The House Swap(30)
‘What?’ Francis says, his eyes wide and uncomprehending, hands still hovering lightly on my shoulders. I bite my lip, trying to resist the urge to twitch them off. ‘I’m just trying to help.’
I know I should apologize, but your words are still pounding in my head. I glance at Francis, and guilt stabs at me unpleasantly – we’re meant to be on holiday together – and I can’t bear that, either. ‘I don’t want any help,’ I burst out, knowing I sound angry and ungrateful. ‘I don’t want anything from you.’
There’s a moment’s pause, and then his expression changes. ‘Well, fuck this,’ he bites back. ‘I can’t win. I thought this week would be fun. But honestly? So far, you’ve been a bloody nightmare most of the time. Nice and affectionate one minute, on another planet the next. I don’t know what’s going on in your head, Caro, but I’m starting to think that, whatever I do, it’ll never be enough. Christ knows I’ve tried.’ His voice is rising, and people are starting to hesitate in their tracks and look in our direction. I motion for him to be quiet, but he ignores me. ‘I’ve tried to make up for the past few years,’ he says, ‘because I know I needed to, but you know what? Sometimes, it really fucking sticks in my throat that I’m the one who needs to make all the effort, when I wasn’t the one who—’
He is abruptly silent. We are standing inches apart and my whole body is hot and trembling, waiting for his next words. ‘When you weren’t the one who what?’ I say quietly when he doesn’t continue. ‘Go on, then.’
He looks directly into my eyes. The contact jolts me, makes me feel more present in this room with him than I have done all day. ‘When I wasn’t the one,’ he says, deliberately spacing out the words for emphasis, ‘who dealt with our problems by lying on my back and fucking someone else.’
The air between us lightens, the tension exploded – but what it leaves behind it is a sadness I can’t look at head on, something too raw and intimate to handle. He’s wheeling around and away, stuffing his hands into his pockets and walking head down, elbowing his way through the crowd. In the old days, I would have run after him – grabbed on to his coat sleeve, begged him to come back, made a public scene, to no avail. But my legs are weak and shaking and the strange blue light is still making me feel dizzy and unsure and, in this moment, I want to be alone as much as he does. So I just stand still and watch him until he’s disappeared.
I walk around the museum for another fifteen minutes or so, staring at smooth, curved metal structures, twinkling maps of the galaxy. I remember, the first time I came to this place, I was struck by a powerful feeling of being on the edge of something huge and unreachable – the minuteness of my own life in the face of the universal. This time, it’s the exact opposite. I can’t see beyond what is happening right here and now. My own concerns have blown up to the size of the world.
Once I’m back at Turnham Green, I sit down on a cold bench at the bus stop and read the email again. If you want me to be. If you want me to be. You were always like this: batting my questions back, twisting them into self-reflection, saying that you only wanted to do what was best for me. Your own feelings were slippery, like mercury. I would seize on anything that gave me a clue as to what was going on inside your head, only to find that I was holding on to nothing, no wiser than I was before.
I press the reply button. I don’t understand, I tap out, painfully aware of how inadequate these words are. Why are you doing this? Why now? What do you want? Too many questions. I can’t think what else to say. Somewhere in the back of my mind I’ve always clung on to a little private fantasy, that if I ever had any contact with you again it would be tinted with tenderness and nostalgia – not this strange, adversarial game of cat and mouse. For a moment I can see you as clearly as if you were standing next to me, and I badly want you to be there, to throw my arms around you and ask you to tell me it’s OK, that there’s some explanation for why you’re doing this and that it all makes sense.
I put a C at the end of the message, then a kiss. I stare at the kiss, then delete it. Hit send. Already I’m counting the seconds, waiting for a reply. I can’t stand it. Regret is surging through me – I’m not sure enough that this was the right thing to do – but it’s too late to unsend it and now I’ve set myself up to wait for God knows how long, my nerves as scratchy and strained as barbed wire.
On the bus back, I press my forehead against the windowpane and watch the lines of trees and houses rushing by, trying to drive these thoughts out. There’s nothing to replace them with. Only the image of Francis’s face, and that painful mixture of anger, hurt and regret in his eyes. It’s been a while since we fought like this. In the early days after I told him about you, exchanging this kind of vitriol felt too dangerous – as if every harsh word could be the one to tip the balance and break us apart.
I would have thought it would feel safer now, but it doesn’t. What we have remains precarious. We’ve fought hard to keep it, against the odds, and the idea of losing it is bleakly depressing. All this effort and sacrifice, and still no lifetime guarantee. Now I’m stepping off the bus and walking quickly through the streets and swinging left towards Everdene Avenue, and suddenly I’m thinking of our wedding night … lying awake in the early hours and looking across the dark room at him sleeping next to me, and that powerful sense of tenderness, of knowing I was where I was meant to be. How frighteningly easily certainty can crumble. How little it takes.