Page 127 of Where Do We Go From Here?
‘And please don’t talk to me like that in front of my sister.’
Wendy raises one hand. ‘Please, stop, both of you! It’s fine. You’re both right. It is nice to see you and chat after so long. But I also do need to get to the point. Because Neil’s right. There’s no point pretending everything’s, you know… And it’s true. I didn’t come to talk about the weather.’
‘Right,’ Neil says, crossing his arms. ‘Well, good.’
‘Though I didn’t expect you to be so…’
‘So what?’ Neil asks.
‘So… I don’t know… combative?’ Wendy offers.
‘No?’ Neil asks. ‘How did you expect me to be?’
‘Just… Look. Can we start over?’
‘Sure. Go ahead,’ Neil says. ‘Start over.’
‘So first of all. I want to apologise,’ Wendy says, launching into the speech she prepared during her train journey. ‘I’ve come to the realisation that I’ve been drinking too much. And that I’ve been… a bit difficult, lately, let’s say. And I’ve stopped now – the drinking that is. So I’m sorry if that affected you. Affected us.’
Neil pulls a strange pouty expression combined with a raising of the eyebrows that seems to imply,And…?
‘Gosh,’ Sue says, visibly trying to counterbalance herhusband’s lack of enthusiasm. ‘Well done you on the drinking. That’s great news, isn’t it, Neil?’
‘Yeah, great. If it lasts.’
‘And I actually have a question about that for you, so let’s start with that one. Because – unless I got this wrong – you told me way back when that you’d stopped drinking too. I feel sure you said that to me, didn’t you?’
Sue glances at Neil, who remains poker-faced.
‘But Fiona told me that I’d got that wrong,’ Wendy continues. ‘So I was wondering what that was about.’
‘Well, Neil did stop for a while, didn’t you? For what was it? Almost a year?’
‘A bit more than a year, actually. For sort of medical reasons.’
‘And I did kind of slow down, too,’ Sue says. ‘The way you do if your partner stops drinking.’
‘But you did tell me that, didn’t you?’ Wendy asks, addressing Sue. ‘I’m sure I remember you saying repeatedly that you’d both stopped drinking. I remember because you no longer even had any drink in the house.’ She remembers this because she had started smuggling a small bottle in her handbag whenever family gatherings took place at Neil and Sue’s. Facing their thin-lipped smiles had felt impossible without a drink just as it feels almost impossible right now.
‘No. Yes. I mean… uh…’ Sue splutters, turning to her husband. ‘Neil?’
‘OK. So, we said that for your benefit,’ Neil says, stepping in brutally to save his wife. ‘If you must know, that’s what happened.’
‘For my benefit?’
‘It’s just… the conversations,’ Sue explains. ‘When you were drinking. They often got a bit… excitable… So we thought it was easier this way.’
‘Excitable? You were downright argumentative,’ Neil says. ‘I’m sorry, but if we’re going for the truth here: you were absolutely bloody exhausting.’
‘Oh,’ Wendy says. She can feel herself blushing. ‘OK.’
‘You weren’t that bad,’ Sue says unconvincingly. ‘But it’s true, we didn’t want you drinking when you were here because that seemed to make everything… awkward. So the easiest way seemed to be to stop drinkingwithyou.’
‘But you used to smuggle in your own and swig it in the bathroom,’ Neil says. ‘So I’m not sure it helped.’
‘Gosh,’ Wendy says, blushing even harder. ‘OK. I didn’t know you knew about that. But OK.’ She’s imagining all the conversations they must have had about her behind her back and feeling mortified. ‘Couldn’t you have said something, though? Couldn’t you have asked me to slow down, instead of, you know, lying to me?’
Neil laughs sourly. ‘Oh, we tried, didn’t we, Susie?’
