ROAN GETS HOME just before seven that night. Cate watches him flick through the letters on the kitchen table. He gets to the letter in the white envelope with the card in it and she sees it, a crackle of something passes through him, like a tiny pulse of electricity. His fingers stumble, vaguely, but he keeps flicking, then wordlessly puts the letters back down on the kitchen table.
“You still up for drinks tonight?” he asks.
“Definitely,” she responds quickly. “I did have a look online, but I couldn’t find anything that didn’t need to be booked.”
“Maybe we should just head into the village. Go to the least Valentiney-looking pub we can find?”
“That’s fine with me. Eightish?”
Roan nods. “Eightish sounds good. I think I might just head out for a run, then. What time’s dinner?”
She glances at the oven, where Josh’s chicken strips are cooking. She hadn’t thought about dinner for Roan. For her. “Are we not eating out tonight?”
“Can do. Fine with me. I’m not that hungry anyway.”
She opens her mouth to say, “Oh, that’ll be because you went and had lunch in town somewhere, with someone, for some reason.” But that’s not how she wants the night to start. Instead she smiles and says, “Great. Have a good run.”
Georgia appears a moment later. She goes to the bread bin and takes out the expensive rye and sourdough loaf that Cate buys especially for her. She puts it in the toaster and then goes to the fridge, pulls open the vegetable drawer, rummages for a moment, emerges with the fresh avocado in her hand, slices it over the sink, tugs out the stone with the tip of the knife, drops the stone in the bin, mashes the avocado in the same bowl in which she always mashes her avocado, grinds salt into it, smears it over the two large slices of toast, sits it on the table with a large glass of apple and mango juice, and bites into it.
Georgia sees Cate watching her. “You all right, Mum?” she says.
Cate nods, shaking herself out of her mild reverie. “I’m fine, yes.”
Georgia picks up the Banksy Valentine’s card with her spare hand and examines it. “Aw,” she says. “Sweet. Dad got you a card. Bless. What’s it mean?”
“It means…” She tugs a piece of kitchen towel from the roll and uses it to mop up some spilled tea on the counter. “I don’t know. I think maybe he thinks I’m still a bit sensitive after what happened last year.”
“Oh, you mean your crisis?”
“Yes. Our crisis.”
“That was so weird,” Georgia says, her mouth full of food. “Just so, so weird. What was it even about?”
They’d never told the children what it was about. They’d never told the children how close they’d come to splitting up. They’d just said they were having a bit of a crisis, totally normal after so many years together, that they were going to spend a few days apart and see how they felt after. And then there hadn’t really been an after. Roan had moved back. They’d gone skiing. Life had continued.
Cate shakes her head. “I’m still not too sure,” she says. “Just one of those things. Happens to every couple, I guess.”
“But you’re cool now? You and Dad?”
“Yes. We’re cool now. In fact, we’re going out to the pub tonight.”
“Ooh, ooh, can I come too?”
Cate raises an eyebrow. “What on earth for?” She laughs.
“I like pubs.”
“You’re so strange.”
“What’s strange about liking pubs?”
“Nothing.” Cate smiles. “Nothing.” Then she says, “Get any cards today?”
“Mum, it is very old-fashioned of you to ask such a question. You should be asking me if I gave anyone a card. I’m not some passive blob, sitting round waiting for boys to do things to impress me.”
“Good,” she says. “Glad to hear it. So did you give anyone a card?”
“No way!” she says. “Have you seen the boys at my school?” She puts the Valentine’s card down again. “Where’s Dad?”
“Gone running.”
“Freak.”
Georgia and Cate share an anti-running sensibility. Neither of them is designed for running. They get stitches too easily and feel the ground hard and heavy beneath their feet. They also both think that Roan looks faintly ridiculous in his Lycra outfits.
Josh enters the kitchen in his shambling, slightly lost way, as though half-heartedly looking for something. He comes to Cate and hugs her. She smells school on him, and the deodorant he always wears. Then he reaches into his back pocket and pulls out a battered envelope.
“Happy Valentine’s,” he says.
She opens the envelope and finds a card he’s made himself out of black paper with a red paper heart stuck on the front attached by a paper hinge. Inside it reads, “To the best mum in the world. I love you so much.”
He’s made her a Valentine’s card every year since he was tiny. He’s one of those boys: loves his mum more than anything in the world, puts her on a pedestal. In a way it’s glorious. In another, she feels worried that she’s only ever one bad decision or harsh word away from completely destroying him.
“Thank you, my lovely boy,” she says, kissing him on the cheek.
“You’re welcome,” he says. Then, “What’s for dinner?”
She switches off the oven and takes out his chicken and places the card next to the two already standing on the kitchen table. And as she does so, her heart jolts.
Georgia has opened the white envelope addressed to Roan; she has slid the card out and is about to open it.
“Oh my God, Georgia! What are you doing?” She snatches the card from Georgia’s hand.
“God! Why are you overreacting? It’s just a card.”
“Yes, but it’s addressed to Dad. You can’t go around opening other people’s mail.”
“You open mine!”
“Yes, but you’re a child! And I would never open something like that, that looks so personal.” She picks up the envelope, hoping to slide the card back in, but in classic Georgia fashion, she’s virtually torn the envelope clean in half to get the card out. “Oh, fuck. Georgia. I can’t believe you did that. What were you thinking?”
Georgia shrugs. “I just wanted to see who was sending Dad Valentine’s cards.”
Cate forces the card roughly into the bottom half of the torn envelope and shoves it in a drawer. She can’t deal with this right now.
“Aren’t you going to look? See who it’s from?”
“No, I am not. It’s none of my business.”
“But how can you say that? He’s your husband. Valentine’s cards from strangers is, literally, one hundred percent your business.”
“It’s probably just one of his patients—i.e., none of my business whatsoever,” Cate says.
“But if it’s one of his patients, how the hell did they get this address?”
“No idea,” Cate says. “Maybe it was written on something in his office. I don’t know.”
“Hm.” Georgia raises her brow dramatically and puts a finger to her mouth. “Well, have a nice Valentine’s night at the pub, then,” she says facetiously. She takes her empty plate to the sink, letting it fall loudly as she always does. “Anything good for dessert?”
Cate passes her the box of chocolate-covered honeycomb, then turns to face the kitchen window, where she sees her face reflected back at her, the face of an older woman who looks just like her, a woman whose life, she feels very strongly, is heading down a dark, twisty path to somewhere she doesn’t want to be.
Her fingers find the handle of the kitchen drawer, the one where Roan’s mystery card is hidden. She pulls the drawer open, then shuts it again, very firmly, and leaves the room.
Roan doesn’t get back until well after eight o’clock. Cate calls him three times between 8:05 and 8:15, but he doesn’t answer his phone. When he finally appears in the hallway at 8:20, sweaty, almost gaunt-looking, he goes straight to the bedroom to shower in the en suite.
“I’ll be five minutes,” he shouts to her down the corridor.
Cate sighs and picks up her phone, passes a few moments mindlessly scrolling through Facebook. The card is still in the drawer. She still has not looked at it.
At 8:40, Roan is finally ready and waiting to go.
They say goodbye to the children, who are both in their rooms doing homework, or at least doing something on their laptops that they claim is homework.
The air is damp and cloying as they head up the hill into the village, and Cate feels her skin grow clammy. She thinks of reaching out to hold Roan’s hand, but she can’t bring herself to do it. These days, holding hands, like cuddling in bed or instigating sex or kissing on the lips, feels like an expression of approval, like stars on a reward chart, actions that need to have been deserved or earned in some way. To hold Roan’s hand now would be to suggest that they were still the same people they’d been twenty-five, thirty years ago, that she still feels the way she felt about him then, about them, but she can’t negate everything that has happened since. She can’t pretend that none of it ever happened.
“So,” she says, “long run today?”
“Yeah, well, I had a big lunch. I was making sure I had an appetite for dinner.”
“Oh, what did you have for lunch?”
“Big bowl of pasta, with some kind of creamy sauce. I hadn’t been expecting the creamy sauce but ate the whole lot anyway.”
“At your desk?”
“No, no, I went into town.”
His tone is light. There is no sign that there was anything untoward about his lunch in town, but her voice still comes out wrong, slightly high-pitched. “Oh, what was that for, then?”
“Just met up with Gerry. You know. From UCL? He wants me to run a first-year module for him next year in childhood psychoses. Three hours a week. A hundred an hour.”
“Oh,” she says, the strange darkness starting to lift slightly. “That’s amazing! Are you going to do it?”
“Too right I am! Extra twelve hundred pounds a month. That’ll pay for a decent holiday or two. A couple of new sofas when we move home. Plus I really like Gerry. And I got free pasta. So yeah. A no-brainer, really.”
He glances down at her and he smiles, and it’s a great, great smile, free of any editing or hidden agenda. He had a good lunch with a good person and now has a good job that will provide them with a good holiday and some good sofas. She cannot help but return the smile in the same spirit.
“That’s brilliant,” she says. “Really brilliant.”
She wants to ask why he didn’t mention the lunch when they were talking this morning. She would tell him if she was meeting someone for lunch to talk about a job. But she bats the complaint away and holds on to the good feeling.
They reach the top of the hill, and Hampstead village opens up to them like a dream or a film set as it always does. They find a pub down a cobbled alleyway with fires burning in the grates and dogs stretched out on gnarled old floorboards, and although they’d said it would be an anti-Valentine night, Roan comes back from the bar with a bottle of champagne and two chilled glasses and they toast his new job, and their faces fall in and out of shadow in the light of a dancing flame, and Roan’s hand finds hers on the seat between them and he takes it in his and it feels nice, and for quite some time Cate forgets about the card in the drawer at home.