Page 37 of Such a Good Couple
‘I’ll see you when you get back, I guess.’ She unbuckled and slid out of her seat. Making her way down the side of the house and towards the stairs to the deck, she could feel his eyes on her back.
She knew he just wanted her to smile and accept his new life. He craved her unquestioning support. He didn’t get that shewastrying but he never seemed to think about what she was sacrificing for him to get everything he’d ever wanted.
In the first year or two of the ‘fame storm’, as she’d come to think of it, he’d still encouraged her own work. He’d pushed her to get nannies for the girls so she could focus on projects. He didn’t seem to follow the logic of that idea – if he was gone for months at a time and Maggie was immersed in her theatre work, Dodi and Essie would be alone with a pale imitation of a parent on the payroll. Despite what Clara and Annie might assume, Maggie had never got a nanny – she had a housekeeper, Betty, who ran the house, cooked and helped with babysitting the odd time, but Maggie tried to always be there for the girls, the only constant in their strange, unsettled lives.
She paused at the foot of the steps as Fionn’s buggy engine growled to life. She would not look back: that was her tiny act of defiance.
She would push down these feelings like she always did. Fuck it, things would look different when the bleached light of another beautiful day in Provincetown dawned in a few hours’ time. Shewould cope and put on a show for their friends, who would no doubt pity her, maybe even think she was a pushover for going along with Fionn.
There was a simple way to cope, a simple way to bury the humiliation of her marriage.
This whisper of a thought unfurled in her mind like a tendril of blood in water. There was a route to numbness. The problem was, she had nothing in her room that would soothe her. Eating had always been her refuge from the discomfort of living. Even before she had become ‘officially’ unwell during college she had never really eaten normally. Growing up, her mother had monitored the size of her own body closely and that toxic focus had eventually extended to her daughter’s body when, as a teenager, Maggie had started to gain weight. Maggie knew her mother loved her and that her urging Maggie to give up chocolate and watch her portions was not a conscious effort to hurt her. But feeling endlessly observed at the dinner table eventually drove her eating underground and into the lonely, dark corners of her life. It became routine to eat little at dinner and then sneak as much food as she could late at night after her family were in bed. This pattern produced two contradictory effects: a soothing, almost tranquilising sense of peace and a feeling of drowning in a soup of shame and self-loathing which, of course, was when the purging had started to creep in.
It was just from time to time at first. It was so hard to hide until she became scarily adept at it – a dubious brag. Then in her flat in college with so much more autonomy and privacy, the grim habit started to become a rampaging force. The answer to everything, college stress, fights with Fionn, success and failure, was to eat and purge, eat and purge. Maggie closed her eyes against the memories rising – puking in Portaloos at festivals, being spattered in the face with toilet water when she flushed to try and hide the sounds she made as she hunched over retching.Now her thoughts darted to the kitchen. Would the staff lock it at night? She continued to hesitate on the threshold where the beach met the house.
She felt the urge gathering inside her, like a wave surging up. It had been years since she’d last done it but being sick in the restaurant the night before had felt undeniably good and these thoughts, once unleashed in her mind, were dogged. Insidious and insistent. Eat and blot out the uncomfortable feelings. Sure then the shame, familiar as her own hands, would soon come and smother this temporary relief. And then a simple way of dealing with all of it. The thing people had never seemed to understand was that there eventually came a time when being sick didn’t feel gross but satisfying; ridding yourself of everything was a narcotic high in and of itself.
She wondered if she could slip into the house from the front and get to the kitchen that way without running into anyone.
‘Maggie? Is that you?’ Clara’s voice came from above her and Maggie froze.
Maggie debated creeping away but the thought of slipping back into the shadow of the house and stealthily finding her way to the kitchen caused more dank humiliation to wash over her. Sometimes she wished that she was a secret drinker instead – anything seemed less shameful than bingeing on food. But for whatever reason, for her, alcohol and drugs didn’t have that same seductive pull.
Footsteps on the wooden boards above sent fine sand down from the underside of the deck. ‘Maggie?’ Clara was now above her, leaning over the railing. ‘Are you okay?’
Maggie pulled on a smile. ‘Yeah, sorry, I was just admiring the view.’ Maggie gestured towards the beach.
Clara’s slightly bewildered gaze followed the direction of Maggie’s hand. There wasn’t a whole lot of ‘view’ visible out in the darkness, where the black sea was barely distinguishablefrom the black night above.
‘Hmmm … quite a view alright.’ Clara was sombre, though her words were loose and a teeny bit slurred. ‘Please, come up and tell me I haven’t totally ruined my marriage, will you?’ She turned and disappeared from view.
Maggie made her way up the steps and over to the two lounge chairs at the edge of the deck. Clara slumped onto one and Maggie took the other. ‘How are you doing? Where’s Annie?’
‘She and Conor did some cursory comforting and then hightailed it upstairs. Obviously they had some sex business to attend to. I guess who in their fortiesdoesn’tget a boner from watching the fights of their married friends?’ she joked bleakly.
Maggie took in the half-empty bottle of Pinot Grigio and the one empty wine glass and couldn’t help feeling a flicker of judgement –does she really think more booze is going to help?
Maggie regrouped and tried to settle her expression into one of compassion, even though she was not feeling the most thrilled with Clara.Why does she have to get so wasted and make her problems everyone else’s problem?
Clara’s palms were pressed to her eyes but she seemed to intuit Maggie’s thoughts. ‘I know the last thing I need is more booze but …’ She hung her head, leaning forward. A curtain of hair obscured her face and Maggie couldn’t tell if she was crying. ‘When we got back here, Ollie said exactly ten words to me, Maggie. He said, “Sleep somewhere else, I can’t look at you right now.”’
‘Clara,’ Maggie breathed. ‘I’m sorry.’
‘He was so cold.’ Clara’s shoulders began to shake. ‘It was only a kiss but he’s acting like I had sex with someone else.’
Maggie thought about how she’d feel in Ollie’s position. It didn’t take much imagining. She’d had to work throughthe sickening discomfort of seeing Fionn kiss other actors all through their relationship. The fact that she’d worked in theatre had helped her compartmentalise somewhat. It was storytelling, she told herself. Though his scenes with some of the most beautiful women in the world still felt fucking shit sometimes. When the urge to take refuge in food started to creep in, it was often these images that she was running from.
Kissing someone else in real life is still a betrayal,she thought.It’s intimate.
She shifted her focus back to Clara. Maggie knew she still had to be her friend, even if shehadfucked up. They had all done it for each other at various times. That’s what made a twenty-year friendship: sitting with the other person, staying by their side even when you knew they’d been a bit of an asshole.
And also lying to them a bit when necessary. Maggie put her arm around Clara. ‘I think you will feel better able to handle this in the morning, darl. He’ll come around. I’m sure he will. It’s Ollie.’ Maggie forced herself to sound confident, though privately she wasn’t sure at all. Everyone had their limit, and Ollie had always been very clear abouthis.
Plus, if Ollie felt he had to hide something as innocuous as a hobby from Clara, then God knows what state their marriage was in. Maybe all their jokey slagging wasn’t as playful as it seemed. ‘Give him some space. Come up and sleep in my room, Clara. Then you two can talk it out properly tomorrow.’
Clara looked up at her. She seemed lost, diminished from the turn the night had taken. ‘Is Fionn not there?’ she asked.
‘No, Fionn went back to the dune shack, long story.’ Maggie resurrected her forced smile from earlier. ‘Come on, it’ll be like a sleepover. A grim, grim sleepover.’ Maggie stood and tugged Clara to her feet.
