‘He’s a beagle,’ Rufus says. ‘Bubbles breeds them. He has a pedigree going back five generations and he’s been wormed and had all of his vaccinations.’
‘Our house,’ Richenda says, her voice high and hot in her ears, ‘is carpeted in cream and most of the walls and furniture are shades of pale because you, in your architectural wisdom, want nothing but clean space and clean lines. We have never had a pet. We have never wanted a pet. Not so much as a goldfish.’
‘I thought he’d be company for Kate,’ Rufus says, still pleased with himself, but not enough to meet Richenda’s gaze.
‘And will Kate take it to university with her?’ They both look at their daughter, who is laughing for the first time since the accident, as the puppy licks at her scrunched-up nose and eyes, and in this moment at least it seems that the answer is a resonating yes, barked from the rooftops. Rufus risks tilting an eyebrow at his livid wife, seeing how her face is softening. It’s too soon. When she sees him looking at her, her features set back into fury.
‘And will you take it with you when you go to work, or will I be looking after it?’
‘He’s house-trained,’ Rufus offers, ‘almost, anyway. He knows about newspaper.’
‘Oh good. Can he operate a door handle to put himself in the garden?’ Richenda curses herself for being bamboozled into moving from ‘it’ to ‘he’. ‘Does he hoover furniture and shampoo carpets? I’m sorry, Rufus, it’s too much. He’s just going to have to go back.’
Kate, who hasn’t been listening, looks up. ‘He can sleep in my room,’ she announces, ‘and we’ll call him Beatle.’
Later that evening, Kate coaxes Beatle up the stairs and takes him into her room. She lifts him on to the bed, in direct contravention of one of the many doggy directives that her mother has spent the evening laying down, and strokes his silken ears. Crying feels easier in his company, and more complete; validated by a witness, but not complicated by comfort, questions, cajoling.
When she is calm again, she strokes the dozing puppy. Every now and then Beatle angles his ears to the sound of arguing from downstairs. Most of it’s just rumble and squawk, but the odd word makes it up to them, ‘unilateral’ and ‘thoughtless’ and ‘uptight’. Kate tells him the story of the gold bracelet her father bought for her mother once, after what it pleased him to call one of his indiscretions had been discovered. ‘Indiscretion,’ Richenda had said, very quietly, imagining Kate in the next room couldn’t hear or wasn’t listening, ‘is an understatement as far as you’re concerned, Rufus. The new shirts. The whistling. The coming home at 2am and having a shower. I think I’d be slightly less furious if you made at least some attempt to pretend that you weren’t screwing your way around your client list again.’ Beatle’s eyes seem bright with understanding as Kate tells him the next bit: how she had leaned back in her chair and been able to see, unseen, through the doorway. Rufus’s offered gift, Richenda’s opening of the box, the way she had held up the bracelet, twisting it through the light, then gone to her bedside table and offered Rufus an identical box, containing an identical bracelet, with the words, ‘This is the one you bought me last time. Your taste, if nothing else, is fairly constant.’
‘He looked sorry,’ Kate tells Beatle, ‘properly sorry.’ She hasn’t told anyone about this before, afraid that in the retelling it would become comical, or trite, when it had twisted her up and made her feel so sure that, when she fell in love, she’d never fall out of it again. And before she knows it, she’s crying, and she’s telling Beatle other things that no one else knows.
Mike,
I’m wired all night, my mind won’t stop, my heart just breaks over and over again and the noise and the pain of it is unbearable. I can no more sleep through this than I could sleep through being kicked in the ribs every two minutes. But every night I try. Stupid.
So this morning I was standing at the back door while Pepper had his morning scuttle – Blake takes him out when he walks his dog, which is just as well, because I don’t think I’ll step out of this house voluntarily ever again, despite your mother’s incessant attempts to get me to the WI or the library, and Mel’s pleas for a change of scenery before she goes mad.
So, the back door is as far as I go. But this morning there was a patch of sunlight at the end of the patio. It was so pathetic and feeble that I sort of recognized it, and I went and stood in it, and then I saw the snowdrops.
My feet got wet as I walked through the last of the frost to pick them up: just half a dozen nodding white heads, tied with a piece of silver ribbon.
They were just in the corner of the garden, by the gate, the place that got the last of the sun in summer and where we’d sit with a glass of wine on warm evenings. I stood there with them in my hand and I remembered you, just back from work, just half an hour after I was back from work, walking towards me as I sat there. You smiled and said, ‘I see you’re already in our happy place.’ I thought of how, one winter, when I was so low, you bundled me up and walked me round to Butler’s Pond because you said you had something to show me, and there was a tiny crop of snowdrops, huddling under a tree. ‘You see,’ you said, ‘there’s always hope.’
So I knew that these were my sign. I knew, straight away, that these snowdrops are from you. They are what you’d leave. That’s the place you’d leave them.
If you could. If I believed in that sort of thing.
I’ve put them on the windowsill in the kitchen, and I’m going to sit at the table all day and look at them.
Thank you.
E xxx
Then
‘IS THIS YOUR first time in Sydney?’ Elizabeth had asked the next guy in the queue. Brit, she said to herself. Something about the pallor, and the haircut. Michael smiled.
‘Don’t tell anyone,’ he’d said, looking around the lobby full of people who seemed to know how to do this travelling business a lot better than he did, ‘but I’ve never been out of the UK before.’ He’d handed over his passport, which was fresh and inflexible in her hand. Valid from the month before. He wasn’t kidding.
‘Your secret’s safe with me,’ she’d smiled, quietly upgrading him to a room with a sea view, ‘and welcome to Australia. You picked a great place for your first trip overseas.’
‘Well, it was my new-year resolution to travel more, and if you’re going to do a thing, I think you should do it right,’ he’d said, and he’d smiled a tired smile as he headed for the lifts.
Over the next few days she’d kept a lookout for him. She saw him standing in the doorway, studying a map. Buying postcards and water from the hotel kiosk. He always seemed to be on his own. On his fourth day, he approached her at the desk with a leaflet about the city, and a question about public transport. The skin on the bridge of his nose was peeling but his shoulders, broad and thick, were turning a pleasing gold. She noticed that his eyes were as brown as his hair, and that one of his front teeth was ever-so-slightly crooked.
‘How are you finding Sydney?’ she’d asked as he’d picked up the map and made ready to turn away.
‘Honestly?’ he’d replied. ‘Big and hot.’
Elizabeth had nodded. ‘Fair comment.’
Michael had rested an elbow on the desk and leaned in, a man with a terrible secret. ‘The place I come from has two bus routes through it and no more than six burglaries a year, unless someone comes in from another village for the hanging baskets and window boxes. I’m a little bit lost, if I’m honest.’ Seeing her eyes offering something like pity, he adds, ‘It’s not as though I’ve never been anywhere, or anything. I’ve done London, and Edinburgh, and I’ve been on training courses all over the place. But everything here is just different. More different than I thought it would be.’
‘I grew up somewhere like that,’ she’d said, ‘but without the buses. It was cycle or die of boredom, where I come from.’
Then Elizabeth did something that she hadn’t done in four years of working in hotels, four years of at least once a day talking to a guest
who was fit, flirtatious and obviously ready for a fling with a pretty Australian girl. She offered to show Michael the city. He accepted.
At the end of the day, he kissed her on the cheek and thanked her. She was charmed. The next night, she showed him the nightlife, and they walked on the beach in the darkness and he took her hand. ‘Are you being a gentleman?’ she’d asked him as he walked her to her door, and he’d said, ‘No, I’m being a man who really doesn’t want to blow it.’
Michael left after a week and a half on the next stage of his holiday: a two-week escorted tour of ‘Australia’s Highlights’, although he told Elizabeth that he’d already found his highlight. He’d be back in Sydney for two nights before his flight home. By the time he got on the coach, Elizabeth had shown him the city, the beaches, the harbour, and a few of the restaurants that the tourists didn’t know about. She’d walked over the harbour bridge with him even though she didn’t much like heights. She’d taken him to Luna Park where he’d laughed like a child on the rides, and she’d cooked for him and introduced him, casually, to her sister. She’d looked at photos of where he lived and tried to imitate his accent. She’d been charmed when he’d offered to come running with her – she was training for a marathon at the time – and liked how, although he was a head taller than her, they’d found a matching stride. She’d had sex with him, noisily all over his hotel room and quietly, gigglingly, in her little shared flat. She was having, she told herself, a holiday romance.
Michael wasn’t. He was smitten and he didn’t care that she knew it. He felt ambushed by love and told her so. She laughed at him, telling him that he had sunstroke, infatuation, a bug. He curled her hair around his finger and shook his head. She told him she’d be forgotten as soon as he was back in the England he kept telling her about, rainclouds and gravy and all.
‘No,’ he said, ‘no, Elizabeth, you’ve got me all wrong. You’ll see.’
She asked him how, if he’d never been out of his country before, he knew it was her and not Australia he was loving. He explained how he’d felt, this last year, that there was something missing from his life, but that at the same time he loved his job, and his home, and when he saw the TV ad for Australia he’d felt something speak to him, something telling him to come here.
There you are then, Elizabeth had said, rolling herself closer to him, the universe wants you to get a tan. That’s all it is.
‘No,’ he’d said, ‘it was you.’ But she’d refused to accept it. Refused the idea that she could tie her existence, her happy, easy days, to someone who would, by dint of his birthplace, make her life awkward, complicated, in need of compromise and planning and all of the things she had deliberately removed from it when she came to the city and started anew.
While he was away he texted her every day: good-nights, good mornings. He called and left cheerful, thinking-of-you messages on her answering machine.
‘He’s behaving like my boyfriend,’ Elizabeth had said to Mel.
‘He’s behaving like your soulmate, sis,’ Mel had said, scrolling through the messages, ‘and you need to decide whether you want that or not. He’s not the holiday romance sort.’
‘No,’ Elizabeth had said, ‘I suppose he’s not.’
‘And neither are you,’ Mel had added.
‘No. I know.’ She had been mostly-happily mostly-single since she came to Sydney, and could hardly believe that five years had gone by since her school sweetheart gave her an ultimatum about settling down and getting married, and she gave him the answer he didn’t want. She’d known, then, that he wasn’t really the man for her, although it had felt as though everyone except Mel had known better, and been lining up to tell her she had made a mistake. She had been sure that she hadn’t. But, now she came to think about it, she wasn’t sure that the life she had made since was really the life for her, either. It wasn’t that she didn’t like Sydney, and her friends, and running and swimming and working too many hours and saving for a deposit on her own place. She did. But perhaps it wasn’t really right: perhaps that was why she was thinking about Michael the way that she was.
But it was best to be sure. Elizabeth had spent the next week making a list to herself of all the reasons it wouldn’t work. Not really knowing each other. Distance. Culture. Expense. Time apart. On-holiday self different to at-home self. The countless times she’d mopped the tears of broken-hearted colleagues when their One True Love had got on a plane home and never been heard from again.
Compared to the reasons for the relationship – getting on well, great sex, both like running, the feeling that, as she struggled to put it to Mel, she ‘just couldn’t not’ – the ‘against’ list seemed overwhelming. So Elizabeth had ignored Michael’s texts – or, at least, she’d not responded to them, which didn’t stop her from reading and re-reading them. She’d filled up her diary, booked some more shifts, started planning a holiday of her own, and made a future with no Michael, and no space for Michael in it. She’d agreed to go on a blind date with a friend-of-a-friend. She’d persuaded herself that the last ten days – only ten days, barely enough time to decide whether you like someone, let alone anything else – had been a madness that was over.
By the time Michael returned, Elizabeth had been so sure of her infallible heart that she had stood in the shadows by the hotel doorway and watched him get off the coach: a game of emotional dare. He had been more than she remembered him. More tanned, of course, but more imposing. More upright. More confident. Happier. She’d realized that he had no doubts about her, about them. She saw that he Knew, and that was what made him aglow with something special. And in that moment she had recognized that she Knew too. Unmoving, unspeaking, she had let herself love.
He had seemed to sense her change of heart. Just as she had thought about stepping towards him, about his mouth and his hair, he had looked straight at the place she was going to step into.
He’d insisted on a plan. ‘Can’t we see how it goes?’ she’d asked.
Michael had said, ‘No. You can see how it goes on a picnic, you can see how it goes with a test drive, but this deserves a plan.’
So they had made the rules. Some sort of contact – a text, an email – every day. A phone call at least once a week. No going to bed on an argument. No more than three months without seeing each other. An understanding that long-distance relationships were hard and they wouldn’t lose heart too easily or too soon. Elizabeth was to come and take a look at Throckton before the year was out. And, if they were still together in eighteen months, a serious conversation about The Future.
‘This feels like quite a serious conversation about the future to me,’ Elizabeth had said, and Michael had turned a solemn face to her and replied, ‘Elizabeth, there’s nothing wrong with serious.’
And for a moment, falling for some guy from the other side of the planet had felt not only good, but perfectly reasonable. She had groped for that feeling as she’d watched his flight leave, but there was no finding it again until the three months were up and she was stepping on to a plane herself.
Now
Mike,
People are still coming, and I try to listen, and I try to talk, but I can’t seem to. Especially since the snowdrops. Mel is so good, she’s like a sort of filter, she sits next to me and touches my hand when she thinks there’s something I might want to listen to, and the rest of the time I just look at the wall. Everyone says such lovely things about you.
Sometimes I wish everyone would go away and leave me alone, but then the thought of being alone is too much. Which is stupid, stupid, because I am alone, alone, alone all the time, because you’re not here, and you should be. You should be. You know that, don’t you?
Blake says Kate still doesn’t remember anything after going into the water. Mel said, has anyone tried turning her upside down and shaking her until the memories come out? Because if they haven’t, I will. Blake said, sometimes these things take time. I said, Mel, accidents happen. We of all people should know that, after what happe
ned to Mum. Tyres blow out. Yes, she said, I’ve never understood how you were so accepting of that, either.
I didn’t say anything else to her, but I’m not accepting anything, here. Some days I can’t bear not knowing. And then some days I couldn’t care less, because it’s not as though her remembering anything else is going to bring you back.
But I don’t accept that you’re not here, Mike. And I think – I know – you should come back. I can’t believe you won’t. This was never in the plan. Come back. Come back to me. I don’t care how. I’ll wait. Because I can’t, won’t, don’t want to be living my life – our life – without you. I absolutely refuse.
I’ve pressed the snowdrops in our wedding album. And I’m waiting.
E xxx
IT’S HARD TO know what to do on Michael’s birthday. Mel tells Elizabeth that next year she will be able to remember her husband, and find happiness in those memories. Elizabeth agrees but doesn’t really believe her, in the same way that she doesn’t really believe that she’s in the air when she’s on a plane: it seems too impossible, too ridiculous, and looking down and seeing clouds only makes it all the more unlikely, somehow.
Patricia brings her photograph albums round.
Elizabeth hesitates before looking, but can see nothing in the chubby boy with the curly hair that she can relate to her husband. Until Patricia turns a page and there he is, only nine, eyes looking straight into the camera, mouth a solemn line. ‘I remember that year,’ Patricia says, ‘it rained and we had to have his party indoors, and so we couldn’t have races. He wasn’t very pleased.’ And everything the man will be sings out from the boy, and suddenly Elizabeth is gasping, gasping at how vivid he has become.
‘I thought it might be too much,’ Mel says to Patricia as she holds Elizabeth’s hand, Mel’s other hand rubbing a rhythm up and down her sister’s spine. Elizabeth’s eyes are closed, her body shaking. Her head has dropped and it’s impossible to see whether she is crying or not. There’s no sound, but Patricia and Mel know that this means nothing.
Letters to My Husband Page 5
