One day, as Michael had been coming home from work, he’d looked in through the living-room window to see her sitting on the floor with her head in her hands. He’d rushed to the back door, immediately and thoroughly worried, his years of being a good husband leading him to think only that someone else has hurt his wife, not that he could be part of whatever the matter was.
What happened when he got to the back door shocked him. He went in to find Elizabeth as she always was, happy and smiling, delighted to see him, with a shortlist of next year’s marathons and a new travel book.
Every time she tucks her hair behind her ears, the diamond earrings he gave her for their tenth anniversary last year wink at him and remind him that he walked into the jeweller’s with an eternity ring in mind.
Kate had asked to talk to her parents on the Saturday after her A level results came in. She had thought it would be the best time: they were so proud of her, of her success and, by extension, their own success as parents, that the three of them had managed to spend a genuinely enjoyable evening together, with no snipes or sulks. When the mood had still been cheerful two days later, Kate had decided that there wouldn’t be a better time.
‘I just want you to hear me out, please,’ she’d said, and her parents had looked at her and waited, her mother with half a smile, her father with half a frown.
‘I’ve decided that I don’t want to go to Thailand. I’ll have time to do those sorts of things in the holidays from uni, and I really want to spend the time I have between now and next September here; I want to save some money and I want to just do nothing for a bit. So, I want to cancel my trip.’
She’d held her breath, waited, seen her parents glance at each other and swap expressions, her mother taking the half-frown in exchange for her half-smile passed to Rufus.
‘Are you sure, Kate,’ Richenda had asked, ‘has something happened to change your mind?’ And Kate had thought of what has happened to her, not so much a change of mind as a transformation of body and heart. There’s the tang of limes and the salt of sex that she feels herself emitting in great waves with every move and breath, the ache in her thighs and the feeling of fingernails moving across her lower back, not hard enough to mark her but hard enough to leave the sensation of themselves behind. There are only two places that Kate wants to be these days: the nest that they make for themselves at Butler’s Pond in the good weather, Michael’s car, warmer but so much less comfortable, parked in the dark when it’s cold and wet, or when he’s on his way to or from work, with no Pepper for an excuse.
And there’s her heart, which seems to be stretched to vastness, taut and tense with love, vibrating at every thought of the man who is making the leaving of Throckton impossible. She wonders if Michael will ever understand the enormity of what she is doing; until they found each other, she was counting down the days until she could get away from her parents’ constant bickering, the home made sad and cold by years of hopeless effort. Not yet.
‘Not really,’ she had shrugged, remembering what Mike had told her once, that the best way to avoid an argument is to not engage with it at all: that if you give nothing, there’s nothing to react to. Just the thought of him had sent out a twang that she couldn’t understand her parents not hearing, or seeing, somehow.
Although the look in her mother’s eyes had made her wonder whether she did know something.
But Richenda had said, ‘Well, it’s your choice,’ and Rufus had nodded, and added, ‘I thought for an awful minute that you were going to say you didn’t want to go to university.’
‘No, Dad,’ she’d said, and she’d thought, we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it, if we have to.
University-Kate seemed like another person, in another world: although, once, all she had to do to turn into that person was to keep putting one foot in front of the other, now, that other Kate seems hypothetical.
The place they had found was in a hollow made by tree roots, well off the beaten track, well away from all of the other places couples with nowhere else to go went to. Mike had made Kate sit there, when they first found the spot, while he had curved a radius around her, checking to see whether they were visible.
‘Probably best if we lie down,’ he’d said when he came back, pulling her down to him, and Kate had blushed, still not used to this frankness and frank enjoyment.
Her sexual experience had been limited, so far, to a classmate who had known as little as she had, and a university student intern of her father’s who had been nice enough, but couldn’t wait to get away from her afterwards – in retrospect, her bedroom at home while her parents were at work probably wasn’t the best venue – and so Kate had been left with a mixture of guilt and ‘Is that it?’ which had made her determined to wait for something better. She hadn’t anticipated that ‘something better’ would take the form that it had, but she knew that life’s best love stories were unlikely. The usual form of things, as demonstrated by her parents, certainly wasn’t anything to hold out for.
They had been lying on a blanket in their spot, later on the day when Kate had told her parents that she wasn’t going to Thailand after all.
‘What would we do,’ she had asked, sitting up, cross-legged, and reaching up inside the back of her T-shirt to refasten her bra, ‘if someone found out?’
‘You’d be all right,’ Mike had said, smiling at her as she tugged down her T-shirt, raked her fingers through her hair, bound it into a ponytail again. ‘I’d be run out of town. But no one’s going to find out.’
‘Eventually …’ she’d said, carefully.
His eyes, lazy in the dusk, had found hers then. ‘Kate,’ he’d said, ‘there’s no eventually in this. In us. You’ll go off to your turtles and some lucky boy will watch you in your bikini and – eventually – he’ll pluck up the courage to ask you to come for a walk with him in the moonlight, and I’ll be someone that you barely remember.’
‘I thought—’ she’d begun.
‘Sweetheart, don’t think.’ He was tired. He said it kindly. ‘Sweetheart’ was his reassuring work-word for sullen children, before he had learned their names. Kate didn’t know this. She took those two syllables, wrapped them up tight, put them just behind her solar plexus for safe keeping. Used them to fend off that last sentence which, later, she would pick over again and again. ‘Boy’ and ‘barely remember’ would distress her the most.
‘I’m not going,’ she’d said.
‘Why not? What’s happened?’ He had sounded concerned, a bit scared. This conversation was not going the way that Kate had planned it. She had hoped for – expected – relief at this news, an admission of how much they had both dreaded parting, and finally, the thing she is waiting for more even than the next touch, a stuttering declaration of love. She had thought that this would be the Night. She had been wrong.
She had looked at him – he was sitting up too, now, his eyes on hers, his mouth a line, his forehead a question, and for all that Kate’s heart was twisting and shouting, her mouth managed to do the right thing.
‘There weren’t enough people,’ she said, ‘they cancelled it.’
‘That’s a shame,’ he said, then carefully, cautiously, ‘You’ll be looking for something else?’ Inside, his heart is flapping, a tethered bird. Their jokes about turtles are so much a part of their conversation that he hadn’t noticed, until now, how often he had thought about the end date of this – thing. (It’s not an affair. He’d never do that to Elizabeth.)
Later, walking back to the place where, by common consent, they parted, he had said, ‘Kate, you know there’s no future in this, don’t you?’
‘Of course,’ she’d said.
‘Good,’ he’d replied, ‘because I couldn’t stand the thought of you throwing away your future because you thought there was more to me than there is. I never got much further than Throckton, but I was happy to do that. I am happy.’ He thinks of adding ‘without you’, decides against. ‘You – you could do anything. And you should. Don’t th
ink of me.’ He had remembered how he had wanted to help her: how, when they had first talked, he had encouraged her to talk about Thailand, about Oxford, asked questions about what she would learn, see, do. He knew when it had all changed: the lip-gloss-mint kiss that should never have happened.
‘Of course not. Don’t worry about me,’ she’d said, and some tautness between what she was feeling and what she wanted him to see had meant that she’d smiled him a smile that was a perfect balance. Strength pulled it north, fear south; love sent it east, longing west. And so it flew a true path, and banged Michael right in his solar plexus, so he stood, half winded, for a moment or two before he composed himself and headed for home.
After that Michael had tried harder. He had renewed his efforts to stay away from Kate. He had taken Elizabeth to a spa for a weekend, which had turned out to be a lousy idea. She’d spent most of both days having treatments that required either isolation or silence, so apart from a half-hour in the jacuzzi or a stroll around the grounds in the slot between Elizabeth’s manicure and her massage, he was left to himself. He swam fifty lengths of the pool, he took a squash lesson, he ran a five-mile loop around the grounds in one direction, then the other. And all the time, he thought about Kate. About that smile. If the kiss had made his body sing, the smile could, very possibly, have done for his heart.
And yet. At dinner, Elizabeth had glowed with relaxation, good health and gratitude. At night, she had slept the sleep of someone who has spent all day having the tension wrung out of them. Michael, sleepless, had watched the shadows of the night hours move across her face, and he had loved her. He had known that he loved her without end; that the years they had spent together had only made them more than they were to begin with; that nothing, nothing, not even Kate’s magic, would take him from Elizabeth. A part of him still remembered the difference between love and infatuation: a part of him recognized his impulse as being different to his true wish.
And he lay there, not switching on his phone, not looking to see whether Kate had sent him something, a picture of her painted toenails accompanied by a question mark, a little ‘thinking of u’ which was the most affection that she ever dared, and he wondered what it was that Elizabeth had been feeling, that day she sat on the floor with her head in her hands, that she had been unable to show him.
Mike,
I don’t know why today was the day to sort out your clothes, but it was. It was the thing I’d dreaded most, and your mother and Mel have given up suggesting it. But now that there’s something I dread more, I thought I would give it a try. Even though I like the smell of your things when I open the wardrobe door, and I like the way your clothes and mine are all squished up together.
First I looked at the colours, the greys and blues that, if you mixed them all together, would make the kind of sad sky that England does so well.
I started with the thing I thought would be the hardest: I pulled out your old leather coat that makes me think of winter walks. Especially my first January here, because I never put enough clothes on when we went out and you would wrap me in your coat when you said my ears had turned blue. Sex by the fire when we got home. My second winter, we bought me what your mother called ‘a proper coat’ but I missed walking with the old leather one around my shoulders, your arm keeping it in place.
I sat on the bed and I held your coat and I realized what people mean when they talk about ‘sorting out’ the clothes of a dead person. They mean, decide which memories are really precious to you, and which memories you can risk losing. The shirt we bought when we were meeting Andy’s girlfriend, and then neither of us liked her. The jumper that lived downstairs for most of the winter so that there was always something for one of us to put on when we took Pepper out. Your white dress shirt that you used to like me to wear in bed when we’d been somewhere dressed-up, over my black bra and knickers. The jeans with the tear in the knee from when you fell on our way down from Beau’s Heights, and I thought it was funny until I saw how deep the cut was. I’m sitting here writing to you with all of these memories sprawled around me. I’m supposed to decide which ones I can throw away, manage without. Well, I can’t manage without any of them. When I die, someone can throw away all of our clothes together.
If you were thinking of one day putting in a ghostly appearance, this would be a really good time. I don’t think I’ve ever been so lonely.
E xxx
Then
IT HAD BEEN a month after the seventh round of IVF failure, the fourth that they’d paid for, from their savings and from the money Elizabeth had inherited from her aunt and uncle and left, untouched, to pay for her children’s university education, one day. When she thought of that former version of herself, so sure she would have the future that she planned, Elizabeth wanted to laugh, but couldn’t, quite. Summer was coming.
Michael had hardly needed to look at Elizabeth’s face to know that something was serious: she was sitting in the half-light of the kitchen, waiting for him, not doing anything: not putting food on the table for them, not looking at the crossword, not reading a book. No wine, no coffee at her elbow; no radio, no TV. Just Elizabeth, beautiful and calm and eerie in the evening. Michael had gone to switch the light on, but she’d said, ‘No.’
He’d looked at her, then, looked for tears or pain in her face, now more afraid than concerned. ‘I think it might be easier to talk in the dark,’ she’d said.
‘OK,’ he’d said, ‘then how about the garden? It’s warm.’
And she’d nodded, and then he had regretted his suggestion, because it meant talking about having a glass of wine, and finding the bottle opener, and Elizabeth going to get something to put on her feet, all of which had given Michael time to wonder what on earth this could be about.
He had been able to imagine a new test result, given with an apology about mixed-up lab samples, that meant that one of them was, in fact, properly infertile. Or something else the tests had shown up: some medical condition that made being sterile the least of their worries. He had taken glasses from the dishwasher and thought about cystic fibrosis, about the heart problem that took his father, about Elizabeth’s aunt with the aneurysm, her father, medical history unknown, her mother, who died before she had the chance to show where the weaknesses in her body were going to be. His stomach had been heavy. The skin around his eyes had pinched and ached.
Elizabeth had obviously been finding it difficult to look at him as they settled into their usual chairs by the garden gate, so Michael had poured wine and thought, even if it isn’t medical, even if there’s no bad news in that sense, she’s gearing up to tell me something I’m not going to like. He had listed the possibilities: she wants to go back to Australia; she’s going to leave me so she can find a man with a history of children, before it’s too late for her; she doesn’t love me any more. All of the above.
Elizabeth had been planning this conversation all day, and mulling it, in the quiet wakeful night hours, for weeks. It had been that morning, when the thought struck her that she could no longer talk to Mike about what was in her heart, that all of this baby-making stuff had made them cautious, stepping through tall fields of fragile flowers when they spoke to each other; afraid that one day the stepping-through might go wrong and then they would be facing each other, knee-deep in dead petals that their clumsiness had shimmered to the ground. And then – well, and then not having a baby would be the least of their worries. Once, they had had a joke about how, if they split up, Elizabeth would at least get to leave all of the terrible wedding presents behind on the grounds of air freight charges. They don’t joke about that kind of thing any more. Not because it feels as though their marriage will end: these months and years are binding them tighter, tighter, every day. But sometimes Elizabeth dreams of suffocation, sometimes of disintegration. She knows she needs to find some freedom, somewhere.
So she had taken a deep breath and flipped her hair back over her shoulders so that her whole face had faced her husband’s, and she had said, �
�How would it be if we never had a baby?’ The look on Mike’s face had confirmed all that she had feared. She had watched as he thought, considered, opened his mouth, closed it, trying for words that wouldn’t cause so much as a petal flutter.
‘I would be sad,’ he had said, ‘because you – we – want to have a baby so much.’
‘Are you saying that because you know that that’s the right answer?’ Her tone had been sharper, more combative than she had meant it to be. Speaking the language of their love, she had touched his thigh: an apology.
He had put his hand, briefly, on hers: an acknowledgement.
‘I mean,’ she’d said, ‘that I’m afraid we’ve stopped being honest about this, Mike. We’re so busy trying to have a baby that we’re forgetting things. Other things.’
Michael had thought about the way it felt to come home, these days. ‘I think we’re paying a high price,’ he’d said. And then, remembering the sharp, good taste of undiluted honesty, ‘There are times when I dread coming home.’
Elizabeth had bowed her head. ‘There are times when I dread waking up,’ she had said, and then she’d started to cry, and although Michael had thought that there couldn’t be anything worse than dreading waking up, as she kept talking he had begun to understand that that was just the beginning of bad days. ‘I dread going to the hospital and I dread coming home. I dread my period but—’ and her eyes, finding his, had looked wild where the moonlight was catching at the tears, ‘I dread being pregnant. What if I was, and then I miscarried? Or there was something wrong with the baby? What if I was a terrible mother? What if I died when the baby was small, smaller than I was when my mother died, and then it had to grow up without me?’
Michael had been on his knees in front of her, his first thought to be close enough to comfort, but, as he had listened, feeling his own list of what-ifs begin, he couldn’t find a way to comfort her. Instead, he had sat with his back to Elizabeth, his shoulder blades at the outside of her knees, feeling her left hand on his left shoulder, knowing that her right hand was wiping away her tears as his right hand was wiping away his.
Letters to My Husband Page 18
