Our House by Louise Candlish (8)

8

‘Fi’s Story’ > 00:30:10

Yes, the custody arrangements were crucial to the crime, I would say, because they gave Bram access to both the house itself and the documents he needed to sell it – not just the shared homeowners’ stuff, but my personal papers too. No, I didn’t think to keep them separate from his after we parted, though obviously that’s the first thing I would urge other women in that position to do. Keep your passport taped to your body, even when you sleep!

Irony doesn’t begin to cover the fact that the solution I came up with was intended to let me keep the house. Bird’s nest custody, it’s called, and like all good ideas, it rang true from the very instant I heard it. I read about it first in the Guardian and then on parenting sites online; well past the experimental stage, it’s a US-originated arrangement growing in popularity. The way it works is that the children remain at all times in the family home and the two parents take it in turns to be there with them. ‘Off’ time is spent at their respective second homes or, in the case of tighter budgets like ours, a shared one. Some couples even manage without a second residence, using their parents’ spare room instead or the sofa of a friend.

For Bram, the offer was less an olive branch than a whole sun-drenched Puglian grove.

‘Why?’ he asked me, not daring to believe my sincerity. ‘Why are you giving me this?’

‘It’s not for you,’ I told him, ‘it’s for the boys. I don’t want them to lose their home. I want as little to change for them as possible. You betrayed me,’ I added baldly, ‘but you didn’t betray them.’

Of course, the internet had told me that not everyone bought into this interpretation, that many women insisted that by betraying the mother of his children a man betrayed them too, but I didn’t agree with the internet. Husband, father: the roles were linked, but they were still distinct. Whatever I’ve done as a husband, I’m not that person as a father. And he wasn’t. As I say, he was excellent, acknowledged by other parents as the one the kids gravitated towards, the one who built dens and treehouses (and playhouses) and who came up with Dodgeball Day and the Lawson Olympics and who assembled the street’s kids one Sunday to help him pull down a dead tree with ropes, when the other dads were probably lying low with their phones, trying not to catch anyone’s eye.

‘If you’re committed to making it work, there is no better set-up for the child,’ our bird’s nest counsellor told us.

Except a happy marriage, I thought.

Her name was Rowan and she was precise and courteous, modelling the painstaking niceties we would need to practise if our reconfigured union was to succeed. ‘Bird’s nest custody offers exactly what you would expect from a real bird’s nest: strength, safety and continuity for the chicks. With the best will in the world, it can be unsettling for them to shuttle between two homes, especially if those homes aren’t in the same area. This completely negates that disruption. In the best-case scenario, they’ll hardly notice anything has changed.’

She guided us through the nuts and bolts – or twigs and feathers, as she joked. We would have a trial period in which I handled the weekdays and Bram most of the weekends. Handovers would be 7 p.m. on a Friday and noon on Sunday, giving us each weekend time with the boys. He would also visit on Wednesday evenings to do the bedtime routine. ‘It works best if you can keep separate bedrooms in the main house,’ Rowan advised. ‘It helps with establishing boundaries.’

I’d already given this thought, grateful that the house’s size and layout suited our new purposes so readily. There would be no uprooting of the boys and no modification costs. ‘We can do that. We have four bedrooms, so we can use the spare for one of us and there’s a study downstairs that can become the new spare.’

‘You’re very lucky,’ Rowan said. ‘Some couples have to take turns in the same bedroom. You’d be surprised how many negotiations I’ve had involving who changes the sheets.’

‘You keep our room,’ Bram told me, ‘since you’re going to be there more nights than me.’

Our room. Setting up new sleeping arrangements was one thing, adjusting the language of our home, our life, was another.

‘The trick is to think of both places as your home,’ Rowan said. ‘Your house is your primary home, the other place your secondary. No one has the greater claim to either, you are co-owners and co-tenants. Above all, you’re co-parents. Equals.’

She showed us a diary app she recommended. ‘This is where it all goes: who’s in the house, who’s in the flat, who’s away for work, who’s picking up from school. The clubs, the playdates, the birthday parties: all colour-coded.’

As for the financial arrangements, they required little adaptation in the short term. Bram and I earned similar salaries, contributed the same amount to the joint account, from which we paid mortgage, utilities and all the kids’ expenses. This pooled figure would now increase to cover the rent on the second property in Alder Rise, most likely a studio or a room in a shared house, and left little to spare. For this reason, I suggested that the other expense, divorce lawyers, should be postponed for this trial period.

‘That makes sense,’ Bram said, and there was enough raw optimism in his tone for me to glance across at him.

‘You do understand we are separated?’ I said, struggling to keep the sharpness from my tone. ‘The divorce will happen, just not straight away. There’s no going back as far as I’m concerned.’

‘Of course,’ he said.

Rowan watched, composed, thoughtful. ‘In some cases, a clean break in living arrangements is preferred. The way you’re choosing will inevitably bring a level of invasion of privacy because it’s not going to be practical to remove all traces of yourself every time you leave one property for the other. Are you certain that’s what you both want? Fiona?’

I breathed so deeply I filled every recess of my lungs, and then I pictured the boys’ faces, their Lawson curly heads, and I nodded.

Bram agreed with uncharacteristic earnestness. ‘Let’s do it,’ he said and his smile, unexpectedly self-conscious, made me remember why I’d loved him in the first place.

Bram, Word document

You know that great Smiths line from ‘Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now’ about Caligula blushing? Well the thing Fi was proposing, a saint would have blushed. Seriously, not a day went by without there being some new article about divorced dads consigned to flat-sharing Bedlam, not a cat’s chance in hell of getting a new mortgage while they were still paying the old one. But Fi spared me this; she spared me all the miseries she had every right to inflict on me. Rather than exiling me, she was reintegrating me; rather than taking me to the cleaners, she was allowing current financial arrangements to stand.

She was doing what parents always say they’ll do but never get halfway to achieving: putting the kids first.

We drew up an agreement – non-binding, but important to her – and signed it. Of course, this is Fi we’re talking about and so there had to be some touchy-feely therapy attached. The counsellor had a low, filtered voice bordering on seductive. ‘Is there anything non-negotiable?’ she asked us. ‘Any no-nos?’

‘No new partners in the house,’ Fi said immediately. ‘Only in the flat. And no speeding, not with the kids in the car. He’s already got two sets of points on his licence. And no drinking on duty.’

‘What a charming portrait you paint of me,’ I joked. She had a point about my driving, but it seemed to me that the only difference between my drinking and hers was that her drinks were a prettier colour. She liked mint-green mojitos and ruby-red kir royales; weird gins made with rhubarb or blueberries or Christmas spices. They all went crazy for gin, the women of Trinity Avenue.

Still do, I’m guessing.

‘And you, Bram?’ Rowan said. ‘Any conditions?’

‘No conditions. Whatever Fi wants, I’m on board.’ And I meant it, I was being ‘authentic’. I didn’t even make any jokes about life jackets.

‘She’s a rare woman, is Fi,’ my mother said when I relayed the news. She’s always had a little insecurity around Fi and her family, with their middle-class attachments to thank you notes and regular theatre, their trips to the Dordogne – or at least she might have done if Fi hadn’t always been so kind and attentive to her. But the fact remained that she thought I’d done well. I’d married up – and now I was separating up too.

‘Don’t go spoiling this as well, Bram,’ she warned me, her gaze containing traces of both disapproval and indulgence. ‘You might not get another chance.’

There was a sense that the Lord had had mercy on me – for now.

‘Fi’s Story’ > 00:36:18

We agreed on Friday, 2nd of September as the first day of the new plan. It was the weekend before the start of the school year, which gave us very little time to find our ‘second residence’ (I thought of it like that, in quotation marks, as if it were artificial, somewhere I would never connect with in any real way).

But the project was charmed, it seemed, what with Bram never burning his bridges, at least not where his drinking buddies were concerned. He still had a pint now and then with the estate agent who’d sold us the house on Trinity Avenue and this agent knew of a studio rental in an apartment block that had gone up a few years ago on the western side of Alder Rise, an easy ten-minute walk down the Parade and across the park from our house. Bought as a-buy-to-let investment, the flat had since passed from tenant to tenant, evidently too small for people to want to stay longer than the minimum period.

The exterior was stylish enough. Designed in echo of the art deco building on the high street that had once housed the art school, it was sleek and white with steel window frames and curved terraces. Baby Deco, the agents called the block (in Alder Rise, even architecture was expressed in family metaphor).

Bram handled everything: negotiated the rent, checked and signed the contract, even made a trip to IKEA for the kitchen supplies we needed.

At a viewing together, I took the opportunity to remind him of my condition about other women. ‘You can do what you like here, but the house is off limits.’

‘Got it,’ he said. ‘I’ll run my crystal meth lab from here as well, shall I?’

‘Very funny.’ I held his eye. ‘And I meant it about the speeding too. I don’t want any nasty surprises.’

Was I imagining it or was there the briefest flicker of furtiveness in his face? Impossible to tell, even to my experienced eye, but something made me press the point. ‘I mean it, Bram, no secrets.’

‘No secrets,’ he said.

I should have got it in writing, had it put in the signed agreement. I should have set it as a notification daily – hourly – on our new shared diary app: no secrets.

And, yes, in spite of everything that’s happened, I still think the set-up was an excellent one – for people not married to a criminal, that is.

Bram, Word document

I torture myself sometimes with the thought of how the bird’s nest might have panned out if I’d just been able to keep past sins secret and avoid committing future ones. (‘Just’!) I think it would have succeeded, I genuinely do. In terms of the division of time and labour, it really played to our strengths: I’d take care of the weekend rough and tumble, the necessary letting off of steam (the Trinity Avenue mums always used to say that boys needed precisely the same amount of exercise as a Labrador retriever), while Fi handled the school needs, the laundry, the nutritious balanced diet. Okay – so that’s most things.

That’s not to say she didn’t have fun with Leo and Harry. She was probably the only person who could diffuse the fever pitch of competitive spirit between the two of them, to remind them that they could choose to be a team of two. They’d clamour for quizzes, especially ones about capital cities, and just as it risked coming to blows over Bucharest, she’d derail arguments with a bad joke. Like: ‘Where do Tunisians buy their music? iTunis.’ And the boys would look at each other in affectionate resignation. ‘Oh, Mum. Be serious.’

(She looked the jokes up in advance, I guess.)

It breaks my heart to know how deeply she’ll be regretting those arrangements now. It will destroy her to realize that disaster could not have struck without the framework of logistics suggested by her, without the trust she continued to place in me as a family man, a fellow householder.

Even when she could no longer trust me as a husband.