‘Would you and Graham be happier?’
Moira had swallowed.
Mitch laughed again. ‘You don’t have to answer that. Bitching, judgement – Moira, they’re all jealousy. And jealousy, well, that’s just fear isn’t it? Fear of taking the leap yourself.’ Mitch had started walking again, his brushed cotton tartan trousers like pyjama bottoms getting wet in the surf. ‘I think you actually quite enjoyed your life. It’s just now your boxes are empty.’
Moira stopped abruptly. ‘Excuse me!’
Mitch laughed. Then jogging to the shoreline to pick up a driftwood stick he drew two boxes for her in the sand: ‘If all your life is taken up with these two roles’ – he’d written MOTHER and WIFE in two separate boxes – ‘then that’s what your whole life becomes. It’s as simple as that.’ He’d stood there in his cheesecloth shirt with a lump of jade round his neck on a black thong, freshly tanned from a meditation week on the Algarve, and stared at her directly until she’d got embarrassed by the eye contact and had to look away. ‘You need more boxes, Moira,’ he’d said, pointing to the two in the sand with his stick then drawing lots more all around them. ‘You need more elements that create you, that we can write in these,’ he said, gesturing to the new, empty boxes, ‘otherwise your life just gets smaller and smaller.’
Moira had wanted to say, ‘I have Frank Sinatra now.’ But luckily she’d run the sentence through in her head before saying it and realised how pathetic it sounded, on so many levels.
And so she had joined the book club at the library. Where she was sitting right now, with an AWOL husband, in a fancy pair of jeans, next to Joyce Matthews (of cleaner fame), looking about guiltily to check no one was watching because Joyce had tipped a slug of brandy from a hip flask into her cup of lukewarm Gold Blend.
‘Don’t, it’s half past ten in the morning, I’ll be pissed as a fart. I shouldn’t really be here.’ Moira waved the brandy away.
‘Nonsense,’ said Joyce, pouring a dash into her own. ‘Your husband’s gone missing. Sometimes you just need to escape.’
Moira thought of her house filled up with her children, the view like one of those funny optical illusion pictures – look at it one way and they’re all as close as close can be, squint your eye and it’s a room full of strangers.
‘I haven’t read the book,’ she said.
Joyce shook her head. ‘Neither have I.’
Moira gave her a sideways look. ‘You never read the book.’
‘Shall we escape?’
‘I couldn’t.’
Moira could see the librarian walking over. She had her slippers on. She always put them on for book club – she wanted to relax apparently. Moira hated it. Why couldn’t she wear shoes like everyone else? That was judgemental. Surely she couldn’t be jealous of the librarian’s hideous pink moccasins? Maybe she could. Maybe she was jealous of her audacity, or her desire for comfort above all else. Maybe she was jealous that this lady’s husband had not gone missing and all she had to think about was slipping on her slippers to happily chat about what might well be, had she read it, a very good book.
‘Come on.’ Joyce gave Moira a nudge.
‘I can’t. It’s bad enough that I’ve escaped to come to book club. I can’t escape book club as well.’
‘Oh Moira, if you can’t escape now when can you? Come on, let’s go for a coffee. Or to the pub.’
But Moira said no. Propriety got the better of her. She couldn’t bear the idea of the slipper-clad eyes of the librarian watching her back as she retreated, going home to tell her husband or her cat about the terrible woman who lived in the big house by the sea who skived book club when her husband had disappeared. She couldn’t bear the eyes of the locals in the pub – ‘Is that Moira? Moira, good to see you! Take it Graham’s back then?’ ‘No, no, still missing.’
She pulled the book out of her bag and sat with it on her knee as the librarian started flicking through her own copy to the book club questions printed at the back.
As Moira hadn’t read it, the whole chat went straight over her head. So she sat staring at all the people’s shoes in the group and thought instead about Graham. About what a relief it was to come downstairs this morning and not find him sitting on the sofa.
She hadn’t minded Graham’s numb passivity when Bobby had first died. She understood that it was a bit like losing Stella all over again. Bobby had been the first athlete since Stella that Graham had got excited about. Bobby was a star in the making. An ace little surfer when he first met Amy. He just wasn’t strong enough, didn’t have the killer instinct. And so Graham had taken it upon himself to train him up. He had him swimming every morning at six, in the gym every evening on the free weights, constantly pushing him to better his maximums. It was Graham who gave him his pep talks and made his competitive acumen sharper and stronger with visualisation and meditation. It was Graham who got him his first big win. And when Bobby moved into a league higher than Graham could take him – not being a surfer himself – they would still train together, still swim those early mornings. Just like he had with Stella.
But Bobby had died over two years ago. And still Graham sat. To the point that it felt like he’d almost forgotten why he was sitting. The grief subsiding while the hopeless lethargy remained. He seemed to shrink away from life, getting grumpier, angrier, and more annoyed with the world he barely ventured into – bar the occasional trip to the pub but even that he muttered about – too far, TV too loud, beer not cold enough. It had been OK when Amy had moved back in. Her sadness after the accident enough to consume all their lives. It had given Moira back her familiar sense of motherly purpose, like having a baby bird to look after: feeding it, caring for it, keeping it safe and warm until it was strong enough to fly the nest again.
Unfortunately, when Amy did get strong enough she showed no intention of flying the nest again. And the two of them – Amy and Graham – just became a permanent fixture in the house, a morose little team staring zombified at the TV flickering in the corner. Moira had started to worry she might go mad. Even getting the builders in had barely shifted them, after Graham had absolved himself of project management duties they’d just decamped to a makeshift living room upstairs for a couple of weeks. That was why Moira had got the dog – an excuse to get herself away from them. And that was when she’d met Mitch. When she’d found joy in life again. When she’d started, for the first time in almost forever, to see herself as a person in her own right. When she’d plucked up the courage to give Amy a gentle nudge out of the house – which Amy had taken very badly and flounced off to London in an impetuous show of defiance, leaving Moira worried sick that she’d done the wrong thing, hardly hearing from Amy the whole time she was there. She’d only been able to console herself recently when Sonny showed her Instagram selfies of a perfectly happy-looking Amy eating brunch overlooking the Thames.
But with Amy gone, it just left Moira and Graham in the house. The gulf between them ever widening. She thought of the silent dinners, the two of them on either side of the table, when just the sound of him chewing made her body tense with irritation. The sighs when she’d make him lift his feet for the Hoover. The noise of his incessant snoring. It saddened her to think he had become just a litany of annoying noises, that there was no spark left between them. But she had tried to help him and she was exhausted from trying. At some point enough had to be enough.
In the book club circle a small row had broken out which the librarian was ineffectually trying to quash by steering the discussion back to the official book club questions. Moira glanced over at Joyce who rolled her eyes and then gestured towards the door with a tilt of her head, trying again to get Moira to make an escape.
Moira shook her head.
Then she sat annoyed with herself for staying. She couldn’t even leave book club – what hope did she have of leaving Graham? She had thought she was getting braver. Fiddlesticks. That was before the children had