Alphabet Weekends - Elizabeth Noble [70]
When the kiss ended, he pulled her to him and held her tightly, his face buried in her hair. Muffled, he said, ‘I… hate… you.’
Lucy leant back, and took his face in her hands. ‘I hate you too. I was happy.’
‘I was happy too.’
‘So what are we doing?’ Creeping fear. What had they done? It wasn’t just one kiss, was it?
‘I’ve seen something I haven’t seen before, and now I’ve felt something I haven’t felt in the longest time. If I ever did.’
‘This isn’t something you do, then?’ She knew it wasn’t, didn’t she? A young tanned couple on a beach skipped through her mind, but they seemed so detached, so alien. They didn’t belong in this moment, did they?
He looked almost stern. ‘Never once. Never.’ He was holding her again. ‘I don’t know what this is, Lucy. I don’t have a neat name for it. But you have to believe that it is about you. It’s all about you.’
She knew it was. That made it worse. That was what she wanted it to be.
K for Kids
‘How’s the old man?’
Lucy put two steaming mugs on the table and sat beside Tom. She felt utterly discomfited. Weirdly, it was harder to be sitting with Tom, Patrick’s brother, now, than it had been to greet Patrick, Marianne and the kids when they’d got back that afternoon. The lie felt bigger. Why would that be?
‘Not great.’
‘Where is he now?’
‘He’s at an interview, with a recruitment specialist.’
‘That’s good, isn’t it?’
‘I don’t know. He’s already had a couple and nothing’s come of them.’
‘You’re all right for now, though, aren’t you?’
‘We’re fine. It was a good pay-off. They gave him the car. We’ve got redundancy insurance on the mortgage. It’s not the money, not really, not for a goodish while, anyway…’
‘What is it, then?’
‘It’s Patrick. He can’t seem to pick himself up.’
‘I’m sure I’d be the same.’
Lucy looked at him quizzically. ‘Are you? You don’t seem the type for self-pity.’
‘That’s a tough word for it, Luce.’
‘Is it? That’s what it feels like. He can’t get past what happened – it’s starting to feel like he’s wallowing in it.’
‘Really?’ Tom wasn’t used to feeling this rush of defensiveness. It had never seemed necessary before.
Lucy shook her head. ‘I’m sorry, I don’t mean to sound like a bitch. I don’t really know how he is, that’s the truth. He won’t talk to me, Tom, not really, really talk to me.’
‘That’s just pride, isn’t it? He wants to sort it out himself. You know what he’s like.’
‘But I’m his wife.’
‘Still. He’s him.’
‘The other night I told him I was thinking of going back to work. There’d be a little retraining to do, but it shouldn’t be too hard to find something. Something local, a bit flexible with hours around school holidays and stuff.’
‘That sounds good.’
‘Exactly. And it’s something I’ve been thinking about for a while – since before all this came up with his job. Ed’s not a baby any more, and I can’t imagine not going back to work.’
‘And how did he react?’
‘He went berserk. Gave me this long speech about how he was capable of taking care of us all, how he was the provider.’
‘Sounds a bit Victorian.’
‘Too right. He told me I was undermining him, that it was the last thing he needed right now.’
‘And that doesn’t sound like Patrick.’
‘Come on! You know he’s always had this thing about protecting me. It’s a joke, isn’t it? That he was my knight on a white charger.’
‘But that’s what it was, Lucy, a joke.’
‘I’m not so sure.’
‘I don’t follow.’
‘Maybe he views our entire relationship in terms of him being the provider and the protector, and now that he isn’t those things, he feels like a failure. I really can’t talk