Six days to go
So where were we, Frank? My confessions, yes. It sounds so terribly Catholic, doesn’t it? I’ve never really flirted with religion. In fact, that was something that drew me to you. You had no need for higher powers, just facts and reason. Solid ground for me to stand on—stability, at last! Solid ground for a marriage too. Or so you would think. That said, I have always liked the idea of the confessional; some kindly, balding priest on the other side of the screen, primed and ready to wipe it all away with just a few incantations and a donation to the charity tin. I am not sure this will be so easy.
I am, unfortunately, a serial liar. It’s not nice to write, harder yet to live with. Did you notice, Frank? Did you? Part of me hopes so, so this won’t be as much of a shock. Part of me hopes not, otherwise my deceits have been in vain. Either way you will be disappointed and I can never stand to see that, in me of all people.
I’m not proud of the way I am, but I am proud of the relationship we have had, and I’m afraid that my lies have been a part of that. I always see our marriage like a bike chain, looping through the years in smooth, predictable circles. But with age come sticking points, and sometimes a little lie is all it takes to oil the mechanism and keep the whole show on the road.
Why? That’s the crucial question, of course. I would trace it back to my mother. I can imagine you reading this, your eyes rolling up to the ceiling the way they always did when I mentioned her. You blamed her for a lot, and for a lot that was fair. But if there is a straightforward pattern of passing blame from mother to daughter, down through the generations, where does that leave me with Eleanor? Responsible. That’s where.
But, first things first: back to my mother. You never liked her, that was clear. Not when she came to stay, not when she phoned. Not even when she wasn’t in contact for months on end. But me? I didn’t hate her. I tried once, but it was so unsustainable. She frustrated me, baited me, irritated me to the point that I would avoid her calls for weeks on end, but still I didn’t hate her. I only hated what I had inherited from her—that subtle, utterly undetectable ability to lie.
In all our years together, I never found a way to explain that all my earliest memories of my mother are of her with other men. I didn’t want you to judge her. You already did, so harshly, and she was my mother—do you know how much that hurt me? I don’t judge her for that. Not really. My father was never there, always working, and that was a relief. When he was home, no one could relax. Not so much treading on eggshells as marching barefoot on glass.
“What have you been up to today then, Margot?” he would ask over supper.
“Mum made us stay in because she had friends round.”
“Oh really . . . Anyone you knew?”
My mother was never quicker than when she was interrupting me.
“Anna and her sister—one of their friends.”
The minute my father looked down at his plate she would shoot me a look that said I was better seen and not heard. Disaster averted. Until the next time, of course.
After that, it never crossed my mind to tell him the truth about the stream of uncles who would pass through the house bearing gifts and no genetic relation to us at all. I suppose you could say lying became second nature. It became my preservation technique. Not so much for myself but for those I loved more than myself. And I’m afraid you fell perfectly into that category, Frank. I told myself I would never be like that.
And then one of the first things I ever told you—a lie. Fresh out of my mouth before I had a chance to haul the words back . . .
As a husband, Frank has always felt that he has been winging it. There isn’t an instruction manual, more’s the pity, and his own father had passed away by the time he really needed his advice on longevity, what it takes to keep the show on the road beyond the early, easier years. Frank assumed there were basic tenets for a successful marriage: don’t take your spouse for granted, be kind, be honest. In fact, he should rearrange that. Surely honesty is the first rule.
If Maggie started out with a lie, what else can’t he trust? It is true, at least, that he never liked her mother. He knows a little about Maggie’s childhood, although it was always like pulling teeth, trying to get her to go into any real detail on the subject, however much he asked. He knows that her mother left the family for another man the moment she thought the children could look after themselves, although Maggie—at thirteen—had begged to disagree. He can’t say he ever made much progress with his mother-in-law. She would never answer a straight question, though was fond of putting everyone else on the spot. An avoider. He should know. Frank winds back over the six long months when he tried so desperately to keep hold of Maggie, evading the truth of what he had done by not speaking at all—
Frank is jolted out of his reminiscence by a sharp prick in his thumb where he has been resting it too hard on the paper. He looks down at the thin line of red now trailing along the bottom edges of the book. Maggie would be appalled—she was so attached to this planner, even before she repurposed it. He blots his hand against his shirt and watches as one drop spills out, spreading its liquid contents and weaving its way into the tiny, almost imperceptible cotton fibers. Just like a lie, he thinks, reaching out so much further than first thought.
One of the first things I ever told you—a lie.
Frank tells himself that if he was a good husband, he would have some inkling of what that was. In reality, he has no idea. Something about his outfit? A commentary on what he had planned for their first date? He twists the bedside lamp so it shines more fully on the planner.
He’ll have to find out the hard way.
Six days to go
I never should have gone on that first date with you, Frank. It wasn’t right or fair.
Why? Well, I was attached. Quite seriously—two years in with Guy and all eyes fixed on my ring finger. When I first bumped into you, in the Rose & Crown, it was his birthday and not a very happy one at that. Edie and Jules had told me that I could expect a proposal that Christmas. They said he would finally make it official and put me out of the endless limbo of uncertainty.
He didn’t pop the question, obviously. I doubt he was even aware that he should. You men never get it, do you? While Guy was so wrapped up in rugby, his career, his own anus, I was busy being humiliated. Why wouldn’t he seal the deal? What was so wrong with me that he couldn’t just make the commitment? Was he waiting for someone better to come along? Honestly, it didn’t even matter if I wanted him down on one knee or not; all I needed was just to get the whole performance over and done with.
I say this as if he was awful, but that’s not fair either. It wasn’t as if Guy was a bad bloke. For starters he was very easy on the eye. I know it sounds terribly shallow, but that was the biggest draw at first. He was charming and funny too, the sort of easy, consistent fun that I had wanted as a student, away from home for the very first time. When I was with him I wasn’t the third, slightly square musketeer tagging on to Jules’s and Edie’s coattails. In his company, I was a good-time girl. I didn’t care if I was basking in his reflected light, just as long as I could glow too.
The longer we went around together, though, the more everything that initially had been so endearing to me began to grate. His jokes fell flat, I was tired of his one-man show, and he seriously needed a haircut. I wanted to know where we were going, if anywhere at all, but the moment we were alone, he scrupulously avoided any form of serious conversation. I had never seen anyone change the conversation so quickly, and trust me, he wasn’t the sharpest tool in the shed.
The thing was, for all my frustrations, I couldn’t see a way out of it. He was, by most measures, a catch. Would I do better? Did I really have the energy to try? Deep down, I knew that I was hard to like, let alone love. I have so many edges, sharp ones at that, ones that can’t be filed down. There was only so much that I could change about myself, and surely I should settle for someone who was interested enough in me to stick around? If anyone knows how
difficult that is to find, it’s me.
You saved me from that, Frank. You raised my aspirations, and you took me as I was. I know I didn’t make it easy. In your shoes, could I have done what you did? Probably not. You took a broken woman, and you loved her as if she were whole. You didn’t try to fix me, and that was your greatest kindness of all.
I’ll never forget the moment when I knew that you were it. The real deal. The end of the search I didn’t know I was still conducting, somewhere at the back of my mind. It was following our afternoon in the museum. You insisted on walking me back to my bike even though it was freezing and miles out of your way. We’d kissed by then, but the experience had made us both bashful. I was grateful it was dark and so you couldn’t see me blushing as we set off back to the surgery to collect my ride home. Every so often your hand would brush against mine, furtively, as if you were testing your own confidence.
I was disappointed when we reached my bike. “This is it!” I said, or something like that, hoping at the same time that it wasn’t true. I so wanted to see you again. I was waiting for you to ask. That was what had always happened before, if things had gone well. The sort of men I knew were keen to lock you in for round two or were entitled enough to assume it was on the cards regardless.
“It’s been a pleasure,” you said, eventually. Just that. Nothing else. It was as if those few hours were all you could have wished for.
“Will we do it again?”
I was the one who asked. I never would have done that before you. There was something about you that made my mind stop its whirring conveyor belt of anxieties and expectations, at least temporarily. I could do what I wanted, go with my gut. Finally, I could be myself, not what someone else expected me to be.
Up until then, I’d spent so much of my life ceaselessly trying to be good. A good daughter, or at the very least good enough to meet my mother’s exacting standards and persuade her to stick around. I went off to college, and then I was determined to be good fun, the sort of person people wanted to make good friends with, someone the guys would think was a good bet. The minute I nabbed one, I wanted to make sure he thought I was a good investment for the long haul. Good, good, good.
And with you? From that moment under the surgery’s security light, when I spoke up for what I wanted and to hell with everything else, the whole endeavor went out the window. All I wanted was to be good at love. I wanted to stop sabotaging my one shot at happiness and finally relax into the love of someone so good that I didn’t have to try anymore. You were always the better half of this relationship. You are the very best of me.
I know it can’t be easy to hear about Guy, but trust me, this is the last you will. He was out of the picture pretty much the minute you walked in. There was just one night, one overlap. It was a few weeks after we met, a drunken fumble after a night at the pub with some mutual friends. It was a one-off, I promise. Only the timing wasn’t great. It lined up, Frank. With the baby. The one we lost. You both did.
I was out of my mind with grief when we got to the maternity unit. I was being punished, I knew it; otherwise why did I have to sit there, with the expectant mums, the new mums, the crying and the ultrasound images and a thousand reminders that I had screwed everything up?
It was a relief when I finally got taken in, when the midwife came and got me and anesthetized something. She told me it wasn’t my fault, as she set a mug of tea down on the side. She told me these things don’t work like that.
“They do for me, though,” I said. I couldn’t meet her eye. “I did something wrong.”
I was inconsolable, Frank. I had to tell someone. Why the baby? Why not me?
I waited for a second or two, then I looked up at her. She didn’t say anything, but there was something in the way she reached over, touched my arm, and squeezed it for just a few seconds too long that showed me she knew what I was getting at. I’m almost certain she did.
Do you know what she said to me? Blame is never that simple.
I’ve thought about that a lot recently, what with everything that has happened. I still don’t know if I agree.
Chapter 3
In all their years together, Frank has never considered that there could be someone else. Now he feels naive. He places the book on his lap and rubs his thumb and the knuckle of his forefinger across his forehead, gathering the drooping skin there into a mound. Is this what a cuckold looks like? Perhaps he is too old for that label to stick.
He’s had colleagues who dealt with infidelity. Some came out and said it in the canteen over lunch, their levels of indignation and anger rising as they railed loudly enough to make everyone else in the room drop their own conversations and lean in over the water jugs. Someone would place a reassuring hand on their shoulder, reining them in again. It isn’t decorous to announce yourself as a victim, not when it reminds everyone else just how distant their own partner has been lately. Some wouldn’t mention it at all, as if the very word were contagious.
Until now, Frank has rarely given any thought to which camp he would fall into. He has spent forty years either too happy or too complacent to think that Maggie would ever play away. At what point does cheating become such old news that you look petty bringing it up? He does not want to be petty. Not when there is so much at stake. Not when Maggie is lying hooked up to life support and he is the one who put her there.
It still rankles, though. Could he have been the father to another man’s child? Probably. He wouldn’t have known. And even if he had? If there was fifty percent Maggie in it, then it would be one hundred percent his. He loved everything about her so much that he absorbed it automatically, without so much as questioning it. Loving to a fault. He was that oxymoron par excellence, if it is possible for such a trait to exist.
Frank shudders at the thought of Guy. He has never been the jealous type. There had been plenty of times when they were out—at the pub, on holiday, hell, even at a parents’ evening—when men would be magnetized to Maggie, a rogue hand flittering over her lower back. But to think of himself at twenty-six, fast asleep and dreaming of her while the two of them fumbled round the back of the pub kitchens, pressed up against the empty oil canisters, or in her bedroom, surrounded by piles of hastily torn-off clothes? It makes him feel sick.
On the scale of betrayal, where does infidelity sit? High up, certainly. If he had found this out before, he would have been angry. As angry as he has ever been, although, he supposes, he hasn’t set much of a benchmark. But now? In the face of his own deceit, the secret he has guarded for six long months, there is nothing.
Nothing can be as bad as what he has to tell Maggie the minute she wakes up.
Five days to go
I tried to keep her words at the back of my mind when we got home, through all the long days cooped up in bed, torturing myself. Time helped, even if it never fully healed. You did too, although naturally you wouldn’t take a jot of credit for that yourself. Sometimes, on the days when I felt so guilty that the minute I got up I wished I could get right back into bed, it was the sight of your face that made me put one foot in front of the other and get on with the day. You delivered me porridge at my dressing table, a smile made of raisins balanced across the oats. Hope can rub off, and you had enough for us both.
What do you think of when you look back on those early years of our marriage, Frank? I hope they were happy for you. They were for me. I loved waking up to the warmth of your body on the sheets and the way that, when you inevitably woke a good half hour before we needed to, you would start subtly coughing because you knew I hated being jolted awake by the alarm. I liked the way you would leave a Post-it note with a joke in my lunch box and always felt the need to repeat it the minute I got home, as if I had forgotten the punch line in the intervening four hours. When you regaled me with it, replete with actions and accents, it never failed to make me laugh. I hate to break it to you, it wasn’t so much that they were funny but that you were. I have never known anyone to find silliness in the everyday q
uite like you.
For our second wedding anniversary, you organized that day-trip to London. Preserved in your memory, I’m sure, and on the wall of the downstairs loo just in case you forget. We did Buckingham Palace, Hyde Park. A scone from a builders’ café off Oxford Street because I’m pretty sure that our budget didn’t stretch to the Ritz. You insisted we dress up for the occasion, as if the whole city was paved with aristocrats. I let it slide. After all, you looked so handsome in your suit, and with my party shoes I gained an extra three inches. All the better to kiss you with. Naturally, they were something terrible to walk in, and by the end of the day my heels were in tatters. At Trafalgar Square, with five minutes to get to the last bus, you threw me over your shoulder and ran for it, heedless of the crowds.
We were wheezing and choking the whole way back up the motorway. You with the exertion, I’m sure, me with the laughter. Talk about making memories, Frank. You were the master. There was unbridled joy with you, and I’d never known anything like it. There was the noise of the world and the ceaseless chatter of everyone in it, but somehow you could drown it all out so that it was just us and a packet of plasters zooming up the motorway in the dark. When you went for the paper the next morning and my arse was front and center in a piece on the “Unprecedented Women’s Lib March,” even that couldn’t manage to put us back in context of the bigger, wider world.
It didn’t even matter that money was tight. The end of the month could never come fast enough, but we found plenty of ways to distract ourselves until then. What was it you called it? Fridge roulette? You’d come home brandishing something from the “Reduced” section, and consult the contents of the cupboards like an auctioneer before the bidding. “Three carrots, sardines, and two croissants—any takers?” God, some of the things we ate! My stomach ached by the time we got into bed, although whether from the concoction or the laughing was anyone’s guess.
The Silent Treatment Page 15