evaporate completely if I was no longer “happily” married to Jack.

“I know it’s not ideal, but our marriage could still work. I do still love you…in my own way,” he said quietly. I stared at him, not sure what to make of that. If only he hadn’t added those last few words, it would have been temptingly easy to say yes.

“I’ll have to think about it,” I said.

He nodded and left, closing the door behind him with a soft click.

I was faced by an impossible choice. I could stay with Jack, who despite everything I think I still loved; otherwise this wouldn’t hurt so much. But he would never love me the way I wanted, and it would break my heart every day to live in a pretend marriage, even though it would be easier in so many other ways. Or I could leave and try to manage it all and a baby on my own.

I didn’t know if Edwina would actually follow through with her threat to stop helping pay the school fees if we disgraced her by divorcing. It was possible that she might, locked as she was in a time-warp where divorce was still a dirty word, rather than an unfortunate and painful event that was almost as common as marriage itself. Telling her that the reason we were breaking up was because Jack was gay and I had taken a lover was unlikely to help. I’m sure I’d still be blamed for not being a good enough wife to keep him interested in women.

Chapter Twenty-Three

O
UR
N
EXT
S
ESSION
with the counselor came two days later.

“Shall we look at the infidelity? Affairs involve sex, but it’s not usually the real reason one has an affair. Do you know why you did it?” Faye asked, turning to me.

“Well, Jack and I hadn’t been…intimate regularly for years. I guess we’d do it once every three or four months? So, I guess part of it was the sex.”

“Yes, she’s all about the sex,” Jack said, rolling his eyes.

I took a calming breath before I exploded at him.

“What are your needs?” she asked me.

“I like sex,” I said unapologetically. “Not all the time, but ideally once every few days. Jack used to want it, but then he stopped, and suddenly I was the one begging.”

“Jack, what is happening for you?”

“Ah…um…” Jack was so uncomfortable, it was excruciating to watch, but I was fascinated to hear what he was going to say. “I enjoy sex, but I just don’t want it that often. I’m stressed at work and tired, and we both have busy social lives, sometimes together, sometimes on our own. Sometimes it feels like the planets have to be aligned for it to happen. It’s not that I’m avoiding it or don’t want it, but it just feels like too much effort, and I’d rather go to sleep.”

“Kate, how do you feel when you hear your partner saying that?”

“It makes me feel unattractive and unloved. How are you supposed to feel when your husband would rather sleep than have sex with you? It’s also a lie. He’s been fooling around with men.”

Faye did a really good job of not reacting, though I could see her struggle by the sudden clenching of her jaw. I almost laughed at the horrendousness of the whole situation.

“Jack, would you like to respond to that?”

“No.” He glared at me. Faye cleared her throat and soldiered on. I had to admire her composure; this had to be incredibly difficult.

“Kate, what else did you get from the affair apart from sex?”

“Why are we focusing on my infidelity? Jack was unfaithful too, but he gets to not have to talk about it?”

“We’ll get around to Jack too. You seem a bit more ready to open up.”

“I felt special and it was exciting, I guess. I enjoyed being intimate with someone. It made me really see how distant Jack and I had become.”

“Jack, what is your reaction when you hear Kate say that?”

“It makes me angry. I thought everything was fine. She never said she was unhappy. Sure, we were busy, but that’s just life. If she had needed something, she could have just told me.”

“So, Kate, did you try to talk to Jack about it?”

“Not specifically. I don’t think I was fully aware of how I was feeling before I met…before this happened.” I nearly said Anders’ name.

“Let’s go back a bit. When do you think the intimacy problems started?”

Neither Jack nor I looked at each other. I thought back to the last time we had been truly happy, and the pieces fell into place. I understood the events that had started us down this path. I opened the box that I usually kept tightly closed, something that was the defining moment, the turning point for us: our daughter, Eve.

A miscarriage, such an innocuous word, sounds like it describes being too late for a conveyance of some sort that involved horses. Not so much. It is too bland a word to apply to an event so dark and bleak. The horror of labor pains too early, the unrelentingly cruel diagnosis, and the horrific pain of her death so close to what should have been a time of joy. My mouth twisted into a grimace with the onslaught of the tears, and my nose ran unchecked.

She was our dark-haired beauty who never had a chance. I held her in my arms, her tiny frail body, too red and listless, and felt her life slip away, and there was nothing I could do, apart from kiss the final warmth from her still cheeks. I could not deny her an escape from the needles and the pain, but I loved her so much I selfishly wanted her to stay. Jack and I cried out our heartbreak together, holding her so carefully until we had to leave her alone in the morgue, which was the hardest thing I have ever done.

It was ten years ago now, but the wounds were as fresh as ever. If I could have one wish it would be to have her back, healed and happy, and I would give my own life in exchange without a moment’s hesitation.

Apart from our love for her, there was so little tangible evidence that she had ever existed, and we had buried her alone, Jack’s family not making the effort to understand and mine so far away. Jack sat alone in her room for hours, slowly and gently dismantling the preparations we had started for her life with us.

The way I dealt with the grief was to bake. I baked everything, all day and night for months afterward. I ran out of recipes, so started creating my own. Inevitably, really, I became good at it. It didn’t make things better, but it didn’t make them worse, and somehow making other people happy by giving them a cake or a biscuit, such a small thing really, filled some of the void inside. That’s how I got the name Saint Kate of the Cupcake; I would give away the endless things I had made to homeless shelters and women’s refuges, and it was the name jokingly given to me by the director of one of the shelters.

The boys were only four years old at the time, so their memory and understanding of what happened soon faded, but they knew Mummy and Daddy were sad and did their best to cheer us up and make us laugh. I had to lock my grief away and carry on for them.

Maybe that made it worse somehow, not dealing with it properly, but I just couldn’t do it. I felt that if I broke down I would never get back up again, and I couldn’t do that to their childhood. They needed me to be there as their mother, not someone who never got out of bed. So, I locked it away for later, when I was alone in the dark, though there was not a moment that I forgot her. Slowly, the excruciating pain eased into something more bearable, but it never went away entirely. It never would. Even now, I occasionally woke up sweaty and cold in the middle of the night, disorientated and panting, in a panic because Eve was lost and alone somewhere and I couldn’t find her.

Jack carried on too, but we were never the same again. We dealt with our grief in different ways. I mindlessly baked, and he went to work. When the cookbook became a success, Jack’s indifference was the first real indication of the degree of separation between us. Both of us were swollen from sadness, but we were still functioning, and I had no energy left over then to build a bridge. We were not unhappy, just living in parallel.
Later
, I thought. There was nothing seriously wrong. But as time passed, it was still there.

The relationship we had before had morphed into something else, something far more solitary. When I stopped to think about it and mourn what we had lost, it was a dull hurt, and, in comparison, a mere brick in the house of pain where we dwelled. Rarely did we talk about Eve, as if we were both too scared to combine our pain as it might overwhelm us with its enormous weight, rather than lighten our own loads. So, we put one foot in front of the other and set off down the road to here, where we had both had affairs and our marriage was broken. We had become so good at ignoring things that were painful that neither of us had noticed until then. We had become too proficient at carrying on regardless.

We sat there silently in front of Faye, who waited patiently for us to open up the wounds we had so carefully concealed. I finally looked across at Jack and admitted to myself there was nothing left. All I felt was tired—tired of fighting, tired of trying to pretend everything might one day be fine, that we could go back to what we were before or find a new place where there wouldn’t be so much pain between us. It wouldn’t. It was who we were together, and to deny that was to deny Eve. I was ready to give him up, because that would keep her memory intact, which was the only thing I had left of her. A deep sadness settled into my bones, and all I wanted to do was sleep and make it go away. I put my head down in my hands and cried, dark, heaving, soul-wrenching sobs, unsure which loss I was mourning, my husband or my daughter.

I had finally reached the point where the thought of breaking up and moving on with my life was less painful than staying. It was never going to be anything more than what it was now: a complete façade, with no deeper feelings or connection. The difficulties from now—moving out of Clouston Hall, splitting the finances, the hurt this would cause both us and the children—I dreaded less than the feelings of drowning and disgust at the vision of my future if I stayed. Even if it meant the end of my career, it was a price I was finally willing to pay. I could see that, whatever justifications I had made to myself, I had stayed with Jack these last few months out of fear. I had been too scared of being on my own. The prospect of being alone still sent a chill through me, but if I imagined a set of scales, the fear no longer outweighed the relief of leaving.

And so, our dance that had begun with so much joy and enthusiasm at our wedding was almost done. There were only a few more steps until we finally reached the end of our song and the end of our marriage.

It took a week for me to get my head around the decision, and even then I struggled not to change my mind and take the “easier” path, the one where I had to do nothing at all, except live a lie. Jack seemed to have been avoiding me, without words asking me to pretend that nothing was wrong and to swallow this too. Unfortunately, all our issues had accumulated into a small mountain that was impossible to ignore anymore.

Jack had disappeared into his study after dinner and emerged only as I was turning the lights off, preparing for bed. It was time. I truly looked at him, tall and handsome, to all appearances the fairy-tale husband even now. I was struck by qualms over whether this was the right decision. It would be so much easier to stay with him. He’d left me with an option, one that would be mutually beneficial, but would mean a lifetime of no intimacy, only the pretense of it in public. I wouldn’t truly know until I’d left him whether it was a mistake or not, and that was frightening.

What if I never found anyone else? It’s not like single women were complaining that there were too many great men out there and they couldn’t choose. I’d give up security and comfort, upset my children, and live a life of loneliness. On the other hand, the thought of only ever having
this
, of living the rest of my life in a barren desert of a marriage, was intolerable. Inside my head, I was screaming. I didn’t want to bring my baby into an environment like this. Jack said he would be able to raise the child like his own, but would he when he was faced by a child who looked nothing like him? There really was only one decision.

“I’m sorry, Jack, but I can’t do this anymore. I can’t spend the rest of my life pretending everything is fine when it isn’t and it’s never going to be.” My voice came out husky as I tried not to cry.

“It doesn’t have to be pretend. I can take care of your…needs too.” He seemed to squirm a little when he said that. It set me off, the thought that I was so repulsive to him, the sexual equivalent of eating a slug. I was sick of feeling like I was not normal and that wanting to have sex was disgusting. I think the pregnancy hormones might have been making me a bit touchy too.

“I get it! You’re gay and you don’t want to have sex with me! But this is
not my fault!”
I screamed, furious at him. I pushed past him to run up to our bedroom. I grabbed a suitcase from the cupboard and, randomly opening drawers, started piling things in. The dam wall containing all the hurt and anger was cracking, and it all came pouring out.