Raking the Ashes Read Free Page A

if I’m the other woman, after all. You’ve been divorced for ages.’
    ‘It’s nothing personal,’ he assured me. ‘She’s just a woman who thinks in stereotypes. Her mother’s the same.’
    ‘And you,’ I said, because he’d just come back from London with a present for each of his children. For Harry he’d bought a puzzle. It was a complicated, three-dimensional affair, tremendously clever in design. (I have to think that, since I spent a good deal of time over the following weeks trying to solve it.)
    For Minna, he had bought two pretty hair slides.
    ‘I see,’ I told him. ‘“Man does, but woman is”?’
    He didn’t get it. ‘Minna
likes
pretty things.’
    ‘Minna likes presents,’ I told him. ‘All children do. And Minna especially likes getting presents from you. But what you give her shows her what you think of her. And pretty hair slides send a very unaffirming and sexist message.’ I twisted the puzzle round one last time before reluctantly surrendering it for wrapping. ‘Especially when you give a teaser as fiendish as that to your boy.’
    I never expected something like that to lead to a quarrel. (It was our first.) He had the nerve to
argue
. I pointed out that what I’d said was no more than the truth. He still kept at it, wittering on about how Minna actually
collected
pretty things, and liked doing stuff with her hair. ‘That’s not the point,’ I kept telling him. ‘She could like licking poisonous toads , but you wouldn’t offer her one as a present.’
    I can’t believe how long I kept trying. ‘It would be fine,’ I tried to explain, ‘if you’d bought Harry something equally pretty and pointless.’
    ‘Like
what
?’ he crowed, as if the fact he couldn’t think of anything equally vapid to give a boy proved his point, not mine. When I pointed this out, he fell in a giant sulk (manifesting itself as a hoity-toity claim to have ‘far too much work to do to spend any more time on this futile discussion’).
    I should have ended things right then. I look back now and realize that was the moment. That was the first step down the slippery slope of mere accommodation, whereby a pair of rolling eyes foretells the death rattle. He might as well have cut the crap and come straight out with that grim marital hostility, ‘Well, if you say so, dear!’ At least then I would have had the sense to go after him with a pipe wrench. ‘Discuss this properly, or leave right now!’
    No, it is all my fault. I take the blame. I should never have let all the pleasant and easy things about living with Geoffrey outweigh the fact that right from the start we were incapable of coming to a shared understanding of any single problem, however trivial, let alone make any progress on the way to a solution. I wish I’d had the sense to face the truth back then: ‘This will unpeel. I’d better get out now.’ But he was very nice in bed. Clean. Pleasant-smelling. Attentive. He never spoiled the mood by lapsing into lectures on thrifty asset-management, like Sol, or trying to cadge money, like Stefan. And he was wonderful when we went out, never panicking when I reached across to take my turn at picking up the bill, and brilliant at getting taxis for exactly the right time, with no rushing or waiting. So I ignored the bad signs and just kept taking pleasure in his company – shilly-shallying, my mother would have called it – until one day, before I knew it, he had rented out his flat behind him. ‘Well, it seemed sensible. After all, I can’t afford to leave it sitting there doing pretty well nothing for ever.’
    I took up the cudgels. ‘How could you
do
that? Without even
asking
me?’
    ‘Oh, come on, Tilly!’ (He was actually trying to pre-empt me by acting more put out than I was.) ‘We must have discussed this a dozen times. You’ve always agreed that it’s plain stupid to leave the place for weeks on end, and get no rent for it.’
    ‘Maybe I have. That’s not the same as