Letters to My Husband

by Stephanie Butland

  This year, she’d left them to it. With her parents’ marital relations frostier than the winter air this Christmas, the decision was clearly going to take some time, so Kate wandered through the rows of trees, thinking how different this year was from last. Last year she had had to be persuaded away from her books, focused as she was on doing well, doing better than well, getting away from this place and off, up, away in the world. This year, she was in possession of her four meaningless As at A level, no turtles nurtured, no foreign adventures apart from a fortnight snivelling in a shared house in Paris, and none of it mattered. All that mattered was where Mike was, what he was doing, what he was thinking. Whether he was thinking of her.

  And then she’d seen them.

  Mike and Elizabeth were holding hands. She had an ugly coat on, the sort that Richenda sometimes wore for bedding down the garden in the autumn, when she’d catch her daughter’s look and say, Kate, I don’t care what I look like so long as I’m warm. Mike was wearing the leather coat, the one he and Kate had sometimes lain on. In all the people and the trees, with her head down and her hood up, Kate had been able to get close enough to hear what they were saying.

  Elizabeth’s eyes had been bright. Kate hadn’t known that the brightness was to do with the terrible feeling Elizabeth always had in places like this. Christmas trees meant Christmas, which meant children. Children at every stage. Elizabeth always felt as though she was walking through an illustration of everything that she would miss: manoeuvring a buggy up and down steps and through doorways; walking around, high with tiredness, a baby squalling on your chest; holding a little mittened hand; hoisting someone on to your shoulders so they could inspect the top of a tree. Watching sons tumble and race like Labrador pups, their ears and feet too big for them. Refereeing arguments. Marshalling the over-excited, calming the tired. Trying to get an unwilling adolescent to take their earphones out for long enough to contribute to the discussion. It had been all around Elizabeth, as usual, making her feverish with disappointment, beaming with determined love, for the life that she does have.

  But all Kate had seen was someone confident and happy, someone that she wanted to be, or at least, someone who was in the place that she wanted to be her place.

  As she watched, Elizabeth had stood on tiptoe and reached up with her hands. She had dropped Mike’s hand, as though the holding of it was nothing, and she’d said, ‘We have this conversation every year, Mike, you always say the ceiling of the alcove is higher than it is and we always buy a tree that’s too tall and then we have to hack bits of it off. So I measured it, and it’s this big.’

  He had laughed.

  She had said, ‘Don’t laugh. You know this morning, when you came back with Pepper and you were asking what I was doing, and I said I would tell you later? I was seeing if I could touch the ceiling, because I knew we would be having this conversation. And now, here we are, having this conversation.’

  As Kate had watched, Elizabeth had pouted, and Mike had caught her round the waist and kissed her, such a kiss, as though the two of them were in love. And he’d whispered something, and she’d laughed, and he’d laughed, and Kate, who had been skewered to the spot by the sound of Elizabeth’s voice, had found that she could move again.

  She’d come up behind them where they stood, still entwined, and bumped Elizabeth’s arm as she passed.

  Elizabeth had turned and Kate had been able to say, ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t see you there’ clearly and smilingly, and there’d been that second’s space when she’d been able to look at Mike, her eyes flicking to him and away, just for a blink, before she had walked on, past, to the place where her parents were still wondering between trees, and it was as though she’d never stepped away from them.

  What Mike had understood in that moment was simple: he’d hurt Kate, and he’d hurt her very, very badly. He’d hardly given her a second thought since the day he’d told her that things had to stop. It was as though Elizabeth whispering that she was on his side had brought him home, and if he did think about Kate it was in the way that he thought about a holiday once it was over: within three days of being back into the routine of your usual life, it feels like another world.

  He had turned back to Elizabeth, who was watching a mother cradling a scrap of a baby, the baby’s cry hardly making an impact on the air, and he had thought about what an easy thing it was to hurt someone: how much less simple to save them.

  When the tree was decorated, Elizabeth had opened some wine, and she had said, without preamble, ‘I think you ought to tell me what’s wrong, Mike.’

  They’d been sitting opposite the tree, the room lit only by its lights. It was the right height for the alcove, for once, something that Elizabeth had delighted in pointing out when they brought it in. When Patricia had popped round to ‘check the arrangements for Christmas Day’ – as though they would dare to spend it anywhere but with her – and commented on what a good fit it was, Elizabeth had winked, and Michael had thought that the knock he had taken from seeing Kate had gone unnoticed.

  But then Elizabeth had asked her question, and oddly enough, that moment when all was right in their world was the moment when he could have told her everything. Kate’s pale eyes, the way she was there every time he turned round, until she seemed like a part of his life, the taste of mints and the smell of lip gloss, the way he thought it wouldn’t, couldn’t last, but it kept on lasting. (Sometimes he tells himself that, in the scheme of things, four months from Throckton Fair to the definite end was nothing compared to more than a decade with Elizabeth.) How every time, he had thought it would be the last, had understood that it was all wrong, but then she would be there again, and somehow disappointing her would have been worse than walking away, because she was there to be disappointed while Elizabeth didn’t know. The curious addictiveness of secrets, for him who had never had any. That had been the moment when he could have told her everything: that had been the moment when she could have forgiven him, or started to, and the constant nagging thought that Kate might turn up at his door with one of those stupid pictures that she took would have been gone for good.

  He had almost told her.

  Then Elizabeth had said, ‘This all started just after the fire. Whatever it is, it started after the fire.’

  Michael had thought of the fire, a series of memories making a storyboard. First, the catch of the smoke in his face, the hot choking, the solidity of the heat he was pushing through. Then the terror on the mother’s face when he found her, guided to her, it seemed, by the force of her need. The sight of the baby, who seemed already to have life threading out of him, wisping away. Pushing them through the smoke and out, back into the day, safe. The cold air as shocking as the hot had been not two minutes before. The paramedics, quick and professional until the baby cried, when their spines relaxed with relief and, just for a moment, they sought another eye to say, wordlessly, I thought we were on a loser there.

  Elizabeth’s face at the hospital, horrified and pale. Kate’s face at the summer fair, sun in her hair, another sort of pale.

  He had said, ‘Yes, it started after the fire.’

  ‘Why did you do it?’ she had asked. ‘I know I asked you at the time and I know you said you didn’t know. But now,’ and she had looked at him, as if to say, now you can talk, now I can listen. Now the shock is over and the world is coming back to being the way it should be. Now we can make some sense.

  He had sighed, blowing the last of the moment to talk about Kate out of him. ‘It was the thought of that baby,’ he had said, his words slow as they stretched to make themselves fit the things that there were no words for. ‘It was the thought of that baby. I thought about you saying how getting pregnant was only the first thing, then you had to keep the baby safe and help it grow and anything could happen to it, any time.’ Without looking at her, he had known that she was crying, although she wasn’t making a sound.

  ‘I see,’ she had said, and he had felt as though there could be an end of it,
just as, a few moments ago, there had been a moment for Kate.

  But he had kept talking, finding truth as the words came out, as though the saying of them was the only way of discovering what he meant. ‘I couldn’t bear the thought of that. I thought, what if those people were like us? What if it took them five years to have a baby? And now the baby is dying. I couldn’t stand there.’

  Elizabeth nods. ‘I can understand that.’

  ‘And then, afterwards, everyone was angry, and I could see why, but I felt – I felt disconnected from it. From all of you.’

  ‘Did you ever think that you might die? Because that was what I thought.’ She had said this before, at the time, but then it had been an accusation, and Michael had had to defend himself against it. As a statement of fact, now, it was different; harder to hear.

  ‘I don’t think so,’ he had said, wishing for more words, better words, ‘I was just … lost. In the moment. Not thinking about anything. And that’s a strange feeling. Hard to shake.’ He corrects himself, striving for some sort of accuracy. ‘It’s been hard for me to shake, I think.’ Now Kate seems like a part of his recovery; the thing that’s brought him back to his wife.

  Elizabeth had nodded, and her body, taut as a rower’s in the last strokes of a race, had relaxed and sunk towards his. ‘Have you shaken it now?’

  ‘Yes,’ Michael had said, pulling her to him with arms full of everything he couldn’t find words for, ‘I have.’ And he had been almost completely certain that it was true.

  Now

  ELIZABETH IS NEITHER awake nor asleep. She’s lying in a clean white bed in a clean white room and, tempted as she is to think of herself as dead, she’s fairly sure that heaven would smell better than disinfectant, and hell worse. Also, her head is banging, and she can feel the stiffness in her hand where she thinks a drip must be. Her stomach aches. She thinks someone might be sitting next to her. Keeping her eyes closed, she feels around her memory for clues, gently, so as not to make the headache roar. She finds: sleeping tablets, whisky, birthday. Mike, Kate, baby. She feels like a fool. She feels like a failure.

  Dear Mel,

  If you are reading this, then the worst has happened and I’ve done the thing I promised that I would never do. I’ve left you alone in the world. You probably don’t remember. The two of us were sitting in the back of that social worker’s car, and they were driving us to Uncle Al and Auntie Brenda’s farm, and neither of us had really grasped that Mum was gone, but I think it was starting to sink in because you were crying. Not sobbing, but a sort of ongoing low-level snivel that was a much more truthful reflection of what the two of us were feeling, and what we would keep feeling for a long time. Motherlessness was a shock at first, but the worst of it has been that it never stops. At my wedding, I remember watching Mike’s mother struggling down the sand in her heels and that hat, and how we looked at each other and tried not to laugh, but I think we were also trying not to cry because it’s hard to have a wedding without a mother. It’s hard to have a baby, or not have a baby, without a mother. It’s hard to be here now, grieving and fuming, broken beyond all mending, without a mother.

  And although we had no idea, on the day we sat in the back of that car, with the windows open but still the faint smell of other children’s carsickness, of quite how it was going to be, I think my nine-year-old self had some sort of sense of it. So I took your hand and I told you I would never, ever leave you. And you looked at me and said, I know, as though it was the most obvious thing in the world, as though the fact that our mother had just been wiped off the face of the earth thanks to a blown-out back tyre hadn’t altered your world view a bit.

  I’m writing this two days before my birthday, four days before yours. I’m writing it when everything is dark and frightening and I find myself wishing for a central reservation hurtling towards me, cold English water pulling me down. I keep thinking of how much I wish I could talk to Mike again: how, although we all understand that death is final, you don’t completely get how final until it’s too late.

  Just after we got married, Mike made us write down everything we wanted to happen after our deaths: what happened to our bodies, who got what of our possessions, funeral songs, all that sort of thing. (Do you remember you wanted ‘The Birdie Song’ for Mum? Because we all used to dance around to it when it came on the radio, and so you were sure it was her favourite song. I wish they’d listened to you. It would have been so much more fitting than anything about that horrible funeral. Although we did get ‘All Things Bright And Beautiful’. I remember you leaning over to me during the eulogy and asking who the vicar was talking about.) After we’d done it, I kept thinking I would write a letter to him, that he could open after I died. I thought it would be comforting. Now I really wish we’d both done it, for each other.

  So, here I am, writing to you, to say, I’m sorry. I’m sorry I’m not here any more. Whether you’re reading this when you’re thirty-two or when you’re eighty, I promised to look after you, and if you’re reading this, I’ve broken that promise.

  As I write this, you’re the one who’s been doing most of the looking after. But I hope that it balanced out somewhere between me writing this and the rest of my life. I hope I got to be strong and helpful again, although at the moment—

  KATE HASN’T SLEPT much. She gives up and gets up at 6 a.m. and sits downstairs in the darkness, wondering how often she will be here when Kayla is born. She thinks about how everyone says she’ll be really tired, but she can’t imagine how she’ll ever be more tired than she is now. Her body is starting to resist any sort of movement, wanting stillness and rest, but at the same time unable to find comfort, full of aches and twinges that make nights feel like marathons run.

  And Kate’s heart is unquiet: it carries the memory of Elizabeth two weeks ago, her pain and her fear. She keeps thinking about the conversation that she’d had with her mother, on the night they returned from seeing her and showing her the photographs. Kate had been distraught, and Richenda quiet, until Kate had said, ‘She had no right to speak to me like that,’ and waited for her mother’s unstinting agreement. Instead, Richenda had sat down next to her, and said, ‘Kate, that woman has done nothing wrong. Even if they were unhappily married, she did nothing wrong. And she’s done nothing to you. She trusted her husband and he betrayed that trust—’

  ‘But—’

  ‘But nothing, Kate. All of the times he was with you, he had told his wife he was somewhere else, or let her think that he was. She clearly had no idea what was going on—’

  ‘But isn’t that her fault?’

  ‘Well, if trusting someone who loves you is a fault, then yes, I suppose it is.’

  Kate had made to get up, uncomfortable in almost every way it was possible to be uncomfortable, but Richenda had said, ‘I haven’t finished.’ Kate had rearranged cushions behind her as she waited.

  Richenda’s mind had gone back to Rufus’s first affair, in France, when they were newly married, his second while she was pregnant with Kate. She has thought that there have been several women since; she suspects that Rufus is lining the next one up now, but part of her clings to the lack of any real evidence. The new shirts, the late showers; it’s all circumstantial, when it comes down to it. And she had to admit that the fear of being alone had kept her here: the possibility that life with Rufus might not, quite, be the most difficult way to live. She had thought of how her fiftieth birthday wasn’t too many years away, and known that she’d left it too late. Perhaps, she had thought as her daughter waited for her to speak, if she had known then how much it would still hurt, now, she would have done things differently.

  ‘Can you imagine, just for a moment, how it must feel for Elizabeth, who had no idea her husband was unfaithful to her, no idea that he had fathered a child, and no way to understand it because she can’t ask him?’

  It’s on the tip of Kate’s tongue to say, yes, she can understand perfectly well, because she is in the same position, but the wiser self that sh
e will one day be intervenes and keeps her silent.

  Richenda had said, ‘Elizabeth was unkind to you, and she said things that she shouldn’t have. But Elizabeth is suffering in a way that neither you nor I can understand. If you want people to extend compassion and understanding to you – and you are probably going to need them to, if your life with your baby is going to be something good – then you need to think about doing the same for other people.’ And Kate had said nothing, and gone to bed, and tried to pick the seeds her mother had sown out of her heart.

  But now, in the dark morning, it seems that she didn’t get them all. She wonders what Elizabeth is doing; whether she is awake too.

  Rufus clatters down the stairs, and when Kate says, ‘Morning, Dad,’ he jumps. Jumps again when he looks over to her, unused still to the un expected body below the face he’s adored ever since he watched it take its first scrunchy blink, more than nineteen years ago. He makes himself smile.

  ‘Tea?’