the lovely fruit bowl. She laughed a little, trying to turn it into a funny story her friends would enjoy, and selected a mandarin from the bowl. As she plunged her thumb into its fleshy centre, she heard something. A voice? It didn’t come from Ben and Jessica’s room. It was the other room adjoining hers. There was a thud, followed immediately by the unmistakeable sound of something breaking.
A male voice swore, loudly and forcefully. ‘Fuck it!’
Indeed, thought Frances, as the malevolent beginnings of a headache crept slowly across her forehead.
chapter seven
Jessica
Jessica sat on the four-poster bed and tested the mattress with the palm of her hand while Ben stood on the balcony, one hand shielding his eyes. He wasn’t enjoying the beautiful view.
‘I’m sure they haven’t stolen it,’ she said. She meant to sound funny and light-hearted but she couldn’t seem to get the tone of her voice to come out right these days. A hardness kept creeping in.
‘Yeah, but where have they parked it?’ said Ben. ‘That’s what I don’t get. I’d just like to know where it is. Have they got an underground bunker somewhere? Did you notice that when I asked if it was parked undercover, she sort of avoided answering the question?’
‘Mmm,’ said Jessica noncommittally.
She couldn’t bear another fight about the car, or about anything. Her stomach was still recovering from the last screaming match. Whenever they fought she got instant indigestion, and that meant that these days she nearly always had indigestion. Their arguments were like submerged rocks they kept crashing up against. They couldn’t be avoided. Wham. Wham. Wham.
She lay back on the bed and looked at the light fitting. Was that a spider web near the globe? This house was so old and dark and depressing. She’d been aware it was going to be a ‘historic’ house, but she thought they might have, you know, renovated. There were cracks all over the walls, and a kind of damp smell.
She turned on her side and looked at Ben. Now he was leaning dangerously over the balcony railing, trying to see the other side of the house. He cared about that car more than he cared about her. Once, she saw him running his hand along the bonnet and for just a moment she’d felt envious of the car, of the way Ben was touching it so gently and sensuously, the same way he used to touch her. She was going to tell their counsellor that. She’d written it down so she wouldn’t forget. She felt like it was a really profound, powerful thing to mention, quite significant and telling. It made her eyes prickle with tears when she thought of it. If the counsellor ever wrote a book about her experience as a marriage counsellor she would probably mention it: I once had a patient who treated his car more tenderly than he treated his wife. (No need to mention the car was a Lamborghini; if they did, all the male readers would say, ‘Oh, well, then.’)
She wished the ‘intensive couples counselling’ part of this retreat would hurry up and start but ‘Delilah’, their ‘wellness consultant’, had been annoyingly vague about when it would begin. She wondered if the counsellor would ask them about their sex life, and if she (Jessica assumed she would be a she) would be able to hide her surprise when she heard they were down to having sex, like, once a week, which meant their marriage was officially in dire trouble.
Jessica didn’t know if she could talk about sex in front of the counsellor anyway. The counsellor might automatically assume that she was sexually unskilled or that there was something wrong with her, in a very personal, gynaecological kind of way. Jessica was beginning to wonder that herself.
She was obviously prepared to get more surgery (even down there) or do a course. Read a book. Improve her skills. She’d always been prepared to improve, to listen to the advice of experts. She read a lot of self-help books. She Googled. Ben had never read a self-help book in his life.
Ben came back inside from the balcony, lifting up his t-shirt to scratch his stomach. He didn’t bother with crunches or planks and his stomach still looked that good.
‘That author we met is in the room next to us,’ he said. He picked up an apple from the fruit bowl and tossed it from hand to hand like a baseball. ‘Frances. Why do you reckon she’s here?’
‘I expect she wants to lose weight,’ said Jessica. Like, duh. She thought it was kind of obvious. Frances had that padded look middle-aged women got. Jessica herself would never allow that to happen. She’d rather be dead.
‘You reckon?’ said Ben. ‘What does it matter at her age?’ He didn’t wait for an answer. ‘What are her books like?’
‘I used to love them,’ said Jessica. ‘I read them all. There was one called Nathaniel’s Kiss. I read it in high school and it was just really . . . romantic, I guess.’
‘Romantic’ was too ineffectual a word to describe the feelings Nathaniel’s Kiss had provoked in her. She remembered how she’d cried big heaving shuddering sobs, and then she’d kept rereading that last chapter for the pleasure of more crying. In some ways, it felt like Nathaniel was the first man she ever loved.
She couldn’t tell Ben that. He never read fiction. He wouldn’t understand.
But was that one of the problems in their marriage? That she didn’t even bother to try to communicate how she felt about things that were important to her? Or did it not matter? She didn’t need to hear him talk about his passion for his car. He could talk about his car with his mates. She could talk about her memories of Nathaniel’s Kiss with her girlfriends.
Ben took a giant bite of the apple. Jessica couldn’t do that anymore, not with her new capped teeth. The dentist wanted her to wear some sort of a mouthguard at night to keep her expensive crowns all safe. It was annoying that the better the stuff you got, the less relaxed you could be about it. It was like the new rug in their hallway. Neither of them could bear to walk on something so astoundingly expensive. They shuffled down the sides and winced when their guests marched straight down the middle in dirty sneakers.
‘That smoothie was pretty good,’ said Ben, his mouth full of apple. ‘But I’m starved. I don’t know if my body can cope without pizza for ten days. I don’t see why we even have to do that part! What’s that got to do with marriage counselling?’
‘I told you,’ said Jessica. ‘It’s, like, a holistic approach. We have to work on everything: our minds, bodies and spirits.’
‘Sounds like a load of –’ He cut himself off and walked over to the row of light switches by the wall and started playing with the one that made the ceiling fan work.
He put the fan onto cyclonic speed.
Jessica put a pillow over her face and tried to go for as long as she could without saying, ‘Turn it off.’ Once, she wouldn’t have thought about this. She would have just yelled, ‘Oh my God, turn it off, you idiot!’ and he would have laughed and kept it on, and she would have tried to turn it off, and he wouldn’t have let her, and they would have pretend-wrestled.
Did they laugh more before?