I Invited Her In. Adele Parks
brightens. ‘Bring me up to date. What have I missed?’ she says with a burst of enthusiasm and excitement.
‘Where to start?’
‘Show me the pictures. Take me through every lost year. You said you have albums, right?’
‘Well yes, but—’ I can’t believe she’d be prepared to sit through them. I mean, how interesting can they be to her?
‘Come on. You get the albums, I’ll fill the glasses.’
Despite her suspicions that Rob sometimes strayed, dallied, Abigail had never felt so inclined. She told herself that he wasn’t being unfaithful, it was at worst, just sex. Someone once told her that sex was like drinking a large G&T. Pleasant at the time, forgotten once swallowed. She didn’t imagine there was ever any emotional commitment to these women, therefore there wasn’t any emotional betrayal of her. Overall, he was careful, discreet. There were hints, whispers but no evidence, no facts. Anyway, even if he was indulging himself that way, then she certainly wasn’t going to compound the issue by also doing so. She had opportunities. If not endless then certainly countless. But a marriage was a marriage. Vows were vows. If they weren’t taken seriously, then what was the point? You could just buy a white dress and throw a party, you didn’t need the solemn oath bit. That’s what she’d always thought.
But now she was questioning her own decisions, mourning the opportunities she’d missed. Now, she knew just how deep the betrayal ran.
When she found out, was faced with indisputable evidence, facts, she’d howled. She wanted to kill him, rip him piece from piece. A bolt of visceral violence surged through her being. She’d been lied to and cheated upon. It was wrong, it was cruel, it was unfair. She screamed, roared. Like a lioness. Rob was passive, almost sanguine. That hurt her more; he couldn’t see why she was so devastated. He said their marriage was dead anyway.
‘No fucking way is it dead. Don’t say that,’ she’d yelled.
‘It is,’ he insisted. ‘You killed it with wanting a baby more than anything else. You stopped wanting me ages ago. I was a means to an end and when that didn’t work out for you, you didn’t want me at all.’
‘No, no, that’s not true. That’s not true!’
‘When did we last have sex, Abi?’
She wasn’t sure. It was months, probably, maybe a year. She didn’t like to think about it. That wasn’t how she saw herself, how she saw them. She was sexy. He was sexy. People assumed there was a lot of sex. But the truth was she’d started to go off it a while back. She glared at him. How dare he say ‘when that didn’t work out for you’, as though their childless state was some awful dollop of unluckiness. It wasn’t that way. She felt fury swirl through her body, gushing like blood. She knew when she’d started to go off sex. She could give him an exact date. He should be able to work it out, if he cared to. It was the day he came home with a slight limp, told her he’d been to the hospital and had a vasectomy. Just like that, without even discussing it.
When she threw a dinner plate at him, he’d been surprised. ‘We agreed no kids, we agreed that forever ago.’ He’d said it as though it was no biggie.
No one understood. She had been thirty-six at the time, he was forty-three. When she complained to her girlfriends, they commented that he was being thoughtful, considerate, taking away the burden of responsibility from her. One or two of them leaned in and whispered to her that a man getting a vasectomy was an indicator that he wasn’t planning on throwing over the first wife and starting again with a younger one. She should be pleased!
She just saw a full stop. An end. A blank. If their marriage was dead it was because he killed it when he had that operation. Indiscreetly fucking other women? No longer being considerate enough to try and be careful? That was just a matter of scattering the ashes.
Besides, she also suspected that the vasectomy was not a considerate act designed to take the burden of responsibility away from her, it was so there would never be the chance of an accident. Either with her, or she supposed, with any of his other women, who all had the potential to turn out to be gold-diggers. He’d always been disproportionately concerned about unplanned pregnancies. She was on the pill and she took it regularly, never daring to skip a day because he was right, they had agreed no kids, and it wouldn’t be decent to try to trick him. Now, she regretted playing so fairly. Even though she had always known it was unlikely she would get pregnant while she was taking contraception, she always believed there was a chance, an infinitesimal hope. Then, after the vasectomy, she knew it was all over. She cried in the bathroom every month that she had her period.
So yeah, maybe things had become a bit snoozy in the bedroom, maybe even comatose. It would be impossible to exist in that crazy mental early stage, when all they wanted to do was grab one another and rip each other’s clothes off. Truthfully, she could barely remember that stage when they couldn’t see anything other than each other. When nothing else existed. She wanted more. And he wasn’t allowing her to have it. He was blocking her. It was only when she walked in on him, discovered his horrid, dirty little secret and started to yell at him – really scream, swear, shout – that she remembered feeling passion. Her indignation was so violent, her fury, her hurt so absolute that she felt something like passion.
She couldn’t remember wanting to rip off his clothes. She couldn’t remember thinking the world was populated by just the two of them. It was a relief, in a way. It would hurt so much if she could.
She wished he was dead. Then people would have sent cards and flowers. They’d have respected her, sympathised with her. As soon as news of their split leaked out, people started to avoid her, cancelled coffee dates, didn’t listen to her at production meetings, scattered to the corners of a busy room when she walked into the centre of it. They were embarrassed for her. She was drenched in shame and it should have been him. He was the shameful one.
She’d been robbed. Opportunities had been stolen from her. Years had been squandered. She’d been a fool.
But she wasn’t going to be anybody’s fucking fool again.
Saturday 24th February
On Saturday evening, Abi offers to take Ben and me out for dinner as a thank you for our hospitality. She even thinks to invite Liam along, which is so kind. He declines, preferring to spend the evening with Tanya, but it was nice of her to think to include him. We pay him and Tanya to babysit the girls and the three of us set off to Golden Orchid for Thai – it’s the nicest place in the local area.
As we leave the house, Abi giggles, ‘Isn’t that weird for you?’
‘What?’
‘The fact you’ve basically just paid them to have sex on your sofa.’
‘Oh my God, Abi. That is not what I have done,’ I laugh.
‘It sort of is,’ Ben points out as he climbs into the front of the taxi and Abi and I scramble into the back.
‘No, I paid them to see that Imogen and Lily clean their teeth and go to bed. If they have sex on the sofa, that’s their business. There are some things it’s best not to think about too closely.’
‘I just can’t believe you have a son old enough to be in an adult relationship,’ says Abi. ‘I still feel like we’re eighteen, don’t you?’ I nod and smile. I guess I do, when I’m around Abi at least, I get glimmers of it. But until this weekend, I’d say I felt the full weight of my years. I’m not complaining, I’m