After tightening the odd handle and oiling some hinges, I could sense my aimless standing about was getting in your way and on your nerves. With my stomach growling, I set off for some interim supplies. I can’t have been gone long. Long enough, though. When I think back now, I wonder when exactly it was that I realized something was wrong. When you didn’t get the doorbell? When I couldn’t see you in the sitting room? Whatever it was, it was the quiet that confirmed it.
“Mags! Mags! I’m back. I’ve got stuff for tea and toast—shall we have it now? Mags, where are you?” I go from room to room, popping my head round the door frames. Upstairs, the bathroom door is locked. I knock, quietly.
Silence.
“Mags, are you in there? Is everything OK?”
Silence.
I’ve never been a door-barging type of man, and I’m not going to start now, however terrified I might be. After a few seconds, I hear the bar of the lock being drawn back. Slowly, cautiously, I inch the door forward.
You are sitting on the toilet seat, tights bunched around your knees, your head in your hands. You don’t look at me. I follow your gaze. Crimson against the crisp white of the floor tiles: a pool of blood.
You don’t say a word. Not then. Not for three days. Your silence is louder than any scream could ever be.
I run the bath. You offer no resistance as I strip off your clothes, leaving them in a pile to soak up the soiled reminder of what we have lost. Your naked body is as limp as a rag doll as I scoop you up, one hand around your torso, one under your thighs, and carry you, childlike, into the tub. In the cruelest twist of fate, you have become my baby. I run only a small amount of water, fearful that you cannot, or will not, hold your head up and will drown if I so much as blink. There is still a small orange blotch on your sternum where some of the tomato sauce from last night’s dinner fell short of your mouth. I have to rub hard with my thumb to remove it, but you don’t register it at all.
I am out of my depth. Should I call a doctor? Can I do that without your permission? My only reassurance is that this is, or was, your area of expertise. You must have seen women like this before, you must know what needs to be done.
Kneeling at the side of the tub, I use my hands to scoop the warm water over your body, watching as the first clear palmfuls turn increasingly rosy. You have yet to unpack any towels, so, when the water begins to feel tepid, I lift you from the bath and wrap you in the sheet from the single bedroom. Cloaked in the bobbly white cotton, you could be a child playing dress-up as a bride, your dainty features dwarfed by an event that feels too adult for us to bear.
I get you to bed and close the curtains. In the darkness, I can see you curled in the fetal position, your back to me. When I am certain you will not move, I tiptoe into the hallway in search of your handbag. I have thought no further than that I must find Edie. Her number is in your address book, tucked, as I had hoped it would be, in the inside pouch. We have yet to meet our downstairs neighbors, but I need a phone and my awkwardness pales in comparison to my need.
Thankfully, they are in. My distress must be obvious, because the surly-looking kid who answers waves me right through to the hallway. Edie does not pick up on the first few rings. I can feel a knot of anxiety tightening in my bowels. There is no plan B.
At last . . . “Hello?”
“Edie, it’s me, it’s Frank. Can you get here as soon as possible?”
“What is it, Frank, what’s wrong?”
“It’s the baby, Maggie, she . . .”
I don’t know how I will say it, but Edie knows.
“I’m leaving now, Frank, go sit with her. Leave the front door open.”
When Edie arrives, I am on the edge of the mattress, tentatively stroking your hair. Some of the strands have dried crisp and dark. Edie gets into bed, next to your shrouded body. There is something about the intimacy of the moment that leaves me feeling as if I am trespassing, and I go back to the bathroom, on the pretense of cleaning. Should that have been me, Mags? Did I let you down? I’m sorry, so sorry if I did.
Edie finds me perched on the side of the bathtub, halfheartedly scrubbing at the rusty marks along the waterline.
“We’re going to take Maggie to the maternity unit. I’ve got a friend on duty who should be able to take her quickly. She’s getting dressed now, then I’ll drive us all down.”
I do not know if she is including me to be nice, out of pity, perhaps. Then again, it is my loss too.
There is fresh hell in you being taken to the ward you shouldn’t have been admitted to for another few months, in seeing all the new mothers being wheeled to their cars, their eyes sunken with exhaustion but somehow still beaming with delight. You keep your eyes on your shoes, but I still see you wince with each newborn’s cry.
For the procedure, you go in alone. Edie and I sit, outside, an empty chair where you waited between us.
“You will still be there for her, won’t you, Frank?”
“Of course.”
“The wedding . . .”
“I still want to marry her.”
“I know—it’s just . . . the timing. Ten days?”
I nod. “I’ll wait as long as it takes, though.”
“You’re a good man, Frank. She knows that.”
I hope desperately that what Edie says is true. I can’t stand to lose you too.
When you emerge, you look as if you have shrunk. Your coat hangs off one shoulder; the hollows of your cheeks are more sunken than before. The doctor gestures to Edie but, oddly, I don’t feel affronted. All I want to do is to be with you. I wrap an arm around your shoulders, shepherding you back to the car.
I only notice that you are crying when we reach the main entrance. Your body slips from under my arm, bent double and shaking. It is just us two.
I didn’t say anything then. Not that night, not in the days just after. This wasn’t about me. I was terrified of making things worse. I always have been. It’s paralyzing, Mags, it really is. If I had my time again? Yes, I would do it differently. There was so much I wanted to say, so much that I should have said. “It’s not your fault” would have been a very good place to start.
Chapter 7
Our marriage could not have gotten off to a worse start. Indeed, it almost didn’t get off at all. For two whole days after we returned to the flat, you barely moved from the bed, didn’t say a word. I brought cups of tea and poured them away an hour later, still full and cold. You didn’t even try to make the toast appear nibbled. Torn between wanting to be near you and wanting to give you some privacy, I tried to make myself useful, unpacking the remaining items and stocking the cupboards. Anything to make the place feel less empty.
On the third day, I was at the kitchen table, marking a stack of undergraduate scripts, when you came down wrapped in a toweling dressing gown. Your hair was sticking up at all angles, and there were pillow crinkles crisscrossed on your cheeks. Do you know, Mags, that you never looked more beautiful to me than in that moment? My girl, my darling girl, come back to me. Or so I hoped.
“Hey.” You take a seat adjacent to me and stretch your left hand into the gap between us. The paper ring I fashioned has long since disappeared.
“Hello, darling—how are you feeling?”
You nod. I have no idea what that indicates, but I carry on anyway.
“Mags, look, I still want to marry you. I’ll understand, though, if . . . if . . . you don’t feel—”
“Well, that’s a relief,” you cut in. “Because I cannot lose you too.” There are tears brimming in your eyes, threatening to send you back to bed, far from my reach. I lean over, clumsily using my thumb to blot your tear ducts and making you smile in the process.
“You’ll need a ring in that case—about time, eh? Shall we go this afternoon?”
“Shouldn’t you be at work?” you ask, biting your lip with a look of concentration that tells me you have lost track of the days.
“It doesn’t matter. I needed some time off . . .” I am gab
bling in my anxiety. I take a deep breath and try again. “You’re the only thing that matters to me, Mags.”
I have never meant anything more.
I offer to cancel the wedding guests, to do it just us, but you are insistent that we go back to normal, put on a “good show,” whatever that means. The last-minute preparations seem to take your mind off things, as far as I can tell at least. By the time the day of the wedding rolls around a week later, there is nothing to indicate the shaky start we have overcome to get there.
And we had a beautiful day for it, didn’t we, Mags? Cool to start off with but bright, the sun radiating off the city spires and leaving us with a series of group shots where every member of the party is either squinting or shielding their eyes. Our decision not to announce the pregnancy works in our favor. To our families, my colleagues, and the girls from home, you are every inch the blushing bride, not a care in the world.
All our friends love your resolve to walk yourself down the aisle—a modern woman! I was sure it would be a bit unorthodox for my own parents, but they have the good sense not to mention it; you don’t say that you wish you could have had your father there to do the honors, not in so many words, and I decide not to probe either. Not with everything else going on. I already know that you two never had a straightforward relationship, but I do wonder how much you miss him now—a memory rather than a steadying hand on the way to the altar.
Instead, I turn my attention to trying to bond with your mother. It’s only the second time I’ve met her, what with her being abroad, but she keeps herself to herself, on the arm of your brother the artist; the other is stuck in the middle of a big deal, or so he told us. I’m not sure that I make much progress with her, and after a half hour of increasingly tenuous questions (me) and curt answers (her), I make my way over to the rest of the guests. Our friends haven’t had the chance to mix much before, and the social experiment is well and truly under way. At least the novelty allows you a little bit of space, the opportunity to divert back to the proceedings any questions that fall just that inch too close to the bone. Only Edie keeps close to your elbow the whole way through the reception.
A honeymoon feels extravagant, and we have both taken a week off work already, pleading a nasty bout of stomach flu. We make up for it with a long weekend by the sea as soon as the wedding has wrapped. The change of scene does us both good. My parents had bought us a Polaroid, and the photo I keep of you in my wallet has Brighton Pier in the background. Your jeans rolled up, you carry your loafers in one hand, the other thrown back in delight. The belt of your trench coat just touches the water. When I look at it now it reminds me of what I fell in love with, the wild abandon, the warmth and joy. It also reminds me of just how quickly that can be taken from me.
At the B and B that night, you allow me to touch you again. As ever, I am tentative, wary of trespassing where I am not wanted yet, but I am surprised by how you warm into me, urging me faster, harder, until the two single beds we have pushed together begin to split apart and your body caves into the crevasse between. You laugh, breathlessly, and, in the motion of hauling yourself back up, bring me prematurely to climax. There is an angry knocking on the wall by our headboard. And do you know what, Mags? I couldn’t have cared less. They could have evicted us naked and still I wouldn’t have cared. All I wanted was right there in front of me, smiling once again.
Soon we were back in Oxford, our lives taking on much the same form as third had before. For the first few months, there was no mention of what had happened or of trying again. Now, I don’t know why I didn’t do more to sound you out, to delve beneath the guise of good cheer that you wore from dusk to dawn. I suppose I was just too happy. God, what an excuse to make. It holds, though. I loved our newly married life, I really did.
All it takes is the smell of wet paint and I snap right back to those days, just after the wedding. You had decorating fever, and I was your willing assistant, in a pair of overalls a good four inches too short, tickling at my shins. The landlord was lax, to say the least, which gave you the opportunity to really go to town on the place. We had great fun painting every room (some twice if they didn’t feel “quite right”), tore up two carpets, and hung hundreds of framed pictures. Any minute of any spare time was funneled into your renovations, and I could sense, even when you sat down, that you were itching to be up and back at it again.
For weeks, we’d go to bed every night with flecks of paint all over us, however hard we’d scrubbed in the shower. Some nights I’d try to kiss them all, but the tiny white drops had landed everywhere and I’d have to kiss faster and faster until I was dizzy with the action and had to crash out onto the safety of your lips. I’m sure that inspired you to make more mess with the paint than was strictly necessary when the next day we picked up where we had left off.
We’d work through the weekends, not a break in sight. Lunch was a standing-up affair, a hunk of bread and a slice of cheese propped on top while the teapot cooled. When we ran out of mugs, you would instruct me to just top up the pot with the milk and we drank straight out of the spout. You had taken down the curtains by that stage, so God knows what the neighbors must have thought. And me? Well, I stopped caring pretty quickly. All my self-consciousness had escaped through the open window with the paint fumes. You always had that uncanny knack of making me forget the rest of the world, Mags.
When you finished a room, I’d pin one of the dust sheets up against the door frame as a makeshift curtain so you could do the grand unveiling to your adoring audience of one. I’d play the estate agent, in my anorak, interrogating you on all manner of minor details. How many coats of paint? Was this design inspired by any artist in particular? Before we collapsed with the absurdity of it all, I made sure to give your efforts my “scores on the doors.” It was never less than ten out of ten.
I suppose what I’m trying to say, Mags, is that we moved on from that loss. Not that we forgot it, you never do, but we were building a new bliss that wasn’t contingent on anything or anyone but the two of us. I had never known happiness like it. I hoped you felt that way too.
Then, a few months into our marriage, I came home to find you in tears at the kitchen table.
“Everything OK, Mags?” I ask. Your back is turned to me, elbows propped on the table as you drag your fingers through your hair. You don’t get up to greet me and barely seem to have registered my presence. I know something is wrong, but I have no idea what.
“Work OK? They aren’t making you switch districts? Imagine the cycle!” My hand is on your shoulder. You haven’t recoiled, but nonetheless the joke has fallen decidedly flat.
“Hey, Mags, come on.” I walk round and catch your profile, tear-stained and blotchy. “You know you can tell me anything, anything, I promise. What’s wrong?”
“I’m not pregnant,” you whisper quickly, quietly. “I’m not pregnant again. I’m sorry.”
“Sorry? What for? Mags, this isn’t your fault. Say, it’s only been a month or two.”
“Ten.”
“Ten, then.” I feel the crushing hand of alarm clutching at my chest. I had barely noticed any time passing. “No time at all. Your body has to work itself back out. It’s early days, Mags, we’re young, we’ll try again. Plenty of times. And, well, if it’s not meant to be, it’s not meant to be, eh?”
I wish I had never said that. The hollowest of all throwaway phrases. And what does it really mean? Who decided that you would suffer so much? No benevolent deity, that’s for sure. You, the best of people, having to endure the worst of your own nightmares. The sort of mother who would love too much, if such a thing was possible. So, who was drawing straws for our lot and constantly pulling you up short?
I know I have said the wrong thing as I see your body drop, your shoulders round down an inch farther. I want to kick myself for rolling out a pointless platitude. I know how much the uncertainty kills you, how much you have always craved the stability you never had as a child. I want to tell you our son or daughter
couldn’t provide that, but I could, I did, I always would, Maggie. Somehow I have always found that easier to show you than to say.
“I want it to be, though,” you say, pushing the kitchen chair back and slowly getting to your feet. “I want it so much.” You are in danger of breaking down completely. I am almost too scared to touch you again in case it is the gesture that sets you off, that takes you beyond my reach. “I’m off to bed, Frank. There’s some bits for supper in the fridge.”
I watched as you walked away, down the hallway, and past the one room that had been left untouched by plastic covers and slippery-lipped paint cans—the one earmarked as the nursery. Fortunately, we had only bought one item, a mobile made of tiny, fragile paper birds that I’d had the forethought to remove and hide. Even without the reminder, the room was too much for you, and I never saw you go in. You skirted the door, moving a good few inches away, as if there were a force field humming around it.
Once I had heard you make your way upstairs, I realized what I should have said. For years the phrase rolled around my palate before I swallowed it up for another day: What would be so wrong with just us, Maggie? Isn’t that what we signed up for? Isn’t that what marriage is?
I’m sorry, Maggie, but when it comes to you, I am selfish. I want you, all of you. When I proposed, there were three in the picture, but when we said our vows, there were just two. That has always been enough for me. It always would have been too.
Chapter 8
“Ah, Professor Hobbs, I’m glad I caught you.” The doctor is back. I have evaded him long enough, dodging his consulting room, keeping my head down along the corridors in the rare moments I venture away from Maggie. Maybe he saw me kick the water fountain in the canteen when the drum gurgled empty for the second time in a day? Most people did.
He hovers in the doorway. “Professor Hobbs—may I?” He tilts his head toward the spare chair.
The Silent Treatment Page 6