‘Don’t tell me it’s nothing,’ she said quickly. ‘I know you’re not happy, Matt.’
‘OK, you’re right, you’re right,’ he snapped, slamming down his fork. ‘I’m not happy. You win first prize for noticing.’
‘I just want to help,’ Hope said in a small voice.
‘I’m just…oh,’ he threw his hands in the air, ‘I don’t know. I’m a bit down, that’s all. Unfulfilled, pissed off, depressed, I don’t know what you call it.’
She stared at him mutely, not knowing what was coming next.
‘Don’t say it’s a mid-life crisis,’ he added harshly. ‘That’s what bloody Dan said. Said I’d be running off with a seventeen-year-old soon.’
Hope flinched.
‘He was only joking,’ Matt said, seeing her face. ‘Who’d want me?’ he added in a voice resonant with bitterness. ‘I mean, I’m forty and what have I done? Nothing. Worked my butt off for years for what? A decent car and the chance of a good pension. I haven’t done anything, not anything I’m proud of.’
‘You’ve got Millie and Toby,’ Hope said weakly, not wanting to add ‘…and me,’ in case Matt didn’t feel as if she was much of an asset.
‘I know, I know, it’s a…male thing.’ Matt seemed lost for words, possibly for the first time in his life. He couldn’t appear to say what he meant. Or perhaps he knew exactly what he wanted to say but wanted her to figure it out. He was leaving, that had to be it.
Hope waited, guts clenching in painful spasm. This was it: Matt was leaving. People left all the time. Her mother and father had left before she’d had a chance to know them, just when she needed them. All right, they’d died, so that was different. But Hope had been expecting Matt to leave almost from the moment she’d fallen in love with him. History repeating itself. There had to be a price for winning such a handsome man – you could never be sure of him, never keep him. All the fears Hope had successfully kept to herself over the years were coming to the surface.
Matt was watching her across the table. He knew her background, knew her horror of being abandoned. ‘It’s alright,’ he said sharply, almost harshly. ‘I’m not going to leave.’
The tears Hope had been successfully holding off now flowed unchecked. She knew he was lying: it was obvious. There was someone else, he wanted to leave her and it was just a matter of time. He’d merely decided not to dump her on his birthday.
‘I’m going through a bad time and I’m trying to deal with it,’ Matt said. ‘I’m better if you leave me to it.’
‘But I can’t,’ whispered Hope. ‘I love you so much, and I can’t bear it if you feel upset. I mean…’ she pushed aside her plate, her appetite gone, ‘I’d do anything to make it all right.’ She was too scared to ask him if there was someone else. Too afraid that he’d tell her the truth.
‘You can’t make it all right,’ Matt said bluntly. ‘I’m the one suffering the mid-life crisis, not you. You can’t magic it away so we can play happy families. Life isn’t like that. Now can we just have our dinner and try and have a relaxed evening? Please,’ he added more gently. ‘I don’t feel up to talking about it.’
Hope nodded. She poked her steak around the plate, trying to pretend she was hungry. Matt went back to eating and watching the television.
She watched him surreptitiously, her nerves in tatters, wishing she wasn’t so needy and pathetically hungry for love that she’d take any excuse. She didn’t believe a word of it. Matt was lying. If only she were stronger, she’d demand the truth. Someone like Sam would have sent the entire dinner flying and demanded an explanation. She’d have yelled that he wasn’t moving from his seat until he told her exactly what was wrong and cut all the crap about how he was better off dealing with it on his own. Hope knew how Sam would handle this situation, because Sam’s responses were programmed into her brain. You didn’t grow up practically joined at the hip to your older sister without knowing everything about her. But that didn’t mean you could apply her no-holds-barred type of reaction to your own life. Sadly no.
Hope, hating confrontation and loving Matt almost obsessively, was content to know nothing if that was what Matt wanted.
Matt finished his meal and smiled at his wife. ‘That was lovely,’ he said kindly. ‘Let’s forget about everything and watch a video. I stopped at the shop on the way home.’
‘I can give you your presents,’ Hope said, eager to leave the desolate place she was currently in. If they had a nice evening after all, it meant their marriage was OK. Didn’t it?
Matt was up early the next morning. An early meeting, he said as he threw back the duvet at half six instead of the usual seven. Hope, head heavy after a practically sleepless night of worrying, couldn’t move. She was exhausted, her head throbbed with tiredness and her eyes felt piggy, as if someone had injected them with some type of swelling agent. She knew she should get up and talk to Matt – anything to convince herself that it was all okay – but she was too tired. The speediest dresser in the world, Matt was showered, shaved and ready in twenty minutes. Wearing the black Armani suit with a white shirt and his new tie, an outfit that made him look like he was auditioning for an Italian James Bond, he stopped by the bed to pick up his watch from the bedside table. Hope sat up on the pillow and rubbed frantically at her sleep-filled eyes.
‘Bye darling,’ she bleated. ‘Love you.’ She hoped he’d kiss her goodbye but instead he smiled briefly and busied himself with his watch strap.
‘Bye, I’ll see you this evening,’ he said and he was gone, without kissing her.
Hope remembered a time when they’d been so in love that some mornings Matt had ripped off his suit and got back into bed with her to make mad passionate love, not caring that he’d be late for work. She bit her lip miserably. The seven year itch wasn’t just an itch: it was a damn outbreak of eczema.
Her only consolation was that he had looked tired too and clearly hadn’t slept well. Whether it was because he longed to make it up, or whether he’d been mentally going over the various ways of informing her their marriage was over, she couldn’t tell.
As usual, Millie was naughtier than usual because she sensed that Hope was tired and cross. Millie may have looked like an angelic child model from the Pears soap adverts, but there was definitely a vein of sheer mischief running through her body that belied her sweet face. Hope knew from experience that whenever Millie was looking particularly innocent, with her full bottom lip jutting out and her dark eyes round with naïveté, she’d undoubtedly done something very naughty. Like the time she put the plug in the upstairs bathroom sink and set the taps running full blast until water poured down the stairs. The carpet had been ruined.
This morning, she belted downstairs and started to make cakes out of tomato ketchup, mayonnaise, broken up biscuits and breakfast cereal, squelching out an entire bottle of ketchup with the subsequent splodges getting all over the kitchen floor, while Hope was upstairs getting Toby ready.
‘Millie,’ was all Hope could say when she got downstairs with Toby to find an ocean of Millie’s ketchup cake covering the table, a good deal of the floor and most of Millie’s lime green fluffy jumper, clean on half an hour ago. Even worse, it was a jumper that had to be handwashed and spent much of its life at the bottom of the laundry basket with the other handwash items until Hope had the time to tackle them.
‘You’re a very naughty girl; you’re all messy and I’ll have to clean this up. Go upstairs immediately and take off that jumper. We’re going to be late.’
‘Shit,’ said Millie mutinously.
Hope’s jaw clanged so low she could hear the joint creak.
‘What?’ she gasped, appalled. Where could Millie have learned that?
Even Millie seemed to realize