Erica
Isla. Had something happened to Isla? Fear gripped Erica like a bear hug, squeezing the breath right out of her.
Lee stopped in the doorway to the cabin and leant in. ‘It’s your husband,’ Lee said. ‘Your mother is unwell.’
‘Oh.’ A wave of relief hit, washing away the panic. It wasn’t Isla or Henry.
‘This is our only emergency phone,’ Lee said, handing the clunky black handset to her. It was heavy in her hands, reminding Erica of her first Nokia mobile. ‘Please keep the conversation as brief as possible. It’s also a temperamental bugger, so you might get cut off.’
She nodded before striding into the icy night towards her own cabin.
‘Henry?’
‘I’m here,’ he said. She’d expected a crackle of interference but his voice was as clear as if he was standing beside her. Her heart lurched. She missed his voice, missed him, she realized.
‘What’s wrong? Is Isla OK?’
‘She’s fine.’
‘What happened to Mum?’
‘Your mum is fine too,’ Henry replied. ‘I just told that bloke that so I could speak to you.’
‘Oh, thank goodness,’ she said with a shaky sigh of relief. ‘Although this phone is really only for emergencies. It’s sweet you want to wish me a happy birth –’
‘It is an emergency.’ Henry’s tone sharpened, wending an unease through Erica’s body, like stinging nettles rubbing her insides. ‘Just not one I wanted to share with anyone else.’
‘Oh.’ She didn’t need to ask what.
‘When were you planning to tell me, Erica?’
‘I … I was hoping you wouldn’t find out.’ Erica scrunched her eyes shut tight for a moment, wishing she’d said something different. She knew how terrible she sounded, but all of a sudden she couldn’t lie any more.
‘Oh. Well that’s all right then, is it? I find out my wife has been lying to me for the better part of three months. No, wait, not just lying. Deceiving me. Manipulating me. Lie after lie. And not just big lies, but day to day as well, but it’s all good, because I wasn’t supposed to find out. What the hell, Erica?’ Henry’s voice shouted into her eardrum.
‘I’m sorry,’ she whispered. Hot tears pricked her eyes and ran two lines down her cheeks. She stepped into the darkness of her cabin and sunk to the cold wood floor.
‘I just … I can’t sodding believe it. All the times I asked you about your day, all the times you actually answered. Not just an “it was fine”, but actually answered with what it now turns out was utter utter bollocks. You lost your job. Why would you keep that from me?’ His voice was no longer shouting, but soft, carrying a hurt that sliced right into her heart.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said again. How could she explain? The lies had been like plates stacking neatly together. One on top of the other, on top of the other. They’d fitted at first, balanced and steady, but every lie was a new plate until the stack was teetering from side to side, and now they’d toppled to the floor with a crash of despair. And maybe a little bit of relief too. She didn’t have to lie any more.
‘Did you seriously think I wouldn’t check the bank balance, Erica? Did you seriously think I wouldn’t notice and call your office to find out where your salary was when it didn’t hit our account? Imagine my surprise when I spoke to Luke and discovered that not only does he know nothing about the trip that you told me Channel 6 had signed you up for, but also, more to the point, you don’t even bloody work there any more.’
Yes actually, Erica thought but didn’t say.
Henry sighed. She imagined his breath, warm on her skin, and wished she could undo it all.
‘I’m so sorry, Henry. Please believe me. I never meant for any of this to happen.’
‘Explain it to me then,’ he said.
Erica swallowed and pushed back her own hurt. Henry had a right to the truth. ‘This challenge has nothing to do with Channel 6. They didn’t send me on it. The truth is that … that I signed Molly and me up for it. In fact, the studio decided to scrap the daytime news and create a new evening news show. I thought I was a sure thing for the director spot. It was just me and Darcey –’
‘Who’s Darcey?’
‘The grad I told you about once. The one with the attitude.’
Henry made a noise as if he remembered.
‘I thought it was a formality. Some red tape issue they had to go through before they could give it to me.’ She let out a laugh that bounced in the empty cabin and hit her ears as an anguished cry. ‘And I believed them. I prepared my pitch and delivered it brilliantly. The job was supposed to have been mine.’
‘Why didn’t you tell me any of this at the time? When exactly was this?’
Erica sensed the cogs of Henry’s mind replaying memories, searching for any hint of what he’d missed. Guilt ricocheted through her body.
‘I didn’t want to admit I was having to apply for what was rightly mine, and not only that, I was up against some twenty-something celebrity-obsessed nobody,’ she sighed. ‘It happened really quickly, and we’d both been up in the night with Isla when she had that ear infection. There didn’t seem any point mentioning it. Things were hectic enough.’
A loaded silence carried down the line that made Erica’s throat ache.
‘But then they made me redundant. Just like that. Schuster didn’t even have the guts to do it himself. He made HR do it with some rubbish about there being a stronger applicant for the role, and they were very sorry, but as there were no other producer roles available, they were cutting me. Just like that. They gave the job to Darcey. That’s when I realized it had all been a charade. All the stuff about merging roles, the red tape of making people apply, it was all to get rid of me and promote Darcey.’
A sickness churned in her stomach as if she was right back there on the street by Waterloo station, staring at the bright wintry morning sunlight with her carrier bag of useless belongings, and no clue whatsoever what she was going to do next.
‘They decided I was past it,’ she whispered.
‘They said that?’
‘No, but I knew it was what they were thinking.’
‘Why didn’t you appeal then? Take them to a tribunal for unfair dismissal?’
‘And be the woman who was past it, and couldn’t let go? No thanks.’
‘Erica, you should have told me.’
‘I know. I’m so sorry, Henry. I was reeling and hurt. All you ever want to talk about is how perfect our life is, and how well it works with you staying at home part-time and me going off to work. I wanted to tell you, but I knew it would ruin every –’
‘Because you wanted it that way,’ he cut in. ‘You didn’t want to go part-time. It wasn’t like I actually wanted to take a backwards step in my career either, but I knew it didn’t mean as much to me as yours did to you, so I did it for us – you, me, and Isla.’
‘I know. But you were putting so much pressure on me to have another baby. I couldn’t destroy your plans.’
‘That’s utter bollocks, Erica. I’d never have kept something like this from you. We’re a family. We’re in this together, for ever. Well that’s what I thought, anyway. Maybe you see it differently. I don’t know why I’m surprised really. It’s not as though you like spending time with us, is it? You’re forever disappearing into the study at the weekends. Anything to avoid being part of this family.’
‘I am part of this family,’ she gasped. ‘I love Isla. I’m her mother. I love spending time with her. It’s you who’s ruining that, not me. I get home after a long week, working every hour there is, and all I want to do on a Saturday morning is sit on the floor in the living room with a cup of coffee and play puzzles and games with Isla. Actually spend some time with her. But that’s never good enough for you, Henry. You’re forever forcing this family time on all of us where we go on long walks with Isla strapped in the pushchair or carried on one of our backs. That’s not the time I want to spend with her.’
‘Oh, so it’s my fault you lied, is it? I just don’t get it, Erica. I’d never keep anything like this from you. Why didn’t you just tell me?’
‘I tried. I honestly tried, but you just piled on the guilt and it was just easier to withdraw. I want to be Isla’s mother; I want to spend time with her, but I also want my career and to be who I am, and I am so tired of the guilt from you about that. Why should I have to give up who I am just because I’m a mother as well?’
‘I’m not asking you to. For God’s sake, Erica, I’ve always supported you. How many other men do you know who are fathers and willing to put their wife’s career before their own?’
‘But that’s it – you never let me forget it. The sacrifice you’re making for me, like I’m supposed to be grateful all of the time. Do you have any idea how long a tax return takes to fill in? How long it takes to find a new deal for the mortgage, sort out the home insurance and every other little thing? Do you think it’s what I want to be doing at the weekends? But you leave it all for me to do, so what choice do I have?’
‘You should have told me,’ he said again, his voice softening a fraction.
‘I know, but I … I didn’t know how. My career was everything.’
‘Everything eh?’ Henry asked, his voice shrill. ‘Well that sums it up then.’ There was a pause before Henry spoke again. ‘If you lost your job in December. Then where exactly have you been going when you’ve woken up at five every morning and dressed for work?’
It was Erica’s turn to be silent. The other part of the lie she’d almost forgotten about in the heat of their argument. ‘I … ’ she stammered, drawing out the silence. She had to tell him. She wanted to tell him. And yet the words wouldn’t come.
‘The thing is,’ she started again, waiting for Henry to cut in with a prompt or even to shout at her. He didn’t. ‘Henry?’
Silence.
‘Henry, are you still there?’
Erica lifted the phone from her ear and stared at the blank phone screen. He’d hung up on her.
Had she just ended her marriage? Sabotaged her family? For what – a job she didn’t have and a stupid childhood dream?
My career was everything.
She hadn’t meant it to sound as though Henry and Isla didn’t matter. Of course they mattered. She just didn’t know who she was any more without her career.
Erica’s leg knocked against her backpack. It scraped against the wood and fell to its side. She shone her torch over it and rifled inside until her hand reached the gift buried at the bottom.
The box was small and wrapped in silver paper. Henry had used too much wrapping paper as usual, making the folds chunky and uneven. A smile to twitch on her face despite everything. ‘When Isla gets a bit bigger we’ll tell people she wrapped the gifts,’ he’d said once.
She’d laughed. ‘Or you could learn to wrap properly.’
Placing her torch upright on the floor, Erica ripped open the paper. She bit back a sob as the distinctive light teal blue of a Tiffany box fell into her lap.
The necklace was exquisite. A dainty platinum chain connected by a curved infinity band that glistened in the spotlight. Erica closed the box and pushed it back into the depths of her bag.
Infinity. The word echoed in her mind. How could she wear it now after the fight they’d just had?
Erica pulled herself up from the floor and stared into the gloom of the cabin. She knew she should take the satellite phone back to Lee but all of a sudden her ankles felt shackled with irons and it was all she could do to drag herself to her bunk and lie down in the dark. She shuffled her body against the wall and curled herself into a ball whilst her shoulders shivered and deep wrenching sobs shook her body. Why hadn’t she just told him from the start what she’d been doing? What was she so scared of?
She thought she’d been living a double life. She’d thought she’d been proving something to everyone who had doubted her, everyone who thought she was past it. She thought she’d been proving something to herself. Now though, in the dark of the cabin with the cold drilling into her bones and Henry’s words in her ears, all she saw of the last three months was a woman burying herself in a ridiculous notion to avoid thinking about the future.
Happy Birthday, Coward, a voice hissed in her ear.