The Silent Treatment

by Abbie Greaves

  “I can bring you a chair, if you’d like?” she asks, her Yorkshire accent warm and reassuring. “It can’t be good for you, all that standing.” She is clearly young. She can’t be more than, what, twenty-five? She has the sort of easy charm that Maggie always had, a way of lighting and lightening up a room all at once. It sends me right back to forty years ago, the drizzle and the streetlamps and a drunken rendition of “Good King Wenceslas” providing the soundtrack to our first encounter.

  “Shall I?” she prompts, interrupting my trip down memory lane. “Really, it’s no trouble, I promise.”

  “Thank you. I’d be very grateful.”

  For the best part of twenty-four hours, I have kept it together, but it is at this very act of human kindness that I feel I am ripe to come undone. The nurse returns shortly and even goes to the trouble of folding the seat out for me. I suddenly feel like the guest of honor at the most unpalatable picnic of my life.

  “What’s your name?” I ask, not bothering to try to decipher her name tag in the dimness or run the risk of scrutinizing another woman’s chest at my wife’s bedside.

  “Daisy,” she says. “None too dainty like one, though, I’ll admit.”

  I try to smile. The whole bottom half of my face feels as if it is cracking with the effort.

  “I am sorry, really very sorry to see this,” Daisy says, noticing as the corners of my mouth begin to drop. For a minute, maybe more, we both watch Maggie, her chest rising and falling with regimented efficiency, her lips slightly parted as if in a permanent state of surrender. Everything about this is not her. The discipline, the hush, the fuss of nurses providing the sort of kindness Maggie spent a lifetime expending and eventually being punished for.

  “You can speak to her, you know,” Daisy says. “It’s so quiet here, often people feel scared to speak aloud. But you have to push through that. Let your wife hear your voice.”

  I gulp. I wonder what Daisy would say if she knew. She seems so much wiser than her years, and I’m sure she has seen more than her fair share of suffering in this line of work. Even so, could she understand?

  I think back to the day my voice first failed me. I was so close to confessing what I had done. I’d seen the consequences laid out before me, and the guilt was so pure, so overwhelming, that I knew I had to tell Maggie. The words were on the tip of my tongue, or at least I thought they were. I had braced myself as I tiptoed up the stairs to our bedroom.

  Then I rounded the corner and I saw her in the half-light, struggling to sit up to reach a glass of water on the bedside table, a shadow of who she used to be, and I knew I couldn’t risk hurting her any more than she already had been. She was barely hanging on; I couldn’t bring her more bad news. I couldn’t tell her what I had to, not when it meant she would leave me. Every day when I couldn’t speak, in the silence, I lived with that same guilt, the same burning shame. I was suffocating myself, but somehow anything was better than the thought of telling Maggie what I had done and losing her forever.

  Daisy clears her throat lightly to bring me back in the room. “I’m no doctor, don’t get me wrong, but I can say what I have seen, and sometimes it is a familiar voice that will do it, more than these tubes ever will. The patient hears you. It reminds them of all the good things they have to wake up for. Spurs on the recovery, you know?”

  I don’t know, but I nod regardless. I can see how much she cares about Maggie, even if she is just one of an extensive list of patients. Daisy has large fingers, long and thick, but they move so tenderly as she works to straighten the fabric at Maggie’s neck where it has bunched up under the tubes. It’s the sort of gesture I know Maggie would appreciate.

  “You could tell her your news,” Daisy prompts. “You’ve probably got plenty to say anyway, after the day you’ve had. Or maybe there’s something that’s been on your mind that you want to share?”

  “Well, I’ve certainly got that.” My attempt to sound lighthearted comes out as it really is—sheepish and forced.

  “Pardon? I didn’t catch that. You’re muttering,” Daisy says, taking one final reading from the monitor next to Maggie and flipping her pad shut.

  “Sorry—yes, I do have something I need to tell her. Something important. I don’t know why I didn’t tell her before.”

  The understatement alone is enough to crush me. I press my fist hard against my lips and force myself to look at Maggie square on. How did I never realize just how small and fragile she has become? She has always been tiny—a good foot shorter than me. The first winter we lived together, I couldn’t wrap my head around the sheer volume of jumpers she needed to wear on her minuscule frame just to function around the rental flat. The dubious central heating didn’t help matters, Maggie hopping from one foot to the other like an aerobics instructor while I bashed at the buttons in the boiler cupboard to no avail. I learned early on that she brought her own warmth wherever she went.

  “Now isn’t the time to be hard on yourself. Ease Maggie in. Don’t blurt it all out, mind—you don’t want to scare her away. Definitely not at first. Try to keep it positive. Remind her she’s loved. Tell her about all those times you showed her that.”

  My face must read wild-eyed panic, as Daisy lays a hand on my shoulder, a subtle pressure that flattens the crumples in the cotton of my shirt.

  “Don’t worry about it too much. Just talk to her. Don’t let this time get away.”

  Chapter 2

  I don’t stay long that first day. The moment Daisy is gone, I feel my reserve creep back, despite my best intentions. It has only ever been Maggie who has had some way of cracking through it: my studious awkwardness, the well-meaning remark delivered always that bit too late, my inability to “just gel” with new people. In all our years together, Maggie has never felt as much of a stranger to me as she does here, a little, lined face among the network of taut tubing, reduced to a series of regular beeps and timetabled measurements.

  There is so much I have to say that I have no idea where to begin. I can’t start with the reason why I stopped speaking. Not when Daisy has told me to go easy, to coax Maggie back to me. Talking has never been my strong point. “Not a man of many words,” my sixth-form tutor wrote on my university application by way of a character reference. My own mother used to describe me as a “quiet sort” to friends and relatives; even the traveling podiatrist got a version of that when she came to visit, every fourth Saturday, foot file in hand. It dawns on me now that I am about as much use here as an umbrella in a hurricane. I’m not sure I can do this after all.

  I wait for the little bus that comes direct to the hospital. Pity on wheels. No one on board makes eye contact; it would tip us over the edge—the sufferers and the ones watching the suffering unfold in all its grotesque, undignified detail. What about those who inflicted the suffering in the first place? I doubt I would be welcome. I find a window seat and place my bag next to me.

  At the traffic lights, a couple idling on the pavement nearly miss the green man as they cradle each other’s waist, their eyes intently focused on each other as they delve deeper into their conversation; behind me, a family with two children and a boisterous Labrador pack out a battered station wagon; a group of students ride their bicycles three abreast, unconcerned by the queue of angry, honking cars behind. I have never felt so alone. Wasn’t that what marriage, our marriage, was meant to keep at bay?

  It has been swelteringly hot today, not that I felt it in Maggie’s artificially cooled room. When I get off the bus and stumble the short distance home, I feel as if I am being blasted by a hundred hairdryers, dry and intense, and wonder if anything will ever feel comfortable again. I get the key in the door after a few false starts with my faltering fingers. The last of this late August evening’s sunlight illuminates the hallway, a ribbon of dust dancing and swirling toward the scene of the crime. Hers or mine? I ask myself as I head up the stairs.

  I can’t bring myself to go back to the kitchen, not yet. Without turning on the light, I head straight
to our bedroom. Our. I hardly remember a time before I spoke in the plural. What I would give to have her back, here, on her side. In reality she had all the sides. I never knew how much space such a small person could demand, wriggling like an octopus throughout the night until I was squashed up at the precipice of the mattress edge, just a corner of duvet to my name. God, I never knew I could miss it.

  I trail my fingers along the stack of books that has accumulated on her bedside table—some from charity shops, a slim gift book titled The Wife that I bought as a stocking filler a few years back, one in its plastic library jacket (firmly overdue). After she retired three years ago, she decided she would go and volunteer there, at the library in Summertown that was earmarked for closure. “In solidarity!” she’d said when she told me. I wasn’t sure if she meant with the books or with the overworked professionals who had enough on their plates without the threat of government cuts teetering over their heads. Either way, it was something to distract her until I retired a year later as well. She loved it there—the people, the sanctuary. She gave it up, though, when everything happened. I suppose you can’t help others until you are able to help yourself.

  In recent years, she hasn’t been sleeping so well. She still tries to read but when I lean over, to plant a kiss behind her ear or to stroke the inside of her arm in the way she likes, I can see she’s still on the same page, her eyes fuzzy in the mid-distance. I make the call on when to turn out the lights, knowing full well neither of us will drift off easily. Instead, I draw patterns on the soft skin at the base of her spine, which is exposed by her pajama top. It takes me right back to our first dates together, when I was too scared to tell her I loved her but traced the letters out on her back instead, a coward’s compromise delivered with a trembling hand.

  I kick off my shoes and lie down on top of the duvet. I am so desperate to touch her again, to spell out all the ways I love her. When I drift off, all I see is Maggie cocooned within it, one hand poking out to pull me in.

  At the hospital the next morning, I am welcomed by my first name at the nursing station by a woman I don’t recognize in the slightest. I hope this is not a sign of how long they expect me to be visiting. At first, I don’t see Daisy and feel a rush of panic. She was so calm, so nonjudgmental. I can’t afford to lose her too. I scan the reception space with its bewildering array of staff, assessing their backs, their hair. Eventually I catch sight of her, busy at one of the computer booths in the corner, her back to me and her hips straining at the seams of her scrubs. My heart rate slows just a tad, and I clear my throat, loudly enough to feel like a nuisance. Loudly enough that a pregnant woman waiting five feet away covers her mouth with her scarf.

  “Ah, Professor, good morning,” Daisy says, beaming as she wheels her chair round to face me and levering herself up, palms on thighs. She is even taller than I remembered from yesterday, only three inches or so shorter than me. She has the sort of build Maggie would have affectionately described as “sturdy,” as if she were assessing the stability of a tree in the back garden.

  “Is that what you want to be called, eh? Professor?” she asks as she weaves herself out from behind the counter and leads me down the corridor. Her dark brown hair is pulled back in a ponytail that swings sleekly in time with her step.

  “Well . . . er . . . ,” I begin.

  “Cat got your tongue, eh? Don’t know your own name now?” Daisy smiles with the sort of easy complicity I always wished I could generate with my own family, let alone strangers.

  “Frank,” I say decisively. “Please call me Frank, Daisy.”

  Daisy turns to smile at me, and for a second I feel as if maybe, just for once, I have done some infinitesimally small thing right. Then we reach Maggie’s door, still closed, and I feel the weight of my own frustrated hopefulness crash down around me again. The blinds in her room have been opened, and I am able to take in the space fully. It is sparse, and I suddenly feel conscious of arriving empty-handed.

  “We need to keep it all very clean here,” Daisy says, somehow sensing my embarrassment. “But I kept your chair, Frank, so you two can talk.”

  Daisy moves behind me to adjust the blinds, lowering them slightly so I don’t have to squint.

  “How did it go yesterday?” Daisy asks.

  “Not well,” I admit.

  “It’s hard, Frank. I get that. But our Maggie is going to want to know that you are here.”

  “I’m scared.” The words slip out before I have the chance to think better of them.

  “I know, but trust me, you’ll be more scared if you don’t talk. If you don’t, then you’ll have regrets. And regret is something to be far more scared of.”

  I sense Daisy is about to leave, and I am overwhelmed by my desire to keep her here. She is safe—a reliable conduit to Maggie.

  “Daisy,” I call, as she heads for the door. “What shall I say?”

  Daisy’s face remains unchanged, bar a slight smile that breaks at the corners of her lips. Evidently, I am not the first visitor to need schooling on their bedside manner.

  “That’s up to you, Frank. If you’re struggling, why don’t you tell her your story? You and her, huh? There’s a reason people tell you to start at the beginning. It’s easiest that way. Only this time, you can do it right. Tell her all the things you should have said before.”

  I nod.

  “Not all at once now, remember.”

  With that, Daisy is gone.

  I pull my chair a little closer to Maggie’s side, careful not to knock the cables. I am struck by how much there is to say, how much I should have said, and yet how very little feels appropriate. And how do you start to talk again, when you stopped so long ago?

  “Morning, Maggie.” My voice comes out as a croak. “The things I should have said before, eh? Well, you better get comfortable.”

  In the silence, I remember her laugh, light as a feather and quick to humor me—my bad jokes, the dad jokes.

  I see the cannula strain where I have grasped at her hand, and I quickly place it back down before one of the contraptions signals my disruption and I am unceremoniously hauled out by the staff.

  “I . . . I . . . Can you hear me? Did you hear that, what I just said? No? Oh. Well . . . Oh God, Maggie, I’m terrible at this, aren’t I?”

  For a minute I think of leaving, of making a repeat performance of yesterday’s nonstarter. Then I think of the house, each room achingly empty, a memory of Maggie imprinted on every chair and wall and light switch. What sort of husband would it make me to leave her here? Not a very loving one, that’s for sure. I have had plenty of failings over the years, but not loving Maggie enough has never been one.

  I sit up taller, imagining each vertebra slotting back into its proper formation, and rise out of my half slump.

  “Look, Mags, you are going to have to put up with me being terrible at this because I am here to stay. I will stay as long as it takes for you to wake up. See, I even have a chair.”

  Nothing.

  “You need to know what happened, Mags, why I switched off.”

  I half expect her eyes to open wide at this. Finally, an answer. The answers that she spent six months looking for. The answers that nearly took Maggie from me forever.

  “I can’t let you go without telling you that.”

  It sounds so morbid, out in the open, and I kick myself. This wasn’t what Daisy meant about keeping it positive, quite the opposite.

  “I can’t let you go full stop, Maggie. I can’t be without you. Really, Maggie, I can’t,” I whisper, reaching for her hand. “I’m so sorry. I’m sorrier than you can ever know.

  “Do you remember that was the first thing I ever said to you, Mags? Do you? ‘I’m sorry.’ And do you know, I have spent the last forty-odd years thinking what better lines I could have tried out on you instead?”

  The first time I saw you, all I could make out were your eyes and the very tip of your nose, ruby red like a beacon in the cold. You had a thick woolly scarf pulled u
p over your lips, your hair bunched up under it so that only a few wisps could escape. When you arrived, it was as it ever would be, like a cyclone descending, all flailing limbs and air kisses, a flurry of hugs and exclamations and the sort of warmth everyone in the vicinity could feel, even at three degrees below.

  I hadn’t seen you around before, that much I knew for sure. I’d been in Oxford for five years by that point and I was knee-deep into my PhD; the lab was hardly swarming with women and it wasn’t as if I was dripping in them in my spare time either. No, I definitely would have remembered if I had seen a girl like you before.

  With its cheap lager and large outdoor seating area, the Rose & Crown was a stomping ground for the developmental biology department, if such a thing could be claimed by a group of scientists who didn’t see much daylight, let alone the social evening hours. It was far enough from the Dreaming Spires to dodge the Canon-wielding tourists but close enough to stumble back to halls if anyone did manage to land it lucky at the end of the night. I know it is a cliché to say that I noticed you straightaway, but it would still be true, even if your elbow hadn’t half caught Piotr’s glass as you barreled past and into the arms of your equally excitable friends.

  That close to Christmas, there were plenty of new faces in our local, some of them home in time to spend the week with family. Our group of academic exiles was either too far from home to enjoy the festive season in the comfort of our own front rooms or, as in my case, would rather prolong the inevitable awkwardness of returning to our parents at the age of twenty-six and without a bride in tow. So much for the social upheaval of the seventies: the liberal ideals of the decade had scarcely reached the Home Counties, let alone brushed the doorstep of my parents’ three-bed terrace in Guildford.

  It was a relief to be free, really, as much as my family meant well. I loved them, and I knew they loved me; it was just that everything at home felt so very small. We didn’t really discuss things. Not the important stuff, the big questions that kept me awake at night. No, it was polite, and it was comfortable. There was an unspoken assumption that I would follow in Dad’s footsteps, take over the garage and shore up the business. As they saw it, science was all very well, but it was best left at the school gates in favor of a mortgageable career. My choices took some getting used to, but I knew they were proud, in their own way at least.