chapter eighty-six
‘Do you want distracting talk?’ said Sam as he drove her into the city. ‘Or calming silence?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Clementine. ‘I can’t decide.’
It was a little after ten on a Saturday morning. Her audition wasn’t until two. The ten minutes past ten leaving time had been calculated to take into account anything that could possibly go wrong.
‘I can drive myself,’ Clementine had told Sam last night.
‘What are you talking about?’ said Sam. ‘I always drive you to your auditions.’
She thought with mild surprise, So we’re still us then? Maybe they were, although they still went off each night to sleep in separate rooms.
Something had changed over the last week since the first aid course; nothing dramatic, in fact the opposite. It was as though a feeling of utter mundanity had settled upon them, like the start of a new season, fresh and familiar all at once. All the anger and recriminations had gone, drained away. It reminded Clementine of that feeling when you were recovering from being ill, when the symptoms were gone but you still felt light-headed and peculiar.
The girls were with Clementine’s parents today and they were both in fine form. Holly had come home from school yesterday with a Merit Certificate for Excellent Behaviour in Class, which Clementine suspected was really a Merit Certificate for No Longer Behaving Like a Crazy Person in Class. ‘The old Holly is back,’ her teacher had told Clementine in the playground, and she’d done a little ‘Phew!’ swipe of the back of her hand across her forehead, which made Clementine think that Holly’s behaviour at school must have been much worse than she or Sam had been made aware.
Ruby had said Whisk could stay home today and have a little rest. She appeared to be losing interest in Whisk. Clementine could already see how poor Whisk was going to slip unobtrusively from their lives, like friends sometimes did.
‘Okay, so there’s no need to panic because we’ve allowed enough time for exactly this possibility,’ said Sam, as the traffic on the bridge came to a stop and a neon sign flashed in urgent red letters: INCIDENT AHEAD. EXPECT DELAYS.
Clementine breathed in deeply through her nostrils and out through her mouth.
‘I’m fine,’ she said. ‘I’m not thrilled, but I’m fine.’
Sam held out his palms as if in meditation. ‘We are Zen masters.’
Clementine studied the crisp white curves of the Opera House’s sails against the blue sky. Thankfully the Opera House was one of the venues where she knew she’d be given her own warm-up room, and she wouldn’t have to share with other cellists, or worse, talk to the chatty ones. There were plenty of dressing-rooms available, some with harbour views. It would be a comfortable, pleasant process. Her audition would be in the rarefied atmosphere of the concert hall.
She looked back at the road. The traffic inched forward past two cars with crushed bonnets. There were police and an ambulance with the back doors open, and a man in a suit sat on the kerb with his head in his hands.
‘Erika said something the other day and it sort of stuck with me,’ said Clementine. She hadn’t been planning to say this but all of a sudden she was saying it, as if she’d been subconsciously planning it.
‘What’s that?’ said Sam warily.
‘She said, “I choose my marriage.”’
‘She chooses her marriage. What does that mean?’ said Sam. ‘That doesn’t make sense. She chooses her marriage over what?’
‘I think it does make sense,’ said Clementine. ‘It’s about making a choice to make your marriage your priority, to, kind of, put that at the top of the page, as your mission statement or something.’
‘Clementine Hart, are you actually using soulless corporate jargon right now?’ said Sam.
‘Be quiet. I just want to take this opportunity to say …’
Sam snorted. ‘Now you sound like your mother making one of her speeches.’
‘I want to take this opportunity to say that I choose my marriage too.’
‘Um … thanks?’
Clementine spoke rapidly. ‘So, if, for example, having a third child is your heart’s desire, then that’s something we need to at least talk about. I can’t just ignore it, or hope you’ll forget about it, which was what I was doing, to be honest. I know when I asked you a couple of weeks ago you said you didn’t want another child, but that was when you were still … or when we were both still, kind of …’
‘Crazy,’ finished Sam for her. ‘Do you want another child?’ he said.
‘I really don’t,’ said Clementine. ‘But if you really do, then we need to talk about it.’
‘What? And then we work out whether I want a baby more than you don’t want a baby?’ said Sam.
‘Exactly,’ said Clementine. ‘I think that’s exactly what we do.’
‘I did want a third child,’ said Sam. ‘But now, well, it’s just not something I’m thinking about right now.’
‘I know,’ said Clementine. ‘I know. But we could, we might, one day, not forget, of course, but we might forgive. We might forgive ourselves. Anyway, I don’t know why I brought that up today. It’s not like we even …’
Have sex anymore. Sleep in the same bed. Say ‘I love you’ anymore.
‘I guess I just thought I should put that on the table,’ she said.
‘Consider it tabled,’ said Sam.
‘Great.’
‘You know what my heart’s desire is right now?’ said Sam.
‘What?’
‘It’s for you to get this job.’
‘Right,’ said Clementine.
‘I don’t want you going onto that stage thinking about babies. I want you thinking about whatever it is you need to think about, intonation, pitch, tempo, whatever those nancy-boy ex-boyfriends of yours would have told you to think about.’
‘Well, I’ll do my best,’ said Clementine. She said softly, ‘You’re a good man, Samuel.’
‘I know I am. Eat your banana,’ said Sam.
‘No,’ said Clementine.
‘You sound just like your daughter.’
‘Which one?’
‘Both of them, actually.’
The traffic was moving freely now.
After a moment Sam cleared his throat and said, ‘I’d like to take this opportunity to say that I choose my marriage too.’
‘Oh yes, and what does that mean?’
‘I have no idea. I just wanted to make my position clear.’
‘Maybe it means you don’t want to sleep in the study anymore,’ suggested Clementine, her eyes on the road ahead.
‘Maybe it does,’ said Sam.
Clementine studied his profile. ‘Would you like to come back?’
‘I’d like to come back,’ said Sam. He looked over his shoulder to change lanes. ‘From wherever the hell I’ve been.’
‘Well,’ said Clementine. ‘You’re very welcome to submit an application.’
‘I could audition,’ he said. ‘I have some smooth moves.’ He paused. ‘You could be blindfolded. We’ll make it a blind audition so there is no possibility of bias.’
She could feel a wild, raw sense of happiness growing within her. It was just silly, cheesy, flirty talk, but it was their silly, cheesy, flirty talk. She already knew how it would be tonight: the sweet familiarity and the sharp clean edges because of what they’d nearly lost. She didn’t know how close their marriage had got to hitting that iceberg – close enough to feel its icy shadow – but they’d missed it.
‘Yeah, I choose my marriage.’ Sam swung the car to the right. ‘And I also temporarily choose this illegal bus lane because I am one crazy motherfucker.’
Clementine reached into her bag, took out her banana and peeled it.
‘You’ll get a ticket,’ she said as she took a mouthful and waited for those natural beta-blockers to take effect, and it must have been a really good season for bananas because it was the best banana she’d ever tasted.