Page 46 of Where Do We Go From Here?
H: It doesn’t?
W: No. And even if I did want it, that doesn’t mean it was a good idea.
H: Right. Gosh. I don’t think I’ll ever understand women.
W: No. You’re right. Your best bet is not to try.
Yes, every single relationship – every single combination you could make out of the members of that foursome – was already shifting to a new, far-less-pleasant version, and it was all entirely her fault because matching Sue with Neil was what she’d thought she wanted.
Now, five years later, here we are, she thinks, still staring at her sister-in-law’s text.Just about as far apart as friends, or couples, or family for that matter, can be.
She is woken by heavy rain drumming on the roof of the cabin. She glances at her watch; it’s 3.30 a.m. – about the worst possible time for her to have woken up.
Jill, for some – no doubt mythological – reason, calls it ‘the witching hour’, and certainly for her (and for Jill, for that matter) between 3 and 4 a.m. is the specific time slot in which she knows she won’t get back to sleep. She has no idea why this is the case, but it is so. It’s been that way for decades.
She wonders if the electricity is still on and tries to listen for the buzz of the refrigerator, but the drumming of the rain is tooloud so she fumbles for the switch of the bedside lamp. It works, thank God! She didn’t know she could feel so grateful for something as basic as electricity.
She switches the lamp back off and tosses and turns for half an hour before giving in to the inevitable and getting up.
At the moment she switches on the downstairs light she spots a pair of animal eyes looking in through the gap beneath one of the blinds, but in the fraction of a second her eyesight takes to focus they’ve vanished.
She fully opens the blind and peers out into the night. The rain is falling in sheets and it’s pitch black.
Poor animal, she thinks, imagining it out there, soaked through, peering in, dreaming of a spot on the sofa next to the fire. Had it been a cat? A dog? A fox? It’s impossible to know.
She adds a log to the fire and pulls a blanket around her shoulders.
The drumming of the rain intensifies abruptly, sending a ripple of excitement through her body that feels like some primitive reaction to the terrifying power of the elements.
She picks up her phone and scans the messages and the call list. The last two entries are both ‘missed’ calls from Harry.
She’s going to have to pick up at some point, and if she’s honest, she does want to hear his voice. But how to go about it – how specifically to talk about her situation without sounding like a damsel in distress? And how to talk about anything without discussing the elephant in the room? The elephant in Harry’s bed.
Perhaps he isn’t phoning for her news at all. Perhaps he has news of his own: that he wants a divorce so that he can marry his elephant woman.
She sighs and puts the phone down, and only as she does this does she consciously realise something she has seen outside.
She jumps up and returns to the window, and yes, she’s right: no more snow! The rain has washed it all away.
Thank God for that!she thinks, marvelling again at how basic her joys and triumphs are becoming. ‘Electricity, good!’ she grunts. ‘Big snow, gone! Also good!’
Now they’ll have no choice but to sort out the bloody car.
It continues to rain for two days solid. Other than to bring in a few fresh logs, she doesn’t step outside. Without a car, without a sou’wester, how could she?
So she finishes the novel (not bad, but a lazy ending) and starts a new one she struggles to get into. She concocts weird meals from the diminishing contents of her cupboards, and phones and hassles the car hire company to no avail. They’re waiting, as far as she can understand, on news from Renault, and Renault are waiting for the tow truck to bring them the car, and the tow truck people appear to be waiting for the rain to stop.Imagine if the British waited for the rain to stop, she thinks.We’d never get anything done at all.
On the third morning after Jill’s departure she wakes to drizzle, and the forecast promises that even this will give way to sunshine by mid-afternoon.
Deciding to kill two birds with one stone – bird one: pushing through the boredom of this final wet morning, and bird two: getting the damned call out of the way – not to mention her difficult-to-admit-but-nevertheless-true bird three: the desire to talk to her husband, she braces herself and initiates the call.Hello, Harry,Hallo, Haz, or plainHello? How chummy does she want to be?
Wendy: Hello, Harry.
Harry: Ahh! Finally! I was beginning to think you were ghosting me.
W: Ha! Not really my generation’s thing, ghosting. You’ve been spending too much time with the kids.
