The Runaway Wife

by Rowan Coleman

  But Rose had ignored him, tearing into the night, knowing she had only a few minutes before his rage supplanted his shock and he came after her. She stuffed Maddie into the back of the car, slammed the driver’s door shut behind her, and banged down the central locks. Richard did not attempt to follow her, though; he did not try to stop her taking his daughter, probably because he never imagined that his mousy wife would have the courage to go farther than once round the block. Rose had taken one last look at him standing in the doorway of her mother’s house, leaning against the post, his arms crossed as he watched her, now utterly calm.

  He doesn’t think I can do it, Rose realized. He doesn’t think I’m capable of leaving him. And for a moment, as her white-knuckled fingers gripped the steering wheel, she wasn’t sure that he was wrong.

  “Mummy, go,” Maddie pleaded in a whisper from the backseat, her voice trembling with fear. “Mummy, drive.”

  It was at her daughter’s bidding that Rose had switched on the ignition and pulled away.

  • • •

  “When we will see Daddy again,” Maddie asked her now, quietly unable to make eye contact, “will he still be angry?”

  “Not with you,” Rose said. “Only me.”

  “He wasn’t angry with me before. I still got this,” Maddie pointed out, gingerly reaching over her shoulder to touch the bruise.

  “I know,” Rose said wearily. She was so tired, so desperate just to be able to close her eyes and sleep, but there was one more thing she had to say to Maddie while she had the chance. “I . . . Maddie, I don’t think I can be married to Daddy anymore.”

  “I know.” Maddie nodded as if she’d already worked that out for herself. “That’s OK. We can stay here. I will become an artist with John.”

  “Wouldn’t you miss home, school, Daddy?” Rose asked her as she escorted her into the bedroom, pulling her pajama top over her head. Maddie might feel this way about Richard now, but how long would it last? The last thing Rose wanted to do was impose an estrangement between daughter and father, even if she knew Richard was by no means the best of fathers. The damage done by ripping him completely out of her life could be worse even than the bruise he’d given her, which would heal, at least.

  “No,” Maddie said with certainty. “I don’t like school there, and I like you better here. You are much more interesting to look at and listen to. You are kinder and funnier and . . . you smile more. Here is better for you, this is where you are happy. And you like me better here too.”

  “What do you mean?” Rose asked her, horrified at what Maddie thought she knew.

  “I mean,” Maddie said, with some emphasis, speaking slowly and carefully, “that you like me better here than you do at home. Because you aren’t frightened or sad.”

  “I think not being at school, not being in the middle of all the worries that me and Daddy had, even though we tried our best to keep them from you, has helped you not to be so uncomfortable and anxious,” Rose said, trying to work out what Maddie was feeling herself, and if being away from Richard gave the child the same sense of relief and being able to breathe that it gave her. “And so I am less worried about you, less worried about how you will fit in. But it’s not that I like you better; I can’t like you better than I do. I love you, Maddie, more than anything.”

  Maddie looked at her for a long moment, studying her face as if she were trying to decipher exactly what it was that Rose was saying, and then out of the blue she launched herself into Rose’s arms, nestling her head into the curve of her neck, a rare gesture of affection that Rose embraced happily.

  “I don’t want to see Daddy,” Maddie said after a while in her mother’s arms. “And I don’t want to go to school ever again.”

  “I think you will change your mind about Daddy,” Rose said. “And you will have to go to school, as soon as we’ve decided where to live. It’s the law, darling.”

  “Let’s live here, then,” Maddie said. “We’ve got a bedroom and our own bathroom, and Jenny cooks.”

  “We can’t stay here forever,” Rose said, as much as she would like to.

  “John’s house, then, although John doesn’t cook, he told me. I do like Jenny’s cooking.”

  Rose sighed and smiled all at once. “You are a funny girl, Miss Maddie.”

  “Can I go and see Shona and Jenny to say good night?” Maddie asked her. She liked tiptoeing up and down the carpeted stairs in her bare feet.

  “Yes,” Rose said, picking up a hairbrush and running it through Maddie’s damp hair. “But don’t hang around too long. Back in ten minutes.”

  Her phone started ringing again almost as soon as Maddie closed the door behind her, and absently Rose picked it up, looking forward to speaking to Frasier again, hopeful that the sound of his voice would calm her nerves from trying to talk to Maddie about the way things were, which had gone much better than she could have hoped for, all things considered. It had been such a difficult day, a day fraught with so much emotion, as her worries had come crashing home. Rose felt wrung out, every last little drop of her strength squeezed out of her. It would be nice to hear Frasier’s soothing voice.

  “Sorry about that,” she said as she answered.

  “You should be.” It was Richard’s voice that replied, calm and cold. “Where have you taken my daughter, Rose?”

  “Richard, look.” Rose panicked, uncertain what to say or how, her mind scrambling to know what to do. Her first instinct was to hang up, but if she never talked to him, then this constant nagging fear of what he would do if he caught up with her would never go away. She had to face him, confront him, make him see the way things were now. “I know we need to talk, I just needed time—”

  “Time? Time?” Richard’s fury was not tempered by the quiet control with which he spoke. “You abducted Maddie, and now you have to bring her back. Immediately.”

  Just the sound of his voice was enough to drag Rose right back to where she had been in those seconds, sitting in the car outside her house, before she had found the courage to switch on the car engine. Life without Richard’s voice always in her ear, his demands, his wants and needs, seemed impossible in those seconds. How would she know what to do, where to go, what to say if he didn’t tell her? Richard always knew what was best for her, he protected her, cushioned her from the world. And yet—Rose fought with her own habitual need to give in—and yet she was here because of the things he did to her that she couldn’t bear to remember. She was a different person without him. Now was not the time to be weak.

  “I’m not coming back,” Rose told him, finding unexpected courage waiting for her in her words. She sounded strong, determined. Now all she had to do was to find the physical strength to carry it through. “I don’t have to do anything you want. I’m free of you and so is Maddie, and she’s glad. She hates you, Richard.” Rose knew that not only was that last statement untrue, it was also unfair, the wrong thing to say, but still she said it because she knew it would hurt him the most, and because just once she wanted to wound him as badly as he’d injured her time and time again. Rose had had a lifetime of doing what was right, and what was expected of her. Not anymore.

  “I knew it,” Richard spat. “I knew you were unstable. This breakdown’s been brewing for months, Rose. You can’t see it because you are in it. You’re deluded, caught up in this little fantasy of yours, the poor abused wife who has to escape her villainous husband. That’s not how it is, Rose, and if you stop to think for one second you’ll see that. I love you. I am the only person in the world who has always stood by you, I am the only one who can put up with your problems.”

  “Was it my problems that made you hit me, and hurt Maddie?” Rose asked him, the sudden rush of years of pent-up emotion, words, feelings, and questions, which she had been forced to clamp behind closed lips to safeguard herself as best she could, pouring out. “Or was it just that for once I wouldn’t give in to your bullying, Richard, that for once you couldn’t get control over me any other way?” />
  There was a long silence on the other end of the line, crackling with frustrated, impotent fury.

  “That didn’t happen, Rose,” Richard said finally, his voice taut and strained. “Not the way you remember it. I only wanted what any normal man wants from his wife. You overreacted, went crazy! You are the one who hurt Maddie.”

  Rose was so shocked, so completely flattened by his incredible statement, delivered as if it was utterly incontrovertible, that it took her several seconds to be able to gasp in enough air to be able to reply. What was he planning, what was he trying to do?

  “She still has the bruise, Richard!” Rose said, her voice rising in panic as the realization slowly dawned on her.

  “You gave it to her,” Richard said calmly, regaining his composure and the sense that he was regaining control.

  “She’s old enough to know what happened herself. She will tell anyone who asks her,” Rose countered.

  “She’s a confused child, with problems of her own, probably brought about by her unstable and unaffectionate mother,” Richard said. “No little girl wants to make her mother angry. She’ll say anything to try and stop being hurt again.”

  “You . . . you . . . liar!” Rose cried, tears springing into her eyes, as yet again Richard twisted out of shape everything that was good in her life.

  “Who do you think they will believe, Rose?” Richard inevitably said. “The family doctor, the loving, patient husband and father? Or the crazy woman who ran away without even stopping to pack her child a change of clothes? Come home now and we’ll say no more about it. It’s been a long time, I miss my wife. You belong at my side.”

  Rose closed her eyes, the room spinning around her.

  “Why?” she said quietly. “Why do you want me, when you hate me so much?”

  “Because you are mine,” Richard said simply, almost tenderly.

  Despite all her fear, her anger and resolve, Rose found herself wavering. She could almost feel the weakness spreading through her, as if Richard’s words were sapping her strength. Perhaps she should just go back, go back to the life that she knew so well, that she knew how to endure, to survive. Perhaps that would be easier than trying to exist alone in a world where she had never fitted in. And then Rose remembered the bruise still flowering on Maddie’s shoulder, and she knew she could never go back. No matter what Richard threatened to do to her, she could never, ever go back.

  “No.” Rose’s voice was trembling but also strengthening with every syllable she found the strength to utter. “I’m not yours. I’m not anyone’s, and I am not coming back. Say what you want, do what you want, Richard, but you can’t frighten or bully me anymore. I am finished with you.”

  “You will regret this, Rose,” Richard said, his voice icy cold, laden with menace. “The next time I see you, which will be very soon, you will regret ever speaking to your husband that way.”

  Once she was certain that he had hung up, Rose threw the phone across the room, where it skittered along the carpet and shot under the dressing table. Flinging her arms around herself, she held on tightly until her breathing regulated and she could remember that Richard was not there, not in the room with her. His threats, as menacing as they might be, could not reach her here. He still did not know where she was, and even if he did, she wasn’t alone now. There were people here for her. People to stand between her and him.

  • • •

  “No, for the last time I am not going to let you paint my portrait,” Shona was saying as she guided a very talkative Maddie into the room. Instantly, she saw the look on Rose’s blanched face, sensed the tension in her clenched body.

  “I’ve forgotten my . . . um, shoes,” Shona said to Maddie, putting a hand on her shoulder to stop her advancing any farther into the room. “They’re downstairs in the living room. Will you get them for me?”

  “What do you need shoes for?” Maddie asked her. “It’s bedtime.”

  “Bedtime for children, not for grown-ups. I want to go for a walk.”

  “Where?”

  “Maddie, just get my shoes?” Shona told her in such an authoritative way that Maddie turned on her heel and went.

  “What?” Shona said, crossing to sit beside Rose on the bed and hooking a protective arm around her. “What’s happened?”

  “Richard called. I spoke to him. He . . . he’s saying terrible things, things he’ll tell people if I don’t go back—that I hurt Maddie, that I’m unstable, a bad mother. But I can’t go back to him, Shona. I just can’t.”

  “Rose, you’re trembling,” Shona murmured, the way a mother might comfort a frightened child, pulling Rose tight into her body as if she could physically stay her shaking. “What did he do to you the night you left? What was it that’s frightened you so badly, made you leave after all these years of his bullying and put-downs? Did he . . . did he hit you? Did he?”

  Rose nodded. “Yes, I made him so angry, he knocked me across the room. And Maddie too when she came down to see what the noise was. But that’s not the worst of it,” she whispered, the terrible scenes that had preceded Maddie entering the room flashing through her head in a series of dreadful tableaux.

  “What, then?” Shona asked her in barely more than a whisper.

  “He tried to rape me,” Rose whispered, the words making her want to gag as she spoke them. “When I fought back, when I refused him, that’s when he hit me. I made him so mad. That was the first time, you see.”

  “The first time he tried to rape you?” Shona asked her, appalled.

  “No, the first time I fought back.”

  • • •

  By the time Maddie returned with Shona’s shoes, Rose was in the shower, the hot water riveting into her, scalding her white skin and imprinting it with red welts. Shona was standing by the bed, her mouth set in a thin grim line, her fists still clenched. As Maddie approached, she literally forced herself to unclasp her fingers, prising a smile onto her face as she took the shoes and slipped them on.

  “Jenny doesn’t like you wearing shoes inside,” Maddie reminded her. “Where’s Mummy gone?”

  “Mum’s just jumped in the shower,” Shona said. “So I said I’d tuck you in and put the telly on for you for a bit.”

  “Can I do drawing?” Maddie said, wielding the outsize sketchbook that John had given her that afternoon. As soon as she had caught on to the idea of drawing what she saw around her, she had become obsessed with it, and the book was already filling rapidly with really quite accurately executed sketches of the countryside, sheep, trees, rocks, teapots, shoes, books, and even John. It was the first time in her life Maddie had discovered something she was naturally good at, and she was loath to give it up for something as mundane as sleep or even the treat of television in bed.

  “Go on, then,” Shona said with a shrug.

  “Can I draw you?” Maddie persisted.

  Shona sighed, glancing anxiously at the closed bathroom door and sitting down heavily on the bed. “OK.”

  Just then Rose’s mobile phone sounded from underneath the dressing table. Maddie and Shona both stared at where the noise was coming from, neither making a move to retrieve it.

  “Should we . . . ?”

  “Just leave it,” Shona said. “If it’s important they’ll leave a message.”

  • • •

  Rose had no idea why she couldn’t cry. She wanted to, she could feel it there like a heavy stone embedded in her chest, the grief over what she had endured for so many of her married years, but it would not be dissolved by tears. Richard’s abuse of her had not been constant, nor daily, nothing like the grueling regime of violence some women lived under for so long.

  There had been rare, sporadic attacks, if that was what they could be called, that came months apart, a year apart once. For the most part, after Maddie was born Richard showed no sexual interest in her at all, as if once she had borne him a child Rose had become less than the perfect flawless girl he’d first admired, and she had been secretly relieved. Th
eir adult married life had been less than passionate, to say the least, first making love a week or so before the wedding. Inexperienced and clumsy, Rose had been tense and uncertain, and Richard had done his best to be kind. Although he was so much older than her, he didn’t seem to know enough to put her at her ease, or ignite any more emotion in her than sheer nerves and uncertainty. And yet it had been a sweet union, the first time, and one that Rose remembered feeling was full of love. Richard so wanted her to be his alone, his wife, his lover, and she had felt cherished and safe for the first time in a very long while. How ready she had been to marry him, how gladly she went down the aisle, alone, without anyone to give her away and not a single relative on her side of the church. And that was how those first almost featureless years of their marriage had passed, Rose unaware of how Richard gradually controlled more and more of what she did, whom she knew, where she went, or even how she thought or felt, so willing was she to trust in him. And their sex life wasn’t ever earth-shattering, but neither was it unkind or cruel. After years of marriage, it petered away to once or twice a month, and Rose, who never felt any kind of desire other than to please her husband, was content with that, letting him always take the lead. And then she became pregnant.

  Richard was furious with her, more angry than Rose could have imagined, even if she had suspected that this was how he would react, which she hadn’t. Happily, she went to him one evening with her news, sitting at his feet as he watched the ten o’clock news in his favorite armchair, and told him, with a small quiet smile, that they were to become parents.

  His anger was shocking and disorienting. How had it happened? he demanded. Why wasn’t she taking her pills? Did she think she could trick him into something she knew he never wanted? Bewildered, Rose said she wasn’t sure how it happened, there had been that time she’d had food poisoning a month or so ago, perhaps then, but anyway, did it really matter?