much you meant to me, but all I felt was more and more insecure. Every single morning I’d wake up and ask myself whether this would be the day you’d decide you’d had enough of being married. To someone,’ he concluded brokenly, ‘who didn’t deserve you.’
He’d stopped speaking. It was Janey’s turn. Her glass was empty and she’d almost forgotten how to breathe.
‘But that’s crazy,’ she managed to say, her voice barely above a whisper. Of all the possible reasons she had come up with, this was one she had never for a moment even considered. ‘We were married, we were happy together.’ - ‘Yes, it was crazy.’ Alan nodded, his expression regretful. ‘I know that now, but at the time I think I was a little bit crazy myself. It was a kind of self-torture, and I couldn’t break the cycle. The more I thought about it, the more real it became.
And the fact that you seemed happy no longer counted for anything, because I’d convinced myself that you were only putting on some elaborate act for my benefit. You read about it all the time in the papers; it happens every day, for God’s sake. Perfect couples with apparently perfect marriages, except they aren’t perfect at all. Suddenly, out of the blue, the wife or husband says they can’t stand it any more; they hire a hit-man or simply up and leave with their secret lover.
Janey, it got so bad I had to get away. I didn’t want to go, but it seemed like the only option left to me. You have to try and understand, sweetheart. I was desperate.’
Wordlessly, she held out her glass and watched Alan refill it. He still wore Pepe jeans, still moved with that same casual, confident grace. He had always exuded such an air of confidence; how could she possibly have known that beneath the surface lurked a maelstrom of insecurity and self-doubt?
The brandy was no longer lacerating her throat. This time it slipped down like warm honey.
‘You should have asked me,’ she said, tears prickling the back of her eyes. ‘If you’d told me how you felt, I could have—’
‘I didn’t want to hear it,’ Alan interjected, his own eyes filled with pain. ‘Don’t you see, Janey? If you’d reassured me, I would only have convinced myself you were lying. And that would have been almost as unbearable as hearing you say you didn’t love me.’
‘Oh God.’ With a trembling hand, Janey covered her face. What he was telling her made an awful kind of sense. Such paranoid beliefs, once they took a hold, made reassurance impossible.
‘You should have gone to see a doctor.’
‘I did. After I’d, um, left.’ Alan gave her a crooked half-smile. ‘And a world of good that did me, too. He said that, in his experience, any man who harboured suspicions about his wife most probably had every right to do so. Then he told me that his own wife had walked out on him three weeks earlier and it wasn’t until she’d gone that he found out she’d been having an affair with their dentist for the past five years.’
‘I wasn’t having an affair,’ said Janey, her voice beginning to break. ‘I would never have done anything like that. Never.’
‘Yes, well.’ He dismissed the protest with a shrug. ‘You can understand it didn’t help.’
Janey could understand that such a bloody useless doctor should be struck off the medical register. She shuddered at the thought of the damage he might have inflicted on countless innocent people.
‘Are you still cold?’ Alan patted the empty cushion on the settee. ‘Why don’t you come over here, sweetheart? Sit by me.’
But Janey needed to hear everything first. There were nearly two whole years separating them, two blank years in which anything might have happened. She couldn’t relax until she knew it all. She also needed more brandy .. .
‘Where did you go?’ she pleaded, suddenly desperate to get it over with. ‘Where have you been living? What have you been doing?’
His smile was bleak. ‘Existing. Trying to stop loving you.Telling myself a million times that I’d been a complete fool who’d made the worst mistake of his life, but that it was too late to go back.’ He stopped for a second, gazing into space and swallowing hard. ‘I’m sorry, Janey.
Here I go again, moaning on about my own stupid feelings when what you want to hear are the facts. OK, well they aren’t exactly riveting but here goes. I hitch-hiked to Edinburgh, did a bit of bar work, got myself a filthy little bed-sitter and spent most of my spare time shaking cockroaches out of the duvet. After a few months, when ‘I couldn’t stand the place a moment longer, I travelled down to Manchester. That was just as awful, but the customers had different accents and at least the pub employed bouncers to break up the fights, instead of expecting me to tackle them myself.’
Janey shuddered. ‘That scar on your forehead ...?’
‘A bloody great Scotsman with fourteen pints of lager inside him and a broken bottle in each fist.’ He touched the scar as if to remind himself. ‘I was lucky. One of the other barmen almost died.’
Janey bit her lower lip. Alan could have died. She had thought he was dead .. .
‘Go on. How long were you in Manchester?’
He thought for a moment. ‘Three, four months? Then I moved down to London. Another lousy bed-sit, another family of cockroaches to get to know. I did some casual work here and there when I could get it, but it was pretty much of a hand-to-mouth existence. Not to mention lonely.’
‘But you must have met people, made new friends?’
‘I didn’t want to,’ he replied simply. ‘I didn’t think I deserved any. Unless I was working, there were times when I didn’t even speak to a soul for days on end. London’s like that; you can almost begin to believe you no longer exist.’
‘Girlfriends?’ said Janey, needing to know. It had been almost two years, after all.
But Alan smiled and shook his head. ‘Hadn’t I suffered enough? Janey, my feelings for you were what got me into this mess in the first place. I was hardly going to risk it again, was I?
Besides,’ he added sadly, ‘I was still in love with you. I didn’t want anyone else. And even if I had, it would have been too much of a betrayal.’
‘And now you’re back.’ Janey still felt as if she were in suspended animation. It was a curious feeling, like one
