Whatever You Love

by Louise Doughty

  The letter arrived on a Tuesday morning. Betty was at school, Rees at nursery – he had just started three mornings a week as I was due to go back to work on a part-time basis soon. After I had dropped him off that morning, staying for a few minutes to make sure he was settled, I had gone to the supermarket then waited at the shoe repairers, so by the time I got back, it was almost time to go and pick him up. As I came in the house, three plastic bags on each arm, I kicked the door closed behind me and picked up the post, noting the plain white envelope with my name handwritten on the front. It was my first name only, no address or stamp, so it must have been hand delivered. The only other item was a note in a brown envelope from the health centre, about Rees’s inoculations.

  I dropped both items of post in the plastic bag that contained the shoes I had just had re-heeled and went down into the kitchen. I put the bags on the table. I turned the kettle on. I unclipped my hair clip because a section of hair at the front had fallen out and was annoying me, then went and stood in front of the fan oven, which had a glass panel that doubled as a mirror for the purposes of inserting clips in one’s hair. I re-clipped. While I performed these self-consciously mundane actions, the letter in the handwritten white envelope was glowering away in the bag, like the grey-hot embers from a coal fire. I knew in the same way I knew when Chloe started work at David’s office, when I answered that first phone call: there are things we know in our brains and things we know in our bones. I’ve learnt to trust the bones.

  Eventually, the bones sat down at the kitchen table and pulled the bag containing my newly heeled shoes and my post towards me, delicately, as if it was a box of chocolates I had been saving as a treat. First of all, I pulled out the paper bag containing my shoes and took them out – they were the smart court shoes I only ever wore for job interviews, the ones with the kitten heels and little silver bows. My silver shoes: I’ll never wear those shoes again, I had thought as I handed them over to the man behind the counter. I was going through a phase of smartening up my clothes in the sad, brave way that people do after their spouse has left them. Half a dozen saggy or bobbled jumpers had gone down to Oxfam. My silver shoes, the ones I never wore, had been reheeled.

  I put the shoes on the table to prove to myself that I didn’t believe in bad luck. After that, I took out the envelope from the plastic bag and held it in my hand for a moment or two, turning it over as if I expected answers on the other side and pulling a face when the other side revealed nothing. I examined my hand-written name, which gave away only that the author had neat, sloping writing. The envelope was the self-adhesive sort and firmly sealed. The letter inside it was typed.

  Dear Laura,

  I wonder just what you think you are gaining by all this? Do you imagine you are ever going to get your husband back! Let me tell you, you aren’t. He’s left you for good and why? Do you ever ask yourself that? If you loved him as much as you like to pretend then why can’t you just let him go and be happy with someone who really cares for him?

  I feel sorry for you. It must be difficult being such a bitter person especially when you have those two children to care for but do you ever think about them in all this? What must it be like for them! They have a right to see their father and you might think you are getting back at your husband but actually you are hurting them!

  He has left you for good so it’s time you got used to it, don’t you think? Otherwise you and the children will suffer in the end. I know this is hard but I’m only telling you the truth that your husband is not prepared to say to your face because he is a bit of a coward (who can blame him) but he should just say it to you maybe it would be better that way. Perhaps when you read this you might think about that. If you weren’t like this in the first place maybe he wouldn’t have left.

  Yours truly,

  A Friend

  I couldn’t quite believe it, so I read it again and, once I was over the initial shock, gave an open-mouthed exhalation, small but vehement, of amazed satisfaction. It was the babbling quality of the letter that gratified me so much, the way that almost every sentence pretended reason while oozing spite of the most uncontrolled kind. I read it for a third time. A Friend? Who did she think she was kidding? I feel sorry for you? That was playground-level insult. And what about the veiled threat in you and the children will suffer, not to mention the disloyalty to David? He is a bit of a coward. And this was a woman who David had told me, more than once, was an exceptionally gifted graphic designer. The mad tone might be deliberate, of course, to make identification difficult. I could already picture David holding the letter and saying, ‘Chloe would never have written this. She isn’t like that.’ If so, then she was less mad than she seemed but more manipulative than I had given her credit for. My God, I thought, she really hates me. I went to the fridge and cracked open a beer, even though I never drink during the day and Rees needed picking up from nursery in twenty minutes – it was a symbolic beer. She hates me. I felt a wild desire to celebrate. I had got under her skin in a way I had never imagined. Here was I, thinking she was all happy and triumphant with my husband, and all along she had been obsessing dementedly about me every bit as much as I had been about her. I should have realised when the phone calls started. I had thought of them as something meant to get at me, rather than a symptom of her own distress – but this letter was unmistakably distressed in its bitterness and incoherence. I nearly punched the air.

  I think what surprised me most was that she didn’t sign it. A Friend. From everything David had told me, I wouldn’t have said that anonymity was Chloe’s style, but his refusal to believe me over the phone calls had already proved he was hardly a reliable character witness where Chloe was concerned. If she was as calm and pleasant a person as he liked to make out – in comparison with his fruitcake of a wife – then I would have expected a letter from her to consist of a long, carefully assembled collection of phrases in which she laid out, point by point, why I was being so unreasonable. What I got was barely coherent.

  A Friend. Was that sarcasm, or melodrama? Perhaps, and only perhaps, that was the point at which I started to get over David.

  *

  Dear Laura. The next letter was signed, but only with an initial. Like the first, it was hand delivered, but this time I was in the house when it arrived. It was around the same time of day, a week later. Chloe must have guessed I was at home as my car was parked outside and it was such a gloomy day I still had the hallway light on. I could have been looking out of the front window as she tripped up the steps to my front door but, as it happened, I was upstairs in Betty’s bedroom, pulling clothes she never wore from mangled tangles in her chest of drawers. I heard the letterbox. It makes a clatter.

  I had been in all morning, so I had already picked up my post. As I came down the stairs, I saw the white envelope immediately. It was the sole item on the mat but for two pizza parlour leaflets which had arrived earlier. I picked the envelope up, turned it over again, looked at my name written in the same neat hand on the front, then went straight to the sitting room window. I looked up and down the street but it was empty. There was no fading sound of a car engine and we live in a quiet side street. She must have come on foot. It crossed my mind that I had a fifty per cent chance of guessing which direction she had come in and could probably catch her if I ran but instead I walked slowly back out to the hallway, and sat down on the bottom of the stairs. This second letter didn’t have the shock value of the first but it was disturbing to think that only minutes earlier, this woman that I had never met, the architect of all my recent misery, had been at my front door.

  Dear Laura,

  I suppose you are feeling a bit better in yourself now you have made your husband hand over almost every penny of his salary. I suppose you think that you deserve that big house all to yourself. Well all I can say is enjoy your consolation prize. You might think he still cares a bit for you because he is being so kind and considerate but that’s just because he is a soft sort of person who will always take t
he path of least resistance. And because he has those poor children to think of. Anyway, soon enough you are going to be realising he is gone for good, you will have to do that very soon. I am not saying this to be unpleasant only because it’s the truth and someone has to tell you don’t they?

  Yours truly,

  E

  This letter left me feeling less triumphant than the first. It worried me that the mad tone was so exactly replicated, for that suggested it was genuine. Unpalatable as it was, I could not rule out the possibility that this woman would, one day, be a part of my children’s lives. Why ‘E’? So far, I had refused to let Betty and Rees meet Chloe but if David didn’t come to his senses, then they would. I had comforted myself with what Sunita and Maurice at work had told me. ‘Look, love,’ Maurice had said, over a drink in the pub one evening. Maurice enjoyed being the only man in our office. There was nothing he loved more than dispensing male wisdom to us women and we played up to it no end. ‘Thing is,’ he said, sipping his cider and slowly folding a beer mat between his plump fingers, ‘there’s no chance this new bird of his is going to go the distance.’ Sunita had nodded, ‘He’s right, you know,’ she said, nodding at Maurice, nodding at me. ‘The affair that breaks up a marriage never survives, you know, all that guilt and tension, not exactly a good starting point, is it? Sooner or later he’ll dump her and go off with something completely different.’

  At this point in the conversation, there had been a silence during which Maurice and Sunita exchanged looks and silently acknowledged that I might not find this an entirely comforting thought.

  I agreed with them though, which was lamentably arrogant on my part. I just couldn’t believe that David would stay with a woman knowing his association with her had caused me so much pain. I had already written the narrative of their relationship in my head, successfully removing my own desires from the picture and concentrating on the story of them. He would dump her for someone else, I had decided, after a long period of arguing about his guilt and regret over the break-up of our marriage. By then, it would be too late for me and him, of course. When he asked if we could try again – and he would do that before he had actually left Chloe – I would explain very gently that I simply didn’t love him any more. He would be devastated.

  I had even fantasised about how gracious I would be to Chloe’s replacement, one day, about how we might get to bitch about Chloe together. ‘God, Chloe was a nightmare,’ this unknown woman would say to me, several years in the future. ‘She was so manipulative. I can’t believe David left you for her. He must have been mad.’

  But – and I couldn’t accept that it was any more than a ‘but’ – if that didn’t happen, or didn’t happen soon enough, then at some point, I would have to tackle David about these letters. I would have to lay out the ground rules for Chloe’s association with my children.

  I was so intrigued and baffled by ‘E’, that I missed the implications of the penultimate sentence.

  *

  David and I remained on non-speaking terms for several weeks more. When he came to collect the children, I would stand at the front door and watch them trip down the steps and run down the path to him. He stayed at the gate. Then one Sunday, inevitably enough, came the occasion when Rees, still young enough to be clingy, refused to go with him, running back and throwing his arms around my legs. As he tried to clamber up them, monkey-like, I bent and picked him up and looked at David, who was holding Betty by the hand and standing waiting. I began to say, ‘It’s okay, Rees can stay,’ when I saw the look on Betty’s face. Her lower lip was in a precarious downward curve. If they both refused to go with him, I knew I would be held to blame.

  David kept his face expressionless as I walked down the steps to the path, holding Rees on my shoulder. When I got close to him, I said, ‘So what have you got planned this afternoon?’

  David was smart enough to take his cue. ‘Aunt Lorraine has said they can help her make chocolate pudding. And Uncle Richard has got a new DVD. It’s about dinosaurs.’

  I looked down at Betty. ‘That sounds good, doesn’t it?’ I said brightly. She nodded.

  Rees allowed himself to be prised from me, still whimpering but without hysteria.

  David mouthed, ‘Thanks,’ as he turned away.

  *

  When the children got home from their Sundays with their father, I always quizzed them carefully about what they had done. He had promised me they would not meet Chloe without my permission, so he couldn’t take them back to his place, wherever that was. When it was too cold for the beach or the playground, that meant either trips further afield in the car or visits to Aunt Lorraine’s house, which had become a sort of no-man’s-land or neutral territory between us.

  ‘So, did you help Aunt Lorraine make chocolate pudding?’ I asked Betty casually, as I washed her hair in the bath that evening.

  ‘I did the stirring!’ piped up Rees, who was sitting on a soggy bathmat, wrapped in a towel, making spaceship noises while he wiggled his fingers.

  ‘No, you didn’t!’ spat Betty. ‘I did the stirring, you just helped!’

  Before Rees could open his mouth to scream abuse at his sister, I jumped in with, ‘I’m sure you both helped Aunty Lorraine lots and lots.’

  ‘So did the lady!’ Rees said.

  I was combing conditioner through Betty’s long hair. The comb snagged on a tangle. ‘Ow! Mum, you’re hurting!’

  ‘Sorry darling, sorry…’ I concentrated on the combing for a few minutes. Betty had fallen suspiciously silent. ‘Which lady?’ I asked eventually.

  ‘Daddy’s friend,’ Rees confirmed helpfully.

  ‘She came later,’ Betty said quickly. I was not sure whether her nervousness was because she had been urged to deceit by David or whether she was simply picking up on my mood.

  ‘Her name’s Eddy,’ said Rees, pulling his towel over his head and rolling around the floor.

  ‘Eddy’s a boy’s name,’ said Betty, in a tone of voice that made it clear she had only just restrained herself from adding the word, stupid. ‘Her name is Ee-dy!’

  *

  As soon as the children were asleep, I sent David a text. Who the fuck is Eedy?

  His reply must have been carefully composed, maybe shown to Chloe before he sent it, as it took half an hour to come through. Edie is nickname for Chloe. Battery went flat and Richard couldn’t find leads so she came. Lorraine invited her in. Wasn’t planned. Sorry.

  I did not trust myself to compose a measured reply, so for once in my life, I had the good sense not to respond.

  Edie. E. I wondered if he called her by her surname as well, or her initials. I wondered if he played that trick on her, the one where you make someone look down by pointing at something on their top or jumper, just so you can flick their nose with your finger as they drop their gaze.

  A week later, David rang. I listened in silence while he gave a full and detailed explanation for why he had had to call Chloe to help him jumpstart the car that Sunday, why Lorraine had invited Chloe in, and how he thought it was probably for the best that the children met Chloe unexpectedly and quickly like that without turning it into a big drama. He told me he was sorry that he hadn’t been able to consult me first and it honestly wasn’t planned and I would just have to take his word for that. Then he altered his tone and told me, with insulting gentleness, that he and Chloe were going to have a baby.

  11

  The next morning, as soon as I had dropped the kids off, I went up to the cliffs. I had an idea that it would be good to go to the spot where David had threatened to throw me over the edge to acknowledge that my marriage was over. I am not sure why I thought this was a good idea – maybe for the same reason that physicians performed blood-letting in the eighteenth century. Maybe I thought that if I caused myself some extra emotion I would feel drained afterwards – not better, perhaps, but too exhausted to care.

  Everything is reversible except a child. A child will always be there, I thought, no matter what.
>
  I did everything that I knew would cause me most pain. I walked slowly, taking long strides, up to the point where David had grabbed me with that strange mixture of passion and aggression, nearly ten years before. As I walked up the slope, I pictured me and him walking together, hand in hand, about to spend the rest of our lives together. I pictured the way he turned on me, perhaps not even knowing himself what he was about to do. I rubbed at my upper arms as I walked, feeling the grasp of his hands on them, the firmness of his grip, remembering my sudden knowledge that this was more than his usual messing around. I remembered the unexpected venom and passion in his gaze. Inevitably enough, I wandered up towards the edge of the overhang. Ten years on and still it had not dropped into the sea. Time it did, really, I thought.

  As I walked slowly towards the edge, I was already picturing myself staring over it, at the huge chunks of jagged concrete below and the brown shingle and the grey and white of the English Channel. I began to shiver violently and it was more than just the cold. I was contemplating how easy it would be. I was thinking about looking over in the same way I had done that day but without David’s arms to hold me. I was imagining tipping forward, slowly at first, letting my centre of gravity pull me, arms outstretched in a simile of flight. I was wondering if falling like that stole the breath from your body, whether maybe you were already unconscious when you smacked against the ground, or whether your mind screamed all the way down at the irreversibility of your decision. One moment of bravery, that was all it would take. After that, you would have no choice.

  I would like to say that as I approached the overhang, I was indeed contemplating throwing myself off, just standing on the edge and tipping, maybe without even looking down. I would like to say I felt the pull of gravity, the magnetic force of the concrete blocks below. The truth was, I didn’t even get close to the edge. Before I was near enough to look over, I pulled back, afraid and shivering, hating my cowardice, convinced that a life of post-David misery was what I was destined for, was nothing more than I deserved.