11

Bolognese

Keeping in mind Valeria’s advice about communication, I’ve sent my apologies to the Heston Fields committee and am preparing a meal this evening, a proper sit-down-and-talk meal. Cooking opens up a pocket of calm. Everything happens mechanically, my body obeying the bolognese-making habits of a lifetime, onions chopped and fizzing in oil, perfuming the kitchen as they slide around a cast iron pot. I pour a glass of Rioja, set the table for two and bring in a few sweet peas from the garden, arranging them in a yellow jug on the kitchen table. Dom’s at band practice and the house is quiet but for the radio and the background laughter of a panel game.

The phone rings and I let it go to answer machine. It’s Mum. She speaks in a rush, sending her love, but as usual she tries to cram too much information on the tape and it cuts off. Her voice – chatty, warm, reliable – causes me stop and stare through the kitchen window.

Six-thirty comes and Pete isn’t home. I finish my glass of wine. Seven arrives and seven-thirty. I pour another and send him a text. Eight o’clock passes. I boil a small amount of spaghetti for myself and drain it, then regard it without appetite, leave it in the colander and settle on the old sofa beside the garden door. It’s a worn chintz, something that once belonged to Pete’s parents. I’m intending to make a list of grant application letters, but the list turns into a doodle and I get lost in a network of loops and boxes while evening springs up over the garden.

He comes in at nine-thirty. ‘Sitting in the dark?’ he says, turning on the standard lamp and draping his jacket over a chair. At the sink he fills a glass with cold water and drinks it down.

‘You might have said you were going to be late.’

‘Sorry. I went for a pint with Bill. Switched my phone off.’

‘Right.’

‘Thought you were at one of your meetings anyway.’

‘Cancelled it.’

He says he’s eaten so I go about spooning the Bolognese into a bowl for the fridge. He takes a fork and tastes it.

‘Delicious.’

‘It’s only Bolognese.’

He sighs, sits down at the kitchen table and pours himself a glass of wine while I busy about making more noise than is necessary. After a tense pause he speaks. ‘Look, we’ve got the Ofsted inspectors in next week and I can’t handle this right now, Tessa. I’ve told you I’m sorry about all that make-over stuff. I don’t know what else to say.’

‘Sorry won’t make everything slot nicely back into place.’ I’m making room in the fridge for the cling-film-covered bowl. This wasn’t how we were supposed to start off, and I definitely wasn’t going to dig at him, but now the words are out.

He shakes his head as if at some private joke. ‘Everything wasn’t nicely in place.’

By this time we should be on the sofa side by side. This was supposed to be our turning point. I’d imagined laying my head on his chest, him stroking my hair.

‘What d’you mean?’ I say, closing the fridge. He’s rotating his wine glass in small circles from the base. He gives me his weary face, shakes his head again and sighs.

‘I’m not one of your kids, Pete, I don’t want the Mr Perry treatment.’

‘You know what the problem is: you’re never here. You’re always in a meeting, or at a committee, or off at some climate camp or other.’

‘Twice, I went to the climate camp twice. And I’ve asked you to come to things.’

‘I don’t want to spend my evenings around more tables or my weekend in a tent.’

‘You used to love camping.’

‘We were younger then.’

‘You want me to sit watching telly with you all night.’

‘No.’

‘What then?’

He looks at me squarely. ‘I want a wife.’

His words go into me. ‘What am I, a mirage?’ I lean back on the counter.

‘You’re married to your campaigns. If it’s not saving the post office it’s the library and if it’s not that it’s rescuing a patch of scrubby field no one’s bothered about.’

‘You’re not bothered about.’

‘Don’t you get enough of it at work all day?’

He stands up and goes to look out at the garden. One of the doors is open, it’s a warm night but the perfume from the honeysuckle bush isn’t soothing us. He massages the muscles at his neck.

‘So I’m a disappointment,’ I say to his back.

‘No, no of course not. Don’t be defensive.’

He’s right, that is defensive, but I feel defensive. I pick up the colander of cold spaghetti and slide it into the bin. It has congealed, solid and contoured like a section of brain. ‘You want a woman who has facials and hair appointments and spends Saturday in the shops.’

‘It’s not about how you look.’

‘No? It is from where I’m standing.’

‘It’s the way you go about things. You don’t have to save the world all by yourself. It’s not always down to you.’ That expression again, saving the world, the same one Maggie used. He softens his voice. ‘I know you care and I respect that. But it’s…’ He stalls for the words, ‘You’re constantly distracted by the next great cause, as if your life depended on it.’ He turns to face me. ‘What’s it for? You might as well still be living on that common for all I see of you, and when I do you’re preoccupied, always on a mission. It’s like an obsession, this need to be do-gooding all the time.’

‘Do-gooding?’

He rakes a hand through his hair. ‘What else is it?’

‘I like to have a purpose that’s all.’ I’m still holding the colander. ‘You want me to be someone else.’

‘No.’

‘Yes you do, why else did you agree to that programme?’

‘A bit of make-up and some new clobber, is that such a drama? It was supposed to be a treat. Honestly. We’ve been through this…’ It doesn’t matter how many times we’ve been through it, it still hurts. He shakes his head as if he’s decided something. ‘But I tell you what, I don’t want to live like this any more, I’m sick of you carrying on like a one woman United Nations. I’m sick of ethical bananas and carbon footprints and hemp bloody shower gel. I don’t want a goat for Christmas. I don’t want to walk around my own house in the winter wearing three jumpers. I want to fill the bath up, I want to…’

‘You want, you want. Why don’t you just have done and trade me in for someone else then?’

He recoils as if he’s been struck, and the flutter that passes across his face exposes him. Because this is the man I’ve been married to for twenty-four years, I understand what the flutter signifies: it’s guilt.

‘Have you..?’

‘No.’

In the still kitchen his breathing comes heavily. I’m at the sink holding the colander. He picks up the wine glass again and drinks. Oh my God. Surely not, that’s mad isn’t it? This is Pete, my husband, solid, bearded, practical Pete, Mr Perry, Head of History. The silence shivers between us, there’s a sudden sick feeling in my stomach.

‘Is there…?’ I can’t say the words someone else because they’re too surreal. He blinks at me.

‘Will you say something!’ My voice is so loud it startles us both.

‘It’s over,’ he says.

‘What’s over?’ The colander is a dead weight.

He takes a deep breath and whatever it is he’s going to say, I don’t want to hear, but it’s too late because he’s saying it anyway. Or trying to.

‘I did something stupid. It’s over now, not that it was… it didn’t mean anything… I stopped it, it could have gone on, but I didn’t let it.’

It’s an effort to match him to the words. The mouth moving is Pete’s because it’s the same one that reminds me we need to buy milk, but the words coming out are foreign. I have the odd sensation of being in a badly dubbed film. What my husband should be saying is, Let’s forget about all this make-over rubbish and start again, but what he’s actually saying is… what is he saying?

‘You had an affair?’ He’s staring at me like someone hungry pleading for a morsel of food. I repeat the question.

‘Not that no… it was more of an accidental… fling.’

‘A fling?’ He makes himself sound like a debutante in a Noel Coward play.

‘But it’s over.’

‘…as in the flinging off your clothes variety?’ The ground feels like water. ‘So what you mean is that you’ve been sleeping with someone?’ He says nothing. ‘Who?’

It’s a long moment before he gives up the information. The house is still but for the low purr of the fridge. ‘A supply teacher.’

‘Fresh out of teacher-training college?’

He looks up. ‘It was nothing. I didn’t want anything to happen.’

‘Am I supposed to be grateful? I don’t believe this.’

‘Look, it didn’t mean anything. I promise.’

‘When did it start?’

‘It’s over. It only lasted a few weeks. It was a mistake.’

‘When did it start? How?’ I am shouting, trying to shout. My voice doesn’t feel like my own. Nothing feels like my own.

He sighs. He is not answering. ‘Tess, I’m so sorry.’

I start laughing. He’s startled, spot-lit by the lamp, his hair sticking up like an exclamation mark from where he’s raked through it.

‘What a perfect day.’

‘Tessa.’

I look away from the face I know better than my own, towards the sweet peas in their yellow jug. ‘Get up, go to work, find out council isn’t renewing funding for charity that’s taken four years to establish. Come home, discover husband having an affair.’

‘What? They can’t do that,’ he says. ‘After all the work you’ve…’

His sentence dissolves. The letter came today. Two brief paragraphs telling us our grant has been pulled. We won’t last more than another four or five months without it. He’s the one I needed to talk to: he’s the one I needed to come home to, because even if things aren’t perfect he’s my husband. But I don’t know him. The familiar kitchen suddenly feels alien too, as if it belongs to someone else. I’m leaning against the sink, still holding the colander. The room and everything in it is a bleary mess.