The Friends We Keep(2)

She was fine with me getting drunk on the weekends. Most of the time she’d drink with me. It was the nightly beers and a triple vodka before bed that she couldn’t stand. (I never considered it a triple vodka. It was my nightly nip.) Being on my own in a London flat during the week meant I didn’t have to worry about it. If I chose to have a triple vodka, or three, before bed, no one would kick me awake throughout the night because of snoring, or look at me across a table and mutter, within earshot of everyone, that I’d had enough.

After a while, I didn’t want to go home. Being on my own in London made it easier to party with my best friend: booze. Until my boss intervened, telling me there were complaints that I was smelling of alcohol, and that if I didn’t get myself sober, they would have to fire me. It worked. I got sober. One of many, many times.

This time around, I’ve been sober the whole time I’ve been working in London. If my colleagues invite me to the pub, I turn them down. They joke about my flat being the perfect bachelor pad, but it’s lonely as hell. What’s a man like me supposed to do with a high-rise luxury flat in Paddington when his wife is at home in Somerset? Yeah. Don’t answer that. That’s not my style. At least, it’s not my style when sober. I don’t want to think about all the mistakes I made while I was drinking, the betrayals I’ll never be able to forgive myself for.

Nowadays the worst thing I get up to is ordering a Peshwari naan with the Indian takeout, and watching Sky News while scrolling through my phone. I now text my wife every day to say good night, at around nine p.m., but there are two differences from all those years ago when I used to phone her. The first is that I’m actually home, and the second is that she doesn’t text back.

I know she knows I’m sober for real this time. I worry that she doesn’t care. I’m ready to make a fresh start with my marriage. If I knew how to reach her.

How do you reach someone who has withdrawn so completely she barely looks at you even when you are together? I understand her resentment. I know that apologizing isn’t enough. I have to show her I’ve changed. We have to find a way to start again, to stop being strangers, rattling around in an enormous country house that now feels like a prison, filled with nothing but disappointments.

Would it be different if we had been able to have children? Yeah. Of course, it would be. When I was a kid and people asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, I used to look at them very seriously and say, “A dad.” It was true. It was all I ever wanted. My sponsor thinks that’s why I started drinking, but I’m not so sure. My mum was a drinker. I think it’s in my blood. For years it was something I thought I could control, even before we got together. I’d get drunk on weekends only, and then the weekends stretched to include Thursdays, and then I stopped thinking about what day it was.

Now we’re settling into middle age, and I’m sober, and the past doesn’t matter anymore. Who do we have if we don’t have each other? I don’t want to divorce, I don’t want to be on my own, and I don’t want to start again with someone else.

I still love her, I just need to find a way to make her forgive me. You don’t spend half your life with someone and not love them. It’s just a bad patch, and I can’t blame her. I can prove to her how different I am, how much I’ve grown. Am I in love with her? No. Not anymore, neither of us is. But I think we could both learn to fall in love with each other again. I think we could learn to pay attention to each other, to make a decision that we’re not going to let this marriage fall apart, because right now, this marriage is falling apart.

So that’s why I’m surprising her with a second honeymoon. We haven’t had a holiday in years. We sit together at the kitchen table for meals, her scrolling through her phone, me reading a science journal. We barely communicate unless it’s transactional—cut the grass, trim the hedges, pay the bills.

This will change all that. I’m determined. I’ve even booked the same room we had. How can we not rediscover each other while walking down memory lane? I’m going to print out the boarding passes when I get home, and I’ll put them on the kitchen table for when she comes down tomorrow.

This is our fresh start. This is our second chance. I’m smiling as my phone buzzes, and I look down at the screen, seeing that she has texted me. This is a sign, I think, a sign that everything’s going to be okay.

I’m still smiling when I open up my messages to read her text:


I’ve seen a lawyer. I’ve had enough of this sham of a marriage. I want a divorce.





PART I


   the beginning





one


- 1986 -



Once upon a time Evvie would have been like these other students, she thought as she paid the taxi driver and wrestled the huge Louis Vuitton trunk out of the back of the car. Once upon a time she might have had a mother and a father just like all the ones around her now, who have driven their kids to universities, helping them decorate their rooms with colorful duvets and posters, running out to the hardware store for more picture hooks, or rods for curtains, or a kettle so they could make tea in their rooms.

Evvie no longer spoke to her father. Not since he hit her mother, knocking out two of her teeth. Two days later they were on a plane, heading to London, to her grandmother’s tiny terraced house in Stockwell. It was a far cry from their old life in Brooklyn, but her mother had had enough. She went back to the bosom of her family to get her teeth and her life fixed, and she retained a divorce attorney who handled everything from overseas.