After You Left(66)
Mark wasn’t at all happy at the way she was looking at him. He got up and went to fill his Scotch glass, just because she was making him feel twitchy. As he did, he caught sight of himself in the mirror. His reflection made him take pause. He was a vibrant, upright, attractive man in his prime. An affair with a gardener! What on earth had she been thinking?
He brought his drink back to the chair and sat down again. Harry went and nudged off a bauble from the bottom branch of the tree. It struck Mark that he needed to be angrier. He had felt the rise of genuine pique a moment or two ago. But it had burned out like a log fire that starts off promisingly and then you don’t quite know what suddenly happened to it. ‘I’m presuming you want to leave me and go and be with him, your gardener,’ he said, after he realised that she hadn’t answered his question about what she wanted to do.
He drained the glass in one go. But he wasn’t as calm as he might have looked. He sounded so rational, like a mediator in a debate. But he wasn’t rational, either. Public school had taught him how to do the complete opposite of what his emotions were instructing. This whole thing was mad enough that she might actually do it. He didn’t want to lose her. He loved her profoundly. Right now, it didn’t matter massively that she might not love him back. She was looking at him in that strange way again.
She watched him polish off his drink. She could have said, I want to leave you and be with Eddy, if he’ll still have me. The letter she had tried to write this morning – to explain why she hadn’t shown up as promised – was in the drawer of her writing bureau upstairs. She hadn’t managed to compose it. She had made her choice, and yet she hadn’t committed it to paper. On one level, it was urgent that she sent an explanation to him; it was only fair. And on the other . . .
I could leave now. I could just get up and go.
Despite fading in and out of emotional blankness at times, she really had no doubts about her love for Eddy, even though she might have gently fudged it with Mark, just to be kind. But deep down, she knew that she didn’t want to walk away from her husband, either – this man who was looking at her in a way that he had perhaps never looked at her before. As much as these paintings and vases, and chairs and rugs all belonged here, so did she. And Mark belonged here, too: he with her, and she with him. This was their life, and she couldn’t really imagine it not being her life any more. Everything about London suited the person she had been happy enough to become. And, as much as she had questioned the happiness of that person at times, and as much as she thought she could leave it all, she really couldn’t see herself walking away from Mark and the life they had made together. She just kept picturing him buying her Christmas gift in Harrods, and how he might have died doing it. There were different kinds of love. One didn’t invalidate the other.
She thought, distantly, of Serena’s sage advice about nostalgia, and how people would talk about her. Mark would be a laughing stock, and she worried more about that than what they would say about her. Then, inevitably, he would find someone. But he wouldn’t really want to replace her. He’d be doing it out of necessity, because Mark needed order in his life, and order meant a wife. And in a way – knowing her messed-up self as she did – she would envy that woman he had chosen to try to love as much as he once loved her.
‘I don’t know what I am going to do. I’m only telling you all this for one reason, Mark. Because I’ve done wrong, and it’s too big a thing to keep from you. I’m not a good enough actress.’
‘Well, frankly, I would have appreciated you trying to be.’ His last defence was a small attack.
She found this ironic. Sometimes, she felt that Mark only ever wanted to know the part of her that it suited him to know. He would cheerfully bury his head in the sand as to the rest. And that was one of the infuriating things about him. But it was part of their marriage’s psyche. She couldn’t hate him for it.
‘I take responsibility for what I did. I never, ever, intended to be unfaithful, and I regret it in ways I could never begin to articulate. But you should know that my affair was a symptom of us, of how we are together as a couple, of what we’ve become. I have never fitted your mould. You married a human being, not a talking ornament. I wasn’t going to be placed where you decided to place me, and polished once in a while. I am a person.’
It was sounding way more accusatory than she really intended, but she needed to be fully honest if they were to go on. ‘Mark, what I’m struggling to say is that I had independent dreams and desires of my own that shouldn’t have had to step in line with yours. If you hadn’t expected me to have them, you should have chosen one of those stuffed blouses that your other posh friends married. It was only natural that I would evolve from that naive girl you walked down the aisle with. But you have changed, too. Let’s not forget that. We evolved differently, and sometimes the differences are just too great for me. Plus, we should have tried harder to have children. It would have made us the family we haven’t quite managed to be without them.’
He had absolutely no idea what to say to that. Talking ornament! She was a person! And now she wanted children? She’d hardly made a massive fuss about them before. When she acted like this – became all complex and rambling – it was completely over his head. There were a great number of pretty, airhead secretaries whom he could have married, who would have given him less grief, and a great many times he wished he’d picked one.