Free The Heart of the Country by Fay Weldon

am so sorry! Weren’t we once happy? What? No? Never? Oh, oh, oh!’ She weeps and wails and laments and he lowers through the once happy home, aggrieved and self-righteous. Well, that’s how I, Sonia, see it: I put it to the shrink and he agreed, but asked why I couldn’t keep my mind on my own problems, which run to the manic rather than the depressive.
    As I say, the morning Natalie came up to Sally Bains in the school office Sally herself was distressed and confused. She’d left Val a hump in the bed, with a thermos of coffee beside him for when he woke, and she kissed the top of his head fondly – it was all she could see – and he’d said something and she’d said:
    ‘What did you say, darling?’ and he’d said:
    ‘Don’t kiss the top of my head. You know you don’t mean it,’ and she’d said:
    ‘Oh,’ feeling as if she’d been slapped, and he’d opened an eye and said:
    ‘Christ. Don’t you know better than to put coffee in a thermos? Couldn’t you at least give it to me in a cup, like other people?’
    And since she was late for work – the making of the coffee had made her late, and the ringing of the doctor for a repeat prescription of painkillers for his back, and the phone had been engaged and engaged and engaged, as it always was in the early morning, she just left. And what’s more, he’d had the drawer by the bed open, in which he kept the photograph of the girl he had ditched in order to marry Sally twenty years back. She knew she ought to have stayed and taken away the thermos and made fresh coffee and left that (in a cup and saucer: he didn’t like mugs either) by the bed, but somehow that morning she just had to get out. And now she was at the office she was beginning to feel better, only the feeling better was not somehow the true state, was it?It was a kind of frivolity. Other people lived in a cheerful, trivial world which Val did not allow her to inhabit. And Val was right. She knew well enough that coffee never tastes its best after being in a thermos an hour or so; she should have remembered that, instead of how the thermos would let him sleep on, escape from the pain in his back, and still have something hot and reviving to drink when he woke up. She’d got itwrong, as usual.
    ‘Can I ask you something, Mrs Bains?’
    ‘Ask away.’ Sally smiled brightly. Sally knew that Harry Harris had run off with Marion Hopfoot the beauty queen. Everyone did. Some cared more than others. Most just thought it a good story.
    ‘How do I go about taking the children out of school? We are just a little financially pushed, and what with the back fees and so forth…’
    As she spoke Natalie stopped smiling brightly herself, turned quite pale and sat down. She could not quite grasp what she was saying, let alone the sense or otherwise of saying it. One part of her brain was trying to talk to the other, but couldn’t get through. It kept ringing engaged. Itwas a horrible feeling. But look now, rationally, using the brain that was attempting to ring through, even if Harry did eventually get in touch, did repent or whatever, did come home, did send a cheque, and it all turned out to be some kind of mistake, she could not rely upon it happening. It was just not sensible to have the children in private schools when there were free ones available. Somehow they had started with the schools and worked back.
    ‘There has to be a full term’s notice,’ said Sally. ‘You’re liable for fees for the next five months. That’s going to take what’s owing up to about seven thousand. Look, don’t worry. It’s happening all the time. People go bankrupt, husbands run off, someone falls ill, dies. Children are forever being taken out of these schools. There’s nothing permanent about privilege. That’s its point, isn’t it? It’s the battle to stay on top. All tooth and claw and you’re forever fighting to keep on your perch.’
    ‘I hadn’t thought about it like that,’ said Natalie. It