by Sue Watson
Chapter Six
I spend the next few days attempting to achieve a calmer state of mind. But despite heavier medication, Caroline keeps rearing her ugly head. Even 45 mg of Mirtazapine can’t keep her away. I see her in Waitrose, in Costa sipping a latte and I even think I see her in Simon’s office when I drive past the hospital, which I sometimes find myself doing. But I know it isn’t Caroline, it’s the medication.
I feel like I’m standing on the edge of a cliff. Will I fall or be pushed? I have to stay safe, keep my mind healthy, not veer off and cause chaos again. So, apart from the school run, I stay home and do my grocery shop online, avoiding Waitrose and Costa and Caroline. I keep the house spotless, tend to the garden and cook for Simon and the children. Digging out recipes for some of his favourite suppers reminds me of how I cooked for him when we were first together, Sophie safely tucked up, wine flowing, sex on the menu most nights. I leaf through French-style family banquets, salivate over soufflés, recall the texture of steak tartare, the richness of creamy, garlicky dauphinoise potatoes. And it occurs to me that if I want the old Simon back, perhaps I need to be the old Marianne again?
So, for the next few days, I make a concerted effort to get my mind and marriage back on track and recapture some of those romantic moments. I scour Julia Child and Elizabeth David cookery books for the best, most difficult and most delicious recipes. I make their complex French and Mediterranean dishes that take hours, reducing stock, layering flavours, filling my mind and my time. I make home-made pasta just like I used to, filling the home with the warm aroma of robust, herby breads to dip in rich casseroles. Cooking is creative and it’s one of the few things I do well – Simon’s always appreciated my food, and I want to feed him, to please him, like I used to. I may not have a glittering surgical career or perfectly cut blonde hair, but I can beat her in the kitchen. He will soon bore of your soft lips and tiny hips, Caroline, but my sourdough culture and bone broth will always excite him.
I work to ensure supper is ready as soon as Simon walks through the door, the kids already bathed and in bed and that I’ve taken my pills. I feel exhausted all day and am mostly on autopilot, blindly driven to protect my marriage, my life – I can’t let Caroline, or even the idea of her, invade our castle.
This isn’t my first rodeo. Moving here was the third time we’ve had to move because of my illness. But Caroline is different. She bothers me even more than the others. This one is so much more – she’s a colleague, a peer, someone on his level who he can share ideas and problems with. Caroline is worthy of him. He could go home to her and talk about his day, and she would understand because her days are the same. And Caroline would know how to behave at the Surgical Department’s Christmas party. She wouldn’t take pills with gin and accuse random women of having sex with her husband. She wouldn’t burn the dinner, leave twin boys in a hot car, write profanities on another woman’s Facebook page or scrub her skin so hard with disinfectant it bleeds. No, she’s everything I’m not. This one is a real threat – and I suspect she isn’t just a diversion, like I thought the nurse, the barmaid, the best friend or Sophie’s friend’s mother might have been.
Simon says his first wife, Nicole, was an amazing cook, and along with all the imagined women, I do feel the weight of her legacy. It’s just another penny in the falls for me, more pressure to be perfect, to not slip and fall and crash into the rocks below. Simon often remarks on what a wonderful wife and mother she was too, and I know I don’t come up to scratch – how could I, she was perfect. Nicole now has angel wings, whereas I’m still a mere mortal with all the faults that go along with it, as Simon is often keen to remind me. So, spurred on by the challenge to be ‘the best’ wife, along with my Herculean culinary achievements, I don’t raise my voice, ask any difficult questions or make any crazy accusations. I scrub all surfaces constantly with antibacterial cleaner, dry shampoo every carpet and deep-clean each room in the house. I even get up after midnight sometimes to clean the kitchen floor so no one will walk on it. Sometimes I sit in the semi-darkness admiring the perfection in the early morning quiet, my surfaces unsullied by human feet or hands – everything’s perfect. But nothing lasts forever and dirty footmarks soon appear, blighting the sheen, intruding on perfection, and I seem to be in a constant battle to keep on top of it all.
Today, the boys are at their French tutor after school and Sophie’s revising upstairs. She’s tense about her A levels, and the sudden change of school earlier this year hasn’t helped. Simon says he’ll buy her a car if she gets three A stars, but as I pointed out, she has to pass her test first. A driving test and A levels are both a big deal and I feel like she’s under too much pressure. I suggested she might take some time out, have a gap year before university, but Simon won’t hear of it. He says a year off is for ‘spoiled brats’ and she has to ‘buckle down’, which is the right advice I suppose, but sometimes, when I see her crumpled face and furrowed brow I wonder at the wisdom of forcing her to go to university at eighteen, just because it’s the done thing.
As Jen’s collecting the boys and Oliver, I have at least an hour to myself now and it’s very precious. I’ve cleaned everything in sight and have a roast in the oven for dinner and I’m wondering how to make the best use of this uninterrupted time. I hate doing nothing – it makes me think, makes me remember. I don’t want to remember. Should I start a new handbag? I’d love to make another bag, but that might irritate Simon if he comes home and I’m ‘lolling around’, in what I laughingly call ‘my office’, which is basically a corner of the utility room.
‘Stitching bags isn’t contributing to the household in any way,’ Simon remarked the last time he found me working. ‘It’s just… self-indulgent sewing. Is it too much to ask that you bath the boys first and perhaps clear all this mess?’
There wasn’t much mess, but I took his point. Besides, my medication kills any spark of creativity – but I can always find the energy to clean. Wiping away dirt is a compulsion and I can’t rest until the house is spotless. And then I realise Simon’s office is one room in the house I haven’t cleaned in a while. It must be filthy – it’s off limits to the kids and therefore I adhere to that rule too, but surely I can give it the once-over while the meat’s cooking? I can even put some flowers in there, freshen it with room scent. He’d like that. So I gather all my cleaning equipment and head upstairs to the fifth bedroom, ‘Dad’s office’. I’m half expecting the door to be locked but am pleasantly surprised to turn the handle and walk straight in. The room is very minimal, with a white desk and chair, an open shelf containing various medical books and a small stone figurine of a young woman. Naked. It was given to him by a patient. ‘She says it’s her and it’s anatomically correct,’ he’d laughed, when he brought it home about five years ago. ‘And is it?’ I’d dared to ask.
He never answered me.
I push away unwelcome thoughts of my husband with naked women and take in the room. I have to smile; he travels light, my husband. If he was a celebrity and I was on one of those TV programmes where I had to guess ‘Whose house?’ I’d never guess, and I’m his wife.
Last Christmas, Sophie bought him a beautiful glass heart-shaped paperweight that she said would look good on his desk.
‘Thanks Sophie,’ he’d said, holding it in his outstretched palm like it might be contagious. Then he seemed to spot the flaw. ‘It’s scratched.’ He’d winced, lifting it up to the light. I thought Sophie might cry.
‘It’s okay, darling. It’s so beautiful, you can’t see the scratch,’ I offered.
‘Of course. It’s quite lovely,’ he’d added, realising his mistake. But it was too late, Sophie was already disappointed in his reaction and had closed herself off again.
My heart broke for her. So I’m pleased to see the paperweight on the desk. It’s a gift from a child to a parent, and it touches me still. I adore all my kids – all three of them. Simon says I’m a tiger mother, and I suppose I am. I’ll protect my kids until the end. I’ve nev
er said this to Simon, but they come first, even before him – always have, always will, even Sophie, who isn’t my biological daughter, but feels as close.
I polish the shiny white desk, tickle the ceiling corners with a feather duster and vacuum the carpet vigorously. Twice. I give his landline a wipe with something smelling strongly of lemons, which tells me reassuringly on the packet it kills 99.9 per cent of germs. With that acidic smell of fresh lemons, I find Caroline wafting back to me. I wonder if Simon’s ever seen her Instagram account, or peeked at her Facebook. I doubt it, because he doesn’t dabble in social media – he says it wouldn’t be professional, after all a patient might see him and, God forbid, try and ‘friend’ him. ‘It’s for sad teenagers with no lives,’ he always says, which I think is a bit unfair, especially as I’m on Facebook and Instagram and put my recipes and household tips on Pinterest. I enjoy posting pictures of my new kitchen, the kids dressed up on World Book Day and Halloween and all the family stuff in between. It doesn’t hurt to show the good bits. I haven’t told Simon I have online accounts. He wouldn’t approve and would probably ask me to close them. He says Sophie’s ‘online activities’ leave us open to a cyber attack that could put his career in jeopardy. I feel he’s a bit dramatic, but it’s a testament to his love for Sophie that he indulges her, allowing his daughter to engage with what he perceives is a threat to his privacy. He’s fanatical about privacy, says data companies are selling our secrets to Russia, but quite frankly if someone wants to hack my online accounts and steal my recipe for lemon meringue pie or my tips for getting mould off taps, they are welcome. Russian or not.
I suspect the real reason Simon wants me to stay away from social media is because he doesn’t trust me; he thinks I’ll go spying, put two and two together and make six. I once got it into my head that Simon was sleeping with a neighbour and wrote nasty stuff on her Facebook wall. She came round to the house, screaming at me and threatening legal action, which was all very embarrassing and Simon had to talk her down. That was a couple of years ago, and I have to remind myself of these incidents when I want to come off the medication. I really can’t be trusted when I’m not on the tablets.
I go on to clean the table and the drawers, although of course, the drawers are locked because Simon sometimes brings home sensitive patient information. It wouldn’t do for it to be open and accessible to anyone wandering in. Not that anyone does wander in. We all respect Simon’s space, although he can be a little hypocritical and go into the utility room and move my bags of fabric when I’m not there. I know I don’t sew much these days, but it’s the principal, and I wouldn’t mind, but he spilled a cup of hot black coffee over a piece of lovely material. I’d left it on the side, and I know it’s stupid but I cried when I discovered it in a heap, ruined. He hadn’t even tried to clean it or tell me about it, just left it there soaked in black, sugary coffee, treacle-stained. I mentioned it to him, and he said it must have been one of the kids. But I know it was him, because he’s the only one in the house who drinks black coffee with sugar.
I waft the lovely fabric away like gossamer from my thoughts and stand back to survey my work on Simon’s office. It smells fresh but doesn’t look that much different as it was pretty spotless and empty to begin with. I wonder at these two words, spotless and empty – on bad days, I’d use them to describe my life, though of course it’s not, it’s just the way my addled mind works. As Simon often says, ‘I’ve given you everything, but everything isn’t good enough for you, is it Marianne?’
From the doorway, my eyes land on the laptop sitting untouched in the middle of the desk. I feel it looking back at me, or perhaps it’s just the medication making me a bit weird again?
I’ve done so many terrible things when I’m off the pills and am ‘unleashed’, as Simon puts it. The last time was the reason we had to leave the house on Ellis Road. Such a shame because we were happy there, but I had to go and ruin everything by getting it into my head that Simon was having a raging affair with the twenty-three-year-old barmaid at the local pub. Stupid really, as Simon said she was young enough to be his daughter and keen to point out ‘also not very bright’. But by then I’d already been in The Hare and Hounds, screamed in her face and thrown a glass of beer over her. Poor Simon, he was mortified – said he could never drink in there again and the next day he put the house up for sale. Within two months we were moving, much against Sophie’s wishes, just when she’d finally settled at that school. We’d only lived on Ellis Road for about three years and the idea of leaving her hard-won friends and moving twenty miles away to a new town again really upset her.
Sophie’s recently shown signs here of struggling with schoolwork and new friendships – life is hard enough as a teenager without being uprooted every couple of years. Her teacher has said she’s finding it hard to cope with the new environment, and I know that’s all my fault, but Sophie had got it into her head that we’d moved this time because Simon wanted to change his job. Anyway, it was soon cleared up when he explained it was because I’d been poorly again and we’d had to leave because I’d embarrassed them all. To my horror, Sophie seemed to know about my little visit to The Hare and Hounds to launch a pint of beer over the young barmaid’s head.
‘Everyone was talking about it at school,’ she’d said, defeated.
I know how that feels.
‘Darling, I’m so, so sorry,’ I’d said.
‘It’s okay, Mum, I knew something was wrong, but didn’t want to upset you.’
‘What a pity your mother hadn’t had the same respect for your feelings when she stormed into a public house and abused one of the staff,’ Simon said, with fresh anger at my stupid actions.
I relive the shame all over again. I am a stupid, selfish bitch who doesn’t deserve to be loved.
I’m still staring at the laptop, thinking. I’m trying to resist opening it, but I don’t think I can. Something pushes through the mists of medication and I have no self-control. As Simon says, I can’t blame my mental health because it’s only part of who I am and even strong medication can’t change someone’s flawed personality. The trouble is, I am emotional, too emotional, and act on my feelings. I have no control. I can’t be trusted.
I slide my fingers under the lid. It’s cool to the touch as I gently lift it and the screen springs to life. Gazing at the now flickering screen, I wonder what secrets this sleek oblong holds? I imagine the tangle of explosive information twisting through the hard drive. The clandestine human knowledge living inside, inveigling its way through the circuit board, snaking along the keyboard membranes, waiting to pounce.
I press a key and suddenly turn around. Is he watching from the doorway?
Guilt and fear overwhelm me but are suffocated by my uncontrollable urge to access this Pandora’s box. I bend down for a closer look and, with one hand on the table, dare to attempt a password. I go for the obvious and type in ‘surgery’. The computer tells me I’m incorrect and suggests I try again. A part of me is relieved the password didn’t work, because I don’t want to go there – if I find something, it will near kill me. But if I find nothing, I’ll have peace of mind. I long for peace of mind. I can live my life and be well again, safe in the knowledge that we’re still a family and he won’t leave me and take the children with him. This is my worst fear; it’s what keeps me awake at night through the fog of Mirtazapine.
Then a thought occurs. What if there’s a way Simon can find out that someone’s been in his computer, poked around in the hard drive of his privacy? I don’t know, but by now I’m beyond reason or consequence. I have to know if I’m mad, paranoid, psychotic, all the words he uses to describe me, where once he used words like beautiful, bright, talented. I want to be those lovely things to him again. I want to be the me he fell in love with and perhaps then he will finally forgive me for what happened to our baby and we can move forwards together.
I type in the long-shot password with hope. ‘Marianne’, I key in slowly, carefully. And my heart thuds to
the floor as I’m faced with ‘try again’. Once I was his password. I move around the desk like a hunter circling its prey and tell myself to give it one last go. I want to look away as I punch in her name. ‘Caroline’ – and there it is. Where once it was me, Caroline now unlocks his world. I don’t need to know any more, but now I can’t stop. I’m through the looking glass, and there’s no turning back.
A generic sandy beach flickers onto the screen and I have the opportunity to take a dip into Simon’s world, bathe in his secrets, splash my feet in the ‘privacy’ he so craves. I lean over the computer, unable to sit in his seat, knowing I’m trespassing on my husband’s life, but intrigue and irrational anger spur me on. I need somewhere, someone, to channel this strange anger – or is it merely my madness again?
I check the clock on the screen. My vigorous and thorough vacuuming took longer than I thought and he’s due home in less than half an hour.
I should just close the lid and walk away but of course I can’t. Instead I open up his favourites. He hasn’t thought to hide anything because it never occurs to him anyone will disobey him and go into his office, let alone on his laptop. So where do I want to go – emails, photos, documents? I click on email and it opens out before me, his life laid bare. Emails from the hospital, the tennis club, various colleagues and friends, and then I find her, nestling in a folder. She has her very own folder in his inbox. Caroline.
I click on Caroline more forcefully than I need to and even though I’m expecting a lot of emails I’m shocked at the sheer volume. Oh my God, I’ve hit the horrible jackpot – and won the booby prize. I scroll down. He started working at this hospital in February but I can’t see any emails to or from her before April, so I start there, at the very beginning… the beginning of what, I really don’t know. But I sure as hell am going to find out.
