by Natasha Bell
“So Alex cycles and you drive?” Nicola says. “You don’t share lifts?”
“No. I mean yes,” my husband says. “Alex likes the exercise, even in winter.”
“And after your work day?”
“We come home,” Marc says, his exasperation leaking into his tone. How many times has he gone over this by now? “We have dinner as a family, play games or watch something. All very dull, I’m afraid.”
There’s a pause, I think while Nicola scribbles something in her notebook. I always wonder here why my husband feels so apologetic for the life he already misses. I want to reach out and tell him it’s okay, I miss it too. I’d give almost anything for one more boring weekday.
“A lot of the time,” Marc says, “we just play. It sounds daft, but we turn everything into a game for the girls, invent elaborate scenarios to make doing the dishes fun. Sometimes Alex’s games take up the whole evening and we’re giggling right the way through.”
“Sounds wonderful,” Nicola says. I like her for finding this explanation enchanting rather than ridiculous. Some of our closest friends used to roll their eyes at us, as if we were daft Peter Pan wannabes, destined to land in reality with a thud.
“Now…uh, can you think of any breaks in your family’s routine? Anything, however tiny?”
You can hear on the tape recording that Marc exhales before speaking. “Only that she’s been working late on this paper. She’s been toying with getting a PhD for years and I think she feels this conference is her opportunity to prove she can do it. I mean, everyone else knows she can, it’s just her that doesn’t believe in herself.”
I had to screw up my eyes the first time I heard that. He was watching me as I listened. I couldn’t let my tears fall, couldn’t give him the satisfaction of seeing that.
“Okay.” There’s the sound of a pencil being tapped on a notebook. “And you’ve had no fights? The children haven’t been in trouble at school?”
“No, everything’s been normal. We’re a happy family. I mean, we were.”
It’s hard to tell with such a low-quality recording, but I have the impression she wants him to say we had problems. Does Nicola think he’s hiding something, protesting too much? Perhaps Marc’s supposed to tell her I complained he worked too much or that he worried about the amount I spent on clothes and home furnishings. Perhaps he’s meant to talk about Lizzie’s attitude problem and the tears I let fall when my daughter disobeyed me, about the spats I had with his mother and how tired he was of mediating between us. Perhaps it would have been simpler if he’d shown her our cracks.
Nicola tells him they’ve spoken to my mother’s carer. “Given Mrs. Carlisle’s condition,” she says, “we haven’t made it a priority to interview her, though we may pursue that avenue soon.”
She asks about our friends and Marc tells her where we met them, what they do. My husband sounds like he’s not sure what she wants him to say, so he keeps talking until she interrupts.
“Does Alexandra have friends she sees without you?”
“I suppose,” he says. “She’s still in contact with someone she knew at secondary school. They catch up once a month or so. And obviously there are people from work she sometimes goes for a drink with, and she’s on the PTA.”
“What about in America? She studied there, yes?”
“Just for a year,” Marc says. “She’s still close to her old roommate, Amelia. They write to each other.”
“By hand?” Nicola says, interested. “Does Alexandra keep the letters? Would they be here?”
“I’ve no idea,” Marc says. “I never asked her.”
“You’ve never asked your wife about a friend she’s stayed in contact with for the past fourteen years?” There’s an edge now in Nicola’s voice and I don’t like her anymore. I picture the quiver of Marc’s shoulders as his muscles tense.
“That’s not what I said,” he replies. “We talk about her. Al’s been following her career as a performance artist. She’s shown me her reviews. I just don’t know if she keeps her letters. She’s fairly prominent. Amelia Heldt?”
A pause, and I picture Nicola showing no sign of recognition. Marc would have been smug at this.
Then a phone rings and Nicola must pause the tape to answer it, because next she’s saying, “That was DI Jones. Alexandra’s exit records have come through. Her passport has not been used at any UK airports or ports.”
“Okay,” Marc says.
There are a few moments of silence before Nicola asks, “Does Alexandra travel frequently?”
“No,” Marc says.
“What about to America? Perhaps to visit her friend?”
“She’s only been back a couple of times. The last trip was two or three years ago.”
There’s another pause. “Did you go with her?” Nicola says eventually.
“She only went for a week and a half,” Marc says dully. “Hardly worth the jet lag.” How surreal it feels to listen to him speak to a policewoman about our life with the same words, the same stock phrases I’ve heard him use when meeting new colleagues or catching up with the neighbors.
The recording ends soon after that. I imagine Marc standing up to see her to the door, blood rushing to his head and him having to steady himself against the back of his chair.
“Try not to worry, Dr. Southwood,” Nicola will have said. “One way or another, we’ll find out what’s happened.”
* * *
“How tragic that you’ve lost so much,” he says, ejecting the tape. “Sounds like you had the true fairy tale.”
I refuse to look at him. I know it sounds like a fairy tale, but I hate being mocked for it. I know the officers doubted Marc too. Maybe I would have a hard time believing it if someone else told me that after more than a decade of marriage they were as happy as when they met. But it’s true. Or was until that Thursday. Our life together wasn’t like normal life. I’d seen my parents destroy everything that had ever been lovely between them, so when I got married I vowed never to do that. I vowed to give Marc the happiness he deserved, the future I wanted to believe we both deserved. I worked hard to keep our world light. I didn’t see the point of the heaviness and the moods. I made up games to entertain the girls while we loaded the dishwasher or when they started to flag toward the end of a long walk. And I did the same for us too. I didn’t want to hold anything back from Marc, but I wanted our love to be about joy and play and pleasure. I’d seen marriages crumble, our friends get so bogged down in the minutiae of life that they forgot how to make each other smile. My mother abandoned my father for the bottle a decade before they divorced; she turned into a different woman and my dad, too, was transformed into a tyrant for her to rebel against. He couldn’t even say her name after she left.
So all those things that made Marc worry, I tried to let them wash over me. I tried to see through them and ask what he thought mattered so much. Mortgages and bills, promotions and forms the bank asked us to fill in: what was the point of me stressing about them as well as Marc? I could so easily have been that wife. That nagging, worrying, frowning wife. I could have told him my every thought and grumble. But why? What would it have achieved? Instead, I laughed and said, yeah, we’ll do it, but don’t forget how amazing the simple fact of you and me and Lizzie and Charlotte holding hands and picking blackberries is.
“Jack and Jill went up the hill to fetch a pail of water,” he sings, invading my thoughts.
I imagine punching the smile off his face, bashing his head against the wall. I’ve paced this room a thousand times looking for something to defend myself with, something to use to break out. I know there’s more than this door, though. I’d need all of his keys. And where would I find myself? I imagine I’m at the center of a maze, visited daily by my own personal minotaur.
“Humpty Dumpty sat on the wall,” he says, his voice dropping its singsong sug
ar.
“What do you want?” I spit.
He locks his eyes on mine. “What do we know about fairy tales and nursery rhymes? Humpty Dumpty fell and Jack broke his crown and poor little Alex couldn’t be put back together.”
He laughs again. A big, confident belly laugh. He’s still laughing as he locks the door behind him, as I curl my knees up to my chest and try to take myself away from this place.
He wants me to believe I deserve this. The happier I tell him we were, the more excited he gets. “Look where it got you,” he says.
It makes no sense, I know, but I wish I could have been with Marc to help him through that first week. I wish he could be with me now. For fourteen years we faced things together. For fourteen years Marc had someone to turn to, someone to confer with—to share the burden, split the responsibility and divide the pain with. For fourteen years I helped him through. Yet suddenly he was alone. It breaks my heart to imagine that breaking his.
1999
4/16/99
Dearest Al,
Here goes our epistolary exchange. I can’t forgive you for leaving me, roommateless, friendless. You’ve ripped us apart in the most unnatural of ways. The showcase is next week, for fuck’s sake. How am I going to survive without you here? Couldn’t you have stayed a few more months? What were you thinking? You could have lived without screwing Prince Charming for one more semester, couldn’t you?
I know, I know, he changed your whole perspective on life, blah-blah-cocksucking-blah. I don’t buy it. One minute you’re an artist with all these rebellious passions. But you go home for a few weeks and all that flutters out of your heart like so much child’s play. Suddenly you’re a walking cliché. Are you already imagining a nice big house and a dozen von Trapp children?
I want to be happy for you, Al, but how can you change yourself for a man? What happens after this honeymoon period is over, when the artist inside you starts to hack her way out? You’ll resent him, you know. That’s what happens. Suddenly someone likes this kind of music rather than that, or a person used to scoffing popcorn in front of HBO decides out of the blue that they just love hiking and white-water rafting because their new beau is the outdoorsy type. People wear different clothes, cut their hair, paint their faces, reinvent themselves to meet someone else’s idea of perfection. And then one day they wake up and hack their loved one into a hundred pieces and feed them to the dog.
Okay, maybe not, but still. Everyone does it to some extent, but shit, Al, you’ve gone all out. You’re looking for teaching work! You’re back in the country you used to hate. The city you complained was as diverse as an Oasis concert. You’re playing happy families with some guy. All those nights we spent talking about bringing down the bourgeoisie, about living beautiful bohemian lives, about attacking the system, challenging the patriarchy. All the conversations about our duty to do such things, about the impossibility of just rolling over and accepting this shitty world as it is. All those lives we were going to lead. I know I’m not impartial, but I hope you know what you’re doing.
I won’t say any more. This is the last time I’ll criticize, because maybe I’m the one that’s got it wrong. Maybe you’ve found your true self with this Marc and the Al I knew was the performance. I hope so, because I want you to be happy. It’s selfish, but I wish it could be with me.
Love
Am xxx
THURSDAY, JUNE 10, 1999
The first one arrived on a Thursday. Somehow I knew as soon as I heard the letter box fall shut. It made this horrendous squeak, however much WD-40 we squirted on it. Anyone else would have thought our first flat a dive. The previous tenant had lived there for a decade. There was no shower, just a grubby bathtub. The tiles were coming loose. Every window frame was coated in a layer of grime. The thin carpets were stained. The place came furnished, but when Marc placed his thesis file on the desk, one of the front legs collapsed and we had to hack it up with a cheap coping saw to get it out of the building.
We didn’t care. We saw space for bookshelves made of bricks, paper snowflakes hung from beams, a real Christmas tree in the corner, a futon we’d keep permanently in “bed formation” and a shelf beside the bathtub for our wineglasses. Patrick and his first wife, Rebecca, had just moved to York with their two-year-old daughter, and he and Marc had picked up where they left off after university. They helped us clear the place up, and Rebecca and I hunted in secondhand furniture shops for a replacement desk and strange little objects to make it a home. We splashed out on a coffee machine and settled into a routine of Marc bringing me a steaming mug each morning. He’d coax me to get up and on with applying for jobs, and I’d bully him to crawl back under the duvet and while away the morning. If one of us had to nip out for milk, we’d stop what we were doing to kiss good-bye, lingering as if it might be months before we returned. Marc was meant to be finishing his dissertation and I should have been finding a job. Instead, we frittered entire weeks. We’d look at the clock and it’d be 6 p.m., a whole sumptuous day swallowed by each other. We’d giggle guiltily and ask how the other thought that could have happened.
That day Marc had insisted he needed to go to the library. My pleas had failed and he’d left me with a full coffeepot and instructions to apply for the admin post at the uni that had just been advertised. I knew I should, but my brain was already thinking of other ways to spend the day. I’d been feeling the itch to make something again. I hadn’t told Marc because I knew it’d make him worry. Maybe I’d go for a wander with my camera, think about some small project I could work on while he was at the library.
I’d heard him on the phone to his mother last night and wondered if his new work ethic had something to do with her. I remember those first months as blissful, but I know they were also tainted for Marc by his concern that I would regret staying. He tried to hide it, but I knew. He wanted to watch me every second, worried about each frown. I told him over and over that I regretted nothing, but he still couldn’t be sure. I think our main problem was other people. To outsiders it seemed absurd and impulsive. Patrick and Rebecca had welcomed me with open arms, but I know Marc’s mother kept asking what was going on. She couldn’t understand where I’d materialized from and how crazy her son could be about me.
I waited until the postman clanged the gate, then swung my legs out of bed and padded down the stairs. I paused, looking at the envelope on the mat, my name written scrappily in that familiar left-hand scrawl. I considered leaving it there until Marc returned, wanting to validate its existence through his eyes. But he’d ask what was wrong if he arrived home at six and found I hadn’t even picked up the post from the mat. He’d fuss over me all night, worrying what I was thinking, if I might be depressed, finally ask if I was having second thoughts. I’d have to soothe and coo and convince him that I wasn’t. Because I wasn’t, I really wasn’t. I was happier than I’d ever been.
So why were my palms sweating as I stared at an envelope on our scratchy doormat?
Wednesday
Six Days Gone
Marc had no idea when he woke how much the day ahead would break him. He dropped the girls at school and drove to campus. He’d rung John yesterday and told him he’d be in for his lecture.
“Are you sure?” his colleague had said. “You can take as much time as you need.” But Marc wanted to be busy. He couldn’t sit around the house for another day feeling this helpless. He couldn’t stand living in this limbo state. And, apart from anything, it was pretty hypocritical to force the girls to go to school, abandon their worried faces at the gates, but not make himself do the same. Still, he felt eyes on him as he made his way around the lake to his office. Were people judging him for his presence here?
His lecture was surprisingly full. The roof of his mouth felt dry as he wondered if these teenagers were here to learn about Landscape and the Sublime or just to gawp at the poor sod they’d seen on the telly. He stood at the fron
t finding reasons to fiddle with his bag. Every few moments he cast a furtive glance at the auditorium. He noticed an arm draped over a shoulder, a head slumped on a desk, a flustered commotion as someone hurried in the back and struggled to find a seat. A blond woman with a ponytail held his gaze until he looked away.
A couple of minutes after eleven he cleared his throat and shuffled his papers on the lectern.
“Right, I think we’ll start.”
The voices died to a murmur and then silence. Marc heard the crinkle of a water bottle, a lone phone ping, a cough.
“Thank you all for coming,” he said. He stared out at the rows of expectant faces, pens poised over pads. He swallowed.
“What we, um, right, what we’re going to look at today is, uh, the way, uh—”
Marc looked down at his notes. He liked this lecture, gave it every year. Normally he barely had to look at these prompts. Normally he added in a couple of jokes. Normally he enjoyed making a crowd like this titter. He loved glancing up and seeing them all scrawling notes, knowing his words were inspiring different thoughts in each of their brains, his ideas germinating theirs.
But eighty pairs of eyes now sat waiting for him to give them an idea and my poor husband couldn’t even move his mouth around his title. He scanned the crowd, looking from face to face, not understanding how all these girls and boys could be sitting here in perfect health, growing bored and impatient, while I was not.
“I’m sorry,” he said, his voice catching in the back of his throat. A murmur rolled through the room as eighty students shifted their weight and exchanged looks with one another.