Everything and Nothing by Araminta Hall Page A

usually wake until midnight. It’s a good idea, he heard himself saying, let’s try it tonight. Anything to break this misery which seemed to enshroud their lives.
    With a glass of red wine in her and another one waiting, Christian saw his wife relax. Her shoulders dropped and her mouth turned up into a half smile. She looked pretty if wan in the flickering light of the candles.
    ‘So tell me about this nutritionist,’ he said, wanting to take her hand across the table, but as the thought flittered into his brain like a starling in a church roof, she used her hands to wrap her shawl closer to her slight body.
    ‘I guess he was just old school. I don’t know why I let him get to me so much. It was a shit day. Betty dropped her fucking Brat onto the track on the tube and then had hysterics all the way there. I think the people in the carriage would have preferred me to have a bomb rather than Betty, you should have seen the looks I got.’ Christian laughed. Ruth smiled back at him. ‘Then I was expecting some nice Alan Rickman type of doctor and I got fucking Dr Crippen.’ Christian laughed again. ‘Seriously, he was like a parody of a posh doctor. And all he could ask was when had I gone back to work and then he said that five months was a critical time and had I heard of separation anxiety. I wanted to ask him why he wasn’t asking when you went back to work or anything like that, but instead I kept apologising. And then Betty started freaking out and so we had to go before our hour was up and as I left he said some snide remark like, Why don’t you leave her at home with your fabulous nanny next time?’
    ‘We should complain.’
    ‘Don’t be silly. He didn’t do anything wrong. In fact, he was probably right.’
    ‘What do you mean?’
    Ruth tucked her hair behind her ears. She couldn’t force any more of the food down, even though it was delicious and she’d hardly eaten anything. ‘Well, I waited a year before I went back with Betty, and she eats. And I looked up everything he said on the Internet this afternoon and there is research on it.’
    ‘There’s research on everything.’
    ‘Yes, but did I go back to work for me or for Hal?’
    ‘Does it matter?’
    ‘Of course it does. That year after Betty I nearly went mad, and so I rushed back to work after Hal, saying that we needed the money and everything, but we could have stayed in our old house.’
    ‘It was tiny.’
    ‘Yeah, but we could have, and then I wouldn’t have had to work.’
    Christian was becoming confused by the turns in the conversation. He felt as if he’d been led too far into a maze. ‘But you wanted to go back.’
    ‘I know, that’s what I’m saying. Why did I want to go back? Why can’t I look after my kids? Am I a bad mother?’
    And there was the exit. Of course, this was what it was all about. ‘Why does working make you a bad mother and not the millions of other women who do it?’
    ‘Maybe they are too.’
    ‘Yes, and maybe so are all the women who stay at home and go silently mad or build up a head of resentment. I think you’ll find there are bad mothers everywhere, as well as good mothers.’
    ‘But . . . ’ Ruth was drawing a pattern on the table with a drop of red wine.
    ‘Staying at home and baking cookies doesn’t make you a good mother, Ruth.’
    She looked up at him, her eyes glistening. ‘Well, what does then? Because I’m all out of ideas.’
    Agatha did not want Ruth’s life. Let’s just get that straight, she said to herself as she looked up cake recipes the next day. But it did give her a warm feeling of superiority to see Ruth falling apart while she coped so well. The woman was nothing more than a mess. Sometimes when she was breezing through the house tidying and sorting, she would have conversations in her head with Ruth’s mother, a woman she had never met and someone whom Ruth rarely spoke about. All of which was fine by Agatha because it was one less person to interfere in her