Page 39 of We Live Here Now
“You scared the shit out of me.”
“I wondered where you were.” He’s casually dressed in jeans and a shirt, but, as ever, he looks great. There’s something of Jeremy Irons in his heyday about him. “You can’t hide at your own party. What are you doing up here?”
“Just taking a moment.” I don’t have any valid reason, and that’s the best I can think of. “You know how it is.”
“Shame it’s so dark.” He’s at the window. “Strange being back here after so long. I’d forgotten how good the view is from up here. Quite stunning. Isolating but stunning. Don’t you think?”
“I haven’t seen it. The stairs are tricky with my leg.” Right now, all I can see is mist and darkness. “I’ll come back up in daylight.”
He leans on the windowsill and turns his attention to me. “You don’t have to answer and can tell me to mind my own business, but is everything all right with you and Freddie?”
“Why do you ask?” Our closest friends haven’t noticed that maybe we’re having problems, so I’m surprised Joe’s picked up on it.
“You’re up here when the party’s downstairs, for one thing.”
“Oh that. I just…” I blush slightly. “If you must know, I wasdispelling the last of my ghosts. This is where I heard the strange noises coming from. The horrible smell. I wanted to come up and check it out for myself, and I figured when there was a houseful of people was the best time.”
“Your ghost was in here?” He looks around the room, thoughtful, alert, as if maybe he does believe in the supernatural a little after all. “I can’t sense anything.”
“Me either, now. It’s fine. Obviously was just my mind playing tricks on me.”
“Maybe we should get back downstairs, just in case. Don’t want to invade their space.”
I go first, and he pushes the doorstop away, turning the light out and shutting the room up again, and after he looks back at the primary suite door for a moment, I can feel him watching as I hobble slowly and carefully back down the stairs.
“I really would like to paint you, Emily. Such beauty in the face of adversity.”
Happier now that I’m on the middle landing, I laugh. “I don’t think Freddie would be too keen. Your art is amazing, but it’s very intimate.” Remembering how shocked Freddie was when faced with the first canvas in the cottage, I have a pang of affection for him despite all the shit we’re in.
“I’d paint you in a silk dressing gown, your leg stretched out, the rest of you relaxed in a chair. All the curves and none of the nudity. How about that? The sexuality you’ll have to allow me. Although you’re perfectly safe. I won’t try to sleep with you. I don’t have sex with all my models, whatever the gossips say. Of course, if you wanted to, I wouldn’t stop you either.”
Everything about Joe should be creepy, but instead he makes my heart beat faster, the upstairs room totally forgotten. He makes me feel like a woman. A living, breathing woman who is raw and real and perfectforher flaws rather than despite them.
“But come on, we should get back to the party. I can feel the pool table calling me.” He matches my pace on the way back to the melee below, and I turn off the upstairs lights before pausing to sayhello to Mrs. Tucker, and Joe disappears down the corridor. I like his calmness. It’s infectious. I feel calmer for having finished my search. I didn’t find anything. There was nothing to find.
The party seems to be going well. In the study Mark is giving financial advice to Ron Cave and his wife, Elsa, the farming family who own most of the nearby land on one side of us, while Alex and Dom, a younger couple who are very involved in the parish activities, listen, wide-eyed. I know how they feel. When Mark starts talking about his work to me, he might as well be speaking Japanese.
In the sitting room Russell is cross-legged on the floor in the corner laughing with the Watkinses on the sofa, and it’s good to see them all chatting so animatedly. Turns out Merrily’s sister is head teacher at the local secondary school and Merrily used to teach part-time at Exeter College, so they’re sharing amusing horror stories of rabid teenagers and school politics.
Over by the fire, Freddie, my poor, woeful Freddie, is with the vicar and Cat, and I think despite having religion in common with the vicar, Cat is a bit bored because she keeps looking to the door, maybe wondering where Iso’s wandered off to. She’s not making any move to come and talk to me, but I don’t mind. It’s hard pretending everything is fine, and I think Cat is the most likely to see through my veneer. Iso never looks beneath the surface of people, really. She’s very busybeingIso, but Cat has always been more interested in others. It’s the quality that makes her such a good teacher. When she asksHow are you?she’s not looking for a cursory answer. And if she gets one, she’ll dig deeper.
Looking at Freddie, I’m not sure how I feel. I’m shell-shocked. All our equity gone. We’re running on empty, and he still has some debts to clear. I love him, I’m sure I do, but I wish I could respect him more. He’s always been prone to weakness under pressure. He’s always been prone to weakness full stop. It’s the part of him I’ve always ignored—the part of him that makes him agree with Mark or Russell because he’d rather not say what he actually thinks, and I let him call it diplomacy rather than an inability to stand his ground. The part of him that lied to me rather than tell me what’s reallybeen going on. The part of him that blames my accident for his weakness. I feel so conflicted. How can you love someone but not like them very much all at once?
The thought makes me feel bad because it’s not as if I don’t have my own secrets and shame. He’s been truly apologetic and stayed out of my way yesterday, popping into the Exeter office to give me some thinking time. If everything I’m experiencing here is coming from my post-sepsis syndrome, then I’m amazed the house didn’t fall down around my ears. It stayed standing and silent and most of the time I just stared out the window, watching two ravens whirling around in the sky over the moors. I like to think it was my raven. I like to think he’s found a new love.
Maybe I should find a new love. Freddie looks over at me and smiles, all hangdog and adorable. Someone like him but who isn’t so weak. Maybe I should leave him. There was a part of me that was thinking that before the holiday. The part of me that had cheated and wanted the promotion and wasn’t sure I wanted to be a stay-at-home mum to a baby I could only be sure was mine, not Freddie’s.
I touch my stomach, a new hope maybe growing there, and pick up my glass, heading toward the kitchen, where I tip out my wine while no one’s looking and get a glass of tonic water and add a slice of lemon. I can’t make any decision about Freddie yet. Not until I know. My period was due yesterday but so far there’s no sign. A day late doesn’t mean anything in and of itself, but I can’t shake this tiny feeling, a small certainty that something’s changed inside me. I’m becomingtwoagain. And this child would definitely be part Freddie too. Could I manage as a single mum? Would I want to? And could I do that to Freddie? Keep him from being a proper dad? It’s what he’s wanted all his adult life. It could be the making of him. Of us.
I head back toward the sitting room, but as I pass by I notice that the upstairs hallway light is on again. There’s someone on the middle landing, their shadow casting long down the wooden stairs.
“Hello?”
I take a couple of steps up, then pause. It’s Sally, her back to me,facing the landing window. She’s standing so perfectly still that I wonder for a moment if she’s on the cusp of some kind of medical event. “Sally?” I go up one more step. “Are you okay?” She doesn’t answer. I keep climbing, my good right leg doing all the work, and even with the sound of my approach, she doesn’t look my way.
“Sally?” I repeat as I reach her, and finally she startles and turns to me, eyes wide and confused, one hand fluttering up to her throat.
“God, I was lost in my own world, sorry. I think I’m getting another migraine.” She looks back to the window even though there’s nothing but darkness and mist outside. She does look pale though.
