The girls were in bed. I was halfway through my third glass of wine. Everything was a little hazy. Paul was sitting on the opposite end of the sofa to me, a glass of whisky in his hand. He swirled the crystal tumbler, the ice cubes knocking together while he looked deep into the amber liquid. He didn’t take a sip, just went back to looking at the TV.
There was a chat show on, but I don’t think either of us was really watching. We were both too lost in our thoughts. I wanted to reach out to him then, selfishly needed the comfort of his familiarity. It felt strange, though. There was a block between us and I couldn’t quite bring myself to reach out to him, physically or emotionally.
I heard him sigh. I glanced back to where he was staring again at his drink, as if it might hold the answers to some great mystery.
‘I’m not immune to how awful all this is,’ he said, looking up and catching my gaze. ‘I know you might think I’m being cold about it, but I’m not. If the truth be told, I just can’t get my head around it. That she’s dead. How she died. She’s one of us, you know. One of our gang.’
His voice was choked with emotion and in that moment I saw his vulnerability laid out in front of me.
‘I know,’ I said, feeling tears prick at my eyes.
‘I don’t want to think about it too much,’ he said. ‘I don’t want to know what happened. I just keep thinking, it’s so close to home. Too close to home. I imagine if it had been you, or Beth …’
I watched as a tear slid down his cheek – down that well-worn face I’d loved for almost twenty years. He sniffed, rubbed his eyes roughly, raised his glass to his mouth and knocked back his drink. That was Paul – never one to let his emotions get the better of him.
‘This is something we need to face,’ I said. ‘We can’t run from it. You can see Beth. You can see how hard she’s taking it and it’s only going to get worse, you know. We’re only at the start of this. God knows where the next few months will take us.’
He reached over and took my hand. I didn’t pull away, didn’t shrug him off.
‘Remember we used to say we could get through anything if we did it together?’
I nodded.
‘I think somewhere along the way we might have forgotten that,’ he said.
He looked directly into my eyes with such intensity that I wanted to look away. I wondered, did he know something, about Michael and I? Could he sense it? Had he seen something or overheard something? There was just something in his demeanour that made me feel transparent. Guilty.
And, of course, I was guilty.
I kept his gaze for as long as I could and then I dropped my eyes to our two hands, still together. Taking a deep breath, I vowed again that I was going to stop seeing Michael, no matter how it might pain me in the short term; instead, I’d work on what I had with my husband. Starting right at that moment.
‘Shall we go to bed?’ I asked him, a shake in my voice.
He nodded.
Quietly, in the darkness of our bedroom, we found each other. We didn’t need the light on, we knew every curve and contour of each other’s bodies. It felt strange, alien even, and I had to push down any feeling that I was betraying Michael by having sex with my husband. That was absurd.
This was how it should be.
We barely spoke. We barely made a sound, if the truth be told. Years of being aware of two children in the house had taught us to be quiet. We were out of practice with each other. Hesitant. I tried to remember the last time we’d had sex. It had been the winter. January, perhaps. Maybe earlier. I closed my eyes and tried to enjoy his touch, to remember the things he liked. How he liked to be touched.
It didn’t quite work. We were trying, but it was perfunctory. Like awkward teenagers, not long-term lovers. When we were done, he rolled off me and onto his back, exhaling loudly. I curled up, fought the urge to turn away from him.
‘It will get better,’ he said. ‘If we keep trying.’
I nodded in the darkness first before muttering a yes. Muttering, ‘It will,’ but wondering why we even had to try. Surely it should be natural between us after all these years.
I got out of bed and walked to the en suite to freshen up, switching on the light. I was just pulling my dressing gown from the back of the door, when I heard him say my name. I turned and looked at him, there in the half-light. He’d rolled onto his side, facing me, his right arm slung over the covers.
‘I love you, Rachel,’ he said.
I would have answered him, but I couldn’t speak. The vivid red scratches on his right upper arm had caught my attention.
I walked into the bathroom and closed the door, stood with my back to it. I felt sick. Those scratches: three red-raw vivid lines from his shoulder down to his bicep looked like the kind of scratches fingernails might make.
I knew I hadn’t been responsible for them. There wasn’t a whiff of raw passion about what had just happened in our bed. I sat on the toilet, cold despite the heat in the room. Maybe it was ridiculous to feel a pull of betrayal in the pit of my stomach. In fact, I knew it was both ridiculous and hypocritical, but I felt it all the same. Those scratches, the way he’d been acting lately. Even the way he’d looked at me earlier. How he’d insisted on spending more and more time in Belfast – staying there during the week instead of doing the daily commute.
‘It makes more sense,’ he’d said. ‘I can work late and when I come home on Thursdays or Fridays, you and the girls’ll have me all to yourself all weekend.’
Except it had never quite worked out like that. I’d strayed; it wasn’t beyond the realms of possibility that he could have strayed, too. I sat there, wondering if he’d fall asleep if I waited long enough. Knowing the alternative now was either to go back out there and pretend everything was normal, or open a can of worms I wasn’t sure either of us wanted open.
I felt it like a punch to my stomach, the thought of him with another woman. The throes of passion so intense that she’d dig her nails into his flesh and mark him as hers.
What other logical explanation could there have been?
I felt something twist inside me. Something about the way he’d always looked at Clare. Something about the whispered conversations they’d had. Something from the pit of my stomach that had wondered if he really had been working late all those nights he said he was. If, indeed, he had been in Belfast. He could have been anywhere.
An echo from earlier: