I could leave now. I could just get up and go.
Despite fading in and out of emotional blankness at times, she really had no doubts about her love for Eddy, even though she might have gently fudged it with Mark, just to be kind. But deep down, she knew that she didn’t want to walk away from her husband, either – this man who was looking at her in a way that he had perhaps never looked at her before. As much as these paintings and vases, and chairs and rugs all belonged here, so did she. And Mark belonged here, too: he with her, and she with him. This was their life, and she couldn’t really imagine it not being her life any more. Everything about London suited the person she had been happy enough to become. And, as much as she had questioned the happiness of that person at times, and as much as she thought she could leave it all, she really couldn’t see herself walking away from Mark and the life they had made together. She just kept picturing him buying her Christmas gift in Harrods, and how he might have died doing it. There were different kinds of love. One didn’t invalidate the other.
She thought, distantly, of Serena’s sage advice about nostalgia, and how people would talk about her. Mark would be a laughing stock, and she worried more about that than what they would say about her. Then, inevitably, he would find someone. But he wouldn’t really want to replace her. He’d be doing it out of necessity, because Mark needed order in his life, and order meant a wife. And in a way – knowing her messed-up self as she did – she would envy that woman he had chosen to try to love as much as he once loved her.
‘I don’t know what I am going to do. I’m only telling you all this for one reason, Mark. Because I’ve done wrong, and it’s too big a thing to keep from you. I’m not a good enough actress.’
‘Well, frankly, I would have appreciated you trying to be.’ His last defence was a small attack.
She found this ironic. Sometimes, she felt that Mark only ever wanted to know the part of her that it suited him to know. He would cheerfully bury his head in the sand as to the rest. And that was one of the infuriating things about him. But it was part of their marriage’s psyche. She couldn’t hate him for it.
‘I take responsibility for what I did. I never, ever, intended to be unfaithful, and I regret it in ways I could never begin to articulate. But you should know that my affair was a symptom of us, of how we are together as a couple, of what we’ve become. I have never fitted your mould. You married a human being, not a talking ornament. I wasn’t going to be placed where you decided to place me, and polished once in a while. I am a person.’
It was sounding way more accusatory than she really intended, but she needed to be fully honest if they were to go on. ‘Mark, what I’m struggling to say is that I had independent dreams and desires of my own that shouldn’t have had to step in line with yours. If you hadn’t expected me to have them, you should have chosen one of those stuffed blouses that your other posh friends married. It was only natural that I would evolve from that naive girl you walked down the aisle with. But you have changed, too. Let’s not forget that. We evolved differently, and sometimes the differences are just too great for me. Plus, we should have tried harder to have children. It would have made us the family we haven’t quite managed to be without them.’
He had absolutely no idea what to say to that. Talking ornament! She was a person! And now she wanted children? She’d hardly made a massive fuss about them before. When she acted like this – became all complex and rambling – it was completely over his head. There were a great number of pretty, airhead secretaries whom he could have married, who would have given him less grief, and a great many times he wished he’d picked one.
Well, not a great many times. But perhaps right now.
There was a tiny coil of gold tinsel on the carpet that Harry must have carried from the tree. He stared at it and said a silent prayer. Please don’t let her ever leave me.
He had turned very still. Harry came over and nudged his hands.
‘I’ll leave if you want me to,’ she said. ‘If you’d done this, I don’t know if I could have stayed with you. So I’ll completely understand if that’s what you wish me to do.’
He played this back to himself. It seemed that the decision was his. He didn’t know if this was genuine on her part, or a strategy. He suspected it was genuine, because she looked too indifferent to have a strategy.
‘You want me to tell you to leave, so that you can go to him and feel easy in your conscience. That’s what I’m guessing.’
‘I’m not going to him. He has a wife and a daughter. If I go, I split up his family, and the one who would suffer most would be his child.’
He was slightly relieved to hear about this child. In fact, thank heavens there was a child! Evelyn did have a conscience. It was one of the things he’d always admired about her. ‘I’ve known for a very long time that you weren’t happy, Evelyn.’ He stroked the dog’s ears, and once again tried to picture life without her and felt intensely sad – sadder than he’d ever imagined. ‘I think you have mastered a way of being happy with your unhappiness, if that makes any sense. And I have just come to accept that this is how you are. And I’ve still loved you, despite it.’