3 June
I hear Ed’s key in the door as I am checking for an email from Jonathan White. I leap from my phone, guilty when he walks in, and I have no idea why. I am supposed to be keeping in touch with the lawyer; that’s the idea. But somehow everything connected to this whole thing makes me feel guilty, sheepish, part of a grubby cover-up.
My husband and I stare at each other.
‘Hey,’ he says, then walks over to kiss Poppy.
I can’t bring myself to reply.
I wipe down a table where we used to lose hours talking about friends and the news and how good the tagliatelle tasted. I look at photos framed on the window ledge that are looking less and less like us; these people squishing their faces up against each other to get closer. This naturally uptight Ed who had softened with that first fun wave of love. Who couldn’t be in a picture with me without kissing me. Who could hardly be near me without kissing me. We loved long weekends in European cities, taking our running kits and beating our times along the Seine, around big Madrid parks. We loved having no guilt about the oily prawns or the sticky cheese board we would eat afterwards. We loved falling into bed later, limbs falling into each other whenever we stirred. We loved, if we’re honest, always being the hot couple at whatever wedding we went to, the statuesque model-like pair, everyone telling us we looked like celebrities. It’s probably why we got a kick out of the blog.
The new us moves around each other oddly, like losing track of each other’s minds means we no longer know the shape of each other’s bodies either.
I wonder why again. Is it just the video? Or are his limbs touching somebody else’s now?
Knowing how it used to be makes it so much worse.
Without comparison we have no idea what’s good, what’s bad. We used to stick together, now we float around miles and miles apart.
‘Do you have any plans this weekend?’ asks Ed, tentative, like we are on a second date and he is nervously suggesting a third.
Do you have any plans? It used to be we. Now we exist on separate planes, our plans and weekends presumed to be spent apart. I’ve seen it happen in divorced couples, friends of my dad’s; this is the start of the end. You move away, gradually, until no one has the energy to put their boots on and trudge all that way back.
I look up, holding a mug with our faces on it. A wedding present from my half-sister Josephine, now about to get married herself but at the time too young to enter into the systemic politeness of a John Lewis gift list. ‘I got you a mug!’ she said, so pleased with herself. ‘It’s got your faces on!’ It was one of my favourite presents, to be honest, in a sea of fancy stuff with no feeling.
I think of Asha’s matching sets. I’m fond of this mug, though less so since looking at it started to feel like nostalgia for the old Ed and me.
‘I don’t think so,’ I say nervously to Ed now because where is this going? Do I need to steel myself? Is he suggesting couples counselling? A divorce lawyer?
Ed looks emboldened. ‘Let’s go away,’ he says, decisively.
This is a long way from what I was expecting.
‘Where are we going?’ I say.
‘Anywhere,’ he replies, almost desperate and I wish I could close the gap and cuddle him tightly. ‘Anywhere. We just need to be on our own, Scarlett. Out of these walls. My parents will have Poppy.’
But are we ready for this?
I think of Joseph and the night at the coffee shop – a place I have had to steadfastly avoid in the weeks since – and I cringe.
Alone. Away from home. With nothing to do except talk. Can we do that? I’m so angry with him for leaving me alone through this. For that life holiday at his parents’. Do I even want to do that?
I am still holding the mug and I look at it now. At our faces in the grainy picture on the side: happy, naive, sure. Split up? Not them. Not those people.
‘Yes,’ I say. Don’t give in, Scarlett. Don’t give in. ‘Let’s book something.’
And miraculously, I can feel something that is not dread.
Forty-eight hours later we are dropping Poppy and her sixteen bags at Ed’s parents’ amidst promises of Peppa Pig marathons and strawberry ice cream.
I take a deep breath before we walk into their huge modern house to drop her off. It’s the first time I’ve seen them since the video – both parties, I suspect, as keen to avoid each other so that Ed has done every drop-off with Poppy. Whole-family visits – with Ed and I barely speaking – have been off the table anyway. Ed and Poppy head off together while I run or sleep or cry.
‘Scarlett,’ says Phillip, as red-faced as a drinker. ‘Good to see you.’
Nancy, in her cashmere cardigan and thick glasses, gives me a hug in which she manages to barely touch me. Fingertips float just above my skin.
I look down at the floor.
I wouldn’t say we’d ever been close.
But there are nations and continents and time zones between us now and I am not sure we’ll ever stumble back over to sit in the same country, let alone the same sofa.
We stay only long enough to settle Poppy in and then Ed and I and our two tiny bags are dispatched to our country house twenty miles away amidst promises of happy hour mojitos and stomps in the forest.
I don’t connect to the Wi-Fi. My marriage has my undivided attention. If I want this relationship to work, I need to put effort in.
Ed and I sit at a table outside. I kick my sandals off and tilt my face up to the sun. I exhale, and it feels like I’ve been holding my breath for a month.
‘What can I get you?’ says a slightly sweaty waiter.
It’s one of those moments that so rarely combine to mean you’re outside in an idyllic setting when it’s actually hot in England and it seems a sign. It’s helping us be fun us. The grass is cut neatly like a lawn at Wimbledon, the flowers are bright and we are the only ones here. It’s like we’ve got our own mansion with our own sprawling gardens.
I smile, lady of the manor.
I order a Prosecco cocktail, and I am getting into this now.
Maybe we’ll be okay. Maybe we can spend tonight clawing it back.
I smile, take my sunglasses out of my bag.
But as I look up, eyes shaded now, I see a flicker of something cross Ed’s face.
‘Just a beer for me,’ he says, snippier than anyone in this image should be.
Am I being paranoid or is Ed letting me know that I shouldn’t be so flash as to order a cocktail when my sexually deviant past has resulted in me leaving my job and us being short of money?
I try to let it go but all I can think of is the thing I am trying to let go and I know it will come out in the end so I might as well speed on to the inevitable and get it out of the way. Eventually, it bursts out of my seams.
‘Should I not have ordered the cocktail?’ I ask. I’ve already downed half of it.
Ed looks at my glass and laughs. ‘Bit late now.’
I pause. ‘I’ll watch my spending,’ I say, chastised. ‘I know it’s my fault we’ve lost an income.’
He rolls his eyes. ‘There’s no need to be a martyr, that’s not what I was saying,’ he says. ‘Jesus, we’re supposed to be getting away. Does everything have to come back to that?’
But you did it, I think. You did it!
We sit in silence for a minute before I change the subject.
There is a certain type of misery you can only feel when you are in a setting so beautiful, and you can almost touch the joy you could or should feel there, if only you weren’t in a slump.
I look around. Across from us there is a hammock between two trees.
‘Swing?’ I say, trying.
‘My allergies are playing up,’ he sniffs. ‘Being in the trees won’t help.’
I’m embarrassed at how juxtaposed Ed and I are to the indulgent happiness of our setting. This garden needs honeymooners and dirty weekends and kissing in the hammock with one last G&T you’ll regret in the morning. It needs sunburnt shoulders and too many Aperol Spritzes and scallop starters and holding hands in the gazebo. It needs proposals and flings. Instead it has us. Wonky, unright us.
Stroppy, I walk over to the hammock and swing alone, still nursing the first cocktail while desperate to order the indulgent second that I don’t deserve. This weekend would be better with my friends, I think, than my own husband. Cora would have ordered champagne, everyone would be piled into the hammock, I wouldn’t have a knot in my stomach like the one I have now. What does this say about my marriage?
I feel petulant. Why come here if he was going to be like this? Across the lawn, Ed scrolls on his phone with his humble beer by his side. I slap on a smile and take a selfie for my Instagram. If I’m going to grow the numbers, I need content, whatever the mood. The equivalent of dragging yourself to work on a bad day.
I see the waiter look between us at this picture and register its anomalies.
Eventually Ed heads over (braving the trees) and mutters that the waiter has told him our room is ready, so I heave myself out of the hammock – no hand reaches out to help me – and we go to check in.
The heavy wooden door slams behind us and we are alone again, face to face.
Ed sits down on the bed, rumpling the bedspread as his own face does something similar and crumples.
‘I’m sorry,’ he says, real Ed for a moment and I am caught off guard, realising that for all of his stoic appearance, he’s in pain too. I’m torn, like so often, between wanting to hug him and wanting to slap him.
I remember when he proposed to me, in a similar setting to this one but in the Highlands. Frost not heatwave, hot toddies not Prosecco but the countryside was pretty; the hotel fancy.
I came back from the toilet to find a piano playing and Ed on one knee in the middle of the restaurant looking so like something out of Gone With The Wind that I stood there and stared at him for a good five seconds before I remembered he needed a reply.
‘Yes,’ I replied. ‘I forgot to say that bit. But yes.’
And we kissed more than was appropriate for a restaurant and then skipped dessert and moved the kissing to a more appropriate bedroom that looked similar to this one. Oak beams, sheets that felt brand new and this beautiful man with his big eyes standing in front of me, then, now.
And now I make a split-second decision and I kiss him. It’s hard to say I want to kiss him because he’s irritated the hell out of me today but I want to want to kiss him and I think that’s enough. I want my marriage to work. I don’t want to cheat with Joseph. I want us to stick together. I want Poppy’s family to be in one place. But if I’m Sheryl Sandberg leaning in to the kiss, Ed is physically leaning out. His whole body is reacting on autopilot to pull away from me, even as his lips touch mine. His arms are flailing awkwardly out to the sides.
I pull away and look at him and suddenly I get it.
‘Oh,’ I say, flat and lucid. ‘I’m repugnant to you.’
When I made that video, I had never met Ed. I didn’t cheat on him but I may as well have. We are that couple. We want to get it back and we are making the effort but. But.
‘You’re not repugnant to me,’ says Ed, exasperated. ‘Do you have to be so dramatic? It’s not easy. All I can think of is you with them.’
All he can picture when he thinks of me naked is me having sex with somebody else. All he can feel about my body is shame. I slept with somebody else – some other people – in a different lifetime but it might as well have been behind his back last week.
My insides collapse. Because how do you come back from that?
He lies back on the bed.
I take a deep breath.
‘I realise it’s not easy,’ I say. ‘But it’s also not easy for me. In fact, having your whole life blown apart and your body splashed on the internet and your career taken away and your husband disappearing on you and not wanting to touch you is fucking hard.’
I tell Ed to stay at the hotel alone because we have paid for it and we could do with the space and I drive home at 4 p.m., leaving Poppy at her grandparents’ house anyway and thinking that it’s a good job I didn’t get Joseph’s phone number. Tonight I would have used it.
I go to sleep late, sad, wishing I could tell my mum friends what just happened; wishing they knew the whole story. With our marriage in such a mess now, I am aching to talk without omission to people who love me.