‘Yes, it’s nothing like that,’ he says, ‘just something I’ve heard that I think it’s best you know about.’
‘You’d better come in, then,’ she says, thinking that there’s not a lot happens in Throckton that he would know about before she did.
‘Yes,’ he says, ‘this won’t take long.’
Patricia offers him coffee: she thinks she can smell whisky, which will be down to Mel again. I’ll sleep when I’m dead, Patricia, she’d said the other night, which was all very well, but Michael and Elizabeth were never big drinkers, and Patricia would hate to see Elizabeth being led astray. Especially with those tablets Andy has got her on.
‘I saw that Elizabeth and Mel were drinking whisky again the other night,’ she says as they wait for the kettle to boil, ‘and I wondered about those tablets you’ve given her. If it could be dangerous.’
‘Oh, it’s all right, Patricia,’ Andy says, though he seems a bit distracted. ‘It’s either the sleeping tablets or the whisky. One or the other, I’ve told her.’
‘Well, good,’ Patricia says, uncertainly, as she carries their drinks through, coffee for him, camomile tea for her. But she soon understands why she hasn’t had his full attention.
Sitting in the room full of photographs of her two dead men, Andy tells Patricia that he’s heard a rumour that Kate Micklethwaite’s baby had been fathered by Michael. He tries to be as matter-of-fact as he can. He tells her that Kate has said nothing about the father, and that he couldn’t see that there was any truth in it, just people putting two and two together to make five because he was near enough to save her when she went into the water. He says, he really didn’t think it was worth worrying about, and he’s only here because he doesn’t want her to hear it from elsewhere.
And then Andy braces himself for the rant about That Girl, and the goodness of Michael. Part of the reason he is here, now, on the brink of when she will think it acceptable of him to call, is because Blake had said that she would need time to think about it, and Mel had wanted to put the maximum possible distance between her hearing the news and her being able to talk to anyone – especially Elizabeth. So he’d gone home for bath-and-bedtime, told Lucy the tale, and come to do the deed.
But Patricia doesn’t rant about Kate and she doesn’t reminisce about Michael. Her mind is tumbling and turning like ferrets in a sack. She knows, of course, that Michael would be very, very unlikely to do anything as sordid as get involved with a girl when he was so happily married himself. But she also knows, with the wisdom of a long life, that these things will and do happen, no matter how contrary appearances are.
She starts to think about Elizabeth: such a lovely girl, but always working, all those holidays, no babies. Michael wasn’t brought up that way, and she should know.
Well. Stranger things have happened, that’s for certain.
She puts down her cup and saucer, carefully, by her feet, and she puts her hands on her knees and takes a deep breath, bracing, and then she looks straight at Andy and she says, ‘You’re telling me that I may have a grandchild?’
Mike,
When you died there were a lot of things I had to do that I didn’t like. Go to your funeral. Look into your poor mother’s devastated face every day and understand that it was a reflection of what my own face looked like. Read letters with the words ‘late’ and ‘deceased’ in them. Go to sleep on my own, every night – or try to – and wake up on my own, every morning. Not be able to talk to you, or at least not have you talk back to me when I did. Look at your weird beer in the fridge and your horrible sweet cereal in the cupboard and know you wouldn’t be back for them.
And I know that there are decisions I will have to make that I won’t like, either. Mel wants me to think about going home with her, she says for a holiday but I know what she’s thinking. I’m refusing, for now, but the day might come when I have to really think about where I want to spend the rest of my days, and whether to move back to Australia or not. One day I might have to make decisions about Pepper without you – he’s started limping, sometimes, when he’s been running too hard, and it makes me think that one day he’ll have something really wrong with him. It was hard enough to make the decision about Salty together, and then to take him to the vet’s and leave without him. I remember how you wouldn’t let me go into the consulting room with you. I said goodbye to him in the waiting room and then you did the hard thing. I can’t imagine losing Pepper, let alone having to be the brave one when the time comes.
I can’t even bear the thought of the mundane things, replacing the double glazing, renewing the insurance, buying a new car before our beloved banger rusts itself to death during another crappy, damp English autumn/winter/spring. But I’ve come to accept that I can manage to do these things without you, when I have to, because I tried lying down and dying and that didn’t work, and so now I don’t have a lot of other options.
One thing I never thought I’d have to do – something that wouldn’t have crossed my mind until I got ambushed into that vile conversation – was to stand up for your good name. I didn’t think I’d need to tell people who loved you too that you didn’t screw a teenage girl, that you’re not the father of her child. Because it’s so blindingly obvious. Why would anyone even think that you would do such a thing? Everyone knows we were happy. Everyone knows that we loved each other and that we didn’t need anyone else. For crying out loud, it’s Throckton. Your mother once asked me why you’d been buying white bread when we normally had brown. Someone would have known if you’d so much as looked at Kate Micklethwaite. And even if they hadn’t, I would have known. I was your wife. I loved you. You loved me. I would have known.
I know that you probably don’t care about this stuff any more, because you’re all made of grace and starlight now, or whatever, and human suffering is something that you’ve forgotten, or are seeing from a long way away, like watching a rainstorm through a window.
But, wherever you are, whatever you’re doing, I need you to know that I care, and I don’t believe it, really don’t believe it. I won’t believe it. It’s not true. I know that.
I’m standing up for you.
I love you.
E xxx
Then
THE HOLIDAY WAS meant to be blissful. ‘Remember,’ Michael had said when they booked it, a break before IVF began and therefore, very possibly, their last holiday as a couple rather than a family, ‘my darling Elizabeth, we are having a holiday because you’ve worked hard all summer and we need to top up your sunshine before winter comes. We are not going on a baby-making expedition.’ She’d laughed, and said no, of course not, but she did rather hope there would be some sex, and she’d kissed him, but she’d wondered if he had been reading her mind. Because just at that moment she’d been thinking about the advice she’d been giving Mel – that the best way to find a man was to stop looking for one, and just go and enjoy having her own life – and she’d thought, yes, perhaps the best way to get a baby is to forget that that’s what we’re trying to do. All those teenagers with prams who thought it could never happen to them: maybe that’s what we need, to be forgetful of the consequences.
And Michael and Elizabeth had tried. Elizabeth hadn’t taken her temperature; Michael had tried not to watch her for signs of excitement, disappointment, premenstrual tension, tried not to step carefully round her, calculate dates and times – although at this point it wasn’t really possible for him to unlearn everything he knew about cycles and timings. They had lazed in bed in the mornings, gone to markets, gone snorkelling, lain in hammocks, reading, during the hottest part of the day, settled on the balcony at night. All in all, they did an excellent impression of people who didn’t have the baby they had yet to make on their minds all the time.
Elizabeth had tried to remember how much she loved, simply loved, her husband; he had tried to appreciate her, turning golden in the sun, beautiful and fit and strong, although her shoulders drooped when she thought he wasn’t watching, and her eyes took
on a fairy-tale hunger as she watched toddlers splashing in the shallows on the beach.
They had drunk too much on the last night. Elizabeth had been bright and brittle during dinner, but afterwards, walking along the shoreline, warm evening water lapping at their ankles, she’d confessed how much easier it was for her to be happy here, at night, when all of the children were safely tucked up in bed. How she dreaded the flight tomorrow, the babies who could only be comforted by their mothers, the fathers proudly pretend-apologizing as their big-eyed offspring tried to play with everyone around them. Elizabeth tried to explain how it’s the assumption children have that they will be loved that broke her heart: because she would love, oh, how she would love, a child of her own. Of their own.
Michael had held her and they had stood in the warm tide until the water lapped at the backs of Elizabeth’s knees, tickling her into the now again. They’d walked up to the hotel hand in hand, and Michael had told her that he thought they were getting some help with this, just in time, before they both got broken, and she had nodded and smiled and said, yes, Mike, it’s time. I know I’m breaking. I know you’re holding me together, and that’s not fair on you. That night they had both slept better than they had in a while, and in the morning they’d smiled straight into each other’s eyes.
During the flight home, Elizabeth had played peek-a-boo with the toddler on the seat in front of her for what seemed like hours, and Michael had watched her: the patience on her face, the smile in her eyes. The child’s mother had thanked her as they got ready to get off the plane; Elizabeth, still smiling at the child, had said that she was getting some practice in. ‘Oh! Congratulations,’ the mother had said, ‘you’ll make a lovely mother.’ And somehow, in that moment, it had been easier for Elizabeth and Michael to smile at each other and squeeze each other’s hands and say, thank you, than it had been to embark on an awkward correction.
‘It’s a sign,’ Elizabeth had said in the car on the way home, and although Michael didn’t believe in signs, he’d just smiled and said, ‘Well, you will be a lovely mother.’ And then they were back in Throckton and it felt as though everyone was lining up to tell them how well they looked, how relaxed, how happy, and the baby seemed no longer a distant, fading possibility, but a little plump gurgle of newness waiting just round the corner.
Two months later, the first cycle of IVF had a certain novelty value to it: the daily injections, the appointments, the schedule, all meant that Elizabeth and Michael had a sense of purpose. Things were happening at last.
Elizabeth was shining with excitement. The baby-naming conversations started again.
‘Does it have to be a flower, for a girl?’ she’d asked.
He’d said, ‘What’s more beautiful than a flower?’
Elizabeth had shrugged and said, ‘OK, but I’m crossing Rose off. Too thorny.’
Michael had known he should have said something, just a cautionary word or two, but he couldn’t quite bring himself to remind her of everything that the consultant had told them: that it might take a while, that it might not work, that Elizabeth’s body would strain and that their relationship would be tautened and tested. That it would be hard, and unpleasant in places, and the success rate was a lot better than it used to be, but it was not guaranteed.
Elizabeth had smiled, and said, ‘We think we’ve waited long enough,’ and, well, that had been it. They were off. Blood tests, tablets, injections, dates in their diary. In the coldest November Elizabeth had experienced since she came to Throckton, she glowed with warmth and excitement. Patricia had kept commenting on how well she looked, even risked the word ‘blooming’ a couple of times, but Elizabeth had stuck with their resolve to tell no one anything until they had something to tell. As she injected her thigh every morning, she reminded herself that there didn’t seem to be anything wrong with either of them, so what they were doing was a boost. Michael kissed the little circles of bruises on her thighs better and brought her flowers. And so she bloated, and she ached, and she waited, and she was absolutely certain that she’d taken the stern advice of the nurse to heart: that on no account was she to think that she might be pregnant during the two-week wait to see if an embryo had implanted. That there was no way to know. That she must put the whole question out of her mind.
But when the bleeding started, and the scan confirmed the gaping black emptiness of her womb, tight and cramped inside her like a clenched fist, something in her broke a little bit more.
Still, that first time, it was almost easy to talk about bad luck. They had known it might take more than one go. Elizabeth could find a brave face, although she started to go to bed earlier and earlier, and sometimes didn’t wake when Michael got in beside her after a long shift or a late dog-walk.
Salty died two days before they went back for the embryos to be implanted the second time – he’d gone from being a little bit off his food to being put down in the space of two weeks – so it always seemed unlikely that a baby would come from those sad days. When the bleeding had started, Elizabeth had felt sad, but not surprised.
It was during the third try that Elizabeth and Michael started to struggle. With their new pup Pepper a force of scuttering, chewing enthusiasm for life, and bluebells everywhere on their walks, and a feeling of warmth returning to the world, they couldn’t quite believe it when a baby still didn’t materialize. To not be pregnant seemed perverse. To sit, weeping, over blood once more, while everywhere Elizabeth looked there seemed to be growth and newness, was wrong. But it was what happened.
Sitting in front of the consultant like two bright sixth-formers who hadn’t done as well as they should have in their exams, Michael and Elizabeth had talked about options again. Their NHS-funded treatment was at an end. Michael remembered being a boy at a fairground, looking at his empty hands where three hard rubber balls had been a minute ago, the coconut still obstinate on its stand. His father, clapping him on the shoulder, saying: some things are harder than they look, son.
The consultant had advised a break and suggested that they could come back in six months and fund their own treatment, if they wanted to. Elizabeth had cried. The consultant had offered tissues, with the gesture of a man who mopped tears with great regularity. And Michael had said thank you, and taken his wife by the hand, and walked her to the car park, and put her in the car, and tucked the belt around her. And in many ways he had felt not a lot different to the way he felt when he spent a day at work dealing with the aftermath of a car accident, a house fire, a sudden death. He was sorry, he was helpless, he was hurt, he was strong with the strength that comes of having a role to play. These things were all the same, whether he was taking his distraught wife home or doing his job on a difficult day. But there was a difference that made all the difference. At work, he was not responsible for whatever had gone wrong to begin with. At work, he could hand over to someone else, and go home, to a life that had once been so perfect he could barely believe it would last. Well.
‘Maybe we should have a weekend away,’ Elizabeth had said, in an attempt at making an effort, a couple of days later. Michael had agreed, although he used to like it when holidays were holidays, rather than attempts to recover from the last failure of baby-making or prepare for the next. But neither of them had the heart to organize anything, and if they were going to pay for IVF they’d have to watch their money. So Michael bought a set of all the James Bond films on DVD – he couldn’t remember so much as a single baby in a Bond film – and they watched them, one a night, and when they had worked their way through them all, they went back to the fertility unit and started IVF again.
Mike,
I’ve started driving to work. I don’t talk to anyone any more than I have to. I drive home and I come upstairs, to our room, and I wait for all this to pass.
Because it will. It will. All I have to do is wait. I can wait.
But when I close my eyes, and I want to see you, instead I see her.
Standing in our garden with that look on her face.
Leaving the flowers.
Help me.
E xxx
Between
IT WAS ONE of Michael and Elizabeth’s holidays that brought everything to a head. Michael and Kate had just bumped into each other, in a way that could have looked casual, Kate coming out of the café at the entrance to Butler’s Pond just in time to see Michael arriving with Pepper, Michael setting off slowly on his walk so that anyone walking quickly would have been able to catch him up just out of sight of the car park.
Kate had had a lot to say about waiting for exam results, and how far away university seemed, and how boring her parents’ arguments were, how repetitive, and how every time they whined or shouted each other’s names she was glad that they had, at least, given her a sensible, easy name. ‘Although my middle name is Eris,’ she’d said, ‘so I didn’t get off completely, when it came to weird names.’
‘I’m Michael John,’ Michael had offered, ‘you can’t get much more functional than that.’
‘Like bread and butter,’ Kate had said, and she’d smiled.
Up until then, that smile, Michael had been pleased with how things were going. It had all been as he’d been determined it would be: what he had in mind when these walks had started. These conversations made what he was doing a sort of public service. He was striving to mentor a teenager who was under pressure, to show her that there was life beyond exams, and parents arguing. He knew what it was to be an only child: he knew what it was to feel the borders of Throckton as restraints and frustrations.
But then there was that smile: it gave him a glimpse of what she was feeling. That smile, that in another man – a man less devoted to his wife, his beautiful, generous, sweet-natured, unreproaching wife – might feel an answering glint.
By common consent, they had seated themselves on a fallen tree a little way away from the main path. On warm days like today, Michael would pour some water into Kate’s cupped hands, and she would stretch down her arms so that Pepper could drink before he settled at their feet. No one would be passing close enough to see who they were.
Letters to My Husband Page 15