Page 23 of A Midlife Marriage

‘Of course!’ Head bowed, she gathered her bag and her jacket.Great start, Helen. Great bloody start.

Trotting to keep up,Helen followed as Christian led her through the offices of Stronger Together.

‘This is our collaborative area,’ he said as they passed an area filled with high tables, spaced in front of a whiteboard.

Good height for tapas,she almost quipped, and remembering her last joke, settled on, ‘Very nice.’

‘Our tech space.’

She turned to see a closed office, with individual desks and screens.

‘It’s booked through an app.’

‘I see.’

‘The hydration station.’ Christian had stopped next to a strip of kitchen. White gloss cupboards, under a granite bench, a sink with two taps. Two taps?

’Would you like some water?’ he said.

‘Yes please.’

‘Fizzy or still?’ He picked up a glass and turned to the taps.

‘Still is fine.’

‘Mint or lemon?’

Helen blinked, glancing across at two huge glass dispensers on the bench, one topped with lemon wedges, one with sprigs of mint. ‘Plain is fine,’ she said. ‘Plain, still water.’ She was thinking of the tea-stained sink in the kitchen at the health centre. The white crust of limescale around the lip of the kettle. Clutching her glass, she followed on. Past a ‘creative breakout space’ which, with its stack of board games, box of Lego (Lego!) and chess set, looked to Helen more like a sixth-form common room. At least they put their toys away here. Past a ‘game-zone’ with a screen and handsets and past the ‘quiet zone’ with cocoon-like pods and noticeably softer lighting. And she couldn’t help it. ‘So, where’s the naughty step?’ she quipped, not noticing that Christian had stopped. Not noticing and walking right into him. ‘Oh gosh!’ She stepped back. ‘Sorry.’

Christian winced. She’d trodden on his toe.

‘This is my office,’ he said, his smile noticeably less bright than the one he had greeted her with.

19

Stiff as hell from hunching over a sink that had been built a hundred and fifty years earlier, for people several inches shorter, Caro walked on the spot. ‘Ouch! God, it hurts.’ She jigged her weight from foot to foot, hands burning with cold as she lifted them from the freezing water. ‘How many more?’ she gasped.

At the Aga, Tomasz turned. Pushing his glasses back on his head, he raised his hand to count the huddle of cabbages on the kitchen table, one, two, three … the knife in his hands a sheath of silver.

‘Nine,’ she said, a tinge of impatience in her voice.

‘Nine.’ He agreed. He nodded at the sink. ‘Use the sieve. You don’t have to put your hands in then.’

‘If I use the sieve,’ Caro groaned, ‘we’ll be here till Christmas. At least this way I can get a good load done at once.’ And turning back to the sink she plunged her hands in again, gathering the flow of shredded cabbage together, lifting, squeezing and finally dropping it onto a tea-towel. She folded the tea-towel in half and then half again, pressed and rolled and shook it open, spreading the pieces onto a baking tray that had been lined with paper. Sheput the tray in the freezer and leaned against the sink, looking out of the window. High above, the torch of a July sun had risen steadily, Helios driving his chariot halfway across the world, while she had been chained to the sink, blanching cabbage. ‘Can we take a break?’ she said.

Tomasz looked up from the skull-sized cabbage he was busy quartering, and Caro looked down at her hands. Her knuckles were as creamy white as the cabbage heads, her nails already splitting, the varnish, so recently applied, flaking and chipped. ‘There’s an awful lot in the freezer already.’ She shrugged. ‘I mean, how much cabbage does anyone need?’

Smiling, he put the knife down. ‘I could always make Sauerkraut,’ he said. ‘We don’t have to do all this then.’ And he waved a hand at the tea-towels laid the length of the kitchen bench, the paper-lined trays stacked next to the sink. ‘Sauerkraut is more of a one-person job.’

‘If we do that, we’ll have time for coffee in the garden before I go. I can make it,’ she added. Becauseif we do that, meantif he does that.If Tomasz carried on fulfilling the obligations of this trial run they were in the middle of, while she escaped again. Escape wasn’t the right word of course, she just couldn’t think of another one right now. It was Thomas who had insisted she go in the first place. When she’d told him about Helen’s idea for a joint retirement/hen evening he had waved aside any reasons she had made not to and booked her ticket, presenting it with her over breakfast. And of course she was looking forward to the evening, it’s just that the one excuse she hadn’t voiced, was the one he wouldn’t have waved aside: that while Spencer Cooper was still in town, it was better that she wasn’t. She hadn’t examined this idea, she had in fact done the opposite, shut it away, and covered it up with other thoughts, such as arranging delivery of her bouquet, double-checking that the car company had all her instructions. But it was stubborn, and every time her guard fell,it was there, this persistent notion that if he was in town, it was better that she wasn’t. She watched as Tomasz took a huge pan of boiling water and poured it down the sink.

‘I don’t even like cabbage,’ he said.

Smiling she put her hand on his cheek. It was OK. Helen’s place wasn’t even in town. Close, but not London. Not really. ‘Neither do I,’ she said and kissed him.

‘Let’s not tell the Sullivans then.’

‘I won’t if you won’t.’ Caro smiled. Laura and Neil Sullivan were the couple who owned Hollybrook Farm – the people they were leasing from. The husband-and-wife team who had handed them a file containing A to Z instructions of everything they would need to know about running a smallholding. A: assess your soil quality regularly. D: Ditch management. It was the size of a brick and equally dull, and frankly she’d seen merger proposals between companies worth billions use fewer trees. She hadn’t made it beyond F: (fertilise the soil regularly), although Tomasz read it regularly. Sitting by the stone fireplace, night after night leafing through the pages with the devotion of a true believer.

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