“You said you wouldn’t do this anymore,” he says. “You said—” He raises his hand in a gesture of frustration before letting it fall, giving up on her. “You stank of booze when I arrived this morning, and you still do.”
She looks at the bottle in her hand. “I was just—” she starts to say but she has no lie ready, no explanation. “I repulse you,” she says.
“What?”
She changes tack. “It was the letter, Edie’s letter. It started everything.” This isn’t how it’s supposed to be. She’s supposed to be confronting him, not defending herself. And yet she feels she has to. “You don’t know what it was like,” she adds. Even to her ears, she sounds pathetic.
He tries to take the bottle from her. They tussle briefly over it, but her heart isn’t in the fight and she lets go. She knows where another bottle is hidden.
“I think I know you better than you know yourself.” His sad expression enrages her. What does he know about her at all? Has he ever recognized her as a mother?
She watches him empty the bottle down the sink and the way he does it, with his jaw set firm as if he’s so superior to her, and the way he gives the bottle a final shake to get rid of every last drop feels so purposeful and cruel, as if he wants to twist some final, desperate, craving feelings out of her and thwart them. The punishment aspect of it is unbearable and she says, “I know you’ve been grooming younger women.”
He turns. The expression on his face is incredulous.
“Not this again,” he says.
“Where were you this morning?” she asks. “I know you didn’t get picked up from home, or from your sister’s house.”
“Fuck you, Ruth. After everything.”
“Tell me!” she screams, and it feels as if all the frustrations and fears she’s ever felt meet in that moment, as if in those two words she’s letting the world know that she can’t bear anything any longer.
He stares at her as if she’s lost her mind. Her chest is heaving. The sense that this is the moment when everything comes out, when nothing is repressed any longer and she is as raw as she can be is terrifying and also electrifying and she takes pleasure when she sees that she’s got to him, that there is something as crazy and hurt in the backs of his eyes as there is in hers.
He throws the brandy bottle across the room and it smashes in the corner, into brutal shards of thick glass that please Ruth. We’re finally our true selves, she thinks. She’s forgotten she’s even a mother. She’s just a woman, facing a man and wondering why she ever let it come to this.
“I cannot deal with this,” he says.
When he walks out of the room, toward the front door she feels as if he’s robbing her of something, as if he’s snatching a moment of catharsis from her and leaving her surrounded, as ever, by the casual, relentless rebuke of domestic debris that is hers to clear up, in the cage of their home.
The door slams behind him and she screams as long and as loudly as if she is no stronger than the shaking feral version of herself that Jayne discovered this morning, alone in the fog on the moor.
And in the heavy silence that falls over the house afterward, she thinks, “I’m not fit to be a mother,” and if she’s sure of one thing, it’s that her failure is Toby’s fault because he will not hear her, or see her or touch her, and she’s suffocating in the void that leaves her in.
Jayne inhales again, deeply. The scent is strong. It’s not going away. There’s no mistaking that it’s lingering in the house.
It has, surely, to do with Edie.
For the first time since she read the letter at Dark Fell Barn, every last scrap of Jayne’s rationality deserts her and she feels truly, viscerally afraid that Edie might have harmed Mark.
And she’s not sure if she’s alone in this house.
Her gun is right at the bottom of her bag. The bag is at her feet. But Jayne can’t risk the time and noise it’ll cost her to extract it, let alone to load it, and she reaches, instead, for a brass door stop on the floor beside her.
It’s a beloved object, in the shape of a shire horse, and now a weapon. Moving almost silently, it doesn’t take her long to reassure herself that the downstairs rooms are empty, and the back door is locked securely. All the while, the sense that someone else is in the building grows.
Back in the hall, she looks up the stairs. Holding the brass horse by the neck, she climbs, taking care not to step on the tread that creaks, all her senses straining to protect her. At the top, she pauses.
Silence. No movement. The smell lingers up here, though. It might even be a little stronger than it was downstairs.
Her bedroom door is nearest to her, almost closed, and she pushes it gently. It swings open far enough that she can see the room is unoccupied, and she steps in to where she has a view of the en suite, which is empty, too. She backs out onto the landing and checks the spare room.
The bed is unmade. Her first, unwelcome, shocking thought is that this is an affair, that Mark’s boyhood crush has survived into adulthood and he’s fallen back in love with Edie, or never fallen out of love with her, and they’ve made love here. She imagines their bodies together. His hands on Edie. The pain of this possible betrayal feels like a punch in the abdomen.
The scent is stronger here and she has an impulse to sniff the bed linen that’s simultaneously irresistible yet repulsive. She doesn’t do it but backs out of the room, turning suddenly when she reaches the doorway, realizing with an extra jolt of fear that she’d droppedher guard for a moment. Adrenaline courses through her but also betrayal and anger and worry for Mark. Where is he? The brass horse feels heavy in her hand. There’s one more room to check. She enters the spare bathroom with breath held, but it, too, is empty.
A sense of desolation hits her. She perches on the side of the bath and puts the horse down. All her life, Jayne has pushed forward, determined to fix things, confident that she can, that she knows her strengths. Her whole purpose since she met Mark, since he surprised her by asking her, the plainest girl in the room, on a date, has been this marriage, and the mending of this man.
