‘I’m sorry I’ve not been very helpful,’ begins Adrian, when we’re alone in the kitchen. ‘You and your mum have been doing everything since we opened.’
I wonder where this is coming from. ‘That’s okay.’
He runs his hand over his beard. ‘It’s not, though, is it?’ He moves towards me. ‘This is supposed to be our thing.’ He takes my hands in his.
I dip my head. ‘I know it’s not how we imagined it.’ I wonder if he would have been any different if it had been just the two of us, distracted by his book, squirrelling himself away upstairs, not wanting to see people.
He shuffles and looks down at our joined hands. He’s swapped his usual scruffy attire for smart jeans and a short-sleeved shirt, and he smells of the Tom Ford aftershave I bought him two Christmases ago. ‘It was kind of your mum to help us out. Selena made me realize I might have been taking you for granted.’
My head shoots up. ‘Selena?’
‘Yes. She said—’
I cut across him. ‘When was this?’
‘Last night. You were in bed with Evie. I’d come down to fetch a glass of water and Selena was in the kitchen …’
I drop his hands and he moves towards the dishwasher. I watch as he begins stacking the dirty plates. ‘What else did she say?’
His dark eyes bore into mine. ‘She thinks a lot of you, you know.’
I’m thrown. ‘Right.’
‘You don’t have to sound so suspicious.’
I pinch the top of my nose with my thumb and forefinger. I have a headache coming on and I hardly slept last night, thinking of Nigel turning up to hurt Selena, or Dean prowling around the house with his hunting knife, getting up to God knows what. Maybe I drank too much wine. ‘I’m sorry. I don’t mean to.’
He’s silent for a few moments. The cutlery clinks as he dumps it in the rack, a baked bean rolls off one of the plates and lands on the back of the dishwasher door. ‘She told me about the other bouquet of dead flowers. Did you get more this morning?’
It had been roses again this time, the hints of their original peachy colour still evident underneath the brown. I consider lying. But it must be written all over my face because he sighs, then slams the dishwasher door.
‘She shouldn’t have told you.’
He closes his eyes as though in pain. When he opens them again they’re full of hurt and anger. ‘You can’t keep things from me. I’m your husband. We’re a team.’
‘I just didn’t want you to get stressed out.’
He holds a hand up. ‘I know that.’ His voice softens. ‘And I love the way you try to take it all on yourself. But that’s not good for you.’ He walks towards me and pulls me into his arms so that my face is pressed against his chest. I close my eyes and surrender to him. It feels so good to let go for a while, to let someone else take the burden.
He kisses the top of my head. ‘I don’t want you to think of me as this weak man who can’t take any pressure.’
This weak man? Is that how I’ve seen him since his breakdown? Someone frangible maybe, someone who is on the mend. But not weak. ‘I don’t think that. I’m sorry.’
‘So, you’ll tell me what’s worrying you in future?’
I think of his reaction yesterday when he found the noose. ‘Of course I will,’ I lie.
When I first met Adrian, it was his strength I admired. The way he took charge. He wasn’t one of those alpha males who had to shout to be heard. He had a quiet confidence. It was there in the way he led me through crowded streets, always knowing which way to go when I was useless with directions, or in the way he kept his patience when trying to fix my computer or the TV. How he’d listen without judging when I admitted to finding motherhood hard, or when I was filled with fear that something bad would happen to the girls. How honest he’d be if he thought I was being unreasonable about a work situation, or a relationship with a friend.
We’d met in our early twenties when I was a junior in the marketing department of a law firm in Old Street. He was three years older and training to be a lawyer in the same firm. I was impressed with how clever he was. He was like a walking encyclopaedia. He wasn’t loud and brash, like some of the others in his team, with their swagger, their booming voices and sexist jokes. I’d find excuses to go into his department just to get a glimpse of the tall man with floppy dark hair and warm eyes. One day, when we were both at the coffee machine I made him laugh with a caustic joke about the sleazy middle-aged man in Archives who could never meet a woman’s eye but stared instead at their chest. I loved his laugh – he’d throw back his head with an actual guffaw. It sent tingles through me. After that he began to seek me out, too, and I started to wonder if the attraction might be mutual. And then he asked me out, a meal and a movie, laughed at my jokes and asked me to talk to him in Welsh. I loved how he thought I was clever and funny, how he would sit back in his chair and assess me, as though I was the most interesting, the most wonderful thing he’d ever seen. I preferred the person I was through his eyes.
Soon we were inseparable, moving in together within three months. I knew some of his background: his Home Counties upbringing, his public-school education and then Exeter University (his parents had been disappointed, he said, when he failed to get into Oxford). He was an only child and his parents were older, his father a professor, his mother an economics lecturer, so the pressure had been heaped upon him. On our first date, he told me he’d wanted to be a writer but his parents wouldn’t hear of it. His eyes, the colour of conkers, had lit up when he talked about writing and I remember feeling sad that he had been forced by his parents down a different path. That he’d felt he had no choice but to conform.
He wasn’t going to be like that with our children, he said. He was going to give them the freedom they needed to grow as people.
Maybe I pushed him, too, without realizing it, when I encouraged him to go for that promotion at work so he’d be earning more money, enabling me to give up my job, or when I convinced him to move from our two-bedroom flat in Balham to a three-bedroom house near Twickenham Green, doubling our mortgage. Or when I started to complain that he was working too hard and had less time for me and the girls.
We were all guilty, his parents and me, of piling pressure on that sensitive, creative, clever man. I don’t think Adrian is weak. He’s stronger than I am in lots of ways. But I am conscious of pushing him too hard.
