Letters to My Husband

by Stephanie Butland

  Now, whenever someone mentions that she might want to go for a walk, Mel tells them that Elizabeth can make her own mind up about that, even though it’s clear from the way that she has to be reminded to eat and drink and go to bed that that’s probably not true.

  So apart from the necessities – the Chapel of Rest, the funeral, the inquest – Elizabeth has yet to stray further than her garden. Cold and dark and dead with the season, it’s matched her, mood for mood. The sun, when it’s come, has been watery and weak. She can stand on the patio and breathe the air with a hand still on the wall, for safety. Every now and then she puts on her wellies – unaccustomed to enclosure, her feet twitch when she walks in them – and works her way around the grass, cleaning up after Pepper, searching the earth for signs of spring and wondering if she will be able to bear them when they come, or whether the memory of Michael making her ring the bell of the first snowdrop will be too much.

  And of course, the garden is the place where the posies appear.

  Elizabeth likes it best in the morning, when Pepper is bouncing with energy and watching him scurry gives her something other than the day ahead to think about. She stands in her pyjamas and sometimes she is even able to make herself a small plan, the fulfilment of which will help to get her through the day: I will change the sheets and duvet covers, I will reply to all of the emails that need a reply, I will defrost the freezer, I will sort out the photographs. (Sorting out the photographs is one of the plans she often makes but has yet to begin. When it comes to it, she cannot bear to look at photos of them, smile upon smile upon smile.)

  This morning, still wrung out after the inquest, she cannot face making even a small plan. She thinks she might try going back to bed. It’s still early, not even morning really, light barely beginning.

  She’s just turned away from the garden, taken off her wellies and stepped into the kitchen, about to close the door behind her, when she hears the click of the garden gate, and turns back.

  At first Elizabeth thinks she’s seeing a ghost, or an angel. The figure is beautiful, and she stands just inside the gate, reflecting her own surprise, still as a deer in the dawn.

  And then she recognizes Kate Micklethwaite from the inquest yesterday, from the photographs in the local paper, as the Girl Saved by the Brave Policeman Who Drowned: but up until now she has tried not to look at her too closely, afraid of what seeing her will do to her heart, instinctively, in the way she’d once kept her eyes pointing away from her freshly broken arm, knowing that seeing the damage properly would make the pain worse.

  But now, she looks.

  Kate has the lightly worn, unconscious loveliness of the young, with no idea yet that she will never be more beautiful than in these few years before age and sun and worry and sleepless nights and hangovers all find places to rest in her body. Elizabeth takes in a pale waterfall of hair, full-moon eyes of ice-blue-grey. Kate is crying, grief and fright combining, and the tears magnify her eyes and make them shine, shine.

  In her hand she holds freesias tied with a piece of silver ribbon.

  And everything makes horrible, awful sense to Elizabeth. Of course the flowers are a tribute. Of course the girl would bring them here. Of course, she’s grieving and confused and needs a way to express how she feels about Michael doing what he did.

  Of course, of course, of course.

  Time stops, as they look at each other. Then Pepper barks, there’s an answer from beyond the gate, Kate turns her head, says, ‘It’s all right, Beatle,’ the second hand sweeps, and Elizabeth makes her move. She’s in front of Kate, holding her shoulders, before either of them has fully realized what she’s done.

  ‘The snowdrops?’ she asks.

  Kate nods.

  ‘The crocuses?’

  Kate nods.

  ‘The winter pansies?’

  Kate nods. Elizabeth, just a shade shorter than Kate and barefoot on the earth, is looking up into her face, but Kate is looking away, down, to the left, to the flowers still clutched in her hand. Elizabeth shakes her, not hard, to make her look towards her. Kate refuses, eyes determinedly elsewhere. A burst of the sweet scent of the freesias rises in a clear cloud.

  ‘I thought my husband was leaving them for me.’ Elizabeth’s tears start. ‘Isn’t that stupid? I thought he was’ – her hands fall, and, freed, Kate’s arms move to wrap her own body, cradling, protecting – ‘I thought he was coming back and leaving me flowers. I thought he was telling me, Elizabeth, it’s all right.’

  Elizabeth is fighting, fighting for control of her breath, her tears, her words, her hands, which want to take Kate’s face and force her to look at her, as though looking into her eyes will make her understand. ‘How stupid. How stupid.’

  Kate’s tongue is a lump of dead meat. Her feet are buried in the earth. She can’t move. She can’t speak. The thought of her tributes so misunderstood makes her stomach shake: they were for him, in a place that was a little way into his life, not lost in a mass of flowers piled on his grave.

  Elizabeth says, ‘He would be glad you are alive. Mike. He would be so glad that you are alive.’ What leaves her lips is different to what had left her heart, though, because the ‘you’ comes out hard, an accusation, and she sees Kate flinch.

  ‘It wasn’t your fault,’ she says, aching with the effort to be the person Mike would want her to be, ‘that he died. It wasn’t your fault.’

  For Kate, the truth of this widow, her neglected hair and sallow face, wrenches her heart this way and that, while her body stands, mute. She sees that Elizabeth is wrapped in a man’s dressing gown that’s too big for her, and suddenly her hand is alive and grasps at the sleeve, stroking. Now they are both watching Kate’s hand on Elizabeth’s sleeve, as though it’s something on television, something neither of them has power over, and then Elizabeth takes hold of Kate’s wrist and she says, ‘Tell me. Tell me what happened. Please. Tell me. I beg you. I beg you.’ She looks at Kate, cannot tell whether her mouth is sulking or planning to speak, and says, desperately, ‘Please. He was my husband. He was my husband and I was his wife and I need to know.’

  And the tears come, really come, a tempest, and Kate is suddenly free to move and she says, ‘No, no,’ the first words she has said to Elizabeth, and then she’s out of the garden and gone.

  Two hours pass before Mel gets up and heads out to the garden for her first cigarette of the day. She had worked late the night before, translating a Spanish novel with so many characters that it made her head spin; although she keeps on telling Elizabeth that she can work anywhere, which is true, she is finding that she can only really concentrate when she’s certain her sister is sleeping.

  When she sees Elizabeth sitting by the fence, still in her pyjamas and Mike’s dressing gown and – well, just still, so still – for a second she thinks her sister has died too. Elizabeth’s hands are freezing, she’s wet from sitting in the grass, she doesn’t respond to her name. Mel thinks about a conversation she had with Andy yesterday, about how if this was the 1800s he’d be confidently diagnosing Elizabeth with a broken heart, and he’s not sure that the diagnosis would be too far off today.

  But as Mel gets closer she sees a pulse in Elizabeth’s throat, and takes her hand and rubs it, rubs her fright and fear into it, and Elizabeth looks at her and says, ‘Oh, Mel, I should have known,’ and she starts to cry, and she sobs the whole story out, her foolishness and hope, before she’ll move a muscle.

  Mel calls Andy at work, and until he arrives there’s nothing she can do but sit in the grass too. It takes both of them to get Elizabeth – who seems to have only the slightest of connections to her body, and have no idea that she’s cold, or wet – into the house, out of her wet clothes, and into bed, where she lies shivering, silent. Andy gives her some sleeping tablets and a glass of water, and Mel says, ‘No arguments,’ and so Elizabeth does as she’s told and sleeps for six hours without moving a muscle, her colour and warmth seeping back like morning through a northern sky.

  W
hen Elizabeth comes downstairs, it’s early evening, and Blake, Andy and Mel are gathered round the kitchen table. Three pairs of cautious eyes turn towards her, assessing, appraising. ‘How are you doing?’ Mel asks.

  Elizabeth makes a gesture with shoulder, eyebrow, chin, that means ‘I could say something in response to your question, but I have absolutely no idea how I am, so my answer would be meaningless.’ She says, ‘I should have told her off and sent her home, or called someone, or brought her inside and talked to her properly, instead of – instead of being stupid.’

  ‘Well,’ Blake says, ‘you need to remember that if she’s upset it’s not because of you. It’s because of what happened to her. And she wasn’t to know—’

  ‘That I was thinking her flowers were gifts to me from beyond the grave? No, she wasn’t.’

  ‘I’ve spoken to Richenda,’ Blake says, ‘and Kate’s quiet, but she’s all right.’

  ‘Good,’ Elizabeth says, then, ‘I begged her. I begged her.’ She shakes her head.

  Blake picks up a look from Mel – before her sister came down, they’d been talking about Kate, and how she wasn’t Elizabeth’s responsibility – and offers, ‘Kate is having a hard time, but she’ll come through it. She’s young enough, and she has so much to go on to. This time next year she’ll be at university, she’ll be living a whole different life, and of course she’ll always remember this, remember Michael, this won’t be the end of her.’

  Elizabeth nods, understanding that Blake thinks he is telling her not to worry about Kate, but feeling that he’s describing the opposite of her life now: that all of the reasons Kate will be OK are the reasons why she won’t be.

  Andy says, ‘It’s time, Elizabeth. It’s just time that we need.’

  She says, ‘Well, I have plenty of that,’ thinking of how every single conversation she has now, every single wretched conversation, ends up with someone saying something about time. Time heals. Time will make it easier. In time it will be better. Give it time. Elizabeth stands barefoot and exhausted in her kitchen, looking at the fridge with the photos on it and the cupboard that she knows still contains the half-eaten box of cereal that only Mike liked and that she can’t imagine ever having the heart to throw away. And she’s almost certain that time won’t make anything better. It just keeps making it different; awful in lots of new ways.

  ‘The thing is,’ Blake says to Mel later, as he herds Pepper and Hope along the path and she lights a cigarette, ‘if I had to write what happened in an incident report, it would sound like nothing. A young woman is found trespassing in a garden. She isn’t stealing, but bringing a tribute to the man who saved her life. The property owner found her there, talked to her, and then the trespasser left.’

  ‘Why the garden, though?’ Mel asks. ‘The grave, I could see. Butler’s Pond, I could see. But the garden? How does she even know where he lives? Lived. Oh yes, it’s Throckton.’

  Blake shakes his head. ‘Richenda said the same things. I’m not an expert, but I’d say that she might be worried about going to the grave: if she feels responsible for Michael’s death, she might feel that she shouldn’t be there. She’ll be afraid of going back to Butler’s Pond. Michael’s home makes a strong, private connection with him.’

  ‘Or she’s thoughtless.’

  ‘A lot of thought had gone into those flowers, Mel. And it must have been really early, so she didn’t want, or expect, to be discovered. Richenda says Kate was home before six – she and Rufus didn’t even know she had gone.’

  Mel stops to grind out her cigarette. ‘Well, we’ve been there before, haven’t we? They didn’t know she was out at Butler’s Pond either.’ Blake puts an arm around her, hugs her to him. ‘You’re like a bear,’ she says, ‘in a good way.’

  ‘Thank you.’ They walk on in silence for a minute or two. ‘It will be all right, Mel, somehow. We’ll get her through this.’

  ‘I know,’ Mel says, ‘but it just – it feels like a bomb has hit. Another bomb.’

  Mike,

  Writing to you seemed quite normal, before. Because when part of me thought that you were somehow leaving those flowers for me, it felt as though we were still doing this together, as though you’d gone away but you were reading what I was writing, and replying, in posies.

  Now I sit here and I feel like a crazy woman writing into a void, when actually I was crazier before. How come I forgot that someone who has been pulled from a lake and isn’t breathing and has been cut open and taken apart and examined and had all their organs put back in and sewn back up and nailed into a coffin and put into a big hole with a ton of earth on top is not going to be in any kind of shape to leave flowers in his wife’s garden?

  Life is confusing, and crap, and just seems to go on, endlessly. For me, anyway. Yours isn’t going on anywhere. It seems I have no choice but to admit that I know that now. You, Michael Gray, my husband, my partner for all of these years, are dead. See? I can say that now. You are dead. You are dead. You, Michael Gray, are dead. You, my husband, are dead. You are dead. You died. You’re gone. YOU’RE NOT COMING BACK. DEAD.

  The stupid thing is, I am mad as hell with you. As though you made her come here with her grief and her drama and her sulkiness and her double-take beauty, and mess with my head.

  God. I thought I couldn’t do this before. I know it now.

  E xxx

  RUFUS COMES HOME in good humour, and the greeting that he gets from Beatle, tail swaggering aloft, only amplifies his excellent mood, and makes him rash. ‘If I say so myself,’ he calls to Richenda, who he notices from the empty plate on the table has eaten without him again, ‘Beatle is a triumph.’

  ‘Yes, Rufus,’ his wife replies, ‘you’re an absolute marvel, and you deserve a prize.’ Her tone is slightly different to the one she usually uses when she’s about to go off into a dog-themed rant, though, so he turns into the kitchen where she’s unloading the dishwasher, and he sees that she’s been crying. Richenda rarely cries – or lets him see that she’s been crying, anyway.

  ‘What’s happened?’

  ‘Kate,’ Richenda says, ‘has been walking Beatle to that poor’ – she stops herself, decides to do the hard thing – ‘to Michael Gray’s house, when she goes out early, and she’s been leaving little bunches of flowers – floral tributes, I suppose – in the garden. His widow found her there first thing this morning. Blake rang to tell me.’

  ‘Oh, Christ,’ Rufus says, and he is so utterly crestfallen that Richenda stops what she is doing, puts her hand on his arm, and says only, ‘That’s what I said.’

  ‘So, what do we do?’

  ‘Blake says not to worry—’

  ‘That’s easy for Blake to say.’

  Richenda takes her hand away. ‘Blake says not to worry, because it’s not unusual for people who’ve been through a trauma to find a way to deal with their feelings that doesn’t seem completely rational to anyone outside. He says we should encourage her to visit his grave, or think about taking her down to the place where it happened.’

  ‘Well,’ Rufus says grudgingly, ‘that sounds sensible enough.’

  ‘Yes.’

  And then it’s Rufus’s turn to reach out to Richenda as he says, ‘I can’t believe that I didn’t realize. I was so pleased she was going out. I thought she would talk when she was ready. I thought time would put her right.’

  ‘Me too,’ Richenda says, and in the closest thing they ever get to closeness now, they clasp hands, briefly, look into each other’s faces, more briefly still.

  Kate, upstairs, is scratching Beatle’s ears – the look of bliss on his face makes it impossible for her to stop – and thinking about Elizabeth. Even before all this happened, she’d seen her around: months ago, she’d stood behind her in the queue in the Co-op once when she was picking up something her mother had run out of. Elizabeth’s hair had been pulled back in a knot and she was wearing a black skirt, a white shirt and heels, from which Kate assumed she was on her way home from work. There were potatoes
and tampons in her basket and she wore tiny diamond earrings, and Kate could see from where she stood that her ears had been pierced for a second time and the holes left to close. She was wearing a scent that smelled summery and familiar but Kate couldn’t quite decode: peaches, roses, maybe.

  The Elizabeth of the inquest had seemed smaller in every sense: thinner, but also treated like a child, dressed up and then pushed and pointed into the right places, coaxed into the courtroom and out again, always a hand at her elbow, her waist, her shoulder. Kate, who could have been similarly supported if she had wanted – she had kept shrinking away from her mother’s hand until Richenda had got the message and let her be – sat as straight as she could, hoping she looked dignified, imagining Michael watching her and seeing her strength and grace under pressure.

  Kate had kept her head low and peeped up through her fringe to look at Elizabeth, until she caught a look from Melissa that had made her decide to concentrate on her fingernails until the hearing was over. She nodded and shook her head when she needed to, crossed and uncrossed her fingers and spoke quietly, marvelling at how easily these people were speaking of death, wondering if they would do it that way if they’d ever choked on water and felt sure that they were dying.

  And then there was the Elizabeth of the garden, smelling of sleep, salt scabbing the edges of her eyes, skin pale, nails bitten, hair neglected. Smaller still than she had been at the inquest, but frightening in her grief and her insistence that Kate knew more than she was saying.

  As Beatle dozes, Kate rewrites the history of Michael and Elizabeth that she has made. In the new version, she changes the neglectful, uninterested wife to someone clinging, needy, fawning. Michael remains the same: strong, loving, reliable, in need of true love. Although the meeting in the garden had thrown Kate, this new tale makes her happy, and gives her courage.