Letters to My Husband

by Stephanie Butland

  Michael had unlaced his boot to take out a stone, and as he’d done so, he’d said, ‘I won’t have this problem next week. Next week it will be flip-flops all the way.’

  Kate had looked at him, an animal alert for danger, and he’d said, as casually as he could, ‘Oh, Elizabeth and I are going to the Canary Islands for a fortnight. Just to get her some sun before the holiday season at the hotel gets really busy, during the school summer holidays. Even after all this time, she can’t completely get used to the climate.’

  Kate hadn’t been able, in that moment, to fathom what was worse: the thought of two weeks without seeing him, or the way he had talked about his wife, so casually, the way you’d talk about your arm, so much a part of you that you barely think of it. She had watched Michael’s foot being swallowed up by his boot again, and watched his hands, lacing, pulling, back and forward, back and forward, snap, snap, snap.

  She’d thought about how, if he’d cared for her even the smallest bit, he would have explained it better, added some preamble, tried to let her down gently. He wouldn’t have told her that he was going away in a blurt, like that. He wouldn’t have flung it in her face.

  Kate had wanted to get up and go but she felt weak all over, and the tears came without announcing themselves in advance so she had no chance to dig her nails into her palms and stop them.

  Michael had fastened his boot again, stood up, and turned to Kate to suggest that they head back, before he noticed that she was crying. He sat down again, cursing his stupidity, knowing that he knew better than this, and he said her name. It was meant to be a coax, a teacher to a student, but it came out as a plea, a man to a woman.

  But Kate wouldn’t look. She kept crying, every now and then the heel of her hand swiping up her face to knock the tears aside. When Michael put an arm around her, she sat solid, not showing that she noticed.

  So he put out his free hand, and he turned her face towards him.

  It was the way his thumb fitted so exactly along her cheekbone that did it.

  And once he had kissed her, he was done for, and he knew it.

  When they had walked back to the car park, he said, ‘This can’t happen, Kate. You know that, don’t you?’

  And she had said, ‘I know, Mike.’ It was the first time she’d ever dared to shorten his name.

  When Michael had walked away from Kate that afternoon he was sure he’d never put himself in that position again. He’d planned to rearrange his shifts, persuade Elizabeth to do more dog-walking with him, get organized to go out with Blake and Hope more often. He’d stick to busy places. He’d explain to Kate that it was inappropriate for the two of them to spend so much time together and apologize if he had hurt her feelings or misled her in any way. By the time his hand was on the gate at home, half an hour later, that kiss had felt like a thing of the past, or an ill-judged moment in someone else’s life.

  But it hadn’t stayed that way.

  The holiday had been fine. Good, even. Elizabeth had read books and slept and been charmed by local bits of tourist nonsense, and she had worshipped the sun. Michael had read a bit, and gone to the gym once or twice, and stroked Elizabeth’s hair while she lazed and dozed. They went to couples-only resorts these days, so everything had felt quiet, and calm, and civilized. They had swum in the mornings and chatted over cocktails and meals and promised each other that they would cook fish more often when they got home. It had been every bit the holiday that they had planned: every bit the holiday that they always had these days.

  It was a holiday designed not to remind them of the fact that they didn’t have a child, or two children, or three. Designed to remind them of how lucky they were, to have each other, to have love, to have a happy home, to have the money to do this sort of thing.

  Except: maybe it wasn’t the thumb/cheekbone. Maybe it was the eyes, or the soft, waiting unsureness of two mouths new to each other. All Michael knew was that, all the time they were away, Kate Micklethwaite filled his mind. He didn’t think that she was anywhere near his heart, but he didn’t trust himself. Because he had already done something that he had been certain he would never do.

  He was a loyal man, a true man, a faithful man. He loved his wife, and since the moment he’d set eyes on her, standing behind the hotel reception desk with her uncomplicated eye contact and her unforgettable smile, he’d thought of no one else. No one. It had felt like madness. It had felt like walking towards those flames, the heat building, the cries behind him, powerless to stop.

  When he and Elizabeth had got home, Michael hadn’t been able to wait to take Pepper out and see whether Kate would appear. He knew how much could happen in a fortnight, and he half hoped that she had found herself a boyfriend – there was someone she mentioned sometimes, a lad who worked at the restaurant where she waited on tables at the weekend – and the other half he ignored.

  But Kate was nowhere to be found, although he walked Pepper in all the familiar places, and dawdled past the end of her road. It’s for the best, he told himself, imagining her hand in hand with someone nearer her own age, single, full of things to give her. It’s for the best, he said to himself, as he came home from work late and curled in bed, wrapping himself around his beautiful wife in the way they knew worked best for their bodies, Elizabeth waking only to mumble something with the words ‘love’ and ‘night’ in it.

  And after five days without so much as a whisper of Kate anywhere, he had given in, and he had texted her. He had remembered as he’d done so how he’d protested, politely, as she’d put her number into his phone. He hadn’t wanted to say, but why would I ever need to call you, so he’d just said, well, we often bump into each other so I shouldn’t think I’d need it. And Kate had smiled and said, you never know, and then rung her own number from his phone so that she had his number too.

  And Michael had paused before sending the three little words that he knew would change his world. But he had sent them.

  Kate had been waiting. After two weeks without seeing him, and another week since he’d got home – she’d checked the flights and worked out exactly when he would be back in Throckton – she was starting to wonder whether her strategy had failed. Her decision to let him find his way back to her if he wanted her had been much easier when he’d been out of the country: since he’d been back in Throckton, tanned and smiling, she’d found it much harder not to put herself in his path. Much harder to press ‘delete’ rather than ‘send’ after writing another text message.

  And then Kate’s phone beeped, and she was looking at three magic words: ‘Dog walking tonight?’ She didn’t reply. But she went. And they sat on the tree trunk, and they kissed, and Kate smelled limes and fresh sweat, and Michael tasted lip gloss and breath mints, and they were both of them lost.

  Mike,

  I remember, once, we were planning a holiday, and I said, how about a boat. Like a cruise, you said, and I knew you were thinking about your mum’s unending list of people she knew who were either planning a cruise, going on a cruise, away on a cruise, or coming back from a cruise. And I said no, not a cruise, a gulet. A little Turkish boat, maybe five or six other couples, just kind of doodling around the coast. Swimming, reading, sleeping, sex, watching the sun go down.

  And you shuddered, and you said, no, as though I’d suggested going clubbing in Ibiza or trekking through a rainforest or any of the other things we’d agreed that we never needed to do.

  You said, it was the idea of being surrounded by water that you didn’t like, a tiny little boat and nothing but sea.

  I asked you whether you’d looked at a map, if you knew where you lived, on a tiny little island full of people obsessed with going to the edges of it and looking at the water while they were lashed by the wind?

  I know, you said, but – I can’t stand the thought of it.

  And you shuddered again, and I stopped laughing at you, because I could tell that you weren’t fooling around, that you felt the way I felt when I walked past a pet shop and saw anything in
a cage.

  And I thought, how funny, I never knew that about you. We must have been married for eight years by then: I think it must have been about two years ago.

  Still. I never told you about the day I thought I was pregnant. You never knew that. You never, ever knew.

  So. My not-baby. Your surrounded by water thing. I think that makes us even. One secret each. No more. I know that.

  I refuse to talk about the rumours, or have anyone talk about them in our house. I’ve hardly seen your mother; she obviously can’t trust herself to keep off the subject. But in our bedroom, it doesn’t matter. In our bedroom, there’s just me, and the memories of us.

  I wish, wish, wish you were here.

  E xxx

  Now

  BLAKE FEELS AS though he has a foot in both camps, and is fully welcome in neither. Elizabeth’s eyes are hostile when he asks how she is feeling, and she snaps back that she’s feeling every bit the way he might imagine, and does he ask the Micklethwaites the same question?

  She’d got up and left the room, and he and Mel had caught each other’s eyes, and Elizabeth had called, from the bottom of the stairs, that there was no need to look at each other like that, she wasn’t mad, she just knew her husband.

  With Richenda, Blake can’t manage to have a constructive conversation, either. When he tells her, tentatively, that there are rumours about Kate that she probably ought to know about, she holds up a hand and says, Blake, I’m not at home to rumours, I don’t need them.

  But, he says, and she says, no buts, Blake, thank you. And he stands in her kitchen while she grinds beans for coffee and then tamps them with what seems like unnecessary force, and he sees what it would be like to have this woman as a teacher, a mother, a lover, the sort you could only push so far and if you overstepped the mark you’d know about it.

  ‘Rufus just wants to argue, because if he’s making a big noise he doesn’t have to think,’ she says, ‘and Kate is so busy thinking about what colour to paint the spare room that there’s no getting any sense out of her, but I can see it’s going to hit, sooner or later, and when it does, well, heaven only knows, and here I am, trying to keep us all together, which is a joke because we weren’t even together to begin with—’

  ‘These things—’ Blake begins.

  ‘Please don’t tell me that these things can bring a family together, because I’m sure it’s true but I don’t need to hear it now, while my husband is behaving like a spoilt little boy who can’t believe that everything isn’t going according to his plan, and my daughter is having to be way older than she should be, but I still hear her crying in her bedroom at night.’

  ‘I won’t,’ Blake says. Richenda takes coffee mugs from the shelf, puts them on the worktop, then looks at them as though she has never seen them before, and has no idea what they are doing there.

  ‘Coffee,’ he says, gently, and is rewarded with a smile, quickly erased by a shake of the head.

  ‘You can see,’ she says, ‘why I don’t need to hear any more bad news.’

  Mel’s desperation for a change of scene has brought her, Andy and Blake to the pub – ‘I’m having an early night,’ Elizabeth had said, and as if to prove her point had gone upstairs and started running a bath.

  So they’d gone. Blake had asked, halfway down the drive, whether they ought to leave her, but Andy had said they could, and Mel had grinned and said, see, a medical opinion, then added, sadly, all she does is work and sleep and cry.

  Mel manages to get what she declares to be a half-decent Martini – ‘If I can’t smoke, I need a real drink, not a pint of something cloudy’ – and sits back, in the corner of the corner table, a place they’ve chosen in the hope that they can Talk. ‘Right. Where do we start?’

  ‘No new rumours,’ Andy says, ‘I checked with Peggy when I left work. I know where you can get a kitten if you want one, though.’

  ‘Well, that’s something,’ Blake says. He has been over and over it. He keeps thinking about Michael: his dedication to the job, his burning need to help, to put right, to resolve. He had been a dream to work with from the beginning, punctual, willing, meticulous, able to talk to anyone. With time, a good judge of which situations needed a gentle hand and which needed to be shut down fast. Apart from the time when he walked into the burning building, the man had been everything he should have been.

  ‘So it might just die out of its own accord, if no one else says anything,’ Andy says.

  ‘Or if the father shows up,’ Blake adds.

  ‘Or if it’s not true,’ Mel adds, although it’s more of a moan. ‘Please let it not be true.’

  ‘Of course it’s not true,’ Blake says.

  ‘It’s hard,’ Andy says.

  ‘I tried to get her to agree to come back to Australia with me, again, but she just said she can’t leave Michael behind. Not even for a couple of weeks.’ They all shake their heads, helpless. Mel doesn’t tell them the other part of the conversation, when she’d pointed out that Elizabeth never visited the grave, and her sister had said, with chill dejection, that that didn’t mean she didn’t know how close to it she was.

  And they have another drink, and they try to talk about something else, they really do, but it’s like pushing water uphill: it won’t work, and it’s exhausting.

  ‘OK,’ Mel says, returning from a smoke break with two pints and a fresh Martini on a tray, ‘I’m just going to name the baby elephant in the bar, and if neither of you know what I’m talking about, or neither of you think we should be talking about it, then we’ll all pretend I was pissed and I made it up. OK?’

  Andy and Blake tip eyebrows at each other, nod.

  ‘Right,’ Mel says, ‘I know that Mike and my sister tried for years to have a baby and it never happened.’

  ‘I didn’t know that,’ Blake says, ‘though I was a bit surprised they didn’t have one. After the wedding Mike told me I’d be his first choice for godfather when the time came.’

  Andy says, ‘I knew they were trying. Michael said that there didn’t seem to be anything wrong with them. They went for IVF. Still nothing.’ He remembers how wan Elizabeth became, how sad. Lucy saying that she thought Elizabeth had ignored her and the twins in the street, and it wasn’t as though they were easy to miss, the noise they were making. How he’d told Elizabeth that she could come to see him if she wanted any help; how she hadn’t. He adds, ‘They were very private about it.’

  Mel nods. ‘I think I only knew because I was over here once when they were getting ready for IVF, and Elizabeth realized that she wasn’t going to be able to keep it hidden. I think it started because they didn’t want Patricia to know they were trying, and the only way to make sure Patricia doesn’t know something is to make sure nobody knows.’ They all pause, drink, pause again at the wisdom of this. Blake opens a packet of crisps, tears down the side of the packet, lays it flat on the table.

  ‘But what I was wondering was,’ Mel says, ‘Elizabeth always said that there was nothing wrong with either of them, it just wasn’t happening. When they had IVF I couldn’t get any details out of her. She always just said it hadn’t worked and it was too horrible to talk about. So I was thinking how neat it would be if she was lying to me to defend Mike’s honour, as it were. That if he was the one who had a problem …’

  ‘She could certainly be sure that Kate’s baby wasn’t his,’ Blake agrees.

  ‘Exactly!’ Mel takes a crisp, beams at it, balances the end of it on the tip of her tongue, brings it back into her mouth, crunches, beams again. Both of them look at Andy, hopeful.

  Andy remembers an afternoon he and Michael had driven into Marsham together to collect some secondhand furniture that Lucy had bought for the twins’ room. Not taking his eyes from the road, Michael had said, ‘So, a below-average sperm count isn’t disastrous, right? Because that’s the worst they can come up with.’ Andy had told him that no, it wasn’t disastrous at all, that it was the nature of averages that some people would fall below them.

/>   ‘His sperm count was a bit low, but a lot of men’s are. Half the fathers in Throckton will be the same. The tests didn’t find anything else. Elizabeth was telling the truth.’

  ‘Of course she was,’ and Mel puts her head in her hands, ‘so there was nothing wrong with either of them, and they wanted to have a baby, and they tried to have a baby, but no baby? That has got to fuck you up.’

  But Blake is on another path. ‘So there was no reason why he couldn’t have got someone else pregnant? In theory?’

  ‘Nope,’ says Andy, wondering how it is that they are talking about something they were sure could not have happened, ‘but he probably thought he was infertile, whatever the tests said. People do. They’d rather believe an answer that they don’t like, that fits the evidence in front of them, than live with uncertainty, or the idea that there might not be an answer at all.’

  ‘Oh, wise one,’ Mel says, muffled by her own palms.

  ‘It’s true, though,’ Blake adds, ‘sad, but true.’ He thinks of a family he knows where the mother, decades after her teenage son left home and never came back, still refuses to take a holiday, just in case she’s not there on the day he returns.

  ‘So if – hypothetically – a man who thought he was infertile, despite all medical evidence except the evidence that after years of relentless sex his wife still isn’t pregnant,’ Mel raises her head, pauses, gathers her jumbling thoughts, ‘if that hypothetical man was, hypothetically, shagging someone else, someone non-slutty and young and fertile, he might well not bother with a condom?’

  Mike,

  There’s an alternative universe in which none of these things are happening.

  In my alternative universe I got pregnant on holiday, and the fact that we’d had to wait a couple of years for our baby made us all the more excited about him. You watch the baby grow, and you talk to him and sing to him and we take sedate walks around Butler’s Pond and just let Pepper take a run around the garden last thing, so we can go to bed together and you can have a little chat with the baby before we go to sleep.