Letters to My Husband

by Stephanie Butland

  The ground was wet underfoot. I remembered those conversations we used to have, about little wellies. Still.

  When I got to the place where you drowned I was all ready to cry, but I didn’t. The swan’s nest that we kept an eye on all last summer is abandoned now, and I sat down next to it. Pepper puttered about for a bit, and then he came and sat down next to me, and the two of us looked at the water. I thought about how cold it must have been, in the water and out, that night.

  And then I sat and wondered at how I came to end up here, thousands of miles from the place where I grew up, with no husband, no child, no future to speak of. I kept waiting to feel something: some sense of you, some revelation. The full force of grief. I think I hoped that there was something I’d missed so far, that I would understand. Some secret of mortality, some understanding of what happened to you that night.

  I waited, but nothing happened. Except maybe the knowledge that there’s nothing worse to come. I am plumbing my own depths of grief. There’s a strange sort of comfort in that.

  Then Pepper ran off and I found him curled into the roots of a tree, looking very sorry for himself. I thought I could smell your aftershave.

  On the walk home, I decided it’s time to start making some little steps out of this awful place. I don’t know how, or how well, I’ll do it. I do know that I will never stop missing you, or loving you, even though you did the thing you promised that you never would, and left me.

  E xxx

  Now

  MEL IS SURPRISED by how little resistance her haircut-and-new-clothes suggestion meets. She’d agreed with Andy that if she kept it light, made it not too much of a big deal, Elizabeth was more likely to agree, and so she waited until she and her sister stood side by side making sandwiches in the kitchen.

  ‘You know, sis, if I’m ever going to find myself a decent English bloke you need to stop this trip down the crone road. I’ve made us hair appointments in Marsham, and then we’ll get you a manicure, and then we’ll buy some clothes that fit you and aren’t jogging pants.’

  She’d stopped, watching Elizabeth carefully, kicking herself for making it sound like too much of a post-mourning makeover, but her sister had just said that that was fine, so long as they came straight home if she said so.

  ‘Do I look like a monster?’ Mel had asked.

  ‘No, you don’t, but I probably do,’ Elizabeth said, then added, ‘I know I have to start somewhere, Mel,’ with such a wobble in her voice that Mel had been the one in tears, for a change.

  When they’d pulled into the car park in Marsham, Mel had said, ‘You know, you’re allowed to do these things. Shaving your legs is not a betrayal of Mike. Having your nails done doesn’t mean you’ve forgotten him.’

  ‘I know,’ Elizabeth had said, but Mel hadn’t believed her.

  Elizabeth flips through the hair magazines while she half listens to Mel putting the fear of God into the hairdresser about what she wants and what she doesn’t. She’s heard it all before – how many times she had to go back until they got the colour exactly right, how in the end the MD of the whole chain got in his helicopter and came to meet Mel to apologize in person – and while it used to make her laugh, now it’s irritating, because a haircut feels so trivial. But then, suddenly, she’s looking at a picture of exactly the haircut she would want, if she cared about how she looked.

  Elizabeth shows the picture to Mel, who says, ‘It’s very short,’ and passes it on to Chloë, the hairdresser, who has somehow come out of the other side of the hair expectations lecture as a trusted friend. Chloë looks at the picture, scrunches her nose, looks at Elizabeth, head on one side, and says, ‘It is quite drastic.’

  Elizabeth says, ‘In India, widows shave their heads. In comparison, this is nothing.’ Mel and Chloë look at each other, Mel nods, and before Elizabeth can get exasperated about not being allowed to decide on her own hairstyle, she is having her hair shampooed and her scalp massaged. She takes deep breaths and endures. She thinks she might have liked this sort of thing once, but now she’s grown unused to such deliberate touching. This casual intimacy from a stranger feels wrong, when intimacy has become so absent from her days and nights.

  As Chloë cuts and great swathes of dark brown hair fall, heavy, to the floor, Elizabeth watches her reflection and feels as though she is coming back, from a long way away. Her eyes look bigger and her cheekbones are emerging from the shadows of her hair, casting shadows of their own. She has to admit that this suits her. And she thinks about how Mike wouldn’t have liked it: how he used to hold her hair in his hands, how she used to joke about having it cut off so he could carry it around with him; how even joking about it made him uncomfortable.

  She thinks about days at the beach in Australia, lying on her stomach reading while Mike stroked her hair, over and over, from the top of her head to the middle of her back, while he watched people go by. Every now and again she’d turn over and remind him that he was off duty, and he’d say, never. Which, as it turned out … Elizabeth watches her reflection and thinks about spilt milk, but it’s not enough to stop the tears from coming.

  Mel, trapped under a dryer at the other side of the salon, makes concerned faces and ‘honestly, it really suits you’ eyes. Chloë says, ‘It’ll grow back.’

  And Elizabeth, who is sick of crying, nods and dries her tears and doesn’t bother to explain how everything she’s done these last four months has been something Mike would have wanted, or would have approved of, or would have liked. This haircut, something he would have hated, is all for her. She can’t tell whether she is proud of herself, or ashamed. She’s definitely angry, but unsure of whether it’s herself or her husband that she’s angry with. But she feels strong. She is strong. She looks Chloë in the eye.

  ‘Now dye it blonde,’ she says, ‘really, really blonde. Icy.’

  Mel is sitting in the garden in the late afternoon sun, feeling mildly optimistic about her sister, who not only had a haircut – a real, proper, wow haircut, not the swift removal of split ends that had been the most Mel had hoped for – but also bought jeans, and tops that suit her, and a new pair of shoes. They’re not what Mel considers shoes – she admires her own new red-patent-leather boots, gleaming in the dull greens of the garden – but they are a start. And, as her experience of this funny little country is largely cobbles and mud, she can see why Elizabeth went the Mary-Jane route. The important thing, she texts gleefully to Andy and Blake, is that she has done some things that are looking after her, and that she has done them willingly and without repercussions, apart from the tears in the hairdresser’s which, Mel thinks, any long-haired woman might shed when she made such a big change. Although Elizabeth had gone upstairs as soon as they got back, Mel isn’t worried. This feels like a good road.

  Mel hears footsteps stop outside the gate and braces herself for another chat with Patricia. The two of them tend to plough the same furrows, conversation-wise: the wonderfulness of Michael, the delights of Throckton, how Elizabeth is doing. Patricia has gamely attempted to understand Mel’s work as a translator, but none of those conversations has gone well. Mel understands that there’s no malice in Patricia when she asks whether her job will be done by a computer one day (‘There’s no such thing as a literal translation,’ Mel had said, and Patricia had said, ‘Not yet’), but she tries to keep away from the subject. In what she thought was a moment of inspiration, she’d asked for book recommendations, thinking that this would mean that there was always something to talk about. Unfortunately for Mel, whose tastes are a little more varied, Patricia likes family sagas, and having supplied a dozen, interrogates her about them every time she sees her.

  But it’s not Patricia. It’s Rufus Micklethwaite, carrying a bouquet. Mel recognizes him from an article in the Throckton Warbler, when he’d been pictured at the opening of a school extension he’d designed. Patricia had pointed him out, wondering that he looked so pleased with himself after what his daughter was putting everyone through.

  �
�Hello,’ he says, ‘I believe you’re Elizabeth’s sister.’ He holds out a hand, which Melissa shakes, although just hearing this man speak her sister’s name has made her suddenly furious, her soul the colour of her boots.

  ‘That’s right,’ she says, ‘I’m the sister in charge of picking up the pieces.’ She sits down again, without gesturing for him to do the same.

  So he stands, awkward, and says, ‘I brought these for Elizabeth.’

  ‘You can’t see her,’ Mel says, ‘she’s sleeping.’ She lights a cigarette, blows smoke high, and ignores him to see what he’ll do. He stands his ground.

  ‘Well, I brought her these flowers—’

  ‘I’d assumed they weren’t for me.’ She nods, grudgingly, to a chair, and has a look at him.

  She has to admit that he’s handsome, at least if you don’t know what an idiot his daughter is: he has good skin, he knows how to dress, with decent cufflinks and trousers the right length, so that when he sits down she doesn’t get any leg.

  The flowers, too, are well chosen. The bouquet has no ribbons or flounces, stating clearly that they are not for a celebration, and no lilies either, so nothing to make anyone think of a funeral. There’s no fluff of fern or gypsophila, but there are sculpted leaves, which frame roses, tulips, freesias, tiny orchids, all in shades of purple.

  ‘They’re nice,’ Mel says, but then, seeing Rufus plump himself up at the praise, thinking of her sister crying, sleeping, crying, pacing, crying months of her life away, adds, ‘the perfect way to say, “I’m really sorry my daughter fucked up and your husband died and then, when it was all starting to get a bit better, my daughter fucked it up all over again.”’

  ‘I just wanted,’ Rufus says, ‘to let your sister know that we haven’t stopped thinking of her. That we won’t stop being grateful to her husband. I’m sorry if you think that’s inappropriate.’

  ‘What’s inappropriate,’ Mel says, quietly, so he has to lean a little towards her, ‘is a woman in her thirties being a widow. What’s inappropriate is her knowing that her husband died in such a terrible way. What’s inappropriate is you not knowing where your daughter is – which, frankly, points to how we are all in this mess in the first place – and so allowing her to upset my sister again. If Elizabeth was here she’d thank you for the flowers and say she was glad that Kate was alive, but she’s much nicer than I am.’

  ‘I’m sure she is,’ Rufus says, and gets up, ‘but I won’t trouble her or you again. I was trying to do the right thing.’

  ‘I think that’s best,’ Mel says, then adds, although she knows she shouldn’t, ‘Would you like to take a photo of my boots before you go? You seem to really like them. You’ve hardly taken your eyes off them.’ And she stretches out her leg so the leather gleams. As she tells a horrified Elizabeth and horribly amused Andy and Blake later, it was like shooting fish in a barrel, but she couldn’t help herself.

  Mike,

  Today I had a visit from Ian, who manages the hotel now. I think he was probably at your funeral though I don’t remember. Mel let him in.

  ‘Things are looking up, sister,’ she said as she brought him through. He wants to know if I want to work the season again. He was very kind. He said he didn’t know whether it would be inappropriate to ask, or inappropriate to assume that I wouldn’t want to come back, so he was here to see what I wanted to do, and to give me the option of saying no.

  I asked what he’d want and he said, the same as usual, really. Three to five days a week, a bit of flexibility, from the end of May to the start of September. I said, well, I suppose so, I have to start somewhere.

  Ian said, good.

  Mel said, I bet you’ve had more enthusiastic responses to a job offer than that one.

  Ian didn’t know what to say, but I told him to ignore her, and we arranged for me to go in and take a look at the updates to the computer system, and that was that.

  So, in two weeks I’ll be working, just like I was at the same time last year, and nothing like I was at the same time last year. I have no idea whether I’ll be able to do it. We’ll see.

  When Ian had gone, Mel said, I really didn’t know what you were going to say.

  I said, me neither, until I opened my mouth. But it’s time, isn’t it?

  She said, yes, it’s time.

  I think maybe it’s time for her to go home, too, but when I mentioned it, she said her career’s been going brilliantly since she’s been here because there isn’t a decent Daiquiri to be had within fifty kilometres so she’s in no hurry to leave. I think that’s Mel-speak for ‘I’m not quite sure that you’re ready to do without me just yet’, which is probably fair enough. For all that I may look a bit more together on the outside, I think it’s more of a scab that I’ve formed than anything else.

  I mean, look at me. Look inside. Underneath.

  I’m still writing to you, for a start.

  I loved you. I love you. I will love you.

  E xxx

  Then

  ELIZABETH HAD GOT through her first British winter with relative ease. The fact that she was newly, glowingly, excitedly married had helped: so had the winter itself, a snowy, bright one rather than the dull, wet months she’d been warned about. The days matched her mood. She watched in wonder at the snow coming down, laughed as it made a clean squeak in her hands.

  Michael in his turn had watched her and hoped, with all his heart, that she would settle to life here, and keep on being as happy as she seemed to be. Back in Australia for their wedding, she had asked him whether he really would have been prepared to move for her. He’d said yes, and he’d meant it, because he would have done anything for her and for the sake of being with her. But he doesn’t think he would have liked it the way Elizabeth seems to like it here.

  They had decided to run the Marsham March Marathon together, and so even on the darkest days they were out training, putting in the miles as Michael says, clocking up the kilometres according to Elizabeth. A training run is the setting for their first serious argument: Michael trips, and his wife laughs and tells him not to make such a fuss, then keeps running. Somehow – and neither of them can ever work out how – that night Mike insists on sleeping on the sofa after Elizabeth has told him that if he wants to be mollycoddled then he’s picked the wrong woman, and he’s said that yes, maybe he did, he had no idea she could be so selfish. Some time around 4 a.m., he’d climbed into bed beside her, and she’d said, I have no idea how that all happened, and he’d said, no, me neither, and that was the end of it, although their training runs seemed to lose their rhythm for a while. But they both ran a personal best in the marathon.

  ‘We’re so good for each other,’ Mike had said as they crossed the line.

  That spring, Elizabeth found a job in the new hotel on the outskirts of Throckton. So, on their first wedding anniversary, spent in a country house hotel just the other side of Marsham because Michael could only get one night off, Mr and Mrs Gray seemed to be settling down well enough.

  ‘Are you really happy here?’ he’d asked her.

  ‘Yes, Mike, I’m as happy as can be. I really am.’ Elizabeth had noticed how much reassurance he needed: even now they were married, settled, and she was the one on the wrong side of the world if it all went badly, he still needed her to tell him that everything was all right. Which it was. So that was fine. She kissed him, hoping to distract him.

  ‘I’m so glad. When I look at you I still can’t quite believe my luck.’

  It was the next anniversary when the baby question became the baby answer. Elizabeth and Michael were in Edinburgh, walking down the Royal Mile, dodging pushchairs and laughing about the increasingly unsubtle hints coming their way from Patricia, when Elizabeth had said, in the casual way that only comes out when things mean a very great deal, ‘Well, I’m game if you are, Mike.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Really.’ She’d only glanced towards him, not so much as broken her stride as they walked together down the hill, but he’d stil
l known that this was no spur-of-the-moment offer. His beloved wife wanted their first baby now. His beloved wife would have one. Michael must, somehow, prepare for a better life than he had now, a job he loved, a place to live that had always looked after him, this woman beside him. It seemed impossible to him.

  But not to Elizabeth, who had been ambushed by her desire for a baby. Motherless since the age of nine, she thought of mothers as something that happened to other people. When she watched friends with their children, she more often than not found herself overpowered by anxiety on behalf of the baby, imagining itself safe in the unchanging world of its mother’s arms when in fact anything could go wrong, at any time. She had to stop herself from interrogating her friends about what provision they had made for their children should disaster strike. When she and Michael had talked about their own plans for a family, she’d known, in the abstract, that that was what she wanted, but had no idea of how the hot, visceral need would hit her.

  One ordinary day, a couple had checked into the hotel, bleary from a long drive, bickery from tiredness as they gave their details. By the woman’s feet was a baby car seat and the child in it, dressed all in pink and still peachy with newness, stretched in her sleep, and it was as though that wave of a tiny arm flicked a switch in Elizabeth. In that instant, she loved the child, she longed for her own child, and when the woman sensed her baby waking and picked her up, all tension draining out of her as the little one found its place against her shoulder, Elizabeth felt such jealousy attack her that she wondered if she was ill.

  The next anniversary, they were still in good spirits. Marriage had failed to settle down into something mundane, everyday, uninteresting: Michael and Elizabeth were still walking hand in hand, seeking each other out, planning time together, mainly delighting in the life they were making.