Page 71 of The Village Midwife
‘I know you didn’t,’ she replied stiffly, pouring some more wine into her glass. ‘You’re right, silver linings and all that. I was devastated at the time, but hey, at least we don’t have to feed our son on end-of-day bargains from the market because you lost your job, right?’
‘Zoe,’ he said quietly. ‘I always said we could try again. For another baby, I mean.’
There it was. Zoe was forcibly reminded of the very reason why their marriage had fallen apart after she’d lost her baby. Because he didn’t understand what she was going through. He didn’t understand that you didn’t just make another baby to replace the one you’d lost. He’d never seen their unborn child as a complete person as she had. To him, the baby had been an abstract bump, one day there, the next gone. Zoe had since realised that, in a way, neither of them were wrong or right in the way they’d viewed it, only different. She couldn’t see it from his perspective, and he couldn’t see it from hers. In the end, the two views had been so incompatible, so utterly beyond reconciliation that they’d both agreed the only thing to do was split.
‘But you didn’t want one,’ he added. ‘You said you didn’t want that.’
‘There’s no point in going over this again,’ she said. ‘Not now. What’s past is past.’
‘I had thought…’ he said, moving to take her hand across the table. She slipped it from his grasp and put it in her lap. ‘I always thought we might get around what happened and we might try again.’
‘I know you did, but I always told you that wasn’t going to happen.’
‘But you were happy to see me. Like today. You invited me.’
‘Because I thought you might need a friend. Because I care about you.’
‘I care about you?—’
‘I’m not sure it’s the same. I’m not sure you understand what I’ve been saying this whole time. We’re almost divorced and I’m not going to turn back now. We agreed it wouldn’t work.’
‘We said it wasn’t working, but we didn’t say it never would.’
‘I did. I thought the divorce was saying that too. You agreed to it.’
‘I know.’
She got up and brought the roasting tin to the table. ‘Do you want some more chicken? There’s loads here.’
‘Yeah,’ he said in a dull voice. ‘I’ll have some.’
He looked up at her as she scooped up a leg and put it onto his plate. ‘Why did you ask me to come here today?’
‘I told you why.’
‘That’s not it. I thought…’
‘You thought wrong. Sorry, Ritchie. It was only friendship.’
‘Are you seeing someone else?’
‘You think just because I say no to us getting back together there must be someone else?’
‘I don’t know. You tell me.’
‘There isn’t.’
She went to put the roasting tin back on the worktop, and when she returned to the table, he was smiling. She stared at him, not daring to ask why. He’d been so resentful, almost angry only a moment ago, and now he looked as if he didn’t have a care in the world.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I’ve been totally out of order. It means a lot to me that we’re still friends and we can still do stuff like this,and I don’t want to ruin it. Please scrub the last ten minutes and let’s start again.’
‘I can do that,’ Zoe said. At least, she wanted to.
‘Tell me about the village,’ he said. ‘What’s it like? Are there any village weirdos? There must be, right? Anyone with six fingers married to their sister?’
Zoe rolled her eyes and tried not to let his comments rile her. It was the kind of flippant stereotype he’d always made jokes about. He could only change so far, and as she didn’t have the energy to fight him on everything, she had to pick her battles. ‘Sorry to disappoint you, but everyone is perfectly normal and very nice.’
‘You’re telling me there’s nothing strange going on? These tiny places are always a bit backward, aren’t they?’
