The Men in her Life

made up better stories than his mummy ever could?
    The anger she felt towards Joss on Tom’s behalf was more painful than any hurt he had inflicted on her. She pushed open the door. The house was cold inside, uninhabited. They had lived there almost twenty years but all that time was as nothing now. Ella’s life was the only proof that it had ever happened.
    It disturbed her to realize that she had spent so much time with someone she had not known. She could not have lived with him if she had known that he was capable of leaving Tom so casually. She had racked her brains to understand it from Joss’s point of view but she could not. Even if she had driven him to go, even if all the responsibility for their break-up was hers, he had still abandoned his son and, even in the deepest depths of her guilt, she could not find a way of blaming herself for that.
    The house no longer felt as if it belonged to her. There had been times in the past few weeks in London when she had found herself missing the sounds of the sea, the distant drag of water on pebbles, the mournful cry of seagulls at twilight. Philippa’s house was not home. There was no space there that she felt was her own. But this house was not home now either. She wandered round the rooms viewing them almost as an outsider, feeling no nostalgia for the kitchen where she had cooked so many meals, nor the bedroom where she had slept so many nights. The way they had split had negated the time that she and Joss had spent together. It was as nothing. Perhaps Joss had decided that the only way he could start again was to pretend that it had not happened. But, in doing so, he had denied her a past and denied their children’s lives. She could not get her head round that.
    Standing on a chair, she pulled down the children’s paintings from above the cupboards, leaving white rectangles on the wall that had been stained ochre by years of cooking. She realized that she had come back not just to get the birth certificates for their passports, although that task seemed profoundly symbolic, but to pack up their things and move out. There was nothing to be said any longer. The solicitors could talk to one another. They could handle the sale, and do the sums. It did not matter now. Only in the garden did she allow herself tears, as she looked at the tangible products of her labour disappearing, the vegetables yellow and overgrown, the bean rows suffocated by convolvulus.
    That night, when Tom was asleep, she began to clear out Joss’s office. There were heaps of the unpaid bills he had snatched from her hand as they arrived, scowling at her as if she had been deliberately squandering fuel, insisting, ‘I’ll deal with it’. But after a while, when the red-bordered copies had arrived, it had been left to Clare to go to the bank, negotiate with Matt’s father for a little more on their overdraft, and write out the cheques.
    There were cardboard boxes of Joss’s notes and unfinished poems, and at the bottom of one of them she found the manuscript of the novel he had once written. It was about a man who lives with his wife and child in a cottage by the sea and fantasizes about other women. Sitting on the floor, Clare read the first page: an image of a seagull poisoning itself by preening feathers covered with crude oil. With the objectivity of time, she was surprised how disturbing and beautifully written it was and she wondered why it had not been published. Then she felt a needle of guilt in her chest as she remembered secretly wishing it would be rejected, unable to bear the idea of her marriage being literally an open book for everyone to read.
    She carried the boxes downstairs and piled them up in the garden for a bonfire. But then she brought them in again, choosing the sweeter revenge of sending them to him. She imagined his lover’s face as she opened the door to the tatty pile of heavy boxes that would clutter up their life together with evidence of his past. Burn it yourself, she thought. I have cleared up after you for the last time. It took several journeys down the hill to the post office the next day, using Tom’s buggy as a trolley, and many raised eyebrows in the town, but the great feeling of catharsis made the trips worthwhile.
    Afterwards, she and Tom walked to all their favourite places to look at them one last time. She wondered if, when the little boy had become a young man, he would arrive in this godforsaken place one day in a camper van with