Little Bee - Chris Cleave [73]
“Oh, hi! Hi! Andrew O’Rourke, this is Sarah Summers. Sarah is the editor of Nixie. Andrew’s a columnist for The Times, terrific writer, strong opinions. I’m sure you two are going to get on.”
“So was the priest,” said Andrew.
“I’m sorry?”
“He was sure we were going to get on. When he married us.”
Andrew, lighthearted, almost smiling.Lawrence—poor Lawrence—quickly removing his hand from my back. Andrew, noticing. Andrew, suddenly unsmiling.
“I didn’t know you’d be here, Sarah.”
“Yes. Well. I. Oh. It was a last-minute thing. The magazine…you know.”
My body betraying me, blushing from my ankles to the crown of my head. My childhood, my inner Surrey, reawakened and vengeful, redrawing its county boundaries to annex my new life. I looked down at my shoes. I looked up. Andrew still there, standing very still, very quiet—all the opinion, for once, drained out of him.
That night we stood on the empty foundation at the end of our garden where Andrew was planning to build his glasshouse, and we talked about saving our marriage. Just the phrase is excruciating. Everything Andrew said sounded like his Times column, and everything I said could have been ripped from the agony page of my magazine.
“At what point did we forget that marriage is a commitment for life?”
“I just felt so unfulfilled, so downtrodden.”
“Happiness isn’t something one can pick up off the shelf, it’s something one has to work at.”
“You bullied me. I just never felt loved or supported.”
“Trust between adults is a hard-won thing, a fragile thing, so difficult to rebuild.”
It was less like a discussion and more like a terrible mix-up at the printers. It didn’t stop till I threw a flowerpot at him. It glanced off his shoulder and smashed on the concrete base and Andrew flinched and walked away. He took the car and drove off and he didn’t come home for six days. Later I found out he’d flown over to Ireland to get properly drunk with his brother.
Charlie started nursery that week, and Andrew missed it. I made a cake to mark the occasion for Charlie, alone in the kitchen one night. I wasn’t used to being alone in the house. With Charlie asleep it was quiet. I could hear the blackbirds singing in the twilight. It was pleasant, without Andrew’s constant bass line of gripes and political commentary. Like the drone note of bagpipes, one doesn’t really realize it’s been playing until it stops, and then the silence emerges into being as a tangible thing in its own right: a supersilence.
I remember scattering yellow Smarties over the wet icing while I listened to Book of the Week on Radio 4, and suddenly feeling so confused I burst into tears. I stared at my cake: three banana layers, with dried banana chips and banana icing. This was still two years before Charlie’s Batman summer. At two years old, what Charlie loved most in the world was bananas. I remember looking at that cake and thinking: I love being Charlie’s mother. Whatever happens now, that is the one thing I can be proud of.
I stared at the cake on its wire tray on the work surface. The phone rang.
Lawrence said, “Shall I come over?”
“What, now? To my house?”
“You said Andrew was away.”
I shivered. “Oh, goodness. I mean…you don’t even know where I live.”
“Well, where do you live?”
“I’m in Kingston.”
“I’ll be there in forty minutes.”
“No, Lawrence…no.”
“But why? No one will know, Sarah.”
“I know but…wait a minute, please, let me think.”
He waited. On the radio, the continuity announcer was promising great things for the next program. Apparently there were many misconceptions about the tax credit system, and their program was going to clear up a good few of them. I dug my nails into the palm of my free hand and fought desperately against the part of me that was pointing out that an evening in bed with Lawrence and a bottle of Pouilly-Fumé might be more exciting than Radio 4.
“No. I’m sorry. I won’t let you come to my house.”
“But why not?”
“Because my house is me, Lawrence. Your house is your family and my house is my family and the day you