I wanted to say ‘You’re not,’ but resisted.
‘And there’s the kids,’ he said. ‘I sometimes feel like I don’t spend enough time with them.’
I wanted to say ‘You don’t,’ but once more I kept it in, because we were talking. Me and Dan were actually talking – we weren’t shouting, or accusing or blaming, we were just talking to each other and it was good.
‘I sometimes feel like I don’t deserve this life,’ I sighed. ‘I have great kids, I have you and the family, lovely holidays like this…’ I gestured towards the window; this one looked down onto the car park, but he got the gist. ‘Your family are good to me… to us.’
He nodded.
‘I used to think I was a good mum,’ I continued, ‘a good wife, but then… you…’
‘Don’t, Clare.’
‘I’m not saying this to make you feel bad, I just need to be honest about how I feel. I’m coming through the other side now, and it’s been painful, but it’s made me think – what didn’t I do? Where did I fail as your wife that you needed to be with someone else and how can we stop it happening again? I mean it isn’t like it was the first… there was the stewardess, she called me at home for heaven’s sake, she knew where we lived, Dan. You compromised the safety of our children…’
‘Clare, you’re being dramatic, she wasn’t dangerous,’ he said, irritated, perhaps a little embarrassed still. Then he spoke more gently. ‘I can’t change what happened, but I can’t keep apologising either. I just hope that one day you can forgive me.’
I felt the bed creak. He stood up and walked away. I’d lost him again. I could have kicked myself – why didn’t I just let the conversation flow, why did we always come back to this, to her, to his infidelity? ‘Because for you those two women are always there,’ is what my friend Jackie would say. ‘For you they sit there like great big gooseberries whenever you’re with Dan, and until you can remove them from your head, nothing will change.’ And I had removed Carmel, I’d moved on, but this Marylin thing had brought her back.
Joy’s way of dealing with it was to sweep her under the carpet, remove her, remove them from our lives and pretend nothing happened. But for me they were like a bloodstain on a white carpet: it didn’t matter how hard I scrubbed, I couldn’t get rid of them from my marriage. They were always with him, the smell of their perfume lingered in the air.
Dan paused at the door. ‘Please try not to… dwell on the bad things,’ he said.
I nodded my head slowly, unconvinced I would ever be able to shake them off. I know, I know it takes two, it was his fault as much as theirs, if not more. But I couldn’t hate him, because if I did, I’d have to end my marriage, and, after everything, I still loved him.
‘I’m going to check on the kids,’ he said. ‘They will have run Dad ragged by now.’
We both smiled at that. I liked it when Dan smiled.
‘Poor Bob, he looks tired to me,’ I said. Bob never seemed to have the stamina that Joy did when it came to the children.
‘Yeah, you’re right, and it is his retirement. Been at it over 50 years. Left school at fourteen, you know?’ He said this in his father’s voice. It was something Bob often said, it was his badge of honour: ‘I didn’t need no university education.’ I could almost hear Joy correcting his grammar in the background, and I laughed. Bob was very proud of his lack of formal education; he was a self-made man. He didn’t get the modern world, the internet, the signing of contracts – ‘We just shook hands in my day,’ he’d say, and Dan would turn pale at the very thought. ‘I’m amazed Dad hasn’t been fleeced, or bankrupted, the way he does business,’ he’d once said to me. ‘Taylor’s could have been so much bigger if he’d been more open to change.’ But Bob wasn’t interested in making millions, he just wanted everything to run smoothly and if things weren’t right, he’d just fix them. There were lots of staff at Taylor’s, but Bob seemed to operate in his own orbit with his own rules, and Dan just let him get on with it while trying to drag the company into the twenty-first century. There was a lot of potential, and I knew it sometimes got to Dan that it wasn’t being realised, but as Bob always said, ‘All I ever wanted was to be able to provide for my family – anything else is a bonus.’