The Child Inside (26 page)

He flinches at the rise in my voice.

‘Rachel, don’t let’s argue,’ he says. ‘Please. Don’t let’s spoil things.’

‘Don’t
spoil
things?’

Again I think of him enjoying his lovely weekend with his lovely wife and his lovely children and his friends down from London . . . I think of how he didn’t call me, and it wasn’t because he was too busy. Of course he wasn’t too busy. He
chose
not to call me. I am compartmentalized. We haven’t talked about
love
, or any kind of future. All that we have talked about is the past, and the transient, fantasy world that we have created from it.

But what would I do without this escape?

I see him looking at me now with his blue eyes so unreadable, and I am gripped with fear.

‘I don’t want to upset you,’ he says in his beautiful and tender voice. ‘I don’t want to make things awkward for you . . . with your husband.’

‘I thought this was what you wanted,’ I whisper.

He closes his eyes. ‘It is, Rachel,’ he says. ‘It is.’

He left me in his flat. He didn’t want to, I could tell. But he had to get back to work and there was I, still sitting in his bed, still naked.

I watched him, torn between leaving me and not leaving me, but in the end he had no choice.

‘I think you can trust me to set the alarm,’ I said, but I wondered. Was it that he didn’t want to leave me, or that he didn’t want to leave me in his flat?

He leant across the bed to kiss me on the cheek. How polite. How very formal.

‘I’m sorry I have to go,’ he said, as he has said to me many times. ‘I’ll call you.’

And, too eager, I asked, ‘When?’

‘Soon,’ he said. ‘We’ll talk more soon.’

And it will hang between us now, this need to talk.

I have never been alone in his flat before. The silence when he is gone is strange and unfamiliar. I have the overwhelming feeling that I don’t belong here, but it is a feeling that mixes inside me with longing and envy.

I take a quick shower and dry myself on one of his thick, soft towels. I straighten the bed, and dress. And then I walk about the flat; I look in the cupboards and the drawers. I see his socks, all neatly rolled, his pants laid folded and ironed. I see that blue cardigan still hanging in the wardrobe, and I find an umbrella that I somehow missed before, tucked in at the side of the shelf above the hanging rail, near the back. It’s a woman’s umbrella, striped purple and black. I check the items in the bathroom cabinet and I scrutinize them for signs of further use, though there are none.

The housekeeper has left Saturday’s post on a pile on the kitchen counter, next to the newly stocked fruit bowl. Of course Simon hasn’t had a chance to open his mail yet, so I can only read the envelopes and guess at their contents; they appear all to be business letters, officially labelled. And now I trail my eyes along the shelves stacked with legal books and files; I know already there is nothing here of interest to me, but I look again, anyway. And inevitably I pick up that photo cube. I see the laughing faces of his beautiful children; I see the confident, knowing look in the eyes of his wife. I see how strands of her dead-straight hair flutter across her forehead. I see how she smiles at the camera as she hugs her small daughter close to her, cheek to cheek, in a squeeze.
Look at me
, she is saying.
Look at me and see how you will love me.

I put the photos down and move over to the window. I wish that this view was mine to stare at forever. I wish that I lived here, high above the world. I wish that I could come and go, without complication, without depth. And I wish that it was me in that photo, clutching
my
daughter.
Then see me too,
I might cry.
See me too.

My sister knows about us
, I said, but I didn’t need to tell him at all. I told him because I wanted him to care. I wanted him to cling to me and say,
What will we do?
I wanted to chug us forward, into another phase. Stupidly, I was testing.

But there is no other phase. This is it. The world that we have conjured together is thinner than a breeze. So easily it could be gone, and then I will have nothing.

I leave him a note.
It’ll be fine
, I say, scrawled on the back of an unopened envelope on top of his pile of mail.
I’m sure my sister won’t tell. I’m sorry, I was just upset.

And I sign my message:
love Rachel.

The next day, when I have seen Jono off to school, and cleared up the kitchen and put on the dishwasher, and shoved a load into the washing machine, I phone Janice. It is coming up to a quarter to nine and I am still in my bathrobe. She, however, has been at work since eight. Somehow this difference between us makes my lie seem more real; I am the meek one, as always, buckling under.

‘You need not worry,’ I say stiltedly when she answers her phone. ‘I won’t be seeing him again.’

I hear her sigh of relief. And then there is a long silence while I imagine she considers the likelihood of my words.

To convince her further I say, ‘And it really wasn’t anything anyway.’

My heart beats into the silence. I am ready to take back my words, to scream into the phone,
Oh, but it is something. It’s everything. And who are you to sit in judgement on me, my dear hypocritical sister?

And in my head I see her, when I was nine and she was ten; I see her marching home from school three steps ahead of me with her long hair pulled back in a ponytail and flicking horse-like from side to side behind her. I see the upturned tilt of her head, I see the stomp of her feet. And there is me, running along behind her, grizzling,
Please, please don’t tell them
, because I had been told off in front of everyone by the headmistress for talking in assembly, and
she
had been there two rows behind me to see it and now
she
was threatening to tell our parents.

Please don’t tell
, I wailed, and the fear that she would had me grovelling to her for days.

You should be ashamed
, she scolded, hands on hips, watching me squirm.
I was ashamed. And they will be ashamed of you, too.

She who used to steal the pick-and-mix in Woolworths, and get away with it.

I think of this and I am nine years old again, with the old resentment knotting itself up inside me.

At last Janice speaks. ‘You don’t realize how lucky you are to have Andrew,’ she tells me now in her schoolteacher’s voice. ‘And Jono.’

‘Yes,’ I say. ‘Thank you. Well, goodbye then.’

And I hang up, because I do not need to hear how lucky I am. I have heard it too often and it simply doesn’t wash any more. They are words to keep me down, that is all.

Still, she believed me. But then why would she not?

The nail on the little finger of my left hand is chipped and jagged. I pick at it. I pick and I pick until it is split right across, split too low, so that the pink and tender skin below the nailbed is unwillingly exposed. I probe the soreness and it sings as though electric, raw and sensual, disproportionate to the size of the wound. Like gum pain, I cannot leave it alone. I pick, I feel it throb. And I sit there at my kitchen table wrapped in the cloying heaviness of my bathrobe, like just one of so very many housewives, marking down the years.

And I think of Janice, busy with her life, doing whatever it is that she wants to do, because, after all, she is Janice. Her sense of entitlement marches full steam ahead of her, waving its flag in your face.

I have no such flag. I am a wife, a mother. And that is it: the beginning, the middle, the end.

Late last night Simon sent me a text, saying simply,
Thank you for your message.
That is all. What am I to read into that?

Now, having dealt with Janice, I sit here, still in my bathrobe, toying with the phone in my hand. I watch the minute hand on the clock above the door, as it ticks its way round. The washing machine quietly whines in the corner, and from somewhere, out in the street, I can hear the distant scream of a road drill. But it is my heart that I am aware of, thumping out its fear.

Already I have texted Simon back. I reinforced my message:
I’m sure everything will be fine.

But how will it be fine?

I saw it in Simon’s eyes: the instant pulling-back.

And now I picture him again, fresh from his weekend with his wife, his children, his friends . . . I see them all; I see their clothes and the way that they move, so at ease, so sure of themselves as they tramp across the fields . . . and I see how they laugh together at jokes I will never share, and how they talk, so animatedly; those conversations of which I will never be a part.

I see, and I am so bruised with longing and envy.

The clock clicks to half-past nine.

My grip on Simon is tenuous, but I cannot let it go. Without him what would I do? I see my life stretching ahead of me, vacuous, numb.

I dial his number.

When he answers I say, ‘Simon, I’m
so
sorry about yesterday. I think I was having a bit of a bad day.’ And I laugh, a quick, throwaway laugh, a roll-your-eyes oh-my-God-what-am-I-
like
? kind of laugh. Like a flash in my head I see Fay, curled up on the sofa in the den at the house in Oakley, her legs, clad in maroon woolly tights, drawn up so that her chin is on her knees. We were teasing her – I forget about what – and she slaps her hands across her face, hiding her eyes. Her thick brown hair falls forward, then she throws back her head, tossing her hair back again, smooth and luscious as chocolate. She takes her hands away from her face and spreads them at the sides of her head like starfish.
Oh my God, what am I like?
she squeals, her eyes sparkling like black jewels. And she laughs, that fast, infectious, runaway laugh.

And here I am in my worn and stained bathrobe, copying her. I think what an actress I am and something splits inside my heart.

‘That’s okay,’ Simon says and I hear the ease slide back into his voice. ‘We all have bad days. But your sister—?’

‘I’ve spoken to her,’ I say quickly. ‘Really, it’s fine.’ And again I manage that laugh.

‘You’re sure?’ Simon asks, and his voice washes over me, warm, soothing.

And I say, ‘I’m sure.’

We arrange to meet the next day. The thought of it gets me through Sainsbury’s. It gets me through the washing, the tidying, the cooking. It gets me through the heartache of Jono’s bad mood when he comes in from school, and through the hours of waiting for Andrew to get in from work, and then avoiding him when he does.

It gets me through the silence.

We make love on the sofa this time. To be back in his bed, after last time, would be too awkward, too much a reminder of my little scene. Today I am on form. I did my hair, chose my clothes well. And when Simon started to say, Are you sure about—?’ I kissed him full on the mouth, stemming his words. And we did it fast and hard, blanking out any doubts.

But afterwards, when we are lying there semi-naked, the demons start creeping back in.

‘What happened with you and Fay?’ I ask.

And he says, ‘Why do you ask?’

‘I was just thinking about her, that’s all.’ I keep my voice light and idle.

Simon sighs. ‘I was young,’ he says. ‘Too young. And my mother . . . well . . . I told you about that.’

‘Do you ever keep in touch?’

‘No, sadly. We did for a while, but . . .’ Again he sighs. His arm is around my shoulder; absently he draws his fingers in a circle on my arm. ‘She was my last contact with Vanessa.’

I hear the sadness in his voice, and jealousy for Fay snakes through me.

‘Until now,’ I say pointedly.

He turns his head and kisses me. ‘Until now.’

‘What about your wife?’ I can’t stop myself from probing. ‘Where did you meet her?’

‘Isobel?’ he asks in surprise, as if it had slipped right out of his head that he’d even got a wife. ‘I’ve known Isobel for years. I met her through friends.’

Friends.

I lie still, staring out the window, at the clouds trekking fast across the cold March sky. The jealousy slithers, and tightens, and snares.

‘Does Isobel know about Vanessa?’
Isobel
. Her name is alien, distasteful in my mouth.

‘Of course she does,’ he says. ‘Why do you ask?’

‘Do you talk to her about Vanessa?’

Simon’s hand, on my arm, stills. It is a while till he replies, as if he is carefully choosing his words.

‘Not really,’ he says at last. ‘Not any more.’

‘But you used to?’ I can’t stop myself. ‘Like you do with me?’

Very slowly, Simon pulls away from me. And now he is looking at me intently, but I cannot look back. I am afraid to see the expression in his eyes. He says, ‘Isobel knows about Vanessa, but she didn’t
know
her. There is a difference.’

‘Does she know about me?’

‘
No
.’ He pulls right away now. He isn’t even touching me. ‘Rachel, what is this about?’