by Meg Mason
I said, ‘I don’t want a baby.’
‘Not a baby – our baby. Can you imagine? My looks, your brains. How can you wait?’
‘I’m not waiting. I never want one. Neither do you.’
‘And yet, I just suggested it.’
‘You told me,’ I said his name because he wasn’t listening, ‘you told me the second time we met that you didn’t want children.’
He laughed. ‘I was front-running it, Martha, in case you turned out to be one of those women who is desperate for a –’ Jonathan interrupted himself. ‘Imagine a girl. Me with a daughter, a tribe of them actually. It would be phenomenal.’
Already and from then on, Jonathan was consumed by the idea, in the same way he would be if one of his university friends called to say they should go skiing in Japan ASAP or buy shares in a boat. He kicked the covers back and sprung off the bed, saying he was so convinced he could change my mind, he might as well put one in me now before he had to leave for the gym so that it was already underway by the time I did.
I laughed. He told me he was deadly serious, and went over to his wardrobes that looked like a stretch of mirrored wall.
My suitcases were in his way, open and empty but surrounded by the clothes that I had taken out the day I arrived and was still in the process of putting away. He asked me to take care of it while he was out because the whole area was starting to look like the square footage beneath a TK Maxx sale rail.
‘Have you ever seen inside a TK Maxx, Jonathan?’
‘I’ve heard tell.’
He opened the wardrobe doors and, as he was dressing said, ‘Apart from the risk of my daughter also being a slattern, you’d be a ravishing mother, ravishing.’ He jogged back to the bed, kissed me and said, ‘Fucking ravishing.’
Once he was gone, I went back into the en suite and started running the bath.
8
THE NIGHT I got engaged to Jonathan was also the night I found out, beside a row of commercial rubbish bins, that Patrick had been in love with me since 1994.
I had come down, hoping Ingrid might still be on the street. There was no one. I crossed over and stood under an awning, unready to go back upstairs. It was raining and water was sheeting off the sides and thundering onto the footpath. I had been there for a few minutes when Oliver and Patrick appeared out of the lobby. Seeing me, they bolted across and pressed in on either side. Oliver reached into his jacket pocket, took out a cigarette, lit it behind his hand and asked me what I was doing.
I said mindless breathing. He said ‘in that case’ and put the cigarette to my mouth. I inhaled and held in the smoke for as long as I could. Above the volume of the rain, Patrick said congratulations.
Oliver looked sideways at me. ‘Yes, bloody hell, that was quick work.’
I let go of the smoke and said yes, well. A taxi came around the corner and drove towards us, spraying water from puddles. Patrick said he’d actually come down to leave and might make a break for it. He turned his collar up and ran out.
Oliver took the cigarette back and I put my head on his shoulder, exhausted by the prospect of having to go back inside and talk to people.
He let me stand like that, then a moment later said, ‘So you’re sure about the getting married to Jonathan thing. He doesn’t seem especially –’
I lifted my head and frowned up at him. ‘Especially what?’
‘Especially your type.’
I said since he had known Jonathan for two and a half hours I wasn’t massively interested in his take on things. He offered the cigarette back and I accepted it, irritated by what he’d said, more at how sullen I’d sounded in reply.
Patrick had not stopped the taxi and was waiting for another one, unsheltered on the other side of the street. I smoked and stared ahead, aware that Oliver was observing me. After a minute he said, ‘So you’re clearly not with child then. In which case, what’s the rush?’
I began to say that I didn’t have any conflicting plans but stopped because acid was starting to come up my throat and then I was coughing.
After a series of painful swallows I said, ‘He loves me.’
Oliver took back the last inch of cigarette and with it in the corner of his mouth said, ‘Not the biggest newsflash though, is it? It’s been what, ten years?’
I asked him what he was talking about. ‘I’m talking about Jonathan.’
He said, ‘Shit, sorry. I thought you meant Patrick. I assumed you knew. Sensing now, you didn’t.’
I turned and looked at him properly. ‘Patrick does not love me Oliver, that’s ridiculous.’
He replied in the slow, over-articulated tone of someone trying to explain an obvious fact to a child. ‘Ah, yes he does. Martha.’
‘How do you know?’
‘How do you not know? Everyone else does.’
I asked him who everyone was in this instance.
‘All of us. Your family. My family. It’s Russell-Gilhawley lore.’
‘When did he tell you though?’
‘He didn’t need to.’
I said oh right. ‘So he’s never said so. You’re just guessing.’
He said no. ‘But it’s –’
‘Oliver, he’s basically my cousin. And I’m twenty-five. Patrick’s whatever, nineteen.’
‘Twenty-two. And he’s not, by any definition, your cousin.’
I looked out at the street again. Patrick had given up and was walking away from us with his head bowed into the rain.
I had never consciously considered any mannerism or physical aspect of his, but everything about him – the width of his shoulders, the shape of his back, the way he walked with his hands pressed so deep into his pockets that his arms were straight and the insides of his elbows faced forwards – were as familiar to me in that moment as any known fact or person in my life.
At the end of the street, Patrick glanced over his shoulder and briefly waved. It was too dark by then to see his face properly, but for the split second before he went on, turning the corner and disappearing, it felt as if he was looking only at me. And I realised then that it was true – Patrick loved me – and, in the next instant, that I had known it for a long time. It wasn’t sympathy I had seen on his face, earlier, at the table, and that was why it was unbearable: someone conveying love while everyone else laughed at me.
Oliver said nothing, only lifted one eyebrow when I told him it didn’t matter either way since I was in love with Jonathan, then I ran through the rain and back upstairs.
9
MY WEDDING TO Jonathan cost £70,000. He paid for all of it. I let it be organised by his step-sister who described herself as in events and shared his gift for creating unstoppable momentum. In emails that did not contain any capitals, she told me that she had about a million strings she could pull at soho house, or any hotel in w1, meaning she could get us a date in a month. She said she knew the gatekeeper at mcqueen and had gone to school with most of the girls at chloé so, whichever I preferred, and she didn’t have to make an appointment with any of the florists on the list (attached below) like a pleb, she could one hundred per cent just walk in and get everything sorted in half an hour, even if i was thinking out of season.
I said she could choose. At Soho House, wearing Chloé, holding lily of the valley flown in from somewhere, I told Jonathan I was so happy I felt like I was on drugs. He told me he was positively ecstatic, and actually was on drugs.
*
Patrick accepted the invitation to my wedding. Peregrine, walking the Camino de Santiago with Jeremy, sent his deepest regrets and an antique oyster knife.
*
We had a honeymoon in Ibiza, which was short but in dog years, proportionate to our marriage. Jonathan said it was a crime he hadn’t already taken me to his favourite place in the world which was, he promised, nothing like its reputation. I said I would go as long as we stayed somewhere that was far away from everything.
In the members’ lounge, waiting for our flight, I told Jonathan I had chang
ed my mind. He was sitting in a deep armchair reading the Weekend FT with his feet up on the low table in front of him.
‘Scratch too late, I’d say, darling. We’re boarding in twenty.’
I said no. ‘About having a baby.’
His campaign had been relentless over the six weeks since he first suggested it, and he seemed unsurprised to have broken me so quickly; he said in that case, I could look forward to being thoroughly knocked up by the time we got back to London, unaware that the effort he had invested in changing my mind had been wasted. I had flushed the pills that I told him were birth control, and the pills that really were, down the toilet, while he was on his way to the gym.
It was not my intention, but while the bath was running I looked in the mirror and remembered how I had appeared in it on the night of Jonathan’s dinner, the rictus expression on my face. I remembered the minutes after he proposed, standing in front of my family while they laughed and laughed at the idea of me being a mother. Jonathan did not think it was hilarious any more. He thought I would be a fucking ravishing mother. Standing over the toilet I pressed the pills out of the foil one by one. They were already dissolving in the water before I pushed its hidden flush.
Once Jonathan had gone back to his newspaper I looked around the airport lounge for a moment, then got up to get a drink. A woman in the next circle of chairs was so enormously pregnant she had balanced a small plate of sandwiches on the top of her stomach. As I passed her, I tucked my hair behind my ears, both sides at once to hide my face because I was smiling in a way that would make me seem mad.
Jonathan and I flew business class. We drank champagne from miniature beakers. I found out that my new husband owned an eye mask that he had bought in a shop, not retained from a previous flight. All the way there, I thought about my baby.
*
We got to the villa in the early afternoon. While I was unpacking, Jonathan suggested a swim followed by some pre-prandial fornicating. I told him I felt tired, that I would sleep while he swam and join him for the sex part. He had already changed into his floral trunks and did his famous impression of a sulking child on his way to the door – the bottom lip, the crossed arms, the stomping. I had a shower and got into bed.
The housekeeper woke me up, apologising that she needed to come in and close the shutters to keep the mosquitos out now that the sun was setting. She said the husband would be unhappy to come back and find she had let the beautiful wife get eaten to the death on the honeymoon. I asked if she knew where the husband was. He had gone in the taxi to the town and even though, she said, the husband had told her he would be back at eight, it was nearly nine and she did not know what to do with the dinner that had been ready for a long time.
I ate on the terrace, at a table that had been carefully set for two and was hastily reset for one while I stood waiting. Excessive sad-eyed smiling, and fussing with napkins and glasses, constant coming in and out to check if the lady likes what she is eating and if she would like more candle for the mosquito and compliments on her youth are the international signs for your marriage is bad.
Afterwards I lay on a lounger beside the pool with a towel around my shoulders, looking at the sea, which rose and fell on the other side of the low stone wall, black and straggled with bits of goldish moonlight. I stayed there until midnight. Jonathan came back early the next morning, his septum crusted with what could have been the fine white sand Ibiza’s beaches are famous for.
*
While Jonathan had conceded to stay somewhere that was far away from anything, he couldn’t bear days of it being just the two of us. I could not bear nights of it being just the five hundred of us at clubs he said he had been to once or twice, and where he would invariably turn out to be well known. He promised I would have fun if I let myself and I stayed for as long as I could each time, but when I became panicked by the music that sounded like the soundtrack to a session of electric shock therapy, we’d agree that there was probably no point. I took long taxi rides back to the villa by myself and went to bed.
The amount of sex he’d told me we’d be having – a medically inadvisable amount – was not had. Jonathan was too dazed when he came back in the morning, too haggard in the afternoons, too agitated as it got towards his standard departure time. The only time he attempted it, returning to the villa after a twenty-six hour absence once and finding me still awake, I pushed him off me and told him my period had started. He got up and struggled back into his jeans, saying too loudly that if girls got their periods at thirteen or something, surely by twenty-five I should know how to game the system. I said, ‘It’s not the fucking stock market, Jonathan.’ He didn’t respond, except to say to himself as he kicked his shirt up off the floor, that with any luck the taxi that had just dropped him off might still be outside.
A moment later I heard tyres on the gravel, and then I was alone again.
*
Although he accepted the invitation, Patrick did not come to my wedding. He called my mother in the morning and said he had fallen off his bike.
*
In the short time we’d known each other, Jonathan had never been exposed to the one of me who can cry for days and days, without being able to say why, or when I am going to stop. It began on our early flight back to London. I took the window seat and, after watching the island recede beneath us and the view become sea, I put a pillow against the cabin wall and rested my head against it. When I closed my eyes, tears started to slip down my face. Jonathan was choosing a movie and didn’t notice.
I went to bed as soon as we got back to the apartment. Jonathan said he was going to sleep in another room, since I was obviously coming down with some hideous flu thing – why else the trembling and looking like death on legs and the weird breathing – and he had no interest whatsoever in catching it.
He went back to work in the morning. I didn’t get up then, or the next day. I stopped leaving the apartment. In the daytime, I could not make the rooms dark enough. Light sliced through the curtains, found cracks under the pillows and T-shirts I put over my head and hurt my eyes even when, trying to sleep, I covered them with my hands.
In ascending order, Jonathan said when he came home in the evenings and found me still there:
Are you sick?
Should I be calling someone?
Genuinely, Martha, you’re giving me the creeps.
Ah, what the fuck?
It looks like you’ve had another productive day, darling.
Do you think we could find it in ourselves to return our sister’s calls so our husband isn’t assaulted by her messages while he is at work?
I might as well go out then. No, truly, don’t get up.
God, you’re like some kind of black hole sucking in all my energy – a force field of misery that just drains me.
Feel free to avail yourself of another bedroom if this is going to be you, in perpetuity.
Weeks passed that way. Letters came from my work, which I did not open. Then Jonathan booked a buying trip and said he would be gone for ten days; in that time, I should, with all love and respect, think about skedaddling. But, he said, hand on the door frame, he had Googled it and I would be pleased to know that my chastity had spared us the faff of an actual divorce. A downloadable PDF, £550 and six to eight months of twiddling our thumbs and it would be, at least in the eyes of the law, as though the whole thing had never happened.
As soon as Jonathan left the apartment, I turned my phone on and texted Ingrid. She arrived with Hamish half an hour later and helped me get up. While she worked my arms into my coat, Hamish filled my suitcases with whatever he thought might be mine.
*
The lift dropped us to the ground floor and as the lobby doors slid open, air hit my face, hot and cold and human-smelling, exhaust and asphalt. I dragged it into my lungs like I had been too long under water, and for the first time in weeks I felt like I wasn’t about to die.
My father was double-parked on the other side of the street. Behind
the car was the row of commercial rubbish bins, next to an awning. I was too worn out by pain to think, any more, about what would have happened if instead of running back inside, I had run in the other direction, the way Patrick had gone.
With her arm through mine, Ingrid led me to the car and helped me into the front. My father leaned over to do up my seatbelt and at every set of traffic lights on the journey home, he reached across the divide and squeezed my hand, saying my lovely girl, my lovely girl, until the lights changed and he had to drive on.
As he parked in front of the house, I saw my mother standing in the front window. I knew everything she was going to say, if not the order in which she would say it on this – my latest – occasion. I was not sick, I was highly strung. I could not self-regulate. And if I had a depressive bent, I also had an unbelievable knack for timing my dark periods with, for example, other people’s career-making exhibitions. I thrived on negative attention and if I had to break something or scream or, she would say in this case, leave a marriage to get it, I would. But, like a toddler flailing on the floor of a shop, the best thing was to ignore me. And once I had calmed down, I could be invited to consider how my behaviour affected other people, setting back their careers, costing them a son-in-law they’d come to adore even more intensely since they first discovered him to be their fellow in the art world, a reciprocal flirt, someone who always supported the finishing of a bottle and the opening of another one.
I did not want to get out of the car.
Hamish and my father went in with the bags. Ingrid waited until I said okay, and walked me inside. By then, my mother was elsewhere. Ingrid took me up to my room. The bed had been made up and next to it, on a chair that had always been my bedside table, there was a ceramic jar full of ivy branches, cut from a vine that grew up the side of my mother’s shed. I thanked Ingrid for putting it there. She said, ‘I didn’t. Here –’ she pulled the covers back.
