‘But what about your job?’
‘I’ve been talking to Carl.’ Carl is his brother and they co-own a sound studio where Hugh is an engineer. ‘He says he’ll cover with freelancers.’
‘You’ve told Carl?’ Before he’d told me. I took another swig of wine. ‘So you wouldn’t be earning any money for six months?’ What about the mortgage, all the different insurances, the daily drain from the girls, all the small expenses that add up to so much?
Then he looked properly shamefaced. ‘I’m so sorry, babe, but the cash left over from Dad’s house will cover it.’
I didn’t think I could feel any more shocked. No more nest egg. ‘When were you thinking of going?’ Did I have weeks or months to change his mind?
‘Maybe in a week or ten days.’
Jesus Christ. ‘Have … you haven’t bought a ticket?’
‘I’ve been looking at flights.’
‘Oh, God, Hugh …’
‘I’m sorry.’ Shockingly, his face crumpled and he began to cry, the first tears I’d seen him shed since his dad’s death.
‘Sweetheart …’ I scooted round and took him in my arms.
‘When I saw Dad lying in that wooden box …’ he shuddered into my shoulder ‘… all the things he’d wanted to do and now he never would, it just hit me …’
I had to wait until he’d cried out his sorrow before my next question. Finally, he swiped the sleeve of his sweatshirt across his wet eyes. ‘Sorry,’ he mumbled.
‘Hugh?’ I was breathless with anxiety. ‘When you say it’s not simply a sex thing? You mean that it is a sex thing?’
I was still hoping I might have misunderstood even though I knew, right in the marrow of my bones, that I hadn’t.
We exchanged a look and it was as if our entire relationship flashed between us: the promises, the trust, the enmeshed emotions, the rock-solid unity – and now some sort of appalling unravelling where he peeled away on a path of his own.
He shook his head. ‘That’s not what this is about.’
‘But it’s not out of the question?’
He studied his hands for a long time. ‘Amy, I love you. I’ll come back to you. But if it happens … then yes.’
Fuuuuuuuck …
He grabbed his beer, his knuckles white. ‘For the six months, it’d be like …’ He paused, then blurted, ‘Like we wouldn’t be married.’
I was plunged into the horrors. Because this had happened to me before – being left by a husband – and it was the worst thing I had ever gone through. It had been so horrible that, to insure myself against a repeat episode, I’d avoided anything serious with any man for half a decade. And when, five years after Richie had legged it, something lovely sparked between me and Hugh, it had scared the daylights out of me.
It was several months before I could talk myself into giving him a chance, and then only because I’d spent the intervening period of chaste denial observing and checking him, the way a horse-buyer inspects a potential purchase, lifting its hoofs and examining its teeth. And the thing I’d been looking for was staying power. I did NOT want a player. I did not want a man who’d change his mind. I did NOT want a man who might leave me. Because it couldn’t happen again.
And yet, here it was – happening again.
As if he knew what I was thinking, he said, ‘It’s only for six months, Amy. Not for ever.’
‘Yes, but –’
‘I’ll come back. I’ll definitely come back.’
He couldn’t know that. You can’t put the toothpaste back in the tube.
But he could have done this the way men usually do it – sneakily, dishonestly, two-mobiles-y. Telling lies that he had to go to some tedious conference when he was actually off to San Sebastián for a weekend of gastro-riding.
At least he was being honest. Did that make it any better? I didn’t know.
I reached for my wine and tipped it into me, then said, ‘Can you get me a vodka?’
‘Sure.’ He jumped up, guilt and relief adding extra vigour.
This hurt too much. I needed to get drunk.
Sometime in the ominous pre-dawn I came to. I was in bed, with no memory of getting there. Something catastrophic had happened – I had the feelings before I had the facts. Then I remembered: Hugh wanted to go away for six months of conscious uncoupling.
Half a year. It was a long time. People can change a lot in six months – especially if they’re meeting all kinds of new people. A sudden image of Hugh fucking some taut-bodied girl with pretty tattoos and surfy hair made me feel I was awake in a nightmare.
Was this just about sex? He’d said it wasn’t but I was suddenly convinced that this was all my fault – I should have made more of an effort on that front. Generally once I’m actually doing the sexing, I like it, but the shameful truth is that in the last couple of years I wouldn’t have minded if we’d never done it again.
Because I was afraid of being the cliché I was, I stepped up to the plate every four weeks or so and tried to fool myself that Hugh hadn’t noticed my lack of enthusiasm.
However, the very last time it had happened – and it was ages and ages ago – Hugh had said, ‘That’s your duty done for another month.’ A second too late, he’d forced out a laugh. (I’d flailed around searching for the right words as he vamoosed in a passive-aggressive scarper.)
Maybe if we’d had a full-and-frank there and then we might have averted this current situation, but clearly we’d both known there was too much at stake.
In a panic, I nudged his sleeping body. ‘Wake up, Hugh, please. We could have more sex.’ My head was racing through all the ways I could persuade him to stay – I could dress up in saucy rig-outs, send him nudie photos of me, make home videos of us riding … I was suddenly aghast that I hadn’t done the nudie-photos thing – I suspected he’d like it because whenever nudie photos of celebrities were hacked, a charged atmosphere sprang up between us.
No one could say I hadn’t been warned about the perils of stagnation in a long-term relationship – experts were forever writing about it. Recently I’d read a thing by some American couples’ counsellor who said that to keep the spark alive you had to – and I quote – ‘be each other’s whores’. He’d written an entire book on the subject and for half a second I’d contemplated buying it, then thought, No. I won’t be anyone’s whore.
Now I wish I’d bought the fecking thing.
However, alongside these thoughts a loud voice insisted that no woman should have to do anything she didn’t want to do just to hold on to her man. But maybe if I’d tried them I’d have liked them …
‘Wake up!’ I shook him, then fumbled for the switch and light flooded the room.
Oh, why hadn’t I been more adventurous? For the love of God, how hard would it have been to photo my hidey-hole?
But shyness had stopped me. And something else that I was only now seeing properly: an uncomfortable suspicion that our sexual wants were different. In countless ways, Hugh and I were aligned – sometimes it felt as if we actually shared the same brain, and that sense of having an almost-twin was a huge comfort. Except for sex. Buried deep in me was a suspicion that Hugh wanted stuff I didn’t. It had never been vocalized – I was afraid that if it was, he’d become like a stranger.
But, instead, this had happened and it was far worse.
‘Are you awake?’ I asked.
‘Yeah …’ He was blinking and trying to sit up.
‘Is this real?’ I asked. ‘Is this really happening?’
‘I’m sorry.’ He tried to hold me.
I pushed him off. ‘We could have more sex.’ I sounded shrill and desperate.
‘Babe,’ he said gently. ‘This isn’t about sex.’
Hope flared, then I forced myself to check, ‘But you might have sex with other people?’
He nodded.
Despair overtook me, followed swiftly by self-revulsion: I was too old, too round, too crap in bed. ‘Is it because I’m a porker?’ I asked.
He actually laughed – a proper laugh, something that hadn’t happened in a while. ‘No. And you’re not anyway.’
‘I am,’ I said. ‘Well, a bit. It’s just, you know, giving up the cigarettes.’