by Mary Loudon
The emails I kept, some more precious even than the ring Angus gave me. As for the texts, I should have deleted those as we went along but I never did. I have, now. Something had to go. Something had to be jettisoned, so there is a place I can be where Angus is not.
In the shower, on school days, is where I scream. I turn the lever until the heat is more than I can stand. I wait until my skin burns scarlet and the top of my head stings. Afterwards, my forearms itch so much I scratch them until they bleed.
The skin around my eyes is pink and raw. Each time I cry it gets worse. I apply some E45 cream to the blotches but it makes no difference, not even after two or three days. In the medicine cupboard, I find some time-expired steroid cream. ‘Do not apply to the delicate skin around the eyes.’ I smear it on. Overnight, the blemishes fade. I cry more, apply more; it is the wrong thing to do but my eyes look better for it. Betnovate and tears: who would have thought them such a harmonious match.
After showering, I put on Angus’s old Guernsey sweater: he lent it to me once to keep me warm on a late journey home, told me later to keep it and enjoy thinking of him whenever I wore it. All I want is him. His sweater is the nearest I can get.
I could work but I don’t. It is many weeks since I accepted a new commission. Life is very quiet. I take myself upstairs and lie on the bed that has nothing to do with Angus. I set the alarm so I will be ready to collect the twins on time, bury my face in his thick folds of wool, and cry. After that, I sleep.
After a storm, there is always clearing to be done. In the winter, when the gales come, our yard is strewn with dead sticks and stray branches. We collect them up, and in the small field behind the house we make a pile that will be a bonfire when the right day presents itself. When it does, in the spring sometime, the girls will help to keep it going, with enthusiasm and smaller sticks. They will perform a haphazard dance around the fire’s perimeter, poke unnecessarily at its edges with long twigs, and jump to its louder cracks, as the wood splits and twists in the flames, alive one last time after a season of lying dormant. Heat will belt out in a jubilant release of energy following a winter of postponement.
Mark takes the pitchfork, inserts its tines into a mess of elder, and tosses the straggling, anorexic branches on to the fire. He says, ‘October already. We’re so late with the fire this year.’
‘I don’t understand why we didn’t burn all this in the spring.’
‘We had other things to contend with.’
I stare into the flames for a while. The juices from the elder hiss as they evaporate.
I say, ‘Why didn’t you stop me?’
‘You were gone,’ he replies, ‘within ten minutes of meeting him.’
‘You could have stopped me.’
‘Nothing could have stopped you. It was like watching the weather close in.’
I remember it. Immediate and heedless, devoid of rationale. How blatant it was, our beginning; how lacking courtesy, compared with mine and Mark’s.
‘You didn’t even try, though.’
‘I never thought for a minute it would amount to anything.’
‘But you just let me go.’
‘You chose to go!’
‘Because I thought you didn’t care.’
‘And I thought you didn’t love me enough.’
‘You had a choice, too, Mark.’
‘Yes, and I made it. I thought if I allowed you the freedom to do what you needed to do—’
‘Wanted to do.’
‘Okay, wanted.’
‘Well, there’s a difference.’
‘I thought if I allowed you that freedom, then at least I’d know that if you came back it was because you chose to and not because I’d forced your hand. I’m married to you but I don’t own you. I mean, what did you want me to do? Torch his piano? Beat him up?’
‘Of course not!’
‘Which, by the way, I could easily do if the need arose; I could take him down, no problem.’
‘Right.’
‘And which I never would, because I’m not a Neanderthal.’
‘No.’
Mark sighs.
‘So, what else could I do? Beg? Fuck that! Throw you out? Not really. Would I have been much more the man in your eyes, if I’d done that?’
‘No. Well, maybe. I don’t know.’
‘Okay, so tell me how any of those things would have helped.’
‘I don’t know.’
Mark says, and his voice neither rises nor falters, ‘Listen to me, Luce. What if I’d objected? Think about it. I could have put you in a position where you might have come to hate me. And I might have lost you that way, and then the twins would have lost us being together, too. At least this way I was part of it and not just some loser in the background not knowing what the hell was going on. At least I had some control – what little was available to me.’
‘I could not have done that, in your shoes.’
‘I would have said exactly the same thing, before. But it’s not that simple. We’re a family. And you don’t know until it happens to you, how you’ll react. Some of it is knee-jerk. You didn’t expect to behave the way you did, either. We all do things we would never have imagined. A lack of obstruction was the only response I could think of at the time, and I had to think on my feet. If I couldn’t stop you, I was damned if I was going to try, and risk failure.’
‘So, is that what you have been doing all this time? Not risking failure?’
‘Partly. Mainly, I’ve been trying to hold us all together. Someone had to.’
Something I always wondered, and did not care to ask.
‘Did you never hate him?’
‘Once.’
‘When?’
‘When he took you to the concert that first time. I thought, “You slippery, mendacious bastard. Offer my wife something I can’t, why don’t you.”’
‘Oh, Mark.’
‘It’s okay. But it’s the one thing I didn’t feel I could say no to – your listening to music with someone. I didn’t want you to feel as locked in by me as I do by my deafness. I never wanted to co-opt you into my world. It’s not the greatest place to be.’
‘You never have.’
‘Come on, Luce. I’m bloody difficult to live with at times, I do know that.’
‘That’s not because you are deaf.’
‘No, it’s because I am so determined not to be.’
With the fork, he pitches more elder on to the fire, then prods at its charred centre. I pick up some dry ash branches and toss them into the mix.
I say, ‘I always thought that you were so much the better person.’
Mark frowns.
‘It’s true,’ I continue. ‘I felt that whatever I did I could never match you, that I would always be insubstantial. I’ve always felt that, beside you. I’ve done nothing important with my life except have the girls.’
‘That’s crazy. You’re a good photographer.’
‘Not really. You’re the one with the career.’
‘Thanks to you. And probably at the expense of yours.’
‘Do you mean that?’
‘Yes,’ he says. ‘I do. Do you think we would have this,’ he gestures from the field towards the house and the yard, ‘if it weren’t for you? Do you think I would have been able to do what I do if it weren’t for you? I’m not just talking about you being a mother at home, so I can get on and paint, though God knows that’s enough. I’m talking about those times when something happens to make me feel really deaf and really isolated and a real fucking outlier, and the single person that makes the difference, that makes it bearable and even funny at times, is you.’
‘And then I do this. I make you lonely.’
‘Luce,’ he says. ‘I live in silence.’ He pauses. ‘Do you think I could feel any lonelier than I already do?’
‘I am so sorry.’
‘Don’t be. There is nothing that anyone, not even you, could do to make the feeling much more potent than it already is.
That’s why I reacted as I did. I couldn’t stand how confined you seemed; it was just too close to home.’
‘Why didn’t you say so?’
‘You couldn’t hear a thing at the time.’
I say, ‘This will sound so hollow but it’s the truth. I only ever wanted to love you.’
I did. I wanted to love Mark and I wanted the world to be kind to him. I felt that with me, it would be. I wanted to make something soft and amenable of myself and give it to someone else. I was terrible raw material but it’s what I hoped.
And I wanted to marry. A bit of a separatist I might be, but solitary? No. Loneliness, I wanted it to stop. At the time I met Mark, no obvious road lay ahead. There’s no doubt I fell for him hard and fast but when Di asked me once, around the time the twins were born, ‘Why Mark, especially?’ I answered before I could even think about it, ‘Because he was there.’
Because he was there. It truly wasn’t meant the way it sounded.
Yet how far might I backdate the original sin, that kernel of my shame? Because he was there. When I accepted his proposal in the kitchen, tea towel in hand? That chilly August night in Oxford under the cherry tree? I recollect what I said to Angus, over our first supper: ‘Isn’t it usually the case, that it is more about oneself than the other person?’ After all, Angus and I loved one another with a greed and self-absorption I still find hard to square with otherwise reasonably generous, outward-looking human beings.
‘I belong to you but you don’t belong to me . . .’
I shudder.
Mark says, ‘You have loved me, mostly.’ He holds out one arm. ‘You’re cold. Come here.’
He puts his arm around me. He has not done this for a long time. My mind with a mind of its own hurls backwards to our first moments – mine and Angus’s. I can see him now as he approached me that first afternoon on Verity, one hand raised to stroke my face, fingers curling softly. I see that beautiful smile of his, the man I have loved unlike any other – see how he held my gaze as his hand rose and then fell. I remember how he traced me so often with his hands, and drew me so completely; how he captured me in every mood and light – and I, him.
My throat constricts, for I am sick with longing. I shut my eyes and inhale the smell of Mark’s shirt, which is woody and cool, and think of Angus, always warm to the touch.
I look at my husband. His hair is greying and his eyes are beginning to crinkle much more noticeably around the edges. He dislikes this but I don’t because those lines tell the truth: that Mark is older, and weary, and handsome still. I understand things that before I did not. I realize that Mark is unafraid of truths I have been so keen to deny; that we are born alone and die alone, and that despite our mating and our passions we live alone too, whether alongside another person or not. Angus understands this as well: he learned earlier and more brutally than most people do, what it means to be entirely recast, alone. Perhaps his solitariness, and Mark’s, is their most defining feature – the characteristic that makes them closer to one another in spirit than either of them could ever be to me.
Mark says, ‘You look exhausted.’
‘I can’t sleep.’
I wake three, four, five times a night. Too often still I reach for Angus and though I understand immediately it is not him, sometimes it is still such a shock it makes me cry.
I would know Angus even in the gloom of a moonless night, from the curve of his broad back and the way he takes my arm and wraps it around his chest, tucking it under his own arm and folding my fingers into his hand. He strokes my fingers gently with his own, idly brushing my wedding ring. Occasionally, he even rubs the ring itself, and when he does this I wonder what he is thinking. If we are lying the other way, me with my back to him, he kisses the nape of my neck, I curl my back closer into his belly and with his arm around my waist, he pulls me close. Our legs knit together and his foot will gently surf the downward slope of mine until his toes come to rest under my arches. We fall asleep that way, most times. In the morning, heat and the need to stretch having separated us in the night, he strokes my hip and thigh. Back and forth, back and forth, in long, slow arcs. He keeps it up for a good, long time, if I am lucky, whilst I lie completely still, feigning slumber, like a rabbit in a field pretending invisibility, electrified, waiting for a threat to pass – except that there is no threat; I am simply enjoying the sensation, electrified also.
Or, was.
Oh, Angus. Damn it all.
Tears come, silent and full. I think how the duvet always travelled his way; how he rolled himself into it so that I had to nestle close in order merely to stay covered; how even in sleep, I was in his wake. In bed, as in our entire relationship, he wanted my proximity always and he composed – or so it seems, now – an arrangement of sensual and aural connections so entire that it was impossible to experience anything less than profound intimacy. The piano, the sofa, the kitchen table, the bed, the bath: instruments, all of them, played to perfection, and with real heart.
When I wake beside Mark, I am disappointed. Yet there is something else too, a consciousness so sharp it feels physical, of white-hot relief and gratitude. My husband has not left me. He had every reason to go and yet he chose to stay. I watch him sleeping, oblivious, and even though I am toxic with misery each time I experience the split-second realization that he is not Angus, I place one arm across him. Remorse, not desire. I tell him that I am sorry and I still love him. Occasionally, I elaborate, for telling him only this feels incomplete. I tell him I still love Angus, as well. I tell him I missed the children like hell whenever I was on Verity, and I miss Angus like hell, now. I tell him how blank I felt towards him, how with Angus in my eyes I could see almost nothing and no one else. I explain how frightened I am – that this effect might never go away, that my sight will remain for ever obscured. I say things I will share with no one but Mark, and that Mark will never hear. I say that I do not know how to be, any more; that I am no longer the woman I was, no longer the wife.
I say, now, ‘Can you forgive me?’
‘There’s nothing to forgive. I didn’t consider the scale of the risk.’
‘But I still did something selfish, something wrong.’
‘You fell in love with someone else. I could have done much more to help us both. You can say it was my fault it happened in the first place, or yours, or both our faults, or nobody’s. But you can only forgive someone if a wrong has been committed and I don’t think you’ve committed a wrong, and I don’t think I have, either. I don’t think right or wrong is a helpful way of looking at these things. We’re human. We both just got lost for a bit.’
Mark inhales, deeply. ‘One day,’ he says, ‘when we’re older and life is giving us something else to worry about, all this will just be a sentence in a conversation – about that miserable year we had, way back when. Chances are, in time, we may not even remember which year it was.’
‘But the children.’
Mark says, ‘Don’t cry, Luce.’
‘They’re seven next month.’
‘And they’re fine. You’ll give them a lovely birthday party, as you always do.’
‘I went away.’
‘Not so they really registered, or not terribly. And they had me. Anyway, you’re here now.’
‘I should have been here all the time’
‘That’s unrealistic. Few mothers are.’
‘Mine never was. Nor Dad. But they’re lousy examples.’
Mark says, ‘You know, one thing occurred to me a while back.’
‘What was that?’
‘All that cooking you said Angus did. Playing music to you, wanting you to be happy. All that attention he lavished on you, like you were the only thing that mattered. I honestly don’t think it was a lover you needed. It was a parent.’
We tell the girls it’s time they came out to the field for some fresh air, before it gets too dark. We bribe them with the promise of fire-toasted crumpets. They oblige, and for a while, four-square, we stand around eat
ing and chatting. When the temperature starts to drop and our breath becomes visible in the air, they ask if they can return to the television.
I look across the field. I feel like a boat that sailed away. For a short while, the land was still in view but so quickly, it disappeared out of sight. Now, I can see it again but it is indistinct and uncertain. I cannot know whether I would feel differently had I turned around and begun to sail back to shore sooner than I did.
What hubris, that I could have imagined myself immune to the effects of another person, capable of sustained control over a lawless body and ungovernable mind. What conceit made me believe I was better equipped to cope with emotions so powerful they hurl other people to the side of their lives? What convinced me that I could possibly choose how much or how little I might come to care? I know I thought myself more able to avoid the fallout than anyone else, I know I believed I was tough. I thought this might be one of those adventures that life presents very occasionally and that I could deny the feelings, bury the feelings or manage the feelings; that I could help myself to them when I chose. I did not know that, in ways I could never have imagined, I would be consumed; that it was not the time I spent with Angus that counted as much as the space he now inhabits in my heart and my life. What I did know all along, and yet denied, was that an ending of some kind was written into the DNA of our situation, and the scales were never tipped in Angus’s balance. Our love might have been the biggest thing that ever happened to us but it was mostly confined to a few cubic metres on a river, where all change and movement went on outside. We both knew that. We knew it could hurt us. I had no idea how much. I’m such a fool.