A Crowded Marriage by Catherine Alliott

He didn’t turn, but stayed staring bleakly into the stainless steel depths.
    I sometimes wondered if Alex ever missed the life he’d had. The house in Flood Street, the glamorous social life, the restaurants every night, the opera. As I held him, I felt his disappointment at the way things had turned out permeate through him. It cut me like a knife. He didn’t want to be bailed out by old friends. He didn’t want to be shamed into accepting charity, and Eleanor had done it in such a way that it didn’t seem like that. We’d be doing her a favour. As usual, she came out of this shiny and bright, a far, far nicer person than I was, who just wanted to hold on to the trappings of my life, to be like Kate across the road, with my child’s private school blazer and cap hanging in the hall and my occasional girly lunches and the odd invitation to charity balls, when in fact—we were out of our depth. Alex had clearly known it for some time, and I…well, I’d known too, but I suppose I’d been fooling myself. Clinging to the wreckage. I swallowed hard and squeezed him tight. And actually, I could cope with anything, except his sadness.
    â€œWe’ll sleep on it, darling, hmm?” I whispered, my voice, when it came, surprisingly croaky. “Let’s think about it.”

Chapter Six
    Kate dropped the frozen packet and a million petits pois shot, like tiny green missiles, to every corner of her kitchen. She turned, her face shocked.
    â€œYou’re not.”
    I nodded miserably. “We have to, Kate. We’ve been through it so many times now. Unearthed every unpaid bill, every final reminder, every threatening letter. I tell you, it’s not a pretty sight.”
    It wasn’t. Alex and I both suffered from brown envelope syndrome, my policy being to ignore them and pretend I’d open them later, but I was horrified to discover he’d gone one step further and popped them under sofa cushions. We’d decorated the kitchen table with them last night, sat down opposite each other, and forced ourselves to face reality.
    â€œYes, but this is so drastic. Moving out! Things will improve, surely?”
    I took a deep breath and prepared to take on the role of my husband, the executioner, as Kate played me, the condemned: pleading, arguing, imploring for a stay of sentence. I shook my head as I’d been taught. “Apparently not. This is the second year running he hasn’t had a bonus, Kate, and it’s not just him either,” I added loyally. “The whole of the city’s in chaos. People are losing their jobs left, right and centre. And as far as the house is concerned, if we don’t jump now, we might be pushed,” I said, echoing the master’s voice.
    â€œWhat, you mean the bailiffs?” She gazed at me without blinking.
    I shrugged. “Who knows? I mean I agree, I thought they only appeared in Dickensian costume dramas, but apparently they still exist—just look a bit different these days. Ford Mondeos and jangling bling, as opposed to tailcoats and top hats.”
    Kate sat down unsteadily opposite me at the table. She looked stricken. I hoped she wasn’t going to cry, because if she did, I surely would too.
    â€œI can’t bear it.”
    I nodded miserably. “I know. Neither can I.”
    She rested her arms limply on the table and gazed at me, her huge, baby-blue eyes filling up. I looked out of the window, in real trouble now. We both knew how much it meant to have a mate across the road to pop over and confide in, to have a laugh, a coffee, a piece of chocolate, to cheerfully character assassinate a few mothers at school, to have such instant gratification literally on each other’s doorstep, but it was more than that. Recently, Kate and I had become very close. I knew things about her that I have a feeling no one else did, and she knew things about me I certainly wouldn’t have told anyone else.