What she needed, she thought now, straightening up to stretch her spine, then resuming her digging, was to bury herself away. She felt such a fool. A stupid idiotic fool for believing her own lies. The lies she’d told through omission.
It would never have been Geraldine’s intention to humiliate and embarrass Naomi by instigating the conversation they’d had, but that was how she felt, stripped bare of all pretence. In one fell swoop she had gone from thinking that everyone loved and respected the man to whom she’d been married, to suspecting that actually everybody knew the truth and pitied her.
Yet what exactly was the truth? That Colin hadn’t been the perfect husband everyone believed him to be?That behind closed doors, not even closed sometimes, he had been a patronising bully? Nobody was perfect, she used to tell herself; everyone had their share of faults. Hers would certainly run to a lengthy list. In her mind she pictured a dusty scroll of papyrus steadily unrolling as fault after fault was read out in a booming voice of condemnation.
Top of the list, in large bold type, would beSELFDECEPTION.
She was an expert in that, having forced herself to see it as a strength, a virtue even.For the sake of the family.But actually, it was a sign of weakness and cowardice. Of which she wasn’t proud. She would never allow her daughters to behave the way she had.
It first happened when Colin missed out on a promotion which he’d believed was his as a matter of course.
‘I’m perfect for the job,’ he’d said. ‘Everybody reckons I’m a shoo-in.’
But when somebody was brought in from outside to do the job, and Colin then had directly to report to that person, he was furious. He arrived home from London at Anchor House that Friday evening in a foul mood. It was an understandable blow to his pride and Naomi did her best to absorb his disappointment. That’s how she saw her role during that period, as a sponge to soak up the bitterness leaking from his fractured self-esteem.
His mood and temper worsened when the new man, a brash American (so Colin said) took up the position. Then one weekend, after several days of the girls being unwell with a sickness bug (they were five and two at the time), and just as Naomi had settled them in bed,Colin flipped. And over, of all things, the remote control. She came downstairs to find him hurling things around in the sitting room as he searched for it.
‘This place is a sodding tip!’ he shouted as he kicked over a basket of books and toys. ‘Do you really think this is what I want to come home to after a stressful week at work?’
‘And do you think after a week of looking after the children on my own, I need you to start behaving like a toddler having a tantrum?’
That was when his hand caught her hard on her cheek. Such was the sudden force of the blow, her head snapped back and she nearly toppled over. Shock sucked the breath out of her. Regaining her balance, she stared at him in stunned disbelief, her heart hammering in her chest.
‘You hit me,’ she murmured incredulously. She put her hand to her face, then looked at it and saw blood. It was coming from her mouth.
His eyes wide, his jaw slack, he stared back at her. And then he just seemed to crumple before her eyes. Suddenly he wasn’t the Colin she knew; he was a small frightened boy who knew that he had just done something terrible.
She had seen his rage before when he’d shattered the screen of his laptop because it had lost a document he’d been working on, or when he’d yelled furiously down the phone at some poor devil in a call centre who wasn’t dealing with a problem in the way Colin wanted. There were plenty of other occasions too when the red mist had come down – when his inner demon that he refused even to acknowledge had the better of him – but never before had he done something like this.
‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry!’ he repeated, tears filling his eyes.‘Oh, my God, I didn’t mean to do that. Forgive me, please. That’s not who I am. I swear to God. It’s the stress of work right now. It’s—’
From upstairs came the sound of Martha calling for one of them to take her up a drink.
‘I’ll go,’ Naomi said quietly, swallowing her shock and rubbing away any trace of blood from her face. ‘You tidy up the mess you’ve made here.’
By the time she had dealt with Martha, and then Willow who also wanted a cup of water, Naomi had her composure fully reinstated. Downstairs, she found Colin in the kitchen hunched over the sink and staring into the darkness of the garden. Or maybe he’d been looking at the man staring back at him from his reflection in the window.
‘I don’t know what to say,’ he said hoarsely, but without looking at her.
‘Nor do I,’ she replied. ‘Apart from this: you must never lose your temper like that again. And never in front of the girls.’
He turned to face her. ‘I swear, it won’t happen ever again. You have my word.’
But it had And not just once.
Putting aside her spade and taking off her gardening hat, Naomi used her forearm to wipe the sweat from her forehead. With a dispirited sense of hopelessness, she surveyed the weedfree vegetable patch and wondered what it was all for.
The question was aimed not so much at the merit of her morning’s toil, but at her life, and specifically what she had achieved in that life. Could it have been better spent if she had been honest and told the truth at all times?
And where should that honesty have started? With Colin’s affair, or his temper and violence. Or with her infidelity with Ellis?
Why had she not possessed the courage to admit to the affair in the way that Colin had when he confessed that he had slept with his secretary? It could have been a simple tit-for-tat admission. See, two can play at that game!
But she hadn’t done that for the simple reason she had been a coward. And worse, she hadn’t wanted to relinquish her hold of the moral high ground. Remove that and she was no better than Colin.
Except she wasn’t better than him and so when he occasionally lost control of his temper and lashed out at her, she accepted it as her punishment for her betrayal and the lies she told herself.
All of which made it sound as though their marriage had been unhappy. Which was far from the truth. Independently fuelled by guilt on both sides of the relationship, they had each made a huge effort to make things work. And so, swept along on the daily tide of family life, they had coexisted perfectly well, perhaps not as loving as some couples, but certainly better than a lot. If tenderness and passion and honesty were missing from their marriage, there had been an acceptance on Naomi’s part that, for the sake of the children, the status quo tipped the scales in favour of staying together, of keeping up the pretence.
