Sorrow and Bliss

by Meg Mason

  But in a second, my mother started saying something about sex; instantly Winsome brought her hand down and knocked over her own glass. Wine flooded across the table and began running off the front onto the carpet. Leaping up she said, ‘Celia, napkin’ over and over until my mother was forced to stop talking. By the time Winsome finished her show of cleaning up, my mother had lost her train of thought.

  *

  Jessamine was the only other person who drank too much at the reception. As Patrick and I were leaving, she wrapped her arms around my neck and kissed me and whispered, loudly into my ear, that she loved me so much and she was so, so glad I was marrying Patrick. Probably – no, definitely – she was still in love with him but it was fine because I might get tired of being with someone so boring and good and hot and then she could have him back. She kissed me again, then apologised because she had to quickly go and be sick in the loo. Patrick believed that it happened but not that it was true; Ingrid believed both.

  *

  His father did not come to our wedding because he was in the process of divorcing Cynthia. I told Patrick we should go to Hong Kong and stay with him. He said, ‘We really shouldn’t.’ I didn’t meet Christopher Friel until much later when he had a coronary incident and Patrick finally agreed to go. I did not like him after the first five to ten minutes in his company. Patrick had been charitable in every story he’d ever told about him.

  Nothing in Christopher’s apartment testified to the existence of a son. I asked if he had anything of Patrick’s from childhood that I could look at but he said he’d got rid of it all years ago. He sounded proud. But, as we were packing to leave, he brought out a small collection of letters Patrick had written to his mother while she was overseas for a number of weeks. They’d somehow survived the cull, Christopher said, and offered them to me, in their Ziploc bag, inviting me to keep them.

  I read them during the flight home. The cabin light was low and Patrick was sleeping with his arms folded and his shoulders drawn up. He was six when he wrote them. He had signed all of them ‘Lost of love, Paddy’. I touched his wrist. He stirred but didn’t wake up. I wanted to say, if you ever write me a letter, please sign it that way. Lost of love, Paddy.

  *

  He chose St Petersburg for our honeymoon, and the hotel because although I had said I could do it, I fell at the first hurdle, which was the travellers’ photos on TripAdvisor: an infinity of towel swans and seafood platters and unacceptable stray hairs.

  On the plane, he asked me if I was going to change my name. He had just finished a crossword in the in-flight magazine that a previous passenger had already started.

  I said I wasn’t.

  ‘Because of the patriarchy?’

  ‘Because of the paperwork.’

  A steward came past with a trolley. Patrick asked for a napkin and told me he was going to write a list of pros and cons about name changing. Ten minutes later he read it to me. There were no cons on it. I told him I could think of some and took the pen out of his hand. He said I should press my button and ask for a packet of napkins since I was a pro at thinking up cons.

  *

  We lost each other in the Hermitage on our first morning. I went to the café and ordered jasmine tea and waited for him to find me. Before it arrived, I heard his voice on the loudspeaker. ‘Mrs Martha Friel, née Russell. Your husband would like you to come to the main lobby.’

  Next to the desk, a stand of brochures, doing something with his collar – Thank God.

  *

  On the Nevsky Prospekt, Patrick bought me a figurine of a horse from a teenage girl who was selling them. She had a baby with her. Waiting as he chose, I felt like I couldn’t breathe for the sorrow of its smiling at me, and the way it grabbed its little feet at the same time, happy even though its life was sitting for hours a day in a metal pram with dirty white wheels while its mother sold horses.

  Patrick paid £50 for the worst one, not the 50p she asked for it, pretending he didn’t realise his mistake. We walked away and he handed me the horse. He asked me what I was going to call it. I said Trotsky and burst into tears. Afterwards, I apologised for not being fun. Patrick said he would have been worried if I was fun in this scenario.

  *

  That night it was snowing too hard to go out. We ate in the hotel restaurant. Instead of going in by the lobby, Patrick led me out onto the street. The air was so cold, it made me cover my eyes. He took my elbow and we ran along the short stretch of pavement to an external entrance. Back inside, Patrick said, ‘Totally independent restaurant.’ I could not remember if or when I had told him that my reaction to hotel restaurants ranges between ennui and despair.

  I finished reading my menu and told Patrick who was on the second page of his that I would be taking his name after all.

  He looked up. ‘Why?’

  ‘Because,’ I said, thanks to my mother obviously, ‘I am expert in all forms of passive aggression and I can’t let such an emotionally manipulative public announcement go unrewarded.’

  He leaned across the table and kissed me, even though I had just put a piece of bread in my mouth. He said I’m so glad Martha. ‘I had to give the man a hundred dollars to let me use the microphone. I mean, American dollars.’

  I swallowed. ‘You’re probably going to Siberian prison.’

  He said absolutely worth it and went back to his menu.

  Out loud, because I had nothing else to do, I analysed the particular pathos of hotel restaurants. I said maybe it was the lighting, or the fact they were always carpeted, the higher than usual concentration of people eating alone, maybe it was just the concept of an omelette station that made me question the meaning of everything.

  Patrick waited for me to finish, then asked me if I’d ever had borscht.

  I said, ‘I love you so much,’ then a maître d’ came over with two green glass bottles and said, ‘Water with gas or no gas?’

  *

  At Heathrow, waiting for our bags, Patrick said, ‘Remember that wedding we had?’ I had just asked him how he was planning to get back to his flat. He had his arm around me and kissed the side of my head. I said, ‘Sorry. I’m so tired.’ It had been so much effort, telling myself and making myself believe that coming back from a honeymoon is when marriages start, not when they end.

  I did not know how to be a wife. I was so scared. Patrick looked so happy.

  22

  IN THE TAXI and again as I followed him up the stairs, Patrick told me I could do whatever I wanted to the flat to make it feel like mine. It was a Friday. On Saturday he went to work and I took everything out of the kitchen cupboards and put it all back in, one cupboard along, so that if Heather visited, she would not know where anything was. I couldn’t think of anything else.

  I had decided to be neat and I was for a number of days. But Patrick preferred the flat the way it was now, he said, with clothes on the floor, magazines and hair elastics and an astonishing number of glasses, and everything so generally accessible because cupboards and drawers were never, ever shut. The way he laughed as he spoke did not make me feel guilty, and he made no effort to move anything. Maybe that was why his flat felt like my home so quickly.

  The only things he asked if I could do, a few weeks later, was not to leave medication lying around – he said, ‘It’s just my training’ – and try to use the spreadsheet he had made me for financial record-keeping, instead of my method which was stuffing receipts into a ragged A4 envelope, then losing it.

  He opened it on his computer to teach me how it worked. I told him that seeing numbers in such concentration caused an invisible membrane to come down from underneath my eyelids, blinding me until the numbers went away. There were many categories. One of them was called Martha’s Unexpecteds. I said I had not expected him to be so Stasi-like in his financial oversight. He said he didn’t realise anyone would suggest a Word document and the calculator on their phone as an alternative to a spreadsheet. I told him I would try and use it, but it would be in a spi
rit of self-denial. Patrick said later, it was genuinely incredible how many Unexpecteds one person could attract.

  *

  In bed, on the nights he wasn’t working, Patrick would do a difficult Sudoku from a book of only difficult Sudokus and I would ask him when he was going to turn the light off. I told him that was when I felt the most married.

  Once he had finished, he would put the Sudoku book away and read articles from medical journals. If I lay with my back to him, Patrick would absent-mindedly begin pressing his thumb into places that hurt at the base of my spine. He bought massage oil from somewhere and when he found out that things with fake perfume in them make me feel like I am being slowly asphyxiated he bought coconut oil, a kind from the supermarket that came in a jar and had a high smoke point which, the label said, made it suitable for all kinds of frying. Even when he put the journal away, he kept rubbing my back. Sometimes for the whole of Newsnight, sometimes after he would turn off the light. That was when I felt the most loved.

  One night, I rolled over in the dark and asked if he had any feeling left in his thumb. I said, ‘How can you do that for so long?’

  He said, ‘I’m hoping it turns sexual.’

  I told him that was a shame. ‘I’m hoping it turns into me being asleep.’ I heard the lid come off the jar.

  Patrick said, ‘May the best man win.’

  Our sheets smelled like Bounty Bar.

  *

  Then Patrick moved to a different hospital on the other side of London. It felt like he was never home. I was still working at the publishing house. Although spring, it was cold and constantly grey and when no part of the working day could be spent on the roof with the only other girl who was left at the company besides me, it was impossible to sustain activity beyond lunchtime. The editor started telling us to go home if we had nothing to do because he couldn’t bear our salad lunches and the sound of ladies’ voices, talking and talking. I felt like I was always at home. I would invite Ingrid to come over or would ask if I could go there. She always said yes but if the baby had not slept, or was sleeping or nearly asleep, she would text and cancel at the last minute. Or I would go, and she would have to feed him in the other room because he was distractible, or she would complain or talk endlessly about the women in her baby group and I would go home, feeling guilty that from the moment I had arrived I had been trying to think how to leave.

  In bed, on those nights when Patrick was at work and I had seen no one all day, I missed him so much it made me angry. I stayed up late reading Lee Child novels I bought on his Kindle and composing arguments to have with him when he got back. I told him I did not feel married. I told him I didn’t feel loved, in which case, what was the point.

  That was also when I started throwing things. The first time, a fork at Patrick because he walked away from me when I was upset. About something so small – as he was getting ready for work, he mentioned that he had got two more Amazon receipts that day and because I had previously told him I was going to read all of James Joyce including the shit ones by the end of summer, he was starting to worry that the Jack Reacher thing was a cry for help.

  I remember him stopping when the fork hit the back of his leg and rang onto the floor, his looking back and laughing, out of shock. I laughed too so then it was a joke. My funny impression of a wife going insane from loneliness. He said ha, okay. ‘It seems like I should go then.’ And I threw something at the door as he shut it behind him and no one laughed.

  The next day, Patrick did his impression of a husband who hadn’t had things thrown at him the night before. I kept waiting for him to mention it. He didn’t. At dinner I said, ‘Are we going to talk about the fork?’ And he said, ‘Don’t worry, you weren’t feeling great.’ I said fine, if you don’t want to. I sounded angry but I was grateful that he hadn’t made me apologise or explain why I had reacted that way to a joke, because I didn’t know. I said, ‘I’m sorry anyway’ and told him I wouldn’t do it again, ‘obviously.’

  But I kept throwing things, in moments of rage that were unpredictable and incommensurate with whatever had happened. Except once – a hairdryer, hard enough that it left a bruise where it hit him, because I had complained about being lonely and he said, laughing, that I should have a baby for something to do.

  As soon as I had done it, I would go out of the room, leaving the pieces of whatever I had broken on the floor. They would have been swept up and disposed of, always, by the time I came back.

  As a teenager, whenever she was getting ready to go out, Ingrid would have a tantrum about what to wear, becoming so hysterical so quickly, she seemed like a different person. She pulled outfits out of her wardrobe, tried them on, wrenched them off, sobbed, swore, screamed that she was fat, told my parents she hated them and wanted them to die, tipped her drawers out until everything she owned was on the floor. Then she would find something and instantly she would be fine.

  As an adult, she told me that it felt so real in the moment but afterwards, she couldn’t believe she’d got so upset and thought she would never do it again. She never apologised afterwards and my parents did not make her. But, she said, it didn’t matter, she knew they were still thinking about it and her shame was so intense it made her angry at us. ‘Instead of like, hating myself.’

  Throwing something at your husband is the same. I was so ashamed afterwards, it made me angrier at Patrick than I had already become for his never being around.

  *

  When you are a woman over thirty, with a husband but without children, married couples at parties are interested to know why. They agree with each other that having children is the best thing they have ever done. According to the husband, you should just get on with it; the wife says you don’t want to leave it too late. Privately, they are wondering if there is something medically wrong with you. They wish they could ask directly. Perhaps, if they can outlast your silence, you will offer it up of your own accord. But the wife can’t resist – she has to tell you about a friend of hers who was told the same thing but as soon as she gave up hope … the husband says bingo.

  In the beginning, I told strangers I couldn’t have children because I thought it would stop them from continuing beyond their initial enquiry. It is better to say you don’t want them. Then they know straight away that there is something wrong with you, but at least not in a medical sense. So the husband can say, oh well, good for you, focusing on your career, even if, to that point, there had been so little evidence of a career being focused on. The wife doesn’t say anything, she is already looking around.

  *

  By summer I had read four and a half pages of Ulysses and all of Lee Child. Patrick took me out to dinner to celebrate. I told him the shit James Joyces turned out to be all of them. During dessert, he gave me a library card. He said it was a present to go with the £144 worth of Jack Reachers he had already given me.

  I got out one book. An Ian McEwan that I thought was a novel and put it in a drawer when I realised it was short stories. I called Ingrid and told her I had accidentally invested in two characters who would be dead in sixteen pages. She said seriously. ‘Who has the time?’

  23

  ALTHOUGH FROM THE age of sixteen, she smoked every day at high school at the bottom of the playing fields, and although she was regularly caught, Ingrid graduated without any detentions on her record. It was so easy for her to talk her way out of them. Although from age seventeen to that summer, I was regularly ill, I had never been admitted to hospital. It was so easy for me to talk my way out of it.

  It was August, nearly September. Patrick went to Hong Kong for his father’s third wedding, to the twenty-four-year-old daughter of one of his colleagues. For weeks the headlines had been about the weather, about London putting Greece in the shade and giving the Costa del Sol a run for its money. I didn’t go with him because I had started to feel unwell. Two days after he left, I woke up and everything was black.

  I tried to go back to sleep, hot and tangled and sick with guilt t
hat I wasn’t getting up and going to work. A dog was barking from the flat below, and somewhere outside road workers were breaking up the street. I listened to the relentless jangle and bleat of the pneumatic drill. It wouldn’t stop it wouldn’t stop it wouldn’t stop.

  As the noise got louder and louder, it felt – it always felt – like pressure building in my skull, like air is being pumped and pumped and pumped in until it’s hard like a tyre, but still more air pushes in and in and it begins to hurt so much, knife hot and migrainous, that you cry and imagine a fissure in the hard bone becoming a crack and the air finally rushing out and then relief from the pain. You are terrified. You are going to vomit. Your lungs are closing. The room is moving. Something bad is about to happen. It’s already in the room. It is making your back cold. You wait and wait and wait and then it doesn’t happen. The thing has left the room and it has left you behind. It isn’t going to end. There isn’t day and night. There isn’t time. Only pain, and the pressure and the terror that is like a twisted cord running down the centre of your body.

  Late, in the afternoon, I got up and went to the kitchen. I tried to eat but couldn’t. Water made me feel nauseous. My hips ached from lying on my side in a ball. Patrick called and I cried on the phone and said sorry, sorry, sorry. He said he would change his flight. He said, ‘Can you try and go out? Go to the Ladies’ Pond. Take a taxi the whole way.’ He said, ‘Martha, I love you so much.’ I hung up, promising to call Ingrid, but too ashamed once he had gone, imagining her arriving and finding me this way.

  From above, I watched myself get up and move slowly around the flat like I was so old, a woman at the end of her life. I dragged on my swimsuit, put clothes over it, put toothpaste in my mouth, left the flat. The effort of pushing open the building’s heavy outer door took my breath away.