Letters to My Husband

by Stephanie Butland

  After the hairdresser, she goes to see Kate, who answers the door with a smile that makes Patricia overlook, for a minute, that this girl is difficult, this relationship is difficult, that the baby means that she’s going to have a lot of sideways looks and awkward questions for a while. Kate is wearing a T-shirt, stretched tight: they don’t hide their pregnancies the way they used to.

  ‘Come in,’ she says, ‘Mum and I have just been finishing Kayla’s room.’

  Rufus rises when Patricia enters, and although he shakes her hand, his eyes are cold.

  ‘I didn’t know you were coming,’ he says, ‘but I’m very often the last to know anything in this house.’ Patricia is still trying to formulate a reply when he excuses himself and goes out.

  ‘Ignore him,’ Richenda says, ‘he’s not adapting very well.’

  ‘It’s not easy,’ Patricia concedes, remembering the last time she was here, the tears and the panic. Kate looks bigger, more tired, but happier too. ‘How are you? How is the baby?’

  ‘I’m fine,’ Kate says, ‘fat, but fine. And the baby – we’re going to have a check-up and a scan the day after tomorrow. At the hospital.’

  ‘That’s good.’

  ‘Yes,’ Kate stops, rubs her belly, a clockwise motion, looks down as though her body will speak to her, ‘I just keep thinking, well the first scan was fine, and everything she’s doing is everything the books say she should be doing, kicking and elbowing and hiccuping. So. I think it will be all right.’ She looks to her mother, to Patricia, for confirmation.

  It’s on the tip of Patricia’s tongue to say, that’s because you want it to be all right. She remembers her own days of carrying Michael, when there was nothing to go on but the look on the midwife’s face as she wielded her tape measure and used an ear trumpet to listen for a heartbeat. ‘Things have come a long way in nearly forty years,’ she says instead.

  Kate looks a little shy as she asks, ‘Would you like me to ring you and let you know what they say?’

  ‘Yes,’ Patricia nods, ‘yes please,’ and then she passes a bag that she’s brought to Kate.

  Kate takes out jackets, hats, bonnets, bootees, in pinks, peaches, purples, white. She holds each garment up to the light.

  ‘Did you make these?’ she asks.

  ‘Yes,’ Patricia says.

  ‘We’ve only got babygros,’ Kate says, ‘but these are so pretty. Vintage.’

  Patricia and Richenda look at each other, smile.

  ‘I’m glad you like them,’ Patricia says. She looks away so that she can hide her face, her feelings, for a moment. She remembers talking to Elizabeth, cautiously, about babies, and Elizabeth saying, tightly, ‘I’m not sure babies are going to be our thing, Patricia, I wouldn’t get your knitting needles out just yet.’

  ‘But they’re so tiny,’ Kate says.

  ‘Some of them will probably be too big,’ Richenda says.

  Kate looks at her stomach and says, ‘Whatever’s in here is huge, Mum.’

  And then this disparate almost-family makes its way upstairs to take a look at the nursery. On the door, wooden letters spell out K-A-Y-L-A, and Patricia looks at the word and thinks, well, I think perhaps I can learn to live with that, after all. Kate sees her looking, and says, ‘I haven’t decided on a middle name yet.’

  The room is peach, with cream curtains. It’s pale, plain, beautiful. There’s a rocking chair in the corner, a chest of drawers, a cot. It’s all ready, except that there’s a framed Beatles poster propped against the wall, unhung. It seems an odd choice to Patricia, who is planning a trip to Marsham to buy a sampler kit this weekend. Richenda catches her look.

  ‘This was in here when it was the spare room,’ she says, ‘Kate thinks she might keep it in here.’

  Patricia says, ‘When I was born, my parents put me in a drawer filled with blankets, to sleep. That’s what it was like, for them. You might not feel it, but you’re very lucky.’

  Kate says, ‘Mum’s been brilliant. I’m going to stay here for the first year, and we’re going to see how it goes. And so long as Kayla is all right, I’ll think I’m the luckiest person there’s ever been.’ Then, made bold by Patricia’s first unguarded smile, asks, ‘Where did Mike sleep? When he was a baby?’

  ‘Oh, his dad made him a crib,’ Patricia says, thinking how only this girl and Elizabeth have ever been allowed to shorten his name to Mike. ‘His dad was good with his hands. I kept it next to my side of the bed. You can have it, if you want it. If you’re not putting her straight into the cot.’

  ‘Really?’ Kate says, as though Patricia has just offered her the very earth and skies.

  ‘That’s very kind,’ Richenda adds.

  ‘Of course,’ Patricia says, ‘no one else is going to use it,’ and then she remembers that Michael was the one who always went up into the loft when she needed anything. She doesn’t know how she’ll get it down. She’ll have to ask Blake, or Andy, or the neighbour’s son she doesn’t much like, for help. And her loss crushes her, quietly, again, the way it finds a thousand tiny quiet ways to crush her every day.

  ‘Do you want to go and make some tea, Kate,’ Richenda, who has been watching everything with a cat’s attention, says. And Kate does, and brings it to Patricia, who’s grateful for it, even though it’s in a mug, but, she thinks, that’s the young for you.

  Mike,

  I’ve worked out that I need to have twenty minutes of sensible conversation with Mel and ten with either Blake or Andy every day to keep them from doing anything more than look worried.

  But I can’t sleep and I can’t eat and I feel weirder and weirder with every day. The days are merging because I’m not opening the curtains and I’m not getting dressed. My mind is working overtime. I keep thinking about things. Stupid things. Like, you can’t call a baby Michaela Micklethwaite but if you were wanting to get a Michael in there you could call it Kayla. (Mel told me about the name. She thinks it’s stupid. So do I. More importantly, I think you would have thought it was stupid, you with your endless suggestions of Camelia, Jasmine, Poppy.)

  And then, there’s Beatle. I asked Blake how it’s spelled, and he said, like the band. So now I’m thinking, Pepper. Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. But she’s too young to know about the Beatles and you didn’t like them, so I suppose that, at least, is a coincidence. A paranoid coincidence. That’s what happens when you think too much, when your brain churns and churns around the same horrible, muddy, stony, uphill loop. When you can’t talk to the person you need to talk to, even though you can’t bear the thought of seeing their face. Even though, at the same time, you want nothing more in the world than to see their face again.

  Tomorrow is my birthday. I used to love how much we made of birthdays. On the first of my birthdays when we were together, I was in Australia still, and you sent flowers in the morning, which I thought was sweet, and then you turned up in the afternoon, which I thought was a kind of madness, especially when most of my birthdays growing up had been a new bell for my bike and a joint party with Mel, and so I’d never bothered, much. I remember saying to you, you’ve set the bar high now, and you said, there’s no day more important than the day you arrived in the world. And so one of our traditions was made. I suppose it would have changed, if we’d had a baby’s birthday to celebrate.

  Last year, when you took me to Venice, I thought it was because you adored me, but it turns out you were just making it up to me for something I hadn’t found out about yet. Love in the bank. Well, it doesn’t work like that.

  This year my birthday is all down to me and I can do what I like so what I am going to do is this. I am going to bed in a minute, and I’m going to take a couple of sleeping tablets and wash them down with a whisky. Every time I wake up, I’ll do the same thing again. Just until my birthday’s over.

  E

  ANDY ARRIVES AT eleven on Elizabeth’s birthday with flowers. Friendly flowers, muted flowers. Mel takes one look at them and asks, ‘Have you been talking to Rufus Mickl
ethwaite?’

  ‘Lucy chose them.’ Andy is looking for Elizabeth, with the expression of hope and trepidation that Mel feels is a reflection of the way her own face looks most of the time.

  ‘Nothing. She hasn’t woken up yet. I took some tea up at ten, but she was dead to the world.’

  ‘Probably best,’ Andy says. ‘I’ll come back this afternoon on my way home. I’m concerned by how much she’s sleeping, though.’

  Mel shrugs. ‘She’s been like this since Kate came round with her I’m-coming-to-fuck-you-tonight text messages from beyond the grave.’

  ‘Tough times,’ Andy says. ‘I’ll see you at about three.’ Mel nods.

  Three is when Elizabeth surfaces again. There’s a mug of tea, cold, by her bed, but she thinks it’s different to the one that was there earlier, when she took her last lot of tablets. She wonders whether she can face at least a bit of the day.

  But the plan has been so strong in her mind: take the tablets, wake up when the day is over. Take the tablets, wake up tomorrow. So this swallowing of tiny white pills is the obvious, the logical thing. And then she hears the voices in the garden. Mel, talking to Patricia.

  That decides it. Elizabeth reaches for the tablets again, gulps at the tea. As soon as she’s taken them, things start to feel very strange.

  The mug slips from her hand and the tea arcs itself across the space in front of her and on to the floor, landing in a wet strip.

  The mug itself bounces on the corner of the bedside table, the vibration throwing the tablet bottle off to land upside down on the rug. Elizabeth reaches for it but her hand is in kaleidoscope.

  The world has turned peculiar.

  Not scary, exactly.

  Undulating.

  Echoing with silence.

  Calm.

  A little nauseous.

  Then very, very black.

  Patricia is saying, ‘I brought her a cake, and a present, and a card, but—’ Her hands move in the air, grasping for a way to say: I don’t know whether it’s the right thing, or if there is a right thing, but I’m trying.

  Mel says, ‘I know. It’s hard. You’ve just missed Blake. He left her something. An envelope. He says not to give it to her until he’s been back to explain. He was quite agitated.’

  ‘They always made such a fuss about their birthdays, the two of them’ – although Patricia has determined that she has nothing to feel guilty about in getting involved with the Micklethwaites and her granddaughter-to-be, she can feel herself gabbling, anxious, faced with Mel’s tired eyes and reproachful, sad smoking – ‘but it’s hard to know what to do.’

  ‘Tell me about it.’

  But Patricia is spared any more, because Andy arrives, and Mel says, ‘Patricia, put the kettle on, that cake isn’t going to eat itself and she can’t possibly claim that four people is a party. I’ll go and get her.’

  And two minutes later, there’s the scream.

  Andy calls the ambulance and puts Elizabeth in the recovery position. He says to Mel, ‘She’s breathing. She’s been sick. These are good things,’ although his hands are shaking. The bedroom smells of acid, tea, whisky.

  Patricia collects clean pyjamas, a flannel, a towel, toothbrush, toothpaste, one of the guest soaps she gave Elizabeth at Christmas that’s still in a box in the bathroom. She puts them in a bag with Elizabeth’s phone, purse, book, and she puts the bag at Mel’s feet.

  ‘You go with her,’ she says, ‘I’ll take Pepper and I’ll lock up here.’

  Mel nods.

  ‘Do you think it was deliberate?’

  ‘I don’t know, Patricia,’ Mel says, ‘all I know is that she didn’t want a birthday. Could we really blame her if it was?’

  Dear Mike,

  Blake brought me a book about grief and one of the things it says is that you should write a letter to the person who has died and tell them how you feel. I thought that was a good idea. I’ve never written more than a thank-you note and I had to borrow the paper from Mum, because writing on paper from the printer or in a notebook didn’t seem quite right.

  I feel sad. And at the same time I try to think how lucky I am. Kayla is like a door opening, except I didn’t know the door was there before. I’m going to have a completely different life to the life I had planned, but the more I think about it, the more I realize I wasn’t really the one who had planned it. A levels, gap year, Oxford … It was all assumed somewhere, way back, because I’m bright and my parents are well off. That was going to be my life. I was sleepwalking.

  Now I’m awake. I’m wide awake. Although my body’s getting tired, I think being pregnant makes everything sharper and sweeter. I hear Dad muttering about my life being thrown away and I can’t find the words to tell him that, really, it’s just finding the right way.

  At the same time as feeling lucky I feel sad. There are times when it feels unbearable not to be able to see you and touch you. I felt that way when you were alive, too. I used to lie in bed at night and miss you and wish you were with me. I used to pretend that there was no Elizabeth. That day she found me in your garden, and I realized that she was wearing your dressing gown, was the first time that I really started to understand that she was a real person, that you had a real relationship.

  Because we never lay in a bed together, when I lie in bed on my own it’s easy to forget the real reason that you’re not here, just for a moment or two. Then I remember, and it’s like I’m thrashing about in that horrible water again.

  The things I think about most are:

  —I didn’t get to tell you about the baby.

  —I don’t know what you would want to call her.

  —We never went out for a meal together. When I was waitressing, I used to watch people in love with each other. The way they chose food, ate food, took their time, was different to any meal I’ve ever eaten. And I won’t be able to say to Kayla, your dad and I came here, or when we went to this restaurant your dad always ordered that.

  —I don’t know whether you ever would have come back to me, or loved me, or been a family with us. I hope you would have. I think you did love me. I think you probably loved her, too. When you were here, I couldn’t see that. Now that you’ve gone, and everything’s complicated, I can understand better, I think. Especially because I broke a promise that I made to you. I’m sorry. That got complicated too.

  Today Kayla and I go to the hospital to see the midwife and have a scan and talk about cystic fibrosis some more. In my heart I’m sure she’s all right. In my head, I know we won’t know anything for certain until she’s born. But my head is swimming with questions and worries and the horrible thing Elizabeth said. Mum says, any mum is worried, whether there’s a risk to the baby or not. Mum says there’s no reason to think that Kayla will have anything wrong with her at all: I’m well, Mike was well, his mother is well, and I should remember those things. I know she’s right. She’s right about a lot more than I used to think she was.

  Writing this has been a bit weird. I don’t know whether it’s good, or not. But I don’t know how to end it.

  Between

  KATE HAD SPENT the autumn full of an unwavering certainty that Mike would change his mind. It wasn’t as though he hadn’t done this before: avoided her, kept away from her, ignored her. Come back for more. And Kate knew what made him come back, so she kept out of his eye-line. She watched him run but she stayed well behind. She petted Pepper outside shops but she was gone by the time he came out, newspaper under his arm, asking Pepper what on earth he was eating this time. She worked double shifts in the restaurant, a place she knew he would never come to, and she read books in front of the fire on her days off, although she probably couldn’t have told you anything about them once she finished them and put them aside. She helped her mother with a work project and she answered the phone in Rufus’s office for a week when his receptionist left without giving notice.

  And her feelings boiled and rolled like a solstice sea. She longed for Mike, she missed him, she ached for
him. She let herself cry at night, late, when the rest of the house was sleeping, but most of the time she presented a pale, serene face to the world.

  And she waited.

  Weeks passed, then a month. Almost another. These seven weeks had felt like a lifetime. The only thing that kept Kate’s little ship of hope afloat was the fact that Mike didn’t seem to have been doing much. There were no signs of him re-embracing married life: no holidays, no hand-in-hands through the streets of Throckton or round Butler’s Pond. Mike seemed to be doing, mostly, solitary dog-walking. Sometimes he was with the other policeman who had a greyhound, and Pepper scuttled along around the taller dog’s legs. Once, she saw him with Elizabeth, arm in arm, but that was at Beau’s Heights, and Kate thought this proof positive that she was not forgotten: that Mike, loyal, would not take his wife to the place that was so special to the two of them.

  Christmas had threatened, then loomed. Kate had accepted invitations to parties and drinks from her friends who were coming home from their travels for a week or two. She had even made some half-hearted plans to join Bella for a fortnight in Morocco in the spring, but she knew that, if Mike had come back to her by then, she wouldn’t be able to leave him, and if he hadn’t, she wouldn’t be able to leave Throckton in case he did.

  Her world was transcribing a smaller and smaller orbit: she didn’t mind, because her aim was to make a world smaller still. Just her and Mike.

  And so came the ritual of the buying of the Christmas tree. It was the one thing that the Micklethwaites had always done together: come hell or high water, spitting rows or furious silences, on the second Saturday before Christmas the three of them would get in the car and go to the garden centre. There was an unspoken agreement between Richenda and Rufus: they both knew that a perfect Christmas was out of the question, that depending on where they were in the biorhythms of their marriage, either Richenda would be sulky and Rufus sneaky, or one or both of them would be noisily disappointed in the other for something, or both of them would be exhausted from the effort of trying to make things good. But a perfect Christmas tree was within their reach. It must be bushy and thick at the bottom, and arrow-straight at the top, and the tree must be exactly seven feet tall, with the single top branch long enough to be striking but not so long as to be stringy. Richenda would ask the garden centre staff to take off the netting in order that she could check the trees they had shortlisted. They wouldn’t like it, muttering about how busy they were, but Kate’s mother would smile, and they would do it, and then Rufus and Richenda would stand with their heads together, as close as Kate ever saw them, earnest as owls, deciding. And Kate, watching, would wait for the moment when her blessing would be sought, and then the three of them would pay for the tree, arrange for delivery, and go out for lunch. It was the only time in the year when Kate could see why her parents might, once, have loved each other, seen enough in each other to attempt a life together.