He starts leading me back towards my mother’s room but I stop him. ‘She’s having secret talks with Mrs Bishop. I have been banished.’
‘Secret talks? Are they scheming something?’
I lead us to a row of chairs at the end of the corridor. ‘I have no idea. It seems I don’t often have any idea when my mother is scheming things.’
‘Look, she is your mum. She wants to protect you. And she’s a strong woman. Stubbornly independent like someone else we know.’ He raises his eyebrows.
‘Yeah, I suppose. I didn’t lick that particular quality off the stones.’ Conal is right, of course. I am stubbornly independent, but then again, I’ve had to be. I suppose my mother is the same, especially since Daddy died.
‘It’s not a bad quality,’ he says. ‘But it doesn’t hurt to let other people in either. I get that it’s hard to give up that control over your own life.’
I know he is talking about more than my mother, and I wonder if he and I should be having our own secret talks while the Bishop–Burnside Summit is happening in Side Room F.
39
DOUBLE CHRISTMAS
Laura
I do not have to have all the answers now. I am allowed to figure this out as I go along.
Laura is journaling. It’s something she has done since Kitty got ill and which she has become obsessed with since the Free Your Inner Goddess retreat she attended with Becca and Niamh earlier this year.
There are certain rules she has to follow. Obviously, she needs a nice notebook. That goes without saying. The notes have to be handwritten with a gel pen. There has to be a smooth glide of the nib over the paper. It has to be pleasing on a sensory level.
Yes, she has bought those little timed candles that burn for a few minutes so that her journaling sessions are timed and do not extend into an overlong pity party on paper.
Laura has gone home. She stayed in the hotel for threenights until she decided that she was now avoiding her problems rather than escaping for some much-needed space.
There had been a lot of thinking done. Between lectures and visiting Mrs Burnside and practising her singing in the car. (She is determined to be Karl’s teacher’s pet next week.)
She’s come to accept that there is little of merit to her marriage any more. It’s not that it has been awful. It’s not that she hates him. But they have grown apart, and there is no doubt that resentment has set in. Niamh has told her not to be too forgiving of his bad behaviour because whatever has happened between them, he has actively disrespected her and made little effort to understand and appreciate the person she really is.
She’ll need to untangle that in therapy – probably a lot of therapy – but for now she knows that she feels done. It seems there is too big a gap between them to try and bridge. Somehow, they have evolved into two very opposing creatures. Somehow, bit by bit and without her really realising it was happening, he has morphed into someone who does not understand her on a fundamental level, and who seems to have no interest in doing so.
If she’s honest, she feels the same about him – but she hasn’t disrespected him. Not until now. Not until she walked out of the house and checked into a hotel and ignored his messages. But is it disrespect if it’s deserved?
I need to find a good therapist, she writes in her journal, underlining it three times. And she also has to pull the plaster off and make that decision on how they move forward. From the way he looked at her when she got home, she suspects he already knows what she is thinking. It didn’t stop him going out to play golf though – although given that she has just spent three nights in a hotel she accepts she is not in a position to be annoyed about it.
Her house was relatively clean and tidy when she got home.The dishwasher was loaded, but not switched on. The drier was filled with clothes still be to be taken out and folded, but the worktops were clean and clear and it looked as if the hoover had been used at least once.
She had loaded her own washing into the machine, switched on the dishwasher, grabbed a can of crispy cold Diet Coke and gone upstairs to her bedroom. Aidan had made the bed, opened the curtains and the windows so it was more than a little arctic in feel. She’d closed the window, pulled on her big, chunky cardigan and taken out her journal to write.
And so far she has written just those two lines, and is staring into the void. They need to have a conversation. A big one.
‘You’re back,’ Robyn says, making Laura jump. Her daughter is standing in her pyjamas and a pair of thick woolly socks. Her dyed black hair is sitting at all angles, but with no make-up on her face she looks young and vulnerable. More like the little girl who used to greet her so eagerly when she came in from work.
‘I am,’ Laura says, gesturing to her daughter to come and sit on the bed beside her.
Robyn does so, and lays her head in her mother’s lap where Laura not only revels in feeling so close to her child but also enjoys stroking her daughter’s hair.
‘What’s going to happen?’ Robyn asks.
‘What do you mean, pet?’
‘Are you and Dad going to get a divorce?’
The ‘D’ word hangs heavy in the air. The hurt Laura feels at its mention, she realises, is not for herself but her daughter, who really deserves better.
