Letters to My Husband

by Stephanie Butland

  You know that argument we used to have, when you used to say I didn’t like the weather in England, and I used to say that it wasn’t that I didn’t like the weather, it was those days when there was no weather I couldn’t bear. When the air is still and the sky is grey and it’s not sunny and it’s not raining and there’s no wind and it’s certainly not warm but it’s not exactly cold either. Those days. My life is one of those days. The sun doesn’t shine and the wind doesn’t blow and everything is just going along. And it’s fine, bearable anyway. So long as I don’t look up from this dull, grey path and see my dull, grey life stretching on and on and on.

  You were a third of my life, which feels like so little. One day you’ll be a quarter of it, then a fifth, maybe only a sixth if I live to be 72. Awful thoughts, when I look up from this grey path on this grey day.

  We had made a little nest of our life, you and me. Our favourite places, our holidays, our barbecues and our crosswords and our walks and our wine.

  You, saying, ‘We’re just like an old married couple.’

  Together, it was lovely. On my own, it’s too sad. But I’m just getting on with it.

  I’ve told Mel she should go home. She still says no. I think I’m glad.

  I miss you, so much.

  E xxx

  MEL’S ONLY REAL source of Throckton gossip – if she cared, which she doesn’t – is Patricia, with her blending-into-one-after-a-while tales of babies born and conservatories built and cruises embarked upon.

  Elizabeth had done a good job of stopping her motherin-law from talking about Kate Micklethwaite and her baby, and so Mel hears very little about her. Until the day when a flurry of texts between her, Andy and Blake means that she is sitting at the kitchen table while Elizabeth is at work, having a conversation that she really doesn’t want to be having.

  ‘I know I complain about Throckton being boring, but I take it all back. I didn’t know how much I liked boring, until now,’ she says as they settle with coffee that she has insisted on making, although none of them wants it.

  ‘It’s never boring,’ Blake says.

  ‘Too damn right,’ Andy adds.

  Mel remembers that the brother-in-law she was very fond of had been a decades-long fixture in the lives of these two. So she takes charge.

  ‘Come on then,’ she says, ‘from the top.’

  Andy nods. ‘When I got to the surgery this morning, Peggy, who’s our receptionist, brought me a coffee along to my office. She doesn’t usually. She shut the door behind her. I assumed that she wanted to talk about something medical – you know, the staff are supposed to make proper appointments like everyone else but they never do – but she said she knew that I was good friends with Michael Gray, so she thought I ought to know there was a rumour going round that he was the father of Kate Micklethwaite’s baby.’

  ‘Which we don’t think he would be,’ Mel clarifies, ‘although we can see how people might put two and two together, after the accident.’

  ‘Which we don’t think he would be,’ Andy says.

  Blake says, ‘Richenda says she won’t say anything about the father, except that he’s not around. Rufus Micklethwaite is playing holy hell with her every chance he gets, but she won’t say a word.’

  ‘Just like she won’t say anything about when Michael died,’ Mel adds, ‘and she’s lying about that as well.’

  They all look at each other.

  Mel says, carefully, ‘We’re assuming this is no more than a rumour, right? Blake, I know what I said to you, about what we’d think if we didn’t know Mike, but we did know him. I can’t imagine …’ Her words falter, fail.

  Blake says, just as carefully, ‘Elizabeth and I were talking, at the Christmas party, and she was saying that between work and his marathon training and Pepper having taken to running off on walks, she’d hardly seen him.’

  Andy adds, ‘She went into the water. He was there. He was near enough to get her out. It was cold. She wouldn’t have had long.’

  ‘What are the chances of that?’ Mel asks.

  ‘Not high,’ Blake offers.

  They look at each other, seeing in each other’s faces the chasm that they’ve opened. Andy shakes his head, a furious clearing motion. ‘No. No. He wouldn’t. He adored Elizabeth.’

  Mel says, ‘Unless he’d met her nearby, and she was upset. He’d have walked her home, wouldn’t he? He’d have been near enough then.’

  ‘Yes,’ Blake says, ‘but—’

  ‘Oh, God,’ Mel puts her head in her hands, ‘I’m always telling Patricia that there’s no bloody point in speculating, and here I am, chairing a speculation meeting.’

  ‘We might never know,’ Andy says, and the chasm closes again, thanks to all of their good efforts. Mel reaches for her cigarettes and is about to head for the door, when Blake speaks, and brings her back to her chair with a bump and a groan.

  ‘Surely the point is not whether or not Michael fathered that baby,’ he says, ‘surely the point is that people are speculating about it, and sooner or later someone is going to say something to Patricia, and then Patricia will say something to Elizabeth, if someone from the hotel doesn’t first.’

  ‘You’re right,’ Andy says, ‘we need to do something.’

  Between

  KATE HAD ARGUED, passionately, against helping her mother with the tombola at the Throckton Fair.

  ‘I know, Kate,’ Richenda had said, ‘I don’t especially want to do it either.’

  ‘So why are we doing it?’

  ‘Because we do almost nothing in the community, and so when one of your father’s clients, who is one of the organizers, asked if I would help, I said that I would, because it seemed like the least I could do.’

  ‘But that’s your decision. I didn’t agree to it.’

  ‘No, I know you didn’t.’ Richenda has had a sleepless night and a long day of snippy exchanges with Rufus and she is too tired not to let it show. ‘But Kate, your exams are finished, you have nothing else to do, and I presume you’ll be expecting me to drive you around while we – or rather I – buy the rest of what you need for your trip. So I was hoping you could see your way to giving up an afternoon. I think, quite frankly, that you owe it to me to help.’

  So Kate, knowing that ‘quite frankly’ was a phrase her mother used only when she was very near the end of her tether, had agreed with as little grace as she could get away with. She had been roped in for this kind of thing before, and she never knew how to talk to people, or liked the way older people treated her as though she was a child still.

  It had started every bit as unpromisingly as she feared. The early June sky glowered but didn’t rain, so every other conversation that she had was about the weather. The wind whipped raffle tickets out of the basket if she didn’t watch them. Her father had slept in the spare room the night before, which meant that her mother was taciturn and complaining by turns, wondering out loud what on earth she would do when Kate went. ‘Why don’t you just leave him, Mum,’ Kate had eventually said in exasperation, and Richenda had looked at her daughter and laughed and said, ‘Well, you know what, I just might, one of these days,’ and she’d disappeared and come back with a bag of hot doughnuts which they’d eaten while taking the mickey out of Rufus.

  Kate had enjoyed that part, because she was almost never allowed to be rude about her father, his separate trimmers for nose-hair and ear-hair, the way he claimed to be able to tell fresh pasta from dried after it was cooked, his near-obsessive polishing of his car.

  Then, just as Kate was about to suggest that she might go and her mother could probably cope now, Richenda had got up – ‘I’d better do the rounds,’ she’d said glumly, ‘stock up on tea towels with cats on and lemon drizzle cake.’

  Kate had told her off for being a snob, and resigned herself to the loss of the whole day, envying the friends who had come to say hello earlier before heading off to Marsham in a cloud of good feeling that only the end of A levels could bring. She’d texted them to
say she wouldn’t be able to join them. And then she’d been left alone with the last few tickets, a bottle of port, a jar of pumpkin jam, a packet of biscuits and the Throckton Warbler for company.

  And then it happened. The oddest thing. On the front page of the newspaper was the story of a policeman who had saved a mother and child from a house fire. The rescued mother was a friend of the chef at the restaurant where Kate did the occasional weekend shift, so she had already heard all the details: the iron left on when the baby started to cry, the assumption that it had fallen into the basket of clothes waiting to be ironed, or maybe the cat had caught the flex; the mother settling down on the sofa to feed the baby, the broken nights before, the next thing she knew, the smoke, the panic, and then the man appearing in front of them, like a dirty, coughing angel, holding out a hand. Kate looked at the photograph, the grateful mother, the police officer holding the child, looking handsome and ever so slightly embarrassed.

  And then she had looked up when she heard a cough, and there he was, in front of her, the man from the photograph, looking handsome and ever so slightly embarrassed.

  ‘I can’t wait for next week’s newspaper to come out,’ he had said to Kate, then, leaning forward conspiratorially, ‘I am in so much trouble.’

  ‘Why?’ she had asked.

  ‘I wasn’t really supposed to go in. It wasn’t safe. There are rules. You have to wait for the fire brigade. And my mother and my wife are giving me a lot of grief about it.’

  He had glanced over his shoulder to a couple of women standing a little distance away. It was obvious which was his mother; the other woman was in jeans and a navy jacket, thick brown hair being whisked around her face, pushed back, whisked around her face, pushed back. She was holding a dog under her arm; it looked as bored as Kate had felt until this lifesaver had showed up.

  ‘Well,’ Kate had said, made bold by his bright eyes, the scent of limes that splashed towards her every time he moved, ‘I think you were very brave.’

  ‘Thank you,’ he had said, and he’d grinned, and inside her head Kate had said, I wouldn’t give you a hard time if you were mine.

  Michael picked up the packet of biscuits. ‘We brought them,’ Kate explained, ‘we bring them back from France because they taste wonderful there, and we always forget that they’re not as good here. Somehow they don’t have the same flavour back in England.’

  ‘Don’t let my mother hear you say that,’ Mike had said, ‘she thinks Throckton is the best place in the world.’

  ‘I’m going to Thailand, in September, to work on a turtle conservation programme,’ Kate blurted, then wished she hadn’t: her attempt to sound interesting had come out like a schoolgirl showing off.

  But Michael had only looked at her, grinned again, and said, ‘Turtles, eh?’ in a way that made them both laugh, and then he had given her a five-pound note and said, ‘Well, we don’t have any pumpkin jam at home, so here’s hoping.’

  And he had won the pumpkin jam, and the biscuits, and she’d said, ‘Congratulations,’ and he’d said, ‘Thank you. There’ll be a feast in our house tonight,’ and she had watched him walk back to his family, touch the dog on its head and his wife in the small of her back, give the biscuits to his mother and the jam to his wife, who pulled a face and said something that made them all laugh.

  And Kate had felt different. Queasy. And as though the world was a different colour, now.

  Now

  ‘AM I IN Trouble?’ Elizabeth asks when she comes in from her shift to find three solemn faces awaiting her. One day, she thinks, she will take a photograph of the three of them when they are like this, and show them exactly how obvious it is when they’re thinking that poor Elizabeth thinks she’s coping, but she’d barely be alive if it wasn’t for us. She pauses, takes a breath. No, she tells herself, no. Grief can make me sad and lonely. It does make me sad and lonely. That’s OK. But it will not make me bitter, or ugly, or unkind.

  Andy looks away, Mel studies her nails, Blake looks steadily at her and says, ‘Sit down, Elizabeth.’

  She slides into the fourth seat. ‘What’s happened?’ she asks. ‘Just tell me, will you? I’ve had a long day.’

  A long day of holidaying couples and heedlessly happy families checking in, and a wedding party coming by to make sure everything is ready for the weekend. Elizabeth’s face hurts from smiling and her feet ache from standing. In her mind, she runs over the possibilities for disaster.

  The three of them are here, Mike is already gone, Pepper came to greet her with his usual yapping joie de vivre before flopping back into his basket. So, she should be able to manage it, whatever it is.

  Andy sees the pulse beating in the top of her jaw as she sits and looks around at them all. There’s no point in dragging this out. He takes a deep breath and begins.

  ‘There’s a rumour you should know about,’ he says, ‘just a rumour. About Michael.’

  Elizabeth almost laughs. She can’t imagine any rumour that could hurt her. And he is safe from everything, now. ‘Is that all?’ she says. ‘You should see the three of you. You look as though you’ve murdered somebody.’

  ‘It could come to that,’ Mel mutters.

  Blake says, ‘There’s a rumour that Michael is – was – the father of Kate Micklethwaite’s baby.’ And then they all look at her, watching.

  All Elizabeth can think is that no one is telling her it’s not true. She sits very still, her hands clasped in front of her, her head dropped, as though she is pleading, or praying.

  She waits.

  Still nothing.

  So she says it herself. ‘It’s not true.’

  The trouble is, she can’t seem to say it just once. Now she’s started saying it, she can’t stop. ‘It’s not true. It’s not true.’ Without looking up, she can feel the uneasiness around her grow. There is a small part of Elizabeth that is very clear that for as long as she keeps saying it’s not true, it cannot be true. The words are blurring, losing meaning, taking hold of her tongue.

  Mel says, too late, ‘Of course it’s not true,’ but Elizabeth is caught up in her own rhythm now, three words the only fragile wall between her and a tidal wave.

  ‘It’s not true.’

  Andy is the one who gets her to stop. He releases Mel’s hand – Mel, grateful, takes her palms to her temples and wills herself not to cry – and he takes both of Elizabeth’s in both of his.

  ‘Elizabeth.’ He says it very quietly.

  ‘It’s not true.’

  ‘Elizabeth.’ He says it more quietly still.

  ‘It’s not.’

  ‘Elizabeth.’ The third time is barely a whisper, and it’s the smallness of it that lets it slip through.

  She stops talking. She looks up, at each of them in turn, and she says, ‘What do you think?’

  Mel says, ‘I just don’t know. I don’t know.’

  Blake says, ‘I’d be very surprised, Elizabeth.’

  Andy says, ‘Michael loved you so much.’

  And suddenly, Elizabeth is furious at the stupidity of these people, who are supposed to love her, to have loved Mike, but cannot see what’s in front of them. She stands up, leans forward, the tips of her fingers and thumbs making mirrored churches on the table top. And she lets them have it.

  She tells them that Mike wouldn’t look twice at some doe-eyed teenager.

  ‘I knew him better than anyone,’ she spits, ‘I knew where he was, what he did, what he liked, and I can tell you for sure that it wasn’t screwing teenage girls.’

  And then she tells them that if anyone is even thinking about saying anything about smoke and fires then they can go, now, and not come back; that she doesn’t want to hear another word about it until they can tell her who the father really is, and how sorry they are for thinking ill of the dead. Then she turns, and she goes upstairs, and she waits for her breath to come evenly, and she waits for her tears to stop.

  Between

  MICHAEL FORGOT THE girl from the fête as soon as he turned
his back on her. Or he thought he did. But every time pumpkin jam was mentioned – and it was mentioned often, quickly becoming the joke of the moment – he’d see a pair of pale eyes, hear a laugh, listen to an echo of himself saying, ‘Turtles?’ When his mother complained about the biscuits, he smiled to himself.

  And then he started to bump into her. He knew it was too often to be coincidence, really, but he couldn’t see any harm in it. She’d wander out of the end of her road as he passed, and say, oh, hello, I was just going to get some fresh air. He’d be almost at Butler’s Pond and he’d hear running behind him, and there she’d be, hair swinging out from side to side, pink-cheeked with effort.

  I thought I recognized Pepper, she’d say. I wish I had a dog, but with going away soon, there’s no point.

  You’ll have a turtle, Michael would say, and they’d laugh, even though it wasn’t that funny.

  Yes, Michael knew it happened too often to be coincidence. When she took his arm at the water’s edge where the ground was slippery underfoot and then he moved away, just a fraction, and she dropped it, he knew that he wasn’t being very clever. But he thought he was safe.

  Now

  PATRICIA’S HEART SINKS when she answers the door to Andy. He’s a nice enough lad, and she makes a point of telling his mother so whenever she comes into the library, but she sees an awful lot of him at Elizabeth’s, and she can’t imagine what he has to say that won’t wait until tomorrow. She stands at the door for a moment, hoping that he’s dropping off a pie dish as she isn’t far out of his way, but no. He stands his ground, says he’s sorry to disturb her, but he needs to talk to her about something.

  ‘Is everything all right, Andy?’ she asks. She’d planned a quiet half-hour with her photo albums before bed. If he’d arrived ten minutes later, she would have answered the door in her dressing gown. She likes to think that she won’t answer the door after nine at night, but actually, if there’s a knock after nine it’s more likely to matter.