Ruth was not, in general, a woman given to impetuous acts of violence. Working as a teacher in a secondary school, you had to be able to keep your cool and at least pretend you were in control, despite your hands twitching to strangle the next gobby teenager who kicked off in your lesson. She might glower when somebody cut her up at the traffic lights, but she didn’t lean on her horn cursing and yelling, like some did. Even as a child, when her younger sister Evie had ‘accidentally’ let Ruth’s hamster out of the cage, never to be seen again, Ruth had not resorted to fisticuffs or screaming, preferring instead to freeze her out for a full, icy week and then guilt-trip her about it for . . . well, ever since, pretty much. (Poor Mr Woffles. Gone but not forgotten.)
Lately, though, things had changed. She felt angry all the time. So bloody angry. She had recently shrieked, ‘Careful!’ at an elderly lady in Waitrose for short-sightedly ramming her with her trolley. At school, the slightest thing sent her into a detention-giving rage: late homework, bad attitude, and even, once, when Florrie Malcolm kept sniffing, despite being told to blow her nose (was there anything more irritating than a sniffing child?). At home, she found herself slamming doors and muttering under her breath and drinking far too much red wine in the evenings. Sometimes there might also be a few hate-texts to Tim and/or Amanda, if she’d had a particularly bad day, and a glass too many.
Tim. How she hated treacherous, lying, spineless ratbag Tim. She lay in bed at night fantasizing about ways she could torture or injure him, scenarios where he begged for her forgiveness, weeping frightened tears of guilt and anguish. ‘Please, Ruth, please,’ he would sob, reaching out to her imploringly. ‘I’ll do anything.’
‘No chance,’ she always replied in these fantasies, her voice dripping with contempt. ‘You blew it, Tim. And I’ll never forgive you. Never!’
How ugly an imploding marriage was, seen close-up, its innards revealed in all their mess and bitterness. And what a knife in the guts it was to realize that the man with whom you had walked down the aisle – the man with whom you’d made vows and promises and children, for heaven’s sake – was a complete and utter bastard deep down. An incompetent bastard at that. Given that he was an academic at the university, his brain bursting with philosophical conundrums, his entire existence taking place on a higher plane than most of the population, Tim had turned out to be remarkably stupid when it came to covering his bastardly tracks. Higher plane, my butt, as her students might say. At the end of the day, Tim was a pathetic excuse of a man, led by his dick, who’d been dumb enough to leave an incriminating receipt in his trouser pocket; an incriminating receipt that Ruth had duly found when she sorted the dirty washing for the machine.
Of course, if Tim had had the slightest shred of decency, the merest hint of loyalty, the faintest idea about the meaning of ‘Till death do us part’, he would not have had the receipt in the first place, would he? None of this would have happened. He and Ruth would have continued in their successful shared bubble of sterling careers, a tasteful home, clever children and nice holidays twice a year in the South of France and Cornwall. Was it too much to ask for a husband to consider that such a carefully constructed life, such visible symbols of achievement, might be enough? It had been enough for her, after all.
As she stared at the crumpled piece of paper that fateful day, the itemized list danced tauntingly before her eyes: Luxury suite, champagne, one steak dinner, one goat’s cheese tart, room-service breakfast x 2. As each word reverberated around her head, the world lurched and tilted like a fairground waltzer, and Ruth sank breathlessly to her knees on the kitchen floor, a sea of school shirts and muddy football kit around her.
It was Friday morning, her precious day off, and the house was empty. Sunlight bounced through the gleaming French windows of the kitchen, warming the stone flags and twinkling on the empty milk glasses that the children had forgotten to stack in the dishwasher. Next door’s cat rolled in the dust of the patio outside, eyes shut in bliss; the forecast was for another beautiful hot July day.
Ruth didn’t care about the niceties of the weather, though. She didn’t even register the unwelcome presence of that wretched cat, which was forever leaving disgusting deposits in her lettuce bed. All she could think about was the receipt. Hotel du Vin, Brighton, it said; dirty weekend away, it said, even though Tim had told her, quite plainly, that he was going to a boring university conference in Manchester.
Her heart hammering a painful, fast tattoo, she instinctively reached out for her mobile and dialled the number of Amanda, her best friend from university, who lived ten minutes away in Jericho. Amanda would be able to reassure her in a way that Louise, her twin sister, would not. While Louise was loyal to the very core, she could be infuriatingly woolly at times. Amanda, on the other hand, was pragmatic and clear-thinking. If there was a sane explanation to be had for the rogue receipt, Amanda would shine a light on it immediately.
‘Hi, Ruth, how are you?’
Ruth licked her lips, her voice suddenly deserting her. ‘I . . . I found something,’ she said.
‘What is it?’
‘It’s a receipt for a dirty weekend in Brighton. Hotel du Vin – no expense spared. Breakfast in bed and room service for two people, Amanda.’
There was a shocked-sounding intake of breath. ‘Oh God,’ said Amanda.
Ruth was engulfed by a torrent of black, swirling fury for Tim. ‘What the hell does this mean?’ she burst out. ‘I mean . . . what sort of person does that?’
She waited for Amanda to reply with the sane explanation, the don’t-be-so-silly reassurance that Tim would never do anything so awful, that there must be some kind of mistake. Instead came a choked sob. ‘Oh God,’ said Amanda again. ‘I’m so sorry.’
Ruth frowned, not understanding. Sorry? Had she misheard?
‘He was going to tell you,’ Amanda cried. ‘He promised me he’d tell you.’
A swarm of bees seemed to invade Ruth’s head, their buzzing loud and insistent. She shut her eyes, trying to block them out, but they only grew in volume. No, thought Ruth. Not Amanda. Please not Amanda. ‘What,’ she said, enunciating her words carefully, for fear of screaming, ‘do you mean?’
A terrible silence fell, a silence of guilt and conspiracy. You could almost hear Amanda scrabbling to think fast, to conjure up some plausible excuse for what she’d just said. Nothing came.
‘It was you?’ Ruth said into the silence. ‘It was you with Tim in Brighton?’ The bees buzzed even louder, and everything went black before her eyes for a moment, as if she was about to faint. No way. This could not be happening. Tell me it’s not happening, Amanda, she thought desperately. Tell me, goddammit!
‘Oh Christ,’ Amanda said, her voice high and scared. ‘Oh Christ, Ruth, I’m so sorry.’
She was sorry? Amanda was sorry? So it was true, then. This was happening.
Ruth opened and shut her mouth a few times, but no words seemed adequate at this point in the conversation. She hung up, then collapsed, shaking, onto her expensive stone floor amidst all the washing. Then she opened her mouth and screamed so loud it frightened away the cat.
Since then, Ruth’s marriage had been ripped apart, with her and the children left sprawling among the broken shards. Tim had deserted them for Amanda and her sleek, stylish flat, while Ruth was left to pick up the pieces. Thea, her youngest daughter, had cried pitifully every night for an entire month, wanting bedtime cuddles from Daddy, sobbing herself to sleep, her cheeks pink and wet when she eventually fell into fitful dreams. Hugo, now ten, had become sullen and moody, prone to kicking things and scowling all the time. And Izzy, her sweet middle child, sat at the piano playing mournful songs about how much she missed her dad, and seemed to have forgotten how to smile.
Ruth, who had always prided herself on having the sort of life to which others aspired, felt embarrassed to be at the centre of such a messy, hurtful situation. Her parents and sisters rallied round, of course, but she couldn’t stand their concerned faces, their offers of help. ‘It’s fine, we’re fine,’ she kept repeating, with increasing brittleness. ‘We’re all absolutely fine.’
They were not fine. Nowhere near. The cracks went on appearing, however fast she tried to fix each one. Hugo disgraced himself at the end-of-term concert by sticking up two fingers behind the head teacher’s back (the first time he had ever been in trouble at school), and Izzy’s teacher phoned to find out why Izzy had fallen out with her best friends and no longer wanted to play her recorder in the school band. ‘I was just wondering if you could maybe shed some light on the situation – if there was something at home we should know about?’ the teacher asked, her false sympathy barely disguising the nosiness.
‘Everything’s fine, thank you,’ Ruth snapped. ‘Not that it’s any of your business.’
Thank goodness for the summer holidays, when they could all mooch around at home, and didn’t have to face anyone else or answer awkward questions. Weeks earlier, Ruth had organized a packed schedule of extracurricular activities for them: a sports camp for Hugo, music fun-days for Izzy and dance clubs for Thea, but the children were resolute in not wanting to go to anything, and for once Ruth didn’t have the energy to argue. When it came to the matter of going away on holiday, Tim took the children to the villa they’d booked near Cannes, leaving Ruth home alone for the loneliest, most miserable fortnight of her life.
Then, at the end of August, she drove them down to Cornwall, for a week at the cottage in Rock where they’d spent many happy summer holidays in the past. It was all so strange without Tim, though. The balance of the family felt wrong; she knew she was more shrewish and impatient, without his easy-going nature to temper her. Even though they did all their usual favourite things – swimming and sandcastle-building, visits to Evie and Ed in Carrawen, ferry-trips across to Padstow, with fish and chips on the harbour wall – it felt the most colossal effort. Despite her best attempts, she spent much of the week shouting at the children and bursting into frequent tears. (‘That was the most crap holiday ever,’ Hugo muttered as they arrived back in Oxford. She couldn’t bring herself to fake disagreement, let alone reprimand him for his bad language.)
Still. They were getting there. Gradually acclimatizing. Taking it one painful day at a time. And at least she didn’t have to put up with Tim’s smelly feet, the snoring, or routine sex any more. Small mercies.
Summer over, the four of them slogged through a new term at school. Thea turned four and they had a jolly little party for her. Izzy joined the school choir and started to smile again now and then. Hugo marked his eleventh birthday with his first scattering of acne and another stern word from the headmaster about ‘showing off’, but Ruth clung to the hope that he’d get over this before he had to knuckle down to GCSEs in a few years. She was so going to blame Tim if Hugo got anything less than a full set of A* grades.
She limped into December, her reserves of energy at an all-time low, her enthusiasm for the gaudy, festive commercialism of Christmas a big fat zero. Ruth’s sole moment of triumph came when Tim dropped the children back, having had them one Sunday, and she announced that she was taking the children down to Cornwall for Christmas and he wouldn’t be able to see them. ‘Wh-what?’ he stammered, leaning against the jamb of the front door. (She no longer allowed him on the premises, insisting that he wait there, outside her territory, whenever he was picking up or dropping them off.)
‘I said, we’re going down to Carrawen for Christmas,’ she said smartly, relishing the sheer guttedness of his expression. Yes, Tim. Hadn’t expected that, had you? And it’s all your own fault, for shagging around behind my back. So there!
‘But . . .’ His face sagged with dismay. He had put on weight in recent months, she noticed. Getting jowly. Too many luxury dinners with snake-in-the-grass Amanda, no doubt. ‘But I want to see them at Christmas. You can’t just . . .’
His voice trailed away as she fixed him with her iciest glare. ‘Oh yes, I can. And I am. So get used to it, Tim.’ And get lost, she thought, shutting the door in his face.
Christmas in Cornwall. It would be heavenly to escape the misery that had pooled in the house for so many months, to leave Oxford and Tim far behind, to drive away and not look back. It would serve Tim right, being left childless over the festive period. She would not let him have his cake and eat it, no way. This was his punishment. He deserved every moment of missing them.
Of course, it wasn’t all about sticking it to her ex-husband. Absolutely not. She was going for a break, too. Her sister, Evie, had had her own share of life screw-ups in the past and wasn’t the kind of person to judge; plus Ed, as a chef, was sure to lay on the best Christmas dinner ever. Evie had even said Ruth wouldn’t have to lift a finger to help, and after nearly twenty years of cooking Christmas dinner for a crowd, of wrangling with giblets and being splashed with turkey fat, of writing mammoth lists and fighting her way through crowded, frenzied supermarkets to spend a fortune on food that people were usually too drunk or fussy to appreciate . . . Well, the thought of leaving that side of things to someone else was, quite frankly, sheer bliss.
Roll on Christmas. And roll on the end of this bloody dreadful year. It couldn’t be over fast enough.