1 Dusty Bluebells
Category: Toby/Andrea. More of a vignette than anything.
Disclaimer: It wasn't me. ABS reigns supreme. No infringement intended.
Summary: He'll miss her when she's gone, but only for the bluebells.
It's over. They both know it and neither is unduly troubled.
Each is slightly irked by the fact that the other isn't more distressed.
He stands at the picture window he's always hated while she's in his bedroom packing her designer suitcase. For a business trip, she says. She has to go to California to address a local chapter of the Party.
It's true, as far as it goes. She simply omits to mention she won't be back – not for long.
He knows how it will play out. The suitcase won't come back with her; it will be left in the new lodgings he's certain she must have arranged by now. She'll sleep in his bed for a night, maybe a few; if he pushes the right buttons maybe she'll even sleep with him.
One night he will return home to find a note stuck to the refrigerator with a magnet purchased from the gift shop at the British Museum during their tour of Europe three summers ago. He will read that she's staying with an unnamed friend that night.
Maybe she will stay with a friend, or maybe she'll stay with a 'friend', or maybe she'll spend the night in a hotel. It's not impossible that she even has an apartment of her own lined up already.
In any case, she'll be gone.
This could go on for weeks, to-ing and fro-ing and emptying his cupboards and drawers of her belongings, until one of them takes the other by the hand and says that it's over, that they both know it and that neither of them cares.
Then she'll try to kiss him goodbye, he'll push her away and she'll settle for muttering that she'll pick up the rest of her things next week sometime.
And then she will really be gone.
The coffee mug, his seventeenth of the day, is slowly burning his hands but he won't put it down because that would be weakness.
It would be a tiny weakness and one that she, folding her fashionable clothes on his expensive bedspread, would never see, but weakness just the same and he did not want to be weak on this day. Not any more.
He's aware of his ridiculousness. He's aware of just how amusing she would find it if she knew that he was causing himself an injury because she's already made him feel so weak over the years that he now has to clutch onto every miniscule chance to prove him masculinity to himself.
She's never shied of telling him how ludicrous he is. He's never cared, he really hasn't.
He cares this time because it's over and everything is different now.
There's a tinkle from the direction of the bedroom. She's packing a few of her ornaments too. Collectors' items, as she calls them.
How he does hate that picture window, the one that forces him to look out and see that the rest of the world exists and that it does not revolve around him.
She chose the window. She also chose to remind him that the world didn't revolve around him, back in the days when she still thought he was worth trying to change.
It's easier somehow for him to hate the picture window than to hate her.
He looks out the window and sees the city they live in: the city that should have kept them united with its dedication to their shared passion. If he took a step to the left and squinted he would see Pennsylvania Avenue.
He doesn't, because he sees Pennsylvania Avenue every day, which is one of his reasons for disliking the picture window. He has plenty of time to look at the city's buildings while he's in traffic jams driving to work.
Instead he takes a diagonal step and looks down. Yes, there is something he can see from here that he can't see during rush hour.
He will miss those bluebells.
He knows well that he's going to miss her too but his heart isn't breaking over it.
That's long since over, as are the fighting, the screaming, the tears and the regrets. Very soon she'll be gone and everything will be over.
He wonders how he'll feel then and decides he will throw himself even further into his work and see if he can get truly lost in it. Maybe without her he'll actually win something, he thinks with a small grin for the benefit of the bluebells.
But he knows he'll miss her when she's gone.
He doesn't miss the way things used to be, though things were good for a while. If he did he would ask her to stay, and she would, at least for a while. But he doesn't, and he won't, and she won't, and he doesn't want her to.
Things are as they should be now, in the end days as they drift towards over. Even the coffee mug is only comfortably warm against his skin now.
His writer's mind can't help thinking of it as a clunky metaphor of them as an entity. When it was hot, he got burnt. Ever since then it's been gradually cooling, causing less and less pain as the temperature dropped but becoming less tasty and effective at the same.
Even he isn't masochistic enough to drink cold coffee.
Still, it feels more natural to be clasping the mug than to put it down.
Inwardly he winces at the crudity of the comparison: he's never been a big fan of imagery, believing that it most commonly detracts from his always valid - and usually one hundred percent correct – point.
It should be safe at this particular juncture, given that he no longer has a point, only memories.
He hasn't thought about the big things for a long time. He doesn't remember what her wedding dress looked like, or the gifts they exchanged on their first anniversary, or the song she always dragged him onto the dance floor for.
The triggers of the fieriest fights escape his memory and he can't for the life of him recall just when he knew it was over.
Instead he remembers a morning, an unremarkable morning, after a night after a day off work for them both, something rare almost to the point of being unique. As neither of them was planning on working that morning either, the night before had involved little sleep, lots of sex and, for him, hours of lying awake listening to her snore.
He lay with one arm squeezing her close to him and the other twisted painfully beneath her. He didn't move it because it was more comfortable to have her crushing him while she slept than to shift and wake her, and have her get out of bed and go to her laptop to catch up on some paperwork.
She wriggled slightly in her sleep and gave a little smile. His eyes moved between her face and the ceiling as he lay awake and worried, as he always had done when everyone else was sleeping. He had been that way long before her and would continue to be long after her.
He worried a little that they'd have another fight when she woke; that their night of passion would be their last; or, what was worse, they'd sit down in the dining room and have a civilised conversation over a civilised breakfast at a civilised hour.
But mostly he worried about children without medical insurance, about the inflection in his speeches, and above all about joining a losing campaign one more time.
The morning had descended by the time he dozed off. Waking briefly when she lifted his arm to let herself out, he hoped she would bring him hot coffee before he fell back to sleep.
Hours must have passed by the time he woke again, for she sprang into the room breathing hard. Her throwing the bedroom door open allowed the light from the picture window in the next room to stream onto his face and make him groan.
She was dressed in shorts and a light blouse, one he recognised as having been a hefty chunk of his credit card bill, and which was now streaked with dirt.
Her skin glowed redder than her hair and she wore a wide shining grin. She looked so radiant he panicked for a fearful moment that she was about to announce she was pregnant.
Instead she flopped on the bed next to him and ran a sweaty hand over his rapidly widening bald spot.
Taken aback, he pointed out that she was getting mud all over the sheets.
I'll wash them, she'd told him casually.
She was only ever casual about things that he took seriously.
As when he noticed something at all he most commonly took it seriously, it was enough to affect their relationship.
When things were good, it helped her release her frustration at their incompatabilities and reminded him why he loved her in spite of their differences.
When things were bad, it led him to wreak acts of violent revenge on their expensive furniture and them both to question whether he was compatible with living alongside anyone in the world.
When things were indifferent, it made her giggle and him sigh, wondering what the hell love was anyway.
On a morning such as this, he was more interested in coaxing her back beneath the sheets - now that they were dirtied anyway.
She shook her head at his irritated-cum-hopeful expression, trying to look serious but unable to resist a tiny curl of the upper lip, her mouth aching to express the smile that was bursting out all over her face.
He cringed as she wiped first her hands, then her face, on the bedclothes.
When finished, she slid off the bed and to the door. Feeling himself respond to the disappearing chances of relief, he threw the covers aside.
"Fine then, woman," he said, the last word being pronounced in a growl designed to send a shiver down the staunchest spine. "We'll do it in the garden."
The chase was fun, the conclusion even more so, for if he didn't quite make good on his promise, there was something beautiful about standing in a boggy flowerbed laughing aloud with his hands underneath his wife's sweat- soaked clothes, feeling her breathlessness, in full view of the old man mowing his lawn in the next garden.
Even when she noticed where he was standing and gave him a shove, causing him to fall flat on his back in full view of the aforementioned neighbour, he didn't mind. He wasn't one to take humiliation well, but this was something else; this was her and it was laughter and it was love.
"You'll destroy them!" she gasped, still recovering from her gallop round the house and garden with him in hot pursuit.
"What? The weeds?" he deadpanned, barely pausing to lament the grass- stains on his pants.
A half-hearted slap brought her close enough to sneak his arms back around her.
"Aren't they beautiful?"
Some grunts of debatable meaning emanated from his mouth, a feature which happened to be buried within her hair.
"Aw, sweetheart, I know I'm beautiful, I just want to know what you think of my bluebells."
"Sure. Great. You know how I love weeds."
"They're beautiful bluebells, and I made them."
His enthusiasm was waning slightly now that it involved nature, even if the nature in question was a few transplanted bulbs in the kind of strip of earth that passes for a garden in cities.
"You mean you drove to a nursery and bought them."
She slipped from his grasp as she did best, and parted her lips with the vaguest hint of a tongue sticking out.
"I planted them in our soil. I took something that was barren and gave it life. I created something."
He shrugged. He didn't understand gardening, and he certainly didn't understand messing about in the muck without even growing your own plants. But it seemed to make her happy, and that made him horny.
"Is this at all a metaphor for your biological clock?" he asked sceptically.
The expression on her face did wonders to reassure him.
"No! A fine state we'd be in then!"
They shared a moment of picturing themselves struggling to comfort a wailing child vomiting on their thousand dollar suits.
Then they looked at each other and laughed, because she wasn't pregnant, didn't want to be, and they didn't ever have to procreate if they didn't want to.
Plus they had those goddamn bluebells.
He didn't think it anything particularly noteworthy at the time, but it is one of the shadows of the good times that comes back to him now.
There are remnants of the bad times too, of course, lurking over his shoulder, but he chooses not to dwell on those now.
Not until after she's gone.
He will surely miss her when she's gone.
And then he will think of how bad it could get, and he won't mind about her being gone.
He shudders at the thought that she almost made him like the outdoors. It's just as well they didn't make love in the garden, he would have had real problems resenting it then.
Taking a hand off the coffee mug to touch the hated glass, he considers smashing it as one last gesture of some kind of feeling in their relationship.
She would be furious if he destroyed the picture window. She might even shed a tear, something both of them have failed to do over the disintegration of their marriage.
He knows he'll never really do it. Who would it help, who would it hurt, who would end up paying for the repairs?
Besides, the glass would end up in the flowerbed below. He would regret it if the shards damaged the bluebells.
He finally puts down the stone-cold coffee and tears himself away from the window. While she's packing he should see if there are any of her things mixed up with his.
His fingers tap restlessly on the side of the bureau as he unlocks it with the key he unfailingly keeps in his breast pocket and he begins to rifle through unexciting papers, old letters, old bills, with one hand.
Small matters are not enough to keep a mind such as his occupied, and it begins to wander. He wonders when he first began to like the bluebells rather than considering them akin to other botanical blots on the landscape that got in the way of admiring the architecture.
The transformation probably took place around the time he started to associate them with sex.
She kept them maintained faithfully, replacing dead plants, and even those that simply weren't cosmetic enough anymore, with bright and brilliant new ones.
There were many more mornings she came in hot and glowing and satisfied with a job well done, a garden made more competitive with the neighbours'. Few of them had the same resolution that first one had (with him throwing her over his shoulder and taking her back to bed for the rest of the day), but they all had happier endings than most other days did by that stage.
So perhaps he associates the bluebells more with loving her than with sex, but that isn't an appropriate thing to admit to at this point, not even to himself.
He decides it's probably not important that she take with her the receipt for a ludicrous pink purse she stopped carrying years ago and locks up the bureau, throwing the contents back in higgledypiggledy because reorganising them will give him something to do when she's gone.
Not that he'll exactly have a lot of time on his hands. He hasn't been devoting enough time to work lately, waiting for his domestic dramas to sort themselves out, though he has to admit things haven't been very dramatic between them for some time.
He'll work, he'll drink, he'll talk to people in bars. Maybe he'll even look up one of the women he used to know before her. He can think of at least two who would take his call.
He won't be short of distractions.
It never hurts to make sure.
He turns his wedding ring around on his finger. He doesn't know if it's time to take it off yet. The marriage has been over for a long, long time. When is the appropriate time? When she leaves for California? When she officially moves out? When whoever of them gets in first sues for divorce? When the decree absolute is delivered to his mailbox?
He assumes he'll know when the right time comes, and for now he leaves it on.
In the bedroom she is taking hers off. Then she reconsiders and slips it back on. If he sees her without it, he might feel compelled to confront her, and neither of them has the energy for a war.
She can't help being a little irritated that he isn't putting up more of a fight.
He knows he'll miss her when she's gone, and what's more, she knows he'll miss her when she's gone.
It troubles her somewhat that he doesn't try to stop her going.
He knows it can't work, and she knows he knows it can't work, but she didn't expect the breakdown to be so logical.
She supposes they have spent their raw emotions in other fights and other triumphs and that's why they have none left for each other.
Maybe if he were pained enough to ask her not to go it would mean that there was a possibility that she could stay.
But he doesn't, and there isn't, and she can't.
She's finished packing now, but she procrastinates because she doesn't want to pass him on the way out.
She also feels she should try to muster some emotion for the occasion. She expected it to be harder to leave when it came to the point.
Actually, it feels no different to the other times she's gone out, fantasizing about never returning.
She's surprised by how right it feels.
It strikes her as odd. After all, she loved him once.
He turns as she emerges from the bedroom that is no longer theirs. Their eyes half-meet, then they both draw back from something that is closer to intimacy than either is comfortable with.
He is fiddling with a stress toy she bought him as a joke once, a pink rubber ball.
The sight of her, looking uncomfortable and clutching her matching luggage, provokes very little reaction.
They'll both be happier once the going is over and the being gone is begun.
He wonders idly what would happen if he crossed the room and kissed her hard on the mouth, tracing circles on her back to remind her what his hands can do.
Would she let him? Would she like it? Would she reconsider for a half a second?
It was purely academic, as he has no desire to find out. He doesn't want to kiss her any more.
The thought of her expression were he to do such a thing at this stage brings the hint of a smile to his lips.
She notices and is upset. Why isn't he heartbroken? Why isn't she?
He picks up one of her bags and strides towards the door before she can snatch it back to prove that she can manage just fine without him. He already knows she can, but what kind of a gentleman lets a lady carry her own bags?
The bags are soon stowed in the cab that's taking her to the airport.
He hesitates; touches her arm. She flinches and he pulls back. He wishes her a good trip and heads back into the building.
He gets a damn good view of her leaving from the picture window; he should give it credit for that, but he doesn't particularly feel like it.
With the lead gone from the atmosphere (and no-one there to see it) he can allow himself a real smile.
As the cab disappears around the corner, he lets his gaze wander to the bluebell patch.
There is now a flaw in her perfect arrangement. She will notice and be displeased upon her brief return. It is his fault but he has no regrets, just as he has no regrets about his marriage or its ending.
He withdraws the flower he just plucked from its rightful home and holds it to his cheek.
Soon the bluebells will die without her care.
There's no chance of him keeping it up no matter how pretty they are. Besides, it's somehow fitting that they should die out with the relationship.
Still, he'll miss those bluebells when they're gone.
It's over. He decides to call the office.
THE END
First posted 24 September 2001
Category: Toby/Andrea. More of a vignette than anything.
Disclaimer: It wasn't me. ABS reigns supreme. No infringement intended.
Summary: He'll miss her when she's gone, but only for the bluebells.
It's over. They both know it and neither is unduly troubled.
Each is slightly irked by the fact that the other isn't more distressed.
He stands at the picture window he's always hated while she's in his bedroom packing her designer suitcase. For a business trip, she says. She has to go to California to address a local chapter of the Party.
It's true, as far as it goes. She simply omits to mention she won't be back – not for long.
He knows how it will play out. The suitcase won't come back with her; it will be left in the new lodgings he's certain she must have arranged by now. She'll sleep in his bed for a night, maybe a few; if he pushes the right buttons maybe she'll even sleep with him.
One night he will return home to find a note stuck to the refrigerator with a magnet purchased from the gift shop at the British Museum during their tour of Europe three summers ago. He will read that she's staying with an unnamed friend that night.
Maybe she will stay with a friend, or maybe she'll stay with a 'friend', or maybe she'll spend the night in a hotel. It's not impossible that she even has an apartment of her own lined up already.
In any case, she'll be gone.
This could go on for weeks, to-ing and fro-ing and emptying his cupboards and drawers of her belongings, until one of them takes the other by the hand and says that it's over, that they both know it and that neither of them cares.
Then she'll try to kiss him goodbye, he'll push her away and she'll settle for muttering that she'll pick up the rest of her things next week sometime.
And then she will really be gone.
The coffee mug, his seventeenth of the day, is slowly burning his hands but he won't put it down because that would be weakness.
It would be a tiny weakness and one that she, folding her fashionable clothes on his expensive bedspread, would never see, but weakness just the same and he did not want to be weak on this day. Not any more.
He's aware of his ridiculousness. He's aware of just how amusing she would find it if she knew that he was causing himself an injury because she's already made him feel so weak over the years that he now has to clutch onto every miniscule chance to prove him masculinity to himself.
She's never shied of telling him how ludicrous he is. He's never cared, he really hasn't.
He cares this time because it's over and everything is different now.
There's a tinkle from the direction of the bedroom. She's packing a few of her ornaments too. Collectors' items, as she calls them.
How he does hate that picture window, the one that forces him to look out and see that the rest of the world exists and that it does not revolve around him.
She chose the window. She also chose to remind him that the world didn't revolve around him, back in the days when she still thought he was worth trying to change.
It's easier somehow for him to hate the picture window than to hate her.
He looks out the window and sees the city they live in: the city that should have kept them united with its dedication to their shared passion. If he took a step to the left and squinted he would see Pennsylvania Avenue.
He doesn't, because he sees Pennsylvania Avenue every day, which is one of his reasons for disliking the picture window. He has plenty of time to look at the city's buildings while he's in traffic jams driving to work.
Instead he takes a diagonal step and looks down. Yes, there is something he can see from here that he can't see during rush hour.
He will miss those bluebells.
He knows well that he's going to miss her too but his heart isn't breaking over it.
That's long since over, as are the fighting, the screaming, the tears and the regrets. Very soon she'll be gone and everything will be over.
He wonders how he'll feel then and decides he will throw himself even further into his work and see if he can get truly lost in it. Maybe without her he'll actually win something, he thinks with a small grin for the benefit of the bluebells.
But he knows he'll miss her when she's gone.
He doesn't miss the way things used to be, though things were good for a while. If he did he would ask her to stay, and she would, at least for a while. But he doesn't, and he won't, and she won't, and he doesn't want her to.
Things are as they should be now, in the end days as they drift towards over. Even the coffee mug is only comfortably warm against his skin now.
His writer's mind can't help thinking of it as a clunky metaphor of them as an entity. When it was hot, he got burnt. Ever since then it's been gradually cooling, causing less and less pain as the temperature dropped but becoming less tasty and effective at the same.
Even he isn't masochistic enough to drink cold coffee.
Still, it feels more natural to be clasping the mug than to put it down.
Inwardly he winces at the crudity of the comparison: he's never been a big fan of imagery, believing that it most commonly detracts from his always valid - and usually one hundred percent correct – point.
It should be safe at this particular juncture, given that he no longer has a point, only memories.
He hasn't thought about the big things for a long time. He doesn't remember what her wedding dress looked like, or the gifts they exchanged on their first anniversary, or the song she always dragged him onto the dance floor for.
The triggers of the fieriest fights escape his memory and he can't for the life of him recall just when he knew it was over.
Instead he remembers a morning, an unremarkable morning, after a night after a day off work for them both, something rare almost to the point of being unique. As neither of them was planning on working that morning either, the night before had involved little sleep, lots of sex and, for him, hours of lying awake listening to her snore.
He lay with one arm squeezing her close to him and the other twisted painfully beneath her. He didn't move it because it was more comfortable to have her crushing him while she slept than to shift and wake her, and have her get out of bed and go to her laptop to catch up on some paperwork.
She wriggled slightly in her sleep and gave a little smile. His eyes moved between her face and the ceiling as he lay awake and worried, as he always had done when everyone else was sleeping. He had been that way long before her and would continue to be long after her.
He worried a little that they'd have another fight when she woke; that their night of passion would be their last; or, what was worse, they'd sit down in the dining room and have a civilised conversation over a civilised breakfast at a civilised hour.
But mostly he worried about children without medical insurance, about the inflection in his speeches, and above all about joining a losing campaign one more time.
The morning had descended by the time he dozed off. Waking briefly when she lifted his arm to let herself out, he hoped she would bring him hot coffee before he fell back to sleep.
Hours must have passed by the time he woke again, for she sprang into the room breathing hard. Her throwing the bedroom door open allowed the light from the picture window in the next room to stream onto his face and make him groan.
She was dressed in shorts and a light blouse, one he recognised as having been a hefty chunk of his credit card bill, and which was now streaked with dirt.
Her skin glowed redder than her hair and she wore a wide shining grin. She looked so radiant he panicked for a fearful moment that she was about to announce she was pregnant.
Instead she flopped on the bed next to him and ran a sweaty hand over his rapidly widening bald spot.
Taken aback, he pointed out that she was getting mud all over the sheets.
I'll wash them, she'd told him casually.
She was only ever casual about things that he took seriously.
As when he noticed something at all he most commonly took it seriously, it was enough to affect their relationship.
When things were good, it helped her release her frustration at their incompatabilities and reminded him why he loved her in spite of their differences.
When things were bad, it led him to wreak acts of violent revenge on their expensive furniture and them both to question whether he was compatible with living alongside anyone in the world.
When things were indifferent, it made her giggle and him sigh, wondering what the hell love was anyway.
On a morning such as this, he was more interested in coaxing her back beneath the sheets - now that they were dirtied anyway.
She shook her head at his irritated-cum-hopeful expression, trying to look serious but unable to resist a tiny curl of the upper lip, her mouth aching to express the smile that was bursting out all over her face.
He cringed as she wiped first her hands, then her face, on the bedclothes.
When finished, she slid off the bed and to the door. Feeling himself respond to the disappearing chances of relief, he threw the covers aside.
"Fine then, woman," he said, the last word being pronounced in a growl designed to send a shiver down the staunchest spine. "We'll do it in the garden."
The chase was fun, the conclusion even more so, for if he didn't quite make good on his promise, there was something beautiful about standing in a boggy flowerbed laughing aloud with his hands underneath his wife's sweat- soaked clothes, feeling her breathlessness, in full view of the old man mowing his lawn in the next garden.
Even when she noticed where he was standing and gave him a shove, causing him to fall flat on his back in full view of the aforementioned neighbour, he didn't mind. He wasn't one to take humiliation well, but this was something else; this was her and it was laughter and it was love.
"You'll destroy them!" she gasped, still recovering from her gallop round the house and garden with him in hot pursuit.
"What? The weeds?" he deadpanned, barely pausing to lament the grass- stains on his pants.
A half-hearted slap brought her close enough to sneak his arms back around her.
"Aren't they beautiful?"
Some grunts of debatable meaning emanated from his mouth, a feature which happened to be buried within her hair.
"Aw, sweetheart, I know I'm beautiful, I just want to know what you think of my bluebells."
"Sure. Great. You know how I love weeds."
"They're beautiful bluebells, and I made them."
His enthusiasm was waning slightly now that it involved nature, even if the nature in question was a few transplanted bulbs in the kind of strip of earth that passes for a garden in cities.
"You mean you drove to a nursery and bought them."
She slipped from his grasp as she did best, and parted her lips with the vaguest hint of a tongue sticking out.
"I planted them in our soil. I took something that was barren and gave it life. I created something."
He shrugged. He didn't understand gardening, and he certainly didn't understand messing about in the muck without even growing your own plants. But it seemed to make her happy, and that made him horny.
"Is this at all a metaphor for your biological clock?" he asked sceptically.
The expression on her face did wonders to reassure him.
"No! A fine state we'd be in then!"
They shared a moment of picturing themselves struggling to comfort a wailing child vomiting on their thousand dollar suits.
Then they looked at each other and laughed, because she wasn't pregnant, didn't want to be, and they didn't ever have to procreate if they didn't want to.
Plus they had those goddamn bluebells.
He didn't think it anything particularly noteworthy at the time, but it is one of the shadows of the good times that comes back to him now.
There are remnants of the bad times too, of course, lurking over his shoulder, but he chooses not to dwell on those now.
Not until after she's gone.
He will surely miss her when she's gone.
And then he will think of how bad it could get, and he won't mind about her being gone.
He shudders at the thought that she almost made him like the outdoors. It's just as well they didn't make love in the garden, he would have had real problems resenting it then.
Taking a hand off the coffee mug to touch the hated glass, he considers smashing it as one last gesture of some kind of feeling in their relationship.
She would be furious if he destroyed the picture window. She might even shed a tear, something both of them have failed to do over the disintegration of their marriage.
He knows he'll never really do it. Who would it help, who would it hurt, who would end up paying for the repairs?
Besides, the glass would end up in the flowerbed below. He would regret it if the shards damaged the bluebells.
He finally puts down the stone-cold coffee and tears himself away from the window. While she's packing he should see if there are any of her things mixed up with his.
His fingers tap restlessly on the side of the bureau as he unlocks it with the key he unfailingly keeps in his breast pocket and he begins to rifle through unexciting papers, old letters, old bills, with one hand.
Small matters are not enough to keep a mind such as his occupied, and it begins to wander. He wonders when he first began to like the bluebells rather than considering them akin to other botanical blots on the landscape that got in the way of admiring the architecture.
The transformation probably took place around the time he started to associate them with sex.
She kept them maintained faithfully, replacing dead plants, and even those that simply weren't cosmetic enough anymore, with bright and brilliant new ones.
There were many more mornings she came in hot and glowing and satisfied with a job well done, a garden made more competitive with the neighbours'. Few of them had the same resolution that first one had (with him throwing her over his shoulder and taking her back to bed for the rest of the day), but they all had happier endings than most other days did by that stage.
So perhaps he associates the bluebells more with loving her than with sex, but that isn't an appropriate thing to admit to at this point, not even to himself.
He decides it's probably not important that she take with her the receipt for a ludicrous pink purse she stopped carrying years ago and locks up the bureau, throwing the contents back in higgledypiggledy because reorganising them will give him something to do when she's gone.
Not that he'll exactly have a lot of time on his hands. He hasn't been devoting enough time to work lately, waiting for his domestic dramas to sort themselves out, though he has to admit things haven't been very dramatic between them for some time.
He'll work, he'll drink, he'll talk to people in bars. Maybe he'll even look up one of the women he used to know before her. He can think of at least two who would take his call.
He won't be short of distractions.
It never hurts to make sure.
He turns his wedding ring around on his finger. He doesn't know if it's time to take it off yet. The marriage has been over for a long, long time. When is the appropriate time? When she leaves for California? When she officially moves out? When whoever of them gets in first sues for divorce? When the decree absolute is delivered to his mailbox?
He assumes he'll know when the right time comes, and for now he leaves it on.
In the bedroom she is taking hers off. Then she reconsiders and slips it back on. If he sees her without it, he might feel compelled to confront her, and neither of them has the energy for a war.
She can't help being a little irritated that he isn't putting up more of a fight.
He knows he'll miss her when she's gone, and what's more, she knows he'll miss her when she's gone.
It troubles her somewhat that he doesn't try to stop her going.
He knows it can't work, and she knows he knows it can't work, but she didn't expect the breakdown to be so logical.
She supposes they have spent their raw emotions in other fights and other triumphs and that's why they have none left for each other.
Maybe if he were pained enough to ask her not to go it would mean that there was a possibility that she could stay.
But he doesn't, and there isn't, and she can't.
She's finished packing now, but she procrastinates because she doesn't want to pass him on the way out.
She also feels she should try to muster some emotion for the occasion. She expected it to be harder to leave when it came to the point.
Actually, it feels no different to the other times she's gone out, fantasizing about never returning.
She's surprised by how right it feels.
It strikes her as odd. After all, she loved him once.
He turns as she emerges from the bedroom that is no longer theirs. Their eyes half-meet, then they both draw back from something that is closer to intimacy than either is comfortable with.
He is fiddling with a stress toy she bought him as a joke once, a pink rubber ball.
The sight of her, looking uncomfortable and clutching her matching luggage, provokes very little reaction.
They'll both be happier once the going is over and the being gone is begun.
He wonders idly what would happen if he crossed the room and kissed her hard on the mouth, tracing circles on her back to remind her what his hands can do.
Would she let him? Would she like it? Would she reconsider for a half a second?
It was purely academic, as he has no desire to find out. He doesn't want to kiss her any more.
The thought of her expression were he to do such a thing at this stage brings the hint of a smile to his lips.
She notices and is upset. Why isn't he heartbroken? Why isn't she?
He picks up one of her bags and strides towards the door before she can snatch it back to prove that she can manage just fine without him. He already knows she can, but what kind of a gentleman lets a lady carry her own bags?
The bags are soon stowed in the cab that's taking her to the airport.
He hesitates; touches her arm. She flinches and he pulls back. He wishes her a good trip and heads back into the building.
He gets a damn good view of her leaving from the picture window; he should give it credit for that, but he doesn't particularly feel like it.
With the lead gone from the atmosphere (and no-one there to see it) he can allow himself a real smile.
As the cab disappears around the corner, he lets his gaze wander to the bluebell patch.
There is now a flaw in her perfect arrangement. She will notice and be displeased upon her brief return. It is his fault but he has no regrets, just as he has no regrets about his marriage or its ending.
He withdraws the flower he just plucked from its rightful home and holds it to his cheek.
Soon the bluebells will die without her care.
There's no chance of him keeping it up no matter how pretty they are. Besides, it's somehow fitting that they should die out with the relationship.
Still, he'll miss those bluebells when they're gone.
It's over. He decides to call the office.
THE END
First posted 24 September 2001