Truly Madly Guilty(29)

She couldn’t bear it. She wanted him to crack again.

‘Although, actually, Erika mentioned the other day that Vid is keen to see us,’ said Clementine. She didn’t want yet another generic conversation about the view and the menu and the weather. A conversation like elevator music.

Sam glanced up at her, but his face was blank, his eyes were closed windows. She waited. There was that strange little pause before he answered. It was like a mechanical glitch. Nobody but her seemed to have noticed that Sam’s timing was off when he spoke these days.

‘Well, I’m sure we probably will run into him some time,’ he said. His eyes returned to the menu. ‘I think I’ll have the chicken risotto.’

She couldn’t bear it.

‘Actually, “desperate” was the word Erika used,’ she said.

His mouth twisted. ‘Yeah, well, he’s probably desperate to see you.’

‘I mean it’s inevitable that we’ll run into them again, isn’t it?’

‘I don’t see why,’ said Sam.

‘When we’re visiting Erika and Oliver? We can’t avoid driving down their street again.’

Although perhaps that’s exactly what Sam intended. Maybe it was what she intended too. They could still see Erika and Oliver without going anywhere near their house. It would just be a matter of making the right excuse, deftly side-stepping Erika’s invitations. They were never that keen on them in the first place.

She remembered the first time she’d seen Erika and Oliver’s new house. ‘We’re kind of dwarfed by our neighbours,’ Erika had said with a doubtful grimace at the castle-like mansion with its tizzy curls and curlicues. It looked especially over the top compared to Erika and Oliver’s benign, beige bungalow: a safe, personality-less house that was so very them. Oh, but they couldn’t laugh at Erika and Oliver like that anymore, could they? Their relationship had changed forever that day. The power balance had shifted. Clementine and Sam could never again make their superior ‘we’re so easygoing, they’re so uptight’ digs.

Sam placed his menu carefully on the edge of the table. He readjusted the placement of his mobile phone.

‘Let’s talk about something more pleasant,’ he said with the social smile of a stranger.

‘I mean, it wasn’t their fault,’ she said. Her voice was thick with inappropriate emotion. She saw him flinch. His colour rose.

‘Let’s talk about something else,’ repeated Sam. ‘What are you having?’

‘I’m not actually that hungry,’ said Clementine.

‘Good,’ said Sam. ‘Neither am I.’ He looked businesslike. ‘Shall we just go?’

Clementine put her menu on top of his and squared up the corners. ‘Fine.’

She lifted her glass. ‘So much for date night.’

‘So much for date night,’ agreed Sam contemptuously.

Clementine watched him swirl his wine in his glass. Did he hate her? Did he actually hate her?

She looked away from him to their expensive rainy view. She let her eye follow the choppy water to the horizon. You couldn’t hear the rain from in here. Lights sparkled and winked on the skyscrapers. Romantic. If she’d just made the right joke. If that damned man hadn’t laughed like Vid.

‘Do you ever think,’ she said carefully, without looking at Sam, her eyes on a keeling solitary yacht, the wind tugging angrily at its sail. Who would choose to sail in this weather? ‘What if we just hadn’t gone? What if one of the girls had got sick, or I’d had to work, or you’d had to work, or whatever, what if we just hadn’t gone to the barbeque? Do you ever think about that?’

She kept her eyes on the maniac in the yacht.

The too-long pause.

She wanted him to say: Of course I think about it. I think about it every day.

‘But we did go,’ said Sam. His voice was heavy and cold. He wasn’t going to consider any other possibilities for their life than the one they were leading. ‘We went, didn’t we?’





chapter sixteen



The day of the barbeque

Erika checked the time. Clementine and Sam were expected ten minutes ago, but that was normal for them, they seemed to think that anything within half an hour of the agreed-upon arrival time was acceptable.

Over the years Oliver had come to accept their lateness, and no longer suggested Erika call to check if there had been an accident. Right now, he was pacing the hallway and at intervals making an unendurable squeaking sound by sucking his lower lip beneath his top teeth.

Erika went to the bathroom, locked the door behind her, double-checked and triple-checked it was locked and then pulled out a packet of pills from the back of the bathroom cabinet. It’s not that she was hiding them from Oliver. They were right there in the bathroom cupboard for him to see if he wanted, and Oliver would be sympathetic with her need for some sort of anti-anxiety medication. It was just that he was so paranoid about anything that went into his body: alcohol, pills, food that had passed its use-by date. (Erika shared the obsession with use-by dates. According to Clementine, Sam treated use-by dates as suggestions.)

Her psychologist had prescribed her this medication for those days when she knew her anxiety symptoms (racing heart, trembling hands, overwhelming sense of panic and imminent danger etcetera, etcetera) would be hard to control.