But as I look up, eyes shaded now, I see a flicker of something cross Ed’s face.
‘Just a beer for me,’ he says, snippier than anyone in this image should be.
Am I being paranoid or is Ed letting me know that I shouldn’t be so flash as to order a cocktail when my sexually deviant past has resulted in me leaving my job and us being short of money?
I try to let it go but all I can think of is the thing I am trying to let go and I know it will come out in the end so I might as well speed on to the inevitable and get it out of the way. Eventually, it bursts out of my seams.
‘Should I not have ordered the cocktail?’ I ask. I’ve already downed half of it.
Ed looks at my glass and laughs. ‘Bit late now.’
I pause. ‘I’ll watch my spending,’ I say, chastised. ‘I know it’s my fault we’ve lost an income.’
He rolls his eyes. ‘There’s no need to be a martyr, that’s not what I was saying,’ he says. ‘Jesus, we’re supposed to be getting away. Does everything have to come back to that?’
But you did it, I think. You did it!
We sit in silence for a minute before I change the subject.
There is a certain type of misery you can only feel when you are in a setting so beautiful, and you can almost touch the joy you could or should feel there, if only you weren’t in a slump.
I look around. Across from us there is a hammock between two trees.
‘Swing?’ I say, trying.
‘My allergies are playing up,’ he sniffs. ‘Being in the trees won’t help.’
I’m embarrassed at how juxtaposed Ed and I are to the indulgent happiness of our setting. This garden needs honeymooners and dirty weekends and kissing in the hammock with one last G&T you’ll regret in the morning. It needs sunburnt shoulders and too many Aperol Spritzes and scallop starters and holding hands in the gazebo. It needs proposals and flings. Instead it has us. Wonky, unright us.
Stroppy, I walk over to the hammock and swing alone, still nursing the first cocktail while desperate to order the indulgent second that I don’t deserve. This weekend would be better with my friends, I think, than my own husband. Cora would have ordered champagne, everyone would be piled into the hammock, I wouldn’t have a knot in my stomach like the one I have now. What does this say about my marriage?
I feel petulant. Why come here if he was going to be like this? Across the lawn, Ed scrolls on his phone with his humble beer by his side. I slap on a smile and take a selfie for my Instagram. If I’m going to grow the numbers, I need content, whatever the mood. The equivalent of dragging yourself to work on a bad day.
I see the waiter look between us at this picture and register its anomalies.
Eventually Ed heads over (braving the trees) and mutters that the waiter has told him our room is ready, so I heave myself out of the hammock – no hand reaches out to help me – and we go to check in.
The heavy wooden door slams behind us and we are alone again, face to face.
Ed sits down on the bed, rumpling the bedspread as his own face does something similar and crumples.
‘I’m sorry,’ he says, real Ed for a moment and I am caught off guard, realising that for all of his stoic appearance, he’s in pain too. I’m torn, like so often, between wanting to hug him and wanting to slap him.
I remember when he proposed to me, in a similar setting to this one but in the Highlands. Frost not heatwave, hot toddies not Prosecco but the countryside was pretty; the hotel fancy.
I came back from the toilet to find a piano playing and Ed on one knee in the middle of the restaurant looking so like something out of Gone With The Wind that I stood there and stared at him for a good five seconds before I remembered he needed a reply.
‘Yes,’ I replied. ‘I forgot to say that bit. But yes.’
And we kissed more than was appropriate for a restaurant and then skipped dessert and moved the kissing to a more appropriate bedroom that looked similar to this one. Oak beams, sheets that felt brand new and this beautiful man with his big eyes standing in front of me, then, now.
And now I make a split-second decision and I kiss him. It’s hard to say I want to kiss him because he’s irritated the hell out of me today but I want to want to kiss him and I think that’s enough. I want my marriage to work. I don’t want to cheat with Joseph. I want us to stick together. I want Poppy’s family to be in one place. But if I’m Sheryl Sandberg leaning in to the kiss, Ed is physically leaning out. His whole body is reacting on autopilot to pull away from me, even as his lips touch mine. His arms are flailing awkwardly out to the sides.
I pull away and look at him and suddenly I get it.
‘Oh,’ I say, flat and lucid. ‘I’m repugnant to you.’
When I made that video, I had never met Ed. I didn’t cheat on him but I may as well have. We are that couple. We want to get it back and we are making the effort but. But.
‘You’re not repugnant to me,’ says Ed, exasperated. ‘Do you have to be so dramatic? It’s not easy. All I can think of is you with them.’
All he can picture when he thinks of me naked is me having sex with somebody else. All he can feel about my body is shame. I slept with somebody else – some other people – in a different lifetime but it might as well have been behind
