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  I had yet to meet Matty’s parents – our cohabitation was still relatively recent, after all. I was wondering whether we would go down to Surrey over Christmas but that would all depend on Matty’s work commitments.

  The meal was finished. We were still seated round the kitchen table and we were on coffee. If I had been staying for the afternoon, then we would have been in the sitting room for our hot drinks but I had already told my parents I had to go soon – I had a stack of marking to do for the next day. This was true, but it was also an excuse. I didn’t want to spend the whole afternoon there, although so far, it had been pleasant and companionable enough, by which I mean that several crucial things had not happened. My mother had not asked if my jumper was new, in the tone of voice that made clear what she meant was, shouldn’t you and Matty be saving up to buy a house instead of spending money on clothes? My father had not sat upright, paused, then belched from the bottom of his belly – a ritual that made my mother crash the plates onto the table so hard that gravy would slop. I had not, at any stage of the meal, rolled my eyes.

  None of these things had happened, which meant that as far as Sunday lunches with my parents went, it had been easy, pleasant. We had had a nice meal – the lamb worked, as my father had put it, ‘This lamb works!’ grinning as he chewed. My mother had talked animatedly of her new Pilates class. For once, I had managed to quell the mounting irritation I often felt when I saw them.

  *

  I rose from my chair. ‘Just going to the loo,’ I said. ‘I’ll get my coat on and come and say goodbye, don’t get up.’

  The downstairs loo was next to the coat pegs. As I was standing in the hallway, pulling at my scarf, I heard Dad speaking low: ‘Well, maybe. But she’s no spring chicken.’

  Sometimes, you overhear someone say something, and the intonation in their voice tells you exactly the face they are pulling. I was standing in the hallway of my parents’ home. They were in the kitchen, waiting for me to go, and before I had even left their house, they were discussing my relationship with Matty and wondering when we were going to get around to giving them the grandchild they wanted so badly. I didn’t mind them having this discussion, they were entitled to it, but could they not wait until I had actually left the premises?

  Did they ever stop to think that, just because I was an only child, that did not mean I had an automatic responsibility to carry on their genes? Did they not think that I might have a view in the matter, that I might not want children yet, or at all?

  She’s no spring chicken.

  They both fell quiet – or rather, silent – as I re-entered the room. I went straight to my father because I felt so cross that I knew if I didn’t go straight to him and get it over and done with, I might not be able to kiss him goodbye at all.

  ‘Don’t get up,’ I said, as he half rose, and we shared a clumsy embrace, me wrapping my arms around him from behind and kissing the top of his head, him patting my forearm as it rested briefly across his chest. He sat again and I skirted the table to my mother, saying, ‘Just remembered, didn’t put food on the landing for the cat.’ Our downstairs neighbour, Mrs Abaza, had a scrawny tortoiseshell cat that roamed up and down the stairwell whining and we had taken to feeding it. We did it surreptitiously, as Mrs Abaza was not the sort of person you wanted to catch you feeding her cat – she was always complaining about us putting too much rubbish in the communal bins as well as banging the door. She would sweep the hallway with an old-fashioned bristled broom as we went past and stare at us with a hot look. Matty called her Mad Cat Lady.

  ‘Bye, love,’ my mother called out after me as I went swiftly into the hallway, pulling open the front door, a slight note of bafflement in it I thought, at my peremptory departure.

  ‘Bye!’ My father’s voice was more cheery.

  ‘Bye, thanks, bye!’ I called back.

  I stomped off down the Close with pointless haste. My parents. So well-meaning; so annoying. It was like being thirteen again and the only truculent teenager in the house, with no sibling to share the door slamming, the hatred – oh, all that inward-turning agony, thumping my own thighs in the bedroom, furious and boiling with frustration. Why was I me?

  I never saw either of them alone, it struck me then, not even now I was fully grown and had been for some years. My parents always put up a united front. They didn’t see themselves as united against me, of course, they loved me, but that was still how it felt – it was still me and them. They had been alone together for eight years before I was born and they had lived alone together for the last twelve years, since I had left home. I was just a blip. We weren’t a family. They were a couple with a child.

  As I turned the corner into Dogsthorpe Road, I tripped on a loose concrete slab on the pavement. I lost my balance momentarily, wrenched my knee, swore beneath my breath. It started to rain.

  *

  It was a long walk, which I had been looking forward to until I had overheard my parents talking about me and it had started raining. Sometimes Matty would come and collect me when I went to see my parents on my own – it was nice to have a boyfriend with a car who was happy to drop me off places and pick me up again, I had to admit that – but he had driven to the hospital and I wasn’t expecting him back until later.

  I was surprised to see his car parked outside the flat when I got back. I’d thought he was on an all-day shift but maybe it was only a half day, maybe I had misunderstood.

  As I let myself in, I was welcomed by the warm fug of the heating on full and saw that Matty was on the sofa in his T-shirt and boxers, reading the News Review section of the Sunday Times.

  ‘Blimey, it’s roasting in here,’ I grumbled as I unwound my scarf from my neck and unbuttoned my coat. The flat was too small for a hallway – the front door opened straight onto the living room and there was a coat rack on the wall just to the left. Now there were two of us, it bulged with coats. The shoes beneath were always in a jumble, climbing over each other, no matter how often I paired and straightened them.

  I went to the sofa and plonked myself down on the other end of it, dropping heavily, shaking the structure of it. ‘Mum and Dad …’ I said, a groan trapped inside those three low monosyllables, moaning for release.

  Matty lowered the paper. He looked at me over it and replied with a few cool monosyllables of his own. ‘Make us a cup of tea.’

  I was in such a bad mood that the words came out of me smoothly and flowingly, without thought. ‘You make it, for God’s sake, I’ve had a really annoying lunch with my parents and anyway I always make the tea …’ Even as I was saying this, my mood was draining from my blood, and being replaced by something else – what was it? The knowledge that because I was tired and cross, I had spoken out of turn?

  Matty did not reply. He closed the paper and folded it neatly, turned and placed it on the coffee table next to his end of the sofa. Then, still without speaking, he leaned over towards me.

  He reached out a hand and for a moment I thought he was going to stroke my cheek, ask me what was wrong and whether I wanted to talk about it.

  He took hold of my face, his fingers indenting the soft flesh of my cheek in four places on one side, the thumb on the other cheek pressing against my jawbone. Instinctively, I tried to rear back out of his grasp but he held me fast and brought his own face close to mine. His expression was blank but all the same, I looked away, down and away, so his face was blurred.

  When he spoke, his voice was very calm. ‘I’ve been stitching a child’s face this morning. She’s going to have a permanent scar, just here.’ He gave my face a small shove. ‘She was six years old. She fell off a bunk bed onto a radiator. And you want to moan about how hard it is having a roast lunch cooked for you by your parents. What is it, what was so awful? Potatoes not done the way you like?’

  He gave my face another tiny shove, released it, rose from the sofa.

  ‘Matty …’ I said. My tone was both bewildered and conciliatory. ‘I didn’t mean.’

  H
e looked down at me. I shrank back against the cushions. He made a small noise between his teeth, a kind of ‘t’ sound, a scornful noise, then said, ‘I didn’t mean. Just listen to yourself. I, I, I. It’s all about you, isn’t it?’ Then he went into the bedroom, slamming the door behind him.

  I sat where I was for a moment, trying to work out what had just happened. Then I rose and went into the kitchenette and put the kettle on. I warmed his mug first, just how he liked it. I breathed. I thought about the long bath I had taken that morning, before I went to my parents’ house, while Matty was probably running down a corridor at the hospital.

  It was odd, being in my own kitchen and yet detached, moving around at the routine task of making tea: watching myself thinking one thing, feeling another.

  *

  Matty didn’t speak to me for the rest of the day, that Sunday, not even when I took a cup of tea into the bedroom and placed it silently on the bedside table next to him. I went back out into the sitting room and tidied up the flat while he stayed in the bedroom. I emptied a couple of cupboards, cooked an evening meal – spaghetti Bolognese, even though I was still full of roast lunch and would have been happy with a piece of toast. I mustn’t be selfish, I thought. I’ve eaten properly today but Matty hasn’t. He ate it in silence.

  I was too proud to beg him to speak to me, to demand that he explain what I had done that was so terrible, but after the meal, I went into the bathroom and closed the door behind me and cried a little. We watched television together, still in silence. We went to bed with him still silent. He didn’t even murmur goodnight as he turned his light off, and I didn’t dare.

  In the morning, he stayed in bed when I rose. I dressed hurriedly. I considered leaving him a note on the kitchen counter, saying – what? I was sorry? How could I be sorry when I didn’t understand what I had done?

  I thought of how, when I had come home from the lunch, I had been momentarily surprised to see him in his T-shirt and boxers. He must have come home from work and showered. It occurred to me to wonder if he had been at work at all, and then I shook my head as I walked to school. Why would he lie about that, and why invent that awful story about a child’s face being stitched? Was I going a bit mad?

  *

  One of the good things about being a teacher is that you are so busy with pupils, concentrating so hard on making sure they don’t burn the place down and maybe even learn something, that you don’t have time to dwell much on how your weekend has been. I had a free period just before lunchtime, though, and the minute my pupils scrambled for the door, I sat down on my chair behind my desk as if winded, and thoughts of what had happened at home the day before crowded into my head. Why wouldn’t he speak to me for the rest of the day? Even if I was completely in the wrong about what I had or hadn’t said – did I deserve the silent treatment to that extent?

  I stood up. It was important to keep busy and luckily I was. I went to the reception desk, to talk to Lynda about a girl in my class called Jane who had refused to enter the school that morning. She had gone behind the counter and sat weeping and demanded that Lynda called her mum. I needed some more details before I spoke to Jane’s form tutor.

  As I was standing in Lynda’s office doorway, about to turn away, I looked through her window and saw a delivery man walking across the car park towards the entrance, a bouquet of flowers wobbling in his palm. It was a short, wide bouquet, one of those ones where there is a cellophane bulb filled with water and a dome of blooms – there were peonies and roses, some buds still tight and round, pinks and purples and those hard shiny green leaves on tough twigs that florists get from somewhere at any time of the year, evergreen leaves.

  The delivery man looked unhappy with his job. A thick wad of very light grey cloud covered the sky and there was a little December drizzle. The lunchtime bell was due to ring any minute. I had a feeling the bouquet might be for me, and I said goodbye to Lynda and walked back down the corridor, away from reception, where the man would hand the bouquet over to Lynda and she would say, ‘Oh, she was just here right now,’ and bring it to the staff room. Later, I would interrogate my reluctance to take delivery of it myself and save her the walk – I told myself it was because of the embarrassment of carrying a bouquet through corridors teeming with pupils, while knowing that it was something more nuanced. My instinctive reaction to this delivery was not the unalloyed delight it should have been but a strange combination of anxiety and relief.

  Sure enough, I had only been in the staff room for ten minutes when Lynda brought the bouquet in and declared, ‘Well, well! Someone’s popular!’ She plumped the flowers down onto the coffee table in between the two rows of low, comfy seats by the windows. The water wobbled in the cellophane and the blooms glowed pink and purple. As the bouquet squatted there, I had the brief and irrational thought that it was animate, watchful. Lynda plucked the tiny card in its tiny envelope from the cleft of the plastic stick inserted into the bouquet and handed it to me with a flourish.

  ‘Secret admirer?’ said Jenny, in Geography, nodding towards the bouquet, and the other staff members in the room turned and smiled.

  Everyone watched me as I opened the envelope.

  Thanks for putting up with me. I love you. Matthew x

  The messages that come with bouquets of flowers are supposed to be personal and yet are written in the handwriting of a stranger. The two ‘t’s of Matthew were squeezed up tight together and all I could think was, it isn’t his writing, it isn’t him.

  Jenny was at my side, peering at the card shamelessly. ‘Ooh,’ she said, ‘aren’t you lucky? Can’t remember the last time someone sent me flowers.’

  The staff room had filled up for lunch break.

  ‘Secret admirer?’ asked Benjamin, the Head of Business Studies.

  ‘That’s what I said,’ said Jenny.

  ‘No,’ I said, with a smile, ‘it’s Matthew.’

  ‘Why is he sending you flowers to work?’

  Bloody hell, I wanted to say, one bunch of flowers and suddenly my relationship is public property? But that’s what flower deliveries are for, of course, they are as much for the benefit of a wider audience as the recipient.

  Several other people crowded round and cooed and commented and I was congratulated and told how lucky I was that my boyfriend was so romantic – he’s obviously crazy about you, Lisa.

  Not everyone in the staff room gathered round and praised me. On the other side of the room, leaning against the counter top that had the two kettles and the rows of jars of tea and instant coffee, was Amy Brampton, a woman my age who was also in the English Department. We were at very similar stages of our careers and would, it was inevitable, be competing for the same promotions – in that sense, she was my rival. She had pale skin and auburn hair and was quite posh. For some reason, we got on each other’s nerves – I had told Matty this. She was watching me being the centre of attention with a blank, unimpressed look on her face and I began to feel pleased about the flowers, as if Matty had done it to irk her.

  Sitting on one of the soft chairs next to my small, admiring crowd was Bernice Chumunga, a Special Needs Co-ordinator approaching retirement, a woman with tight grey curls and a lively, sarcastic gaze.

  She glanced up once, then returned her gaze to the notes she was reading as she remarked, to nobody in particular, ‘My husband sent flowers to work, I’d want to know what he’d been up to.’

  ‘Oh …’ admonished Jenny with a smile, ‘Bernice!’ There was chuckling from both of them; the small crowd broke apart.

  It came to me that I had better text Matthew right away, to thank him.

  *

  It was early December. The tree trunks were black and bare. My walk home after school at that time of year was cold and dark. As well as my bag of papers, I had the flowers to carry, awkwardly: the bulbous cellophane base was too mobile to hold on its own and I had to put an arm around the bouquet, to support it without crushing the stems. Halfway through the walk, I wished I had just fou
nd a vase in the staff room and left them there – but then I thought of having to explain that to Matthew.

  Inside the flat, I kicked off my shoes and let my shoulder bag drop and arranged the flowers in a vase immediately. I placed the arrangement on the end of the kitchen counter, so they would be visible as soon as he got in the door. I washed my hands: Matty was big on washing hands. I wasn’t a good cook like him, I was a plain and hearty one, but I made a risotto with prawns and tomato that he liked. There was a bag of salad somewhere in the fridge. I extracted it and ripped it open then fiddled with the leaves, dropping them into the salad bowl one by one, discarding the ones that were starting to go limp and discoloured.

  I had just finished laying the table when there was the sound of Matthew’s key in the door. I went straight over to him and rested my hand on the side of his cheek and kissed him and said, ‘Thank you, they are beautiful. Caused quite a stir in the staff room.’

  He looked at the flowers, then at me. ‘Good.’

  *

  That night, I was sitting up in bed reading when he came out of the bathroom in his boxers and got into bed beside me. He took the book out of my hands and, without looking at it, closed it and tossed it across me so that it landed on the floor on my side. He moved up close to me then and I turned to him, expecting sex, but instead, he reached out and put one hand on my chin, cupping it so I couldn’t move. With the other hand, he used two fingers to press hard against my jawbone on one side. ‘You’ve got a nerve, here,’ he said.