Page 73 of The One Day You Were My Husband
“I hadn’t.”
He moves closer and my body, without my permission, simply switches on. Briefly, I feel fury at it, this internal chemistry lab over which I should surely have developed some agency. But it’s very clear that I haven’t, that I can’t move away, no matter how much I want to. And I sense it’s the same for him.
“Take good care, Carrie Cole.” He reaches forward and gently kisses my cheek. It lands near my ear and spreads across my whole body. He watches me for a moment more, then thumbs away the tear that has sprung, against my will.
“There wasn’t a day I didn’t think about you,” he says. He removes a tear from the other eye. “There still isn’t. I loved you every bit as much as you loved me.”
Twenty-six.
I pack my bags and go straight to Arlanda airport, booking a new return flight on my phone. The flight stops in Munich and doesn’t land at Heathrow until nearly 10 p.m., but I don’t care. I need to return to my life, to my three loves, and that needs to happen without delay.
I drive up onto the moor just after 2 a.m., moon hazy behind silver loafs of night cloud. Stars carpet the vast black rising above the hills and tors; rabbits and deer scatter before my headlights. I find myself praying as I bounce down our potholed track, gorse glowing on either side:Please let me not have harmed what I have here. Please.
Even though the only thing I want to do is run up to my children’s bedroom, I go straight to the Pig Shed, which is empty this week, and scrub myself down in the shower like a criminal. My body reacted to Johan’s in ways that frightened me—I want to remove that energy. I am happy here with my husband and children. I don’t want any of this infected by my past.
Soon after, I’m in the children’s room, breathing in their sweetfoggy breath, kissing their divine-smelling little heads. Raffy bats off my hand in his sleep, whereas Maeve, unusually, is sleeping neatly and peacefully, her hair in two plaits like Pippi Longstocking. Before I left for Sweden we read three Pippi Longstocking books. The kids made me promise I’d take them to Stockholm one day, too, to see the Pippi house at the children’s museum.
Finally, I come to my own bedroom, picking my way quietly around the bed to my side, by the window that we never close, and the reassuring shape of Robin’s body in the bed. This is the end of it all. This is home.
“Hello,” a sleepy voice says in the dark. When I called earlier to say I’d binned off the rest of the conference and was coming home tonight, he was delighted. Had my car not been waiting for me in the car park at Heathrow, I think he’d have bundled the sleeping children into his and driven all the way up to collect me.
Explosions and fireworks are all very well at the start of a relationship, but there must be something solid and beautiful beyond that for it to last. My relationship with Robin has been a case in point; my relationship with Johan was not. We had the fireworks, we had the explosions, but then—after the biggest firework of all—we had nothing.
“Hi,” I whisper, dropping a kiss into the dark. It lands in Robin’s hair. He reaches out a hand and manages to land it on my breast, which makes him chuckle sleepily.
I wish I’d just told him. The moment I found Johan on Roof, I wish I’d just bloody well gone to him, to my calm, practical husband, who’s always championed honesty, and told him that something truly crazy had happened. Now it’s far too late.
“You OK?” Robin’s muffled voice asks as I sit quietly on the bed,taking my earrings out. He gave them to me for our fifth anniversary. They look expensive, although I’ve never asked. Johan would never have bought expensive jewelry, but I feel special when I wear them.
A warm hand lands on the small of my back and my body unravels a little more. I lean back into the hand and then curl up next to him, still clothed, unclenching for the first time in many hours.
“Yes,” I say, and he kisses the back of my neck. A big bear arm hooks around me.
I don’t need to find out why Johan pleaded guilty more than a decade ago. He wasn’t willing to be transparent about the situation then, and he isn’t now.
This is where I belong.
—
Two days later, I drive over to help Nicola sort through Dad’s stuff before visiting him at his nursing home. Maya has gone to London for a couple of nights to see some old friends, and the kids are at school.
I have found the past few days hard. Pain and anger at Johan’s betrayal have been the foundation stones of my recovery all these years, and the loss of that firm footing is something I feel keenly.
I’ve developed a routine in which I get up and move my body the moment he creeps, spiderlike, into my mind. The idea was that I got up and danced or did some exercise, but the reality is I mostly clean and tidy. But whatever the movement is, I keep doing it until the thoughts are gone. Maya would tell me I’m squashing down my feelings. She would probably be right.
It’s helped that the kids have been clamped to me like barnacles since I returned. “You were away for weeks,” Raffy whispered the nextmorning, after Maeve dive-bombed our bed, shoutingMummy!at the top of her voice. “Please don’t do that again,” he said.
“It was two nights!” I protested while he tore open the Brothers Lionheart jigsaw I’d brought from Sweden, but he wasn’t having any of it. “Weeks,” he insisted, upending the jigsaw pieces on my duvet. There’s nothing like the physical reality of children who couldn’t care less about what’s happening in your head to return you squarely to the present moment.
“We’ve painted you one thousand three millionty-five pictures,” Maeve said, dragging me down the stairs, circling her new Swedish dance ribbon vigorously. She wasn’t exaggerating. Robin had dried each one and stacked them like poppadoms on the kitchen table. One saidMUMMY YOU ARE MY FAYVRIT, but another saidI HAYT YOU MUMMY.
I haven’t yet broached the subject of me returning to Sweden for a two-week attachment, although I haven’t broached that subject with myself, either. It’s an outstanding opportunity—Yanika will take me into every operation and I’ll get to observe robotic techniques I’d have no hope of witnessing at a regional hospital in the UK. But it won’t make any formal contribution to my reorientation year and, far more importantly, I am no longer sure I can handle being in that city.
—
Nicola has red eyes when she opens the door but tells me she is fine. She’s been dealing with Dad’s departure with a vigorous program of decluttering and sorting, which is something I can relate to. I know from my own struggles with toxic productivity that the last thing she needs is for someone to tell her to stop and rest, because she won’t. She’ll carry on doing it, only in secret. The best thing I can do for her is help.
After making me a cup of tea, she sends me up to Dad’s study.There’s a lot of confidential paperwork up there from his years in the civil service, and he made us promise, when he was diagnosed, that we’d shred it all once he lost capacity to gatekeep it himself.
