Whatever You Love

by Louise Doughty

‘Think of it as everywhere instead,’ I say, and he smiles, a little.

  ‘Yes,’ he says, ‘that’s better.’

  We are the only people in the bar. The man behind it is lifting down the wine glasses that hang upside down in the rack above him and holding them up to the light, then polishing them one by one with a cloth, holding them up again afterwards to appreciate the difference, let them gleam.

  *

  Chloe’s body is never found and Ahmetaj is never found either, although there is still an outstanding warrant for his arrest. My own arrest occurred because of the discovery of the knife on the clifftop. It was shown to Toni, who identified it as similar to the knives she had seen in the knife block on the kitchen counter top, near the sink in my house. In addition, there was CCTV footage of my car entering the car park near to the camp. Once that was discovered, Toni or someone went and had a chat with a few of the neighbours and somebody said they saw a man answering Ahmetaj’s description standing on my doorstep that evening – he would have been briefly visible as the security light in my porch came on.

  That is the sum total of the evidence against me. I was arrested on a fishing expedition, my solicitor says, in the wake of Aleksander Ahmetaj’s disappearance. They would have had arguments about whether or not to try it, she said, me being a grieving mother, and as such having access to a potentially sympathetic press. They would have been aware they might have to justify the arrest at a later date but also aware that they might have to justify not doing it. These things are always carefully weighed. It was apparent to me during the interview that the police did not believe my story about the knife. I said that I was nervous about my physical safety when I went for walks on the cliffs, that I always took a knife with me, wrapped in a tea-towel. When pressed, I said I did not answer the door to Ahmetaj, that I never answer my door after dark. I am a poor liar and this might have contradicted the neighbour witness. The police didn’t believe me about a lot of things, but in the absence of any other evidence – and, crucially, in the absence of Ahmetaj – they have no way of contradicting me.

  I might get a phone call or a letter, the solicitor says, but in the end I have to wait until my month is up and my return visit to the station. It is the male officer who interviewed me who tells me, formally, that I am being released from my bail and that no further action will be taken against me, although I may be re-arrested in the future if any new evidence comes to light. My guess is that they were hanging on in the hope Ahmetaj might be picked up in some other part of the country but as he hasn’t been they have no choice but to drop all charges.

  *

  There are new occupants in the caravan park on the cliffs. They are Romanians. Already, there has been an altercation between one of them and two young local men, a fight in the supermarket car park, over a girl, so local rumour has it. The Romanians are more outgoing than the previous group and have been going to pubs and nightclubs. They are good-looking and cheerful and destined to be decorators and plumbers rather than hiding on the industrial estates. I can imagine the local girls falling for them in droves. The Upton Centre is planning a cultural evening.

  *

  David is broken. After our few days in the hotel, we return to the bungalow and for a while we keep the curtains closed at the front of the house and look over our shoulders as we walk out to the car but nobody bothers us. Even so, I know that the bungalow can only be a temporary arrangement.

  He is broken into lots of little pieces. It is as if he managed to hold it together all through the horror of losing Betty, then Chloe’s disappearance, then my arrest – but then, finally, when I am released from my police bail, it is as if all those things come rushing in together, a tidal wave. We are living together but sometimes it feels more like being alongside David than with him. It is like being with an old man who shuffles from room to room. Despite a mild argument on the subject, I insist on sleeping in a sleeping bag on the sofa in the sitting room. He and I need to be together, and not together. I know I have to let him grieve for Chloe in his own way. His anger towards her is gone now and there is simple despair in its place.

  Rees is getting confused about where he actually lives, and the amount of time we are all spending together. He has started throwing tantrums over small things in a way he didn’t before, and although he has been demanding sometimes amidst all this, this is the first time he has shown real signs of trauma. It is as if, like David, he has finally worked out it is safe to do so, that I will be there to look after him if he does. He makes a fuss about getting dressed in the morning, refuses nursery sometimes, says he wants to be a baby like Harry, and be back inside my tummy. Sooner rather than later, we will have to clarify the situation for him.

  *

  One morning, a few days after I have been released from my bail, I wake early and wriggle out of the sleeping bag, then use the loo and go into the kitchen. David has been up feeding Harry already and then gone back to bed. He has left the door on the microwave oven open and I go over and close it gently. It gives a neat click. I put the tub of formula powder back in the cupboard and wipe the surface where he has left powder scattered over it on the granite. I make myself a cup of tea and take it back into the sitting room. Sometimes, I get back into the sleeping bag and watch early-morning television with the sound turned down low.

  I am halfway across the light-filled hallway, thinking of television, when my eye catches at something in the periphery of my vision. I turn my head, looking around. I have the same uncomfortable feeling I get when I am asleep and one of the children cries out, a dim sense of something, a small sly knowledge that, if I concentrate for a moment, I will discover what it is that is not right. I stop where I am in the hallway, and there it is. I reach out and put down the full mug of tea, resting it on top of a pile of newspapers that is on a small table by the sitting-room door. I bend and pick up the envelope, then glance behind me, down the short corridor that leads to the two bedrooms. All is quiet. I take my tea and the envelope into the sitting room and close the door behind me, turning the handle slowly so as not to make a noise.

  I put the tea on the coffee table, get into the sleeping bag and sit upright in it. Just like the others, the later others, the envelope has no name on the front. I slip it open with one finger. It is hand-written, on a page of A4 copy paper, neatly folded.

  Dear Laura,

  I suppose you must think you have won now, don’t you? I suppose you think you’ve got everything and that you’ve got everybody fooled even the police and even that husband of yours who was too much of a fool to ever see through you. But don’t you never ever forget that even though my daughter is gone I am still around. I am too clever for you and to imply you will get what is coming to you as I know what I can and can’t say. Don’t forget though.

  Yours,

  E.

  I am innocent of Chloe’s death: I am guilty as charged. I did not kill her, nor did Ahmetaj, but I discussed it with him, how much I wish she had never existed. He told me his story; I told him mine. In that sense, the police are right, I am guilty of conspiracy to murder but I am not guilty of Chloe’s death. She killed herself. She must have done. For weeks I have gone over and over it in my head but it is this letter that convinces me I am innocent. Edith has accused me of many things but not of murdering her daughter. The fact that even she believes Chloe committed suicide convinces me, once and for all, that my conspiring with Ahmetaj had nothing to do with Chloe’s death. I am guilty but I am innocent. Chloe is gone. It wasn’t my fault.

  I think of Jenny Ozu as I sit there, holding the letter. I think of how I had to hurt someone because of all the things that were hurting me and how I would never have seen it that way at that time. I think how there is always a way we can justify ourselves to ourselves, make ourselves moral, heroic even – even Edith probably believes herself to be an honest, decent person. There is no end to it, I think.

  *

  I fold the letter and place it back in the envelope, then hide it in
the side pocket of the bag I packed before we went to the hotel. I decide to say nothing to David. We simply have to get far away, as far and as quickly as we can.

  *

  Rees and I look after Harry together. We enjoy it. It gives David a break and provides a way for Rees and I to collaborate.

  ‘He’s our baby, isn’t he?’ Rees says to me later that day, as we change his nappy on the living-room carpet, the foldable nappy mat tucked beneath him. ‘Yes, darling,’ I say, indicating that I want him to pass me the wipes, ‘he is.’

  Later, Rees and I take Harry and drive over to Eastley and go to Willetts. Harry sits on my lap and Rees plays with the leaflets in a stand by the door as I make an appointment for an estate agent to come and value the bungalow and my house. Afterwards, we drive round to Aunt Lorraine’s. David’s sister Ceri is there and the three of us take Rees out into the garden so that Rees can play football while the rest of us watch in the cold.

  ‘When am I going to see my nephew then?’ Lorraine asks me softly, as I kick the ball in Rees’s direction. He is on a team with Ceri. Lorraine’s tone is a little pleading, as if it is within my gift. I don’t know what to say to her. David doesn’t want to see a soul but me, not even his parents.

  ‘It’s going to take a while…’ I say.

  ‘Oh, David…’ says Lorraine, with a tearful sigh.

  Rees has got the ball and is dribbling ineffectually towards Ceri, trying to get past her, even though she is supposed to be on his team. She is pretending to tackle him.

  ‘We are going to go back to Wales, I think,’ I hear myself saying to Lorraine, and it feels surprisingly natural to be sharing this thought aloud, even though I have only just thought it, not even discussed it with David.

  Lorraine looks at me.

  ‘Me and David, and the boys,’ I say. ‘We can’t stay here.’ I don’t know how much Lorraine knows about Chloe’s mother – but that is only part of it, of course. We cannot live in our old house, we cannot live in the bungalow, we cannot live apart – what else can David and I do, now?

  Lorraine looks weary and sad but gives a nod of assent. ‘We still have lots of family in Aberystwyth,’ she says. ‘I’ve often thought of going back myself but I don’t think Richard would have it.’

  Rees scores a goal against Ceri and runs round the garden in delight, arms waving, yelling in victory.

  *

  That night, I am awoken by sounds of stumbling around the kitchen. David is often awake at night, even if Harry’s erratic feeding patterns have not disturbed him. Sometimes I stay in my sleeping bag on the sofa and listen – cupboards opening, muffled sobs. This time, I rise. The bungalow is cold. I pick up the jumper I left lying on the armchair that evening and pull it on over my pyjamas, lifting my hair clear of the heavy collar. I look around but can’t find my slippers, so pad barefoot through to the kitchen.

  David is sitting at the table, his grey hair fluffy, cheeks stub- bled, skin sagging a little – he has lost weight. How much older we both are. Before him, on the table, I see there is a large photo album, lying open. I recognise it as one from the early days of our marriage, when Betty was a baby. I didn’t know he had that one, I think. I thought I had kept most of them.

  He does not look up as I enter the room. I go over to the kettle, silently, fill it at the sink, re-plug it, switch it on. While I wait for it to boil, I lean against the counter top and put one foot on top of the other, rubbing. The bungalow kitchen has a slate floor as well as a granite worktop. It is cold and hard. I dropped a mug on it the other day and it shattered into a hundred pieces.

  David is turning the pages of the photo album and crying, softly, silently. I glimpse the pictures as he turns them – Betty on a swing, in a garden, not ours. Betty dressed up in every scarf and hat she could find in the house. Betty, Betty, Betty… how does he square his grief for Chloe with his grief for her? It baffles me, and I thought I was the expert.

  ‘It feels as though I’m being punished,’ he says, without looking up. ‘For what I did to you and the children. That’s what it feels like.’

  This is not the first time he has said this. I go to him. I put an arm around his shoulders and pull him close. He turns into me. I bend and kiss the top of his head. ‘You’re not,’ I say. He puts his arms around my waist and pulls me in, tightly. His grasp is so familiar, still, after everything. My body has not forgotten the feel of his. We stay like that for a long time, the kettle forgotten, the photo album on the table.

  After a while, I lean back and disengage his arms. From the small bedroom beyond the hallway, there comes a child’s whimper. ‘Did you hear?’ I ask.

  He shakes his head.

  ‘I’ll just go and check on the boys.’ I move towards the door.

  ‘Laura,’ he says. It is still strange and beautiful to hear him use my name.

  In the doorway, I turn. He is looking at me.

  *

  When I return from checking on the boys, I stand in the kitchen doorway and lean against the frame. David is still sitting at the kitchen table with his back to me – either he has not heard my approach, or he is so deep in thought that the sound did not register. He does not turn. His shoulders are sunken. His head is in his hands. From where I stand, leaning casually, arms folded, he looks like what he is, a beaten man. He looks like a man in a painting, I think, an oil painting by someone famous. There are painters who can do that light – the way it falls in a yellow oval from the low-hanging light over the kitchen table, the way that oval casts the rest of the kitchen into a shapely darkness, as if the cupboards and the cooker and the sink are envious creatures crowding round the light. David is as motionless as stone.

  What I felt for David in those early days shouldn’t have matured into marriage and children – it was the sort of love adulterers have, fierce and full of wanting. It should have burnt itself out, like those things do, but instead something else was built upon it, real love, deep and cosy and mutual, and two children grew of that love. Maybe that’s all it is, I think, as I stand watching this man with his head bowed at his kitchen table, this whole construct, love or whatever we want to call it – a raw need, as rough as tree bark, a fear of death so strong we can’t stop ourselves from fucking in the cold and the dark. But if that is so, I think, staring at the back of David’s head, then what is it I feel for him now, when we are both so beaten and low that sex seems like a long-distant dream or something we have only read about in books? What is this that we feel for each other now if not love? Love built on pain – the kind that lasts: whatever we love can be taken away from us at any moment but the loss of what we love belongs to us forever.

  I go to him, pushing myself away from the kitchen door- frame as if I need momentum. I cross the kitchen and lay both hands on his shoulders and he raises his head and leans back against me, as if he knew I was there all the time and was just waiting for me to come to him. My arms slide round him. He clutches at them and turns his head into my stomach, and I hold him like that, against me, awkwardly, him sitting and me standing, for a long time.

  Epilogue

  Betty stands in front of the mirror, brushing her long fair hair. ‘Mum, do you think the sleeves are a bit long?’

  ‘A bit,’ I say, pulling on my boots. Rees is in the kitchen. ‘Rees!’ I shout at him, ‘Come on!’ I have resolved to use the car less often in the mornings – there is really no excuse for it, we just have to get ourselves out of the house a bit earlier, that’s all. The problem is that Rees is too big for the buggy but too small to walk as swiftly as Betty and I – but if we leave in the next two minutes, we’ll be fine.

  Betty is looking at herself in her new jacket in the mirror, turning her head to and fro, with all the innocent vanity at her disposal. I rise from where I am sitting at the bottom of the stairs and go and hug her briefly. ‘It’s fine,’ I say, even though I don’t think the jacket is fine. I think it is thin and cheap-looking and I don’t understand why she was so keen on it.

  W
e bundle out of the house and hurry down our road, waving at Julie who is leaving her house at the same time with Alfie. ‘Are you sure about later?’ she shouts. I have told her I will pick Rees up myself from nursery because of collecting Rebecca as well and taking them both around to the Methodist Church Hall. My head is full of the day’s complicated arrangements, the Venn diagram of different children and mothers it involves. This is the fabric of my life, the interwoven times and places and people, the diary in my head.

  *

  The school bell is ringing as we push into the playground, forging our way upstream through the throng of parents who are attempting to leave through the narrow gateway. We are late for school, they are late for work – or in a rush to be elsewhere for other reasons – and there is never any consensus over who has right of way in this situation, let alone the moral high ground. Once we have battled our way through, Rees rushes over to the wooden pig in the corner of the playground and I have a moment of Betty to myself, to bid her goodbye.

  She is impatient. She has seen Willow heading into school. She gives me a brief hug and turns.

  ‘Hey,’ I shout after her. She turns back to me. I lift her dance kit bag up by its strap. It is heavier than usual because today, for once, I have remembered to put in her tap shoes and a drink and snack for her to have before Capoeira club. I am inwardly congratulating myself on this. She smiles and runs back to me. She grabs the bag from me, then, in a swift, embarrassed gesture, darts forward and gives me a peck on the cheek. ‘Love you,’ she says quietly, so none of her friends will hear, almost so she doesn’t hear herself.

  Normally, I would say love you back, but today my mind is on our new arrangement for that afternoon. ‘So, remember, won’t you?’