Toby doesn’t feel as strongly about their son. It’s obvious and Ruth resents him for it. It’s driven a wedge between them.
For weeks, she’s been nurturing the hope that this weekend, their first break without the baby, can help them rediscover eachother. She’s aching for him to touch her again. It’s been almost a year since they last made love. Toby stopped touching her a few months into her pregnancy. And she misses the intimacy terribly.
The urge to have a drink arrives abruptly and powerfully. Just a small drink. It would take the edge off her worries and help her to get in the mood to party with Jayne and Emily.
She started drinking surreptitiously after Alfie’s birth, during her maternity leave. At first it was a pick-me-up, but soon it was the only thing that held back the feeling that her life was spinning out of her control.
And it didn’t stop when she went back to work when Alfie was eight weeks old. Everything got worse. She found she barely had the attention span to listen to her patients properly and resented how much they both expected and took from her.
She knows she’s got to stop drinking. It’s causing problems. She thinks of the email she received yesterday from the other partners at her surgery and the formal warning it contained about her behavior. She hasn’t told Toby about it yet. Just the thought of it is overwhelming.
And the problem is, she doesn’t know how to stop drinking because increasingly, lately, she’s felt that it’s not just her life that’s out of control, but she herself, as if she’s slipped loose from the moorings that used to keep her stable.
To distract herself from her rising panic and from the stabbing urge to drink, she looks outside, studying the landscape. The view is startling in its immensity. Moorland. Bleak, even at this time of year. Like something out of a gothic novel. She worries she’s been very quiet on the journey. What must the others think of her? She should contribute something positive.
“I’m actually really looking forward to having a fun girls’ night, tonight,” she says. “Just us three. Without the men.”
Ruth looks into the back, to see if Emily heard, but she’s plugged in, eyes shut.
Jayne slows the car to take in the view. The countryside resembles nothing they’re used to in the south of England. It’s wonderful. She feels dwarfed and dazzled by it. The prospect of driving deeper into it thrills her. Mark will love it, as well.
Jayne examines how she feels now about him dropping out at the last minute. Not quite as angry as she was this morning, but not happy.
What she can’t shake is a nagging suspicion. It’s in her nature to question things—in the army she worked in intelligence gathering and lives could be saved or lost depending on the information she acquired, so she was rigorous and second-guessed everything she heard or learned—but the arrangements for this weekend have become such a farce that even the most naïve individual would surely smell a rat.
First Paul texted a few days ago to say he couldn’t be with them at the barn tonight, but that Emily would come anyway, then Toby messaged with a story about his sister. Mark was the third to drop out. His excuse was that a work thing had come up. But surely, it can’t be a coincidence that none of their husbands can be here with them this evening, even though the men are acting as though it is. It’s just such an unlikely scenario.
Don’t you think it’s weird that none of our husbands could come today? she wants to ask, but something stops her. She glances at Ruth then at Emily via the rearview mirror. They probably don’t want to hear it right now. Emily has her earbuds in, anyway. It will only put a damper on things if Jayne mentions it. She imagines that if they have concerns, they’re keeping them to themselves for now, so she should, too.
And Ruth is right. The long and short of it is that they can have fun without the men tonight. Jayne knows she and Ruth can, at any rate; it remains to be seen whether Emily will let her guard down.
The upside is that their husbands will join them before lunchtomorrow and whatever those three have been up to, if they have, will come out somehow. None of the men are great at keeping secrets. They’re too close to one another.
There is someone else missing from their party, but in contrast to how she feels about their husbands, Jayne is secretly pleased about this additional absence.
Edie declined the invitation to join them for the weekend saying that it would be too painful to come without Rob. Everyone understood. Rob’s death has left a hole in all their lives over the past five months, but especially Edie’s. Obviously. Rob and Edie had been a couple since school. Jayne can’t help thinking of their daughter, Imogen. The sight of her at Rob’s funeral was heartbreaking. She was such a daddy’s girl.
Jayne’s kept her relief that Edie didn’t join the party this weekend from Mark and everyone else, because the men all love Edie so much.
But Jayne can’t deny to herself that she’ll find the trip easier without Edie. Whether she’s in a good mood or a bad one, Edie takes up all the oxygen in a room.
“I’m really looking forward to tonight, too,” she says. “Let’s have a blast.”
Here’s something that surprises me: you’d think the fact that I can’t control what happens up at Dark Fell Barn tonight would drive me crazy after all my painstaking planning, but it’s exciting me, making me feel like I’m alive and reassuring me that I can feel something again.
It’s how I know I’m doing the right thing.
Rob has been dead for five months and I’ve been living in a state of numbness. Everyone else has moved on, that’s obvious, eventhough it’s felt impossible to me. I’ve been the straggler, left behind on my own, my only company the ferocious pain of missing him.
And, of course, Imogen. My daughter. My lifeline. I don’t know what I would have done without her.
Sometimes I go online and find the description of Rob’s death in theNorth Devon Gazette. It’s a masochistic habit that I can’t seem to kick. I can’t seem to stop wanting to read it, yet I always feel upset by the article’s cold recounting of the “facts.”
North Devon Gazette, Friday, 17 May 2019
Robert Porter, 37 years old, has drowned in an accident near Hartland Quay on the North Devon coast. Robert was photographing local wildlife along the coastline on Tuesday when he was cut off by the tide and swept out to sea. Friends raised the alert. Swansea coastguards retrieved a body from the rocks at 6pm on Wednesday. Robert is survived by his wife, Edie, and their daughter, Imogen.
Where are the words that mean something? That convey the enormity of our loss?
