April 5th, 2024. Bristol drizzle pocking against the windowpanes as I write this. Margaret snapped her china teacup down with more force than necessary, china clinking like warning bells. “Susan and Anthony arrive Thursday. My parents Friday. Lena and the twins come Saturday. What are we gonna show them, I ask you?”
I looked up from my newspaper, brow furrowed. Our kitchen still smelled of Earl Grey and cinnamon candles we lit on Sundays. “Darling, the flat’s perfectly fine—”
“What’s fine? Look around!” She whirled like a woman possessed, her ballet flats slapping against lino that had seen better days. “These peeling walls! The frayed doormat! That ancient fridge? You haven’t seen it until you’ve seen Lena’s toddlers face-plant into it!”
The fridge in question had survived three decades of single cream and boxed crumpets. I folded my paper. “They’re our family, not bloody Central St Martin’s students. Our home, our rules.”
She sank across from me, knuckles white where they gripped the table. “You don’t see it, do you?” Her voice cracked. “Susan’s got that corner office, that new Range Rover, that cottage in the Cotswolds. And us? Thirty years married and still living like students in a student flat!”
My chest tightened. We’d built this life together—me a journeyman at the steelworks, her a teacher’s aide at the local primary. Pensions, savings, weekly trips to the market. Yet here we were, playing catch-up to Susan.
“Love,” I said gently, “we’re not broke. We’re content. What good is pretense?”
“Pretense?!” Her eyes blazed. “Do you think my mother didn’t say last week ‘I hope you’ve at least got clean sheets this time’? Clean sheets! After a decade of her nagging, you’d think I’d have decent bed linen by now!”
I lowered my gaze. In-laws had never warmed to me, thinking Margaret deserved someone with a proper lineage. Yet she’d always been my shield. Now my shield was shaking.
“Then what do you suggest?” I asked.
Her face lit up, mischief blooming in her cheeks. “Our savings are there. Let’s redecorate. New wallpaper, fresh lino. A shiny new fridge, a proper fridge, not that ancient casserole box!”
I swallowed thickly. The countryside cottage we’d been saving for? Buried deeper with each new roll of wallpaper. We spent the day tearing through hypermarkets. Margaret, who once would’ve brought me a lollipop for choosing the correct lino color, now demanded the poshest of prints—damask patterns with gold edging.
“Can’t we do a mix?” I tried, but she was swaying like a woman in a department store dream.
The till receipt said £3,498.50. My fingers trembled as I signed the card. That was two years of cottage savings.
The next forty-eight hours became a blur of hammering and cleaning. Margaret moved furniture around like a game of chess, shifting picture frames three inches at a time. “Victor,” she declared one evening, “maybe a new sofa? The Kensington one? The one that stares at you with disapproval?”
I stared at our well-loved fern-green sofa. It had borne us through pregnancy, fevers, countless crossword evenings. She used to call the armrest dents “our years in hibernation.” Now they were marks of a life we thought we’d outgrown.
Susan arrived first, her designer coat trailing behind her like a standard of affluence. “Darling, you’ve redecorated!” she exclaimed. “What a stylish touch!”
Margaret beamed at my side, though her smile didn’t reach her ears. At dinner, Susan gossiped about her recent Bali retreat and her husband’s latest venture: “We just gutted our drawing room. Of course it cost an eye, but what’s family without investment?”
Later, I found Margaret crying in the garden shed. “Did you see her? She implied we could’ve gone further. As if we’re not already over here trying to keep up!”
I held her, but she thrashed like a trapped bird. “You don’t get it. They’ll tell their mates. Susan will say we’re still ‘the simple ones’. And mother—” she choked on a laugh, “—she’ll never stop thinking I married beneath me.”
Her parents arrived the following day, her father’s monocle gliding over the new lino as if measuring its worth. Her mother poked at the fridge. “You’ve upgraded! Did you know Susan’s has an ice cream compartment separate from the vegetables?”
I sat on the balcony with a bitter coffee, watching kids chasing pigeons in the street. Our flat, once a sanctuary, had become a stage. The walls no longer whispered our stories, they echoed with comparisons we hadn’t even asked for.
On Saturday, Lena brought the twins. The children leapt onto the sofa, causing Margaret to gasp. “Off! The fabric—!”
“Relax, Margaret,” Susan chirped. “It’s just kids playing, not a bloody tea party with the Queen.”
By the time Lena’s son spilled elderberry cordial on the new damask tablecloth, Margaret was positively white-lipped. I had to intervene. “Let it go,” I whispered. “It’s a family. They’re just…
“Chaos,” she hissed back.
That night, we sat alone in the darkness. “They said it was a success,” Margaret murmured. “No one said we were below par.”
I looked at her—this woman who once wore mismatched socks with pride, who shouted at the telly during coronation matches. Now she locked herself in the bathroom for hours, polishing toothbrushes.
“Do you remember,” I said slowly, “when we first got this sofa?”
She didn’t answer. Her hands trembled as she folded a damask napkin.
I approached, cupping her face. “Do you remember what you said when we brought it home? You lay there, grinning at the ceiling. ‘This is ours now, Victor. All our future, right here in this corner.'”
A tear splashed against my thumb. “It’s just… Susan. She curates her life like a gallery. I don’t want to curate. I want… to live.”
We didn’t speak much the next day until it was clear the guests had gone. She hoovered the floors like it would unearth something telling. I watched the last of our cottage savings vanish into loan sharks.
As I poured my tea, I thought of Aunt Susan’s words at the shops: “You’re not mad at the fridge. You’re mad at the world for not being Susan’s world.” And perhaps Margaret was right. Susan’s sister had her designer dresses, her ice cream fridges. And we had… us.
In the quiet, Margaret sat on the infamous sofa. “Can we… take off the new covers?”
I smiled. “Would you like that?”
She nodded, her fingers brushing the frayed edge of an armrest. “Let the twins come over. Let Susan come. If she judges, so what? She’ll never know about our Tuesday nights in, or how we recite Shakespeare for laughs. She’ll never know about the sofa that’s held our life.”
We sat in the dark, listening to the city breathe. Some things, I decided, are meant only for the ones who make them. Not for Susan’s monocle. Not for comparison. Just for being.