Nearest Thing to Crazy Read Free Page A

without Patrick. Maybe if I’d had a career, or even a job, like you, I’d feel more confident, more of a person in my own right. But the house, the domestic bit – it’s the mundane routine of wifehood that defines me. Without that I simply don’t know who I am. How sad is that? And it’s not as if he was ever a bad husband. I mean he didn’t come home drunk and knock me about every night, did he? So I’ve got some things to be grateful for.’
    ‘I’m sorry, Sally. I’m so insensitive, really I am. I just don’t want you to be taken for granted. If Dan –’
    ‘But that’s the difference, isn’t it?’ she interrupted. ‘You don’t know what you’d do, how you’d feel, until it happens to you. And it won’t. You and Dan are welded together at the hip, anyone can see that.’
    ‘We have our ups and downs.’
    ‘Oh shush. Everyone knows you two are fine. More than fine.’
    ‘I suppose. But it’s not always a bed of roses. You know how it is.’ Dan and I were okay. In our own way. We just sort of got on with it. Wasn’t that normal marriage? Dan said you could hardly expect bells and whistles after thirty-two years together. We muddled along all right. But I knew what Sally meant about the house and Patrick being the axis of her world. When Laura went off to university Dan and I had a kind of readjustment crisis. I think we both felt a bit redundant, but I believe it was harder for me than it was for Dan. He had his career, his other life where he could feel useful and needed, whereas I, like Sally, felt pointless. We were in a sort of post-parent hinterland, with all the years of love, sweat and tears screwed up in the back of Laura’s wardrobe along with the cast-off teddies. No doubt each might come in handy for the grandchildren one day. I didn’t know whether Dan had wondered, like me, whether our relationship would be enough to make up for her absence. Were we enough for each other, just the two of us? Could we be all the things to each other that were necessary for a happy marriage? And what were those things? Friendship, love, mutual support, trust, great sex, financial security . . . Not much to ask, was it? Not much! And did everybody else’s marriages measure up to that, or were we all just muddling through, making the best of things? Just the easy questions in life . . . But we were muddling through pretty well, considering. We’d even managed a holiday together, just the two of us. And it had been lovely. And life had been so much better since I’d followed Dan’s suggestion and turned my hobby into a little business.
    Sally sounded like she was making an effort to be cheerful.
‘Perhaps we can do something another time. Why don’t you ask
Amelia?’
    ‘I already did. But she couldn’t.’
    Sally chuckled over her glass. ‘I bet you bloody asked her first, before me, didn’t you? Go on, admit it, I was second best.’
    ‘Honestly,’ I laughed back. ‘Relax. Obviously I would have got three tickets if she’d wanted to come.’
    ‘Maybe you should ask her. ’ Sally said, sotto voce and nodding in
Ellie’s direction.
    ‘Ellie?’
    ‘Why not? Be neighbourly, wouldn’t it?’
    ‘Yes, I suppose it would.’

    I found myself sitting diagonally opposite Ellie at lunch, and reflecting that spending a day with her could be really good fun. She laughed easily, an infectious belly laugh that was somehow unexpected, slightly incongruous but attractive nevertheless.
    Everyone was asking her lots of questions: ‘What brought you to this part of the world . . . and how brave, when you don’t know anyone . . .’ But she was good at turning the questions around, almost methodically working her way around the table in order to find out about all of us; the usual stuff such as who we were married to, where we lived, what children we had, whether we were locals or not. In fact I did think she was rather adept at deflecting our curiosity. She used the fact that she was cultured and