The Missing Marriage

by Sarah May

  ‘She did.’

  ‘I could have found you somewhere.’

  ‘I like it here.’

  ‘Always so independent. But then you wouldn’t want to be beholden to anybody, would you – especially not me.’

  She stood motionless behind the kitchen bench. ‘I did phone,’ she said at last. ‘I phoned Tyneside Properties and asked to speak to you – then put the phone down. It’s been sixteen years, Bryan. Sixteen years is too long to make a phone call about –’

  ‘Real estate?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘So how much is this costing you?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  He shook his head then pointed to the drawing on the bench, saying, ‘You got it. What did you think?’

  She paused. ‘I was relieved – hopeful. More than that.’ He was standing close to her. ‘I dream about you – often.’ He lifted up her hands and pressed their palms together. ‘I didn’t want to believe you were dead.’

  He studied their hands carefully. ‘I was worried you might tell.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The police. The inspector.’

  ‘Laviolette,’ she said looking at him, but he didn’t look at her; he kept his eyes on their hands, which were clasped now, mid-air.

  He looked at her then, pulling away, drifted over to the bench where the photograph of him in Cephalonia was propped. ‘Where did you get this from?’

  ‘Martha. She gave it to me. She wanted me to keep a vigil.’

  ‘Martha,’ he said, keeping hold of the photo. ‘Martha. God, Martha.’

  He walked to the nearest sofa, collapsing onto it. ‘What have I done?’

  ‘Why did you do it Bryan?’

  He sat with his legs apart, his elbows balanced on his knees, his head bent, staring down at the floor.

  She sat down beside him.

  ‘Are you happy?’ he asked without looking at her.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘That means you’re not.’

  She thought about this. She’d often thought about it before, but now she had to give an answer because she wasn’t asking it of herself. ‘I’m happy with my life, I’m just not happy in it,’ she said at last.

  They sat there in silence for a while until Bryan said, ‘D’you remember the fret – the day I disappeared?’

  ‘I saw you disappear into it.’

  He stood up again – standing limply in front of her, his arms hanging down. ‘I was meant to meet Laura on the beach between here and Seaton Sluice, but then the fret came in and I just about made it to the rocks at St Mary’s. The island was deserted because the tide was in. I pushed the kayak off the seaward side where the graves of the Russian sailors are, and waited for the tide to go in. When it was on the turn, I waded across the causeway and phoned Laura from the pay phone in the car park on the headland.

  ‘When she eventually arrived, I got into the passenger seat and sat there, shaking. I couldn’t stop. I turned to her and said, “Hold me,” and she held me and I cried. The shock – of doing what we’d talked about.’

  ‘Where did you go?’

  ‘She drove me to the Haymarket and I got a bus up to Rothbury.’

  ‘Why Rothbury?’

  ‘D’you remember that place you used to camp when you and Laura were kids?’

  Anna nodded.

  ‘We often went there later. There was a hut in the woods. I lived there for a month or so. No CCTV; barely any roads; no mobile signal.’ He paused. ‘It was a long month. I thought a lot about meeting you that day – on the beach, the day I disappeared. I thought a lot about you. I thought –’

  ‘What?’

  ‘That you’d somehow know I hadn’t really disappeared. That you’d come looking for me.’ He walked over to the windows, watching the blades on the turbines turn. ‘I couldn’t believe it had actually worked – gone to plan. Laura was talking about the insurance money and selling the Marine Drive house; about moving to Uruguay – buying a house on the beach. She wouldn’t stop talking, and I let her talk because I felt free, but I knew I wasn’t going to do any of those things – I wasn’t going to give up my freedom again.’

  ‘Laura met you – in Uruguay.’

  ‘It was meant to be a house hunting trip. I stayed on after she left.’

  ‘Why Uruguay?’

  ‘It’s cheap. Sun. The sea –’

  She stood up and crossed the room until she was standing beside him at the window. ‘You’ve got the sea here.’

  ‘Uruguay’s a long way away.’

  ‘From what?’

  ‘Our old life. You.’

  ‘I was never in your life.’

  ‘Oh you were. Everything we’ve done – Laura and me – every decision we’ve made, we’ve made because of you.’

  Ignoring this, Anna said, ‘You travelled to Uruguay as Tom Bowen.’

  ‘I liked being Tom Bowen. I was going to contact you, from Uruguay. I wanted you to join me in Punte del Este.’

  ‘You wanted me to come to Uruguay?’

  ‘Would you have come?’

  When Anna didn’t answer, he said, ‘If you’d have come, I would have stayed. I wouldn’t have come back here.’

  ‘What about Martha?’

  ‘We’d have found a way –’

  Anna walked back into the middle of the room. ‘Why are you still married? Normal people get divorced.’

  ‘We talked about that. We talked about it a lot. The imminent divorce became a feature of our marriage.’

  ‘I don’t believe you. I don’t believe any of this. Why now? It’s been sixteen years, Bryan. You haven’t contacted me in over sixteen years, and now – this. Whatever this is. I was pregnant when I left for university. I asked you what we were going to do and you told me – you were the one who told me – to get an abortion. So that’s what I did, and I’m tired, Bryan. I’m tired of wondering what it would have been like, if I’d spent my life with you.’

  She started to cry and he tried to take hold of her, but she wouldn’t let him. ‘What are you doing here?’ she yelled. ‘What the fuck are you doing here? You chose Laura.’

  ‘I could give Laura the life she wanted. I didn’t know where to start with you. I did it so that we’d have this – so that I could feel the way I felt that day, seeing you for the first time again after all these years, the way I still feel.

  ‘You wanted to go. You didn’t want to stay. I couldn’t go with you. If you’d had the baby, you’d have stayed with me – you’d have ended up hating me and that would have destroyed me. I loved you too much to ask you to keep it.’

  ‘You’ve got no idea what you asked me to give up.’

  ‘You’d already left, Anna. You’d already left.’

  ‘Well, I’m back now.’

  They started to move towards each other.

  Neither of them had seen Laura’s car go past Roy, standing in the office doorway smoking again. They didn’t see the car pull into the bay next to the yellow Capri, or Laura get out and look up at the apartment. They didn’t hear her push open the front door, which Bryan hadn’t thought to shut, and they were only dimly aware of footsteps on the stairs – of Laura herself in the room behind them taking in the scene she’d foretold would happen at some point in all their lives. Maybe not quite like this, but this was the scene that had haunted her all her married life.

  A marriage she’d built from scratch, and it had been a grind from the beginning having Martha so young. She’d renounced romance for decades of life-threatening rows over spilt milk, and they’d survived – only to find Anna standing in the middle of their marriage now.

  Laura had known the risks as soon as they started talking about faking Bryan’s death. She’d known then that until he was pronounced officially dead, he was free . . . But the financial black hole they’d been in was threatening to swallow their marriage whole and the only way to hold onto to it was to give him up, but not to this – not to Anna.

  ‘Don’t touch
him,’ Laura said, automatically, staring from one to the other. She was breathing heavily and shaking uncontrollably, but didn’t care; no longer cared about anything. ‘I want to see what she does –’ Laura held onto the sofa, trying to get her breath back. ‘I want to see what she does when she knows everything because I know you haven’t told her everything.’

  ‘Laura, he chose you. We were both pregnant at the same time.’

  ‘I know – he told me. I got pregnant on purpose, and it worked, but only because he’s a coward. He was terrified of what you’d think.’

  Anna wasn’t looking at Bryan any more, she was looking at Laura. ‘About what?’

  ‘Terrified that one day you’d find out.’

  ‘About what?’

  ‘Him killing Roger Laviolette.’

  Anna carried on staring at her as Bryan took hold of Laura, pulling on her. She felt choked as she remembered finally who it was who’d let her out of the wash house that day – realised that she’d known all along, but somehow suppressed the memory.

  It was Bryan who let her out. Jamie Deane locked her in that day – the day Roger Laviolette died – and Bryan let her out.

  Then she remembered something else – that his left arm, stomach and some of his face had been covered in blood. The air in the wash house had been so full of blood she thought it was blood from the deer as he pushed past, but now – thinking about it pointedly, deliberately for the first time in years – she realised that Bryan had appeared in the doorway to the wash house already covered in blood, and that the reason he’d gone to the sink by the window was to wash it off.

  ‘I thought he’d come to let me out, but he hadn’t – he didn’t even see me. He was covered in blood – I forgot that,’ she said, shivering.

  The sky outside was becoming darker by the minute, but none of them made a move to switch on any lights.

  Anna turned to Bryan. ‘It was you. You killed him.’

  ‘I knew,’ Laura said, quietly. ‘I’ve always known. I realised early on that romance depended on ignorance so I gave romance up. I loved him harder than anyone ever loved him in his life before. That’s why he chose me; he chose me because I knew him. He loved you because you didn’t. Life’s not fair. If only, when you left, you’d given him up. I kept waiting to hear that you’d met someone, but you never did. You just kept waiting, and now he’s chosen you and I can’t live with that.’

  Bryan was shaking her so hard that she could no longer talk.

  ‘Stop it,’ Anna shouted, attempting to pull them apart. ‘Stop it!’

  But they ignored her. Laura’s eyes were fixed on Bryan – her body had gone slack. ‘Finish it,’ she said, ‘just finish it now.’

  Slamming her hands hard into Bryan’s chest, Anna pushed him back until he hit the wall near the front door.

  Laura stood motionless, watching them both as if they were no longer real. ‘I phoned Laviolette. I told him you were alive. I told him you were here.’

  Bryan stared at her. ‘D’you realise what you’ve done? Do you realise everything that you’ve done?’

  He turned, helpless, from Laura to Anna – who was staring out the window.

  ‘Laviolette?’

  She shook her head. ‘Your brother – Jamie.’

  The white transit van was parked at an angle across three bays.

  *

  Martha stood outside the school gates, jostled on all sides, looking for the now familiar white transit van. The road was chaotic – full of the usual coaches, cars, and streams of girls – but there was no sign of Jamie and his van. She didn’t know what to do. He’d been there every day since September; he’d become habit – the drive home with him in the van something she relied on. She was his reason for getting up in the morning, that’s what he told her; he said that getting out of bed when you had to was hard enough, but getting out when you didn’t have to was even harder.

  She crossed the road and sat down on the low brick wall circling the horse chestnut where she’d seen Bryan all those months ago, waiting. Today was a Thursday and on Thursdays they’d started going to the leisure pool at Whitley Bay because Martha was teaching Jamie to swim – or how not to drown, as she put it. They made a strange pair – the white sinewy, tattooed man with the shaved head, and the skinny, laughing girl – but the lifeguards had got used to them, looked out for them even, and made encouraging comments on Jamie’s progress.

  It had taken Martha a fortnight to get him to let go of the side, but now he was using a float with only one hand. They had a wave machine at the pool and a separate diving pool whose deep, narrow proportions and dark blue water terrified Jamie. The diving pool had an underwater window that Jamie stood shivering at as he watched Martha dive, waiting for her small body in its black school swim suit to cut through the liquid mass of blue. She would swim towards the window and put her hand against it – the flat palm an amphibious white against the glass, her face covered in goggles and an underwater smile that bubbles escaped from, the water around her full of her slow moving hair – until he banged on the glass, worried that she’d been under for too long. Then she would rise to the surface of the deep, narrow pool, breaking it with a spluttering laugh as she pushed her goggles up and swam to the steps.

  She waited on the wall until half four then made her way slowly to the metro station.

  The day felt suddenly all wrong – fathomless in the way it had the day her dad disappeared.

  She got out at Whitley Bay and caught a bus going up the coastal road towards Blyth. It wasn’t until she saw the line up of vast warehouses to her right that she realised she’d completely missed her stop. They were going past South Harbour on the outskirts of Blyth. She stayed on the bus as it made its way down Ridley Avenue, getting out on the edge of Ridley Park. She could walk to the Quayside from there – she hadn’t seen Anna in a long time.

  As Jamie shut the van door, he saw a man standing in the twelve-centimetre length of the wing mirror. The man was gaunt and had blond hair and looked nothing like he remembered his brother looking, and yet he knew – without a doubt – that the man was his younger brother, Bryan.

  He stood momentarily inert with disbelief that the man in the mirror was a reflection of something real; half expecting, as he turned round – which he now did – to find the Quayside behind him empty.

  It wasn’t.

  Bryan was still there – and he’d grown. He was no longer twelve centimetres tall, but well over six foot.

  The two men were suspended somewhere between grief and panic.

  In spite of everything, a brief joy – too instinctive to be suppressed – passed across both their faces. They were brothers, after all, and it had been a long time.

  Then there were the memories; unbidden, but as impossible to suppress as the brief joy they’d both just experienced – and so long forgotten they had no form as they fell shapelessly between them on the Quayside where they stood.

  Jamie remembered a silver stereo he used to have that he recorded songs on from the radio; a black and orange NCB jacket, which had only just been hung up on the back of the door and was swinging still . . . a pile of laundry on the bedroom floor and a woman’s legs in tights and slippers standing beside it . . . sellotape covering the holes in the carpet . . . him grabbing a red tractor out of Bryan’s hands, the tractor breaking and Bryan crying . . . a tea towel on top of a brown gas heater and the smell of the tea towel as it started to burn . . . a blue deck chair with a white rose motif on it, and their mother’s perfume . . . not their mother, just her perfume, which was dusty and sweet smelling because it had been saved for too long, for a life that never happened, and gone off . . . she’d used it all up the day she died because she knew it was the last time she was ever going to wear it. The wash house – the washing out on the line in the garden; the garden itself – had been full of the smell of it. He’d smelt it in his dreams ever since, and it was the smell of departure . . . unspeakable loss.

  Jamie felt suddenly close
r to this woman who was his mother than he ever had anybody. For the first time, he understood the creeping despair she must have felt when the one man capable of making her happy no longer had the time, energy or inclination to manufacture so much as a minute’s worth of joy between them, forcing her to first wait then lose hope then go looking for it elsewhere.

  She was a woman who loved to laugh; who felt that laughter was the best cure for the indignities life imposed. After the joy had gone out of the big things in life, she was happy to look for them in the little. It was after the joy went out of these as well that the despair set in. It was despair that sent her to Roger Laviolette, it had to be – that tight, airless man who was no match for his mother.

  ‘I loved her too,’ he said suddenly to Bryan, poised opposite him still – it was the first thing he’d said to him in twenty years.

  Afterwards, he wasn’t even sure he’d said the words out loud so he said them again. ‘I loved her too.’

  ‘Then why didn’t you do it? I waited and waited for you to do something.’ Bryan shifted position, distressed. ‘It was an accident,’ he finished helplessly. ‘I just wanted to look at the house, that’s all. I thought – I don’t know – I wasn’t even thinking about Roger Laviolette, I just wanted to see the place she’d gone to when she left us because part of me didn’t believe it existed. I went round the back . . . then I saw him, the kitchen door was open. He was sitting at the table mending something. There was this patch of white skin at the back of his neck. It . . .’ Bryan searched for the word; trying to articulate something not governed by reason, ‘bothered me. A lot. D’you remember how things used to bother me? Like that time I went through your drawers and cut up all your T-shirts? Well, it was like that only much worse.

  ‘There was a kid in a buggy beside him and I thought . . . I thought maybe it was his and her’s. That’s what I thought – without thinking. Of course it wasn’t,’ Bryan said – to himself – almost angry. ‘But the things is, that man was whistling, Jamie. There he was, mending a radio, whistling and the sun was shining into the kitchen, and it was like nothing had happened; like none of it could ever have happened. I half thought that if I went home then, I’d find her there doing the same thing . . . whistling in the sunshine. But that wasn’t true. So I picked up the radio and brought it down . . . on his head . . . hard. I kept on banging the radio on his head, and the kid was just staring at me.’ Bryan looked like he might laugh at this recollection. ‘There was blood, and he was moaning, and the whole place smelt of white spirits. He’d been using it to clean the radio and I must have knocked it over because I remember him trying to right the empty bottle, but his hand wasn’t working properly. I watched him stand up and go over to the cooker, and put the fucking kettle on or something and there was all this blood on his shoulders and running into his eyes and mouth. He’d stopped whistling by then, but he turned to me and said, ‘Rachel’s boy.’