It was an odd thing: the ingredients of her were just the same as before – blonde hair cut smooth to the collarbone, puppy-brown eyes with straight lashes, curves that drew the male gaze and yet were disavowed by their owner as excessive – but the flavour was different. It was as if she’d found a way to sugar-coat her sourness, to disguise her bitterness towards me.
We strolled across the threadbare grass to the playground. The place was heaving with day trippers, half-naked twenty-somethings in those trendy sunglasses with blue lenses that looked better on the women than the men (or maybe I only noticed the women). There was even a queue for the swings.
‘Where did all these people come from?’ I said. I hadn’t been out of Alder Rise for that long.
‘Alison says this is the price we pay for our houses being worth so much,’ Fi said, and she somehow managed to make it sound like self-sacrifice, as if this were the most trying issue she faced. Being a property millionaire.
What about me? I wanted to whine. Living in Penge with a religious nut, sleeping on a blow-up bed with my head against a radiator! I’d been careful till then not to pressure Fi or make demands, but now the angst tumbled from me: ‘Speaking of which, we need to decide what to do about the house. I can’t stay at my mum’s for ever. If we really are splitting, then we need to talk about how we divide the assets.’
Now there was emotion in her eyes. Pure alarm.
I blundered on, both wanting to hurt her and willing her to take me back then and there and give me the chance never to hurt her again. ‘Have you been in touch with a solicitor? Or an estate agent? Are you waiting for me to?’
‘No.’ As two swings came free, she took half-finished ice creams from the boys and urged them to take their turns.
‘Fi,’ I began again, but she held up a dripping cone in protest.
‘Please. Stop.’
‘But how much longer—?’
‘Another week,’ she said. ‘Give me another week and I’ll have some suggestions for next steps.’
Next steps: project management speak. The next steps would be to identify the deliverables, secure the assignees and nail down a time frame.
‘Okay,’ I said.
‘And Bram?’
‘Yes?’
‘We are “really” splitting, I just don’t want to be knee-jerk about it. I want what’s best for them.’ She turned to watch the boys swinging, hardly blinking, as if it were some new and hypnotic spectator sport – until I realized she simply couldn’t bear to look at me.
Returning to my mum’s that evening, I remember thinking this is what it must feel like to be a condemned man awaiting news of his appeal.
Condemned? I didn’t know how blissfully free I was.
‘Fi’s Story’ > 00:28:49
Sorry about that little outburst – I’m fine now. My emotions are all over the place at the moment, as you can imagine.
So, what happened next? It was Bram talking about dividing the assets, that’s what galvanized me into action. We’d put on a united front one afternoon for a family trip to the park, and I suppose it shouldn’t have been as much of a shock as it was when he asked what we were going to do about the house. That evening, I went to the window and stood for some time looking at the magnolia, always a source of consolation to me. It had blossomed early this year and we’d all gushed at its beauty; passers-by took photos on their phones and the boys climbed the lower branches to stroke the blossom, tenderly, as they might a newborn hamster, careful not to loosen any of the petals.
I would never get this beauty and tranquillity somewhere else. Everyone knew that the property market exacerbated the hostilities of separation and divorce and that in London and its suburbs you could no longer expect to sell one large home and get two smaller ones in exchange. My work was reasonably paid, but I’d need to be headhunted by Saudi Oil & Gas to have any chance of buying Bram out of his half of Trinity Avenue.
I thought, or at least tried to think, how it might feel to have those precious pink petals open for someone else next spring. No, it was unthinkable. It would split my heart with a violence no adulterous spouse could achieve.
A ‘For Sale’ sign at our gate? Over my dead body.
#VictimFi
@SharonBrodie50 She’s a bit intense, isn’t she? I don’t get how people are so obsessed with their houses.
@Rogermason @SharonBrodie50 Money. At least she’s honest.
8
‘Fi’s Story’ > 00:30:10
Yes, the custody arrangements were crucial to the crime, I would say, because they gave Bram access to both the house itself and the documents he needed to sell it – not just the shared homeowners’ stuff, but my personal papers too. No, I didn’t think to keep them separate from his after we parted, though obviously that’s the first thing I would urge other women in that position to do. Keep your passport taped to your body, even when you sleep!
Irony doesn’t begin to cover the fact that the solution I came up with was intended to let me keep the house. Bird’s nest custody, it’s called, and like all good ideas, it rang true from the very instant I heard it. I read about it first in the Guardian and then on parenting sites online; well past the experimental stage, it’s a US-originated arrangement growing in popularity. The way it works is that the children remain at all times in the family home and the two parents take it in turns to be there with them. ‘Off’ time is spent at their respective second homes or, in the case of tighter budgets like ours, a shared one. Some couples even manage without a second residence, using their parents’ spare room instead or the sofa of a friend.
For Bram, the offer was less an olive branch than a whole sun-drenched Puglian grove.
‘Why?’ he asked me, not daring to believe my sincerity. ‘Why are you giving me this?’
‘It’s not for you,’ I told him, ‘it’s for the boys. I don’t want them to lose their home. I want as little to change for them as possible. You betrayed me,’ I added baldly, ‘but you didn’t betray them.’
Of course, the internet had told me that not everyone bought into this interpretation, that many women insisted that by betraying the mother of his children a man betrayed them too, but I didn’t agree with the internet. Husband, father: the roles were linked, but they were still distinct. Whatever I’ve done as a husband, I’m not that person as a father. And he wasn’t. As I say, he was excellent, acknowledged by other parents as the one the kids gravitated towards, the one who built dens and treehouses (and playhouses) and who came up with Dodgeball Day and the Lawson Olympics and who assembled the street’s kids one Sunday to help him pull down a dead tree with ropes, when the other dads were probably lying low with their phones, trying not to catch anyone’s eye.
‘If you’re committed to making it work, there is no better set-up for the child,’ our bird’s nest counsellor told us.
Except a happy marriage, I thought.
Her name was Rowan and she was precise and courteous, modelling the painstaking niceties we would need to practise if our reconfigured union was to succeed. ‘Bird’s nest custody offers exactly what you would expect from a real bird’s nest: strength, safety and continuity for the chicks. With the best will in the world, it can be unsettling for them to shuttle between two homes, especially if those homes aren’t in the same area. This completely negates that disruption. In the best-case scenario, they’ll hardly notice anything has changed.’
She guided us through the nuts and bolts – or twigs and feathers, as she joked. We would have a trial period in which I handled the weekdays and Bram most of the weekends. Handovers would be 7 p.m. on a Friday and noon on Sunday, giving us each weekend time with the boys. He would also visit on Wednesday evenings to do the bedtime routine. ‘It works best if you can keep separate bedrooms in the main house,’ Rowan advised. ‘It helps with establishing boundaries.’