Page 42 of A Midlife Marriage

That felt like the last sleep she had had. In the days and nights that had passed, her agitation and her distraction, had become obvious. In bed, she tossed and turned, at the table she picked and prodded. Tomasz had gone from concern to impatience, and now to this: a reserved detachment as he went about fixing and digging. It was a week in which she had lived so many different scenarios. The life in which she confessed all to Tomasz and he forgave her, and they carried on happily ever after. The life in which she said nothing, and they carried on, happily ever after. Or the life in which he didn’t forgive her, ending it instead, so they didn’t carry on. Or the life in which she ended it. The more she thought about it, the more the knot in her stomach tightened. How could she live happily ever after knowing what she had done? How could he?

He leaned across for his coffee. ‘Isobella is preening herself to death in there, Caro. We can’t leave it, not with Laura and Neil coming. You know what they said.’

Caro nodded. She did remember and if she didn’t it was there anyway, under R, in the manual. A special chapter dedicated to Red Mite with specific instructions on how to clean the coup, how it affected the chickens, how, if it happened, they needed to act quickly. ‘Of course.’ Hands wrapped around her cup, she looked to the chicken village. The chickens had red mite, a couple she had nothing to say to were coming to dinner and six days ago she had slept with another man simply because she could.

‘See you there?’ Tomasz drained his coffee.

‘See you there,’ Caro said, but she didn’t move. One evening she would have decided. Watching him turn the pages of the instruction manual, her heart would contract with regret, her body shrink with self-hatred, and she would know that shecould not say a word. The next morning, up early in the garden, with the dark peaks that filled her horizon watching her guilty footsteps, and she would feel with a cold certainty that shehadto tell him. Confess not just the act, but the vanity that had led to it. Her load would be relieved completely then, and it would be up to Tomasz to decide. And then there were the times when, brushing her teeth, she would catch sight of herself in the mirror: Caro looking back at Caro, neither of them having any idea what to do.

She put her cup down and stood up. Two months ago, when they had visited Hollybrook for the first time, those hills had felt as exotically different as the sand dunes of the Sahara. Now, more and more, they felt like the walls of a prison. She was paralysed with guilt and weary with indecision, a darkness spreading inside her that she felt sure no amount of Cumbrian sunshine would ever reach again.

‘All done.’Forty minutes later Tomasz emerged from the henhouse, with a bucket in one hand and a sponge in the other. ‘All the perches need to be disinfected now,’ he said, looking to the pile of wood they had, together, removed. ‘Then fresh straw laid.’

Caro nodded. ‘What do you want me to do?’ She peeled off a pair of bright-blue gloves.

‘Powder the hens?’

‘I can do that.’

But she couldn’t. And it wasn’t that she was unaccustomed to grabbing hens by now, it was that the temperature was thirty degrees, and the hens resisted, and snows of grey powder settled in the crevice of her collarbone and along the fine hair of her nostrils. Frustrating her, distracting her, causing her guard to drop so images crashed through. The way she had leaned backto show her legs, his thickened waistline. Words echoed, words she would like to forget she had ever said or ever heard:No train today. It’s just that I have an appointment at six. Which you answered. As if it was she that was infected, as if thousands of mites had nestled in her skin, infecting her, torturing her, she shook herself from head to foot,reached down and grabbed the next bird. But its squawk was shrill and as it twisted, her grip loosened and all she felt was a searing sting on her forearm! ‘Shit!’ Caro jumped back, a pool of blood forming at her wrist. ‘Shit! Stupid, fucking …’ And nursing her arm she kicked the bench so hard it collapsed. The bird screeched, turning to her with a flap of wings and an angry stare of its strange orange eyes.

Tomasz looked up from the rafter he was disinfecting.

‘It pecked me,’ she said, nursing her arm.

He didn’t speak. He looked, she thought, utterly exhausted.

‘It pecked me.’

‘Go in, Caro. I’ll finish up.’

Caro pulled at her lip. ‘I can’t leave you with all this.’

‘Just go,’ he said and turned and carried on with the next rafter.

By late afternoon,the sting had faded to a small sullen bruise. She had showered and dressed and was standing now in a kitchen flooded with light. From the Aga came the delicious scent of rosemary and thyme, the herb crust on a roasting joint of lamb. Her neck ached a little and her fingernails still carried a trace of earth, but she had shelled a bowl of fresh peas and scraped the dirt from new potatoes, and the table looked as if it had walked straight out of the pages ofCountry Life.Laid with willow-pattern crockery, and dressed with a vase of lavender, linen napkins and rush placemats, it was the most beautifultable she had ever set. Looking at it, calmed her. ‘You can do this’, she said as she straightened a fork, ‘you can do this’.

And she might have done.If Laura and Neil hadn’t been as dull as she had remembered, she might have got through the evening, might have stood side by side with Tomasz as they washed glasses and re-lived the worst parts, the funny parts. Together, the two of them, making another deposit in the memory-bank of this life they were building together. And then, who knows where it might have led? A slow walk upstairs? A night where they held each other close, waking the next day to a fragile but tangible peace that would have allowed them to move past her prickly moods, forward to their happy ever after?

No-one would ever know, because Laura and Neil were just too dull, and with dessert served and eaten, they were showing no sign of leaving. Worse, they had only just reached K, in the manual, which Neil had insisted Tomasz bring to the table. As if they were schoolchildren, sitting an exam.

‘R: Record-keeping,’ Neil said, his thumb splodged across the page. ‘Now this is important.’

Beside him, Laura nodded.

‘You really do need to keep accurate records of just about everything.’ Reaching across the table, Neil went to pour himself another glass of wine, but the bottle was empty. ‘Planting schedules, equipment maintenance ––’

‘Yields.’ Laura interjected. 'It’s really helpful to be able to look back at numbers when you’re pickling and making sauces. You can see if you’ve got less jars of something.’

‘Laura’s right.’ Neil flipped the pages of the manual. ‘But you’re getting ahead of yourself, sweetheart. We’ll cover that on Y.’

Y?Caro glanced at the clock.

‘I’ll get another bottle.’ Tomasz went to stand.

‘I’ll get it,’ she said, and the scrape of her chair was loud. As she walked to the larder, she was thinking about the cabbages she’d thrown in the bin, the week every inch of bench space had been covered with jars of sauce she had zero appetite for. She reached up for another bottle and stood holding it to her chest. How long could she stand here, until M … maybe even S …

‘We’re still on R,’Laura whispered, as she came back to the table.

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