‘Nah, I’ll stay,’ Steve said. ‘Samsung’s still paying the hotel and stuff for the whole weekend – I checked. I can travel back with one of the other lads. I could do with a break from the kids, to be honest.’
‘Sure,’ I said. ‘I remember that feeling.’
‘Must be nice when they’ve all moved out,’ Steve said. ‘Must be like back at the beginning before they were born, right? Snuggling up on the sofa together. Going dancing and stuff. Christ, I miss all that.’
I laughed. ‘Something like that,’ I told him. ‘Yeah.’
The drive home was six and a half hours, so I had plenty of time to chew things over.
To start with, I tried to avoid thinking at all, instead listening to the radio. But it was wall-to-wall Covid-19 and after a while I realised it was making me feel anxious. So I switched the radio off and allowed my thoughts to run their course.
I still love Dawn. That was the first clear thought I had.
She’d become spiky over the years and had made herself difficult to be close to, but perhaps that was my fault as much as hers. Maybe she’d known – though perhaps only subconsciously – about Cheryl, and if she had then that could, I supposed, makeanyonespiky.
I thought about how Cheryl had started to grate on me, and wondered what a shrink would have to say about that. Something about my irritation didn’t feel honest, I decided, as if maybe a bit of it was made up or at least exaggerated. If it was, then that was because it served a purpose. It made ending things that much easier.
It crossed my mind that perhaps I’d started to annoy Dawn in the same way Cheryl irritated me. I was surprised I hadn’t thought of it before.
I thought about the way Dawn tended to react if I touched her, pictured her eye-rolls and her sighs when I attempted to pull her leg about something. It certainly all fitted the bill.
Did that mean we were doomed to separate too? Would there inevitably be a moment where I’d sit her down and ask if it was over? The thought was too hard to bear.
I let myself think about sex, then, and that was perhaps the hardest one of all.
Sex had never been an easy subject for me, but the surprise was realising that it maybe wasn’t that simple for Dawn either.
First, I wondered if some kind of therapist could help us get back on the rails, but even imagining that was so embarrassing it made my teeth hurt.
I thought about sex with Cheryl and how unexpected it was that I found myself happy to give it up. So perhaps sex wasn’t so important after all. Or perhaps ithadbeen important before, but because I’d aged, or because I’d had my fill, it suddenly no longer was.
I pondered the fact that I’d gone off sex with Cheryl when she’d started trying to have a baby, and how that meant that sex could feel different depending on your motivation for doing it.
I remembered how Dawn had gone off sex after Lou’s birth, then, and understood, in that moment, on the A1, for the first time ever, how a lack of desire for the outcome of sex – another child – might lead to a lack of desire for the act itself.
If she’d just explained it to me, I thought,then I could have got a vasectomy.
But of course, understanding why we feel the way we do is so difficult that none of us manage it very often… Who was to say Dawn ever even asked herself why she no longer wanted sex?
I bought flowers at the Medway services, and imagined myself handing them over on arrival. I’d have to be sweet enough to let her know I still loved her but not gooey to the point her defences went up. She’d never reacted that well to excess romance, whether in films or in real life. It tended to tip her into cynicism. Too much or too little romance had always been a fine line to tread.
Immediately I turned in to the drive, I saw that her car was missing.
She’s out with Shelley, I thought.Damn!
I let myself into the house and made a mug of tea. I went through to the sunroom at the back and sat listening to the silence of the house, which turned out not to be silence at all, but a series of creaks and groans laid over the barely audible electrical hum of the place.This is how it would be if we split up, I thought, and the image made me shiver as if I was cold.
I phoned and left a simple message. I said I was home,surprise! and asked when she’d be back.
The flowers would wilt, I realised, so I grabbed them and stuck them in a vase, then took them back out of the vase and emptied it and rested them in the sink instead. It would seem silly to pluck them from a vase to give them to Dawn just so she could put them back in the vase, but I wanted them to be a gift, not just some flowers I’d bought for the house. It seemed important to get that right.
At seven, as the sun was sinking, I called Dawn again and, when she didn’t pick up, I had a brief angry frenzy of hitting the call button over and over – it went to voicemail every time. I called Dawn’s mum but she didn’t answer either, so I left a message on her voicemail as well.
Just to hear the sound of their loving voices I phoned the kids. Lucy was on her way out the door and Lou was at a crucial juncture of his video game so neither conversation lasted more than thirty seconds, but it reassured me to know they were OK.
I heated a frozen pizza up and ate it in front of the news.
France was closing schools and colleges from Monday. Italy had tens of thousands of cases. Things weren’t looking good but Boris Johnson still felt optimistic.
