Whatever You Love

by Louise Doughty

  *

  Rees bought me another year. I knew David was seeing Chloe during my pregnancy but I kept up the pretence that I didn’t. Perhaps I thought that if I tried long enough and hard enough to turn us into a happy couple with their second child on the way, I would somehow be able to do it all on my own. For a while after Rees was born, David tried – the fact that Rees was such a difficult baby bought me more time than I would have otherwise had. David was not so callous that he was going to walk out on me during those early months, when the only way we stayed on our feet was to take it in turns to do the night shift.

  He was never a louse. Had he been more of a louse, our marriage might have survived – I might have been able to turn a blind eye but no, he didn’t sleep with women unless he told himself he was in love with them, I knew that. He loved her. He loved her all the more because he couldn’t have her. He couldn’t have her because of me. The logic of it all was so simple, so ordinary, it made me weep.

  *

  ‘Each unhappy family is unhappy on its own. Happy ones are all alike. Or something like that.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I think it’s Russian, War and Peace. Maybe it’s Jane Austen.’

  ‘God, Jane, you’re so pretentious.’

  Jane looked unhappy.

  I was in a queue at the supermarket when I overheard this conversation. Jane, a woman I did not know, was ahead of me in the queue, with a friend who was holding a baby. There was some hiatus at the front, a customer disputing the till receipt, something about it saying on the sticker it was two for four pounds, not £2.69 each. The people immediately behind the unhappy customer were sighing, glancing at each other, but I wasn’t in any particular hurry that day and anyway I was intent on listening to the two women in front of me. The one holding the baby must have been Jane’s close friend, or maybe older sister, as she was criticising her intently. ‘You always do that…’ she was saying irritably, joggling the baby up and down.

  ‘Always do what?’ Jane responded wearily.

  ‘You know. Books.’

  ‘Well I like him, what am I supposed to say?’

  ‘I know that. That’s bloody obvious. I just think you’ve got to get to know him, that’s all. All that glowing and beaming. It’s no good, you’re in cloud cuckoo land.’

  ‘You’ve just forgotten.’

  This enraged big sister. She leaned in towards Jane, across their shared trolley. ‘I haven’t forgotten any of it, all right? I’m just being realistic. I know what that’s like, all of it, all that snuggling up on the sofa in front of the TV. I did it, all right? I’m not that old. It’s like that for everyone. Lasts about, what, maximum three months?’

  The queue began to move. Jane, clearly offended, made no reply, and pushed their trolley an inch or two further forward. She turned to one side and I saw that her eyes were wide with the effort of not appearing too angry – or perhaps she was trying not to cry.

  Tolstoy. All happy families are alike but each unhappy family… How did I know that? I had never read any Tolstoy. Then it came to me. I remembered the quote from a pub quiz I had done a few years back. I wanted to lean forward and tell them but suspected I would get a mouthful from big sister. She didn’t look like the kind of woman you messed with in the supermarket queue.

  Out in the car park, loading my bags, I had just heaved the last one into the boot when – three months, common as muck, according to that woman, all that lovey-dovey stuff. Not realistic. Not what you should base a life’s decision on. Three months was how long David and I had been going out with each other when we had that scene on the cliff. Maybe that was it. Maybe that explained everything. I slammed the boot lid down, then stopped, resting on my knuckles, head down, breathing. I thought of how he had dangled me over the edge that day, how beneath the playfulness of the gesture there was a real, confused kind of anger. I had felt it and thought it the resistance of a man who did not want to face the truth of his feelings – he loved me, it was frightening him. When he held me over the cliff and made me look down at the chopping waves beneath, I thought he was showing me, and himself, what our lives would be without each other, the bleakness awaiting us if we did not seize this moment. How wrong I was. He was angry with himself for making the wrong decision, even as he was making it – and angry with me for making him do it.

  This was the worst of Chloe. She made me re-write my whole relationship with David, re-interpret the smallest of actions and gestures, even ones that occurred long before she came into our lives. When he held me over the cliff and made me look down at the waves, I thought, there in the supermarket car park, he wasn’t showing me our lives apart, he was showing me our lives together. He was showing me what was coming, the cold brown water awaiting me when I was no longer his precious love object, when he would be ready to let me go, drop me over the edge.

  Now I knew what Aunt Lorraine had meant: the price I had paid. David was a man who liked a gesture. He thrived on drama. He was the sort of man you should have an affair with but never marry – but even those sorts of men have to marry someone and David had married me, precisely at the stage when we should have split up. Then, along came Betty, and we had the passion and the newness of a baby. But once that was gone, and we were just a couple with a child like any other couple…

  The re-interpretation didn’t stop there.

  *

  David had taken the kids to the playground while I was shopping. When they all got back, I was sitting at the kitchen table. Bags of shopping were heaped on the table, and the floor. It was a winter’s afternoon, grey outside and gloomy in our low- ceilinged kitchen but I hadn’t turned the lights on, although the central heating was blazing and the frozen vegetables in one of the supermarket bags were starting to defrost, the bag already sitting in a puddle of water. A two-litre carton of milk had destabilised another bag and yoghurt and butter from the same bag was spilling out, as if the groceries had decided to creep out in their own, hesitant fashion and observe their new environment. I was sitting at the table in the half-light, sobbing copiously. David was first into the room, holding Rees who was sleeping on his shoulder and didn’t see me. Betty was in the hallway, kicking off her shoes. As he came in, David flicked on the light, saw me, took one look at my face, flicked the light back off and turned to the hall. ‘OK,’ I heard him call merrily to Betty, ‘I said TV if you were good and you’ve been very, very good!’

  After he had got the children settled in the sitting room, he came back into the kitchen, where I was still sitting in the gloom. He put the light back on but didn’t look at me. He filled the kettle and flicked it on, then began picking up the shopping bags from the floor and putting them on the counter top. I watched him, stared at him, a piece of crumpled kitchen roll twisted between my fingers. I blew my nose. He lifted the bags up two at a time. When he had finished, he opened a cupboard door and began to unload the shopping. He did it methodically, as he always did, starting with the tins, and then putting the fresh stuff, eggs, cheese, fish, in a neat pile next to the fridge. He paused over a packet of gnocchi. I thought, he’s trying to work out whether it came from the refrigerated cabinet or not.

  ‘Did you fuck Abbie?’

  He stopped, put down the gnocchi, said softly without looking at me, ‘What now, Laura?’

  I half rose, my legs trembling, and repeated in a loud voice, ‘I said, did you fuck Abbie? What do you mean what now?’

  ‘So,’ he said, opening the cupboard door next to the one he had just filled and putting the packet of gnocchi in it. ‘Who is Abbie? Some friend of yours I’ve never met? The girl in the café I supposedly looked at about three years ago?’

  ‘Abbie! You remember Abbie! Large breasts, just your type. Carole’s friend.’

  He had continued unloading the shopping but now he stopped and turned to me. When he spoke, it was in a tone of quiet desperation. ‘You’re asking me to remember some girl who knew some girl that I had some insignificant relationship with at university a d
ecade ago?’

  ‘It wasn’t insignificant to Carole!’

  He turned and closed the kitchen door, even though the television was blaring loud enough for the kids not to hear us. He wheeled round. ‘Are you out of your mind?’

  I spoke with icy fury, enunciating each syllable in a descending register. ‘Did. You. Fuck. Abbie. Simple question. Yes or no?’

  ‘Of course I fucked bloody Abbie!’ he exploded. ‘Half the sodding engineering school fucked bloody Abbie! Happy now?’ He opened the fridge door then slammed it shut again.

  ‘While you were going out with Carole?’

  He crashed his fists against his forehead and made an aargh! sound. His eyes were clenched tight shut.

  ‘Just another simple question, darling,’ I spat across the kitchen table. ‘Or do they all blend into one? Were you still going out with Carole when you fucked Abbie, or is it that hard to remember?’ He turned to go, grabbing at the door handle.

  I was shaking with triumph. ‘That’s right! Go on!’ I shouted after him. Then I turned and picked up a small jar of Mayonnaise Light from one of the bags on the table and hurled it. The kitchen door closed behind him as the jar of mayonnaise reached it and sailed straight through the glass panel without a millisecond’s pause in its trajectory.

  *

  Later, on my hands and knees, I cleared up the broken glass and mayonnaise with a dustpan and brush. David was putting the kids to bed upstairs. ‘Silly Mummy threw something for a joke! Look what she’s done!’ I knelt on the wooden floor, sweeping carefully. The jar had broken apart in large shards so there were two types of glass mixed in with the cream-coloured slime. Even that seemed symbolic. Which glass was I – the thick, jagged pieces of the jar, or the small, brittle shards from the panel in my kitchen door – and which was she? We were unmistakably incompatible, yet bound up together by the same oleaginous mess. Fuck, I thought, exhaustedly, I am tormented by metaphors. They have infested my home like the nits Betty brought back from nursery – just when you think you’ve got rid of the little bastards, you find another one. Why does mayonnaise go translucent when it gets warm? Am I the only one who finds that sinister?

  I started to laugh, there on my hands and knees, at the stupidity of my own behaviour and the predictability of its result. At that point, David descended the stairs, slowly. I sat back on my heels and looked up at him, smiling wanly, as if I expected that he too would appreciate the idiocy of what was happening to us. He looked down at me without expression. I was tired, contrite, and seeing the funny side: he was just tired.

  *

  Then there was Betty, Betty and her uncomplicated love. No matter how much re-writing I did of my relationship with David, Betty could not be re-written. She was her own story. Chloe couldn’t lay a finger on her.

  My life as David’s wife was only a fraction of my life. My life as Betty’s mother, her and me together, that was the fabric, the meat of it. We had sailed into an ocean I remembered; Chinese boxes made of paper, rainbow writing, a strict moral conservatism accompanied by a belief that the police were there to arrest naughty children as well as bad grown-ups. One afternoon, we were walking to the shops, me pushing Rees in his buggy and Betty walking alongside, we passed a constable who nodded at us. I smiled back. When we were safely out of earshot, Betty glanced backwards, looked down at her infant brother and pronounced, ‘He looks ashamed.’

  I was so surprised I stopped and looked down at Rees, who was sitting gazing around with the same impenetrable thoughtfulness as always. I carried on walking, glancing at Betty. She had a self-satisfied expression on her face, and I realised that she was pleased with herself for using the word, for applying it. It didn’t matter whether it was appropriate or not. She had come across it, in a book or during a lesson, been told its application to wrongdoing, and was now trying it out for size, seeing how it felt when she had said it.

  Another time, she pronounced, as she and I were waiting for Rees to wake from a Sunday afternoon nap at home, ‘Mummy, if we lost Rees, we would weep and weep and weep.’

  I was so startled I burst out, ‘Oh, don’t say that!’ but she didn’t respond, just carried on whatever colouring task she was engaged in at the time. She wasn’t talking about the possibility of anything really happening to Rees, she was just experimenting. She knew the word ‘cry’. Now she was trying ‘weep’. Real loss was no more than a concept but words were like extra fingers that she grew each day. They had to be wriggled about to see how they worked.

  At the bottom of the stairs one morning, before school, she stopped me in the action of buttoning her coat so that she could fling her arms around my neck, pull me down towards her at an awkward angle and whisper passionately in my ear, ‘I love you too much.’

  ‘I love you too much too,’ I replied, holding her, cosy and complacent. Even when I was at my lowest depths over David, especially then, there was comfort in her physical form, in the compact, clinging shape of her; what a package of a person she was. This was what I loved, more than anything, and this could never be taken away from me. So what if I had only succeeded in borrowing David from himself? He had left me with this, and there would be years and years of this, these embraces.

  *

  Rees was fourteen months old, a fat toddler, bumping and beaming everywhere he went like a tiny comedian of the old school, when David came to me one evening as I was sitting watching television. Our daughter, our solemn little Betty, was in year one at school. She and Willow were already best friends. There was a girl called Ariana who was giving them some bother, trying to get between them. We had just had the hall painted, to brighten it up. We wanted to replace the cheap frosted glass in the door but couldn’t afford it.

  The children were asleep upstairs. They had gone down without fuss, for once. I had a casserole in the oven. I had uncorked a bottle of wine. It was a Friday night, our favourite night of the week in years gone by. I was waiting for David to get changed before I served up dinner.

  He came into the sitting room, sat down beside me on the sofa, and took one of my hands between his. He looked down at our entwined hands and said, ‘I know things have been really difficult for you, the last couple of years, I do. I know you think that I’ve been completely selfish but really, I really do know that it’s been very hard for you too.’ I turned to him, smiling, and felt a rush of love for him. That hurt me afterwards, that, for a second or two, I believed it was affection rather than guilt that made him take my hand between his two so tenderly. I thought that he was going to go on to tell me how sorry he was for all the pain he had caused. Perhaps he was about to suggest that we go away for a weekend together, just the two of us, that he had spoken to his sister who had occasionally offered to have the children overnight. Is there any limit to the self- delusion human beings are capable of? It is like a desert that stretches as far as the eye can see.

  I stroked his hair – it was always a bit dry and fluffy unless he combed it properly. There was still plenty of it, though prematurely grey. In the mornings, it was the sort of hair that could be described as a shock. It suited him, though, a touch of the mad professor, even in his business suit. He had changed into jeans and pulled an old brown T-shirt over his head, rumpling his hair on the way, so I reached out a hand and, gently, with the backs of my fingers, stroked his hair back from his face and said, ‘I know, love. I know you know. I know you never meant to hurt me.’ Let’s not call it naivety. Let’s call it idiocy. What else could have made me use a line straight from a Country and Western song? Blind, stupid and blind – but above all, stupid.

  His head was still bowed. I bowed mine slightly, in an effort to get him to look me in the face. ‘Hey,’ I said gently. ‘It’s okay. I’ve made Moroccan lamb.’ It was an idiotic remark. I think something inside me was beginning to realise the seriousness of this preamble and was trying to keep the conversation on the domestic, the mundane. I have always used food as code, as signal to those I love. I’m good at it. They get the message. I h
ad the sound on the television down low until I was sure the children were asleep. Dimly, in the background, the studio audience for the quiz show I had been watching broke into thunderous applause.

  I rose slightly, to go to the kitchen and pour us both a glass of red wine, but he kept my hand firmly in his, so that I would remain seated.

  There was a moment’s silence, then the knowledge of what he was about to say came crashing down upon me, as hard and wide as a ceiling collapse during an earthquake, like our whole house coming down, for indeed it was. I pulled my hand out from his – forcibly as he resisted – rose from the sofa and began to back away from him. He looked up at me, his face open and his gaze pouring pity.

  I do believe that at that moment I went, temporarily, quite mad; mad with the humiliation of it, mad with the knowledge that after years of battling and with the children as my unknowing foot soldiers, I had still lost.

  *

  It was never going to be a civilised separation. I don’t do civilised. What followed was ugly – had someone described it to me before, I would not have believed how ugly it could get.

  10

  The first anonymous letter came two months after David had left the family home, as the lawyers put it, and set up house with Chloe. Dear Laura – the intimacy of that opening. It made me wonder about the word dear. You are dear to me. Oh my dear. Dearie dearie me. Its use seemed far more sinister than a simple Laura would have done. Dear Laura, I wonder just what you think you are gaining by all this…

  David and I were not on speaking terms, at that point. We communicated by email and text only, using the minimum amount of words that allowed us to make arrangements for him to see the children. He knew there was no point in getting smart with me on that score, although that didn’t stop him trying, in his angrier moments.