Letters to My Husband

by Stephanie Butland

  The tiredness comes over her again, and she gives in to it, thinking as she drifts off that this might be her last night of thinking of herself as just tired. Because tomorrow morning is the morning when she’ll do the thing that she knows she’s been putting off for too long. She should have done it the moment she had that crashing, crushing realization. But she’ll do it tomorrow. Tomorrow will be soon enough.

  Richenda cannot stop thinking about Elizabeth, and how she looked at the inquest. How she had seemed hollow, her clothes too big and her hands never still. How, when Blake had put his arm on her back to guide her to her place, Richenda wouldn’t have been surprised if it went straight through her. How it was as though there was a wave behind her, swelling, and she wasn’t moving away from it fast enough to stop it from engulfing her. She watches Rufus eating, as he reads the newspaper, and thinks: if anything happened to you, if you died, I wouldn’t care in anything like the way that Elizabeth cares about Michael. I would care, of course, because we’ve shared such a lot, good and bad, and been together for so long, but the fact is I’m relieved when you leave, my heart drops when you come back, and I wish one of us had had the courage to call it a day before it felt too late to start over.

  Suddenly Richenda is tired, and although it’s barely nine all she wants to do is sleep. ‘I’m going to check on Kate, and then I’m going to bed,’ she says.

  Rufus nods. ‘I’ll see you later.’

  ‘Yes,’ but Richenda pauses at the bottom of the stairs. ‘Actually, Rufus, would you mind sleeping in the spare room tonight?’

  ‘If you like,’ he says. After a moment flicking through his memories of the last few days, he adds, in the tone of a child given an undeserved detention, ‘But I haven’t done anything.’

  ‘I know,’ Richenda says, and she gives him a sad smile that says: humour me, please, for the sake of all the times that you have done something that means you deserve to spend the night on the too-thin mattress under the Sergeant Pepper poster.

  Rufus nods. ‘It’s been a tough day. I’ll see you in the morning.’

  Mike,

  I wasn’t sure whether you would get any more letters, but it turns out that you do. I’m not sure how many more there will be, so make the most of it, wherever you are. I’m still angry. I know it’s not your fault. I’m angry with Kate too. And with myself, for being stupid, stupid, stupid.

  Being angry is exhausting, but if I stop I don’t know what there’ll be. A space big enough for me to drown in, too.

  Whenever there’s something about a fatal accident on the news, a cyclist killed or someone getting shot or a car accident, you see so many people at the place where it happened. Parents, neighbours, school-friends, whoever, laying teddy bears and tying flowers on to fences with twine. Messages to the person who’s died, as though they are going to pop along and read them when everyone’s gone.

  But I’ve never wanted to go to Butler’s Pond. Plenty of people have offered to take me. Blake, Andy, even your mother, who I think goes down there, quietly, every couple of days, and then goes to your grave. I haven’t been able to see the point of looking at the place where you died. Maybe it’s denial, or a desire to bypass that sort of mawkishness. To me, there’s more dignity in staying here, in our home, and grieving for you. Your mother doesn’t see any dignity in me sitting around the house in track pants, getting further and further away from the world, but it’s felt right to me, so I’ve done it. The last couple of nights, I’ve gone to bed being able to remember what was on TV. I don’t know why I resisted sleeping tablets for so long: anything that wipes out ten hours of my life at a swallow has got to be a good thing. In the fortnight since the Garden Incident I’ve taken them every night and the mechanics of life – sleep, food, night, day – are starting to make a semblance of sense.

  Mel, your mother, Andy and Blake are all acting as though I’m a marvel because I sleep at night and eat at the table. I’ve been out for three walks in the last two weeks, up to Beau’s Heights with Blake and Hope, and you’d think I was abseiling down the Empire State Building from the way they go on about it. What they see as going forward feels a bit like defeat to me. I’m not sure that I want to move forward, or on, or away, or whatever it is. These last three months have been dark as all hell, but dark is safe.

  Anyway. Tomorrow, I’m going to go and take a look at the place where you died. I’m going to go quietly, on my own, except for Pepper, who’ll be my excuse for leaving the house unescorted. (Andy keeps offering to take Mel to get some walking shoes. You can imagine how likely that is.)

  I won’t ever get over you, but I might learn to live with the fact that you’re not here. One day. Not tomorrow, though.

  I’ll take daffodils from the garden and hope that it isn’t too grim.

  E xxx

  Then

  ELIZABETH’S FIRST VISIT to Throckton had been better than any of them could have hoped for. For Michael, seeing the woman he loved in the place that he loved, after months of wondering and longing, was a simple, all-absorbing delight.

  Elizabeth had been ecstatic to see Michael, bursting into sobs at the airport when she saw him waiting for her, his arms opening wide as soon as she stepped into his view. She had become awash with worries about what she was doing as soon as her flight took off from Sydney, and spent a fair amount of the twenty-three hours of travel time checking the small print on her return flight and working out whether she could afford to change it and go home early. So the sight of Mike, not only looking top to toe exactly as she remembered, but also making her feel just as she’d hoped, a key sliding into a lock, had been a great relief. And a new worry.

  ‘You do know,’ Mel had said into the quiet on the way to the airport, ‘that he’s going to want you to stay, don’t you?’

  Elizabeth had protested, brandishing her return ticket.

  ‘That’s not what I mean,’ Mel had said, ‘I mean, he’s never going to settle here, is he? You can see that, just looking at him. He’s going to want you to live there, at some point. So you need to be thinking about whether you could learn to live there. He’s going to want to know.’

  Michael refused overtime and spent every moment he could with Elizabeth, showing her everything from the park where he played as a boy to the pub where he spent Saturday nights. They walked to the top of Beau’s Heights, meandered around Butler’s Pond, strolled by the river and ate ploughman’s lunches in quiet pubs.

  ‘I’ve never wanted a dog before,’ Elizabeth had mused, ‘but it seems strange not to have one here.’

  Michael, looking for any sign that Elizabeth was giving serious thought to their future, had squeezed her hand a little more tightly as they walked home again.

  They’d taken day trips to the Cotswolds and the seaside – ‘Now this is a beach,’ Michael had said proudly as they stood on a slab of pebbly damp sand, alone apart from a handful of seagulls and a dog-walker, looking at the grey-purple, sullen water – and spent a long weekend in London.

  Elizabeth, who would be running a marathon three weeks after she got back, went for long runs while Michael was at work. He only once had to rescue her – ‘I took a wrong turn and I’m in a phone box and all I can see is a bridge and a bunch of oak trees,’ she’d said, and instead of giving her directions he’d gone to pick her up and found her sitting on a five-bar gate looking at the sunset. ‘It’s so lovely,’ she’d said, and Michael, watching his love for signs of something deeper than tourist appreciation, hoped. But it was hard to tell.

  So Elizabeth had thought about it all. She’d looked at the pale sky and the pale people, casting off clothes at the first hint of sun, exclaiming at what seemed to her a laughable lack of heat. She’d listened to Michael as he explained the land, the reason the roads were the way they were, the importance of hedgerows. She’d been astonished by the history that everything seemed to have – not just capital-H history, but how everything around Michael had significance. There was the wall he fell off and broke his leg when
he was nine, the place he first got really drunk when he was fifteen, his father’s grave. Everywhere Michael and Elizabeth went, there was someone to say hello to: an ex-girlfriend’s mother, a colleague’s son, an old teacher, someone who knew Michael’s mother from the library.

  ‘It’s like a big web,’ Elizabeth had said, and Michael had said, ‘Yes, isn’t it,’ smiling at her, delighted at her understanding, with no idea that she might not be offering a compliment.

  Michael had taken Elizabeth to meet his mother, on her first night in Throckton. (‘I’ve said we’ll go round there,’ he’d said. ‘She’s desperate to meet you. I’m sorry,’ and Elizabeth had smiled and said, ‘No, don’t be silly, of course she wants to check me out, it’s what any mother would do. Mel did it to you. Just make my apologies if I go to sleep.’)

  They’d arrived, hand in hand and grinning like idiots at the simple thrill of simple touching after three months of the absence of each other’s skin, and Patricia had recognized in an instant that this was no holiday romance. Elizabeth, struggling through tiredness but charming nonetheless, had wanted to know everything there was to know about Michael, and when Patricia had offered to get the photographs out and Michael had groaned, she and Elizabeth had looked at each other and laughed, the smallest of bonds made and shared, and Patricia had thought, well, I still don’t know why he had to choose a girl from Australia when there are so many lovely ones in Throckton, but if she’s the one, he could have done a lot worse.

  ‘What do you think, Mum?’ Michael had asked later, Elizabeth having fallen fast asleep on the sofa with no warning, and Patricia had told him that she was a lovely girl and, if she was really what he wanted, he’d be a fool to let her go. ‘I’m glad you like her, Mum,’ he’d said. She had been about to ask whether he was sure that they would be making their lives here rather than there, when she’d decided that she didn’t want to know that, not yet. So she’d shooed them home and watched to see how Elizabeth got on in Throckton.

  It was three weeks afterwards when the two of them got to talk. Michael had gone to work: Elizabeth was helping Patricia with the washing-up. She’d developed a simple strategy for being with Patricia – she asked a lot of questions, about Throckton, about Michael, and so the conversation never stopped.

  But that night, Elizabeth had been quiet as she dried plates – methodically, thoroughly, front and back, Patricia noted – and so the older woman had seen a moment to understand more, and said, quietly, ‘A penny for your thoughts?’

  ‘Oh,’ Elizabeth had said, ‘I don’t think they’re worth that, really.’

  Patricia had thought that that was going to be the end of it, but after the next plate was dried the younger woman had spoken again. The twang of her voice was still difficult for Patricia, who found herself paying closer attention, always, when Elizabeth said something. ‘I was just thinking about my mother. She died, you know?’

  ‘Yes, Michael told me. I’m sorry.’

  ‘It was a long time ago,’ Elizabeth had said, ‘but we were young, my sister and I, and we went to live with our aunt and uncle, and we were happy enough, but—’

  ‘You never quite get over it.’

  ‘No. And—’ Elizabeth was feeling for just the right words now. ‘Because we never had a dad, not that we could remember’ – seeing Patricia’s face, she hurried to be clear – ‘he’s not dead or anything, was just a bit of a wild one, you know? And he left my mother, as soon as he found out that Mel was coming along.’

  Patricia tutted, although Elizabeth didn’t think she knew that she’d done it, and she dried another plate (actually, it was the same plate again, though neither woman noticed) before continuing. ‘What I was thinking was that Michael and I, we’ve both lost a parent, and we understand what that’s like. And it means we understand how important our close relationships are, and we know that we need to treasure them.’ And she’d put down the last plate, folded the tea towel the way Michael’s mother liked them to be folded, long edge to long edge then on the oven door to dry, and smiled.

  Patricia had said yes, and she’d put the kettle on. She wasn’t good at conversations with the word ‘relationship’ in them. So instead she touched Elizabeth’s arm as she passed her, a touch that said: I understand that you are telling me my son is safe with you, and I thank you.

  Michael and Elizabeth’s last night together wasn’t easy. They went out for dinner, and looked miserably at each other as they drank too much wine and ate almost nothing.

  ‘Can we just go home,’ Elizabeth had asked when the dessert menu came along, and Michael had paid the bill without a murmur, his idea of a romantic evening having died as soon as he’d seen the tears in her eyes when she picked up the menu.

  ‘The food’s not that bad,’ he’d said, and she’d said, ‘Mike, I don’t know how I’m going to manage this next bit,’ and he’d said, ‘I know,’ because he had no idea either. Now that there was an imprint of Elizabeth everywhere in Throckton, there would be no way to stop missing her.

  At home, he said, ‘We said we’d talk about things after eighteen months.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Shall we talk about them now, instead?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Do you want me to come and live in Australia?’ His face is solemn, true. Elizabeth takes a breath.

  ‘No,’ she says, and his face is already crumpling, before she can get the rest out. ‘Mike, listen, I can’t ask you to move to Australia because I can see how much this place means to you, and I’ve seen you in Australia, and I don’t think it would work—’

  ‘I’d get used to it,’ he says, ‘I would. It’s just a question of acclimatizing.’

  She wants to kiss his stoical face. She does, because tomorrow there will be no face to kiss. ‘Maybe,’ Elizabeth says. In Michael’s eyes, hope. ‘Or I could come here. Settle. I could settle here.’

  ‘Could you?’ he asks.

  ‘Yes,’ she says, ‘I could. I’ve thought about it. I could.’ She doesn’t say: this place is everything I don’t quite remember, growing up, before my mother died, before we had to go and live on a farm, before I decided on the other extreme and headed for the big city that was just as lonely. She didn’t say: there’s something here, apart from you, that feels comfortable, for all of the oddness, for all the Wedgwood blue up above where the azure should be. She knows how hard it will be to be parted from Mel; hopes, trusts that the agreement they made, years ago, that they would always be there for each other but would never hold each other back, will be strong enough.

  ‘Before you make up your mind,’ he says, and suddenly it’s all got very, very serious again, ‘if you come here, there are some things you should know.’

  ‘OK,’ she says, and her voice is slow but her mind is fast, fast, flicking through everything they’ve said and emailed and talked about and not talked about, trying to find the shoe-drop that she’s missed before the second one falls.

  ‘I don’t want you to come here to live with me. I want you to come here and marry me and I want us to have hundreds of babies.’

  She laughs: ‘Hundreds?’ Remembers their ‘Hopes and Dreams’ emails, a mixture of the silly and sublime, marriage, children, happy old age mentioned by both, sandwiched between jokes about space travel and keeping pigs just in case they’d misjudged each other.

  ‘Hundreds,’ he says, ‘and all of them with your eyes, please.’

  She says: ‘I could do that. But let’s aim for three, first, and see how it goes.’ And he looks at her, as closely as he can look, to make sure that she is sure.

  And she is.

  She goes home, their parting a sort of triumph because it’s the first step in their avowed life together. On the flight she stretches between sleep and not-sleep, twisting the pretty silver ring that they bought on the way to the airport round and round on her ring finger. (Michael had taken a note of the size so that he could, he said, ‘organize the real thing’ for when they were next together. The woman in the
shop had as good as melted on the spot.)

  They start the paperwork, Michael impatient and methodical, Elizabeth by turns calm and frustrated, and after four months that felt like a long time apart but are forgotten as soon as the plane lands, they are reunited. Elizabeth has a fiancée’s visa; the wedding is just less than a year away.

  ‘You’re here for good this time,’ Michael says.

  ‘For good,’ Elizabeth agrees. She doesn’t tell him that, for the sake of her sister’s peace of mind, she’s opened a joint credit-card account with Mel. It’s for emergencies only, the emergency being that if she’s not happy, if she doesn’t settle, if anything goes wrong, she’ll get straight on a plane and come home. (I’m only agreeing if it works both ways, and you’ll use this to come to me if you need to, Elizabeth had said. It’s been you and me for a long time, and I don’t want you to think for a moment that I don’t know that this is a big deal for you too.) She does tell him that the sisters have agreed to spend a month together every year, here or there or in between, fortnights of holidays or months as house guests.

  Patricia manages to hide her horror at the idea of a beach wedding in Australia fairly well, comforting herself with the idea of Throckton grandchildren and the little bit of exoticism that Elizabeth is bringing to her family, remembering that conversation in the kitchen, sure as she can be that her new daughter-in-law-to-be is every bit as serious, as loving as her son is. And after all, they are old enough to know what they are doing.

  Within a week of Elizabeth returning to Throckton they’ve a puppy, soon named Salty due to his habit of licking their legs when they come back from a run. Elizabeth has finished the first part of her unpacking, and they’ve found, or made, homes for everything in Michael’s previously too-big house.

  ‘So we’re all set,’ Michael says.

  ‘Happy ever after, here we come,’ Elizabeth replies.

  Mike,

  I’ve – we’ve – walked around Butler’s Pond hundreds of times, so it wasn’t as though there were going to be any surprises. The water was still, and Pepper frightened some ducks, but the noise they made frightened him right back. It’s the sort of thing that used to make us laugh. This time I just felt jealous of Pepper, of his ability to be crushed, for a moment, and then bounce up again as though nothing bad had happened.