Five Winters(65)

“And I do hope you won’t wake up one day and regret everything you could have had with Jaimie.”





24


“So I’m seeing a pattern of relatively short-term serial monogamy in your relationship history. Would that be an accurate assessment?”

“Yes, I suppose it would.”

Maybe there was a hint of defensiveness in my tone, because Clare said, “You understand, this is not intended to be in any way critical of you. I’m simply recording the facts.”

I forced myself to smile. “Of course.”

“But just to be clear, you’ve never had a relationship that has lasted more than a year?”

It sounded so awful. Especially if you added my age to the equation. You’re thirty-seven years old, and you’ve never had a relationship that’s lasted longer than a year . . .

“Yes,” I said. “That’s correct.” It was. It just wasn’t the whole picture. But I couldn’t give her the whole picture, could I? Being in love with someone who doesn’t view you romantically for more than half your life was hardly going to impress, was it?

“And your relationship with Mr. Faulkner, which ended”—Clare consulted her notes—“last January, was the most serious of your relationships to date?”

I nodded. “Yes.”

“And you moved to live with Mr. Faulkner in Ely?”

“I did.”

“How long had you known each other before you moved there?”

“About five months.”

Clare tilted her head slightly. “So that was a big commitment on your behalf after a relatively short amount of time.”

“I suppose it was.”

She looked at me, waiting, making me realise how monosyllabic my responses were.

I dredged my mind for more. “The fact that we lived some distance from each other probably sped things up a bit.”

“Could you tell me a bit about that relationship, please? It’s important, obviously, because Mr. Faulkner has children, and you had regular contact with those children.”

I hesitated, speed-trawling through memories of my time in Ely, trying to decide how to portray those months in a positive light. It shouldn’t have been too difficult. After all, it hadn’t been all bad. Far from it. But Clare wasn’t interested in hearing about great sex, and sometimes when I thought back to those months, it was one of the few truly positive things I could remember. Reluctant naturism, missing my work as a veterinary nurse, missing my home city, almost taking up a folk-dancing hobby out of sheer boredom—none of these were either positive or relevant to my decision to adopt. The pushing-a-stone-up-a-mountain reality of my relationship with Jaimie’s girls was definitely relevant, but equally definitely, it would fail to impress Clare if I described it with complete honesty.

“Is this a difficult topic for you, Beth?” Clare asked after the silence had stretched on a bit too long.

“No, it’s fine. I’m just trying to decide where to start.”

“How about describing your relationship with Mr. Faulkner’s daughters?”

I sighed. I couldn’t help it. Clare’s eyebrows immediately lifted. She sat there waiting, pen poised.

“Emily and Olivia are both very sweet girls. But they do have strong personalities, and they didn’t want their parents to split up. Which is only natural, of course. I think it’s fair to say they still hadn’t accepted this state of affairs when I moved to Ely. That they secretly hoped Jaimie and their mother would get back together.”

Clare wasn’t writing very much. Oh God. The stillness of that pen! Obviously, she thought I hadn’t got to the juicy nitty-gritty yet. My head was starting to ache.

“They didn’t react well when I first moved to Ely. They seemed to resent my being there.”

“And how did that make you feel?”

How did she think it had made me feel? Rejected. Frustrated. Lonely. Inadequate.

“Well, it was very difficult, of course. But I kept on trying to . . . bond with them.”

“And how did you do that? What kinds of things did you try to bring that about?”

“Well, Emily was very interested in reading, as I am myself. So I had conversations with her about books. Bought her books sometimes. And Olivia was very interested in animals, and of course, I work with animals myself, so . . .”

My voice petered out. I wasn’t impressing myself, let alone Clare, and I was also painfully aware of how pitiful my attempts to start those conversations had been. That this was like a job interview where you exaggerated your experience to try and make it sound like a strength.

My greatest weakness is that I sometimes take on more than I can handle, but I’ve installed a project management app and find that really helpful . . .

That kind of thing.

My greatest weakness with Jaimie’s girls was that I was, frankly, terrified of them. Because Jaimie cared for them so much, they had shedloads of power over me. Now that I don’t see them anymore, I realise I should have expected more support from Jaimie to help us to bond better.

“Was Mr. Faulkner supportive of the relationship between yourself and his daughters?”

Ah, right on cue.

Vividly I recalled the way Jaimie had brushed my insecurities aside. They’ll come round. These things take time. It didn’t take much of a stretch of imagination to conjure up an older version of the two of us at either Emily’s or Olivia’s wedding—me sitting next to Jaimie but still very much on the fringes of family life—had we stayed together.