Our House(12)

Believe me, though, what I felt about the cheating was nothing compared with what I feel about the house. This is far worse. This is grief.


Bram, Word document

I don’t remember much about that interim period. It seemed pretty painful at the time, but then I had no idea how dark and disabling pain could get.

It didn’t help that I was staying with my mother. I remember her attempts to advise, her reliance on the kind of Christian learnings that had felt outdated (if not loony) in my childhood and now, in twenty-first-century South London, were irrelevant to the point of gibberish. Suffice to say that the wisdom I had demonstrated fell short of my Old Testament namesake and I refused to discuss it with her – or anyone, frankly.

I remember thinking that the boys were surprisingly unaffected by my absence, almost unflatteringly so. They accepted my weekend gifts of crisps and jelly beans as if their parents’ marriage had not imploded, as if the pleasure of posting Pringles through slotted mouths eclipsed any ill the universe could hurl at them.

As for Fi, seeing me seemed to fill her with none of the anguish I felt – nor the anger I deserved. We even went to the park together, the four of us, one sweltering Sunday in mid-August. ‘Pistachio or salted caramel?’ she asked me at the ice cream counter in the café, as if she was acting the role of gracious host to a foreign exchange student.

‘You choose,’ I said, and there was the faintest arching of her eyebrows. You’ve chosen, I read, and your choice was the wrong one.

It was an odd thing: the ingredients of her were just the same as before – blonde hair cut smooth to the collarbone, puppy-brown eyes with straight lashes, curves that drew the male gaze and yet were disavowed by their owner as excessive – but the flavour was different. It was as if she’d found a way to sugar-coat her sourness, to disguise her bitterness towards me.

We strolled across the threadbare grass to the playground. The place was heaving with day trippers, half-naked twenty-somethings in those trendy sunglasses with blue lenses that looked better on the women than the men (or maybe I only noticed the women). There was even a queue for the swings.

‘Where did all these people come from?’ I said. I hadn’t been out of Alder Rise for that long.

‘Alison says this is the price we pay for our houses being worth so much,’ Fi said, and she somehow managed to make it sound like self-sacrifice, as if this were the most trying issue she faced. Being a property millionaire.

What about me? I wanted to whine. Living in Penge with a religious nut, sleeping on a blow-up bed with my head against a radiator! I’d been careful till then not to pressure Fi or make demands, but now the angst tumbled from me: ‘Speaking of which, we need to decide what to do about the house. I can’t stay at my mum’s for ever. If we really are splitting, then we need to talk about how we divide the assets.’

Now there was emotion in her eyes. Pure alarm.

I blundered on, both wanting to hurt her and willing her to take me back then and there and give me the chance never to hurt her again. ‘Have you been in touch with a solicitor? Or an estate agent? Are you waiting for me to?’

‘No.’ As two swings came free, she took half-finished ice creams from the boys and urged them to take their turns.

‘Fi,’ I began again, but she held up a dripping cone in protest.

‘Please. Stop.’

‘But how much longer—?’

‘Another week,’ she said. ‘Give me another week and I’ll have some suggestions for next steps.’

Next steps: project management speak. The next steps would be to identify the deliverables, secure the assignees and nail down a time frame.

‘Okay,’ I said.

‘And Bram?’

‘Yes?’

‘We are “really” splitting, I just don’t want to be knee-jerk about it. I want what’s best for them.’ She turned to watch the boys swinging, hardly blinking, as if it were some new and hypnotic spectator sport – until I realized she simply couldn’t bear to look at me.

Returning to my mum’s that evening, I remember thinking this is what it must feel like to be a condemned man awaiting news of his appeal.

Condemned? I didn’t know how blissfully free I was.


‘Fi’s Story’ > 00:28:49

Sorry about that little outburst – I’m fine now. My emotions are all over the place at the moment, as you can imagine.

So, what happened next? It was Bram talking about dividing the assets, that’s what galvanized me into action. We’d put on a united front one afternoon for a family trip to the park, and I suppose it shouldn’t have been as much of a shock as it was when he asked what we were going to do about the house. That evening, I went to the window and stood for some time looking at the magnolia, always a source of consolation to me. It had blossomed early this year and we’d all gushed at its beauty; passers-by took photos on their phones and the boys climbed the lower branches to stroke the blossom, tenderly, as they might a newborn hamster, careful not to loosen any of the petals.

I would never get this beauty and tranquillity somewhere else. Everyone knew that the property market exacerbated the hostilities of separation and divorce and that in London and its suburbs you could no longer expect to sell one large home and get two smaller ones in exchange. My work was reasonably paid, but I’d need to be headhunted by Saudi Oil & Gas to have any chance of buying Bram out of his half of Trinity Avenue.