Sorrow and Bliss

by Meg Mason

  He said, ‘It was fucking awful.’

  Ingrid said fucking car alarm, fucking pantry moths, an actual fucking sultana in my bra, and it was unshocking. But I had never heard Patrick swear, not once in our lives, and said by him, the force and violence of the word made me recoil.

  He said sorry.

  ‘No. I’m sorry. Keep going. I want to know.’

  ‘You know already. It’s everything your mother told you.’ He put the journal aside. ‘Just that it was always about you. I know you were sick but I was the one who had to absorb all your pain and have your rage directed at me, just because I was there. It took over everything. I feel like my entire life has been subsumed by your sadness. I tried, God Martha, I tried, but it didn’t matter what I did. A lot of the time it seemed like you actively wanted to be miserable but you still expected constant support. Sometimes I just wanted to go to a restaurant based on the food not on whether the manager looked depressed or the carpet reminded you of something bad that had happened to you once. Sometimes I just wanted us to be normal.’

  He paused, clearly uncertain whether to articulate his next thought. He did. ‘You threw stuff at me.’

  I looked down. I thought, perceiving myself from outside, I am hanging my head. I am bowed by shame.

  ‘I can’t describe what that was like, Martha. I really can’t, and you expected me to just get over it. You would say you wanted to talk about things but you didn’t. You decided that because I don’t provide a continuous emotional commentary and describe every single feeling I have as it’s occurring that I don’t feel anything. You told me I was blank. Do you remember? You said I was just the outline of where a husband should be.’

  I said I didn’t remember. I did. It was in a department store. We were buying a mattress. I kept asking for his opinion. He kept saying he didn’t mind either way, until I stormed out and did not come home for so many hours without telling him where I was that by the time I got back he had called everyone he could think of to see if they had heard from me. ‘I mean yes, sorry. I do. I’m sorry.’

  ‘You constantly accused me of being passive and not wanting anything but I wasn’t allowed to want anything. That’s how it worked. Accepting whatever I got was the only way to keep the peace. And even –’ Patrick felt the back of his neck, pressing his fingers into a muscle, looking as if he’d located some source of pain ‘– you’ve known me this long but you think the first thing I’d do after I left you is go and sleep with your cousin.’

  ‘No I –’ I did.

  ‘It belonged to one of her Rorys. He had the same watch as me. But you didn’t even question if there could be another explanation or consider you could be wrong. What’s the point, if that’s who you think I am?’

  I said I am so sorry. ‘I’m the worst person in the world.’

  ‘No you’re not.’ Patrick’s hand came down in a fist and he hit the arm of the sofa. ‘You’re not the best person in the world either, which is what you really think. You’re the same as everybody else. But that’s harder for you, isn’t it. You’d rather be one or the other. The idea you might be ordinary is unbearable.’

  I did not dispute him. Only said, I’m sorry it was fucking awful.

  ‘Some of the time.’ He sighed and picked up the journal again and let it fall open anywhere. ‘Most of the time it was amazing. You made me so happy, Martha. You have no idea. You have no idea how good it was. That’s the part I’m finding hardest to deal with. That you were oblivious to everything that was good about it. You couldn’t see it.’

  I told Patrick I could now.

  ‘I know.’

  I watched him turn back, in search of some particular page, scan it silently for a second and then he started reading aloud: ‘At a wedding shortly after our own, I followed Patrick through the dense crowd at the reception to a woman who was standing by herself.’

  I touched one of my ears and felt very hot.

  ‘He said instead of looking at her every five minutes and feeling sad I should just go over and compliment her hat.’ Patrick looked up. ‘Did I?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I don’t remember that. I just remember –’ he smiled vaguely ‘– at the time thinking you were so, I mean who would care so much about some woman who can’t get an hors d’oeuvre in her mouth, but you were beside yourself. You looked like you were in physical pain. You just talked and talked and talked until she was okay. That’s what I, that’s the kind of thing –’ He trailed off, and turned somewhere else in the journal and said, ‘This is brilliant. Really Martha.’

  I asked him if he had known today was our wedding anniversary when he texted about meeting.

  ‘Yes, sorry. It wasn’t on purpose. I just needed to get things done.’

  I said, ‘Anyway, I should go.’ He handed me the journal.

  We both stood up.

  ‘Okay, well.’

  ‘Yes, great.’

  I said goodbye and it wasn’t enough, one word, too quotidian to contain the end of the world. But it was all there was. I started walking towards the lift.

  Patrick said Martha, wait.

  ‘What?’

  ‘You were right. I did know there was something wrong. Not to start with but the last few years.’ He looked, suddenly, ill. ‘I knew it wasn’t you. I knew there was something wrong but I was just trying to keep going. I felt like I couldn’t face the whole process. Or I was scared that we’d find out and it would be something we couldn’t deal with and it would be the end. And sometimes, you’re right as well, I didn’t mind everyone thinking I was this incredible husband, because I felt useless, most of the time. But the thing –’ He broke off and then, with uncut anguish, Patrick said, ‘The thing I am most ashamed of is saying you shouldn’t be a mother. It’s not true. I was so angry.’ It was just the worst thing he could think of.

  I asked him to stop talking but he didn’t. ‘I can’t ask you to forgive me. It’s beyond apology. I just want you to know that I understand what I did, and that whatever we both end up doing, I have to rebuild my life with that reality in it, that I was intentionally cruel, to my own wife.’

  There was a noise from another aisle. Something being dropped on a metal floor, someone shouting. After it echoed out I said, ‘I should have told you I wanted her. At the time. I should have told you then.’

  ‘How do you know it was a her?’

  ‘I just did.’

  ‘What would you have called her?’

  I said, ‘I don’t know.’

  But her name was written down, so many times in the book.

  Patrick spoke it aloud. He said, yes. It would have been good.

  I looked at the ceiling and pushed my hands upwards over my face to get rid of more tears from what seemed like a special well of them reserved for her and apparently, fathomless. ‘You must think I’m despicable.’

  ‘I don’t,’ Patrick said. ‘You thought it was the right thing to do. You thought it was best for her, even though you wanted her so much. That’s how I know –’ he said, sorry, maybe this is a bad thing to say ‘– but that’s how I know you were supposed to be a mother. You put her above yourself. That’s what mothers do, isn’t it?’ He said obviously, I’m only guessing.

  I could not keep standing up. Patrick moved aside and I took steps back to the sofa. And he sat next to me, and let me lie with my head on his lap, and put his arm over me, it felt like a weight, and I cried and cried and cried, from the bottom of myself, and when I finally sat up again, I saw tears in his eyes too – Patrick, who once told me that he hadn’t cried since his first day of boarding school when his father shook his hand and said goodbye then drove out the school gates while his seven-year-old son ran after the car. I pulled my sleeve over my hand and wiped his face then mine. I couldn’t think of what to say. Just, eventually, ‘This is all such a big pity.’

  I meant it seriously. I asked him why he was laughing.

  He said he wasn’t. ‘You’re actually not like the rest of us. Th
at’s all.’

  ‘Neither are you, Patrick.’

  Then it was over and we stood up and said goodbye again. It was something else, the whole world was in it.

  I was a distance along the corridor when Patrick called out. ‘It makes a good story Martha. The way you wrote it.’

  I glanced back and said okay.

  ‘Someone – they should make it into a movie.’

  There was more noise from the other aisle, I turned and walked backwards, shouting. ‘I don’t think in a movie, the denouement – I don’t think the final parting can take place at EasyStore Brent Cross.’

  Patrick said, ‘You’re probably –’ I spun back to the lift and ran. I didn’t want to hear the rest.

  *

  The man behind the desk pointed out that I was off again. Presumably I’d be back later. I pushed through the doors without acknowledging him. The light outside was so bright I walked into it with my hand shielding my eyes.

  *

  I was on the platform waiting for the next train, with my bag on my lap, holding my phone. If I believed that the universe communicated with human beings through signs and wonders and social media I would have thought when I opened Instagram, that the first, minute-old post on my feed was a supernatural message, channelled through @author_quotes_daily, meant solely for me.

  A headlight appeared in the tunnel. I screen-shotted it – I would write it down once I was on the train, in letters large enough so that all the empty space on the last page of the journal would be filled. But the train stopped and I got on and there were no seats. I never wrote it down. I can’t remember where it came from. But it plays all the time in my head, repeating itself like a phrase of music, the recurring line of a poem. ‘You were done being hopeless.’

  You were done, you were done, you were done being hopeless.

  41

  LAST NIGHT PATRICK came in while I was watching a movie Ingrid recommended, as a shit remake of a movie that was shit to begin with. I told him we could turn it off.

  He sat down and said because it was based on a true story, I obviously wanted to watch the entire thing, just for the words that come up afterwards. Someone-someone died at eighty-three. The painting was never found.

  He said, ‘How things end is your favourite part. Also I’m too tired to talk.’ I started talking. He said, ‘Genuinely, Martha. I’m too tired to talk’ and closed his eyes.

  *

  This is how it ends.

  *

  A few weeks ago I took my father to a bookshop in Marylebone to see the display in the window. For a long time he stood on the curb and stared at it with the expression of someone who cannot work out what they’re looking at.

  He is the Instagram poet, Fergus Russell. He has one million followers.

  The book, which occupied the window by itself, is the anthology of his most liked poems. Reading an early review, my mother said, ‘Finally, Fergus, you’ve got your definite article.’ He said there should be a verb form of the adjective forthcoming. ‘For when an anthology that’s been forthcoming for fifty-one years forthcomes.’

  It began to rain while we were still outside the shop, harder and harder, but my father seemed not to notice. When I saw that water, overspilling the gutter, was running over the tops of his shoes, I made him come inside with me so I could find the manager.

  They shook hands and my father asked if he could sign a small number of copies but it was fine if they would rather he didn’t. He offered to show his driver’s licence to prove he really was Fergus Russell. The manager patted his pockets for a pen and said it was fine; there was a picture of him on the back cover. He told my father it was their fastest seller since the bottom fell out of the adult colouring-book market.

  A week after publication, my father’s editor had called and said, according to early data, on its first day it moved 334 units – unheard of in poetry – and that was just in bookshops in central London.

  Winsome put on a dinner for him at Belgravia. Everyone came back. It was the first time we had all been together since Patrick and I had separated. Our family treated us like we had just got engaged. Ingrid said we should make the most of it and set up a registry at Peter Jones.

  As the others were sitting down, Winsome sent me into Rowland’s study to get something. The door of an immense armoire behind his desk was ajar. Stacked inside were dozens of copies of my father’s book, some unwrapped, others still in the plastic and paper bags of bookshops in central London. I opened other cupboards. They were full of the same thing. I closed them quietly and left the room, despising Rowland for buying 334 copies of my father’s book as a private joke against him.

  Back in the dining room, Rowland was berating Oliver for the profligate amount of gravy on his plate. Hearing him, I realised it could only be from kindness that my uncle would have driven the Twatmobile from bookshop to bookshop, cleaning them out of stock, hating to spend money so much that his shower soap is a theoretical construct. As I edged behind his chair Rowland turned to my father on his other side and said loudly that as far as he was concerned, it wasn’t poetry unless it rhymed so there was one sale he could bloody well forget. I patted his shoulder. He ignored me.

  I didn’t tell anyone, except Patrick later, about what I’d seen. Once the book began selling in the thousands, I knew it couldn’t only be to Rowland any more.

  It took my father half an hour to sign the window copies and the pile on the front table. The manager put Autographed First Edition stickers on their covers before stacking them back, then took his phone out to take a photo. As he arranged the shot, my father stepped to the side. The manager signalled for him to move back. ‘Oh right, right,’ my father said. ‘With me in it,’ then, sheepishly, ‘Could you also get one of me and my daughter?’

  Afterwards, we walked down Marylebone High Street towards Oxford Street, sharing my father’s umbrella. He asked me if I had any plans and when I said I didn’t, he told me he would like to buy me an ice cream. Because the sight of an adult eating ice cream in public has always filled me with inexplicable grief and still does, I said I would let him as long as the event could take place inside.

  Further down, we found a café and sat in the window. The waiter came and put metal bowls of gelato in front of us and left again. My father said, ‘This is one of the ice creams I couldn’t pay for myself when you were growing up’ and then moved on to the topic of what it had been like to see his own book in a shop because I couldn’t reply.

  He said at the end, ‘Of course, it will be your turn next. Your book in a shop window.’

  My ice cream had melted and dripped off the spoon when I picked it up. I made a track through the puddle with my finger and said, ‘The Collected Funny Food Columns of Martha Russell Friel.’

  My father said I was very funny, and wrong on that score.

  ‘Why did you stay with her?’ I hadn’t meant to ask but while he was signing, I had stood and read the poems again. They were all about my mother. I didn’t understand how his passion for her, woven into each line, had survived their marriage. Her stifling of him, The Leavings. ‘Or,’ I said, ‘why did you always come back?’

  My father gave a small shrug. ‘I loved her unfortunately.’

  We said goodbye outside. My father was going the other way and made me take the umbrella. It broke as I put it up and I was pressing the tangle of bent spokes into a bin when I saw Robert come out of a shop a few feet away from where I was standing. He had a newspaper in one hand and held it above his head while he dashed over the crossing towards a taxi stopped on that side.

  He saw me as he was opening the door and paused as if, in another moment, he would be able to place the woman on the other side of the street who looked like she was going to wave, then didn’t. He was still holding up the newspaper and made a friendly gesture with it before ducking to get in. I do not know if he recognised me, or if he acknowledged me to be on the safe side.

  The taxi drove away and I kept walking. Nostos
, algos. I never went back after the first appointment. I booked dozens in the months afterwards and always cancelled them the day before. The last time I rang his rooms, the receptionist told me I had so many late cancellation fees against my file, this was one of the very rare occasions that she couldn’t let me make another appointment unless I paid them.

  I still long to see him sometimes but I know that I won’t because there is nothing else to say. And there will never be £540.50 in Martha’s Unexpecteds – even if there was, I worry that as an expert in the human mind, he would be able to discern from my body language that of the 820 views his 2017 address to the World Psychiatric Association has racked up on YouTube, 59 of them were me.

  He spoke on the subject of ——. The conference took place a short time after we met. When I first found it I hoped but now I just wonder if I am the articulate young woman with classic symptoms who he will refer to throughout as ‘Patient M’.

  *

  Ingrid had her baby. It was two weeks late and enormous and came out facing the wrong way. Patrick and I went with my parents to see her the afternoon it was born. The delivery required forceps and, she told us, that toilet plunger thing and a fucking episiotomy by a doctor who was seriously trying to shut the barn door after the horse had bolted. She suspected him of doing a bad job with the stitches and, as such, she’d decided to just disassociate from the whole area which she described then, and has since, as her Baginasaurus Wrecked.

  Winsome was already there when we arrived – by herself because Rowland was on a quest to find unmetered parking, from which, she felt, he was unlikely to return. She stood rinsing a bag of green grapes under a high tap over the basin, pretending that she couldn’t hear anything my sister was saying. Afterwards, Hamish asked Patrick how common it was, these days, for a sonographer to misread the baby’s sex. Ingrid had told everyone it was a boy. Patrick said it wasn’t common, especially not across multiple scans.

  ‘I didn’t have multiple scans.’ She looked up from whatever adjustment she was trying to make to the strap of her bra and said, ‘The magic isn’t there when you have three boys in the room with you breaking the equipment.’