Two weeks later, Eleanor sat on her bed, surrounded by empty boxes. The day after the house clearance, Zoe had told them she was moving out. She didn’t say why – there was no need to – and she left that day. On Tuesday, they got home from work and all her belongings were gone.
Eleanor wandered round the basement rooms, absent-mindedly picking up the last traces of her: a rusty Kirby grip, a wrinkled paper bag stained with grease, ketchup and crumbs. Zoe had forgotten to clear out under the bed and there was a bra, a book and a glove underneath it, covered in a film of dust. Eleanor brushed them down and put them in a box, to keep. Zoe hadn’t said where she was going, but Eleanor was sure she would be in touch.
Eleanor started packing a few days later. She refused to stay in the house and it was unsustainable now: without Zoe, they couldn’t afford the mortgage. They would have to sell it. She started looking for flats to rent while the sale went through. Richard resisted: they couldn’t get off the property ladder, they didn’t have the money to move. They could find someone else for the room. He suggested that they go away, think about it, clear their heads. Eleanor was resolute. They were putting the house on the market.
She rang her mother and asked to borrow some money, listening patiently while Carolyn told her that she thought she’d got her life back now and she would never have had a child if she’d known she would still be footing the bill for it thirty-seven years later and what if she wanted to go abroad or back to art school? Eleanor calmly explained that there was a problem with the house that was making her ill. They were going to sell it and buy somewhere smaller in a less expensive part of London. She would repay the loan as soon as the sale had gone through, but in the meantime they needed to cover the cost of the move and somewhere to rent. The money arrived in Eleanor’s bank account the next day. She knew that if she’d said she was considering leaving Richard, she would have got more.
But it was enough – enough to rent a flat, to retrain, to get a flight, to start something. She hadn’t told Richard about it. The money was entirely hers.
So she could leave now, she could go – there was nothing tying her here any more. They would sell the house, Rosie and Isobel’s world would be disrupted anyway and they would be too young to remember a time when their parents had been together. Richard would be generous with maintenance. She scrolled through properties online, imagining herself in the kitchen, making meals for the freezer. Richard would have the children half the time: she would have baths, read books, stand outside pubs after work again, relearning how to be chatty and amusing, even flirtatious. She would get the bus by herself and unlock the door to an empty flat. There would be no endless back and forth about swimming lessons and playdates; the day-to-day decisions about Isobel and Rosie would be her own. She would check the locks and windows at night and keep them safe. She could resign, find work that satisfied her. She felt her body loosen as she clicked through floor plans, photographs, local schools.
Her flat would be part of a large block. It would be big enough for the three of them, but small enough for her to know what was going on in every room. It would have two or three entrances – a security gate, an outer door, her own door – and she would sleep peacefully cocooned in the warren of corridors, lifts, staircases and identical front doors. The walls would be solid and new. She could call maintenance if anything went wrong.
The door slammed downstairs. She heard the children chattering and Richard switching on the TV. She heard him say, ‘Daddy’s just going upstairs for a minute,’ and clatter up the stairs. It irritated her, mildly, the way he felt entitled to make that much noise. He burst into the room and knelt down at the foot of the bed, facing her, extending his hand towards her.
‘Eleanor, I need to talk to you.’
She felt a jolt of panic.
‘I’m sorry I’ve been fighting you this week. In fact, I’m sorry I’ve been fighting you since we’ve been here. I know you’re right about the house – I just didn’t want to know it. It’s crushing to have to leave, but it was never the right thing. It was just too much, for all of us. I see that now.’
She could hear the theme tune of the children’s TV programme. She was bluntly, desperately angry. Her new flat. The money. Please, please don’t take this away from me.
He was looking up at her, his hand still outstretched. ‘We should never have bought it; I should have listened to you from the beginning. We’ll move, we’ll go, as soon as you want. We’ll work out the money somehow. I’d live in a cardboard box with you, if that would make you happy.’
Her new kitchen. The security gate. It was all draining away. She didn’t know whether to try and keep hold of it. Richard was staring at her, looking anxious and afraid.
‘It’s still what you want, isn’t it? To move? To start again?’
She thought about empty rooms, her quiet weekends, her career. She thought about family, predictability and home. She paused, studying his face, and then reached for his hand.
‘Yes,’ she said.