Worn Out Wife Seeks New Life Read online

  ‘Goodnight, Tess,’ he said after he’d read a few more pages of his book, then he turned out the table lamp at his side.

  ‘Goodnight,’ she replied.

  Later, when she was sure Dave was asleep, she stole out of bed to get Bella, the beloved family Labrador, nearly fourteen years old now. Bella was a bit smelly, drooling and arthritic, but she was absolutely adored. Although her hearing wasn’t sharp, she still heard Tess calling to her from the top of the stairs: ‘Come on, girlie, come on up.’ So the old dog ambled up the staircase and followed Tess into the bedroom. There, Tess helped Bella up onto the sofa then wrapped a cosy fleece blanket around her. When Tess got back into bed, she felt comforted listening to the two different rhythms of breathing in the room.

  Her thoughts turned again to how busy and obvious life had felt when the children were young, as they all progressed in a bustle from one year and one step to the next. Now, the house was too quiet, too organised, too perfect, and too… just sad. Natalie was a blur of energy, noise and action too sorely missed. Her long, thoughtful conversations with quiet Alex, now in his first post-uni job, were also an aching gap in her life.

  She missed the daily mothering: the feeding, the explaining, reassuring, encouraging, everyday chatting, and the little acts of love, from stocking up on Natalie’s favourite snack in the supermarket, to folding a freshly washed t-shirt for Alex.

  She had so much enjoyed being the mother captain of the family ship, the centre point in her children’s lives. And she wasn’t sure how to replace that pivotal role.

  ‘Oh, God…’ she thought, ‘this must be my midlife crisis. And I’m trying to solve it with an eye-wateringly expensive family holiday.’

  Quickly followed by: ‘Maybe an eye-wateringly expensive family holiday will solve it… I’m willing to give it a try.’

  And then the brainwave: ‘Why don’t we cover some of the cost of the holiday by renting the house out while we’re away?’

  6

  ‘Your host has cancelled your booking. We’ve made some other suggestions for your visit to Stratford-upon-Avon, England.’

  This had been the distressing message River had found waiting in her inbox.

  After firing the host an appropriately acidic email and blasting her in the review section:

  This flake has cancelled my holiday, no warning, no explanation, so I’m just making sure everyone reading the review section gets to know. Quid pro quo, cupcake, quid pro quo.

  River set about finding somewhere else to stay during her July visit to Shakespeare’s hallowed town. Turned out July was the month when all the plays were on, so her plan was to begin the rewrite now, and make good progress, then use her time in England to add colour and plenty of original work, plus collect material for the documentary, of course.

  She and Phillip had signed the deal. The first instalment of money was due, and she had now read the whole script. It was so much more terrible than she could ever have imagined.

  She’d also endured the ideation session with the straight-outta-film-school babies. They’d been truly sweet, but their suggestions for new comedy and action scenes were lame. Although two ideas, for Shylock to rap his most famous speech and to make white pupils the minority in this high school, weren’t too bad, more research was required.

  She scrolled through the Airbnb suggestions for Stratford-upon-Avon. Almost everything looked ugly, tasteless or too small.

  The place that had fallen through had been so stylish, with power showers, two TVs, a big garden with decking and garden furniture, and it was well away from the road. Now she couldn’t find anything with any of these comforts. She needed peace and quiet, comfort and calm. How else was she going to get the script finished and the documentary written?

  Godammit, she whispered under her breath, so as not to disturb the white-haired ladies at the table next to hers, sipping soya chai lattes after their power walk round the neighbourhood. What was the matter with English people? Look at these horrible houses, everything so beige or so grey. Wasn’t the weather bad enough in England without decorating your entire house in beige and grey? And peach-coloured towels! She was staying nowhere with peach towels left over from the 1980s.

  There was only one thing to do – she increased the price bracket on her search. And lo and behold, there, at the very tippy top of her price range appeared the perfect English house… oh, more, so much more than she was looking for. Like the centrefold spread from House Beautiful, a wooden front door, some kind of purple flowering plant trailing down the side of the house and inside, one room more beautiful than the next: dark polished wooden floors, sumptuous navy sofas, good art, a delightful bedroom, a serious cook’s white country kitchen and a garden packed with flowers, all set up with a barbeque and outdoor sofas and armchairs.

  This was where she had to go. What would it be like to live in a house like that, just for a while? She wanted a slice of that perfect English lifestyle. But, oh, the price was steep, steep, steep. Even for a screenwriter with a big project on the go.

  Maybe she could strike a week off her stay? She scrolled on through the house description and saw that the place came with use of a car included. So she would save on car rental… maybe that would make it just about possible?

  She looked through the photos of the garden again and considered the swanky party she was planning, with Phillip and actors from the theatre and all the other available cool people that she could round up from a hundred-mile radius.

  Surely that would be good for her career? Surely not just staying in this house, but also hosting the party could be written off as an expense? Corporate hospitality… maybe? She tried to imagine the incredulous look she would get from Irma, her accountant, who once a year tried to make sense of River’s chaotic files, packed with receipts and invoices.

  Yes, surely it would all be classed as an expense. River held her breath and sent an enquiry to the owner. No, she definitely couldn’t afford it, certainly not before the first instalment came in from Phillip. But sometimes very good things happened when you took a risk, when you went out on a limb, and stretched yourself.

  And she had struggled of late. She had lost good commissions, done work that was crappy and below the going rate because she was desperate. She’d even stopped seeing a lot of old friends because… well, reasons, but one of those reasons was that their success made her feel low. She was due some better luck. River had the definite feeling that very soon, it was going to be her turn.

  7

  Four months later

  ‘Three months… you’re going to be away for three entire months? I’m sorry but I still can’t take that in.’ Sophie shook her head and lifted another forkful to her mouth.

  Tess and Sophie were having their usual last Friday of the month working lunch in the Italian restaurant round the corner from the office. This was when they enjoyed a lengthy and civilised meal with wine and discussed the month at work, talking through the gripes, problems or grievances, and occasionally patting themselves on the back for things well done. The work discussion was followed with talk about their families and more personal things. Tess’s sabbatical and her ‘holiday of a lifetime’ had been the hot topic of conversation for some time now, especially as she now had only three weeks left in the office. For Sophie, whose children were between the ages of ten and sixteen, the idea of such a long holiday, so far away, was unbelievably exotic.

  ‘I do know that it is completely outrageous,’ Tess agreed, still not quite daring to believe that it was all going to happen, the longed-for sabbatical, with the six weeks of carefully plotted travel round all the most beautiful places in Cambodia, Vietnam and Thailand, plus a further six weeks back at home to recover and put together her ‘midlifer project’. This holiday, so long in the planning, was now really almost here. She could hardly believe it.

  Sophie had helped with the heavy lifting at work – the rearranging of project dates and deadlines, and the organising of cover. Someone was even coming
up from the London office for a month to help out. Then Tess had indulged fully in the planning of the trip itself – where to go, where to stay (from eco beach huts to luxurious spas), what to do, what not to miss.

  For most of the spring, it had become almost a hobby, something she did in the evenings and at the weekends, something on the scale of a major work project that had required a whiteboard, post-it notes and its very own files and folders on her laptop. There was even a Pinterest board of beaches, each one more vibrantly turquoise-blue than the last.

  Yes, it had taken quite some time to talk Dave fully round to the idea of the trip. She’d had to promise more beaches, relaxing breaks between the travelling stints, ‘safe’ food, and some kind of legal tranquilliser for the flights. And when he felt these things were being taken care of, he had finally begun to get enthusiastic. Alex and Natalie had started to get interested, too. They’d opened up email links and WhatsApp pictures, they’d told her which hotels, tourist attractions and areas they preferred over others, but no one had been quite as involved, as zealous even, about the whole thing as Tess. This was her thing, and it was her gift to her family. Not only had she organised everything, but she had paid for it too from her Hambold bonus.

  She wanted this holiday to be something exciting, adventurous and unforgettable – something that took them completely away from themselves, from the ordinary everyday, an adventure they would all remember forever. So she’d relished the plotting and the planning and had even withdrawn some lifetime savings to make this very special dream trip come fully to life.

  She knew that she was trying to recapture lost time with her children. She wished now that she’d spent so much more time with them during the seemingly endless days of the summer holidays. Instead, she’d usually managed three weeks at most. Two weeks on a family holiday and then a third week when they prepped for school, shopping for uniforms, shoes, new pencil cases and lunchboxes, visiting the dentist. At the time, she’d been grateful and only a little jealous to leave Dave at home running art projects, friend visits, bake-offs and day trips, but now that her children had left school, had, to be honest, left home, she regretted the unfettered summertime that she hadn’t spent with them.

  Surely, somehow, she and her colleagues could have made a plan to have given them all much more of the summer off? Didn’t businesses in Scandinavia shut up shop for the whole of August so everyone could swim and fish at their lake hut? And those economies didn’t exactly come to a standstill.

  What had seemed so important about work back then that she’d been able to suit up, pack her laptop bag and leave the house every morning to go and sift through some company’s accounts? And why had a senior accountant and a head of art between them not been able to salary sacrifice a few weeks of pay for some extra summer holiday time?

  Because, looking back, there hadn’t been an unlimited number of summers. And, of course, she loved grown-up Alex and Natalie, loved them both fiercely, but when she allowed herself to think about it, she missed their childhoods very much and wished she’d wrung more out of the available time with them.

  So this was an attempt to make up for it, before the children were fully grown up and gone. And she would spend the first three weeks of the holiday alone with her husband for the first time in years. She hoped this would give them time to take a fresh look at their worn and saggy relationship, their comfortable old pyjama-bottom of a marriage, and have a think about where they were and where they might be headed.

  ‘So what’s this American like, who’s renting Ambleside while you’re away?’ Sophie asked, bringing Tess back from her thoughts. ‘And why is one lone American renting your beautiful big house?’

  ‘She’s a screenwriter from Los Angeles…’ Tess said, pride and excitement in her voice. ‘Do you remember that film Spangled?’

  ‘Oh yes, I do. That was funny, and smart and really good,’ Sophie added.

  ‘So renting Ambleside for the summer is probably small change for her.’

  Although their children were at different ages and at different schools, Tess and Sophie had shared long conversations about all kinds of critical childhood and parenting moments: secondary school choices, the pros and cons of braces, maths exam results, acne treatment, whether or not fifteen-year-olds should be allowed to visit their boyfriends’ homes, screen time, and other assorted parental minefields.

  They never discussed their marriages though, it occurred to Tess. Work, of course, children, yes, homes, yes, wider families, yes, current TV viewing, naturally, but husbands and marriages were topics only mentioned in a superficial way.

  Did Sophie suspect that Tess wasn’t happy with the state of her marriage? That was as much as Tess would admit to herself… that she wasn’t happy with the current ‘state’. She definitely thought of the situation as temporary. She hoped it was temporary and that one day soon, it would pass. But if she thought back to when she had last felt really proud and happy to be Dave’s wife, it seemed a very long time ago… years ago, in fact.

  And sometimes she wondered if they could be heading towards a pivotal moment, a make-or-break decision.

  ‘Is it nearly four?’ Sophie exclaimed. ‘I’ve got to get back to my desk for an hour, then I’m on football taxi duty at five thirty.’

  Sometimes these reminders of busy family life gave Tess a pang, but occasionally – like today – the thought of going home to a calm house completely free of all child taxi duties was really quite nice.

  ‘And who’s going to look after your old doggie while you’re away?’ Sophie asked as she tried to attract the waiter’s attention.

  Even as Tess replied, talking in glowing terms about the pet sitter, who was going to take Bella into her home and look after her really carefully, she could feel her stomach clench slightly.

  This was the glitch in the plan; the one poorly tied loose end. Bella. The old girl had lost so many teeth, her food was a senior dog paste that Tess sometimes spoon fed to her, if her appetite was poor. Bella needed a dose of painkiller for her arthritis twice a day, but she still whimpered when she squatted or got up from her bed because her hips were stiff and sore.

  Tess knew that Bella wasn’t going to last forever, and the thought that Bella might die when they were away on the holiday was terrible.

  Too much wine, she thought, in the back of the taxi home, speeding through a green blur of hedgerow and country lanes. Too much wine… she was sluggish and sleepy. She would take her duvet down to the sofa; get floppy old Bella snuggled up beside her, put the TV on and fall asleep for half an hour.

  ‘It’s this turn here,’ she told the taxi driver, because these twisty back roads were easily confused, ‘and then the first on the left.’

  Several minutes later, the taxi rolled up the smooth reclaimed red brick slope of the driveway and came to a halt.

  This was Ambleside.

  This was home.

  And she loved her house. Ambleside was one of the loves of her life and had been ever since she’d first set eyes on it. Such a handsome 1930s building, with a freshly painted white exterior, gloss black proper wood-framed windows and a shiny oak front door framed with trailing lilac wisteria flowers. This was her family’s home. And had been for eighteen years now.

  They’d moved in when Alex was four and Natalie just a year and a half. They’d taken out a vast mortgage that had caused her panicked middle-of-the-night wake ups as she saw nothing but decades of poring over spreadsheets ahead to pay it off. And all that hard physical labour… stripping out mildewing woodchip, rotted bathroom panelling, ancient, stinking carpet. Uncovering rotted joists, patches of hidden damp, collapsed drains and even, on a particularly terrible Sunday evening, a nest of grey, furless baby rats in the low attic. They’d had to hit the leftover Christmas brandy after that discovery. Wine just hadn’t been enough.

  For almost a year, buying the house had felt like a dreadful, ruinous mistake. But all that pain was long forgotten now, she thought, putting her sturdy m
etal key into the familiar lock. Room by room, the house had been re-made around them into their true family home.

  There had been updates now and then since the first major renovation: the nursery wallpaper had been replaced with stark white for a teenaged Alex and pastel blue with flowers for Natalie. And in the last year or two, Tess’s attention had shifted from sourcing perfect curtains and kitchen tiles out into the garden.

  Today, as soon as she stepped into the hallway, she could tell that something wasn’t right. It was the smell – the sharp back-of-the-throat tang of vomit. Dave was away on a school trip until tomorrow, so only Bella, the family dog, was home.

  ‘Bella,’ she called, ‘where are you, my lovely?’

  She hurried into the sitting room where Bella’s big, comfortable bed and blankets were pulled up close to the radiator.

  Tess’s eye travelled from the first pile of sick along to the second and third and finally to Bella in a heap in her basket.

  She rushed over to the trembling dog and knelt down beside her.

  ‘What’s up, my darling?’ Tess said, running her fingers over the warm, velvety head, ‘are you not feeling well?’

  Bella’s head lifted slightly, she managed a brief whimper, and her old, clouded eyes met Tess’s.

  And Tess was instantly filled with dread.

  ‘No…’ she whispered, ‘oh no, Bella.’

  ‘Well, you’ll have to bring her in,’ the receptionist at the vet’s told her in a voice that sounded clipped and unsympathetic.

  ‘I can’t bring her in,’ Tess said, ‘she’s too ill. It will cause her too much pain.’ Plus, at the back of her mind was the realisation that she’d drunk the best part of a bottle of Chablis, so was in no fit state to drive the car.

  ‘Isn’t there anyone who can come out and see her… even later today? Any time really, I’ll be here with her.’