The Missing Marriage

by Sarah May

  Laura had spent time wondering how to play things with Greg, and as she drifted through the house, listing the obvious features with a genuine pathos, she could see that she’d been right to adopt sadness; a sadness that gave her an allure . . . a weight she hadn’t had before.

  He didn’t tell her that the market had flat-lined, and he didn’t tell her that if she did go ahead with putting number two Marine Drive on the market, she wouldn’t get anything close to what they’d paid for it – because Laura knew all these things. He just told her to think about it; to be really sure.

  ‘It’s a beautiful home,’ he said, following her back downstairs and helping her to regain her balance as she slipped on the last tread.

  They’d just walked into the kitchen and Laura, poised near the fridge, had just responded to his comment with one of her own – ‘It’s not a home any more’ – when Martha burst through the front door. Dropping her rucksack onto the floor near the breakfast bar and – seeing Greg with his hands on the bench behind him, leaning back and smiling, and her mother hanging onto the fridge door in the process of hauling out a bottle of wine – said, breathless, ‘I just saw dad.’

  Greg and Laura didn’t move for what seemed like minutes afterwards.

  ‘I saw dad,’ she said again.

  Laura arranged her hair carefully over her right shoulder, and turned to smile wearily at Greg, who didn’t smile back.

  Confronted by the cataclysmic, a vague sense of horror had settled over Greg, immobilising him at a moment when he most felt like running – number two Marine Drive had lost its appeal.

  ‘You remember Greg, don’t you Martha?’ Laura persisted brightly.

  ‘I saw dad – I saw him,’ Martha yelled, her face suddenly red, the muscles on her neck defined, her eyes wide, and scared. ‘He was standing under a tree outside school. He was just standing there. He had blond hair and there was a dog with him, but I knew immediately – it was him.’ The next minute Martha burst into tears. ‘Say something!’

  Laura’s smile had gone.

  ‘Martha!’ she called out as Martha, running and still crying, left the house.

  She turned back to Greg, clutching the fridge door in one hand and the bottle of wine in the other, but couldn’t think of anything to say.

  On the other side of the fences lining the back gardens of Marine Drive, cars on the coastal road swerved to avoid the girl in school uniform running, oblivious, through the traffic. A van driver supplying custom-made blinds yelled something incoherent at her retreating back as, blue shirt billowing around her now in the wind from the incoming tide, she fled down past the play park and onto the dunes.

  But nobody stopped.

  As the speedometers flickered back up to forty and beyond, the girl became nothing more than a speck of blue and red on the line of dunes in the wing mirrors and rear-view mirrors of traffic heading north.

  Martha sat down in a hollow above the beach.

  She wasn’t crying any more, but her eyes were wet and stinging from the wind that had blown the last of the tears away, and she was sweating heavily. She drew her knees up and sat hugging them as she listened to the sea’s incoming roar.

  After a while she phoned Anna.

  Anna parked the Capri on the headland by the Kings Arms – a three-storey stone building painted white, overlooking the natural harbour at Seaton Sluice, which local history claimed was the birthplace of the industrial revolution.

  She could see Martha, in her school uniform – sitting in the bus stop by the old customs house where she’d told her to wait.

  Martha had seen Anna – was standing up, waving, and making her way towards her, running the last few hundred yards and slamming into her as she’d done on the drive outside her house the night Bryan disappeared.

  ‘Let’s go onto the beach,’ Anna said after a while.

  Holding hands, they slid down the steep grass bank onto the harbour-side, following it round – past a red fishing boat swinging sharply from side to side – onto the beach. They walked slowly, in silence, following the line of debris from the last high tide – the sea had almost reached it now. The wind was strong down on the beach, but warm – and they had to shout to make themselves heard.

  ‘What did he look like?’

  Martha stopped. ‘He looked like dad.’

  ‘I mean – had he changed his appearance in any way?’

  ‘He had this weird blond hair, and there was a white dog with him – a big white dog. I don’t know what the breed was,’ Martha said, worried, ‘but all I saw was dad. To me he looked just like dad.’ When Anna didn’t comment on this, she added, ‘And he looked sad – I never saw him look so sad.’

  Ahead of them there was a group of school children hurling bits of driftwood at each other. Without saying anything, they turned and started heading back towards the harbour.

  ‘He’s alive, Anna,’ Martha said, suddenly excited as the wind blew the last of the shock away, and young enough not to see any difficulties or obstacles in this potential fact. ‘He wants me to know he’s still alive.’ She broke into a run, running hard along the beach until – out of breath – she was forced to stop and wait for Anna, who was walking towards her thinking of the drawing that was posted through her door the day of Erwin’s funeral. That was over two months ago – she hadn’t seen, heard or received anything else since.

  Part of her wasn’t convinced Martha had seen Bryan.

  Part of her was still open to the possibility that it was Martha who’d sent her the drawing – using the spectre of Bryan to remain connected to her.

  But all the other parts of her wanted more than anything to believe that the man Martha saw standing under the chestnut tree outside school, and the person who sent her the drawing the day of Erwin’s funeral – was Bryan Deane.

  ‘What did your mum say?’

  ‘Fuck her.’ Martha drew her foot through the sand in a long arc then looked out to sea for a moment, distracted by the memory of Greg in the kitchen. She’d almost forgotten about Greg.

  ‘D’you think we should tell the Inspector?’

  Anna thought about this. ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Why?’ Martha demanded, immediately distrustful – as if Anna’s comment was indicative of doubt on her part.

  Anna knew what Martha was thinking. ‘Because,’ she explained, ‘so far, you’re the only one who knows, and I’ve got a feeling that your dad wants as few people as possible to know he’s alive.’

  Martha, who’d been listening carefully, smiled suddenly. ‘Okay,’ she said, ‘we’ll keep him for ourselves.’

  There was a simplicity to what she said that was dangerous in itself. But Anna nodded, smiling at the complicity of it, and the next minute, feeling a lightness she hadn’t felt in years, caught hold of Martha’s elbow and said, ‘Race you to the harbour!’

  They started to run, the wind behind them now, the boats in the harbour restless, rocking, tired of their anchors.

  In the heavy silence following first Martha then Greg’s departure, Laura stood motionless in the hallway until the quality of light started to change, casting longer slow-moving shadows over the beige walls.

  Eventually she came to, startled by the sound of the doorbell ringing in the empty house and looking about her with something close to anguish. She hadn’t yet switched on any lights inside the house.

  Falling into the doorframe as she made her way to the front door – badly bruising her left shoulder – she stared at her wind-torn daughter.

  ‘Where the hell have you been?’ she shouted, louder than she meant to and catching Mrs McClaren – who’d just returned from swimming lessons and who was in the process of emptying her car of children – staring at them.

  Mrs McClaren hesitated then waved.

  Laura didn’t wave back; instead she grabbed hold of Martha’s thin arm and hauled her indoors.

  ‘Where the hell have you been?’ she said again, whispering now even though there was no point because
they were indoors.

  Martha stared at her the same way Mrs McClaren had done just seconds earlier – as if they had components inside them that were superior to those inside Laura herself.

  ‘Are we going to talk about this?’ Laura demanded.

  Martha walked past her, in silence, up the stairs.

  Laura followed; the door to Martha’s room slammed in her face – she pushed it open so forcefully that CDs started to fall out the rack on the wall.

  ‘You don’t believe me,’ Martha said at last, ‘so what’s the point?’

  Laura picked up the CDs from where they’d fallen onto the floor, putting them back in the rack – some of the cases had come apart.

  After a while, watching her, Martha said, ‘I saw him outside school – he was standing under a tree on the opposite side of the road. He had a dog with him,’ she concluded, flatly.

  ‘What sort of dog?’ Laura asked. ‘Big . . . white.’

  ‘Have you told anybody else?’

  ‘I don’t want to talk about this any more,’ Martha said sullenly. She swung away from Laura, but she could feel her mother’s eyes on her still. ‘What was Greg doing here?’

  ‘Greg?’ Laura, distracted, sounded surprised at the mention of his name. ‘Oh. I’m thinking of putting the house on the market. It’s something we discussed – dad and I – before –’

  Martha was shaking her head, and Laura knew what was coming next. She stood up.

  ‘No,’ Martha said, her voice loud with disbelief. ‘No!’

  Laura started to leave the room. ‘You’re right,’ she called back through the open door, from the top of the stairs. ‘I don’t believe you.’ She paused. ‘A big white dog?’ She started to laugh.

  Chapter 13

  Later that night – after telling Martha she was going to a Pilates class – Laura drove back along the coastal road towards the Royal Quays Marina at North Shields on a bottle of Pouilly-Fumé.

  She parked the car in the usual bay and, looking up at the waterside flats, saw that the Polish woman was no longer reading on her balcony and that the balcony door to their flat was open, which meant that Tom must be there.

  The purchase of the marina flat – an investment neither of them had the stomach or imagination for; not really – had, within a very few months, come to signal their downfall financially as the property plunged into negative equity and they were left unable to either sell it or rent it.

  The edge of life together as they knew it emerged suddenly on the horizon, beyond which lay an abysmal darkness.

  The darkness had always been there, but now they could see the edge the threshold between them and it had gone. For months Laura found herself holding her breath while Bryan moved slowly, silently about the house – without expression, hovering somewhere between occupied and preoccupied. He’d respond to her with polite intonations that left her wondering, most of the time, whether he was about to make them tea or saw his own head off with the bread knife.

  Their marriage was no longer the blood sport it had always been.

  They’d had their last fight.

  Bryan’s disappearance had been Laura’s idea – it was the only thing she could come up with to prevent him from actually disappearing. She knew it was a risk, him living in the marina flat after they got back from Uruguay, but she wanted to keep him close while he experienced the freedom of death.

  She hurried now across the car park and into the Ropemakers Building, taking the lift up to level three where their flat was, and letting herself in.

  Tom was outside, smoking on the balcony, his arms hanging over the steel railings as he stared down at the marina and River Tyne. There was a stillness to him that was different to the stasis she’d known before, in the months leading up to his disappearance – it was a stillness full of the promise of movement.

  The dining table was covered with sketches that were weighed down, but the edges kept curling up and crackling in the breeze that passed through the flat, lifting the curtains hanging at the balcony door into the air. The Husky – the big, white dog Martha had seen outside school that afternoon – lay along the sofa in a block of evening sunshine.

  They’d decorated the marina flat themselves like it was their first place together. All memory of the four-bedroom detached house on Marine Drive and the life they’d lived there was painted over – in cornflower blue, it was eventually decided.

  ‘Blue’s my favourite colour,’ Bryan had said, awkwardly.

  Laura, quietly stunned, ‘It is?’

  She felt like crying when he said the word ‘blue’ – it was something he should have said twenty years ago; that she should have encouraged him to say, but never did.

  With this revelation, she conceded – the flat became Bryan’s flat – and they painted it blue, to music they used to dance to, played on LPs that – along with Bryan’s old record player – had been retrieved from the attic on Marine Drive and driven over to North Shields like childhood contraband.

  They painted drunk and stoned and everything they touched – including each other – was charged with the eroticism of potential. The rows and disputes they had in the flat led to reconciliation rather than retribution, and although the reconciliation sometimes took place in the bed that Laura had bought new bed linen for from Bainbridges in Newcastle, it also took place on rugs in the living room, the kitchen floor, up against the fridge door – where she discovered the newfound pleasure of climaxing with her back up against stainless steel – the bath, the dining table, the sofa and somewhere close enough to the front door for her nipples to freeze in the draught coming under it.

  They’d got to this point – love again – Laura thought, as she turned the key in the door, aware that if she opened it to find Laviolette standing there, she wouldn’t care as much as she should, because she’d had this: they’d become magnificent again, in each other’s eyes.

  The terrifying banality of things that used to plunge them into life-threatening rows at number two Marine Drive – running out of milk, a blocked sink, a mysterious scratch on the fridge door – Laura embraced in the flat as proof of a romantic negligence.

  Two weeks before Easter Saturday she’d brought over some bin liners full of clothes she told Mrs McClaren she was taking to charity shops. These clothes that Bryan had worn at number two Marine Drive, looked different on Tom Bowen when worn against the cornflower blue walls of the marina flat. Likewise, Tom not only noticed what she was wearing – he noticed what she wasn’t wearing. It had got to the point at number two Marine Drive when Bryan was able to conduct a conversation with her walking naked round the bedroom – about getting the gutters cleaned after autumn’s fall.

  Tom turned round instinctively then, his eyes thin as he exhaled the last of his cigarette before throwing the stub over the edge of the balcony.

  ‘The door,’ Laura said.

  He shut the door, catching one of the curtains in it so that it carried on flapping on the other side of the glass.

  Laura stared at him, waiting for him to speak.

  But he didn’t say anything.

  Distracted, he walked over to the table and thumbed through a couple of his sketches.

  ‘What were you thinking?’ she hissed at last, dropping her handbag onto the sofa by the Husky and crossing over to him, pulling hard on his left arm – anger giving way to relief now that he was here in front of her again. ‘This afternoon – what were you thinking?’ she demanded.

  He sat down, staring absently at the dog stretched out on the sofa still.

  ‘I needed to see her. I miss her,’ he said, letting out a soft sob that turned into a cough – he was coughing a lot since starting smoking again.

  The sob shocked Laura.

  He was upset, disintegrating in front of her, and she couldn’t think of anything to say apart from, ‘It’s going to be fine.’

  ‘God – Martha. What were we thinking? What were we thinking?’

  ‘It’s going to be fine,’ she said
again, barely aware of what she was saying.

  ‘How’s it going to be fine?’ He stood up, and went over to the balcony doors and his posture as he stood there staring out to sea made the flat feel suddenly tiny.

  ‘We’ve got this far,’ she said bravely.

  ‘And it feels too far.’

  ‘We’re nearly there, Bryan.’

  He smiled briefly and turned to look at her, unconvinced, ‘But it’s still not far enough, is it? Not yet.’

  ‘They’ve got to pronounce you dead sooner or later – this can’t go on indefinitely. The hardest part’s behind us. You disappeared.’

  ‘I know I did, and I miss me, Laura. I miss me.’

  ‘No you don’t,’ she said sharply, keeping her eyes fixed on his. ‘And neither do I.’

  The only thing that had kept their marriage up and running at Marine Drive was their ability to lie to themselves and each other. Now the only chance they had of seeing this through was in telling the truth.

  She stood up and joined him by the balcony doors. ‘I can’t stop thinking about you. I haven’t felt like this since I was eighteen, Bryan, and eighteen’s a long time ago. We’re going to make this work. We’re going to do all the things we talked about. This is our second chance and we have to look after it.’

  He stood limply beside her, his arms hanging down, and for one awful moment she thought he was going to burst into tears like he’d done when she picked him up that Easter Saturday and driven him to Newcastle’s Haymarket Bus Station, as planned. Only things hadn’t gone quite as planned – almost didn’t happen at all – because of the fog that day.

  ‘It’s not too late.’ She finished the sentence with more of an inflexion than she’d meant to so that it was left hanging between them, an unanswered question. ‘Everything we need is here in this flat.’

  He smiled sadly at her and passed his hand down the side of her face. ‘Apart from Martha.’

  She put her hands over his, pressing it against her cheek.

  He was holding her now, absently kissing the top of her hair as she watched the sun lower itself fatly onto the horizon.