Letters to My Husband

by Stephanie Butland

  Until then, Richenda does the maths, and wonders about Christmas parties, and that boy whose mother manages the restaurant where Kate sometimes works, and the possibility of violence. And she wonders, yet again, how she could know so little about her daughter.

  She thinks of how Kate had been tested for pregnancy when she was admitted to hospital after the accident. She remembers because Rufus had had to be placated when he found out – ‘It’s completely routine in admissions of women of child-bearing age,’ the consultant had said. ‘We have to know, just in case.’ ‘You’ll find it’s negative,’ Rufus had said, ‘she doesn’t even have a boyfriend.’

  Richenda wonders, not for the first time, whether Kate had been at Butler’s Pond to meet someone. But surely, if she had, he would have come forward by now, come to see her, come to make sure she was all right?

  When they go for the scan, Kate does hold Richenda’s hand. Richenda looks at the small, taut mound of baby when Kate pulls up her top, and cannot believe she didn’t notice. She shakes her head. ‘Please, Mum,’ Kate says, misunderstanding, and Richenda smiles and touches her daughter’s hair, which is the same cream-blonde it was when she was born, although everyone said it would darken.

  ‘It will be all right,’ she says.

  ‘Let’s see if we can find a heartbeat first,’ the radiographer says, and Kate’s whole world shudders to a halt, holding its breath. And then there is noise, filling the room, strong and fast, like feet running along a wet pavement. She looks at her mother, sees a mirror of her own delight and relief, and starts to cry.

  ‘You see, it will be all right,’ Richenda says, looking at the mixture of child and adult in front of her. She thinks of how, whatever the circumstances, you can’t really regret a baby. She remembers her own mother, saying, ‘A baby brings its own love.’ And she thinks about how this almost-young-woman is her daughter still, and if ever there was a time for a mother to stand with her daughter, it’s now.

  And then there’s a picture on the screen, and for a moment the radiographer, who has been all business so far, softens and says, ‘You never get tired of this bit.’

  She starts to measure and check, while Kate and Richenda watch the heart blipping away and the arms and legs moving and point to the outline of a nose and chin.

  Kate has to be asked twice whether she wants to know the sex of the baby, not because she hesitates over the yes, but because she is so absorbed in the graphite image, greedy for the sight of her child, that she doesn’t hear the question. Her last few months of worry and fear and living in a strange, secret universe vanish as she watches her baby’s tiny feet flex. The grief, the loss, remain, but they move back to make room for this new, greater reality.

  ‘You can say what you like to her,’ Richenda says to her poleaxed husband later, ‘but I’m telling you, Rufus, there’s no point.’

  ‘She has options,’ Rufus spits, ‘other than her preferred option of throwing her life away.’

  ‘You can see that, and I can see that,’ Richenda says, ‘but I saw her face when she looked at the scan and they told her it was a girl. I’ve never seen her so—’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous, Richenda, of course she was going to look like that. It’s hormones. It’s instinct. The biological imperative to reproduce, nothing more. We’re outside the hormone cloud. We can see clearly. We’re her parents. She can’t keep it. We can’t let her.’

  ‘We can’t make her do anything else. She’s nineteen. She’s an adult.’

  Rufus pauses, absorbing this. His wife watches as his brain flicks through the possibilities: threaten to throw her out, throw her out, buy a flat to throw her into, let her throw herself on the mercy of the council. He looks at Richenda. His eyes say: all right, all right, you’re right. There can be no throwing. He sighs.

  ‘She’s supposed to be going to Oxford, for crying out loud. Four As at A level. For this?’

  ‘We know that she’s a bright girl. Which means she won’t throw her life away. She’ll have the baby then she’ll find her path.’

  ‘That’s a matter of opinion. She wasn’t very bright when she got herself—’ Unable to say the word, Rufus gets up, sits down, gets up, walks to the window, glares into the garden.

  Watching him, Richenda is thankful for the bargain she struck with Kate on the way home from the hospital: she would break the news to Rufus, if Kate would consent to a sensible conversation with him when he’d calmed down.

  Kate had agreed, with the caveat that the baby’s father was not, and would never be, up for discussion. ‘He’s not going to be part of our lives,’ she’d said.

  ‘Well,’ Richenda had replied, ‘that’s fine, except that your father and I will both want to know that you haven’t been …’ she had rejected ‘forced’, deciding instead on ‘hurt’.

  ‘Hurt?’ Kate had looked puzzled for a moment, then understood. ‘No, Mum. Not the way you think, anyway.’

  Rufus turns his back on the garden, annoyed by its rampant fecundity.

  ‘You don’t think she’ll have an abortion?’

  ‘No. I’m certain she won’t. And anyway, at five months, it’s – it’s not an easy thing. Not pleasant.’

  Rufus makes a half-shrug gesture, dismissing these mechanics as irrelevant to the much more pressing subject of his daughter’s future, having no idea that he’s just added another reason for his wife, already primed, to loathe him a little bit more. ‘Adoption, then?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘I’m completely sure, Rufus. Don’t think I didn’t think about everything that you’re thinking about. But she’s not going to be talked out of this. She’s having a baby. She’s made a choice, and the only choice we are left with is whether we support her or not.’

  ‘And where will the father be in all this? Do we know who he is?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Does Kate know?’

  ‘I think so. She’s not telling, though. Not yet, anyway. I think the less we ask, the better, at this stage.’

  ‘Well, that’s obvious. Christ, Christ, Christ.’ Rufus is still glaring. ‘What do we actually know? Do we know anything at all?’

  Richenda chooses to answer the letter of his question, and ignore the spirit. ‘We know that she’s twenty weeks pregnant. We know that the baby is a girl. We know that both of them are well, and the bleeding was nothing significant. We know that we only know about the pregnancy because of the bleeding, and Kate would have kept this a secret for longer if she could have, because she has no intention of giving this baby up. We know that we don’t know who the father is and Kate is unwilling and unlikely to tell us, until and unless something changes. We know that, if things go as they should,’ she ignores her husband’s furious snort, ‘Kate will have a baby some time around the middle of September.’

  She judges that the storm has passed, and she sits down next to Rufus, speaks quietly. ‘We know that we’ve always supported our daughter.’

  When Patricia arrives, bearing one of her pies, she looks as though she’s going to burst. Elizabeth braces herself for another tale that she won’t be able to follow. It starts unpromisingly, about how someone who had come into the library today had been talking to someone else who had had a hospital appointment the day before, for a lung complaint that won’t be cured, which is a terrible shame.

  She was just launching into an explanation of who, exactly, the person with the breathing problem was, when Mel looked up from her laptop and said, ‘Christ, Patricia, I can do Spanish into English, but not with Throckton rattling away in the background, so do you think you could please get to the point? I’m on a deadline here.’

  Patricia pauses, waits until both Elizabeth and Mel are looking at her, and says, ‘Well, the Micklethwaite girl—’

  ‘Kate,’ Elizabeth corrects, automatically, one of the many small ways she’s found to show her motherin-law that, despite everything, she’s not prepared to vilify the girl. She knows that making a target out
of Kate won’t bring Michael back.

  ‘Well, Kate Micklethwaite was seen at the hospital, leaving the Early Pregnancy Unit, with her mother, and they both looked a bit teary, and the girl – Kate – was holding what looked like a scan.’ She looks at Elizabeth and Mel, who don’t seem to be getting it. ‘A scan. Of a baby. A baby picture that you get when you’re pregnant, these days.’

  ‘OK,’ Elizabeth says. ‘Well, I suppose she might be. We don’t know a lot about her, really.’ She looks to her sister for rescue: babies plus Kate Micklethwaite in any combination aren’t going to make her evening bearable.

  Mel adds, ‘There’s no law against it. Girls will be girls.’

  ‘It seems that she’s no better than she should be, that’s for sure, for all of her picture-in-the-paper-with-her-place-at-Oxford,’ Patricia sniffs, ‘and where was the boyfriend when she needed pulling out of a lake, that’s what I want to know.’

  This is just the sort of malicious triumph that Elizabeth can’t stomach. She gets up, walks to the kitchen, switches the oven on, breathes. Deep, deep breaths. She remembers the girl in the garden, beautiful and frail, just as broken as she is, in a different way. Slow, slow breaths.

  In the other room, Mel is pointing out that they know nothing, really, and even if she is pregnant, that’s her business.

  Patricia is arguing for a baby as further proof that Mike Died for Nothing. When Elizabeth hears Mel asking whether, if Kate had fallen into the water because she was reaching for her library card, that would be an acceptable reason for Mike to go in after her, she interrupts to see if Patricia wants tea. She doesn’t: she’s on her way to a meeting of the church council.

  ‘You know,’ Elizabeth says to her gently, on the doorstep, ‘she might be ill. Maybe the Early Pregnancy Unit is in the same direction as the MRI scanner, or the place they take your blood for testing. Maybe it’s Richenda that’s ill. Maybe Kate is pregnant, because since Mike died she’s been reckless and upset. Maybe she is pregnant, but there’s something wrong. We just don’t know, Patricia.’

  Patricia, who has listened quietly to all of this, half turned away, turns back, touches Elizabeth on the shoulder, looks straight into her face. ‘Michael always said you always see the good,’ she says, but the way she says it makes Elizabeth feel that her motherin-law is telling her off, and her husband is joining in from beyond the grave.

  Every now and again Mel thinks about going home: about her sociable Sydney life and the way her friends are changing, new jobs, new relationships appearing on Facebook and making her homesick. But there’s something in her that won’t let her leave her sister. Not just yet. Even though Elizabeth seems to be ready to go back to work and is sleeping better and spending less time looking like a woman trapped at the bottom of a well, it feels too soon.

  But they are establishing a new sort of normality.

  Elizabeth is back to full-time dog-walking again, although she strides out looking at her feet and the six feet of pavement in front of her. Sometimes she arranges to meet Blake, but any discussion of shift patterns makes her sad, and she quite likes the chance to concentrate on her body and think about the things it can do that aren’t crying and aching – stride, climb, breathe deeply, hurl a stick. She has ordered a new pair of her favourite running shoes. She wants her lungs to burn with something other than tears. The thing she likes least about going out is the coming back: the whole weight of Michael not being at home when she gets there, never being at home when she gets there, crashes down on her again. Not quite again: because every time it happens it happens in a slightly different way, so it’s always surprisingly, shockingly painful.

  Blake is filling the absence created by the death of his friend with more overtime, more sports coaching, more time at the gym. He’s not good at dropping by to see how Elizabeth is, but he often finds a purpose for a visit: he mows the lawn, he’s battled back the leylandii that Michael and Elizabeth somehow never got around to dealing with.

  Lucy had put her foot down when Andy suggested that they might not take an Easter holiday in case Elizabeth needed him.

  ‘What Elizabeth needs,’ she’d said, ‘is to start to learn to live without him. And so do you.’

  ‘He would want me to look after her,’ he’d replied.

  ‘Yes, but he wouldn’t want you to move in with her, and there are times when I think that you might as well.’ It was almost six years since Elizabeth, looking closed off and uncomfortable, had come to see them after the boys were born and refused to hold either of them. ‘I’m not going to make you take one away with you,’ Lucy had joked, and Elizabeth had shot her a look full of fury. Lucy would like to think that she didn’t hold this against Elizabeth, after all this time, all this tragedy: she suspected that she did.

  ‘I’m trying to do the right thing,’ Andy had said.

  But he’d known that his wife was right. Then she’d said, ‘The right thing is to put your own family first, now, and treat her like your friend, and let her work out how to cope on her own,’ and she’d taken his hands, ‘and you can start working out how to manage without him as well. Don’t use helping Elizabeth to stop you from missing your friend. You can’t fix this, Andy. Don’t break other things trying.’

  So they’d agreed that he would go round for an evening every couple of weeks, invite Elizabeth to their home now and then – ‘Not yet,’ she’d said last time, ‘but I think I will, soon, thank you’ – and drop in for a coffee sometimes, in between. It seemed to be working.

  Meanwhile Patricia is doing what she always does: being busy, being helpful (in the ways she judges to be helpful). She can’t talk to Elizabeth about Michael, much – can’t even bear to hear her call him ‘Mike’, a version of his name that he’d rejected with everyone else – but she can feed her, and encourage her, and try to keep her interested. So that’s what she does.

  The evening before Elizabeth goes back to work sees her, Mel, Andy and Blake gathered in the garden. Mel is cooking chicken and salmon on the barbecue, Elizabeth has assembled a salad and bought a pavlova, Andy and Blake have brought the beer. Elizabeth had suggested this, wanting to mark the occasion ‘although it’s not an occasion, and it’s definitely not a celebration’, she’d said to them all, ‘it’s just a—’ But she couldn’t find a word. ‘It’s a gathering,’ said Blake, and Elizabeth had agreed that that would do. Patricia, who is at the WI this evening, has brought some bread and said not to worry about her not being there, she doesn’t really like food cooked outdoors anyway.

  It’s a not uncheerful evening. Elizabeth is more-present than she has been, and Michael is an occasional, gentle topic of conversation. Tonight it feels as though it’s Mel’s turn to be quiet – ‘My head’s in Spanish, I’m having to translate you all,’ she explains, when Elizabeth puts her hand over hers and asks if she’s OK – as the others talk of nothing much.

  When Blake gets up to go, Mel goes with him, picking up her cigarettes and clipping Pepper’s lead on. ‘You’re a hell of a good excuse, and that’s all,’ she mutters as she takes him to the door. ‘Don’t go thinking I like you.’

  ‘I assume,’ Blake says, ‘you’re talking to the dog.’

  She waits until they turn into the corner of Blake’s road before she tells him the short version of Patricia’s story. ‘Well,’ he says, ‘that’s Throckton for you. They were probably visiting someone, and before you know it, Kate will be having triplets.’

  ‘Yes,’ Mel says, ‘but, Blake, if we didn’t know Michael, if all we knew was that she went into the water, he was there, close by, he went in after her, he died, and now it turns out that she’s pregnant, what would we think?’

  ‘Mel, you can’t be saying—’ Blake is standing very still. He’s looking over her shoulder. She can’t read him.

  ‘I’m not saying anything. I’m just saying, if we hadn’t known Michael, what would we be thinking?’

  Walking away from what he still thinks of as Elizabeth and Michael’s house, Andy remembers a
time – the only time – when he and his friend were both at the scene of an accident. A cyclist had got caught in the wheels of a truck, just along the road from the surgery, and a horrified witness had come to find a doctor after calling an ambulance. Andy had been standing in reception at the time. He’d picked up the emergency kit, and run.

  In the event, there wasn’t a lot for him to do. The cyclist had possible spinal injuries and a crushed pelvis at the very least, but it didn’t look good. The guy would be lucky to walk again, let alone get on a bike. Andy cleared his airway, got a line in ready for the paramedics, and told Michael, who was standing on the pavement making sure that no one whose curiosity got the better of them would be able to have a look, that he’d never complain about doing a diabetic clinic again.

  And then the man’s phone, on the road by the doctor’s knee, started to ring. ‘Gran’ came up on the display, shaking Andy more than the blood and shattered bone and the sound of the truck driver sobbing.

  He’d held the phone up to Michael, mute, horrified, thinking that the next time this gran was likely to hear her grandson’s name would be attached to some very bad news. The cyclist was no longer a jigsaw of bone and blood, a game played against poor medical odds.

  Michael had taken the phone from him and switched it off, then put it back in the cyclist’s bag.

  ‘What you have to remember on days like this,’ Michael had said, ‘is that everything works out, somehow, in the end.’ Seeing the look Andy gave him, he’d added, ‘I’m not saying it happens for a purpose or a plan. I’m saying, even with the terrible things, it works out somehow, in the end. The river always gets to the sea.’

  Mike,

  Well, I did it. I put on my black skirt and my white shirt and mascara and tights and heels, and I went to work. I said, ‘Welcome to Throckton,’ and I smiled and I chatted a little bit, and I was all right. Ian hovered for the morning, and Emily took me to lunch, which I’m sure wasn’t as casual an arrangement as it seemed, but I’m getting to be graceful when people try to help me, because God knows I’m not good at life without you, and I need all the help I can get.