by Meg Mason
‘I wanted to say –’
‘Hang on.’ My sister got off the table and retrieved a Matchbox car from a puddle, took out her phone and sent a series of messages before she came back and started drying a different section of table with a tissue she took a long time to locate in her pocket.
‘Ingrid?’
‘What? Go. I said go.’ She didn’t sit on the table again, just perched on its edge.
I apologised. It was a version of what I’d composed in the car, except circuitous and halting, with endless repetitions and false starts, more and more excruciating as I laboured on. I felt like a child at a piano lesson, stumbling over a piece I had played perfectly at home.
My sister became visibly more irritated the longer I went on. Except for saying, ‘I already know all this’ as I returned again to the section about wanting children, before my anticlimactic finish. ‘So that’s it probably.’
She said right and pressed her fingers into a rib on one side. The thing was, she told me, staring ahead, I had worn her out. I had worn everybody out. It had all got to be too much. She couldn’t care for me any more as well as her children. She said that she was going to forgive me at some point but it wasn’t now.
I said okay, and thought to go, but Ingrid shifted along and asked me if I was going to sit down or not. For a minute we watched her sons who were by then trying to make a ramp from planks of wood and a brick. Then I said, ‘They’re so amazing.’ Ingrid shrugged. ‘No really. They’re amazing.’
‘What are you basing that on?’
‘Because they were babies five minutes ago and now look at what they’re doing.’
‘I guess. Riding bikes.’
I said no. ‘I mean repurposing the shit out of found objects.’
Ingrid covered her face with her hands and shook her head as if she was crying.
I waited. A minute later she said, ‘Okay fine’ and took her hands away. ‘I have forgiven you.’ Her eyes were red, and rimmed with tears but she was laughing. ‘You are still the worst. Literally, you are the worst person there is.’
I told her I knew that.
‘Why,’ she said, with sudden sadness in her voice, ‘why did you lie to me about not wanting children? Why couldn’t you trust me?’
‘I could trust you. I couldn’t trust myself.’
She said why not.
‘Because you could have talked me into it. Like Jonathan. If you had told me I would be a good mother, I would have let myself believe you.’
Ingrid leaned against me so our arms were touching.
‘I never would have said that.’
‘You did say it. You told me all the time I should have a baby.’
‘No, I never would have said you’d be a good mother. You’d be shit at it.’
She kicked my foot and said God, Martha. ‘I love you so much it actually hurts my body. Can you get me that?’ She pointed to the plastic bag. I picked it up off the ground and Ingrid said, looking into it, ‘This is the expensive kind. Thank you’ and for a minute I felt like we were together inside our force field.
Then, shouting. A fight had broken out over the brick.
Ingrid said well this is over and told me I was welcome to go and sort it out, she needed to go inside and make their tea.
We both got up and I went over to the boys, all now holding sticks.
She was nearly at the house when she called my name and I turned around and saw her, walking backwards over the last bit of lawn, and I just remember as she reached her arms up to tighten her ponytail, a cloud crossed quickly in front of the sun so the light was flickering on her face and on her hair as she shouted, ecstatically, to all of us, ‘My famous pasta-with-nothing-on-it.’
*
Later, while they were in the bath, we sat outside the door, leaning against the wall. We were talking about something else when Ingrid said, ‘If you have been better since June or whatever, why are you still behaving like you used to? I mean, to Patrick. I’m not judging. It’s just that, if you’re feeling more rational, why isn’t it necessarily, you know, manifesting outwardly.’ She winced like someone anticipating an explosion.
‘Because I don’t know how else to be with him.’ I said I know it’s not an excuse.
‘No, I get it. However many years versus seven months. But you need to figure it out.’
I told her I didn’t feel ready to do that, to see him, and I knew that I would not be able to forgive him anyway.
‘Do you know where he is?’
‘London.’
‘Do you know where though?’
‘No. He’s probably got the flat back.’
‘He’s getting it back but for now he’s at Winsome and Rowland’s.’ Ingrid looked grave.
I asked her why that mattered. ‘Winsome and Rowland are away.’
‘But Jessamine’s there.’
I laughed and said if there was one thing I had never worried about, it was Patrick being with someone who wasn’t his wife.
Even though I had made him leave, and punished him relentlessly for months so that he would, and I had told him that I did not love him any more – calling it out after him as he walked out of our bedroom for the last time – I felt as if I had been shoved when Ingrid said, ‘But Martha as far as Patrick is concerned you’re not his wife.’
36
INGRID MADE ME wait while she searched in a drawer for her key to Belgravia. ‘In case, in case.’
I had already accepted a muesli bar and a bottle of water and a three-disc self-help audio book that she’d turned up in the drawer first. In 21 days, I could master the art of self-forgiveness.
I told her I didn’t need the key. ‘If he isn’t there, I’ll just go home. There’s no other reason to go in.’
‘Yes there is. You might need the bathroom or something.’
She found it and held it out. When I wouldn’t take it, she grabbed my hand and tried to close my fingers around it.
‘What the fuck is that?’ She was holding my thumb.
‘The Hebrides.’
‘Right. Of course it is. Please can you just put this in your bag?’
I took the key so she would stop talking about it.
*
Patrick wasn’t there. I knocked and waited on the steps outside my aunt’s house until my face ached and my hands went numb inside my pockets. I went back to the car and sat, with my coat on, for an hour. The square was deserted. Nobody came and went. It had only been six weeks since Patrick left but, within days, time had acquired an unreal quality and my loneliness became so total that now – sitting in the car – it seemed to challenge the existence of things.
Another hour passed. Still nobody came. I began to feel delirious. There was only cold. I Googled ‘hypothermia in car’ but while my fingers were trying to find each key, my phone died and that was why, I told myself, I needed to go inside. But it was a compulsion to see, if not Patrick, then something of his. After weeks alone, culminating in these two hours in the car, seeing nothing out the window except darkness and an absence of human beings, even he no longer seemed real.
*
Everything was wrong inside. I stood in the foyer with Ingrid’s key in my hand, unnerved.
It was Winsome’s rule that personal effects were not allowed in public areas, but Jessamine’s things were everywhere, her shoes kicked into all corners of the foyer, clothes in piles down the length of the hall. I took my coat off and went into the formal living room. There was a wine bottle and two glasses, empty except for brown sediment in the bottom, sitting directly on a walnut end table.
One year, drunk on Christmas Day, my mother told everyone that when Winsome died, her ghost would return to haunt the formal living room terrorising us all with cries of ‘Wet on wood! Wet on wood!’ and invisibly shifting coasters through the air. I went over and picked up the glasses to take down to the kitchen, collecting other things as I moved through the room, last of all a phone charger and a pink plastic bottle of nail polish
remover. That my cousin would put a cosmetic solvent on the lacquered lid of her mother’s piano felt like the totality of her nature. I wanted to leave. But nothing I’d collected in there or as I progressed towards the kitchen stairs belonged to Patrick. I left it all heaped at the entrance and went back to the main stairs.
His suitcase and things he must have acquired since leaving were in boxes, stacked outside Oliver’s room, the boxes taped shut and numbered, I knew, to correlate with a spreadsheet that would describe the contents of each. I didn’t open them. The numbers were handwritten. That was enough.
On the way back to the stairs, I went into Jessamine’s room to use her bathroom. Patrick’s watch was on her bedside table beside a water glass and a purple hair elastic with blonde hairs stuck in the metal bit. I went over and picked it up. I felt sick, not because it was there. Only because of its intrinsic familiarity, the weight of it as I turned it over in my hand and the recollection that came with it, of the particular way he put it on, the first time I’d seen him do it. I did not feel entitled to the memory. Patrick wasn’t mine. I put the watch down and went into the bathroom.
In front of the mirror, I wiped my face with tissues, the floor where he had delivered my sister’s baby in reflection behind me. A rubbish bin overflowing with Jessamine’s cosmetic debris was beside the toilet. I went over and dropped the tissues into it. They fell on top of a foil sheet, shaped for a single tablet. That was the other one thing I never worried about: Patrick being sent out to buy the morning-after pill for someone who wasn’t his wife.
At some point, driving out of London, I realised I had forgotten my coat in the rush to leave and became less certain, as I kept going, that I had closed the front door.
*
For the week after that, I packed the Executive Home, moving through the house filling boxes that, had I labelled them, would have said: Loose cutlery tipped in from the drawer. Can of sardines in oil/birth certificates. A cushion, a hairdryer, a gravy boat wrapped in a duvet cover.
I fed myself blue Gatorade and water crackers from the emptying pantry and slept on the sofa in my clothes.
It snowed the day I left. In the morning, two men arrived in a truck to meet all my removal and storage needs, per the promise painted on its flank. They began loading it while I was still finishing our bedroom. Except for one suitcase, Patrick had left everything behind.
I packed his wardrobe and dresser, then opened the drawer of his bedside table. On top of other things was a book my father had given him for Christmas a year ago, which Patrick had persisted in reading, in spite of it being about poetry, not even actual poetry. I picked it up and opened it to a section marked by some palm cards, their exposed edges bent and soft.
He had been going to say, ‘No doubt my wife will correct me later and insist it was just for the open bar, but we are all here for the love of this uncommon, beautiful, maddening woman – who does not, in my opinion, look a day over thirty-nine and twelve months.’ He was going to say, ‘I wish it wasn’t the case, but everyone knows Martha is the only thing I’ve ever wanted in my life …’ I couldn’t read any more. I slid them back into the book and returned it to the drawer, instead of packing all its contents, I went around the entire cabinet with tape. The men came to the door and I told them I was finished, they could take everything now.
They left and I walked through the house, holding the address they had given me for a storage unit somewhere in London. I knew each dent in the skirting boards, each chip in the doors, all the places on the living room walls where we had once tried to paint over marks left by a previous tenant. Patrick bought paint in the wrong finish and still now, they stood out like a solar system of high-gloss patches in a vast matte universe. The taupe carpet bore the impressions of our furniture, dust sat like strips of grey felt along the top of each non-standard socket, their uses never determined. For seven years, the Executive Home had exuded a sort of psychic hostility, perceptible only to me. I do not know why, in my last hour there, it offered me a sense of home. I went upstairs again to see the box room.
Outside its small window, snow was settling into the boughs of the plane tree’s leafless branches. I locked it open and went back to the doorway, remaining for a moment. A small flurry of flakes blew in, drifted to the floor and melted into the carpet.
*
The agent had let himself into the house and was downstairs in the kitchen with a couple, younger than Patrick and me. He was saying something about quality appliances. I glanced in, unnoticed as I passed on my way to the door, and saw the wife open the oven, screw up her nose and say, ‘Babe, look.’ I closed myself out, put my key through the mailbox and drove away.
*
Past the gates of the Executive Development, I pulled over and parked next to a break in the tall border hedge. I went through it, coming out to the broad expanse of field carved into allotments. It was deserted, the earth was bare and ugly and sodden underfoot. I did not know why I wanted to stop and go in; I had never come by myself before. Without Patrick I couldn’t find the garden that belonged to us, except by running up and down the paths between them, eyes streaming when I went against the wind, hair wrapping around my face when it was behind me.
I saw our shed, finally, and ran over other people’s gardens to get to ours – a square of black mud, and orange leaves submerged in the water that had pooled in the furrows Patrick had dug. Apart from those, and tendrils of old potato plants flattened by rain, there was nothing to show of his work. Winter had erased the hours he had spent here, by himself, or with me sitting and watching him push the spade in with his foot, pull out weeds, things that had gone to seed.
The door of the shed was unlatched and banging in the wind. People had carried off his tools, and the chair he’d bought me. The only thing they’d left, because it couldn’t be moved, was the fallen tree.
I went to sit down but remembering caused me to kneel in front of it in the dirt. And then, to fold my arms over it, to sink my head, breathing in the wet wood, hearing Patrick say how far along are you? Could I have a few days? I said I’m not going to wait for no reason, Patrick. I will see you at home.
Soon I was so cold I had to get up. I could not bear to leave. I had been pregnant once. I had been pregnant, here, and that made it sacred, this square of black mud that I would be abandoning to the elements. Leaving something that belonged to us unprotected from anyone who wanted it and thought it was no one’s anyway – there was nothing here except for a dead log. I picked up a twig and pushed it into the ground, and made myself walk back to the car, leaning into the wind.
In the immediate quiet of closing the door, I remembered Patrick telling me, as we drove to the Executive Home for the first time, that soon we would be self-sufficient, in the area of lettuce. I laughed, and I was still crying. Briefly, that first summer in Oxford, it had been true.
*
A mile on, I put the address into Google Maps, even though I had lived at Goldhawk Road since I was ten, bar the interruption of two short marriages. As I joined the motorway, the map lady said, in fifty-four miles take the left exit and when I missed it, make a U-turn as soon as possible.
37
THE FRONT DOOR of my parents’ house was ajar. I went in and found Ingrid on the sofa in my father’s study, sitting, with her feet on the ground, not lying the length of it with her feet on the armrest or extended in some way up the wall. And her eyes were fixed on my father, who was standing in the centre of the room, preparing to read something from a book open in his hands like a hymnal. And my mother was with them, holding a small feather duster – the likes of which I had never seen in the house – aloft over some object on the mantelpiece.
The impression they gave was of actors in a play, waiting for the curtain to open on them but too slow off their mark, so that just for a second the audience sees them that way – frozen in naturalistic positions – before they snap to action.
The mother starts waving the duster, the father begins reading f
rom the middle of a sentence, the character of the sister leans forward like she is listening. That she is getting her phone out is obvious to those on the other side of the fourth wall. The father looks up and stops reading because another actor – clearly, the complicating character – is coming in, managing many bags. He invites her to sit down and the mother goes out saying something about coffee, and having enquired about her drive down, the father says, ‘Now where was I up to? Yes, here we go’ and starts again. One sister gives up the pretence of paying attention and looks openly at her phone.
The other one stands where she is, does not put down her bags but listens, giving the audience time to wonder about her backstory, why she has come, what she wants, what obstacles are ahead of her and how they will be resolved in ninety minutes. Whether there will be an interval. If the parking machine takes cards.
‘The great revelation perhaps never did come. Instead there were little daily miracles, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark; here was one.’ He finishes. ‘Isn’t that brilliant, girls? It’s –’
‘Virginia Woolf.’
Ingrid said it without taking her eyes off her phone but then, anticipating his enquiry, lifted her head and said, ‘It was on Instagram.’
He said, ‘What is the Instagram?’
‘Here.’ She thumbed the screen and held the phone out to my father who took it and did a primitive imitation of scrolling that involved all the fingers on his right hand and a palsied flicking action with his wrist. ‘You can put any nonsense you like on it, even poetry, and someone will like it. One finger. Dad. Go up from the bottom.’
He mastered it and minutes later, my father declared @author_quotes_daily a repository of genius and then asked how much it cost to join. Ingrid told him his only outlay would be buying a mobile that didn’t have an aerial, which she said she would do for him online, to the expression of uncertainty that formed on his face at the mention of a retail interaction.
