Letters to My Husband

by Stephanie Butland

  ‘She’s going to have to start making an effort, Mel,’ Patricia says, in a half-whisper that would carry through a stone wall. ‘Look at me, I’ve lost my son and I’m still going to the WI tomorrow. I don’t much care about spring jams at the moment, but I have to keep going.’

  Like so much she tries to say to or about Elizabeth, it doesn’t come out quite the way she means it to. If Patricia had more parts of her heart that weren’t aching, if the constant battling-back of the desire to give up and lie down would just stop for a minute or two, she thinks she could work it out. Somewhere in the air around her drifts the understanding that the generations grieve differently, in the same ways that they love differently, dress differently, raise their children differently. Close by is the feeling that if she could cry for help the way that Elizabeth does, by letting all of the desperate wordlessness out of her, then she would. But Patricia will do what she has always done: manage. She can tolerate enough sympathy to make her feel as though she isn’t alone, but not so much that she can’t take care of other people. When friends touch her arm, she smiles and nods. If she thinks anyone might try an embrace, she takes a step back. When people ask her how she is, she shakes her head, but says she’s bearing up.

  Patricia would never tell you about her baby sister who died, because she never speaks about it. It’s no secret: Patricia was five, little Sheila only two. She would never tell you, because she never thinks of the way that her mother gave herself over to her grief, becoming a shadow-mother, ineffectual, incapable, insubstantial. She never thinks of it, but the memory is everywhere within her. And even though Elizabeth has no children – even though, in this house, there is no five-year-old being woken in the night by the strange, sad sound of muffled crying – she wants to save her from her mother’s fate. She wants to do it with the kindness and the gentleness that, if she was the wishing sort, she would have wished for her five-year-old self.

  But she can’t do it. And when she tries, she says something that she shouldn’t, and she could bite out her own tongue. In her heart she is saying: seeing my friends, having them touch my arm and say kind things will make me remember that I’m not as monstrously alone as I think I am. Taking home a recipe will mean that on one of these mornings when I wake up and I don’t know quite how I’m going to make the day go by, I’ll get out my jars and take the last of the elderberries from last autumn out of the freezer, and there’ll be something to fill up the time, and there’ll be a jar of warm jelly to take to a friend, and that’s the only way I can do it.

  Elizabeth pauses for a moment and Mel looks at Patricia as if to say, well, here it comes, but nothing happens. Or rather, nothing happens outside Elizabeth. Inside, she thinks about making an effort; about lifting her head and explaining her world to her motherin-law, who she knows doesn’t have a cruel bone in her body, not really, but that doesn’t stop the things she says from sounding cruel, at a time when Elizabeth has nothing with which to protect herself from even unmeant cruelty. She thinks about how much of an effort every day is, that sometimes she feels as though she’s going to have to reach into her own guts and move her own diaphragm up and down because her lungs can’t find the strength to fill and empty, or her heart to pump and pull.

  Instead, she says, I think I’ll have a lie-down, and she goes upstairs and puts on her husband’s sweater and waits for enough strength to get up again.

  Andy, Blake and Mel have discussed the protocol for tonight, and come up with a simple strategy for what should have been Michael’s day: they will follow Elizabeth’s lead. So when she comes downstairs, showered, hair brushed and with the palest of smiles, Blake opens wine, Andy makes much of his allergy to dogs – Blake has brought Hope with him, and two dogs seem like one too many for the doctor as he sneezes and blows – and Mel begins some cautious reminiscing.

  It’s the closest thing to normal, or what any of them remember as normal, that there’s been in the five weeks since Michael died. Elizabeth is unpredictable – sometimes present, sometimes worlds away, as quickly as if she is being switched on and off – but she is herself too, hand gestures and smiles breaking through the encrusted grief as if to remind her companions that she’s in there, still, and might come out one day.

  Every now and then she remembers that she will have to have her own birthday without Mike this year, and the next, and the next. Grief stacks itself up, waiting.

  It’s after eleven o’clock when the very-definitely-not-a-birthday-party breaks up. Mel walks home with Blake, taking Pepper, she says, ‘to give him some air’.

  The sound that comes from Elizabeth shocks them all with its strangeness: she’s laughing. It’s a rusty half-laugh, but a laugh none the less.

  ‘To give yourself the chance to smoke all the way home, you mean,’ she says. ‘I hear what you call Pepper when you think I’m asleep.’

  As soon as Blake, Mel and the dogs have gone, Elizabeth looks straight at Andy and asks the question she’s sworn she doesn’t want to know the answer to. Except that, after a drink and a loosening of the fear that binds her, it’s all she can think about.

  ‘What would it have been like,’ she asks, ‘for Mike?’

  His expression tells her that he hasn’t understood, and so she has the chance to back up and off this path, but she doesn’t.

  She just takes a deep breath – diaphragm up, diaphragm down – and says some words she doesn’t want to have to use so close to each other. ‘Mike. That night. I keep wondering, Andy. What would it have been like? To drown?’

  ‘Oh.’ Andy looks into his glass, and into Elizabeth’s face – her eyes are alert, concentrating, sure – and takes a deep breath too. And he tells her, gently, calmly, simply, the way he knows he should.

  Tears roll down her face and gather in his eyes but he keeps going. What he says is part medical opinion and part thirty years of friendship.

  He says that, once the shock of the cold was over, Michael probably wouldn’t have felt much.

  He says that Michael would have been so focused on getting Kate out that he wouldn’t have been thinking about his own body.

  He says that physical strength and the instinct to save both himself and Kate would have taken over.

  He says that the weight of Michael’s own wet clothes and the weight of Kate and her wet clothes would have been a huge burden.

  He says that Michael would have struggled but there would have come a point when he couldn’t struggle any more.

  He pauses and looks at Elizabeth, touches her arm, a question: is this enough? She nods: keep going. I’m OK. Her eyes say: despite appearances, this is OK. Her heart screams for him to stop talking, but something stronger in her needs to hear this.

  He says, Michael probably lost consciousness. He says – he falters as he says it – he might not have known. About the dying. We can’t know.

  No, says Elizabeth, no. We can’t know.

  Later, in the dark, knowing how well Mel sleeps after a drink, she takes a blanket and sits on the stairs, listening to Mike’s voice on the answering machine, over and over and over until it’s a beloved white noise. She’s consented to the machine being switched off, so that unwary callers don’t have to hear her husband’s voice, but she won’t have the recording replaced. As she said to Mel the last time they talked about it, it’s not as though she isn’t here to answer the phone. Mel had made a face that said, well, I’ll let this go for now but this isn’t the end of it.

  Andy’s words have been partly reassuring: she likes knowing that Mike wouldn’t have known, he wouldn’t have been thinking about dying, he’d have been focused on getting Kate out, getting himself out. But the conversation has also reminded Elizabeth of what she’ll never know.

  She wonders how he felt, what he thought about, whether he panicked or was calm, whether he thought about her. She goes upstairs and gets into bed and holds her breath, just to see if she can discover how it might have felt, but something more primal even than grief makes her pant and panic before
she gets anywhere close.

  Mike,

  This morning, by the gate, it was a few crocuses – crocii? – tied with a silver ribbon again. I was out there early – it was barely light – but you’d beaten me to it. I felt as though, if I’d been fifteen seconds earlier, I’d have seen you disappearing around the side of the gate (or through the fence, or dematerializing, or however you do it): it seemed as though the air was still reassembling itself around the place where you’d been.

  I put them in our bedroom, on my bedside table. I opened the curtains, a little bit, so that they would get some light, although I know it doesn’t really matter once they’re picked. Thank you for bringing them for me, today, of all days, when I’ve lain awake all night and thought about drowning.

  I keep telling Mel she can go home, and she says, yes, or she could stay here, because she can work anywhere there’s a socket, and I’m a little bit glad, really, although I’m probably being selfish. Mel’s the only person here who has a history with me that isn’t also with you, so she isn’t an automatic reminder. Not that I forget.

  I’m making no sense. It’s partly because I’m not sleeping, which makes the whole world slightly overexposed. But also because yesterday, you were supposed to get older, but you didn’t, and now that’s something else that’s wrong.

  I looked at your photo in the morning, and I wanted to wish you happy birthday, and then I didn’t, and then I couldn’t work out the tense – ‘It is, was, would be, could have been your birthday.’ In the end, I said, happy birthday, my darling, precious Mike, who brought me to this cold, damp, twisty-turny little place and made it my home. I said it because I’d found something to say that made perfect sense, whether you were alive or not. I said it to your picture, but if you’d been here, I would have said it to your sleepy, bristly, another-year-older face.

  I miss you. I love you. I’m here. I’d rather be there, where you are. Wherever there is. But you know that, because it was always that way.

  E xxx

  ALTHOUGH BLAKE HAS been very clear with the Micklethwaites, telling them that they can call him any time, for any reason, and that he’ll help them in any way he can, Richenda has shied away from doing so. She blames her mother – she blames her mother for a lot, actually, one way or another – whose cry of ‘I’d rather die than take handouts from the state’ had made for a long, cold, bleak childhood and a horror of taking any kind of help from any kind of institution.

  As she dials Blake’s number, she blames herself a little too, for her absurd idea that her family would be able to get through this time by relying on each other when, in reality, it’s been years since they’ve had so much as a fully civil and convivial mealtime.

  Blake arranges to come that afternoon, which gives Richenda enough time to calm down and feel a little foolish for making the call. She plans for coffee and questions about that poor policeman’s widow.

  But there’s something about his face, as honest as the sky, demanding honesty in return. So when he asks her how she is, how things are, she tells him. She tells him in a headlong jumble. The dog, who has at least got Kate leaving the house, but knocks the bin over several times a day and trails rubbish everywhere, and no one seems to find it galling except her. Rufus slotting back into life as it was before this as though nothing much has happened, while she feels as though everything is tilting. The pictures in the local paper of that poor policeman’s funeral, and his mother and his widow. Kate hardly eating and vomiting and refusing to talk, and how she’d looked up bulimia on the internet and felt sick herself, all those girls destroying themselves as they tried to wrest control of something, and how she doesn’t know where shock and trauma stop being a reasonable, understandable reaction and start being something else. How glad she feels that Kate is here, how terrible that Michael Gray is not. (She makes herself say his name, Blake notes, in the same way that Elizabeth carefully forms the words Kate Micklethwaite, although Patricia can only bring herself to spit ‘that girl’, and rebukes her daughter-in-law for caring. Although only, Blake has noticed, when Mel is out of earshot.) The worry that having someone die in the process of saving you is a huge burden to bear, at any age, and because she is so young, relatively untouched by difficulty, Kate has no strategies for this.

  ‘She has you,’ Blake says, his first opportunity to say anything at all since sitting down. ‘Don’t underestimate that.’

  ‘Yes,’ Richenda replies, instantly underestimating it, ‘but she won’t talk to me, or can’t, and there’s something different about her that I can’t quite put my finger on. She’s sleeping all the time and I don’t know if that’s good or bad. She still doesn’t say much about what happened and I don’t know what to think about that – should I be relieved, should I be worried? I wonder, if she did talk, would it be better, or worse …’ She tails off, wiping her eyes.

  ‘Right,’ Blake says, ‘I don’t have any answers, but I can give you one piece of advice.’ Richenda looks straight at him, eyes darkened from blue to grey by the tears and the fading of the late afternoon light. ‘Don’t worry about what you can’t control. You can’t make Kate talk and you don’t know what will happen when, or if, she does. So put that out of your mind.’

  A retort is on the tip of Richenda’s tongue – how easy those words are to say, how impossible to do – when she thinks about all of the times she’s locked the front door at night, knowing that Rufus isn’t coming in, knowing what he’s doing and, sometimes, where he’s doing it and who with, and choosing not to think about those things. She takes a deep breath, exhales, thinks about smiling and, although she can’t quite manage it, Blake sees that the storm has passed.

  The trouble is, Richenda thinks later – apart from her marriage and Kate and the poor dead policeman – the trouble is that now she is working from home more, and being around for Kate more, she has more uninterrupted thinking time. Although her job, as a freelance bookkeeper, is easy to do from home, she’s always preferred to sit in other people’s offices, seeing how they work and getting a sense of lives other than her own. Since Kate’s accident, she’s been going out for a couple of hours to collect paperwork and spending the rest of the week in her beautiful, stifling house. Kate, whom she aches to care for, is mostly sleeping, or going on long rambles with Beatle, who is the only companion it seems she will tolerate.

  When Richenda hears Kate crying and goes to her room, she is sent away, not unkindly – ‘I just want to be on my own, Mum’ – and so she sits in the office next door to Kate’s bedroom and puts her head against the wall. She stares at the signed Beatles poster, one of Rufus’s most treasured possessions, and waits for the sobbing to stop. And she wonders. She wonders where, when it could have been different.

  Richenda unravels her life and looks for the knot that, had she seen it and undone it in time, would have changed the way things had turned out, and meant that Kate would have been safe at home that night. Or that she would have been confident enough to go to Thailand instead of being beset by last-minute nerves. Or that she had been anywhere, anywhere but here. She can’t find it: or rather, she can find lots of knots, tied tight, not easy to undo, not clear what they are holding together.

  Most of the knots attach to Rufus. But of course, without Rufus, there would be no Kate at all. Richenda knows that she’s unkind to her husband, and sometimes unfair; she knows that there were times, earlier, when she was all too ready to let him sleep on the sofabed under his precious poster while she sulked on their vast and expensively sprung mattress. She wishes she had made more effort and got the marriage really working, or made less effort and left him. She remembers their early days, and how the nervous young man, recently emerged from the double prison of obesity and merciless bullying, had been devoted to her, following her around the way Beatle follows Kate now, dejected in her absence, ecstatic when she appears. He hadn’t known, then, how handsome he was, those eyes as bright as cornflowers and those cheekbones and the way his hair wouldn’t quite lie flat a
t the back of his neck. His shyness, his desire to please, was as true then as it is an act now. His interest in her studies was unfeigned, his enthusiasm for her body endless.

  And she curses the fact that she didn’t have the sense to realize that the way he reacted to a little bit of attention from her would be the way he would react to a little bit of attention from any woman.

  Yes, that’s the top and bottom of it, really, she thinks as she listens to Kate’s sobs subside. I can make it a lot more complicated, but it isn’t. That’s how he’s always been, and that’s how I’ve let it be. And now here we are. The mistake I made was to think that the state of our marriage wouldn’t affect Kate.

  When Kate was born – and earlier, when Kate was unborn, swimming and growing inside her mother – Rufus and Richenda took their role as parents very seriously. Rufus set up a savings account on his way to work on the day that Richenda took the test. (‘We don’t want to have any worries about university fees,’ he’d said.) They’d read books about child development and attended antenatal classes with the fervour of newly signed-up members of a cult. Richenda had felt loved, thoroughly, from without and within, and put the unsteady early years of their marriage down to – well, it didn’t matter, really, they were here now, and they were talking about what they’d be doing with their child in five, ten, twenty years, and they wouldn’t be doing that if they weren’t happy. Of course they wouldn’t.

  The birth had been uncomplicated. ‘I wish all of mine were like you,’ the midwife had said, ‘seven hours and three tiny stitches, and baby as calm as can be,’ and Rufus had burst into tears. Richenda had hardly noticed, looking at the wonder of her baby’s earlobes and the way her little feet flexed. Yes, Kate had been easy from the start: easy to feed, easy to get to sleep, easy to love.

  Not so easy to give a baby brother or sister to. The miscarriages and the grieving and the sex fraught with purpose were like taking Rufus and Richenda’s marriage and hurling it down a hill. When it came to rest, the part around Kate was still strong, but much else was broken. Simple intimacy had been one of the first things to smash; without it, honesty soon broke away.