A Spot Of Bother

36

When David had gone Jean wandered down to the kitchen in her dressing gown.

Everything glowed a little. The flowers in the wallpaper. The clouds piled in the sky at the end of the garden like snowdrifts.

She made a coffee and a ham sandwich and took a couple of paracetamol for her knee.

And the glow began to fade a little.

Upstairs, when David was holding her, it seemed possible. Putting all of this behind her. Starting a new life. But now that he was gone it seemed preposterous. A wicked idea. Something people did on television.

She looked at the wall clock. She looked at the bills in the toast rack and the cheese plate with the ivy pattern.

She suddenly saw her whole life laid out, like pictures in a photo album. Her and George standing outside the church in Daventry, the wind blowing the leaves off the trees like orange confetti, the real celebration only starting when they left their families behind the following morning and drove to Devon in George’s bottle-green Austin.

Stuck in hospital for a month after Katie was born. George coming in every day with fish-and-chips. Jamie on his red tricycle. The house in Clarendon Lane. Ice on the windows that first winter and frozen flannels you had to crack. It all seemed so solid, so normal, so good.

You looked at someone’s life like that and you never saw what was missing.

She washed up her sandwich plate and stacked it in the rack. The house seemed suddenly rather drab. The scale round the base of the taps. The cracks in the soap. The sad cactus.

Perhaps she wanted too much. Perhaps everyone wanted too much these days. The washer-dryer. The bikini figure. The feelings you had when you were twenty-one.

She headed upstairs and, as she changed into her clothes, she could feel herself slipping back into her old self.

I want to go to bed with you at night and I want to wake up with you in the morning.

David didn’t understand. You could say no. But you couldn’t have that kind of conversation and pretend it never happened.

She missed George.