Page 29 of Out of Control

The seat opposite Rob remained empty as well. After the last wing he wiped his greasy fingers on the napkin. “It looks like we’ll have to chat between ourselves. What do you think of the club so far?”

He was making small talk as if everything they’d been through together had never happened. No — ‘been through together’ wasn’t the right phrase. Fiona had gone through italone. Rob had closed up after the loss of Amber. She’d wanted to talk. She’d wanted them to comfort one another. She’d wanted them to acknowledge their feelings. And she’d wanted apologies and explanations about the bailiffs and the debt and, ultimately, the gambling. Rob had wept huge sobs beside her hospital bed after an ultrasound scan had confirmed the miscarriage, but after that there’d been hardly any emotion at all. For Fiona the burden of grief had sometimes been too heavy for her even to lift her head from the pillow.

“Too early to say. I haven’t been a member for long.” If he wanted small talk, he could have small talk.

“The food’s good, isn’t it?” He paused. “Do you remember me bringing you here for your birthday, about six months after we started going out?”

Fiona frowned. So much of their early relationship had been forgotten in the blackness of what came later. It was possible they’d been here.

“It’s been remodelled since then,” Rob continued. “It was August, obviously, and we sat close to those French windows. They were open and you started flapping around because a wasp landed in your wine.”

Fiona stared at the curtained doors and tried to imagine them open and full of evening sunshine. She pictured the room devoid of tinsel, garlands and Christmas cracker detritus. Yes, she did remember. It was like a mist clearing in her mind. “It was the first time you saidI love you. To me.” The first sentence was out before she could censor it and the second had to be added to dilute any meaning that he might read in to it.

“I didn’t think you’d remember.”

She shrugged. “You know me, Little Miss Attention to Detail.”

They’d both gone traditional over the choice of main course and it was a relief to focus on requesting the bread sauce andredcurrant jelly from further up the table rather than on any more details of that long-ago birthday. Fiona didn’t want Rob to remind her that it had also been the first night they’d slept together. She unwound the bacon blankets from her two sausage pigs and placed them at the edge of her plate. Bacon made her thirsty.

“Do you mind if I . . . ?” Rob was gesturing at the two rashers. “You always used to plonk them straight on my plate.” He paused. “Not that we actually spent that many Christmases together. And for that I am truly sorry.”

Fiona ignored his last sentence and transferred the slivers of cured meat to him. In return, and without asking, he tipped his plate and scraped red cabbage onto her slices of turkey. She felt heat rise in her cheeks. Swapping food like this after a gap of so many years felt like an act too intimate to be done in public.

By the time the raspberry roulade arrived, Fiona’s stomach was suffering not only from food overload but also from the emotional tightness of being in such close proximity to her ex-husband and the memories he evoked. He’d released the cork by mentioning that birthday, and now past images were overflowing in her mind like the magic porridge pot: paddling in the sea at Blackpool on their first weekend away together, a visit to the zoo the day after she discovered she was pregnant, massive ice cream sundaes on their Lake Garda honeymoon because there was no more worrying about fitting into their wedding outfits. She took two mouthfuls of the roulade and put her spoon down.

“May I?” Rob gestured at her plate.

She nodded. He gave her his well-scraped Christmas pudding and custard bowl and started on the roulade, using her spoon.

“I run marathons now,” he said when he’d finished the soft pink and white roll. “It keeps the weight down and helps the mental health.”

“Wow!” The old Rob had derided any exercise other than football, and the term ‘mental health’ would never have passed his lips.

“I thought that would surprise you. The mental health bit anyway. Back then, it would have been seen as a weakness. Society always gave the message that the man had to be strong to care for his woman. That didn’t work for us, did it?”

There was no answer to that.

“But times have changed. My last job before I retired was with a big multi-national organisation who bombarded us with emails about mental health and the things they offered to help us achieve a healthy mind. I had nothing to lose except the baggage from that dreadful time. So, I took up a personal recommendation from someone in my support group and went to counselling.”

Rob was metamorphosing into a new man before her eyes. Fiona was seeing a part of him that he’d kept well hidden. Physically, he was little changed. His dark hair was now verging on silver but it was still all there. He was a little stockier than in his youth but she could imagine him pounding the streets in Lycra. She had a new respect for him.

“It’s pearl, this year,” he said. “Thirty years on Christmas Eve.”

A sharp little arrow hit the bullseye in her heart. “I think about her every day.”

“Me too. And the woman she might have become. The counselling doesn’t take away the memories and the love but it goes some way towards managing the guilt. Not that you’ve got any guilt to manage.”

Their chairs were now angled towards each other, shutting out the rest of the room.

“Coffee? Tea?” The interruption from the waitress brought Fiona to her senses. Getting too close to Rob was dangerous, but on the other hand it was a luxury to be with someone who had shared that awful time thirty years ago.

He still drank his coffee black with one sugar. On request the waitress fetched Fiona an individual pot of decaffeinated tea. Rob laughed. “On your birthday they didn’t do anything decaffeinated. Now it’s as common as vegan options on the menu.”

“I just came to check that you two newbies were OK.” Alison had slipped into the empty seat opposite Rob. “But you seem to have hit it off.”

“We used to know each other back in the day,” Rob explained lightly.

“Well, don’t hog each other all evening. There’s dancing and mingling to be done.”

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