Our Kind of Cruelty(36)

As the day drifted into evening and they turned on some music, I thought about going round, but at the last minute I kept stopping myself. Kaitlyn was right, I did need to make a grand gesture and it was important I readied myself for that.



V replied to my emails the next day. I doubted they had gone for much less than two weeks, so it must have been the first thing she did on her return.

Dear Mike,

I was very sad to receive your emails. You sounded so angry in the first and so desperate in the second, and I can’t bear thinking of you in either state. I was worried something like this might happen and I probably shouldn’t have invited you to the wedding. But you meant so much to me once and I was hoping we could still be friends, although maybe that was very selfish of me.

The truth is I love Angus very much. I have never loved anyone like I do him, which I am sure is a terrible thing for you to hear, but it’s the truth. If you want to know the full truth I did meet him a few months before you came back for Christmas last year, although nothing really happened. I was going to tell you and finish things with you, but then you told me about Carly and I used that as an excuse. I am so sorry I did that – it was cowardly and foolish of me. But I can’t pretend I wasn’t hurt by what you’d done. Angus and I hadn’t slept together by then and I was shocked that you could do something like that, as if we meant nothing to each other.

You need to move on with your life. You are a great person and whomever you end up with is going to be one lucky girl. I do still hope we can be friends sometime in the future, but for now you need to sort out a few things in your head. I know I said it to you so much when we were together, but I do still think you would benefit greatly from some counselling. You’ve always blamed yourself somehow for how your mother behaved. But you were an innocent victim and you can’t worry that you will turn out like she did just because you share some genes. Everything you’ve done so far is nothing short of amazing and you should be very proud of yourself. Look forward, Mike, it’s the only way.

Wishing you much love,

Verity



I did a little jig around the kitchen after I read it. Everything I had suspected was true. V had been heartbroken by my sleeping with Carly. She also clearly loved me as much as I did her. She cared about my welfare, she thought about me, she saw herself in my future. What I had perhaps got wrong was the sense that she was punishing me for what I had done. Going over the email it seemed more likely that my infidelity had affected her so deeply she had had some sort of mini breakdown, attaching herself to the first man to pay her some attention (and V was never going to be short of men wanting to do that). She had transferred all the love she felt for me to Angus and convinced herself that this was how she really felt. The fact that she said they hadn’t slept together by Christmas made me dismiss him further. I knew better than anyone how important sex is to V and there was no way she would have abstained that long if she had really fallen for him. No, it was obvious he was nothing more than a stooge and I was going to have to help her see this.

V’s mention of counselling was particularly pertinent here. In telling me I needed it she was really talking about herself. I wasn’t going to mention it, but she had quite a bit of counselling before we met, even afterwards. In fact, she had to take anti-depressants for a while after university. Real life, she used to say, was a shock. I never really got to the bottom of why she was unhappy; I’m not even sure she ever did. She told me once that her therapist thought she carried a lot of expectation from her parents. She was a longed-for and only child, and Suzi and Colin certainly both idolised and pushed her, something I saw with my own eyes: one minute telling her how clever and talented she was, the next remonstrating that she hadn’t done well enough in an exam. She told me that her therapist had told her this constant state of anticipation had heightened her emotions, so that she now associated intimacy with excitement and danger. She needed to learn to relax, he told her; she needed to allow herself to let go.

When she was at her worst, just after graduating, I learnt how to meditate so I could teach her. We would sit on the floor of our flat cross-legged and I would talk her through the moments, helping her to regulate her breathing and calm her mind. Sometimes I would open my eyes and she would be sitting there with tears rolling down her cheeks. When I asked her what was wrong she would say that it was just nice to feel calm, and so good not to feel fear in her veins. Then I would hold her and tell her I would always be there to make her feel better and she would cling to me like she was drowning. Once, she called me on the way to work and begged me to come home, saying she couldn’t breathe without me by her side. And I did as she asked, calling in sick, to go and tend to her.

The night I received her email, I slept with V in my arms. It sounds like a strange thing to say because I knew she wasn’t physically there with me, but in all the important ways she was right by my side. It was as if her very essence was in our bed; I smelt her musky scent, felt her hair tickle underneath my chin, fitted my body against hers, held her breasts in my hands.

I woke the next day feeling totally refreshed for the first time in months and when I looked in the mirror after my run my cheeks looked fuller and flushed. Even Kaitlyn commented on how well I looked when I got into work and asked if V and I had made up. Nearly, I told her, with a wink.

Elaine called me during the day and I didn’t have a moment to return her call until I was walking home from the Tube station that evening. I had decided to give V a day to settle back in and then pick her up on Tuesday evening. I had googled restaurants near to her work and decided on a good Lebanese one a short walk from her office.