Walking Back to Happiness (40 page)

It was Peter’s turn to look as if he’d been slapped. ‘So it was
my
fault you had an affair? Is that what you’re saying?’

‘No! But Michael listened to me. He made me feel I had something to say other than, “Where are the baby wipes?”’

Peter flinched at the mention of Michael’s name, and his face hardened, as if he too had gone off piste with his prepared questions. ‘How many times did you sleep with him?’

The effort of controlling himself showed in the twitching muscle near his eye. Louise knew she’d hurt him and her bravado slipped.

‘It doesn’t matter.’

‘Of course it matters!’ Peter’s eyes flashed. ‘How many times? And don’t lie to me, Louise.’

Louise’s jaw tightened. She had a sudden flashback to the diving board she and Juliet had had to dive off at swimming club. Juliet had gone first, jumped off straight away. Even taken a run-up off the board, whereas Louise had counted the steps on the way up, picturing the drop increasing with each one.

There was no way back from this. It was going to hurt, but she had to be honest.

‘Once,’ she said. ‘Once, and I knew I’d made a mistake.’

As she spoke, Peter’s shoulders dropped and his whole body seemed to deflate. Louise realised he’d been hoping she’d say, ‘
Never
. We never slept together. It was just talking.’

‘I’m telling you the truth so we can start again,’ she wailed. ‘I made a mistake! I made one stupid mistake, but now I know what a mistake it was, and I want to get some help so we can rebuild our marriage, because it means
everything
to me. Our family’s all I’ve ever wanted . . .’

Peter pushed past her, heading for the stairs with his empty bags.

‘Where are you going?’ she yelled after him, then remembered Toby was sleeping in his nursery. ‘Don’t wake Toby.’

‘I’m going to get some more of my things,’ he said, in a furious whisper.

‘Don’t,’ begged Louise. ‘Come home. We can talk about this and sort it out. I’ve found a counsellor. We can get some . . .’

Peter spun round and glared at her. Even in the darkness he looked livid. ‘I can’t bear to be here. The whole town has seen my wife gazing into the eyes of some other man, and you want me to be here playing Happy Families? Louise, you can organise most things in your life, but you
cannot
organise my feelings.’

Louise recoiled, and Peter went into the bedroom and began shoving socks and pants into his squash bag, socks that she’d rolled up and filled into neat honeycomb segments.

‘I’ll come round tomorrow night after work to see Toby,’ he continued. ‘I don’t want him to suffer. If you want to go out, that’s fine.’

‘I don’t,’ she said. ‘I want us to talk.’

‘Well, I don’t. Not until I know what I think.’ He went over to the wardrobe and shoved in an armful of shirts, still on the hangers. The hangers were Louise’s concession to her reduced ironing time. Before Toby, they’d been neatly folded and laid in the chest of drawers like tiles.

‘Are you still staying with Hugh? Does he know? What did you tell him?’

‘Seriously, Louise?’ Peter turned and looked at her disparagingly. ‘Is that all you care about? What people will think about our marriage? Don’t you think it’s a bit late for that now everyone in town’s had a good look at it?’

‘No one will know it’s me,’ she pleaded. ‘If it was so obvious, someone would have said something . . .’ But she didn’t believe it herself, and he knew it.

There was a grumble from Toby’s room, the preliminaries to a full-on scream.

‘Don’t go in,’ said Louise. ‘It’ll unsettle him to see you. I’ll do it.’

For a second, she thought Peter was about to go in, just to defy her, but he seemed to think better of it.

‘I’ll see you tomorrow, maybe,’ he said, and turned back to his packing.

With her heart aching, Louise went in to settle their son.

Chapter 26

As the autumnal days got shorter, Juliet’s timetable got tighter, as she aimed to squeeze all her dog-walking commitments into the diminishing window of daylight hours between the misty mornings and the dark afternoons.

People were already talking about it being a white winter. She had to wrap up more every day, heading out across the frost-rimmed fields in her woolly hat and big coat, with socks inside her boots to keep her toes warm when it rained. And there was no choice about going out, whatever the weather; the gloomier it got, the more calls she had from fair-weather owners, but Juliet was so busy with the clients she had that she only took on new walkers if her regulars said yes.

Minton, Hector, Coco and Damson didn’t care about the drizzle or the chilly November air, barking at the plumes of white breath that billowed out of their mouths on cold mornings after their frantic ball-chasing. Juliet soon found she was less bothered about weather conditions too. If it wasn’t for the dogs, Juliet wouldn’t have noticed the rusty autumn colour palette of the woodland ferns, or enjoyed the crackling echo of dead twigs in the woods when she was the only person there.

She reckoned she probably
would
have been made to notice the extra effort the groundsmen had made in the park to keep the beds bright with flowers when the trees around the edge were losing their leaves – and she thought of Ben every time she checked in the
Spotter’s Guide to Nature
she kept in her jacket. It didn’t hurt quite so much to think of him now, or at least, when she wished he were around to share a particularly gorgeous sunset, the pang was gentle, and didn’t make her turn away from it herself.

Juliet reckoned this was progress.

Shorter park hours meant longer DIY hours at home, and when she wasn’t dog-walking, she was sanding down doors or washing walls with Lorcan, who dropped in several times a week, around his other jobs.

Slowly the house was starting to look like a proper home, albeit without a lot of furniture. As Juliet pointed out to her dad when he came to strim the mountain rowan bushes, there were several places you could stand downstairs where it was fresh paint as far as the eye could see. A spare room upstairs was done, as well as most of the downstairs, barring the kitchen; that was a whole project, Juliet knew. Finishing the kitchen also meant finally she had some time to do a few shifts for Kim but only if they fitted in around her dog-walking. Kim seemed fine with that, and Juliet was too, for the time being.

They hadn’t decorated much upstairs because Juliet had been struck by a sudden squeamishness about the bedroom. Changing it would mean painting over the last traces of Ben, and decorating it to
her
tastes, not theirs. And it’d also mean spending time in there with Lorcan, with the great big elephant-bed in the room, lurking there as reminder of both their complicated pasts.

It wasn’t just her. Lorcan seemed loath to discuss colours or any building work upstairs, apart from sending a mate to inspect the ominous crack. Juliet dreaded hearing that there was some kind of major defect – a few months ago, it was the symbolism of a crack in her bedroom wall that haunted her, but now she was more worried about the actual state of her house.

‘Plaster work,’ had been the verdict. ‘Just don’t get a cowboy plasterer in this time.’

It would have been nice to have had her bedroom done for Christmas, but Juliet didn’t push it, because frankly, things were busy enough as they were. Her afternoons felt like going back to school; the sky turning purple, then black outside as they worked, Lorcan teaching her new skills, and then the tea breaks they had, when they could sit back and admire the improvements, and he could eat her biscuits. So long as there were no burned bits, Lorcan would dunk it, and eat it, and compliment it. Their friendship had blossomed into a jokey, sometimes flirty, sometimes brotherly-sisterly one, and there were times when it almost tipped into something else, only for both of them to back off so fast it was hard to say who’d backed off first.

Still, she thought, on the bright side, the house was finally coming to life around her. Even if her dad was doing the garden and her next-door neighbour was doing the DIY, Myrtle Villa was starting to feel like her home.

Louise had always declined Diane’s invitations to join her merry band of volunteer dog-walkers at the weekends, on account of having better things to do with her precious time off than be hauled across the park by a pack of stir-crazy rescue dogs. She included cleaning, ironing and watching Peter wash the car in that list. Frankly, anything above dental surgery would have been preferable to getting her jeans muddy and her coat hairy.

She’d also dismissed Juliet’s claims that walking Minton had kick-started her brain after months of fuggy grief. Nice, but then surely anything was better than sitting around at home, crying?

So it was with some reluctance – and disbelief – that Louise found herself steering Minton and Hector around the park with Juliet one nippy Saturday morning in early December. Juliet had Coco and a rescue shih-tzu called Gnasher, and Diane was a good ten minutes behind them, thanks to a misbehaving pair of golden Labs.

If Peter hadn’t taken Toby out for the day, leaving her at home with her claustrophobic thoughts, she’d never have agreed to it, but now she was out, and the blood was pounding through her veins (Juliet kept up a professional’s pace), Louise had to admit it was filling in the hours quite well.

Without pausing for breath, Juliet had been telling her all about her new downstairs loo, the one kitted out with a beautiful miniature washbasin that Lorcan had got for a song off a mate doing a warehouse conversion.

It hadn’t been near a warehouse conversion, of course. Louise had found it, Diane had paid for it, and VictorianPlumbing.com had delivered it to the Kellys’ house the previous week, ready for installation. At least Juliet was doing that bit herself, with Lorcan’s help.

‘I even got the wrench out and did the U-bend,’ she was saying, proudly. ‘Lorcan said he’d take me on as a plumber’s mate, if I want another job to add to my portfolio. I’ve got good, strong wrists, apparently. You’d love what we’ve done, Lou. It’s perfect, right down to the brass taps. I keep nipping in there, just to look at the mirror!’

Louise thought about telling Juliet where all the mysteriously convenient building supplies were coming from, but she looked so animated when she talked about her home-improvement lessons that Louise didn’t have the heart to spoil any part of it. The fact that Lorcan seemed to have magical access to everything she really wanted but couldn’t quite afford normally was part of that.

‘So are you and Lorcan . . . ?’ she began, with a leading nudge, but the clouds reappeared in Juliet’s face at once.

‘No,’ said Juliet. ‘We’re friends. I feel lucky to have made friends like Lorcan and Emer – I don’t want to spoil it.’ She kept her eyes fixed on the ball she’d thrown for Minton. ‘Anyway, I’m not ready. I think it’d be really unfair to the other person. I’m not in a position to deal with anyone else’s complications as well as my own.’

‘Is this about Michael?’ Louise asked. She didn’t add, ‘And me.’

‘Michael’s a nice guy, but I don’t want to date him,’ said Juliet. ‘It’s too weird. For you, for me, for him – nightmare. I’m walking Damson still, because she needs me, but . . . No.’

Louise could see her casting about for a change of subject.

‘So where’s Peter taken Toby today?’

‘The petting zoo in Hanleigh.’ Louise yanked Hector’s nose away from Gnasher’s rear end for the tenth time since they’d left. ‘He’s going to be there till three, so I’ve got to be back to change over.’

‘Change over?’

‘He’s going out again. With Hugh. He said he’d be back late – he might even stay over.’ Louise didn’t add that she’d actually prefer that; it was better than putting up with the angry silence that hung between them whenever Toby wasn’t around to witness his parents ignoring each other.

Peter had moved back in, moodily and for Toby’s sake only, but the atmosphere in the house was glacial at best, hostile at worst. It was like living with a flatmate you didn’t get on with.

Juliet turned to her and looked sympathetic. ‘How long’s this going to go on, Lou?’

‘This what?’

‘Stop pretending. Mum’s not here; she can’t hear you. You and Peter – not talking to each other.’

Louise stared straight ahead. The fur trim on her hood prevented Juliet from seeing the pain in her eyes, which was a good thing. In the end she’d bottled out of telling Diane, and instead managed to convince her mother that the tension was just down to a tiff about her working hours and Peter’s snoring, but Juliet was harder to fool. She had antennae for sadness now, and asked questions with a fearless directness that Louise was lacking herself these days in court.

‘How long’s he been home?’

‘Three weeks.’

‘And you’re still living like total strangers? With that . . .
that rota
he drew up for childcare? I don’t know how you’re coping. I’d be going mad. Wouldn’t it be better if he just moved out properly for a while, to give you chance to clear the air?’

‘No! I don’t want him to move out.’ Louise bit her lip. She hadn’t told anyone else this. ‘He was going to rent one of those new-build flats by the hospital, just a studio, but it seemed so final. I went mad and told him to put the money into Toby’s trust fund, not chuck it away. I don’t want people knowing our business – you know what this place is like for gossip.’

She sensed Juliet was looking at her, and she knew what she was going to say.

‘Does it
matter
what other people think?’

‘Yes,’ said Louise. ‘It does to me. People know me and Peter. I don’t want them talking about us.’

‘You worry too much about what people think,’ said Juliet. ‘Look at me. My husband dropped down dead in the street at thirty-two. Front page of the paper one week and forgotten the next. Anyway, you’d be surprised what you can keep quiet. The Reverend Watkins and his Weimeraner have been living in Councillor Barlow’s house for the last four months.’

‘Have they?’ asked Louise, intrigued.

Juliet flushed. ‘Um, maybe I shouldn’t have told you that. Anyway, how long can you keep this up? If you can’t talk to each other, you should go to counselling and let someone else referee,’ she went on. ‘If you don’t clear the air and work out what was wrong to begin with, you might as well stay locked up together in silence for the next fifty years.’