Page 36 of The One Day You Were My Husband
I sat by those phones every day that week, until finally our own phone rang at 6:05 p.m. on the Friday. I knew why she was calling. I’d heard Dad yelling at her the previous night. I’d heard him demand that shecall us, and I’d heard him list all the ways in which she’d failed us. I’d heard his every word and now, now I finally had Mum on the phone, I couldn’t think of a single thing to say.
“Carrie?” Johan prompted.
I couldn’t speak. Grief rolled down my cheeks in stinging tears.
“Talk to me.”
“I haven’t been in this territory before,” I said. I tried to take a deep breath, but another shuddering sob came out.
“Hang on,” he said. There were sounds of activity, then his voice again. “Check your messages.”
He’d sent me a screenshot from WhatsApp.
Every evening, at around 11 p.m., he’d tried to text me. Next to each message was a red alert to say the message had failed to send. But he’d kept on trying. Every night—every single night—he’d written,I miss you tonight.
A whole page of it.
I miss you tonight.
I miss you tonight.
I miss you tonight.
I couldn’t speak.
“Carrie, listen to me.”
I listened.
“Carrie. I love you already. I…I didn’t want to say that on the phone but—there it is. I love you. I think about you all day. All night. You’re it. Everything.”
He paused.
“Are you there, Carrie Cole?”
“Yes,” was all I managed to say. But he knew what theyesstood for.
That night he came into the hospital to collect me at the end of my shift. He came with warm samosas and two cans of gin and tonic, and those polar blue eyes.
“I meant it,” he said. “I love you. Don’t bother trying to end this again, because I won’t listen.”
“OK.” I smiled sheepishly.
“And I’ve had an idea. I’ll have a two-week break in the middle of my Myanmar dive. They were originally going to fly me home and then back out again but it’s more cost-effective to keep me out there. Why don’t you fly out? We could have a holiday in Thailand. Or anywhere. I don’t care. I’m just not willing to be away from you for six weeks.”
Eleven.
Now: Devon, December 2022
Christmas. No snow, of course, but the cold weather has persisted and we wake to frost and dazzling sun, the air scalpel-sharp. The kids open their stockings on our bed in a luminous fissure of sunlight, lengthy shadows falling from their Christmas present piles. They look like something from a painting and my heart bursts for them, my chocolate-covered little people, shouting with excitement, pelting Robin and me with balled-up wrapping paper.
After opening their stockings, they run outside to smash the ice on the pond and Maeve, in spite of all our warnings, manages to fall in. She screams loudly all the way back into the house and then spends twenty minutes in the shower, water flying around so wildly that a vast pool forms on the floor and drips down through the kitchen light fitting below. We lose power in the kitchen for three hours while it dries out, which means I have to put the goose—our first ever goose—into the Aga. Christmas dinner is unlikely to be ready before the following day as a result, but Robin tells me it’s all fine and he’s probably right.
We’re on our own for Christmas this year. Dad isn’t up to a daywith my children. I’m not sure he’s up to even an hour with them at the moment; he was very distressed when I popped around to see him yesterday. Maya flew in two days ago and she’s spending the day with him and Nicola. Mum is in Brighton with her friend Gail, who is one of the only people I know who seems to have a limitless threshold for my mother, and Robin, an only child, lost his parents when he was young. So it’s just the four of us, which would be lovely if it weren’t for the fact that I have been with Dad every single Christmas since I was born. I had to lock myself in the bathroom to cry when the kids were having breakfast.
I’m in our dark little kitchen with a head torch, peeling potatoes, while Robin does some game with the kids involving yells of “ATTACK!” In spite of my grief and worry about Dad, it’s been lovely so far. Raffy and Maeve are high as kites on sugar and I’m high as a kite, still, on Robin’s Christmas present. With Dell’s help, and at great expense, he got me into, and paid for, a basic surgical skills course at the Royal College, which took place last week. I loved it. I hadn’t forgotten a thing.
“ATTACK!” Robin yells, diving from the sofa into a pile of beanbags and cushions. Maeve and Raffy scream with laughter, running out from their hiding place to whack him with still-wrapped presents from under the tree.
