Page 7 of We All Live Here
Here are the things I have learned in my fifteen years of marriage: it’s okay if you don’t feel filled with adoration every day. We are all going to get grumpy over the discarded socks, the missed annual car inspection, the fact that you haven’t had sex for six weeks. As the great Esther Perel says, love is a process. It is a verb. All marriages have peaks and troughs, and over those years you gain a greater perspective and realize that it is just part of the ebb and flow of your own, special, unique romantic life. Marriage can contain multitudes of emotions in one single day. You can wake up to the man snoring beside you and think you want to put a pillow over his head, and by eleven o’clock that same morning, you’re wishing the cleaner would leave early so that you could grab him and lose a delicious hour in bed together. You can feel fondness, irritation, lust, gratitude all in the same half-hour. The trick is to understand this process, this ebb and flow, and not be panicked by your own emotions. Because as long as you’re bothin this together, a team, you know deep in your bones that this is just part of the glorious business of being human. Dan is my team, and we’re in this together, and there isn’t a day that I’m not grateful for that certainty.
Sometimes Lila remembers this extract, serialized helpfully in a national newspaper a whole fourteen days before Dan left her, and wants to curl up in a tiny hard ball, like a woodlouse trapped in a washbasin.
She had been so certain when she wrote it. She remembers sitting in the house, constructing that final sentence, feeling overwhelmed with love for her husband, her life. (She had often felt overwhelmed when writing about fictional Dan: he was so much less complicated than actual Dan.) Dan used to shake his head fondly when she talked about her father, had banned her from using her well-worn mantra:Everyone leaves in the end.
The first time she had said it to him, panicky in the face of his alarmingly consistent advances, unwilling to commit in the early months of their relationship, he had reached for her hand, folded it in both of his, and said: “You need to rewrite that story. Just because your dad behaved like an arsehole, it doesn’t mean all men will.” It had felt like a revelation, and then it had felt like a touchstone.
She thinks now that they were probably mostly happy for the first ten years, give or take the childcare juggling, the tiredness competitions when the babies were small. She definitely remembers a family holiday while she was writing her book when she had sat on the beach watching her daughters in the water playing with her mother (Francesca was very enthusiastic about the sea) and thought, hugging her sandy knees, how incredibly lucky she was. It had felt like being nestled in the very heart of something good and strong and solid: her mother splashing, Bill calling encouragement from under his sun hat, her beautiful laughing girls, her husband. Financial security, a new house, the sun, and the twinkling waves. It had felt like she had everything to look forward to.
And then—plot twist!—Dan had gone. And less than a year later, her mother too.
She has been mulling this for twenty minutes, her noise-blocking earphones on, staring out of the window, when she notices a man standing at the end of the front garden, gazing up. She watches him, frowning for a while, waiting for him to leave. But he doesn’t. Just takes two paces to the right, puts his hand on the trunk of the tree, and stands there, apparently thinking. He is wearing a puffy jacket, a pair of slightly grubby jeans, and a beanie hat. She cannot see his face. She feels a vague stab of anxiety: two weeks ago her neighbor’s car had been stolen from the front drive. She wills him to take a phone call, to move on, to do any one of a number of things that will tell her he is not a thief, not someone planning something sinister. But still he stands, looking up speculatively. She sits at her desk for a moment longer, then pulls the earphones from her head and races downstairs, four, five flights, clips a lead on Truant so that she is not alone, and opens the front door. The man looks round at her.
“This is a private driveway,” she says, loud enough for him to hear.
He doesn’t say anything, just regards her steadily as Truant sets up an urgent, deafening stream of barking. She remembers suddenly that she is still in her dressing-gown and pajamas at eleven o’clock in the morning. She had told herself that she was not allowed to get dressed until she had written a thousand words in an attempt to force herself to stay at her desk. Suddenly this feels like a categorical error.
“What?” he yells.
“This is a private driveway! Go away!”
He frowns a little. “I’m just looking at your tree.”
It is a ridiculous excuse.
“Well, don’t.”
“Don’t look at your tree?”
“No.” Truant is pulling at the lead, growling and snapping. She loves him for this show of aggression.
The man seems untroubled. He raises his eyebrows. “Can I look at your tree if I stand on the pavement?”
He takes two steps back, clearly slightly amused. It makes her feel furious and powerless at the same time, this man’s casual confidence, his apparent knowledge that she has no control over the situation.
“Just don’t look at my tree! Don’t look at my house! Go away!”
“That’s friendly.”
“I don’t owe you friendly. Just because I’m a woman I don’t have to be friendly. You’re standing in my front garden and I haven’t invited you to do that. So, no, I don’t have to be friendly.”
A shrill note has crept into her voice, and Truant’s barking is deafening. From the corner of her eye she can see next door’s curtains twitching in the bay window. No doubt this will be notched up on their list of neighborly misdemeanors. She lifts a hand by way of apology and the curtain closes.
“Nice car,” he says, glancing at the Mercedes.
She had bought the sports car because it had felt like something her mother would do—impulsive and optimistic. She bought it from a specialist dealer because the first dealership she called failed to return her calls. And she bought the highest-specification, most expensive model her mother’s inheritance allowed her—a 1985 Mercedes Benz 380SL—because the sharp-suited salesman in the dealership she’d ended up at clearly didn’t believe she could afford it. (“Yup,” said Eleanor, her oldest friend, drily. “You really showed him.”)
“It’s got a tracker,” she yells.
“What?” He cannot hear her over the noise.
“It’s got a tracker fitted! And an alarm system!”
He frowns. “You think I’m going to steal your car?”
“No. I don’t think you’re going to steal my car. Because then the police would track it and you would end up in jail. I’m just letting youknow that that’s not an option. And, by the way, there is no money in the house. Just in case you’re wondering.”
He frowns at his trainers for a minute, then looks up at her. “So you’ve come out here just to tell me I can’t look at your tree and I can’t steal your Mercedes or I’m going to jail and you have no money.”
