The Silent Treatment

by Abbie Greaves

  We did a round of jam for Christmas presents that third year we were married. You can probably still taste it if you lick round the back of your molars for long enough. Lumpy, stringy. A far cry from the picture in the cookbook and even further from my experiences eating the stuff.

  “Fucking toxic!” I believe Edie called it, sticking a finger through the greaseproof-paper lid before we had so much as crossed the threshold of her house. As was tradition, she didn’t bother to take our coats. She was never one for traditional hosting, was she?

  “Frankie boy!” Matt appeared from the kitchen, half a bottle of red in his hand. We’d been at their wedding earlier in the year, a whirlwind affair, and I was at that stage of getting to know him where his constant appearance with my best friend still surprised me.

  Your glasses were all steamed up, so I steered you in his direction. The two of you engaged in one of those male hugs that always involve a disconcerting amount of backslapping. Edie poured me a glass of wine and pulled me into the living room, where she could continue to chastise me for providing such shit gifts.

  The chicken wasn’t cooked according to anyone’s standard of food hygiene, but we had the vegetables, gravy by the bucketload, and enough Rioja to drown the place. We called it a night after Edie started buying hotels in Monopoly, because, let’s face it, she is a terrible, terrible winner. The taxi drove right past their place, and as you were jogging down the lane to flag it back, I gathered up our stuff and leaned in for a goodbye hug with Edie.

  “Hey, Mags?”

  “No declarations of love—I’m too drunk to appreciate them.”

  “You should be so lucky. No, look, I had something I wanted to tell you.”

  You were waving from the driveway, clutching your biceps in the universal gesture of freezing your arse off. I couldn’t wait to curl up in those arms.

  “Make it quick then.”

  “I’m pregnant.”

  Their hallway suddenly felt very wobbly. I leaned against the wall to steady myself and feigned a shoe adjustment.

  “Oh. God. Christ, Edie.” She hadn’t poured her own glass, had she? “Congratulations!”

  “I know . . . Well, look, I didn’t want you to think—”

  “No. No. Honestly, I’m thrilled for you. For you both.”

  You leaned in through the cab window and gave the horn a bash. Edie shouted something about calling her, getting a date in the diary for us two, as I stumbled along the gravel to the ticking taxi meter outside.

  I never did. Call, I mean. Not specifically about that. I feel terrible now. What sort of friend does that make me? I so badly wanted to be happy for Edie. Happy, pure and simple, without that horrible edge of jealousy that undercut everything.

  And what did I have to be jealous of, really? We had so much together, Frank. We had more with each other than some people have in a lifetime, and still I wanted more. I hate writing it down here because it sounds so very, very ungrateful. We were young, we were happy, we were fun. We would exhaust the mattress until the early hours, but still, when the lights were out and I had my head on the pillow, finally alone with my own thoughts, there was always that feeling of something being not quite right. That is what it felt like to be childless, Frank, for me. I couldn’t bring myself to admit that at the time. It felt like saying we weren’t enough. And it wasn’t that straightforward at all.

  I hate to say it, but I resented how calmly you seemed to accept our situation. For you, this was just another thing you couldn’t have at that juncture, like enough disposable income for holidays abroad every year or a pied-à-terre in Mayfair. Those things weren’t part of our life now, but if they were in the future, then great. If they weren’t, it didn’t seem as if that would have any effect on your net happiness, all things considered.

  But for me? Well, it was everything, Frank. That much must have been obvious. It was a daily erosion, my infertility, although that is not to say that some days weren’t harder than others. On the bad ones, when I had an itch in my tear ducts, like the beginnings of a sneeze, I would get up and go to the drawer where I kept pictures of my own mother, from the years before she left. You never caught me there because if you had, maybe then you would have understood why I spent so long locked in the bathroom when my period came, regular as clockwork, every damn month, year after year. I wanted to do it better than her, Frank. I needed to prove that I had it in me to mother, properly. It went beyond competition. I needed to know I had that selflessness in me that she had never had.

  Usually I would spend the week that followed throwing myself into trying again. I’m not sure you saw it as such at first, although you must have figured it out eventually. I was so in tune with my body clock, the “fertile windows” and the “conceiving opportunities,” that I felt like I only ever had one eye on the other tasks at hand. It’s exhausting, Frank, wanting a child. It really is. Then, when the time was up and the bleeding started, I couldn’t help the way I would shut down. It was another indicator that my body was failing. Surely this was its purpose, my purpose? I wasn’t enough to make anything stick around. I couldn’t keep hold of my first child, and now I couldn’t create a second.

  I could see that you were at a loss as to what to say. If you were disappointed, you did a very good job at hiding it, for a few years at least. You brought me back from the brink with assurances that it was “too soon,” “not the right time.” You assured me, “It will happen when it happens.”

  When did you stop believing that yourself, Frank? Six years in, maybe seven? I’ll never forget the day you made your opinion on the matter crystal clear.

  Frank goes to turn the page and a photo slips out from where it had been sitting, obscuring the next lines of text. There is a small tear in the top right-hand corner, where the metal paperclip has caught, so he has to rest his little finger on the edge to hold the image together, pressing down hard to flatten it against the planner beneath. It’s pitch-black by now, and the streetlight outside next door has yet to be fixed, the result of a run-in with a wayward teenager’s trainer a few months back. In between its flashes, he has to bring his nose right up to the page in order to make out the faded image.

  It is not a photo he has seen before. Maggie must be about nine or ten, her hair pulled into two plaits and her face fixed in a smile that looks far from genuine. Frank’s eyes gravitate toward Maggie’s mother, the slightly stiff way she is crouching down, turning her daughter’s torso around so she faces the camera. There you go, darling, smile for the camera. Nice and pretty now, there’s a good girl. The shot is made all the more awkward by her mother’s choice of a pencil skirt in red-and-white houndstooth with an asymmetric edge. She has to strain to bend over Maggie. It always was such an effort for her, the parenting business.

  He has never considered it like that—Maggie having something to prove. To him, she never did. She was enough, more than enough, and so much more besides. He’d said that at her bedside, and he would say it again one thousand times. Why hadn’t he told her before? He thought he had showed her it instead, with his gestures, the little things. Clearly not well enough, though—that’s what she’s getting at here, isn’t it? He hates himself for letting her down.

  More than anything, Frank hates the thought of Maggie crying alone. She was such a social creature, the sort who would see someone in floods of tears on the bus and immediately hurry over to them, hand outstretched with a tissue. While the rest of the travelers studiously scrutinized the passing traffic, the contents of their bag, their own Britishness, Maggie would be absorbed in comforting the passenger crumpled in the corner. Here, come on now, it’ll be all right. No, no, not at all. Misery needs company, that’s for sure. Don’t apologize, you can tell me anything.

  When it came to her own problems, that was quite another matter. They were very similar in that regard. Bottlers, the pair of them. Frank always knew their childlessness was hard on Maggie, however much she tried to hide it. He could see how much she wanted a baby. Some d
ays, when he’d coax her out of herself with an excursion to the Cotswolds or a picnic by the canal but still something lingered, he knew there was more at play. Now he realizes it was the need he couldn’t put his finger on. I needed to know I had that selflessness in me that she had never had. If only she had said that. He had so many examples at his disposal. The way she loved him, first and foremost.

  Frank places the photo in his chest pocket. That way there is still a piece of Maggie with him, albeit one he doesn’t recognize. It is odd, now, forty years into their relationship, to find snippets of Maggie that he never knew before, be it a photo or otherwise.

  He is coming to realize that there is a lot about Maggie that he never fully understood, a row of blanks in the crossword of their life together that are still empty. Frank stares at the bare rectangle in the planner where the photo had been and the blur of words beneath. He hopes they can help him fill those squares.

  Five days to go

  It was May. Just after my thirty-fifth birthday and a couple of months after our eighth anniversary. I remember it particularly clearly because there had been a week of torrential downpours. They always call it “unseasonable” when that happens, but I’ve seen it so many times that I wonder if they might just need to rethink their seasons. Anyway, it was wet, it was a weekend, and we were tucked up, the double duvet on the sofa and something suitably mind-numbing on the television. Every so often I’d get a foot in my ribs, but other than that? It was bliss.

  I tossed you the magazine I was reading, folded back on the page where some minor celebrity was extolling the virtues of life in the countryside.

  “The great outdoors. The dream.”

  “A pipe dream. Darling, you hate the great outdoors.”

  “But it would be so much cheaper. Better quality of life. Better homes. Better schools . . .”

  “Let it go, Mags.”

  I was still in full flow, riffing on gardens, space, the pace of life.

  “We need to accept that it isn’t meant to be. Children, for us. Maybe it just won’t happen.”

  I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. Where did that come from, Frank? There was such earnestness on your face, but your voice? That was a different matter altogether. There was a chip of something sharper in there, an edge of metal in it that I hadn’t heard before. It felt final.

  You started calling after me—something about needing to talk, being on the same page. I knew that if I stayed a minute longer it would be over. All of it—our family, our marriage, our life together. In the hallway I pulled on my boots, grabbed the nearest jacket and a set of keys from the hooks. I made sure to slam the door, good and hard. You didn’t come after me. To this day, I can’t tell if that disappointed me more.

  I had nowhere to go and ended up at the park a few streets away. It had stopped raining by this point, but by the time I reached the bench by the play area, my fingers were stiff with the cold. I ran your sentences over and over again in my mind, trying out a million different inflections. What was this “we” you were talking about? Our decisions, our lives. I had never felt further from you than I did then, Frank. We were singing from two utterly different hymn sheets, and for the first time in our marriage, I wasn’t sure I could see a way back to harmony.

  On the bench next to me, a woman my age, maybe slightly younger, shifted her weight from one thigh to the other. She still had her hood up and looked nearly as uncomfortable as I did. After a minute or two, she stood and I saw it. A bump, eight months at a glance, causing her coat to stick out in an awkward diagonal. Fifty yards away, there was a shriek; a little girl in a blue anorak was flying down the slide into a puddle, an older boy with the same dark hair just inches behind her.

  In that second, I hated her. I hated myself for hating her but that didn’t change a thing. I hated how lucky she was, how fertile. I hated that she had everything I wanted and didn’t even realize it. I had to get out of there, quickly. I didn’t trust myself. Not to what? Run off with her children? Punch her, kick her, scream in her goddamn ambivalent face for wanting just five minutes of peace from their mayhem?

  In the end that was what sent me home. I was petrified of myself. At least with you, Frank, there were boundaries. When I got in, you came out from the kitchen and helped me get my coat off. You didn’t say anything—what was there to say? I didn’t want an apology, not when I knew you wouldn’t have meant it.

  I wonder now if you sensed how close I was then to walking? I spent that night running through all the various ways I could go about finding myself someone who could appreciate the loneliness of a twosome as much as I did, only to flip back on myself, questioning whether that was even possible at all. Could you advertise wanting children without sounding desperate? I doubted it.

  And besides, what about you? I imagined myself wheeling the big suitcase out of our flat and into a bedsit for one. I’m not sure I could have survived the goodbye. Could you?

  A sticky heat rushes up the back of Frank’s neck. He throws his legs off the bed and reaches to push open the window as far as its old hinges will carry it. In the process, he manages to knock the alarm clock off its perch on top of a stack of crumpled journals. Just gone midnight. He presses the metal casing against his forehead in the weak hope it will cool him down in the absence of any discernible drop in the outside air temperature. No such luck.

  Out of our flat and into a bedsit for one . . . Frank runs over the words again and again until the sentence dissolves and all he is left with are a few foreign syllables, strange to his ear and stranger yet to his mind. No, he never knew that Maggie wanted out, not then. Not ever, in fact. Sure, it got hard, far harder than they ever could have imagined, but there was no way he could envisage his life without her.

  He thinks of Maggie lugging the wheelie bag down from the attic while he was in the lab or the minute she caught him dozing on the sofa. He sees them both in the porch: Maggie leaning in for a final hug, all the while her upper body tensed to keep that slight remove between them, in that instant more like friends than soulmates. His head swims with the pain. He has no doubt that she would have found someone new, someone for whom children was the be-all and end-all—but him? He would have never been able to move on from Maggie.

  Maggie must have planned a million exits over the past few months too, the minutes of obsessive thoughts and relentless anxieties stretching out into infinity day after day, even if Frank was still physically close. Who wouldn’t want out in that situation? Someone scared of being alone—that’s who. Maggie never walked by a single bed—in a house, in a shop—without feeling sad. It wasn’t so much the fear of falling out that got to her, rather the fear of not having anyone there to catch her.

  Everyone has their limits, though, and what if Frank had, somehow, in these last six months, managed to tell Maggie what he had done? Well, then she definitely would have walked. He cannot imagine Maggie being able to so much as look at him, let alone live under the same roof, once she knew the truth.

  I’m not sure I could have survived the goodbye. Could you? Frank has barely managed these twelve hours away from the hospital; it is madness for her to have thought otherwise.

  “Of course I couldn’t, Maggie,” Frank mumbles as he finds his spot on the page again.

  Five days to go

  Luckily for you, for me, for us both, I’ve never been a quitter. I’m not sure I could have coped alone, and any man I could have found would have lived so very obviously under your shadow. That much was evident the morning after. You brought me pancakes on a tray and cleared your throat, gently, to wake me up. An olive branch, of sorts. They were the fat ones I like too. You sat there and watched while I ate.

  I offered you the final forkful by way of acceptance.

  “Mags, look, I am sorry for what I said. I shouldn’t have said it like that. It’s not what I meant, not like that . . .”

  I didn’t want to hear it. That looks terrible, written down. But you know what I mean. It wasn’t the time to r
ehash it. I loved you. I wanted things back on track. And besides, I’m not very good in the morning. I kissed you so suddenly that the plate clattered to the floor. In the ten minutes that followed, I remembered how neatly we slotted together, how perfectly you understood what I wanted even before I did. As we slowed down into stillness, my mind was so free of it all—the stress, the pain, the worry—that I could barely remember how we had ended up arguing in the first place.

  The air was definitely clearer after that. I didn’t want you to feel as if our lives were on hold. It wouldn’t have been true anyway. We did more in a year than some couples did in a lifetime. At the weekend, when we had the energy, I loved how you would blindfold me in front of the big map in the hallway and spin me round and round until I had no idea which way was up. You’d pass me the marker pen, I’d jab it on the paper, and off we would go to wherever it had landed, a backpack between us. We saw Glasgow, Bristol, the South Downs and the Fens, the whole length of the Norfolk coast. We did Birmingham, Manchester, Newcastle, and, my favorite, Margate. We went up and down the length of the country seeing every sight imaginable and still there was only one face I wanted to see when I woke up. Any solution had to involve you. That I was absolutely clear on.

  It didn’t take me long before I started thinking about adoption. We didn’t have the money for any expensive treatments, and besides, I liked the idea of being able to help a child in need. There were plenty of materials available at work, and on more than one occasion I brought them home, stashed at the bottom of my bag. I could have sworn you must have been able to sense them burning through the leather. All the way home, I would run through how I would present them to you over dinner, the pamphlets tucked untidily in my skirt pocket as if they had just fallen in there.