Instinctively I pat my tufts. They are very soft and comforting. I shake my head.
‘You know hair can fall out with shock.’
‘So they say …’
She leaves a meaningful pause. And so do I. I look out of the window. I feel so unshockable now; you have to be so certain of something to be shocked. I wonder what was I so certain about.
‘Take me back,’ she says, crossing her legs, ‘to that morning when Karl first told you he was unhappy.’
I admire that businesslike streak in a woman: no apologies. She’s a survivor. But I can’t help feeling a little hurt again; I thought we had established an intimacy.
‘Did you see my mother?’ I ask.
She ignores me. ‘And for clarification’s sake, when did this happen?’ she asks. I sigh. I try and remember.
‘It was the end of April sometime,’ I say. It must have been a Sunday morning because the papers were sprawled over our bed, which means Karl had already been out, but he’d had a bath, made some coffee and brought it up. He was naked, a towel wrapped around his waist, when he dropped the bombshell of his unhappiness as nonchalantly as he did the sugar lump into my mug.
You’re unhappy? I’d said to him. I was truly surprised, because it’s the sort of thing you hope you’d notice in a spouse. It seemed to me that if Karl was unhappy, he’d done a pretty good job of covering it up. Yes, he said. I’ve been unhappy for years. But he didn’t sound unhappy, or angry or sad. In fact he was calm, almost perky. But on he went: I feel like I’ve lost myself, he said.
I look out of the window at the dark low blanket of cloud. It’s suffocating.
You silly idiot, Karl: we’ve all lost ourselves is what I was thinking, but I didn’t say it. After you become a parent, that’s just what happens, isn’t it? You have to shed the skin of your old self, your old ways. You have to abandon that self. It’s just called growing up.
But again and again I’ve asked myself how on earth I did not see his unhappiness. Sometimes I think it’s because it wasn’t there. He made it up and it has now become part of the narrative I tell myself to make sense of things. What I cannot understand is how I got from that conversation on the bed with Karl to this conversation in this place with Dr R. I look back at her. She’s waiting for me to continue.
‘“You’re not happy either,” he said. Of course I wasn’t happy. Who is, Dr R? But we keep the peace, don’t we? We don’t say it. We struggle on with the hope that one day we might wake up and be happy. I had got so used to my own unhappiness, I had accepted it. I was doing what I could to tolerate it: I was taking my pills, I was trying to organize help for my parents, I loved my children, I opened a nice bottle of wine in the evenings, Ness and I went on long walks in the park, I looked for respite where I could. And look at me! There I was, sitting in my giant comfortable bed in my beautiful house, with two healthy children downstairs – what right did I have to be unhappy?
‘“You’re wrong,” I said to him, “I am happy.” I was in denial. I watched him as he got up to shut the bedroom door, running a hand through his messy thick hair. His naked body in all its slackening middle-aged glory was as familiar to me as my own – more so; I could see the back of his, knew every angle. He put on his shabby blue dressing gown and sat down at the end of the bed facing me, his balls resting snugly on the duvet like one of those peculiar hairless cats.
‘“We’re just like everyone else, Karl,” I said. “Well, I don’t want to be like everyone else,” he said, reaching out to take my hand in his, squeezing it. I felt my heart contract with alarm; I had no idea where this was going. He was looking pained, anxious, as if this wasn’t easy for him to say, but he’d clearly been thinking about it for some time. This was prepared, this little speech. “You and I, I feel like we’re not living any more, we’re just existing …” He paused to let me take this in. “Don’t you miss … passion in your life?”
‘Well, I did miss passion, Dr Robinson. I did indeed. But I was willing to sacrifice it for security. Just like you do, just like most of us do. But I thought I understood these worrisome words, what he was trying to tell me was that we had once been free spirits. And somehow we had caged ourselves. “You’re an artist, Con!” he said.’
I peter out – it was almost beautiful, what he was trying to say. I glance out of the window at the cold grey day, at my warrior leaf. All the others have gone now, all of them except for my stubborn friend and some hoodlums around the trunk. A few drops of rain tap against the windowpane. I look down at my hands; they look like my mother’s, the veins protruding, a freckle on my knuckle that hadn’t been there before. Why am I here? I cannot fathom quite what happened.
‘I wonder what it is that makes us so restless as a species,’ Dr Robinson says. Her voice sounds different, as if she is talking to a human being, a close friend even, rather than a patient. I respond to it, I lean into it – it’s like she’s proffering a warm hand, pulling me up from the abyss. ‘What makes us crave transcendence?’ she continues. She understands what Karl was trying to say.
She too is looking out at my tree and it’s hard to tell if she’s speaking to me, the tree, or to no one. But then she turns to me and we lock eyes. It is the connection I have been craving since she came into the room.
‘I presume it’s just part of being human,’ I say, and I know then that I will tell her everything.
‘“Why don’t we make love any more?” he asked me.’
He’d had no resentment in his voice. I’d replied, too quickly. We do. It was a feeble response – we both knew it, but it just sounded too impossibly sad to agree with him, to admit it; one of us had to protect our relationship with falsehoods. But inside I was marvelling at him, his bravery at venturing into such dangerous territory. I don’t know, I said, because I too wanted to open the cage door.
‘Then I heard myself ask him one of those questions that can never be unasked: “Are you having an affair?” I was no fool, Dr Robinson. You see, Karl had been away a lot. He’d been on several trips abroad and had been working for a company up in Edinburgh on and off for a year, and I had had my suspicions that something was going on up there. I’d seen a woman’s name – Janine – come up several times on his phone and each time he’d angled the screen away from me and didn’t answer the call. Then a minute or so later I would see him secretively sending a text. But I said nothing; if it didn’t affect us here at home, I preferred not to know these things.’
‘How did he respond?’ she asks.
‘He looked affronted. “No, I’m not having an affair,” he said, eyeball to eyeball. “But you fancy other people?” I asked.’
I’d thought he was going to deny it. He shifted on the bed.
‘It would hardly have been surprising – we’d been together for fifteen-odd years, of course he was going to fancy other people. I said as much to him.’
I remembered that Karl had let out this long breath that he appeared to have been holding for quite some time. Fifteen-odd years, perhaps. His shoulders slumped with the relief.
‘What did he say?’ she asks, she’s leaning forward on the edge of her seat.
‘He said, “Yes, I do”. And I was grateful for his honesty. I smiled “That’s OK,” I said. And he leant forward and clutched both my hands in his. “My God! You’re amazing, I really love you, you know that.” And I did know that. It was what he said next that really took me by surprise. “Connie, I know you’ve always held a torch for Jonathan Hapgood.”’
I’m still stunned when I think of the nerve he had; at the time it seemed so left-field. It was a subject we’d always tiptoed around, never broached. But now Karl was telling me that he had always known there was some small part of me that he would never possess. And I suppose he was right. In the garden of our marriage, was there a body buried? I mean, we’d sown a lawn over it, grown flowers, put up a slide and hung washing on the line, but was there a body down there? In the garden of most marriages, aren’t there bodies? Isn’t that w
hat fertilizes the soil – the past? I remembered how Karl had once found an email exchange between Johnny and myself; it wasn’t explicit, but there was a tone to it which had been intimate – old lovers who, yes, still held torches and swung them about every now and then in cyberspace. But that was all.
‘Had you talked about Jonathan Hapgood?’ she asks.
‘Barely. Wait for it, because then he said, “I think you should get in touch with him. Why don’t you meet up with him and see whether those feelings are still there?”’
Dr Robinson crosses those strong legs of hers and leans forward, frowning, her chin cupped in her hand.
‘I was astonished. “Hang on, Karl,” I said, “this is dangerous. What exactly are you saying? Are we talking about having an open relationship?” He shrugged. “I suppose we are,” he said. We stared at each other. There we were, perched on the bed sipping coffee, talking about having sex with other people like it was the most ordinary thing in the world.’
It was absurd. My God, even as we were having the conversation I could hear Ness’s reactions in my head when I told her, how she would cover her mouth and yelp. What a peculiar concept: permission from your spouse to have sex with someone else. I knew other people did it, you hear of it all the time, but no one we knew, not in our lovely little community. It would be a little bit ‘out there’. But Karl understood me; I was an artist. Artists aren’t doctors, teachers, accountants, lawyers, plumbers or therapists. We don’t have routines. We don’t sit on packed trains. We don’t have regular salaries or know when bank holidays are. We confuse the paper-pushers; we slip through bureaucracy without ticking their boxes. We spoil their systems. Our signatures are never asked for on passport applications because we aren’t credible. There’s nothing respectable about us. We aren’t important. We are part of the brigade swimming upstream, taking risks, getting humiliated or riding high so that others have culture in their lives, books to read, paintings to hang, evenings with box sets. And to create we have to live.
‘“Don’t you want to feel alive again?” he said. Oh, how I yearned for it, Dr R. “Yes, Karl, I do.”’
‘So there I was, free to contact Johnny if I so chose. In actual fact, I didn’t even know if he was with anyone since our last contact, whether he was remarried with children by now. Yet knowing that I could make love to someone else, anyone else, that I could go out and explore the world again, was like opening all the windows in a stuffy house and letting in a summer breeze. I felt elated.
‘“But home is sacred, right?” I said to him. “What happens away stays away. Nothing must affect the kids.” He was standing up now and I was looking at the back of him as he pulled up the sash window and let the fresh air in.’
For a while afterwards we sat there on the bed staring at each other and then all of a sudden we burst out laughing, so much so that Annie came in to see what all the fuss was about and started bouncing up and down on the bed. I felt closer to Karl than I ever had done. It was tangible, our love. It was unconditional, beyond possession, beyond ego: it was real love. And the weight of unspoken resentment and the next forty years of pretending had vanished. It was extraordinary. We were giddy with it. We were pioneers stepping into a brave new world, hand in hand.
I feel giddy now, as I recall it. We did indeed touch a transcendence, albeit briefly. And it was beautiful.
‘What happened next, Connie?’ Dr Robinson says.
I turn to her and I see it in her face: a sneer. And I hate her with a passion. She’s a pretender, another backstabber. (To think, I nearly trusted her!) Look at the mess you’re in now, she’s thinking. Just like everyone else, she is glad that we failed. It justifies the necessity of clinging on to conformity, to stay in your joyless job, relationship, whatever. Aim low, risk nothing, stay under the radar. Well, take heart, everyone: we certainly failed.
‘No need to be so fucking superior,’ I snap at her. ‘You’ve sold your soul. You live your double life, creeping upstairs to your bedroom with your iPad for furtive fiddles – which MILF will you choose today to get off to on YouPorn?’
Surely she must have known I’d been on her iPad history? But apparently she’s no Sherlock: she looks like I’ve smacked her in the face; her jaw is hanging open. I lean forward, occupying her space now. ‘You’re a fraud. We were trying not to be.’
She looks crushed. I feel bad. I am discovering that I have a horrible, mean streak. She tucks her hair behind her ear. ‘I’m sorry if I seemed superior,’ she says calmly, despite her face flashing like a Belisha beacon. ‘That wasn’t my intention.’
The sky is dark now. It feels as if a great black mouth is about to swallow the entire planet. I jump as the rain hits the window like machine-gun fire. I can’t see my leaf any more. It feels like I’m falling. Everything is always spoilt in the end, nothing good can last. We are born alone, we die alone and no one can be trusted. I hang my head. I can hear it first, a kind of roar. I have to do something about it; I have to stop it. I sit up straight and clench my fist. I punch myself in the jaw as hard as I can. It feels good. I try to do it again but she reaches out and takes my wrists firmly in her hands. We struggle for a moment. I can hear her calling out and someone opening the door. She wraps me up in those strong arms of hers. I’m still struggling. She’s holding me tight; she’s got more resolve than I do. I am weak. I crumble.
‘You’re doing so well, Connie,’ she says to me. ‘You’re doing so well.’
Chapter 12
I’ve been thinking back, wondering what that first big shock was, Dr R. I was sitting at home with Annie on the sofa when the phone call came. It was dusk, but I hadn’t drawn the curtains. Outside I could see a bright, sharp fingernail moon clinging on to the electric blue sky above the footbridge. Commuters trudged past our house in clusters from the station, their faces like ghosts lit up by their phone screens. Occasionally one of them looked up and glanced through our window and I was aware of how snug we looked, how pretty the room was, how fantastic my life was. I was feeling better than I had felt for years in the post-agreement high, you see. Life was suddenly full of potential. Josh was out at footy training and Karl had a meeting in Soho, so Annie and I had decided to watch Toy Story 3 for the five-hundredth time. Annie was dressed as a nun. She was in a religious phase, aided, I now understand, by me. She and Polly had been rummaging around in my box in the attic and found a kinky little nun outfit that I’d forgotten about. She’d appeared in it (accompanied by Polly in a slightly soiled nurse’s uniform, eek) and had been wearing it ever since. It fitted her much better than me but it wasn’t a look I encouraged and I certainly didn’t want her going out in it.
She was sprawled out with her legs on top of me, a bowl of popcorn balancing on her nylon fire-risk habit.
‘When God’s met a girl he really likes and respects, does he do sex with her?’ she asked.
‘What makes you so sure God’s a man?’ I said, in my responsible feminist mother voice. She sat up, stopped chomping the popcorn and thought about it. The whole of Year Four had had a sex-education class at school that day.
‘He might be both. He might have a peanut and a womb so he could make babies with himself.’
‘Penis. Yes. Makes sense,’ I said, trying to picture it. I was enjoying Toy Story 3 more than she was. She went for another handful and nestled her cold foot into my cardigan sleeve.
‘I think I’ll probably be quite good at doing sex when I’m older.’
‘Oh?’ She didn’t lack confidence, my Annie. ‘Why’s that?’
‘I like looking at bottoms and things.’ It’s hard to know exactly what expression to pull sometimes with one’s children. I focused on the film. We were at the bit where the stripy bear turns out to be a right bastard.
‘Danny thinks he might be gay,’ she said. I turned to her, leant forward and grabbed a handful of popcorn myself. Evidently the sex-education discussion had continued out of the classroom and into the playground. I should check with Ness what Polly had b
een reporting back.
‘Wow,’ I said. ‘That was brave of him. And did everyone react well to that?’
‘Yes, of course,’ she said. ‘He says he might even be pansexual.’
‘Jesus!’ I said.
‘Don’t swear.’
‘What the hell is pansexual? Someone who’s into nature?’
‘Yup,’ she said breezily. ‘You know: snowmen and stuff.’
Everything was different in the house; there had been a fundamental shift between Karl and me. It was now a place of tolerance and kindness. This new way that we were living seemed to be working for everyone. I’d relaxed. I was getting on well with the kids. I was writing away like mad – I had the beginning and the end of a great story and had pitched it to my agent, who thought she could sell it. I was feeling generally inspired. Karl had been up in Edinburgh for a few weeks (I didn’t ask any questions at all) and when he came home he seemed happy and loving and kind. One night we had actually even spontaneously made love ourselves. And it was so much better without the duty attached to it. Even my father noticed that I seemed happier. Has something happened? he’d asked, with a peck on my cheek. You’re shining, my darling!
Karl had been adamant that we should tell no one about our new arrangement. I felt the same. Except I did tell Ness, obviously – but I swore her to secrecy. It was a Saturday and we were in her kitchen about to have tea. She was trying to fix the Ikea cuckoo clock; it lay in parts on the table. Once the kids left the room I made her catch me up on her latest romance saga – she’d been on a few dates, with women and men. She was pouring the tea, one hand on the lid of the Cornishware blue-and-white striped teapot.
‘Ness,’ I said, ‘Karl and I have come to a decision …’ (She, of all people, knew how strong but numb our marriage was.) ‘We’re going to take lovers.’ She paused mid-pour, looked at me and frowned. It wasn’t the reaction I was expecting. Not shock or delight, but disapproval. I always forgot how essentially prudish she was. Or did she think I was coming on to her? Was I coming on to her? What did the agreement mean for her and me?
Too Close Page 14
