Revenge of the Middle-Aged Woman

He shrugged. ‘But why did you talk about him?’

‘I didn’t.’

‘You told Minty about him. She told me. That set me off again. Started it all up.’

I said furiously, ‘It didn’t occur to you that Minty made a point of telling you? That she meant you to get the wrong idea?’

‘No need to lose your temper.’

The coffee machine hissed and gushed. Customers drifted in and out of the bar. I dropped my head into my hands. From a minor reference, a light exchange of confidence, something much bigger had – apparently – grown. ‘Nathan, everyone comes with something from the past.’

I raised my head. Nathan was staring at me. Slowly he put out a hand and touched my shoulder, his hand just grazing my breast. It was an old gesture that I loved. ‘Did he do that to you?’

I turned my face away.

‘Rose.’ Nathan withdrew into his formal office manner. ‘I’m sorry about the Hal problem. I think it was because I’m so bad at discussing these sort of things, and he seemed convenient and easy to latch on to. I used the idea of him.’

I closed my eyes. ‘How could you?’

‘We all do stupid things. Even you, Rose.’ He reached for his briefcase and produced a sheaf of papers. ‘I’ve made some lists… about things and how we should divide them. Take them away and see if you agree. I’m open to negotiation. We also have to talk about the house.’ He pushed the papers over to me. I glanced down but left them on the counter.

I should be saying, Please, let’s think again. Let’s try. In accepting the lists I was accepting that Nathan and I were finished.

‘Please look at them,’ he said coldly.

The balance had altered. Something had been smashed out of existence, and I could not put it back together again. And, yes, I had done a stupid thing. I had not noticed that Nathan and I were drifting. We had been at the stage of taking each other for granted yet we had not reached the stage when we were strong enough that it was no longer dangerous. Our keener edges had blunted, and I had stopped searching to keep us in balance… or, rather, I had not made allowances for Nathan changing and, thus, trapped him and denied him air.

I put out my hand and picked up the lists. Chairs and the sofa to him. Mirrors and the blue chair to me. ‘I’m not sure,’ I said. ‘I’ll see.’ I looked up at Nathan. ‘I’m not ready yet.’

He shifted on the stool. ‘You must take your time, of course.’

‘Thank you.’ This small courtesy was comforting, a tiny straw at which to grasp, and I glimpsed a time in the future when it might be possible to face each other peacefully.

Then I spoilt it. The state of Nathan’s shirt had been puzzling me – it was not properly ironed. I leant over and fingered the crumpled collar. ‘Don’t you have an iron at Minty’s flat?’

Nathan pulled irritably at it. ‘Minty is not one of nature’s ironers. It was her turn… and I tried to show her… you know, about shirts.’

‘Did you? And what did Minty say?’

Nathan seemed baffled. ‘When I explained that the trick is to iron from the yoke outwards, she threw it back at me.’

‘Well I never. The free spirit.’

He jerked the lock of his briefcase shut. ‘One minute women are saying one thing, then they’re demanding the opposite. They want to be noticed, they demand homage. Then we provide it, and find ourselves accused of rape or of some fearful transgression against their rights. They say they want us to be free, and they want to be free, and, saps that we are, we believe them.’

‘Oh dear,’ I said. ‘It didn’t take long.’

Angry and hostile, we slid down from our precarious perches on the stools and went our separate ways.

Chapter Eighteen

I knew Nathan would deny it. I knew he would fight against a feeling he would consider wrong and beneath him but, looking back, my job introduced an irritant into our marriage. It was to do with timing, for later on Nathan was fine about it.

I think he felt we had lost an innocence, that an illusion had changed.

Six months after I began work as the assistant in the books department, Sam fell ill. It began with a high fever. ‘It’s just a bug,’ I assured Nancy, the bright New Zealander who helped out in the afternoons and whom I had had to bribe to stay for the whole day. I grabbed my book bag and headed out of the front door.

On the third day, Sam began to vomit and his temperature was still worryingly high. Nancy rang in at eight o’clock to say she was sorry but she could not miss any more of her college course. I cornered Nathan in his study. Could he take time off? I asked. Being new to my job I did not like to risk cutting corners. Nathan dropped a pile of envelopes into a basket marked ‘Bills’ and looked thoughtful. ‘Not really,’ he replied, and I had the impression that he had been waiting for a moment such as this. ‘I can’t take a day off at such short notice.’

I squared up to him. ‘Please.’ If Nathan was in the slightest danger of saying, ‘I told you so,’ I knew I would lose my temper.

‘I told you so,’ said Nathan, but in such a way that my anger was stillborn. This was a serious disagreement.

There was an icy silence. ‘I don’t believe you said that.’

He had the grace to look uncomfortable. ‘Sorry. But you know what I feel about you working. This is exactly what I predicted would happen. I asked you to wait until the children were older.’ He turned his back and stapled a couple of documents together. ‘Do you realize how fortunate you are, Rose, in not having to work?’

‘I’ll overlook the moral blackmail, Nathan. What’s happened to “I help you, you help me”? Where’s that gone?’

‘I don’t know,’ he replied.

I grasped the nettle. ‘You helped me get the job.’

‘You were set on it.’

‘Fine,’ I said. ‘I’ll remember that next time you need support.’

I rang Ianthe and begged for help. Delighted to be of use, she arrived bearing an old jigsaw puzzle of the battle of Marathon that I had played with, plus a copy of The Little House on the Prairie. I had doubts that Sam would respond to a girl’s account of pioneering in the American west, but when I returned in the evening, Poppy was perched on his bed, playing nurses and feeding Sam sips of freshly squeezed orange juice, while he read aloud in a feeble voice from The Little House. He looked up as I entered the room. ‘Mum, such a wicked story.’

It was a soothing, textbook sight.

Ianthe was hemming a skirt. ‘I think he’s a bit better.’ She bit off the thread, and I breathed a sigh of relief. The needle dived in and out of the flowered material. ‘Supper’s done,’ she said, ‘and the washing.’ She reached for her scissors and a machine bobbin fell out of her basket on to the floor, unravelling white cotton as it rolled. ‘All under control.’

Ianthe had been over-optimistic, and that night Sam was worse. I kept vigil in a room that smelt of sickness and disinfectant. Nathan tiptoed in and out, ignoring me. ‘Poor old fellow,’ he told Sam, who was trying to be brave. At one o’clock, Nathan went to bed, leaving our differences to grow colder.

Sam muttered and tossed. Every hour I took his temperature, and at one point I went down to the kitchen and heated water, which I carried back upstairs through the white-tinged darkness and silence. Bit by bit, I washed Sam, his thin white boyish legs, then his arms, his fingers, the white, exhausted face. Please get better, I kept saying to myself. Please, please, let there be nothing wrong.

At five thirty, I managed to get a couple of teaspoons of boiled water down him, and he dozed. I plummeted into sleep.