Letters to My Husband

by Stephanie Butland

  So Patricia steps back, into the hallway, where it is Mel’s turn to blink and wait for her eyes to make sense of the different light, then into the living room, so full of photographs that it’s like stepping on to a stage. Mostly the pictures are of Michael and Michael’s father, the resemblance strong, although the father’s shoulders are broader, the son’s hair darker. Elizabeth and Patricia make the odd appearance too. Patricia, framed, stands camera-shy and formal on her wedding day, then later, outside the same church in Throckton, holding a baby swaddled in a shawl. As time goes on, her pictures become a little more relaxed, the images of her most alive when she is trying to get Michael to do something: look at the camera, blow out candles, ride a bike.

  Mel thinks of how Elizabeth is always lovely in photographs – she has often lamented to Mel that she looks so much better in photos than in real life, and Mel has always said that, if you take the long view, she has the better deal. Except the last time that they had talked about photographs, Elizabeth had just said, Mel, I really don’t care what I look like at all.

  Patricia has wiped her hands on the corner of her apron, and is turning away – ‘Well, I’ll just put the kettle on’ – when Mel moves in front of her.

  ‘I do not want a cup of sodding tea,’ she says, ‘I want to talk to you about a visit I’ve just had from Rufus Micklethwaite. And if I hadn’t been there, he’d have made his snide, nasty comments to Elizabeth. Sit down.’

  Patricia, part afraid, part ashamed, part affronted, sits and opens her mouth. She’s not sure where she’s going to start, but that doesn’t matter, because she doesn’t get the chance.

  ‘No,’ Mel says, ‘I don’t want to hear anything. I want you to answer my questions. Is it true? Did you go and tell Kate Micklethwaite that if it’s Mike’s baby it might have cystic fibrosis? Because if you did, you’re a cruel, cruel woman, Patricia. You were cruel to that girl and you are being very cruel to my sister.’

  Patricia opens her mouth again, but Mel, still standing, with all the advantages of rightness and height and the thought of what havoc this news will bring, holds out an imperious, silencing hand. ‘Can’t you see that Elizabeth is falling apart? Haven’t you noticed that she barely speaks if she doesn’t have to and she won’t even eat your fucking chicken soup any more? What do you think this will do to her? Hasn’t she lost enough?’

  Patricia waits, spine tense, heart thumping, but there doesn’t seem to be any more to come. Mel is glaring, waiting, towering in her own righteousness, and out of the tumult Patricia has one lucid thought: whatever I’ve done, I can’t have another conversation about how hard things are for Elizabeth. I just can’t.

  So she stands up, suddenly, so that Mel steps back, away, and in that moment of advantage she says, quietly, ‘She’s not the only person to have lost something here, Melissa, although no one seems to remember that. My son is dead. And if that baby is my son’s child, the mother needs to know about the risks, so that that baby can be cared for properly.’

  ‘Don’t try to tell me you were doing the mother a favour,’ Mel says, scorn written from the arch of her eyebrows to the pitch of her chin.

  ‘Well,’ Patricia said, ‘I had my own reasons. I’m not particularly proud of myself. But needs must, and I know now that that baby is Michael’s child. When I thought I’d lost everything, it turns out that I have a grandchild. I’m sorry for Elizabeth. I am. But this is my flesh and blood.’

  ‘So much for your saint of a son, then,’ Mel says.

  ‘Yes, I know,’ Patricia says – she thinks about telling Mel how she’s lain awake at night, wondering what he’d done, what Elizabeth had done, what she’d done or failed to do in all of Michael’s fatherless years, to make this happen, decides against it – ‘but we don’t really know what went on.’

  ‘You mean that you think Kate Micklethwaite seduced him with her wicked wiles, and he succumbed because my sister doesn’t bake her own bloody bread, and he’s as innocent as a married man who got a kid of nineteen pregnant can possibly be, which is not, actually, very innocent at all.’

  Patricia closes her eyes for a moment, opens them again. ‘Now who’s being cruel?’ she asks, but Mel isn’t listening. She has turned away, shoulders shaking, and Patricia realizes that this wilful, abrasive young woman, who a moment ago she had feared might hit her, or break things, or do who knew what, is crying.

  And so she takes a step forward, and she touches Mel on the shoulder, and when there’s no reaction she takes both shoulders, more firmly, and she brings Mel to sit on the sofa. Mel responds to Patricia’s touch, goes where she is moved to, meek as milk. Sobs are jolting out of her now. She’s like a little girl who’s lost her teddy in a railway station. Patricia holds her, holds her tight, and she waits.

  ‘This will break my sister,’ Mel gets out between sobs. ‘This will break her, and I don’t know how to put her back together again this time. I put her back when he died and I put her back when she found that girl in the garden and I put her back when the rumours started. I don’t know how to do it again.’

  Patricia’s heart heaves in sympathy. She says, ‘We can all get used to terrible things. You know that. I expect you thought you’d never manage without your mother. When John died I was sure that it would be the end of me. Losing a son is the worst thing you can possibly imagine. I know about being broken. I just don’t show it the way you do. The way Elizabeth does.’

  She thinks that she feels Mel nod, but it might be a sob. She is becoming quieter now, softer. Patricia holds on.

  Mel says, ‘She says you’re the closest thing to a mother that she’s ever had. When I complain about you she says that you’ve looked after and loved her and done your best to help her and she hasn’t always liked what you’ve done but you’ve always acted in her best interests. She says that while she and Mike should have had four parents, they only had one, and you did a great job of doing four people’s jobs. And now she’s losing that too. She’ll be devastated, Patricia. She’ll think you’ve let her down as well.’

  Patricia looks at the photographs all around her, and she remembers how John used to say that there are times for talking, whether you want to talk or not. So she keeps going, down this hard road, with a person she wouldn’t have chosen as a companion.

  ‘Mel,’ she says, and as she speaks she remembers how sometimes the things she says come out sharp when she intends them to be clement, so she does her best to make her voice match her intention, ‘Mel, have you considered that, perhaps, in time, Elizabeth will be glad to see that there’s a little bit of Michael left in the world?’

  Mel snorts, finds a tissue, blows her nose. ‘She’s barely coming out of her room as it is.’

  ‘Well, maybe knowing that Michael wasn’t the saint that we’ve all made him out to be will bring her out.’ Mel looks at Patricia now, for the first time since she started crying. Her face is a mess of mascara and brooding. Her eyes are surprised at what she’s heard, questioning, checking. ‘Oh, I’m not blind, Melissa, and I’m not stupid. I just want to think the best of my son.’

  ‘I don’t feel as though I know how to do this,’ Mel says, and neither of them is quite sure how it happens, but a moment later they are embracing, and Patricia is saying, ‘Mel, none of us know.’

  While Mel goes to the bathroom to wash her face, Patricia hesitates over whether to show her the scan picture or not. But she thinks about where secrets have got them, so when Mel comes downstairs, face bare and embarrassed, she says, ‘Richenda Micklethwaite came to see me. At the library. She wanted to talk grandmother to grandmother. She gave me a picture of the baby. A scan.’

  Mel sits down and looks at it, for a long time. Just as Patricia is trying to think of the right thing to say to make the silence stop, Mel traces the outline of the face with the tip of a fingernail; wishes that Elizabeth had been the one handing her a scan, showing her Michael Gray’s baby. ‘Boy or girl?’ she asks.

  Patricia says, ‘Girl.’

  ‘W
ell, at least she can’t call it Michael,’ Mel says, and then she glances at Patricia to see whether she needs to explain that all she means is that that’s one thing Elizabeth won’t have to contend with. Patricia smiles her understanding. ‘And what does the cystic fibrosis thing mean? Michael was all right, wasn’t he?’

  ‘It might not mean anything, the baby may be fine,’ Patricia says, ‘but it runs in my family, so I really did feel she should know.’

  ‘I can see that,’ Mel says. Patricia thinks, well, that’s as close to an apology as I’m going to get. As I deserve, probably.

  Mel stands, rouses Pepper from where he’s sleeping in a nest of cushions in shades of brown and plum. ‘You’re right. We’re going to have to get used to it.’

  ‘You’re doing a good job,’ Patricia says. ‘You’re a good sister.’

  Mel feels the honour of a compliment from a woman not much given to compliments, but all she says is, ‘That’s not what Elizabeth’s going to say when I tell her about this.’

  Mike,

  The trouble with the quilt plan is, I can’t quite bring myself to cut up your shirts. I washed them all yesterday – they were all clean, but I just wanted them to smell of washing powder when I started this, not have the smell of our wardrobe wafting around me as I cut and sewed. (I’m not even sure if our wardrobe has a smell – I mean, I’m not sure whether those lavender bags and scented, padded coat-hangers your mother was always giving us had any impact, but I wanted to be sure. I’m getting good at pre-empting, and protecting myself from the things that I can see might hurt.) I’d told Mel what I was doing before I went to work, so she didn’t think I was going crazy (crazier?) with the washing, and she said, sister, if this is what you need to do, I’m right with you.

  And I suppose she decided she wanted to help, because when I came home from work, having half forgotten that I’d put the washing machine on at all, what should I be greeted with when I walked through the gate but a dozen of your shirts, waving at me from the line. And it really was greeting and waving, because despite all of Auntie Brenda’s nagging (or maybe because of it), Mel never could hang a shirt on a washing line properly, and pegged them all by the shoulders, instead of the hems, as usual. So at first glance it was a chorus line of you.

  I didn’t see that one coming. I didn’t protect myself from my sister’s kindness and effort and support. I felt the way I feel when I pick up the post and there’s a letter addressed to both of us: as though life has stuck out one of its nasty stinky feet and tripped me up again, when I’d only just staggered up after the last thing.

  I’ve ironed the shirts, and folded them, and put them in a pile on the chair in the corner of our bedroom, with the bag of hexagons on top. If you were watching me bring them in from the line, you’d have seen me holding them to me as though you were inside them still.

  We’ll see.

  E xxxxx

  Now

  ELIZABETH IS WAITING when Mel and Blake arrive. She has something that she wants to say. There have been a lot of casual mentions of her birthday, and Mel’s birthday, and there seems to have been more whispering in corners than usual. So she has decided to tell them that there will be no celebration: no candles, no singing, not even the plainest meal in the quietest restaurant they can find.

  What she wants, really, is to sleep through the whole of the wretched day. In fact, she’d like to sleep through every festivity between now and then, ‘then’ being, as far as Elizabeth can gather, the point at which she can find a way to live a normal life. Andy, Blake, Mel and Patricia never seem to tire of reassuring her that this day will come. Andy leaves books about grief that say the same, and which she refuses to look at since she flicked through the contents section of the first one he brought and saw the word ‘acceptance’ in there. Elizabeth does not feel like moving towards acceptance. She does not accept that she’s in a process. She can see that if she had a child, the way Patricia had had Mike when John died, then there would be some point in birthdays and Christmases and generally pretending that life was going on. But Elizabeth doesn’t feel that way. She’s not trying to be maudlin; she’s not running towards the blackness. It’s just there. It’s just everywhere. So she’s determined to make Mel understand that: to get her to see that, at the moment, with all that’s going on, having even the smallest, meanest of birthday gatherings would be about as appropriate as putting on a bikini and a party hat and going to a funeral. Another funeral.

  Pepper tumbles around Elizabeth’s feet as Mel and Blake stand in the doorway. Elizabeth clears her throat and says, ‘I wanted to talk to Mel, but Blake, you may as well hear this too.’ As though she hasn’t heard, Mel says, ‘I think I probably need to go first,’ and at this odd statement Elizabeth looks up, assuming she’s misheard, sees the look on her sister’s face and takes a deep breath. No, no, no, her heart pleads, no more. Not something else. She sits.

  Then Mel is kneeling in front of Elizabeth. She’s nodding to Blake, who says he’ll be in the kitchen, and she’s remembering the advice he’s just given her: tell her now, because you can control the way she hears it, tell her fast, because she’ll know something is wrong and her imagination will be working overtime, tell her clearly, because every word you say will be a word she’ll remember for ever. It had all seemed sound and sensible when they’d talked about doing it; now that Mel is on the brink of it, it seems like the pits.

  Mel takes Elizabeth’s hands and looks into her wondering face. Knowing what she’s about to do is the bloodiest feeling she’s ever felt: a finger on a trigger at point-blank range.

  ‘Did you know there’s a history of cystic fibrosis in Mike’s family?’ she asks.

  ‘Of course,’ Elizabeth’s face is all bemusement, ‘we knew everything about each other. It was all part of the stuff we went through when we were trying to have a baby.’ She remembers how scary the words had sounded when she first heard them, how she had been amazed and furious at how matter-of-fact Mike had been about the whole thing.

  ‘Well,’ and the bullet flies out of the barrel, ‘Patricia took it upon herself to tell Kate Micklethwaite about it, and Kate freaked out and has said that Mike is definitely the father of the baby. Blake found out about all this this morning, from the Micklethwaites. Rufus came here to tell you. He told me and I went to ask Patricia about it. Kate has spoken to the midwife about the possibility of the baby having it. Having cystic fibrosis. From Michael.’

  But Elizabeth is more bullet-proof than she looks. She shakes her head, squeezes Mel’s hand as though she’s the one who needs to be reassured, comforted. She is all big sister.

  ‘That doesn’t mean anything. Prove anything. She’s told a lie and she’s seeing the lie through, that’s all. What are the chances that the baby will turn out not to have cystic fibrosis after all? It proves nothing, Mel, nothing. You’re all far too eager to believe her. I knew Mike better than anyone, and I know it’s not true. You need to trust me.’

  Mel closes her eyes, but when she opens them again, nothing has changed. Elizabeth’s mood, coming off her like a perfume, has high notes of anxiety, an afterglow of gloom. So Mel has no choice but to reload, take a breath, squeeze the trigger again. ‘There are pictures.’

  Elizabeth enters that space between knowing that something has hit her and not yet knowing what it is. She can’t think what there might be pictures of: what cystic fibrosis would look like, on a scan. She rummages through her memory: she did a lot of reading about it, before the test showed that she wasn’t a carrier so, although Mike was, cystic fibrosis could go on to the ‘we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it’ list. She can’t think that anything would be obvious.

  Then Mel says, ‘Pictures of Kate and Mike.’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ Elizabeth says, but there’s a space in her voice that lets Mel say more.

  ‘I know,’ Mel says, ‘but I think it’s time to face facts. Mike had some sort of thing with her, and we don’t know what, but it does seem that there’s
a good chance this is his baby.’

  Elizabeth thinks of Kate: of how she stood in her garden, a pale angel, and how she had gone down on her knees and begged to be told more. How her head, then, could have been no more than a handspan from where Mike’s child was starting to gird itself into growth and life.

  She cannot feel her heart in her chest. She cannot feel her tongue in her mouth. As the bullet hits its mark Elizabeth’s guts turn over, over, over, and her eyes burn at the pain of trying to stay open and look at Mel, who is crying now. She can see that Mel is speaking, see her lips moving and hear something, but her ears are too bewildered to assemble the words into sense.

  The words that Elizabeth wants to say are all lined up in her head, all ready to march down to her throat and out through her mouth and make all of this stop, with their power and their truth and their good, clear sense.

  Mel, it will be nothing. Don’t take it so seriously.

  Mel, remember, this is Throckton. Everything gets out of proportion and when you get to the bottom of it, 90 per cent of what you’d hear if you listened is barely true.

  Mel, she’s just a little bitch trying to cover up the fact that she fucked some idiot boy at a party. How much more glamorous to latch on to my handsome, dead husband than to confess to getting drunk and not bothering with a condom because you’re nineteen and you still think the world is going to look after you?

  But Elizabeth’s tongue won’t work. She’s surprised that she is breathing, because her heart is still and her lungs tight, her throat clenched. She looks at her sister, tear-stained and pleading. And she stands, and she goes upstairs, and she sits on her bed, and she remembers her husband. His honest eyes. His clear smile. She remembers the days when he’d come home after difficult shifts – accidents, fights, domestic violence – and she would say, but you could have been hurt. And he would smile, and touch her hair, and his fingers would slide down the side of her face until they ended under her chin, and he would say, don’t give it another thought, sweetheart.