Letters to My Husband

by Stephanie Butland

  Elizabeth had said, ‘What if this just isn’t meant to be, Mike?’ and then, finally, she’d become quiet, still.

  Michael, torn between truth and calm, had chosen truth. ‘What if it had something wrong with it?’ he’d begun. ‘What if it grew up, and we were happy, and then our child died before we did? What if being an only child was too much for it? What if we missed all the years of just the two of us?’

  And then, in the quiet of the night, he’d given voice to what had seemed, when it was nestled inside him in the dark, the worst thought of all: ‘What if all this isn’t worth it?’

  That night they’d slept without moving, without dreaming, and in the morning when they’d woken they’d looked at each other with nervous eyes, afraid to confirm whether they’d really said the things they had the night before.

  Michael had been the one to make the move. ‘I’m glad we talked,’ he’d said simply, ‘I feel much better,’ and Elizabeth had smiled and said, yes. Yes.

  Mike,

  I’m making a patchwork quilt. I used to help Auntie Brenda do it, way back in the mists of time, when we didn’t have a lot of money and we didn’t have a lot to do. Auntie B used to save up worn-out clothes, curtains, sheets, and when she had enough she’d get out her hexagon templates and we’d start cutting out. You had to cut carefully round the hexagons so as not to waste anything.

  Mel used to get bored fast, so she’d get the job of putting them in piles, which wasn’t really a job at all, but she’d arrange all the hexagons into soft towers of different colours and that kept her happy.

  Then we’d sew the hexagons on to smaller hexagon templates that were cut from old Christmas and birthday cards. Then we’d sew the hexagons together. If our stitches weren’t neat enough Auntie B used to make us pull them out and start again. I think Mel pulled out more than she ever sewed, but I liked the precision of it, and I liked the fact that I was good at it, because most of the things we used to do – horse-riding and tree-climbing type things – Mel was always best at. She was cleverer at school, too. But I was best at sewing.

  Mel liked the part when you took the tacking stitches out and pulled the cardboard hexagons free, but Auntie B and I couldn’t sew fast enough for her. You could make patterns of flowers or diamonds or stripes or diagonals, or you could make the patchwork completely random, but that was much harder than you thought it was going to be – there would always end up being a pattern, somehow. When the hexagons were all done and all sewn up, we made a sandwich with an old sheet on the bottom, some flannel in the middle, and the patchwork on top, and we sewed a knot where every point touched. We all liked that bit best, I think: the feeling of racing towards the end.

  Like you said, the last mile of a marathon ought to be the worst, but it’s brilliant, because you’re nearly there.

  I’ve decided to make a quilt out of your shirts.

  I reckon it will take me three months.

  By the time I’m done, everyone will have forgotten the stupid, malicious talk about that baby. And I won’t have to get rid of your clothes, ever.

  There will still be your shoes, with the shape and shadow of your feet in them.

  Love, love, love,

  E xxx

  Now

  AS RICHENDA WALKS to the library, she lets her steps be slow and her breath weighty. Although she’s not looking forward to what it is she is going to do, and she hasn’t enjoyed what she’s leaving behind, she can see no reason why she shouldn’t make the most of this sweet space between.

  It’s Tuesday morning. For the first time in three days, no one is talking to her, glaring at her, sulking at her or ignoring her. No one is weeping; no one is achingly inconsolable. No one is making demands about food and care that reveal what a horribly thin veneer of equality exists in their relationship.

  Of course, Richenda understands why things have been the way they have been. Once the initial shock of Patricia’s visit had worn off, Kate had spoken to her midwife, who (as far as Richenda could tell from Kate’s end of the conversation) had made valiant attempts to reassure her over the phone, and then arranged to come round the following morning. Richenda and an unwilling Rufus had racked their brains and spoken to cousins and aunts they hadn’t been in touch with for years, and been unable to find any evidence or anecdote of cystic fibrosis. ‘That doesn’t mean anything,’ Kate had said, face ghoulish with the reflected light of the computer screen, ‘it’s a double recessive. We could all carry it.’

  Denyse, the midwife, had sat with Kate and Richenda and gone through everything they needed to know. If both Kate and the baby’s father were carriers of cystic fibrosis, there was a one in four chance that the baby would have it. Kate’s breath became a moan, but Denyse had said, Kate, you need to stay calm and listen: if neither of you are carriers, the chances are nearer one in a quarter of a million. Now, there is a good chance that the father is a carrier if his aunt was, but we’re not going to panic, because even then the odds are very much in your baby’s favour. She had held eye contact with Kate as she’d counted off on her fingers: there’s no reason to think that you carry the faulty gene, there’s been absolutely nothing in what we’ve seen of the baby on the scan to suggest that she has any problems at all, and we can do a simple test when baby is five days old which will tell us for sure whether there’s a problem.

  ‘There’s no test you can do now?’ Richenda had asked, seeing Kate’s stricken look, knowing that she was working out that that meant three months of waiting.

  But no, Denyse had said, it was too late for the usual tests, which needed to happen much earlier in the pregnancy.

  Kate was like a little girl again, weeping and following her mother, exhausted and afraid. Why didn’t you tell us about Michael, Richenda had asked her, struggling to get her arms around her daughter, and Kate had said, simply, I promised. I promised he could trust me.

  Richenda had accepted this. Rufus had not.

  ‘Did he force you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Kate, you can tell us if he did,’ and Kate had tapped at her phone, passed it to Rufus, who’d held it out for Richenda to see. Michael and Kate, Michael with his arm around Kate’s shoulders, Kate smiling, Michael looking, Richenda thinks, a little bit embarrassed. No forcing.

  Rufus’s voice is unsure whether it’s a shout or a sob. ‘So it happened more than once? It wasn’t a – a—’

  ‘A one-night stand? No, Dad, it wasn’t. But I don’t want to talk about it.’

  ‘I don’t care what you want. I’m thinking about what I want. I’m sorry if you don’t like it, Kate, but if I’m expected to have a hand in the upbringing and, presumably, financing of this dead man’s bastard—’

  Kate had given a little mewl then, and although Richenda thought afterwards that it must have been at the word ‘dead’, it seemed to come out just as Rufus said ‘bastard’ – ‘and it is a bastard, Kate, you can dress it up however you like’ – Rufus had stopped, taken a breath, looked away as he tried to find where he’d taken his finger off the place.

  Kate, undaunted, fierce at the insult to her baby, had offered, unrepentantly, ‘She’s just a baby, Dad. I don’t care what anyone thinks. I care that Mike isn’t here and I care that there might be something wrong with her. I didn’t want anyone to know, but now you do, so—’

  ‘So?’ Rufus had asked, voice low, trying to get Richenda to share his incredulous look. ‘So? Do you have any idea—’

  ‘Yes, Dad,’ she’d said, ‘I know you think I’ve thrown my life away. I know you think it’s the end of the world. I know you think Mike took advantage of me. You’re wrong, but there’s no way I can convince you of that. So you’re just going to have to wait and see.’

  And just as Richenda was being impressed by her daughter’s maturity, Kate walked away, up the stairs, and slammed her bedroom door behind her.

  Rufus had said, ‘See!’, with triumph and malice, and Richenda had truly wanted to hit him, only a fingerfew of times in her who
le life when violence had seemed like the best thing to do. Instead, she’d let him rage and snort and hypothesize at her, her mind on Kate and all that Kate would need. But Richenda had found the time, too, to take a vicious pleasure in not pointing out that all the things Rufus was raging over – Michael’s duplicitousness, his finding someone younger, picking on someone vulnerable to his charm, the exploiting of his position – were things that Rufus himself could be accused of.

  And then there had been Blake’s visit, yesterday morning. He’d arrived when Richenda and Kate were upstairs, talking about the nursery – the only distraction for Kate seemed to be to think about preparing for her baby – and Richenda hadn’t heard the knock at the door, so by the time the raised voices reached them, it was too late for her to do anything except go downstairs and watch and kick herself for forgetting that she’d arranged for Blake to be here, now, when under normal circumstances Rufus would be at work. Normal circumstances. As she heard the words in her head, Richenda felt as though she was listening to an excerpt from a long-dead language, words describing a concept that there was no need for in her world.

  At the top of the stairs, she had heard Rufus telling Blake that they now knew that ‘your dead friend’ was the father of Kate’s baby. By the time she reached the bottom, Rufus was saying, ‘For the last few months we’ve all been asked to worship that man, who turns out to be nothing more than a grubby little cheat. How are we to know that he didn’t push her in there himself?’

  ‘Well,’ Richenda had said, knowing she was fanning flames but too tired to stop herself, ‘we don’t, but as he went in as well, and as he got her out, we can assume it’s unlikely. Kate might have pushed him in, for all we know. Hello, Blake.’

  At that, Blake had caught her eye, nodded a greeting. And in the warmth in his glance, the look that said, ‘Of course I don’t understand what you are going through, but I do understand that it’s wrecking your family and now I’m here I’ll see if there’s anything I can do to limit the wreckage,’ Richenda had had the briefest of glimpses into an alternative universe, where it was a man like this who was steering into the eye of this storm, other storms too, with her.

  Next to him Rufus looked mean, unkind. But Rufus really was just the outward manifestation of the shrew that was burrowing inside Richenda, resenting too the time she’d spent on guilt for Elizabeth’s honourable husband, imagining how easy it would be to dazzle someone like Kate, so grown-up on the outside, so unsure and afraid that she’d cancelled her gap year – oh. Richenda had felt life tilt a little further. The cancelled gap year. Of course. She’s always felt there was something Kate wasn’t saying, about that. She had shaken her head, wanting to clear it of questions that her daughter had no intention of answering.

  Rufus had stopped berating for long enough to take a breath. He had looked small, next to Blake. Richenda had said, trying hard to keep her voice even, smooth, ‘Did you know, Blake? You worked with him. Did you know?’

  At this new thought Rufus had glared afresh. Blake had said, ‘No. I had no idea at all until Rufus told me just now, although—’

  ‘Although what?’ Rufus had asked.

  He’d shrugged. ‘Although police officers are trained to be suspicious, and they were in the same place at the same time. And a strange place at a strange time.’ As he had spoken Richenda had felt what he meant, felt the coldness of the air and the sucking of the water, felt how real all this was, how real it would continue to be.

  ‘Has she told you? Is it certain?’

  ‘Yes,’ Richenda had said. ‘Well, Patricia came here and told us that cystic fibrosis runs in her family. Kate’s face told us the rest.’

  ‘Oh,’ Blake had said.

  ‘And she has pictures of them. Not that it’s any of your business,’ Rufus had added, ‘and it’s not as though he’s here to face the consequences. Presumably he’d have been disciplined?’

  ‘Rufus, the man is dead, I think that’s punishment enough even for you,’ Richenda had said, and Blake had half raised his arm, palm upward, in a gesture that said yes.

  To Rufus he had said, quietly, carefully, ‘We don’t really know what happened. But, assuming the relationship was consensual, and I don’t think we’ve seen any signs that it wasn’t’ – he had paused, Richenda had nodded agreement with his assumption, saved him from the need to defend his friend from anything other than the kind of reckless stupidity that is a regular feature of life – ‘then what he did wasn’t actually illegal. It was certainly unwise—’

  ‘Unwise?’ Rufus had snapped straight again. Richenda had had water-words ready to pour on the flames of what she had been sure would come next, but Rufus had just turned and banged out of the house.

  The sound of Kate’s tears had filled the silence. Blake had looked at Richenda, holding out his arms, and for a moment she had allowed herself the luxury of walking up to him and being folded into smells of soap and grass. She’d stood with her own arms by her sides as he’d wrapped her, not quite a friend, not quite a professional. Richenda had given herself a heartbeat, two, three, four, five, then stepped away, his embrace knowing exactly when to let her go so that she had, without awkwardness, been able to nod, touch his elbow, turn and go up the stairs towards the tears. Afterwards, she’d thought that he had seemed to need that touch as much as she had.

  And now, Richenda has reached the door of the library. She puts her hand on the smooth, hot metal plate, pushes, and then lets the cooler air move out so that she can move in.

  Patricia loves her work at the library. She loves the smell of the place, not dusty exactly – she makes sure there’s no dust – but papery, which is a smell very close to dust. She loves the relentless order of it: letters, numbers, categories, a place for everything. She loves the sense of purpose that finds her, every day, as she puts her coat on the wooden hanger she brought in, checks the date on the milk in the fridge, and puts some lavender hand cream on before starting work. She loves being able to give a child their first library card, see the parade of familiar books loaned and returned, and – depending, of course, on whether and when the child decides it has better things to do than go to the library – following that child’s progress as he or she makes their way through school, university, coming back with their own children and saying, I remember this book. Sometimes, walking through Throckton, she will hear the words ‘Mrs Gray from the library’ drift after her and she’ll feel proud of herself, and sorry that there’s no one who’ll understand if she tries to tell them how that feels.

  She loves the sense that here, in this place where she spends her days, is written, somewhere, everything she knows, or is ever likely to want or need to know. She cannot see the point of typing a question into a machine when you can walk to a shelf, take down a book, and find the page where that very thing you want is waiting for you. Although Patricia has gamely learned how to use the computers they now have, although she will concede that they bring people in and they do have their uses, she still can see no greater miracle than a finger running down a page, stopping, finding what it needed.

  But the most important thing of all is that here, there’s always something to do. And on days like today, Patricia thinks as she heads off to re-shelve Large Print, you need to be able to see where you’ve been. Here, towards the back of the library, she’s less likely to be disturbed, and as the shelves become tidy and well ordered under her hands, she finds herself becoming less agitated. The feeling of having an awful lot to think about becomes less, as she allows herself to think. The knowledge that she’s done something that she’s not especially proud of starts to find its proper place in Patricia: she remembers all the reasons why she did what she did, and if she thinks about the stricken look on that poor girl’s face, well, she remembers that the girl would have had to find out sooner or later. Patricia hadn’t frightened her; the thought of cystic fibrosis had frightened her. She could remember very well how that felt.

  What the library can’t solve for her, this mo
rning, is the idea that people might misunderstand Michael: that they might think this whole thing, this baby, was his fault, his doing. That he was someone who made a habit of seducing young girls, when it’s obvious to Patricia that it’s the other way round. As far as she is concerned, Kate is one of the generation brought up to believe she is entitled to anything and everything she wants. Patricia herself was brought up to believe that what a man couldn’t get at home he’d look elsewhere for.

  Richenda’s appearance round the end of the shelf makes her jump. Patricia notices how pale she is. Richenda’s words have the sound of the carefully rehearsed about them: ‘I wanted to thank you,’ she says, ‘for coming to see us. For – what you said.’ Patricia nods.

  ‘And I wondered if we could talk,’ Richenda lowers her voice further, although there is no one near to hear, ‘grandmother to grandmother.’

  The staff room is little more than a cupboard, really, but it has two chairs and a door that closes and for now that’s all either of the women requires.

  Richenda begins: ‘I don’t think we’ll ever know quite how we got here, but I think we need to find a way to move forward. For the sake of the baby.’

  Patricia reminds herself that this woman is the girl’s mother, so there will always be things they won’t agree on. She thinks about what Michael used to say, when he was talking about work, about sorting out problems and arguments and fights: you start by working on what there is in common. So that’s what she does. She bites back her comment about having a fair idea of how they got here, and she says, ‘Yes. Yes we do.’

  Richenda says, ‘Kate will do her best, and so will I, but I think this baby will need all the love that we can give her. Am I right in thinking that you would like to be a part of that?’