The journey back was a forty, minute trip through monotony. Alistair kept the speedometer reading at exactly sixty, his hands at ten and two, his brain running the mechanical clicks of his indicators.
It was his ritual of decompression, a way of shedding the skin of Mr. Howard before he came into his own home.
His place was a refurbished cottage on the verge of a village so quiet that it was hardly interesting. The air inside was warm and smelled of rosemary and floor polish.
Claire was in the kitchen. She was not that kind of woman who would put on an apron or open the door with a glass of wine. She was a freelance consultant for architectural firms, sharp, quick, talkative, and always on the move.
At that moment, she was leaning on the counter, scrolling through her phone while a pan was sizzling on the stove.
"You're six minutes late, " she said, still not lifting her eyes from the book. "The chicken is probably going to be dry."
"Traffic near the motorway, " said Alistair as he hung his coat on the hook in the hallway. "Hello to you, too."
He went up to her and kissed her on the cheek. She didn't move away but she also didn't lean in. It was a kind of transactional affection, a habit they had both agreed upon in order to save their marriage from damage.
They sat down at the little oak table that was part of the dining room. The silence came right away. It was not the good silence of the library at St. Judes, rather the oppressive, suffocating silence of two people who had stopped talking three years ago.
"How was the gala planning?" Alistair asked, while he was skillfully cutting up his chicken.
"Boring. Diana Halloway is an absolute beast. She wants everything to look like a 1950s debutante ball, " said Claire after she had taken a sip of water.
She looked at him with shining eye, with the look for an object to attack. "But then, of course, you love that, don't you? Tradition. Stagnation. If the school allowed you, you'd be living in 1920."
"It's part of my job, Claire. Stability is one of the reasons people like it, " he sighed.
"Stability is just a fancy term for being bored to death, " she retorted sharply. She dropped her fork with a loud clink on the china. "I reviewed the bank statements today, Alistair. You're still allocating forty percent to the long, term savings. What are we saving for? We don't have kids. We don't travel. We simply... live in this perfectly sealed box, " she said.
Alistair kept eating without looking up. After finishing his bites, he swallowed, took a deliberate sip of his wine, and said, "You know, we have been over the retirement fund. It's the grown up thing to do."
"Grown up, " she sneered, her voice escalating. "You're so crazy about being the right, quiet, reliable man, the anchor. But sometimes anchors just weight down so that things drown. See here, we hardly had a genuine talk in months except about the boiler or the shopping list."
"Im exhausted, Claire. Its been a long haul."
"Youre always tired. Or youre 'not here.' Or youre 'on something, '" She pushed herself forward, her face under the lamp, while her expression changed from an annoyed one to a cold, teasing smile.
"I wonder if you're even in there anymore. Or maybe you have become just one of those lazy books that you relate to all day long. Do you really feel anything at all when I speak to you? Or am I just background noise to your internal thoughts?"
Alistair clutched his knife tighter. He noticed a light burning sensation in the back of his neck, which was a feeling he usually controlled with a few deep breaths.
"I am struggling to create a good and stable life for us here, " he said, lowering his voice.
"You're providing a funeral scenario, " she argued. "I sometimes feel like if I have an affair with the postman, you would just ask if he brought the gas bill. You have turned into a ghost, Alistair. A responsible, dull, miserable ghost."
The word miserable struck the air like a match.
SLAM.
The noise was extremely loud. Alistair slammed his hand down on the wooden table so hard that the wine glasses nearly fell and the silverware clattered against the plates. The shock went through his arm, a cold, sharp sting that brought him back to reality.
Claire caught her breath and her whole body seemed to shrink into the back of her chair. Her eyes opened wide and the pupils got smaller. She glanced at his hand, still pressed flat on the wood, and then up at his face.
Alistair didn't flinch. His teeth were clenched so tightly that they almost hurt. For a brief moment, the expression of the detached teacher disappeared, and something rough and raw came out instead. He was not the quiet man. He was a man who was very, very angry.
The silence that followed was not the same one anymore. It was charged with tension.
"Don't, " Alistair said, his voice a dark, deep growl that could be felt. "Don't try to push me tonight, Claire."
Claire remained silent. She looked at him as if he were a stranger who had just broken into her home. For years she had been poking at his shell, trying to find a weak spot, and now that she had found it, she seemed to be very horrified.
Alistair slowly withdrew his hand. The red mark of the table was still very clear on his palm. He got up, the chair making a loud noise as it was dragged across the floorboards.
"I'll sleep in the guest room, " he said, his voice suddenly going back to its scary, calm level.
He left the room without looking back, leaving his meal half, eaten. While he was going upstairs, he got a weird, sickening rush of adrenaline. On the other hand, he was disgusted at the loss of control, but deep down, under the shame, there was a flicker of something else.
He was alive after all. And for the first time in years, the house seemed unbelievably small to him.