Read Online Every Vow You Break by Julia Crouch - Free Book Online Page A

the free childcare. But he hated it.
    ‘It’s just that the right job hasn’t come along yet,’ she would say, trying to cheer him up. ‘It will, soon.’ But it didn’t, or it didn’t very often. And if it did, it would be Equity minimum wage for some small part in a tiny regional theatre hundreds of miles away. He got these jobs through old friends putting in a good word for him. Not once after Bella and Olly were born did he find employment by stunning a director with a blinding audition.
    Lara dutifully dragged the twins up and down the country so some wardrobe assistant could mind them for a tenner while she watched her husband perform. She remembered the moment – during an Agatha Christie as it happened, in a theatre somewhere up North – that the penny dropped for her. It had always been a given that acting was the only thing Marcus knew how to do. In the long, penniless stretches between jobs he refused to do anything else to earn money. While he never exactly said it was beneath him, he maintained it would be a diversion from the main project. He had to be ready to act, he said.
    But that day, sitting in the dark of the auditorium watching him mark his way through the play, Lara realised his main project was missing something. His neck and shoulders had tightened up; his voice was slightly strangled. What had once looked as natural as breathing for him now appeared false and strained. He was committing that most awful of actorly sins: he was being unbelievable.
    The lacklustre production – a stilted postmodern rendering that failed to be sufficiently ironic – didn’t help; but, the truth was, Marcus stank.
    Of course, as she went backstage afterwards she couldn’t tell him. No one would tell him, she thought as she kissed him and said how marvellous he was. The work would just trickle away slowly as the same realisation struck the people he relied on for employment. Back then, when the children were tiny, she hated herself for disrespecting him. She had made her choices and she worked hard at keeping to them. Knowing he was a bad actor was very difficult for her.
    She sighed at the memory and studied the two suitcases side by side on the creaky bed. Her own clothes were rolled into cigar shapes as her house-perfect mother had taught her to do when they went on their package holidays to Corfu or Majorca. ‘You get more in,’ she had said. ‘And the creasing is minimal.’ This habit her mother had of talking like a walking advertisement had always irritated Lara. It was one of the many things she now checked in herself – little genetic or habitual tics that parents, willing or not, hand down to fuck you up.
    The random scramble of mostly chinos, baggy shorts and T-shirts in Marcus’s case showed he was not what you would call a natty dresser, and he didn’t exactly take care of his clothes.
    It was this chaotic side of Marcus that finally got in the way of her working at home. He didn’t respect her time or her space, interrupting her to ask her where the toilet paper was, filling the house with fellow unemployed actors who would sit around all day, drinking endless cups of tea – graduating in the afternoon to wine – and bitching in well-modulated tones about this director or that agent.
    Lara sat at her desk in the corner of the living room, trying to concentrate on her Quark layouts. Her job was to bring order and form to the bare text she received from clients, and the noise and desperation around her made her wince.
    She thought about renting an office, but it seemed like such an enormous leap. At twenty-four she had been too young, too green. She hadn’t had a head for business – for example, her prices were far too low – and besides, she was too tied up at home to take any big risks.
    So when Lara heard about the council job, she jumped at it. The pay, while not riches, covered the bills, and the hours were perfect: nine thirty until three, five days a week. She could leave the