Chapter 3
“Yes, I agree,” Lia slurred, “She does indeed have the most beautiful brown eyes in the whole world. But that doesn’t mean we can keep her.” They’d opened a nice bottle of red wine in order to ease the tension. There was an atmosphere in the room she’d not experienced since being the last person left on a deflating bouncy castle.
Harry’s eyes filled with tears as he half nodded, half shook his head in response. “But… but where will she go?”
They’d dried her off in the hallway and then set her water and food dishes down in the kitchen, before showing her the back garden and a place to use as a toilet when she wasn’t on a walk. She’d sniffed keenly round the entire house, particularly enjoying the edges of the kitchen where crumbs and bits of cheese were often kicked. Lia had been expecting the entire evening to be about stopping her from chewing and destroying everything in sight, but within an hour of them getting her in, she had curled up quite contentedly and gone to sleep. This left them with no more distractions from the plight of their relationship. Yet still, they discussed her rather than themselves.
“She’ll have to go back to the shelter.” Lia said quietly, “To wait for someone who can look after her properly.”
“We can look after properly.” Harry whined, and Lia took a patience steadying breath, marvelling that she was having this conversation with her boyfriend and not a small child. “I’ve been chatting to the lady there for weeks. She even came round and did a house inspection and said we seemed perfect.”
“But she never met me?” Lia said.
“No, but I told her all about you!” Harry’s optimism was heart-tweaking. “I told her how lovely and patient and kind you were. How you like reading, and writing and listening to classical music.” His eyes were round and wide on her. She poured more wine into her glass.
“And she thought a love of reading, writing and classical music was perfect for a spaniel? She didn’t think perhaps Florence would be better off with someone who liked, oh, I don’t know… long walks and rinsing fox shit?”
“Florence can’t do long walks. She has arthritis.” Florence, who had already decided she was the sort of dog who was allowed on the furniture, was lying asleep next to Harry’s feet and let out a huffing sigh at the mention of her arthritis. “That’s why her old owners gave her up. Couldn’t afford to treat it.” His eyes were brimming again and Lia felt herself melting.
“Why didn’t you tell me you wanted a dog?” Lia asked gently.
“I… I thought you’d say no.” he admitted.
“Right.” She paused, “So, if you thought I’d say no… why did you still get one?”
He looked up at her. “Because I wanted one. You would have said no, and I’d have wanted one anyway, and then it would have been a whole thing where you didn’t want one so much we couldn’t have one and I did want one so much I’d have to choose between you and I can’t make decisions like that at the moment.”
Lia was quite taken aback. She pulled a leg up towards herself, shifting her weight against the radiator. She was sitting on the floor underneath the window where she liked to sit when she drank red wine because she didn’t trust herself on the cream sofas. “Why do you want a dog so much? You’ve never mentioned wanting a dog before.” The song playing changed and the room felt very quiet in the silence in between. Just the sound of Florence’s soft huffling.
“I need something.” He said and his voice was so quiet and dry, Lia wasn’t entirely sure she’d heard him properly. She felt tears prickling the back of her own eyes as she felt the emotion radiating off him. He diverted his gaze down onto Florence’s fluffy head. She was a pretty dog: she had a surprisingly small head and a dappled white and black coat with long wavy black ears. On the top of her head she had a tuft of hair that Harry was twisting up with his fingers and then stroking back down flat to her head.
“What’s going on?” Lia asked, keeping her tone soft and her eyes fixed on the top of Florence’s head.
Harry cleared his throat and his jaw tensed as she saw him swallowing hard and trying to get his thoughts together. “I don’t do anything.” He squeezed out of a tight throat. “I don’t do anything.” Lia had moved up off the floor before she really realised she was doing it. She crossed to the sofa and sat on the other side of Florence. Her fingers joined Harry’s in playing with the hair on the top of the little head. Florence opened her eyes long enough to flick them up and across to Lia, and then settled back into her sleep. Lia had always thought having a dog would be a lot of work but so far Florence was proving idyllic. Maybe it was just puppies that were a terror? She sat in silence just stroking Florence in time with Harry and letting him steady himself again. “If I didn’t come and get you from work, I wouldn’t leave the house most days.” Harry said, and tears ripped through him. Lia felt her world collapse. The lens on her worldview suddenly zoomed out and she saw what a selfish focus she’d previously been filming in. He came to pick her up for him. He was leaned forward on the sofa, head in his open palms, sobbing like she’d never seen him cry before. The motion and the sobbing was enough to rouse the dozing Florence, who sat up and peered intently at Harry’s shielded face, offering the occasional tongue flick towards his tears in a bid to help. “I just sit in the spare room. And I work. And it’s so… it’s so is this it? And if I didn’t… I just… I know you are going to go, I know we’re not… I’ve felt it, but I don’t know how to… and I don’t… so… so I wanted something for me so that when you go… I’m not…”
The words fizzled out and Lia felt the tears dripping off the end of her own nose. She sniffed wetly and reached out a hand to grip Harry’s. “I wish you had told me.” She said.
“Because you’d love me again if you felt sorry for me?” He said bitterly.
“I do love you,” she said, and meant it.
“I don’t think people who love each other end their relationships.” He laughed, “or describe them as clammy.”
“I haven’t ended our-“
“Yet.”
“And if you’d told me how you were feeling maybe we wouldn’t have got clammy because things wouldn’t have got to this?” She took a sip of wine to wet her dry mouth. “I hated you picking me up from work,” she admitted, deciding they might as well really clean out this wound now they were here. Florence had lain back down again and Lia leaned back into the sofa too, the particular exhaustion that comes with the end of a bout of crying hitting her like a wave. “You are always late, and I hate waiting, and I just wanted to get home as quickly as possible after work. It never occurred to me you were coming to get me for you. I wish you had told me. I’d have understood it then, we could have made it more of a thing. I could have helped.”
“It’s very hard to admit that you need to come and get someone from work or your day is entirely meaningless.” Harry said, hollowly.
“Yes.” Lia nodded, “And I suppose I could have told you how much of an issue it was becoming for me and then we wouldn’t be here. We’ve not been talking about anything properly.”
“No.” Harry nodded.
“And now we have a dog.” Lia smiled and it melted into a laugh. Harry smiled too.
“What do you want to do?” Harry asked, and Lia sighed comically.
“That’s the question isn’t it?” She waited for him to say something magnanimous like if you want to leave me I won’t stand in your way I want you to be happy but he didn’t and she realised she was very grateful. The gratingness of his recent behaviour made a lot more sense in the light of it not being the way he wanted to behave either. She felt incredibly shameful for not having noticed, no, not just not noticed… not even considered the idea that Harry was or could be anything less than extremely happy and fine. “What do you need?” She asked, she looked at him but his eyes were pinned on the top of Florence’s head, avoiding eye contact at all costs. “Should we talk to a doctor?” His forehead wrinkled but he didn’t cry any more, it seemed a frown of confused concentration.
“I have done.” Harry said, and Lia felt surprise hit her like ocean spray all over again.
“Oh, right.” Was all she could muster. “What did they say?”
“They’ve offered me anti-depressants and I’m on a waiting list to speak to a therapist.” Lia smiled, there was something deeply interesting about Harry that she’d almost forgotten in their recent sleep-walking months of relationship. He was at once modern enough to independently reach out for and accept help, and old-school bottle it up Victorian enough to have not mentioned it to the person he loved and was supposedly partnered with for life.
“You did all that without talking to me?” Once she’d said it she saw her mistake. You don’t hear that from a person and then make the next sentence all about yourself, “I mean…” she backtracked, “that’s incredible Harry. That takes a lot of bravery to do. Why didn’t you feel comfortable bringing it up with me though?” There was no way to not ask, it seemed.
“It wasn’t about you.” He said, simply and she had no choice but to take a moment and sit in that. There was a silence between them that lasted at least a Florence fart and a half. The first one was definite, the second might have been another, or just a shockwave from the first, but it was something.
“So what do you need?” Lia said eventually. Repeating herself was the only thing she could think to do. How Harry felt wasn’t about her. Harry wasn’t how Harry wanted to be at the moment. Guiltily, she realised this made her feel a bit better.
1 - she wasn’t awful for feeling unsure about a relationship with someone presenting as being extremely pleasant. There was something wrong.
2 - It wasn’t the end of their relationship, it was the beginning of them acknowledging unhappiness. She was unhappy in the relationship, he was unhappy full stop. The relationship could survive.
3 - There was an immediate course of action, and that was to focus on Harry.
“I need the world to unshrink.” Said Harry, suddenly. “Since the lockdowns and work moving into a corner of the living room, and everything changing… it all feels so small. I need to get the world back.”
“Ok…” Lia said, a plan forming, “Do you want to start big or small?” Harry grinned and Lia’s heart bounced. It had been a while since she’d felt that sitting in this room. She finished her wine and squashed down the mini-grief for herself that she’d missed out on that excitement for so long. There would be time to process that in a little while.
Question…
- Big
- Small
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