‘Morning.’ Caroline appears behind me, slipping her way into the nursery and leaning against the wall, smiling. She’s wearing a dark green vest top that barely skims her thighs and a small pair of black knickers underneath. An image of the night before flashes into my head: her face turned to one side on the pillow in abandon, her legs hotly clasping mine. The thought gives me a surge of desire and I have to stamp it back down. These days, it sometimes seems I can barely think of anything else. It was one of the first things that came back, after I stopped the pills. The delirious realization that this was still something I could do – the bizarre novelty of fucking my own wife. She’s watching me, looking as if she’s reading my mind. ‘Are you off soon?’ she asks.
I nod. ‘Got that early appointment.’ It’s a new patient, a last-minute request. I’ve been building back up slowly. A new clinic, new practice. Another clean slate. Not taking on more than I can handle, not caring what other people think. Giving myself the space to breathe. I’m doing this right. It hasn’t been perfect, but it’s still moving in the right direction.
‘Well,’ she says, going over to Eddie and taking his hand to pull him out of bed into a cuddle, ‘I’ll be around when you come back. Day off, remember? I’ll take him in to nursery and then maybe we can have lunch together or something?’
‘Sounds good,’ I say. There’s an unexpected stinging across the bridge of my nose, the hint of approaching tears. My emotions aren’t always predictable. Sometimes, I have no idea where they have come from or what they mean. I’ve learned to sit back and let them take over when they want to, and then to pack them carefully away in their box. Take your feelings out to lunch, my sponsor said to me a while ago, and then tell them to fuck off. That’s what I do. So I give myself a moment, let the strange tenderness and sadness linger, and then I toss them away.
Caroline comes with me to the front door and winds her limbs around me, pressing her body up against mine. She’s clingy at the moment, desiring. I don’t mind. It makes a change from all those months back in the dark times, when she was slippery like mercury and shrank away from my touch. ‘See you later,’ she murmurs.
‘See you,’ I say, kissing her. I pull back and look at her, taking her in. There are lines on her face that weren’t there a few years ago and I can see the tiredness in her eyes, but she’s still beautiful. More so to me than ever, really, now that she’s mine again.
I stride down the main road towards the station in the bright sunshine. The trees are still laden with lush green leaves and the sky is blue and cloudless. It’s a film set, a picture of perfection. I’m thinking of Caroline and the smell of her perfume as she wrapped her arms around my neck. Something tremors at the edge of the image. I let it stay there, knowing I shouldn’t ignore it. These memories are still there, and it’s useless to deny them. Now and again, it still comes in a rush of bitterness and surprise: the knowledge that another man has been inside her and made her believe that she loves him. Every time, it feels like the first time. It isn’t going to go away. It has to be lived with, just like everything else.
I carry on walking, and now I’m thinking about that July night, so long ago, when she came back crying and wouldn’t tell me why. Standing in the middle of the lounge with tears streaming down her face, lost in some private space that she couldn’t explain and which I had no way of reaching through the fog that was suffocating my every breath. It should have been a wake-up call but it only drove me further underground. The few weeks that followed were a disjointed montage of broken sleep, slurred insults, abortive attempts at reconciliation, punctuated by the pills at every hour, until I had completely lost any lingering sense of who or where I was. And finally, the calm stillness of the September evening when she came to me and told me she was leaving. I’m taking Eddie down to my parents in the morning, and I’m leaving you. I’ve had enough. I don’t want this life any more.
What cut through was the relief. Hidden in the pale, tense lines of her mouth, the half-defiant lift of her chin. She’d made her decision, and at least part of her was happy. Strange that that’s what it took for me to see that I couldn’t let her go. I stayed up all night and I didn’t take any more pills. It was the first time I’d gone more than a couple of hours without in weeks. I’ll never forget that bizarre, dreamlike sense of surfacing – the first bubbles of air popping into my body and dragging me up and out, skinned and reborn.
It took hours to persuade her not to go. Hours of talking in the grey dawn, convincing her that now was the time for change. But as soon as we began to speak I could tell that, although the decision was made, it could be undone. She hadn’t managed to sever the bonds as entirely as she thought, and I could see almost at once that, even though she didn’t really believe what I was saying, she wanted to, and that was half the battle.
Six a.m., and I had unfolded myself as much as I could physically bear. The pounding in my head, the weird starkness of the objects in the room around us, revealing themselves to me after weeks of sitting amid them and seeing nothing but shadows. And when I had finished talking, she began. If there’s any chance of us doing this, then I need to tell you something, too.
The affair with Carl was hard for her to speak about. I’d never seen such sadness in her eyes, such reluctance. It was more serious than I had thought. It had been months, and in her head she’d worked it up into a grand passion. I didn’t know – still don’t – how real it was. But I knew she felt it was, and that was enough. It had ended, though she wouldn’t tell me how, but it was clear she wasn’t over it. It didn’t matter. There was no pain, no anger. That came later but, in that moment, there was nothing but the sweetness of revelation. We had spent more time talking to each other in those few hours than we had in months, maybe years. The facts were out on the table for inspection and our marriage was a fucking mess. But the air was sharp and clean and I was breathing in and out and we were both still alive.
I’ve been so lost in thought it comes as a surprise to find that I’m sitting on the train and we’re pulling away from the platform. The sun against the window shines on to my hands folded in my lap. My wedding ring is much too loose now, but I’m still wearing it. For now, at least, we seem to have survived.
The woman who enters the counselling room is in her late forties: dark hair cut into a bob, a slight, narrow frame, smart, neutral clothes. I’ve had barely any chance to skim the notes I’ve been sent from her assessment. It sounds like fairly standard depression. And yet as soon as I see her I get a strange feeling that nothing about this is going to be standard at all.
Maybe it’s the way she stops when she’s halfway across the threshold, looking intently at me, and then around the room. People don’t usually focus their attention on these things. They’re driven by their own suffocating concerns – that’s why they’re here. But she looks around so carefully, and her gaze lingers on my desk: the small, red-flowered pot plant, the framed photograph of Caroline and Eddie. I keep it turned inwards towards me, so all she’s staring at is the back of the frame, but she looks at it as if she really wants to know what’s on the other side. Her hands are twisted together in front of her and I can see the tension in her jawline, like she’s gritting her teeth.
‘Good morning,’ I say. ‘Sandra, isn’t it? Come in. Take a seat.’
She edges further into the room and her gaze flits around the couple of chairs available to her. At last, she chooses the one closest to mine and draped with the purple throw, next to the window. She slides into it in silence. Her eyes are dark blue and unblinking, steady as glass.
‘If it’s OK with you,’ I say, ‘I like to start by just letting you talk. Telling me a bit about yourself and what’s been going on.’