‘Tell you what, let’s light a fire. It’s freezing outside.’
‘Good idea, that’d be lovely,’ she says, and the house feels complete again with him in it. His smell, his bigness, his company. Married love has been a revelation to Miriam – not the lurching outer edges of feeling, no, but the sheer depth and texture of it. All her memories – thirty years of them, especially the really vital ones, like having the children – involve him. And loving the children. He is the only person on earth who can talk about the children with the same exhaustive gusto that she does, as if they are both examining Rollo and Edith at 360 degrees. And she is wrong to be quite so consumed by feminist rage. It’s not as if he does nothing: the cup of tea, for example, he brings her in bed each morning; his final checks on the house at night (doors locked, lights off); the way he’ll run upstairs to find her slippers when she sighs exhaustedly and says, ‘Darling, would you …?’ These are small, repetitive acts of love.
They spend the afternoon in a Sunday-ish homely fug, the log fire spitting and then dying down in the lounge. It brings back the smoked, countrified scent of Deeping, where they will spend New Year. (Must buy light bulbs for Deeping, she makes a mental note to herself.) Miriam could watch those flames for hours until her face is cooked and her eyes dried out. Ian is in and out of his study, some Mozart piano concertos drifting through the house from his iPod dock. She potters about too, tidying up mostly, putting some washing on or reading the ‘Review’ section of the newspaper.
In the evening the doorbell goes and Miriam opens it to the florist delivering 300 stems of scented narcissi and the fresh holly wreath for her front door. This and her mulled wine spice, and the clove oranges she makes will fill the house with festive perfume. Just as she is closing the door against the night, the phone rings and she answers it, still holding the narcissi like an opera singer at her curtain call.
‘Calm down, Will … No, she’s not here … Since when?’ she says, as Ian joins her in the hallway, slightly stooped and craning to hear. ‘So you’ve just got home?’
‘What’s he—’ says Ian but Miriam frowns at him to shush.
‘Well, she’s probably out at a friend’s or gone to Deeping,’ she says into the phone while looking into Ian’s eyes.
Miriam listens, placing the flowers onto the hallway table, then she cups her hand over the phone’s mouthpiece. ‘He says he found the door open and the lights on. She’s left everything in the house – her keys, her phone, her shoes. Her car’s outside. Even her coat’s there.’
Ian nudges her aside to take the phone off her. ‘Will? It’s Ian. When did you last speak to her? Have you called Helena?’
She watches him frowning at the hall table, listening. Then he says, ‘Right, call the police. Straight away, Will. Tell them what you’ve told us. Then call us straight back.’ He puts the receiver down.
‘No,’ says Miriam, looking into Ian’s eyes and shaking her head, her hand clamped over her mouth. ‘No, no, no, no.’
Manon
Manon cries some more. It is the way Bryony listens, as if she has an arm around her, that makes Manon’s barriers dissolve.
‘Was he awful, then?’ asks Bryony. ‘As bad as the last one?’
‘No, that’s the thing, Bri, he was all right, but that’s the worst feeling, that it was just all right, nothing special. Just nothingy, like I can’t ever rise to the occasion.’
‘Maybe you need to give it more of a go. Nothing’s perfect, you know.’
‘He wanted me to pay more for the meal because I had wine.’
Bryony is silent.
‘He didn’t ask me anything about myself.’
‘Yeah, well, that’s just men, I’d say.’
Manon presses her fingers into her eyes. This is what she doesn’t want Bryony to say. People in couples, they always want you to settle for anything, as if you are a second-class citizen. Just because you’re lonely, you have to make do with the scrap ends.
‘You want me to make do with the scrap ends.’
‘We’re all making do with the scrap ends, Manon,’ says Bryony. ‘This is something you fail to grasp.’
‘The sex was quite good, unexpectedly,’ says Manon.
‘You what?’
‘Well, I thought it’d be rude not to.’
‘Don’t make a joke of it.’
Manon doesn’t reply.
‘You don’t need to do that, y’know,’ says Bryony, her voice full of disappointment.
‘No, I know.’
‘When’s the next one?’
‘Next week. Not sure I can stand it.’
‘Treat it like a job. It’s a game of numbers. Your lucky one will come up eventually. Only don’t shag them. Not all of them, anyway.’
Manon can’t stand to talk about it any more. ‘How are the kids?’ she says. ‘How was your Sunday?’
‘Freezing playground, 8 a.m. Started to sleet but we stayed there anyway. Me and Peter had a row. Lunch at 11 a.m. Bobby threw a cup of milk down me, then shat in his pants. The usual.’