PART 1 — ROW THIRTY-FOUR
Twenty-five years. Five children.
I did the lunches and the fevers and the school plays and the running of a house on whatever was in the account that week, and Gideon built a career, and Gideon liked the word breadwinner and used it at other people’s dinner tables.
He very rarely mentioned what made sixty-hour weeks possible.
So when he came home in the March with an envelope and said we were going to the islands for the anniversary, I thought, all right. He has finally noticed.
At the desk at Ardmore I had the two passports and he had the booking on his phone.
The girl printed the passes and handed them across and I looked at mine.
Row thirty-four.
I looked at his.
“You booked yourself first class?”
“My back can’t do six hours in those seats.”
“Then why not two?”
And my husband took the pass out of my hand — took it, turned it over, checked it, and held on to it — and said it to a queue of about twenty-five people:
“Give me that. You haven’t earned in twenty-five years. Be grateful.”
The woman behind us in the queue looked at the floor.
The girl at the desk looked at her screen and did not lift her head, and I have thought about her since, because she was about nineteen and it was not her job to say anything and I could see she wanted to.
Nobody said one word.
And I said, “Right,” and took the pass back off him, and went and found gate eleven.
For four hours I sat in row thirty-four between a man doing a crossword and a woman who slept with her mouth open, and my husband drank champagne on the other side of a curtain, and it was our twenty-fifth wedding anniversary.
Then the intercom went.
“Ladies and gentlemen, this is the captain. Could Mrs. Marit Halloway please remain in her seat until a member of cabin crew reaches you. We’d like to bring you forward. Mrs. Halloway, economy cabin.”
I put my hand up like a child in a classroom.
Every single head in four rows turned round.
A stewardess was at my row inside about ten seconds.
“Mrs. Halloway? Would you come with me.”
“Is something wrong?”
“You’ll see in a minute.”
I followed her up that aisle with my heart going, and when we came through the curtain Gideon came out of his seat like it had gone live underneath him.
“Marit.” Low and tight. “What’s going on. Where are they taking you.”
“I don’t know.”
He got hold of my arm above the elbow.
“I forbid you to go up there. Do you hear me. I forbid it.”
And the stewardess put herself between us without hurrying at all.
“Sir. Please go back to your seat.”
“I’m her husband.”
“And she’s been asked to come forward. Sit down, please.”
He did not sit down. He came after us as far as she would let him.
At the front galley the flight deck door opened and the captain came out.
Forty-something. Four bars. And I looked at that man’s face and I could not get any air at all.
And then I saw what was on the galley counter next to him.
My hand went over my mouth.
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