‘Troy was given every opportunity. They were all given every opportunity. They have no idea how lucky they were.’
She felt the criticism of her children like a physical blow. ‘They played their hearts out!’
He didn’t listen. His mind was still on Harry. His mind had always been on Harry: Harry’s talent, Harry’s potential. Harry, Harry, Harry.
‘Do you want to know why that poor kid cheated?’ he roared. He picked up the bound document and shook it violently at her. ‘Because his father told him his sister had cancer.’
The words jolted Joy, like a change in direction so sudden it could rupture an Achilles tendon. She thought she already knew everything that Stan had to say in this argument.
She said faintly, ‘He told him Savannah had cancer?’
‘Like father, like daughter.’ He smiled with grim satisfaction, as if he’d predicted exactly this bizarre outcome, and pushed the manuscript across the table towards her. ‘He told Harry that he had to win prize money so his sister could get some kind of life-saving medicine. Dumb kid thought he was playing to save his sister’s life. No wonder he cheated. If he’d stayed with me, I would have found out and put a stop to it, but I never got that opportunity because you made a unilateral decision to send him away!’
His hands were splayed like claws, like he wanted to strangle her.
She could not think about Harry now. She focused instead on the information she’d had back then.
‘Your children needed your support!’ she shouted back. ‘I needed your support!’
‘You had no right! Coaching was my profession!’ Stan towered over her and she was not frightened, she was exhilarated, because the fractured shell of their marriage was finally cracking open like a coconut. She wanted it all out. She wanted to finally say everything she’d never said.
‘What about my profession?’ She banged her chest with her fist. ‘What about me? What about my career? My sacrifice?’
‘Your sacrifice?’ His disbelief was like a public shaming. As if she had anything to sacrifice. She wasn’t worth anything: not a smile from the mini-mart man, not a phone call from her children.
‘I gave up my tennis for you,’ she said. Finally she’d said it out loud. All these years it had been there, never on the tip of her tongue, not at the back of her head, but right at the centre of her chest, beneath her collarbone, between her breasts, right where she continued to bang her fist, over and over.
What about me, what about me, what about me?
She’d never wanted his gratitude, just his acknowledgement. Just once. Because otherwise, what had been the point of her entire life? Of all those lamb chops she’d grilled? Of all that spaghetti bolognaise? My God, she despised spaghetti bolognaise. Night after night after night, plate after plate after plate. The laundry, the ironing, the mopping, the sweeping, the driving. She’d never resented it at the time but now she resented every moment, every single bloody lamb chop.
He said quietly, ‘I never asked you to give anything up, Joy.’
But that was the point. He didn’t have to ask her.
‘If you wanted it, you would have done it,’ he said. The anger had gone from his voice. She could see that familiar deathly stillness coming over him. He was removing himself from the situation: first mentally, then physically.
She knew what came next, what always came next. In a moment she’d be alone in this big silent house with her thoughts and regrets.
Stan said, ‘If you’d really wanted it, nothing would have stopped you.’
She couldn’t speak. Did he not see that the only thing that could have stopped her was her love for him?
Then he delivered his final damning judgement. ‘You were never going to rank in the top ten, Joy. If I thought you could have got there, I would never have let you stop.’
The air whooshed from her like a fist to the stomach. He would never have let her stop. As if her sacrifice had been his considered decision.
If she had been the one to be injured it wouldn’t have occurred to him to give up his career.
He was wrong, and there was no way in the world that she could go back in time and prove it, to him or to herself.
Instead, she reacted instinctively. ‘You weren’t good enough to coach Harry. He was better off without you. You would have held him back! He needed a better coach than you!’
It wasn’t true. She believed Stan to be one of the best coaches in the country, maybe the world. She knew what he could have been without the tethers of a family, but didn’t he know what she could have been? How far she could have flown?