Letters to My Husband

by Stephanie Butland

  We can’t decide what to do for the baby’s room and your mother knits horrible, scratchy matinee jackets in terrible pastel colours, even though we’ve showed her the scan picture, because she doesn’t trust the technology.

  In my alternative universe, on the night you died here, we were sitting on our sofa, reading TV credits in search of the perfect name. In that universe, at the moment you died here, we were drinking tea and bickering about shortlists.

  But I can’t get my alternative universe any further than that.

  Where are you?

  I miss you. Everything is going wrong without you here.

  E xxxx

  PATRICIA HAS KNOWN, since the night Andy came to see her, what it is that she needs to do. She’s waited, though, to make sure that she can’t think of a better way.

  She’s almost talked to Mel, but thought better of it, knowing how, at times of crisis, the sisters’ need to protect each other is stronger than any reason, or any consideration of others. Her visits to Elizabeth this last week have been difficult: mostly, they’ve been visits with Mel, who has stood at the kitchen door, smoking, while Elizabeth has stayed in her room.

  Once, Patricia had been there when Elizabeth had got home, and she’d been shocked by her daughter-in-law’s paleness, thinness, the curious look to her hair where the natural colour is growing back in. Elizabeth had seen Patricia, and dropped her bag, come over and embraced her.

  Even though Patricia is not a fan of hugging and caressing and hand-holding and all of the intimacies that seem to take place so casually now, she had submitted, waiting until Elizabeth stepped away, looked straight into her eyes and said, ‘Patricia, this must be so awful for you too. I’m so sorry. I just can’t talk about it yet.’

  And then she’d gone upstairs, and Mel had said, ‘Well, you just got more out of her than anyone else has since somebody put two and two together and all of Throckton made five.’

  And Patricia had left, and gone home to her photo albums, back beyond Michael to her baby sister who didn’t make it beyond two, her uncle who never got to be more than a handsome teenager, and she felt the weight of what she was going to do.

  But Patricia has never been a shirker. So, this fine Saturday afternoon, she finds herself standing on the Micklethwaites’ doorstep, and she takes a deep breath, and she rings the bell.

  Richenda answers the door, in jeans and a paint-splashed shirt. She’s expecting to see Kate, who often forgets her keys when she takes Beatle out, and makes cautious jokes about pregnancy brain. Richenda jokes back, while Rufus looks daggers at them both. But Richenda is coming round to the view that this baby is a good thing, especially now that she is no longer a secret: when she compares the Kate now with the Kate who was hiding her pregnancy, she can only see health where there was illness, anticipation where there was brooding misery. Kate is relaxed, easy, more like herself than she has been for – well, for a good year, now Richenda comes to think of it. Her sulky teenager has gone for good. Her daughter is a woman with whom she is building a more equal relationship.

  It takes Richenda a moment to recognize Patricia out of her library context, although she looks just the same as she always does, neat and smart and sharp, Margaret Thatcher without the hat.

  Patricia says, ‘I’d like to come in and have a word with you and your daughter, if I may,’ and Richenda replies that Kate is out but shouldn’t be long, and invites her unexpected visitor in to wait.

  Patricia sits, very still and erect, in the living room while Richenda makes tea. Much as she wants to dislike Richenda, she has to admire her manners, the way she was obviously in the middle of something when Patricia arrived but hadn’t made a big thing of it; and she has to admire her taste. She thinks that everything here must be the best, that you can somehow tell, even if it’s just a little table for a lamp or a plain white china vase holding a trio of peonies. She’s surprised they can’t afford a bigger television, and is looking curiously at photographs – she’s not quite close enough to see them, not prepared to get up and look – when Richenda comes in with a tray.

  ‘That’s Kate when she used to horse-ride,’ Richenda says, seeing where Patricia is looking. ‘Funny to think that it was only four years ago. And that the most difficult part of parenting was getting up at five on a Saturday morning to take her to some show-jumping event on the other side of the country. Still.’

  Seeing Patricia’s rigid face, Richenda decides against following that ‘still’ to the place where it might lead. Instead she pours tea, and when Patricia says, ‘You can always tell when someone’s warmed the pot,’ she feels more pleased than she ought to.

  ‘I’m not sure whether I should mention Michael or not,’ she says, these days of new conversations and unexpected turns in life making her bold, ‘but we are so grateful to him for what he did for Kate.’

  ‘You may not be,’ Patricia says, sharply, and ignores Richenda’s look of incomprehension. She wants to say it all only once. So she starts to admire the rug, and as Richenda launches into the story of them buying it in Egypt, she thanks one set of stars that Rufus is off looking over something at the summerhouse this morning, and begs another to bring Kate home soon, so that they can get this over with, whatever it is.

  The stars are on her side. Kate blows in the back door with Beatle, starts talking before she’s looked through into the living room. ‘This baby is kicking me in the back like you wouldn’t believe,’ she says. ‘Either that or it’s a fantastic elbowing technique. But I think it’s feet. Isn’t it funny, how you can tell?’

  Richenda’s voice is pretend-bright and heavy with warning as she calls back, ‘Michael Gray’s mother has come to see us, Kate.’

  Kate can smile at the sound of his name now, and thinks how funny it is to hear her mother call him Michael Gray, as though if she only said ‘Michael’ Kate wouldn’t know who she meant. She wonders whether the grief that held her paralysed for so long is really starting to ebb, or whether it’s just masked by her hormones, her baby, her sense that all of her love is not lost. Only the nights are really bad.

  She takes a deep breath and walks into the living room, and sits down next to her mother, which means she is directly opposite Patricia, who is looking her up and down as though she is trying to decide something. Kate thinks of standing with her father at the county show, watching as the horses were judged. Patricia is prodding at her with her eyes. She drinks the tea her mother passes her, even though it’s too strong and not quite hot enough, and she waits. Beatle settles by her feet.

  Patricia chooses her words carefully. Or rather, she recites, with care, the words that she has been choosing for the last ten days.

  ‘I’ve come here to talk to you today about a rumour that’s going around.’ She senses that Richenda is going to try to interrupt her, but she keeps on, looking at her knees. ‘I hear most things, sooner or later, and I’ve heard a rumour that my son Michael might be the father of your child.’ She moves her eyes, briefly, to Kate’s impassive face, then Richenda’s, not yet stricken, rather the face of someone who is working out a difficult equation in her head, not quite sure that the answer she has come to can be the correct answer. ‘The father of Kate’s child.’

  Patricia sees that Richenda is holding Kate’s arm, above the elbow, and she recognizes the gesture: like a mother with a baby about to have an injection, big hand wrapping the little chubby hand, knowing that it won’t stop the pain that’s coming but saying, gently, I’m here, I’m here, you have me.

  ‘Well,’ Richenda says, sliding a look at her daughter, who is giving nothing away.

  ‘That wasn’t what I’d come to say,’ Patricia says, not unkindly. ‘I’d come to say that any child Michael did father would have to be watched very carefully, because there’s cystic fibrosis in our family. In our history. I had a sister who died when she was no more than a toddler – I barely remember her – and my uncle, my mother’s brother, only made it to his teens.’

  ‘No,’ Kate say
s, ‘no,’ and the tears and the look in her eyes tell Patricia what she’s come here to discover. Richenda is saying something but the mother and the grandmother ignore her, facing each other, absorbing, adjusting. There’s a blind panic in Kate that jolts the rest of what she planned to say from Patricia, with more compassion than she thought she had for this flighty, feckless girl.

  ‘I don’t think cystic fibrosis is the end of the world any more, even if your baby does have it – and the chances of that are slim, I think. I don’t think it can be cured but I think people can be helped, more than they used to be. And the more you know about it, about what to look for, the better. When Michael was a baby he didn’t grow quickly enough for a while, and we were afraid that that was what it was, but it turned out he was just a slow baby.’

  Kate is crying, nodding, crying, nodding, her eyes fixed on Patricia, her hands rubbing round and round her belly, something she doesn’t seem to know that she is doing. And Patricia feels her own tears coming, but she’s damned if she’s going to cry in front of these people, so she stands up, and she says, ‘No matter what the circumstances, I would like to be able to get to know any grandchild I might have. Even if it is born on the wrong side of the sheets.’

  She gets as far as the garden before the tears come, so she stands, for a moment, and lets herself cry, and lets herself wish things were different, before drying her eyes and walking home again. When she gets there, she looks out her jam recipes.

  Kate’s sobs are violent and the tears go on and on. The only thing that will stop her is when Richenda looks into her daughter’s frightened eyes as her breathing slows and she says, firmly, ‘Kate, this will not be doing the baby any good.’ And Kate nods, and Richenda can see her fighting, fighting, to regain some control.

  ‘I would know,’ Kate says, ‘if there was something wrong with her? Wouldn’t I?’

  Richenda remembers an afternoon, long ago, when she was lost in a daydream of blue babygros dancing on a washing line when the cramps started; another when a colleague took her aside and said to her, quietly, that maybe she’d sat in something or maybe she was bleeding. She takes her daughter’s hands and tells her not to worry. Tells her that, these days, if anything was wrong, the doctors and midwives would be able to tell, and help, that it isn’t the way it would have been for Patricia’s mother any more, these days. And Kate half smiles and puts her hand to the place where her baby is kicking her and says, ‘She’s perfect. Whatever she is, she’s perfect.’

  She saves the tears that she has for Mike, and for the secret she promised to keep, for later. Richenda lists her questions and puts them to one side, and sits back on the sofa, strokes Kate’s back, and wills calmness through her fingers into Kate, although she doesn’t feel very calm herself.

  Rufus gets home to find his wife and daughter on the sofa, asleep, Kate’s head on Richenda’s lap, Richenda’s hand on Kate’s shoulder, Beatle curled in the triangle behind his daughter’s pulled-up knees. He leans in the doorway and looks, and watching them he has the first moment of true peace that there’s been for him since Kate went into the water. He makes himself look at his daughter’s changing body the way he might look at a gouge on his own leg, forcing himself to examine every detail until he’s not looking at a horror but a fact; something that needs fixing.

  It’s the fact that Kate seems still half-girl that breaks his heart. Her hair is in a ponytail, her fingernails are painted pink, her cheek is as smooth as it was when she was born, and Rufus had held her while Richenda slept and promised her that he would look after her, and protect her, and be the best dad that there had ever been.

  He remembers all of the parent-teacher evenings where he and Richenda were told how bright their daughter’s future was, and how she could do anything she wanted to do. And he could not believe that this was what she wanted: this domestic shackling, this deliberate shrinking of her world.

  Unless she had got scared. Unless all of that promise, all of those possibilities, had been too much, too soon.

  After a quick check on the summerhouse project, Rufus has been to Marsham to have lunch with Caroline, a woman he has lunch with whenever he can contrive it, and will do more than have lunch with if things continue as they are. Caroline has interesting theories about human behaviour, something that attracts Rufus almost as much as her walk, the shape of her forearms, the high warm glug of her laughter. The fact that she laughs a lot.

  Caroline thinks that everything people do they do as a way of getting something that they want, so, according to her, if Kate isn’t ready to go away, if Kate feels insecure, then getting pregnant is a clever way of making sure she doesn’t have to do the things that she’s afraid of. The baby makes her safe from too much change; safe from being alone in the world.

  But she’s not alone, Rufus had said, and Caroline had said, no, but she probably feels that she will be, would be, if she went away. She has no idea that after two days on a beach or three evenings in a university bar, she’ll have made friends who she feels as though she has known for ever. Those of us who live in these small places, these fixed places, can forget how much the world can flex.

  Then she’d reached across the table, rested her hand on his, and said, apologetically, of course, Rufus, I don’t know Kate at all, you must ignore me, or stop me, or tell me that I’m wrong, I’m just going from what you’ve told me, you are her father and you know much better than I do; and he’d said, honestly, Caroline, I feel as though I know nothing about my daughter. Nothing. Not any more.

  And so, as Kate sleeps, he walks over and touches her, lightly, on her head, and then he takes a breath and touches her stomach, and leaves his hand there, waiting to feel, if not love, then some sort of affinity. The baby moves and Rufus remembers how miraculous, really, it all is and he thinks, well, new baby girl, none of this is your fault, and you and I are going to get along just fine. It’s the best he can do for now.

  Richenda has woken, and she puts her hand on his arm. He looks at her, smiles, stops smiling when he sees the look on her face. ‘What now?’ he asks, and that tiny peace inside him wilts away, vanishes, takes with it the memory of it ever being there at all.

  Richenda sighs, moves herself gently out from under Kate, who is sleeping in the way that only the emotionally exhausted can, and says, ‘Let’s talk in the garden. You’re not going to like it.’

  Mike,

  There are other alternative universes that are much worse.

  There’s the one where Pepper dies so you don’t need to walk him, and you’re safe at home that night. We’re doing the crossword, or watching a film, or talking about where to go on holiday. We might even be talking about getting a new puppy. Mustard, I imagine we’d have called him. Or Ketchup. When I look at Pepper now, I feel bad about this universe. I give him too many treats to make up for it, and he’s getting fat.

  The next alternative is worse. I only think of it when things are very dark. In this universe Kate dies and you live, because you don’t see her go into the water, or you realize in time that you can’t get both of you out and you get out yourself, or you call for help. I’m really ashamed of that one, in spite of the lies that girl is telling about you.

  And then there are those alternative universes where you would have died anyway, because in some book somewhere in the beyond, your name and that date are written, unchanging. So there’s the heart attack universe, the car crash universe, the meningitis universe, the undetected cancer universe, the eating a sandwich with a bee in it universe.

  But if you were always going to die, I have a bunch of other universes that are much better than those, because I die too. In the same car, killed on impact universe. The plane crash universe. The house fire universe, where the smoke suffocates us in our sleep.

  But none of those are this universe. This is the slowly dying of a broken heart universe, and I wish it would hurry up and be over.

  There is no universe in which that is your baby.

  E xxxx

&n
bsp; Between

  THAT SUMMER – HIS last summer – Michael was like a man possessed. With Elizabeth at the hotel, and Kate with nothing to do until she went off on her gap-year trip in September, it was as though it was meant to be: as though he had been given this small gift, these few months of uncomplicated sex and simple adoration. A little bit of time off from good behaviour. A little bit of time off from wondering whether he and Elizabeth should have tried a little bit harder for their baby for a little bit longer: whether the sad way she looked sometimes, when she thought he wasn’t watching her, was her thinking about the family they didn’t have.

  Everything was all right between them, of course: good, even. They had enough money, a happy home, a way of living and working that suited them both. When they argued, it was angry and fast, and soon forgotten. The three-holidays-a-year agreement they’d made when they stopped trying to have a baby still stood and their evenings of planning and wondering, researching and deciding, were some of the happiest he ever knew. His wife laughed at him and accused him of liking the anticipation more than the holiday: he denied it, but she might have been right. When she was absorbed in brochures, bookings, dates, flicking between web pages and asking herself where she’d seen something that she’d meant to show him, she was all his own Elizabeth, the one he remembered from the first, serious and sweet and excited, not disappointed yet.

  She still avoided babies, and that made Michael wonder. He had noticed that she would make any excuse not to see Lucas and Toby, left the room as soon as his mother started talking about one of her friends’ new grandchildren. It didn’t worry him, exactly, because he knew that they loved each other, even if the loving was quieter. But sometimes Elizabeth looked wistful, and he was afraid of what she might be thinking. Did she ever wonder whether, if she had picked a better man, she would have a life that didn’t include a pair of pristine white baby shoes still tucked in the corner of her underwear drawer? Michael couldn’t find a way to ask.