One high-pitched one. One deep teasing one. The clunk of the cover from our outdoor hot tub. The gurgle of bubbles. Playful screams. Loud splashes. Giggles. Silence. More silence.
My stomach lurched. He knew I was here, next door. I realised I’d imagined that Scott would be devastated, plotting how to get me back. But that wasn’t his style. Far easier to find someone else to impress with his big-man talk, and punish me into the bargain. After all these rollercoaster years, all the times I’d longed to walk away, I was still hoping there was a little ember of love left, waiting to be fanned. I reminded myself of Octavia’s words: ‘What man puts a woman he loves in a police cell?’ She was right. He didn’t deserve for me to miss him. But I did.
I wanted to pole-vault the fence and see what was happening. I wanted everyone to stop talking so that I could listen. My mind was searching, craving innocent explanations but coming up blank. A cheer went up as the first Chinese lantern struggled into the air, hovered over the summer house, skimmed the branches of the sycamore tree, then disappeared high into the sky, a tiny glow against the universe.
I hugged my arms around myself and offered up a wish for a time when my whole life didn’t seem rotten from the inside out.
January passed in a flash. After Jonathan had exhausted the job opportunities within a 10-mile radius of where we lived, I’d encouraged him to apply for jobs abroad. The more I thought about it, the more excited I became. The idea of exploring somewhere new made me want to rush to a map of the world and draw up a wish list of destinations. Italy. Barcelona. Paris. I’d love to introduce the children to a different culture and watch their minds expand: it frightened me that Immi thought Scotland was the capital of England but knew Jack Wills and Superdry were far more must-have than anything from Asda. When I was with Xavi, I’d dreamt of having bilingual children. Maybe I still could. And yet, despite my best efforts highlighting jobs in Tokyo, Bangkok and Kuala Lumpur, by the time Jonathan’s birthday rolled around at the beginning of February, he was still fixated on jobs within half an hour’s commuting distance.
Birthday cheer, then, was in short supply. Obviously, I’d known he was going to be thirty-nine for the last three hundred and sixty-four days – but that hadn’t stopped me racing from the nursery to the supermarket for fillet steaks on the very eve I needed to cook them. We’d been living on an economy diet of lentils, chickpeas and turkey mince, so I was glad of an excuse to splash out. I’d just arrived home and was bunging the meat in a sherry and mustard marinade when Roberta turned up.
Post-marriage, we didn’t do many unannounced visits. Though since she’d rented a ridiculously tiny flat in a fancy new development shortly after New Year – ‘I’d rather have pristine and small than grotty and spacious’ – she’d been round much more often. For a brief moment, I thought she’d popped round with a present for Jonathan. I glanced down, but there was no sign of the shiny gift bags Roberta couldn’t live without. She was huddled into her mac and looked so pinched and miserable that I bundled her straight into the kitchen, batting away the children with a packet of HobNobs and a promise that tea would be ready soon.
As soon as the door was shut she told me, in a strained voice, that Scott was thinking of moving his new girlfriend, Shana, into her old house. ‘I know I should be delighted, because it will stop him hassling me and telling me what a rubbish mother I am all the time. But I keep thinking about how special he’ll be making her feel. All those little details he’s so good at. Alicia told me she runs her own lingerie business and that Scott keeps raving about what a brilliant businesswoman she is.’
I couldn’t see that Scott directing his attentions onto some other poor woman was anything other than a cause for cracking open the champagne and setting off the party poppers. I could hear the frustration in my voice as I said, ‘When did he last make you feel special? I know he did all that dramatic crossing-continents and grand-gesture malarkey at the beginning but apart from the odd bunch of daffs he gets his secretary to send you, he hasn’t been putting on the Ritz lately, has he? He’ll soon turn nasty with this Shana floozy when he doesn’t get his own way.’
Roberta sighed. ‘Maybe if I’d insisted on having my own career instead of just renovating our houses, he might have had a little more respect for me.’ Roberta sounded brittle, as though something inside her had tightened too far.
‘You have had your own career. It was your input and your designs that made the houses so saleable. If you hadn’t project-managed every detail, sorted out those bloody builders, architects and landscape gardeners, you’d never have made so much profit. Without you, he couldn’t have built up his property business.’
Roberta was so smart in so many ways. I just couldn’t comprehend why she had this blind spot when it came to Scott. I busied myself getting mushrooms out of the fridge so that she couldn’t see my exasperated face. I tried to sound sympathetic. ‘Scott didn’t want you to go out to work. As far as I can remember, that hotel chain offered you a job revamping that place on New Road and he practically forbade you to do it.’
‘I don’t think he forbade me to do it, did he? I think he just thought the timing wasn’t terribly good because Alicia was so young and it would be tricky finding the right childcare.’
Especially if your husband thought his part of the bargain stopped at the sperm donation stage.
‘That’s not how I recall it. Anyway, whatever the rights and wrongs, you can’t escape the fact that Scott was a bully and you’re better off without him.’ I clenched my teeth and waited. Even when Scott was behaving like a total turd, Roberta had never liked me criticising him.
I wasn’t sure that had changed.
Roberta swirled her coffee. ‘That’s just it. I don’t think I am better off. We’ve been talking a lot lately, mainly about arrangements for Alicia but about us, too. It’s almost like talking to the old Scotty, from years ago, before he got so aggressive. I do wonder if he ever dealt properly with the miscarriages.’
‘No one wanted those little boys more than you, and you haven’t got all bitter and twisted.’ I was so cynical about Scott and his motivations that I couldn’t find it in myself to be sorry for him.
‘I know.’ A pause. She looked away. ‘He did say that if I wanted to come back, he would finish with this other woman.’
My head ached with the effort of not telling her to go and get her chakras realigned or her aura smoothed, or whichever one of her bollocky New Age therapies it would take to make her see sense. ‘Woo-hoo, what a ringing endorsement. He might dump the other Sheila if you’re prepared to forgive and forget. Not “I’ll always love you and I’ll be sitting here broken-hearted and experimenting with razor blades until you give me a second chance.” He should be licking the floor in front of you, begging forgiveness.’
‘We were happy most of the time. I know he could be difficult, but he was a good provider. He’s got a girlfriend now, but he wasn’t a philanderer.’
I shook some balsamic vinegar into the marinade and tried to sigh quietly. ‘I think it’s human nature to remember the good times and forget the bad ones. Can I give your rose-tinted specs a little polish? Half the time you couldn’t even speak to your friends on the phone in case the spotlight wandered off him. Then there’s the small matter of that little trip in the cop car. Plus the fact that as soon as you left him, he stopped you getting access to any money – money that you had helped him create – never mind that you still had his daughter to take care of.’
Roberta rested her head on one hand. ‘I know. I did have that conversation with him. He admitted he’d been out of order, said he wasn’t thinking straight when I left him. He’s sorted out an allowance for me now, until we get things onto a more formal footing. That’s if I don’t go back.’ Her voice was small,