by Alison Booth
I was becoming more and more anxious: not about what lay ahead but that Jeff might arrive home before I was ready to leave. After collecting some towels and sheets and an armful of Charlie’s clothes, I piled these into the second case. Charlie was still asleep when I carried the bags downstairs to the front door. In Jeff’s study I found some notepaper and began to write with a hand that shook so much the writing was illegible. I crumpled up the sheet and began to write on another piece of paper in block capitals.
JEFF,
I CAN NO LONGER STAY WITH YOU.
AFTER SEEING YOU TONIGHT I KNEW IT WAS OVER. I HAVE TAKEN CHARLIE SOMEWHERE SAFE AND WILL CALL YOU IN A FEW DAYS’ TIME.
SALLY
I put the note on the hallstand where Jeff couldn’t fail to see it as soon as he opened the front door. Then I picked up the phone and punched in my parents’ number. The answerphone clicked on. I left a message saying that Charlie and I were fine but that we were moving into a hotel for a few nights. My voice cracked and broke altogether, and it was a few seconds before I was able to clear my throat. ‘I’ll phone you tomorrow morning,’ I said before the machine clicked off.
At this moment I heard a car pull up in the crescent. My heart missed a beat. What if Jeff had come home earlier than he usually did on the nights he was supposed to be working late? I shifted the suitcases into the living room, behind the door. I hadn’t drawn the curtains yet, although it was already dark. If Jeff saw that I was planning to leave I had a pretty good idea of how he’d react. But peering around the window frame, I saw only Jim Hunter from two doors down, alighting from his car with a carrier bag from the Thai takeaway on Upper Street.
The clock on our mantelpiece showed that it was already gone nine, later than I’d thought. From the kitchen I collected a large shopping bag. Next I called for a taxi before running upstairs to Charlie’s room. When I heard a noise from below, I stopped on the landing. Was that the front door clicking open? I stood still. Not a sound until I heard the staircase squeak. Was Jeff home? For a few more seconds I stayed where I was, listening. All I could hear now was the blood thumping in my ears and distant traffic from the high street. That creaking I’d heard must have been the staircase protesting after I’d raced up from the kitchen. But I had to get a move on. We had to be out of here before Jeff returned.
Charlie was asleep, her thumb in her mouth and an arm around her favourite toy, Edward Bear. After sweeping some of her other soft toys and a few books from the shelves into the shopping bag, I removed the bear from Charlie’s grasp and put it on top of the books. When I picked up Charlie, she awoke enough to put her arms around my neck. She was heavy and it was a struggle to carry her downstairs, and the bag of toys knocked against my leg at every step. I opened the front door and I saw a taxi parked in front of our house. Heart pounding in my throat, I stopped still. I’d left it too late. Jeff was home and he’d be furious at what I was about to do.
But it wasn’t Jeff. The taxi contained only the driver. He saw me and climbed out. As he carried the suitcases from the hall to the cab, I took one last look around. The note was where I’d left it on the hallstand, fully visible. I took a deep breath: this was it, the moment I’d been thinking about for years. The detached but triumphant expression on Jeff’s face that I’d seen a couple of hours before returned to me. It made me feel sick but it sharpened my resolve. I didn’t ever want to see this house again. Still holding Charlie, I slammed the door shut behind us.
‘Where are we going, Mummy?’
‘For a ride in the taxi.’
‘I’ve dropped Edward.’
‘It’s OK, I’ve got him in the bag.’ I put her on the seat and fastened the belt.
‘Where are my other toys?’
‘They’re here, darling, with Edward. And your favourite books are here too.’ The driver started the engine and the cab rolled forward.
‘Are we going to Grandma and Grandpa’s?’
‘Not tonight. We’re going to stay in a hotel. We’re going to have a nice little holiday.’
‘Why does your voice sound so funny?’
‘Does it? I must have got a bit of dust caught in my throat.’
‘I hope you’re not getting a cold.’
‘So do I, Charlie, so do I.’ But catching a cold was the least of my worries.
Chapter 15
NOW
The clock’s luminous dial shows five-forty five and it’s Tuesday morning again. I turn on the radio and restlessly roll around the bed, trying to get comfortable; I feel as if my life is being measured out in Tuesday mornings and meetings with Helen. When the duvet slides off the bed, I give up the hard work of trying to sleep and get up. The sound of the radio follows me as I drift down the stairs. ‘Genetic engineering is a hit and miss procedure,’ a voice calmly explains. ‘We have…’
By half-past six I am sitting at the computer in my study. As I log on, the date flashes up on the screen: 9 October.
Today is the anniversary of my first meeting with Jeff.
Those early years before we married were the happy times. I haven’t thought of them for nearly a decade and yet they sustained me for years.
After working for half an hour, I take the surprised Charlie a cup of coffee before dashing out of the house, barely in time to catch the 7.30 bus to South End Green. I am determined; I am ready to tell Helen about my marriage.
She is wearing her usual long black skirt and a black V-necked sweater that is unmistakably cashmere. Today there are white daisies in the vase on her coffee table. The room smells faintly of their fragrance. I place on the table the envelope I collected last week. It now contains my cheque; I have crossed out my name and scrawled Helen’s below it. She gracefully acknowledges the envelope and waves me to the sofa.
I waste no time inspecting my nails or gazing around the room, but at once get on with what I’ve decided to tell her. I talk continuously, my words like a water-release from an overfilled dam: faster and faster the sentences spill out, until at last I’ve finished.
I’m unaware of the tears on my face until I see Helen towering over me, with a box of tissues in her hand.
I take a handful of tissues. I wipe my eyes and blow my nose.
And then the floodgates are closed.
There is silence. Feeling strangely detached, I look through the window at the sky. The sun has come out; the first time I’ve seen it for several weeks. But the patch of blue sky surrounding it is small, and dark clouds are gathering at its edges. A shaft of sunlight streams through the window, fine motes of dust swirling in the ray of light. Even Helen has dust in her beautiful white Hampstead room, with its neat bookshelves and carefully positioned vase of white daisies.
I lift up my hand, the one that once bore Jeff’s ring. My vision blurs as I hold it up to the light. The human hand has twenty-seven bones, fourteen of which are the phalanges of the fingers. I turn the hand, a miracle of mobility. At last I’ve laid out in front of Helen the bare bones of my unhappy marriage, the bits that have lasted while the flesh of the happy times has almost completely rotted away.
Only now do I notice that the box of tissues has appeared somehow on the sofa next to me. I blow my nose again and dry my eyes. Mascara comes off onto the tissue. When it falls onto the floor I’m unable to move to retrieve it. Helen clears her throat. I wait for the words that will follow. She says, ‘You’ve had a terrible time, Sally.’
Again there is silence. I listen to the clock and its relentless tick-tick-tick, the countdown to the end of my session.
Helen coughs, before saying, ‘Did you think you deserved it?’
My heart becomes a thumping thing in my throat. I swallow and take a deep breath.
But I don’t know how to respond.
‘Perhaps you thought you deserved to be punched.’ Although Helen’s tone is gentle, she articulates each word clearly, as if she thinks I’ve lapsed into deafness.
Unwillingly I focus my thoughts. Helen deserves a response and there’s n
ot much time left. ‘No,’ I say, quite sure of this.
‘Why do you think you stayed with him?’
‘I loved him.’ Yet I know this is not the whole truth.
‘Even though he hit you repeatedly?’
‘But I loved him! Can’t you understand that?’ I’m speaking rather too loudly. At this moment I feel a rush of anger and I channel it at Helen; it’s her fault that I’m having to defend myself. ‘I loved him,’ I repeat, slowly and – in spite of my anger – calmly, to show Helen I am in control of myself. ‘He was beautiful and charming when we met.’
‘I cannot help wondering how often he hit you.’
‘Maybe a dozen times in those first six years.’
‘A dozen times.’ Helen repeats this slowly, giving each word emphasis. ‘That’s a lot of times, Sally.’
‘Everything is relative,’ I say. But I don’t intend to be flippant.
I look at the golden patch of sunlight on Helen’s white wall. I can hear children playing in the street outside. Although their voices are clear, I can’t make out what they are saying.
‘I know you don’t condone violence against women.’ Helen’s voice is soft but the words are shards of glass. ‘But did it never occur to you that he might physically abuse Charlie as well?’
‘Never. That was another reason I stayed; I wanted Charlie to have a proper live-in father.’
‘Even a violent one,’ Helen murmurs so quietly that I can barely catch her words. When they sink in, I’m enraged by their implication.
‘I could do nothing. I could do nothing!’ I am shouting at her now, and hot tears are filling my eyes.
There is a pause before Helen continues. ‘Perhaps it was hard for you accept any failure.’ Her voice is as calm as if we are talking of the weather. ‘Academics are often perfectionists.’
I feel as if she has punched me and lie very still. After a few seconds I start inhaling deeply, calming myself with each daisy-scented intake. In and out, in and out, my chest rises and falls with the mechanical action of breathing.
It is possible that Helen has a point. A perfectionist; I am certainly that.
‘Jeff never hit Charlie,’ I say, wiping my eyes with a sodden tissue. ‘Never, ever, did he do that.’
‘He didn’t hit you to begin with, Sally.’
‘Are you suggesting I should have left him, or that I should have fought him? That it was somehow my fault that I allowed him to continue?’
Helen doesn’t reply. The patch of sunlight is moving along the wall, and there is a small fly buzzing outside the top sash of the window. My hour is nearly over. I paraphrase to myself the lines from a poem by John Donne that I haven’t thought of for years: I am two fools, I know, for marrying and for staying so.
But in fact I’m three fools for paying to talk to Helen about this. ‘So you think I’m a fool because I married Jeff, and I’m a fool because I stayed married to him.’ I can’t keep the bitterness out of my voice.
I hear her crossing her legs and the sound of her pencil on the pad she keeps by her. She is making a note of my cynicism.
‘What have you got to say about that?’ We both know my question is rhetorical.
‘I’m afraid we’ll have to stop there,’ she says. ‘Till next Tuesday, Sally.’
She ushers me out of the room, and lightly touches my shoulder as I pass. It’s the first time she’s ever done this.
I stumble down the stairs, blowing my nose on a dry tissue I find in my pocket. Before opening the front door, I dig my dark glasses out of my bag and put them on.
The sky is now grey, except for one patch of blue in which the sun is corralled. Slowly I walk along the pavement until I am out of sight of Helen’s house, and there I sit on someone’s brick fence.
It is over. My marriage is over. It’s been over for more than ten years.
When I stand up, I step on something soft. My tread releases the stench of dog turd. I lift my foot to examine the sole of my shoe; a sticky yellow mess is caught in the fine corrugations. Too many dogs in London shitting everywhere. I scrape the mess off on a pile of dead leaves caught up against a low brick wall. The smell is overpowering and I feel sickened; sickened by the excrement, sickened at the thought of Jeff.
Chapter 16
THEN
On the day my mother phoned to let me know that Celia had died, she didn’t bother with any introductory remarks, not even to say hello. In a matter-of-fact voice, she said that Celia had passed away the previous night, peacefully in her sleep.
I sat down cross-legged on the polished floor in the living room of Jeff’s and my house in Islington. Although it was a relief to know that Celia wouldn’t have a painfully drawn out end, her death still seemed shocking. No more chats with her. No more thinking of snippets to tell her as I drove out to Buckinghamshire. Her death meant the end of an era as well as a reminder of my own mortality. I thought of that express train rushing us all to eternity. The one that we could never get off.
My mother began to tell me of Celia’s wishes, that she wanted her ashes to be scattered in the sea off St Mawes on the south coast of Cornwall, where Celia’s husband had been harbour master. Thirty years before, his ashes had been strewn outside the harbour and Celia wanted to join him. My mother spoke about the ashes with heavy irony, as if she were discussing the cricket series with Australia, and she laughed. But I knew she was upset; she had adored Celia.
Although she was calm at first, soon the tears came. When Charlie and I turned up at my parents’ place later that day, my mother’s eyes were red-rimmed and swollen. Charlie hugged my mother and earnestly explained to her that I was upset too, even though I hadn’t been crying. That made my mother laugh; Charlie has always been able to do that.
Two weeks after Celia’s death was the earliest time that we were all able to get together in Cornwall to cast her ashes to the sea. It was an imaginative gesture, I thought, and a lovely way to celebrate her life.
That day marked a turning point for me and not only because I’d loved Celia. Towards noon we all climbed on board the harbour master’s boat, a small launch that was still referred to as a cutter although it relied on a diesel motor rather than wind power. Thirty years of movements of the tides, and the silt and rubbish lining the bottom of the harbour, made it highly unlikely that Celia would be reunited with her husband. His ashes were probably thousands of miles away by now. But the ceremony proceeded, in a way that seemed slightly surreal.
We were dressed in a sober manner in dark suits, looking incongruous in the setting. My father gingerly held a small clear plastic bag, through which the earthly remains of Celia were visible. She may not have wished to be so exposed to the general view. I’d expected that something more substantial would contain the ashes: a small wooden cask perhaps, or a ceramic urn.
It was a beautiful day, the sky a pale clear blue although the water was choppy. As we puttered out from the shelter of St Mawes harbour and into the main part of the river, the rocking of the boat increased. The harbour master tried to hold it stationary in the face of the heavy swell. Jeff lifted his face up to the sun: hedonistically he basked in it, almost as if he were on a pleasure cruise. I sat next to my father, who’d been discussing with the harbour master the whiteness of the ashes in the plastic bag. They looked like small marble chips, and I wondered if they had been bleached or otherwise treated between their immersion in fire and their imminent immersion in water. So little remained. It was hard to believe that the contents of that little bag were all that was left of Celia.
My father cleared his throat. He said a few words, but they were lifted and tossed towards the shore by the breeze, so that we had only a vague idea of what he was saying. Celia and her husband, it appeared, would be reunited both beneath the seas and in heaven. His speech finished, my father wrestled with the plastic bag. Its top had been heat-sealed. No one had thought to bring scissors. The harbour master found a ballpoint pen in the inside pocket of his jacket, and handed it to my f
ather, who used it to puncture the plastic. After widening the hole with his large awkward fingers, he pushed his hand further into the bag, and ran the ashes through his fingers. Quickly he withdrew his hand and wiped it surreptitiously on his trouser leg. An instant later, he leaned over the side of the boat to launch his cargo to eternity. Clutching at the gunwale with one hand, he flicked the bottom of the plastic bag several times with the other. The flapping back of his jacket emphasised the precariousness of the operation. The white ashes poured out and were blown beyond the range of the boat.
The flakes floated momentarily on the surface of the water, before they were caught up in the momentum of the waves and swirled towards our craft. The harbour master flicked the engine into reverse. The boat lurched away from its mortuary position and turned towards the harbour at St Mawes. I looked back at the remains of Celia; the ashes were sinking and, a minute later, were gone. Celia had now departed and all that remained of her were our memories.
At that moment I came to a decision. For a while I’d been sitting on an offer of a PhD studentship at University College. Only Celia knew about it. The words she’d spoken to me, on the last day I’d seen her only a month before, returned to me so clearly she might have been right next to me: ‘Take it. Don’t always do what other people expect of you. Especially Jeff.’
I hadn’t told anyone else about it, not even Jeff. I’d wanted to make up my own mind first, without being influenced by anyone. What else had she said to me that last time we spoke? Something about needing to protect myself, as well as others.
Of course I would accept the offer. I had to change my life. I didn’t want to disappear under the waves – in twenty, thirty, fifty years’ time – having made nothing of myself. So I told my family that day, over lunch, that I was going take up the studentship.
