The House Swap(36)

Things are different now, I remind myself. Francis came back at just after nine last night, subdued and monosyllabic, but still himself. It shocked me, the level of relief I felt – the ease with which I had plunged back into expecting the worst. All evening, the words my counsellor once said to me had circled round my head. It’s a long road. And that uncertainty will always be there. This is the reality of it, when you live with any kind of addict. It will be up and down, and when it’s up, you will never be entirely sure that it will be this way for ever. Some people can cope with this, and some can’t. Sometimes it seems that I’ve spent the past two years waiting for the answer to the unasked question behind these words. Can you cope with it, Caroline? I still don’t know, and I’m starting to think that I’ll be dead before I find out – and then I’ll have answered the question by default, through limbo rather than decision.

I snatch up my hairbrush and brush my hair methodically, dragging the brush through the tangles. My thoughts are working overtime, buzzing insistently in my head. Part of me is wondering if I should walk out of this house and take the first train back home. I imagine walking in through my front door and finding you there, looking you in the eye. Even the thought gives me a rush of longing and terror. I can’t do it. Shouldn’t want to.

I look back at the message. Once again, I have the sense that something doesn’t feel right. I still can’t think of any reason you would want to be in my home without me there. Although, of course, it isn’t only mine. With a throb of disquiet, I wonder if this is the closest you can get to my life with Francis, with Eddie. When we were together, it was entirely sealed off. You rarely asked about it, and I always thought it suited you to pretend that we existed independently, in a hot little bubble of excitement and desire. Just as it did me. But perhaps you feel differently now … perhaps you have turned into someone else.

As the thought flashes across my mind, I can’t help testing it, prodding it, questioning if this might be right. It’s been a long time, and so much has happened since that terrible night when I last saw you. I picture you again, and now I’m imagining you rifling through my husband’s things, trying to get beneath his skin. Picking up his clothes, looking through his papers. Trying to understand our marriage, trying to understand why I’m still there. Trying to work out how happy we are, and wondering if I deserve it, after what I put you through.

I could talk to Francis. The thought rises up, fresh and tantalizing. But when I think about it, it feels as crazy and undoable as placing an atom bomb at his feet. If a couple of emails can rock my equilibrium so much it leads to the scene in the museum yesterday and the silent watchful night we’ve just experienced, lying side by side, not speaking, as night became day, then there is no way I can go to him and inform him that I think you are currently living in our flat. I’ve worked too hard. I haven’t come this far to fuck it up. And for the first time, I feel a surge of anger race through me – at you, and at myself and the fallibility of my own defences.

Riding the wave, I pick up my phone again and tap out a response to the email. I don’t know what you expect me to think. It’s been almost two years. I have no idea why you’re really doing this or why you even want to be in touch with me at all after what happened. I don’t understand it. I want you – and before I can finish the sentence my thumb has skidded impatiently across the screen and the message has been sent. Staring at it in horror, I swallow. I want you to leave me alone. That’s what I meant to say. What I wanted to say. I hit reply again, but now I find I can’t do it. By itself, it looks too stark, too certain. I can’t be sure it’s how I really feel.

That sentence wasn’t finished, I write. Just in case you were getting ideas above your station. Reading that last line over, I wince. No. That sounds light and flirtatious, the opposite of how I’m feeling. I delete it. It doesn’t matter, I write instead. Hit send again. The message is useless. Ridiculous.

Throwing the phone down, I put my face into my cupped palms and breathe inwards, then shakily out again, trying to steady myself. Relax. Calm down. But of course, the only one who ever really relaxed me was you.

As I raise my head, the bedroom door swings open and Francis puts his head cautiously round, edging inside when he sees me sitting at the dressing table.

‘Hi,’ he says, leaning back against the wall. He looks tired, too, but not hostile. ‘Look, we should talk. I’m sorry I disappeared yesterday. I knew it would worry you, but I needed to get away and think. I knew if I stayed it would just end up in a bigger fight, and I didn’t want either of us to say anything else we didn’t mean.’

He pauses, as if to allow me the chance to point out some of these things, but my mind is still spinning and I can’t remember anything I might have said. He sighs, leaning forward away from the wall and coming to perch on the edge of the dressing table.

‘I shouldn’t have said what I did,’ he said, ‘about you and Carl.’ The name falls like a stone between us, making me blink in shock. I can’t remember the last time he said it. It must be months. ‘I really don’t think about it that much,’ he says quietly, ‘any more.’

I remember the hurt that twisted his face as he said those words to me yesterday – the speed and alacrity with which they seemed to come, as if wrenched up from some private and carefully cultivated well of resentment. I have no doubt that there are many more, patiently living out their time in the recesses of his mind, awaiting their turn in the spotlight. But his words are all I need right now to be grateful, and I lean my head against his side, closing my eyes as he rests the flat of his hand on my hair. ‘That’s OK,’ I say into his shirt. ‘I’m sorry, too. Let’s just try to forget about it, shall we? Move on.’