Everything and Nothing

by Araminta Hall

  Halfway to the tube Sarah turned off. ‘Actually, I’m going to get a bus. The stop’s here and it’s more direct.’

  ‘Where are you living now?’ He wanted to put her into some sort of context.

  ‘With my parents in Islington. My dad would kill you if he knew I was with you now.’ She laughed and he was reminded how many years separated them.

  ‘It was great to see you again. You look fantastic.’

  ‘So do you.’

  Sarah leaned into Christian and brushed her mouth against his. They held the position for a second longer than necessary and he felt her arm encircle his waist so that her breasts flattened against him. He could taste the hollowness of his desire at the back of his throat.

  She pulled away. ‘Bye then.’

  When he got home Ruth was asleep on the sofa in front of Newsnight with three-quarters of a bottle of wine in her and no food. She looked pretty from where he stood in the doorway and, even though he knew he was a sad and pathetic man, he wanted to take her to bed. She woke up as he switched off the telly.

  ‘You’re drunk.’

  ‘Is that a statement or a question?’ He suspected that Ruth believed she owned him in some indefinable way, giving her the right to tell him how to live.

  ‘I can smell it on you. I thought it was a business dinner.’

  ‘They’re the worst ones, Ruth.’

  ‘Doesn’t it ever occur to you to say no?’

  ‘Not really. You look knackered, why don’t you go to bed?’

  ‘Don’t patronise me.’

  ‘I’m not. I’m just saying . . . ’

  ‘That I’m not as attractive as all those twenty-four-year-old childless girls in your office.’

  They had slipped, like Alice, into that place between reality and absurdity.

  ‘I don’t know what you’re on, Ruth, but it isn’t pleasant.’

  ‘Oh, and I live to be pleasant for you. In fact, why don’t I give up work and become some sort of domestic goddess with a little pinny and cookies baking in the oven and the children all tucked up in bed so that you can go out and be important and not worry about anything other than the next secretary you’re going to fuck?’

  ‘Ruth, you need to stop this before you say something you’ll regret. I don’t know where any of this has come from, but you’re talking nonsense. When have I ever asked you to give up work?’

  Ruth started to cry. Great big heaving sobs which shook her body so that she looked like a drowning kitten. Christian felt a surge of emotion for her that he couldn’t place. She was so complicated it seemed impossible to comfort her and it made him feel hot and trapped.

  ‘What’s wrong, Ruth? Do you need to see a doctor or something?’

  She sank down onto the sofa. ‘I don’t know what I need. I don’t even know what I want. I’m lost, Christian.’

  Ruth woke at four in the morning, which was always a bad sign. In the worst times she had woken at four every morning, her body shredded by exhaustion but her mind spinning in ever-decreasing circles. It was the same start which got her now, as if her heart had been given an electric shock. Christian was snoring next to her and she regretted their stupid row. Her last words to him were playing pinball in her mind. She shouldn’t have revealed so much of herself. You should never tell men the depths of your despair because then they thought you mad and wished they could still get away with locking you in the attic. If only they shared the same language, she found herself thinking, she could tell him how she was feeling, he’d give her a hug and they’d move on.

  She gave it half an hour and then got up, knowing it was better to pass these hours with a cup of tea in the kitchen rather than lying in bed. Betty had, as was now usual, found her way into their bed at some indeterminable time in the night; she vaguely remembered her small form at the door, her warm body crawling over hers before squeezing herself between them. She was now wedged against Christian, stuck with sweat to his back. Ruth nearly moved her, but couldn’t bear the thought of waking her. Instead she gazed at her tiny daughter and, for a second, felt that she fully understood Betty’s anger; she was after all nothing more than a miniature woman. Ruth resolved to be much nicer to Betty when she woke up.

  The kitchen always felt so different at this time of day. She saw it for what it was and was thankful that it expected nothing more of her. Since the advent of Aggie it was also always so clean, even the supper from the night before was washed up and ready to go again.

  Once she was sitting at the table, watching the sky break an uncomfortable dawn, Ruth allowed her thoughts to acknowledge themselves within the tangles of her mind. She looked up and caught herself in the mirror which was propped against a wall at the far end of the table. She stared into it, trying to see herself. But it was as if she had selective glaucoma; however hard she looked her face was blurred. As a teenager and even in her twenties, she had been confi dent in how she looked, had known that her face was pretty and her body taut. But now . . . now, she could see age creeping over her features, announcing itself with lines and bumps, red patches on her cheeks and thick bags under her eyes. Her skin looked worn away so it was almost translucent, like the wings of a butterfly, and her hair was as insipid as over-cooked spaghetti. She even had a mole on her cheek which sprouted dark hairs if she didn’t keep it in check.

  And her body was not her real body, of that she was sure. One day she would reclaim the clear, toned skin of her youth which allowed her to wear shorts and bikinis and tight dresses. Not the mottled, dimpled covering which made her look like she had been soaked in tea for too long. At least she was thin, but it wasn’t the right kind of thin. It was so easy for women to be either too fat or too thin. The perfection everyone sought was so small a space as to be invisible; even the obscenely beautiful models on the pages of Viva had to be photoshopped to achieve a perfection which was fake. And these were women who inspired clichés amongst men, in open mouths and shortness of breath and babbling words. Could this all still be true? Ruth wondered, as she ran her hands over her face; it felt like her bones were trying to force themselves out of her skin, as if bored by having to support the insubstantial person she had become.

  Christian claimed not to have fucked Sarah because she was prettier than her; although Ruth was sure she had been and that must have been a bit of a bonus. It was interesting to note that men rarely had affairs with women if they were older than their wives, with a plumper body and greyer hair. And anyway, she only had his word for the fact that he hadn’t found Sarah more attractive and when you considered the amount of lying he’d done, it hardly gave her confidence. But more insidious was, why did this fact matter so much? Why did it eat away at her image of herself like maggots on a decaying corpse? It’s not about looks, he’d said at the time, that never came into it. You’re the only person I want to talk to and surely that means something. And yes, she saw his point, but there was still something terrible about being exchanged for a younger model. About knowing that only recently he had run his hands over smoother, fresher flesh.

  She fretted that forgiving him made her constantly and unspokenly somehow subservient to him for ever more. Was there now some terrible acknowledgment between them that she was weaker, that she would keep him at any cost? Before she had got married and had children, Ruth had been certain that she’d never forgive an affair and yet, him leaving had seemed impossible at a time when she was barely able to get out of a bath without help. Sometimes she wondered if that was why he had done it then, simply because he knew he would get away with it, even if he was found out. And why was it that the definitiveness of youth always, always had to give way to the compromise of age?

  Christian claimed to have had a mild nervous breakdown. He’d even gone to therapy for six months to try to understand why he’d done it, but Ruth suspected that had only been to placate her, to show he was serious about being sorry. Not that she’d doubted his sincerity, that he’d genuinely wanted to stay, that the whole affair had no doubt been a
mistake. But often she wondered if they’d papered over the cracks in their desperation not to fuck up too much and that maybe they would be better off apart. All those old sayings kept reverberating round her head; sometimes rows of old women would rear up at her, telling her that men didn’t stray for no reason, that there was no smoke without fire, that a woman’s place was in the home.

  In the end, the best reason Christian could come up with for his behaviour had been that he felt pushed out of his own marriage. That since Betty’s birth he had felt sidelined, that Ruth had fallen so completely in love with their daughter she hadn’t even bought a cot for the first year. And then there’d been the depression, which he’d found terrifying, and once she’d gone back to work she was either feeling guilty or exhausted and they never had any fun any more. So, to comfort himself in her second pregnancy, he’d decided to sleep with someone else. Except of course he hadn’t gone so far as to articulate the last bit to her, that was something he only said within the confines of her mind.

  It isn’t the same for men, she had wanted to say, but never managed to spit out. Women grow them, we give up years of our lives, we distort ourselves, we flood our bodies with alien hormones. Of course we don’t go back to normal. Christ, you men don’t know the half of it. Once we’ve had a baby, that’s it, we don’t ever become a single entity again, even after the cord is cut. But for Christian to have understood this he would have had to transcend himself, something which no one is capable of doing.

  Ruth could remember him saying all these things as they had sat at this very table after Betty was in bed and just before Hal forced himself out of her. She mostly remembered that time for all the bottling up; for not screaming obscenities at him, for not turning up at his work and hitting Sarah, for not sending him more than ten defamatory texts a day. By the time she got to speak to Christian in the evening she would feel as though she’d eaten too much fast food which was now stuck in her throat. But as soon as they were able to speak she would feel starving, desperate to go over and over the details, devouring every last morsel of information in the hope that she could somehow make sense of the mess.

  Worst of all, Ruth had known, she still knew, that Christian had a point; everything he said had been true. She knew she had to accept responsibility, but she didn’t see why she should shoulder all the blame or that he had needed to make his point in such a way. Just be careful, Sally had said to her one day when Ruth had decided to let him stay, don’t do it because you’re feeling vulnerable, do it because you want him to stay. But Ruth hadn’t been able to make a judgement on that, she couldn’t separate her need for help from her love for her husband.

  The other thing that Sally had said could have come straight out of the pages of Viva: If he’s capable of doing it once, he might do it again. Christian, of course, swore this wasn’t true, that he didn’t want to be unfaithful to her, that he’d never done it before. And Ruth believed him; she knew that at heart he was a decent man who was, when it came down to it, honest and trustworthy. She didn’t worry about whether it had happened before or start to wonder if he secretly visited lap-dancing clubs or even if he would look for it again. But she also knew he was weak and now, sitting at her kitchen table, she realised they had slipped back into their old patterns and this was a dangerous moment.

  I love you, he’d said to her a few nights after telling her that he’d been sleeping with a girl at work who was now pregnant, even though Ruth herself was due to give birth in three weeks. I’ve never stopped loving you. I loved you from the first moment I saw you and it’s never gone away. And Ruth knew that to be true. She could clearly remember the rush of emotion which had enveloped them both when they’d first met. All sense of decency and decorum had seemed irrelevant and they had spent the first few weeks pouring their souls into each other, mingling everything, sleeping rarely. There had never been a doubt that they would spend the rest of their lives together. If they could just get back to that moment. If only they could spend one more night on her thin student-issue bed, holding the nylon curtain away from the window as they lay beautiful and naked, looking out at the dawn, wishing for every day like it was the most exciting time of their lives.

  Sometimes Agatha found you needed to write things down in order to sort them in your mind. Her head often felt crowded out with all the stories. Not that she was a liar as the stupid woman at the hospital had insinuated, but she was aware that we all tell ourselves stories to make life easier to deal with. It is hard to get by unless you sometimes tell people what they need to hear. And, to be clear, this is not lying. Lying is mean. Lying is something that people do to get their own way when it would probably be better if they didn’t. Liar, liar, the children at school used to chant. But I’m not, she wanted to shout back, I tell you what you want to hear and you are too stupid to realise that.

  It’s not a lie if you don’t tell your mum and dad, Uncle Harry had said. Although in fact, everything about him had been a lie, he wasn’t even her uncle. He didn’t drive her to girl guides every Saturday to give her mum a break. Instead he drove her to the top of Eccles Hill and told her that what they did was fine, everyone did it and there was nothing wrong in it. It had taken her years to realise that he was lying, even though she had somehow known from the start that he was right and she could never tell her parents.

  Hal was defi nitely real and Agatha had undoubtedly been sent to save him. She wrote some simple facts in her notebook.

  Hal finds eating hard.

  I make Hal eat.

  Hal loves me.

  I love Hal.

  Ruth and Christian do not understand him.

  He is happier with me than he is with them.

  The simplicity of it all made Agatha want to sing. This was what she had been waiting for all her life. This was surely what love was, the sureness of a give and take which hurt no one, that was unspoken, that existed on its own in its own time and space, that was neither messy nor dirty, that did what it said.

  Hal now ate yoghurts, biscuits, chocolate buttons, bananas and Marmite sandwiches. Agatha had wanted to unveil his amazing development at his birthday, making Ruth and Christian so grateful they would let her stay forever. But now this didn’t seem enough. They were both so distant and distracted, Agatha wasn’t even sure they would be as thrilled as they should have been. Since handing over Hal’s party to her, Ruth hadn’t asked one question about it. Agatha still didn’t even have a guest list and it was happening in only ten days’ time.

  Over the last few days it had dawned on Agatha that Ruth was not dissimilar to her own mother. They were both scatty and tired and disorganised and left too much to chance. As a child she had longed to shake her mother as she flapped around the kitchen, failing to put anything away or complete any tasks, always too sleepy to listen to her reading or too busy to help with homework. It was when you got to this stage that you let other people take responsibility for your child and then bad things happened. Agatha did not ever want a situation where bad things could happen to Hal.

  Agatha was worried Hal might eat something on the stupid trip to the farm that Ruth had planned for the next day, which presented her with a dilemma. If she asked Hal not to eat then she might not only put him back in terms of eating, but she would also be asking him to lie for her, something she could never imagine doing. She didn’t want her and Hal to have a secret which they couldn’t share with his parents, but what were her options if those parents didn’t understand? In the end she told Hal that they were planning a surprise for his mum and dad and that on his birthday they were going to show them what a big grown-up boy he was now he could eat. So, it was very important that he didn’t eat anything at the farm because then the surprise would be ruined. Hal nodded in his serious way, but Agatha wasn’t convinced he understood. If someone offered him a chocolate button she couldn’t be certain that he wouldn’t eat it. The thought made her itch, as did the thought of letting Ruth and Christian in on the knowledge of his eating.

&n
bsp; ‘I cannot believe you talked me into this,’ said Christian as Ruth began passing him the multitude of bags they needed for a day-trip to Surrey. ‘Why don’t you go alone? I’ll take the kids swimming.’

  ‘Don’t be annoying, you agreed to it. The kids are excited.’ Ruth made up the bit about the kids. She had no idea what they would like to do today.

  ‘But some bloody hippy commune? I mean, please.’

  ‘Why do you have to make everything sound so shit. It’s not a commune.’

  ‘You know what I mean. They’ll be all holier than thou with their organic kids. I bet they don’t even have a TV.’

  Christian’s words echoed Ruth’s own thoughts, but she wasn’t going to let him know. Instead she wondered how many bottles Hal would need. ‘Can you get Betty into the car? We’re going to be late.’ Ruth stood at the bottom of the stairs and shouted up, ‘Aggie, we’re going.’ There was no response. ‘Hal! Come on. I don’t want to be late.’ She could hear rustling and laughter from Hal’s room. A minute passed, but they didn’t appear. A surge of exasperation knotted unhealthily in Ruth’s bowels. Her foot went to the bottom step but she didn’t move forward and, in her failure to move, she realised that she felt embarrassed, that she would feel like she was intruding if she broke up their game.

  But then Aggie appeared with Hal on her hip. ‘Sorry, we were playing dress up, I was just getting him changed again.’

  Ruth thought she could hear an edge to the girl’s voice. ‘It’s okay, but we really do need to get going now.’

  Still Aggie didn’t move. Instead she put her hand on Hal’s forehead. ‘He seems hot and tired. Are you sure you don’t want to leave him?’ As Aggie spoke Ruth saw Hal nestle his head onto her shoulder, her hand involuntarily stroking his cheek.

  Ruth held out her own arms. ‘No. I want him to come. Thanks.’

  ‘But if he’s ill . . . ’

  ‘Aggie, I think I can manage. I’ve been dealing with children’s illnesses for years.’ Ruth could feel a shift in the air which she couldn’t place, but at least her words made the girl move. Aggie reached the bottom step and tried to hand Hal over, but the little boy stayed stuck to her side, his legs wrapped tightly round her waist. Ruth watched the scene in amazement as she tried to coax her own child out of another woman’s arms. She was shaking, her voice rising shrilly as she told Hal not to be so silly. He used to do that to me, Ruth wanted to scream, I know what that feels like, I know what it is to wrench a small body off you and walk away. But I do not know what it is to be the wrencher, to walk away with the small body.