The Things We Know Now

by Catherine Dunne

  ‘Just don’t make too big a deal out of today. Let them get to know me gradually. And remember – I won’t take any hostility personally,’ and she smiled. ‘It’s the idea of me that must be hard for them. They will feel resentful – they’ll see me as someone who’s trying to take their mother’s place.’

  I made to protest and she took my hand and held it against her cheek. ‘Just promise to introduce me as Ella. No talk of anything else – no wedding, no future, no plans. Not yet: let all that emerge over time. Promise me, Patrick. Please. We are not in any hurry.’

  Ah, but I was. I wanted to put our relationship on a proper footing. I was twenty years older than Ella – perhaps my sense of mortality was a little more finely honed than hers, even then. And, if I’m honest – which is, after all, the whole point of telling my story – a bit of me was afraid that unless I captured her then and there, someone younger, more vital, less encumbered, would claim her as his own. I was almost fifty-four at that time, a newish widower with three grown-up daughters, at least one of whom was likely to spell trouble. I didn’t feel as though I was the best prospect in the world.

  ‘Okay, okay, I’ll do as you ask.’ I held her, surprised all over again at the depth of the affection, the tenderness I felt for her. I hadn’t expected ever to feel like that again.

  I had not always been a model husband to Cecilia – a fact that Rebecca made sure to mention from time to time. As the eldest child by a good five years, she had become privy to some – shall we say – difficulties between her mother and myself that had been resolved long before the twins were born. Rebecca had always been an observant child, although Cecilia used to insist that all children see and understand way more than we give them credit for. Listening at doors, creeping around late at night, sitting at the top of the stairs overhearing their parents’ heedless conversations: oh, yes, children hear far more than they are intended to. And Rebecca had probably had more opportunity than most. Always precocious, she’d ruled the roost for all that time before the arrival of her sisters. Mothers tended not to work outside the home in those days, and so Rebecca had had Cecilia’s undivided attention for, arguably, the most formative years of her life. As a result, she had become her mother’s champion very early on and remained so until Cecilia’s sudden and untimely death.

  I remember, and I suspect that Rebecca does too, that one seminal moment in our father–daughter relationship. As I write this, I realize that it must be all of forty-three years ago. It was certainly Christmas Eve and Rebecca was still only four, although within a few months of her fifth birthday.

  I am ashamed to say that at that time, I had been captivated by a willowy young woman, a secretary – or personal assistant, as political correctness would have it now – who had come to work for me, for my business partner Matt and me, to be precise, about six months earlier. I know now, of course, that Cecilia suspected our affair, and that my absence from the bosom of my family on such a special day must have confirmed it.

  When I finally arrived home, at around eight in the evening, I had a store of excuses ready. Last-minute drinks with colleagues; the difficulty, as the boss, of extricating myself from the raucous seasonal celebration; the impossibility of getting a taxi anywhere in the run-up to Christmas: you know the kind of thing. As it happened, I had spent the afternoon in Janet’s flat, specifically in Janet’s cramped and uncomfortable bed, and left when her tears had become tiresome.

  My affair with Janet, I have to confess, had followed a pattern that by then had become all too predictable. The initial, delicious shock of mutual discovery; the heady potency of secret trysts; and finally tears and clinging and the inevitable plea for commitment. I should have known better; indeed, perhaps I did. That day, it seemed to me that I was merely playing a role, but one that had finally taken on a life of its own. And so, as I extricated myself later on that evening, it was with a feeling composed almost entirely of relief. A small amount of regret, perhaps, but nothing that could dampen my sense of having escaped.

  In fact, I did have considerable difficulty getting a taxi; I even had difficulty making my way along the crowded footpaths, pulsing with shoppers and gawkers and drunken youths. I arrived home some two hours after I had planned to, dishevelled and irritated.

  Rebecca met me in the hallway. And she was angry. She glared at me, both fists clenched by her side. Before I had time to say ‘hello’, she marched towards me and unfurled one small hand. I bent down to lift her, to hug her, to swing her in the way that she liked, but she moved faster. She smacked me, hard, right across the cheek. For a moment, I was speechless. All I could see was her furious face, her brown eyes already beginning to fill.

  ‘You made my Mummy cry,’ she said. ‘I hate you.’ And she fled upstairs, slamming the door of her bedroom behind her.

  I stood in the hall, helpless, looking after her small figure, still seeing her white socks as she disappeared around the turn in the stairs. All my irritation leached away. In its place, a searing sense of my daughter’s vulnerability began to flood me, making the light dance in front of my eyes. Those small white socks, the determined hands, the tears trembling on her lower lashes. And, for the first time in many years, I felt ashamed. It was as though that slap had loosened all that was decent in me, all that had lain dormant for far too long. I made up my mind there and then. Now I understood St Paul on the road to Damascus. But mine was no thunderbolt: rather a calm, single moment of clarity, a moment that unpicked all the seams of my life, tearing the fabric in two. There was before, and there was after: it was as blunt, as simple, as clearly illuminative as that. On that evening, I became transformed into a man with a new and urgent sense of purpose.

  I walked into the kitchen where Cecilia was sitting at the table, a cup of tea in front of her. Her eyes were reddened, her face lined with unhappiness. I pulled her gently to her feet, took her in my arms. She resisted and I held her more tightly. I needed to speak and I needed to speak now. I could not let this moment pass.

  ‘It’s over,’ I said. ‘I promise you, it’s over. She meant nothing to me, nothing at all.’

  How many clichés can one man utter? The fact that it was true, that it was all true, what I had said and what I was about to say, didn’t make it any better. As I stood there, holding Cecilia as she battled a fresh storm of weeping, I did indeed discard Janet – if I had not already done so earlier that afternoon. ‘Forgive me, Cecilia, please,’ I said. ‘It won’t happen again. You’re the one I love. I’ll make it up to you, I promise.’

  She stepped back from my embrace. I could feel her slowing down her breathing. Her hands, just like Rebecca’s, were now clenched at her sides. ‘I can’t do this any longer, Patrick,’ she spoke over my shoulder, her gaze averted. ‘You have to decide.’ Her voice was choked. Her pain was an almost physical presence between us as she struggled to form the words. ‘It’s us or the others – you can’t have both.’

  I was startled. She saw me flinch. Her eyes filled with challenge, widened in disbelief. ‘You think I didn’t know? You think you were so clever, that you hid your tawdry little affairs? You think you fooled me?’ She was suddenly alight with all the pain of my betrayals.

  I had no reply other than the one that still makes me cringe, even all these years later. ‘I never meant to hurt you.’ I made to move closer to her, both arms already open in supplication.

  But she stepped away from me, her hands on my chest, pushing me back. I could feel the white heat of her contempt through my shirt. ‘Choose, Patrick,’ she said. Despite her distress, her tear-stained face, she stood up straighter, lifted her defiant chin. ‘Choose now. Either you pack your bags and leave or you decide to be a proper husband and father. I am not living like this, nor will I have my daughter live like this.’

  She moved even further away from me. I was frightened then. I felt that if she left the room, I would have lost her, that she would have made the decision for me. But she stayed. Her face was now closed; I already knew the anger
that lived there. When she spoke again, her voice was quiet, but it was impossible to ignore the steel in her tone. ‘You’ve always wanted a son, or so you say.’ She paused, looked directly at me, her expression almost puzzled, as though she was trying to figure out something particularly stupid that I had said, or done. ‘Has it never occurred to you why we have no more children? Don’t you even ask yourself why there hasn’t been another baby?’

  I opened my mouth to reply and closed it again. Clearly, she was going to tell me and I wanted the full force of her rage. I welcomed it. I felt it might cleanse me.

  ‘Because I will not bring another child into . . .’ she spread her hands to indicate the kitchen, as though everything around us was further, sullied, proof of all my treacherous impulses, my lack of faithfulness to her. ‘Into . . . this.’ She wiped tears away angrily. ‘Decide and decide now.’

  I did. I stayed, of course. I may be many things, but a fool is not one of them. It was a very strange time in my life. I see it now through the prism of all my lived years as a discrete episode, bookended by Cecilia’s and my wedding day – some five years earlier, in the summer of 1964 – and by the Christmas Eve to which I now refer.

  It seemed to me – even at the time and certainly in retrospect – that no sooner had I committed myself to one woman for life than all the old shackles of fidelity and buttoned-down, stifling suburban lives began to fall away all around me. The world was in turmoil: it was changing beyond all recognition. Certainties were being felled like ninepins, beliefs were being stripped bare, traditions shorn of their falseness. I loved Cecilia, never doubted that I loved her, and she me. But it seemed to me then, as a man in my early thirties, that my marriage had been the result of the worst possible timing on my part. Just when all the world was breaking free, I had made myself a prisoner. A square. A victim of . . . well, whatever the prevailing rhetoric was at the time around governments, the patriarchy, the stifling noose of conformity.

  Even though Cecilia and I had enough money, more than most young couples because her father had seen to that, and even though we enjoyed the same things – books, theatre, music: Cecilia was a superb pianist – I became instantly restless. That whole decade had been a restless one. The blossoming of free love, flower power, the exuberant loosening of all those burdens that had defined our parents’ small and meagre existences. I wanted a slice of that freedom for myself.

  Overnight, I felt trapped by the husbandliness of my life, and soon by the demands of fatherhood. And so I strayed. ‘Tawdry little affairs,’ Cecilia had said. She had no idea how close to the mark her description was. I seemed to seek out in that parallel life things that I would neither tolerate, nor even contemplate, in my real one.

  Later that evening, Cecilia went up to Rebecca’s bedroom, and brought the unwilling child downstairs with her. We did a reasonable job, I believe, of placating her – or at least, Cecilia did. I kept a physical distance from my daughter that night. I thought it right to respect her anger. We said all the usual things parents tell children in situations like this – that sometimes mummies and daddies fight, even when they care for each other. That we both loved her very much. That Daddy had promised not to make Mummy cry ever again. I repeated that promise to my small daughter, carefully, slowly, until I judged that she was ready to believe me. It was a solemn moment that eventually ended in a hug – albeit a wary one on Rebecca’s part – and several bedtime stories.

  I kept my promise. From those very rocky shores, Cecilia and I forged a long and loving relationship. I never cheated again.

  A psychologist might make much of this, I suppose. That I had kept on and on doing what I was doing until I was found out, that at some level I wanted to be found out. That it gave me permission to return to my life: a life that had been waiting patiently in the wings, waiting for me to grow up. That my parallel life had become tired and meaningless, as much of a burden as the one I believed I’d been trying to cast off.

  All I’d wanted, in the end, was to come home.

  I told Ella most of this, of course, during our early therapy sessions. Not everything: some observations about my perfidy I kept to myself. But the truth is, that in the immediate aftermath of Cecilia’s sudden death, and before I met Ella, I could not forgive myself for what my wife had so generously forgiven me, all those years before. The world darkened around me. Even the four walls of my home were nothing other than constant, crowding reminders of all the ways in which I had failed Cecilia – and of all the ways in which I was now condemned to be alone.

  And it was this psychic aloneness that terrified me: that sense of alienation from the world that descended upon me in the wake of Cecilia’s death. Part guilt, part terror, part self-loathing: I felt that I would never again create a meaningful connection with another human being.

  My twin daughters were terrified by the storms of weeping and creeping lethargy that they saw in their normally active and purposeful father. They took charge of me. Six months after Cecilia’s death, Frances sought out Ella. She had been recommended to her as one of the best counsellors in the country – and one who happened to have a consulting room in the city centre, a mere twenty-minute drive away.

  Initially, I resisted. I was determined that I would endure my punishment like a man, that Cecilia deserved nothing less than a long, protracted period of self-flagellating mourning. I see now how close to some precarious edge I had travelled. It would not have taken much to push me over into an abyss from which I might never have returned. I felt useless, worthless. I felt that I belonged nowhere in any real, authentic way.

  Finally, my three daughters enlisted the help of my GP, Eugene, in order to overcome my resistance. Eugene was a serious and thoughtful man, one who had seen me – seen all of us, Cecilia and the girls – through the myriad health worries that befall the normal family. I trusted him.

  ‘Your daughters are perfectly correct, Patrick. Enough is enough.’ He spoke firmly, if not sternly. I had no wish to meet his gaze. ‘I have a duty of care to you, and I insist that you seek help. We can work on this together: I’ll prescribe antidepressants if necessary, but only in tandem with bereavement counselling.’

  Eugene then leaned closer, forcing me to look at him. He must have been conscious, as I was, of my daughters’ silent presence behind the closed door of the kitchen. He lowered his voice. ‘You are causing Rebecca, Frances and Sophie to suffer even more than they already are. They have just lost their mother.’ He paused and looked at me closely. He seemed to be judging the effect of his words. ‘Do you want them to lose their father as well? They’re still young, and you’re placing a huge burden on their shoulders. Do you really want that?’

  Somehow, it was Eugene’s use of the girls’ names that startled me into awareness. In my own wallowing, I was barely conscious of them as individuals; they were simply my daughters, out there somewhere on the periphery of my life. Frances and Sophie, in particular, now looked after me, taking up where their mother had left off. Sometimes they arrived home together, sometimes separately. They took charge of the domestic things: washing, ironing and so forth. They also made sure I was fed, on at least four nights a week. Those are the things that I do remember.

  At that time, the two girls shared a flat, close to the university. I don’t think I gave too much thought in those days as to how I had suddenly colonized their lives. I was aware on one level, of course, of their studies, their part-time jobs, the social whirl that most young students inhabited. But my needs were greater. I was the one suffering, after all – I had lost my wife. They still had their partners: Rebecca had her brand-new husband, Adam, the other two their boyfriends. They were mere onlookers. I was the main event. That was how I saw things back then.

  As it transpired, Eugene’s words were enough of a catalyst. I suddenly saw myself through my daughters’ eyes. I understood that this state of affairs could not continue. And so I agreed, reluctantly at first, that I would accept help. Almost at once, and to my surprise, I began
to feel a lightness settle around me. I now had something to do, something to come to grips with. I had a purpose at last. I called my three girls to my side and apologized to each, one by one, for hurting them, however unintentionally. Rebecca’s forgiveness was perhaps a little less emphatic than her sisters’, and I was reminded all over again of how far short of her expectations I always seemed to fall. Nevertheless, I embraced the three of them, and in that embrace I felt that a tightly pulled knot had somehow begun to loosen inside me, that somewhere out there, hope might lie in wait.

  It did. It resided with Ella and her therapy, in that sense of safety I encountered at last, right from the first moment we met. A sense of safety that blossomed serenely inside me as I sat, surrounded by the walls of her office. It grew alongside the quiet intensity that inhabited our weekly meetings and it deepened with the relief I felt each time I arrived and each time I left. Eventually, I grew to accept that my wife had forgiven me, and that my daughters no longer saw me as a burden.

  All this took time, of course, and perhaps I did project my own wishes somewhat onto my daughters’ attitudes. And now, on that bright August afternoon, these same daughters were about to arrive, back to their family home, back to where their father awaited them, transformed at last. Daughters who had been born and brought up in the safety of that home: the one Cecilia and I had created together after the events of that long-ago but always momentous Christmas Eve.

  ‘I think it’s time to open the wine,’ I now said to Ella, glancing at the clock on the kitchen wall. ‘Rebecca is always early; we can depend on that.’ We folded some more napkins, polished some more cutlery, set out more serving spoons. Anything to displace the nervousness that we both were feeling. And then the doorbell rang. I looked at Ella and smiled with a reassurance I didn’t really feel. ‘Ready?’