Hush

by Sara Marshall-Ball

  Marcus sighed. ‘Unfortunately he’s pretty popular, and he doesn’t have any spaces at the moment.’

  Lily nodded. Said nothing.

  ‘But look, there are lots of other options. How about this one?’ He held up a leaflet entitled Dr Mason’s Children’s Services. A woman of about fifty smiled down at Lily. ‘She looks friendly, don’t you think?’

  ‘She looks a bit like Mrs Brennan.’

  ‘You think?’ Marcus looked at the leaflet again. ‘I suppose she might. Well, how about this guy, then?’ He held up another one. Lily didn’t bother looking at it.

  ‘Whatever you choose will be fine.’ She stood up, picked up her bag again.

  ‘You going upstairs?’

  ‘Yeah. Homework.’

  She climbed the stairs slowly, feeling exhausted. Her mind screamed a protest against seeing another doctor, though she wasn’t really sure why. It wouldn’t be any different from seeing Dr Mervyn. It would probably help. But she had no interest in seeing anyone else. If he couldn’t help her, then she didn’t want to be helped.

  Her mother’s door was shut as usual, and she knocked on it lightly as she passed. She didn’t really expect an answer, but she heard a low murmur from inside, which might have been, ‘Come in.’ She pushed open the door, slowly, cautiously.

  It was dark inside: the curtains were drawn and there were no lights, not even a bedside lamp. Lily could see a shape stirring under the covers, and she went in, pushing the door closed behind her. ‘Mama?’

  ‘Connie?’

  ‘No, Mama. It’s Lily.’ She put down her bag and padded across the room, coming to stand next to her mother’s head. She could see her eyes, peering blearily into the darkness, trying to make out the shape of her youngest daughter.

  ‘Is Connie still away?’ Anna reached out a hand, and Lily took it. Her mother’s palm was warm and dry.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You’ve spoken to her?’ Anna’s voice was suddenly urgent, her grip tightened.

  ‘No, Mama. She wrote to me. You know that.’

  ‘Oh, yes.’ She relaxed again. ‘If you speak to her, tell her I love her, won’t you?’

  ‘Of course I will.’

  ‘Come and lie down.’ Anna shifted over to make room, and lifted the covers so that Lily could crawl in with her. It was uncomfortably warm, and the sheets smelled musty and unwashed. ‘How long has it been, since we were all together? Hmm? You remember when we used to be a proper family?’

  Lily thought about it. She wasn’t sure she could.

  ‘I’ve tried, you know. For so long I tried. To hold it all together, to keep us from drifting apart. And your father just keeps on messing with it all, making us all argue.’

  ‘Dad?’ Lily said. The heat and the dark made her head swim, made everything confusing.

  ‘Yes. He doesn’t love you girls like I do, you know. Doesn’t understand what it’s like, to be a mother. To have your children ripped away from you, ripped right out of your body, and then sent away, both of you sent away, and me left here with nothing…’ She drifted into incoherence, her words blurring together until they were nothing but sounds trying to catch the attention of other sounds. Lily lay very still.

  ‘You, though…’ Anna said. And then stopped.

  ‘What, Mama? Me what?’

  ‘You’re the wrong one,’ Anna said simply. ‘I never wanted you.’

  But she continued to hold on to her until she fell asleep, and Lily listened as her soft snores filled the room.

  now

  Connie was wrapping presents in the bedroom, listening to the squeals of the boys as they played in Luke’s room next door, when she heard the front door close downstairs. It was the first time in four days that Nathan had been home before everyone was in bed, and Connie felt herself freeze, hands poised in mid-air above the present she was wrapping. The boys responded instantly, thundering down the stairs like a herd of miniature elephants, screaming ‘Daddy! Daddy!’ at the top of their voices.

  ‘Hey,’ she heard him say, laughter in his voice, as if their reaction was a surprise. As if he’d only been gone ten minutes. ‘What’s all the fuss about?’

  Connie sat motionless as the boys exclaimed over his absence, told him about everything they’d been doing throughout the day; smiled as they told him that they’d been ‘sooooo bored’ because Mummy had been wrapping presents ‘allllll day’. They moved into the living room, their voices fading to a low murmur beneath her, so that she could no longer distinguish the individual sounds.

  School had broken up three days previously, and Connie had been hoping that the constant presence of the boys might mean Nathan would be inclined to spend more time at home. He’d been just as distant, though, leaving before Connie got up and coming home long after she’d fallen into a fitful sleep. The boys hadn’t really questioned it, used to Nathan’s long working hours and his ‘I’m a doctor and people rely on me’ speech, so things had felt almost normal, except that there was an absence in the household that only Connie was aware of, a silence at her side where usually she would have felt support.

  Tomorrow was Christmas Eve, and they were due to be with Lily and Richard by lunchtime. Connie had been starting to wonder if Nathan would even remember it was Christmas, let alone that they were going away. She couldn’t imagine how they would spend the holiday period together: how they could be in the same house for even a day and pretend that nothing was wrong. It had been a week since their last conversation.

  She had been thinking, idly, about the first Christmas she had spent on her own. It had been nine months after her abrupt departure, and she’d found herself in a largely empty hostel in Berlin, with only a handful of other tourists for company.

  One of them, an American girl who couldn’t have been more than a year older than Connie, had invited her to join their attempt at Christmas dinner. Germany in general did their present-giving on Christmas Eve, but, as Connie didn’t have anyone to give presents to, it hadn’t really made much difference to her. The hostel had provided a roast dinner for what had seemed like an unfeasibly cheap price, complete with candles and decorations and a generous amount of wine. There had been snow on the ground outside, and Connie could remember the excitement of waking up to her first ever white Christmas. It hadn’t mattered that her family were miles away. For a few minutes, watching the sun rise over a whitewashed Berlin, she’d felt the tingle of genuine Christmas magic.

  The feeling had returned after dinner, when the Americans, the couple who ran the hostel and a Swiss couple who had been passing through made their way out of the front door one by one. When she joined them, curious, Connie had found them pelting each other with snowballs, accompanied by a group of children who had already been in the midst of their own snowball fight. For a while Connie was content just to stand on the edge and watch, feeling oddly blessed, as if she had left home at exactly the right time. She refused to think about the reasons for leaving, or, worse, what she had left behind.

  It was a long time since she’d spent Christmas alone, Connie thought now. It would be her twelfth year with Nathan, her eighth year as a mother. Every year since she’d returned she’d visited her mother on Christmas Day, though Lily never joined her and her mother seldom thanked her for it. Her attempts at seasonal family reunions were generally halted when Lily refused to pick up the phone.

  Despite that, she’d always viewed herself as lucky, knowing that so many people didn’t have anyone to spend the holiday with, knowing the feeling of isolation it could bring, being cut off from the rest of the celebrating world. But she’d also forgotten how liberating it could be, when your family weren’t providing the solid foundation that they were expected to provide. She had forgotten that camaraderie, that sense of sudden and instant love that could spring up between people who were stranded together. Had found herself longing, idly, for that feeling again.

  She was immersed in her thoughts, and didn’t notice the sounds of movement in the hallway until
there was a knock at the door. The knock was too light, too calm, to belong to one of the boys. ‘Come in.’

  Nathan poked his head round the door. ‘Hi.’

  ‘Hi. You don’t have to knock, you know. It’s your room too.’

  ‘I thought you might have things out you didn’t want me to see.’ He gestured at the packages scattered across the floor. ‘Or have you decided I don’t deserve anything this year?’

  ‘You can’t just joke this away, Nathan.’

  ‘I know.’ He stepped into the room, moving around the presents to sit on the bed. ‘I’m sorry, Connie. I shouldn’t have been gone for so long.’

  She nodded, but said nothing. She didn’t really trust herself to speak.

  ‘Things have been… Well. You’ve been here, you know how they’ve been.’

  Connie nodded again, eyes fixed on the present she was wrapping.

  ‘I felt as if I was making you worse. I know you keep saying you want a husband and not a GP but I don’t know how to be one without the other. I can’t think about you being depressed without wanting to try to sort it out.’

  ‘Counselling isn’t the answer,’ Connie said.

  ‘Okay. I’m sorry.’

  There was silence, as Connie wondered whether he would answer the question that had caused him to leave in the first place, or whether he would force her to ask it again. The words sat in her mouth, fat and sour, making her feel faintly nauseous.

  He caught her eye, and he understood.

  ‘The affair thing…’ he said, and she steeled herself against whatever was to come, rigidly holding her body in one place so it wouldn’t betray how she felt. ‘I didn’t have an affair. I have genuinely been going to work all this time. But there was –’ He saw her flinch, and paused, but forced himself to continue. ‘There was one night. I went back to another woman’s house. I didn’t sleep with her, but I did kiss her.’ He waited until she looked up and met his eyes before he said, ‘I’m really sorry.’

  Connie found that, though her heart was beating so fast it made her blood feel as if it was fizzing, her voice was calm and steady. ‘Why didn’t you sleep with her?’

  ‘Because I was very drunk and neither of us really wanted to go there.’

  ‘Have you seen her since?’

  ‘Not like that.’

  ‘But you have seen her?’

  He looked at the floor, nodded. She felt the muscles in the pit of her stomach twist with understanding.

  ‘You know her from work?’

  He nodded again. Connie wondered where her tears had gone. She felt breathless and dry-eyed. ‘Right,’ she said, eventually, not really knowing what she was saying. ‘I see.’

  ‘Connie?’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘Are you going to leave me?’

  She looked up at him, and realised that her tears were in his eyes. He looked at her as if she held his entire life in her hands. Which, she supposed, she sort of did.

  ‘I don’t think so,’ she said, slowly.

  ‘No?’

  ‘I need some time to think. This is – well.’ She thought it over for a minute, chewing absently on the side of her forefinger. ‘I guess it’s not as bad as I’d feared. But it’s worse than if you’d never done anything. So I’m not really sure how I feel, now.’

  He nodded, looking down at his hands. He looked lost, and she realised she almost never saw him looking unsure of himself. It made her want to put her arms around him, but she held herself in place.

  ‘Why did you put me through the last few days? You could have just told me. Walking out, it – it made me think it was true. Or that I’d pissed you off. But I had a right to ask, didn’t I? It wasn’t completely unjustified.’

  ‘I walked out because I didn’t know how to answer. I stayed away for the same reason. I couldn’t stand to lie to your face, but I didn’t want to tell you and ruin our marriage over something that was insignificant and stupid to me.’

  ‘But you did lie to my face. At some point you must have lied to me, told me you were in one place when you were somewhere else.’

  ‘I know. I know it doesn’t make sense, but it was different, when you were actually asking me a straight question.’

  ‘That’s just childish logic, Nathan.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘And you know how I feel, about – affairs, and –’ The tears were here now, as she thought about it, the injustice of it, of what her mother had done to her father and Nathan had done to her and everyone in the world did to everyone else in the world on a daily basis. He leaned forward, reached a hand out and clasped it around hers.

  ‘I know, Connie. I didn’t think; I forgot, and I was drunk, but it’s no excuse. I do know, and I really am so sorry. But it’s not like your mother.’

  ‘How do you figure that?’

  ‘It was just once. It wasn’t here. I haven’t lied to you for years, I realised what I did was wrong, and I stopped it before it went anywhere. Please. I promise you it’s not the same.’

  She removed her hand from his and pushed herself a few inches away from him. She found it was an effort to raise her head to meet his eyes, so she looked at his knees, encased in black cotton that hung loosely around the flesh and bone beneath. They sat in silence for a long time, while she thought about her parents, and what the other woman might look like, and what the kids were doing downstairs, and whether she could carry on with this new, different Nathan at her side, and whether she could carry on without him. Tears trickled down her cheeks and dropped off the end of her chin, but she paid them no attention. Nathan watched her, waiting, hands clasped so tightly in front of him that his knuckles had turned white.

  ‘I need some time,’ she said eventually. Her voice was clogged with tears, and she cleared her throat, feeling inelegant and dramatic.

  ‘Do you want me to stay here over Christmas?’

  ‘No. The boys would find it weird. And Lily and Richard – Lily’s been through enough lately. I want to give her a normal Christmas.’

  ‘You are allowed to have your own problems, Connie. Hers don’t always take precedence.’

  ‘Yes, they do.’ She stood up, and found her legs had cramped from sitting in the same position for so long. ‘I’m going to put the boys to bed.’

  And she left him, sitting on the bed, looking unavoidably exposed: the uncertainty of everything laid out all around him.

  then

  Marcus drove Lily to the doctor’s office. She went in alone, leaving him to wait in the car. The waiting room was largely decorated in shades of beige, and there were standard posters taped all over the walls with slogans like MENTAL HEALTH IS NOT A GAME and IS FEAR HOLDING YOU BACK? A large middle-aged woman with tight red curls sat behind a reception window on the far wall, and she smiled at Lily as she walked up.

  ‘Can I help you?’

  ‘I have an appointment. With Dr Robinson?’

  ‘Certainly. Your name?’

  ‘Lily Emmett.’

  The receptionist ran her finger down a list in front of her. Nodded, once. ‘Take a seat, dear, and we’ll call you when we’re ready.’

  Lily chose a seat in the far corner of the room. There were about twenty chairs, and none of them was occupied. She looked around the room. Found herself regretting telling her father to wait in the car. The low murmur of the radio filled the room, a song she recognised but didn’t know the words to.

  ‘Lily?’ The doctor appeared in the doorway. ‘Are your parents not with you?’

  Lily stood up. ‘In the car,’ she said, nodding in the direction of the door.

  ‘Okay. Do you want to follow me, then?’

  Lily followed her into a small room with two armchairs, separated by a low table topped with an ageing plant and a box of tissues. The doctor waved her into one of the chairs, and settled herself in the other one. She didn’t look much like a doctor; her hair was tied loosely with a headscarf, and she wore a long patterned skirt and jewelled hoops around her wrists
. She resembled an old-fashioned fortune teller.

  ‘I’m Dr Robinson,’ she said, pulling out a notepad and placing it on her knee. ‘We’re just going to have a brief chat today, Lily, just to see whether we get on. Is that okay?’

  Lily nodded. There was something about the pitch of her voice that grated. An unnecessary elongation of the words, as if taking the time to speak more slowly made her appear more caring.

  ‘Your father said you have trouble talking sometimes, is that right?’

  Lily shrugged. ‘I’m getting better. My other doctor said.’

  ‘But you’re not completely better, are you? There are still some things your father would like us to go over, as I understand it?’

  Lily shrugged again, and said nothing.

  ‘I understand you’ve had some difficulties in your past. A lot of disruption, is that right? A lot of unfortunate events?’

  Lily stared at her, wondering which of the events in her life would be classed as merely unfortunate.

  ‘Talking about things is one of the ways we get past them. A lot of people find that talking about events helps them understand what happened, and their feelings about what happened. And sometimes they come to counselling to talk about things in a safe place, because they find it difficult to talk at home, to people who know them well.’ Dr Robinson gave her a significant look. ‘Did you talk about things with the doctor you were seeing at school?’

  ‘Sometimes.’

  ‘And did you find it helpful?’

  ‘Depends.’

  Dr Robinson looked at her, waiting. Then: ‘You can talk to me, you know. This is a safe space. I’m not connected to anyone you know, I’m not going to tell your parents about anything you say. This is a place where you can just be yourself, talk about anything.’

  Lily watched her. Waiting to see if she had anything else to offer. When it became clear that she didn’t, Lily stood up. ‘I’m sorry, Dr Robinson. I don’t think this is going to work.’

  She left.