Chapter 22
‘I don’t know if I mentioned it,’ Bonnie began with a nervous swallow, as they ate dinner that evening, ‘but I won’t be able to give you as much money for bills as I usually do.’ She tried to make it sound as matter-of-fact as she could.
‘What do you mean?’ asked Stephen, after he had finished his obligatory twenty chews on his mouthful of food.
‘My hourly rate will initially be less than it was at Grimshaw’s.’ She hoped she sounded convincing because she was a terrible liar. You only have to remember one truth when you don’t lie, was another of her dad’s sayings.
‘I see,’ he said, with a tone based very much in disapproval. ‘Then it was very remiss to move, wasn’t it?’ He lifted the square of kitchen roll acting as a serviette from his lap and dabbed at the corners of his mouth with it. ‘You’ve been deceitful, haven’t you, Bonita? It’s becoming a habit of yours.’
Bonnie reached for a slice of bread and butter aware that her cheeks were heating up. She was probably acquiring quite a visible blush, though one born of repressed anger and not embarrassment. She hated how he talked to her as if she were a rebellious teenager who needed sending to her room to think about her misdemeanours. He wasn’t a stupid man, even if he was hardly the great intellectual he claimed himself to be but he had a hair-trigger for change and would fight against anything that threatened his establishment. She tried to smooth the edges of her revelation.
‘There’s no deception, Stephen, as I said initially. It’s just for a trial period, a couple of months. I thought I had mentioned it, if I’m honest’ – she hoped her nose wasn’t growing – ‘but the good thing is that there might be the chance of some overtime soon which would make up any shortfall.’
Stephen turned his attention back to his garden peas. ‘Well, I hope for both our sakes that is the case.’
Bonnie felt a sharp stab of annoyance at his weary tone and couldn’t help answering back. ‘We’re hardly on the breadline, are we?’
‘That isn’t the point, Bonit—’
‘I mean, how much exactly do we have in the bank, Stephen?’
‘I beg your pardon,’ he said, as if she’d asked the most impudent question in the world.
‘Well, I give you my money every month to put in our supposed joint savings account and yet I have no idea how much is in there.’
‘That money is for living expenses, not frivolities. It is our safety net. Are you insinuating—’
‘I’m not insinuating anything, Stephen. I just think it’s odd that as a married couple I am not allowed to see what’s in my own account.’
‘Our account,’ he corrected her. ‘Why would you need to know? Do you not see the evidence of what it is being spent on? Food, bills, our yearly holiday. Your contribution alone would not cover a fraction of all the costs in running this house.’
‘What about the money my dad left me?’
‘What?’ His face contorted.
‘The money that was left after all his bills were paid. That’s in there too.’
‘The pittance, you mean.’
His neck was mottled with rising rage; Bonnie thought she had better back off. She wanted him to be aware of a slight financial change in their circumstances, but not lead him to start looking for others. But she was angry. Angry that the chance to leave had dangled in front of her face like a carrot and been snatched away just as her fingers had been about to close around it. More than that, she was angry at herself for not having the guts to change a life she was so unhappy with and make that leap from wishful thinking to actually going for it. Her mother would have done it, so why couldn’t she?
‘Of course, you’re right,’ she said, biting her inner tongue. ‘You handle the money much better than I would. I’ll put some extra in when I’ve completed my trial period and make up any difference, if you’d like to make a note of how much that will be.’
She hoped that would satisfy him, but she noticed that he was breathing hard. Her outburst had rattled him. She didn’t for one minute think he was saving their money and blowing it on prostitutes and horses, but she did know that he was obsessed with feeling safe, secure, in control and would do anything to keep the status quo.
So many times she had laid in bed at night and wondered why she had agreed to marry him and what she had seen in him thirteen and a half years ago that made her say yes when he asked her to be his wife. And she had never come up with an answer. Then her head had been a mess. She was still grieving for Joel when her dad became markedly ill. He started forgetting things, ringing her in a blind panic because he didn’t know where he was, talking to ‘the people in the wallpaper’. Bear was poorly too; the vet had found an inoperable tumour in his young, strong body and she felt as if she were sinking into quicksand. There was nothing in her world but aching uncertainty, doctors, vets, tears, bad news piled upon bad news and then suddenly a man appeared who offered to help her pick all her shopping up when the bottom of the carrier bag burst, sending everything rolling in the rain.
She couldn’t even remember giving him her telephone number but when he rang to see if she was all right, she agreed to go out for a coffee with him. He was quiet and steady, attentive, sympathetic, everything her battered, bruised heart craved at the time. He said he could offer her companionship and security and help looking after her dad. He was a buoy to cling to in waters that wanted to drown her when it was time to call the vet to end Bear’s suffering and her heart felt as if a pickaxe had pierced the middle of it. Four months after meeting Stephen Brookland she was standing in the registry office in a blue suit holding a posy of pink flowers ready to vow that she would love him and stay with him for ever. But she hadn’t really known him at all when she married him. The him she thought she would spend the rest of her life with was a charming, caring veneer with a soft voice and a gentle manner and it had seduced her with its offer of a peaceful respite from the mad crazy world of pain she was inhabiting. The real him bound her in ropes of banal, boring, beige aspiring middle-class respectability and knotted them so tightly she couldn’t remember the last time she could freely breathe.
*
Over dinner that night, Lew raised the subject of a dog.
Charlotte’s fork stopped on its journey to her mouth.
‘What do you mean, “do you fancy having a dog”? As a pet, you mean?’
‘Well, yes. I didn’t mean for dinner,’ replied Lew with an involuntary snort of amusement.
‘Absolutely no.’ Charlotte delivered the suspended roast potato to her mouth and chewed.
‘I thought it might be company for you.’
‘No, really,’ said Charlotte again after swallowing. ‘I don’t need company. I have friends for company.’
‘We always said we’d have a dog one day.’
‘You always said we’d have a dog one day. But you’ll be working and it would be me who had to take it out and wash it and things.’
‘Wash it? It’s not a car, Charlotte.’
‘They smell and wee everywhere.’ Charlotte wrinkled up her nose.
‘Puppies might have a couple of accidents. What about we go and adopt an older rescue dog then? One that’s housetrained.’
‘No,’ Charlotte insisted. ‘No, no, no. Why on earth would you think I might want a dog?’
‘I just thought that . . .’ Careful, warned a voice in Lew’s head. ‘I just thought . . . that it would be company for you during the day . . .’
‘You said that already,’ said Charlotte, her nostrils flaring slightly.
‘. . . And that it might give you something to . . . to love. And to love you back.’
Charlotte’s arms came to fold over her surgically enhanced bosom.
‘Do you mean like a child?’ she said.
Lew coughed. This was not quite going as planned. ‘Of course not,’ he said. ‘But I thought as we can’t . . . as we can’t have . . .’
Charlotte held a beautifully manicured hand up to stop his flow.
‘Lewis, if you think I’m jealous of Gemma, you couldn’t be more wrong. I have had to come to terms with the fact that we will have a different life to the one we planned around being parents. My issue with her is that I very much suspect she will become one of those people who has no life outside motherhood and it will bore me rigid. She will want to talk about nappies and babies’ first steps and I won’t.’ She ran out of breath, so dragged another one into her lungs. ‘So, to clarify, I am happy to have a nice house without chewed wires and big doggy footprints all over my carpets and I am happy to have clothes without baby sick down the back of them. And there are other compensations, i.e. I have the same waist measurement I had twenty years ago, unlike Gemma is going to have. Now, would you like some more asparagus with your chicken because I made more than I should have?’
‘No thank you,’ said Lew.
‘Okay,’ said Charlotte, viciously piercing a baby corn. And that was the end of that conversation. At least verbally, because Lew didn’t quite believe her, especially as only two days ago she sounded anything but over it. Even after eight years, she hadn’t found how to cope with the loss of their child. He could have cried for her.