Letters to My Husband

by Stephanie Butland

‘Yes please.’

  ‘Toast? Or maybe some coal?’

  ‘Very funny, Dad.’

  They sit, by unspoken consent, in the half-dark. Kate balances her plate on her bump, and Rufus says, without thinking, ‘Your mother used to do that when she was expecting you.’ Kate thinks, two references to pregnancy in one morning, maybe we’re getting somewhere.

  She asks, ‘Are you disappointed, Dad?’ and although in her head it was a strong, matter-of-fact, it’s-time-we-addressed-this question, when it comes out it’s spoken by a little girl.

  And perhaps that’s why Rufus can answer it. ‘I’m disappointed for you, Kate,’ he says. ‘I hoped for so much for you, and although I know you think that you can manage it all still, and perhaps you will, it won’t be the same. It won’t be as – as carefree. It will be harder than you think it is, whether the baby is ill or not, and I don’t want that for you. I want you to have a wonderful life, not …’ He pauses while he tries to think of a better phrase than ‘saddled with a baby’, and in that space, Kate hauls herself up and over to him and sits next to him.

  ‘She’s kicking,’ she says, and she takes her father’s unwilling hand and puts it on the place, and he can’t help but smile, ‘and I know, Dad, that this isn’t what you wanted, and it’s not exactly what I planned either, but it’s what I’ve got, so I’m going to do my best with it.’

  Rufus thinks of all that he wants to say. About how watching Richenda love Kate had been the best thing that he’d ever seen, as well as the thing that had made him feel most superfluous. About how, although it looks as if he cannot bear the thought of this baby, what he really cannot bear is the thought of his daughter being trapped, unhappy, unable to move, in the way that he and Richenda have been. But he takes a good look at Kate, who is looking down at her own body in wonder, her hand following the baby as it moves. Her filled-out face reminds him of her at six, with pigtails and a bike she fell off more than she ever rode, although it didn’t stop her trying.

  And he says nothing, until Kate turns to him and says, ‘Dad, will you go through my questions for the midwife with me, and see if there’s anything I’ve missed?’

  And he says, ‘Yes, Kate, of course I will.’

  Elizabeth’s world starts to fade. The hospital smell gets fainter and the rattle of voices around her stops, a tambourine put down on the floor. She feels a breath sigh out of her, and she is empty, then she is filled again with nothingness.

  For the first time since Mike died, Elizabeth remembers what peaceful is like. She has the feeling she gets when she steps off the plane and sees the blue of an Australian sky. She tries to breathe without making a noise. She thinks she must be sleeping. Then she smells limes, hot salty skin. In her head, she asks, Mike, is that you?

  Hello, he says.

  She knows that it isn’t him, of course it isn’t. But it also sort-of is, for as long as she keeps her eyes closed.

  I’m so sorry, maybe-dream-Mike says, so sorry.

  I know, her heart says, I know you are. But I don’t know why you did it. We were happy, weren’t we? We were good. I go over it and over it and I can’t see why you did it. We loved each other.

  The air moves as it does when someone shrugs, shifting the smells around. Elizabeth breathes in more limes. Mike’s voice again: I don’t know why I did it either, except she seemed to need me.

  She keeps her eyes closed: she knows that she mustn’t try to look at him, she mustn’t try to touch where she is sure he is. If she does, he’ll vanish, like her shadow when she switches out the light. I needed you, she thinks.

  I know, Mike says, I can see that now. It’s as though there’s a cobweb-thread between them. His voice comes again. You were always so capable, so strong. Even about the baby, you could cope in a way that I couldn’t.

  Did you really think that, Elizabeth says? It broke my heart. Breaks my heart. When it isn’t breaking over you.

  Mike is getting quieter. I think I needed someone to help, he says. You didn’t seem to need me, Elizabeth.

  In this peaceful place she smiles. If you were alive I’d kill you for saying that, Mike, shagging teenagers isn’t helping anyone. And anyway, I was only capable because you were there. You were my stepping stones, and you’ve gone. You could see when I was sad before I did, and you found a way to distract me from the sadness. You came to collect me from work when it was raining. When we were running, you matched your pace to mine, even though you could have gone faster. Sometimes, I was sad, and just the sound of you at the door was enough to make me happy. I can’t go on without you. I’ll drown. I’m drowning. Right now.

  You can do this, Mike says, and Elizabeth can hear him breathing. She wants him to touch her. The tears are starting, the noise of the hospital coming back. He says, I promise you, Elizabeth, you can do this.

  I wish you’d tell me what happened that night, she says. Her hands are gripping on to the blanket now, and so there’s a pain where a needle goes into the back of her hand and she’s stretching the skin around it, but it’s not so much the pain as the sense of returning that makes her flinch. She tries to push the feeling of her body away, but her throat is adamant in its dryness, her headache pressing in. And there are tears, tears.

  ‘Mike,’ she says, out loud.

  ‘Mel,’ comes the reply, as gruff as her own. ‘Welcome back, sis.’

  And then there are people in the room, and painkillers, and questions, and Elizabeth cries when she understands what she’s done, or nearly done. She tries to explain that all she was trying to do was to sleep through her birthday, but the words don’t seem to make sense to anyone except her. And then sleep comes again.

  The next time Elizabeth wakes, she feels better. Andy is by her bed this time.

  ‘Hello,’ he says, ‘you’ve been asleep for a long time, but you’re fine, Elizabeth.’

  ‘Hello,’ she says, and then she lies quietly, for a while. Then: ‘I thought I was talking to Mike. It wasn’t a dream.’ Her lips feel gummy, her throat furred. She struggles to sit up. Her head hurts but her mind feels clearer, a stirred pond allowed to settle. Andy hands her water, which is warmish with a metal tang. She doesn’t mind.

  ‘I’m so sorry about all this, Elizabeth,’ Andy says. ‘I should have seen the signs. I should have done more. I didn’t know you were so—’

  She closes her eyes. ‘I was trying to sleep through my birthday.’

  ‘Well, maybe,’ he says, ‘but you’ve had such a terrible time, Elizabeth, and I could have done more. We all could have done more.’

  ‘Well,’ Mel says, coming in with water, a bag of chocolate limes, magazines, a newspaper, ‘I think we could all agree that Mike could have done less.’

  Andy looks at her. Elizabeth tries out a laugh, just a small one. ‘There’s no need for a doctor face, Andy,’ she says, ‘I’m OK.’ And as she says it, it sounds true.

  ‘Well, you look like shit, sister,’ Mel says.

  ‘I feel like I’ve got a dozen hangovers.’

  ‘That’s understandable,’ Andy says.

  ‘You deserve them.’

  ‘I know. I’m going to pull myself together. I promise.’

  ‘Good,’ Andy says. Mel doesn’t say anything until he leaves.

  Then: ‘I went back to get some sleep. Andy made me. And I found your suicide note.’

  Elizabeth says, for what feels like the fiftieth time and she still has the psychiatric assessment to go, ‘I only wanted to sleep through my birthday. That was all. I didn’t leave a note.’

  Mel says, ‘Well, I found that letter you were writing me, that not-suicide note in which you wrote to me as though you were dead and I was alive.’

  ‘It wasn’t—’ Elizabeth feels all the disadvantage of the pyjama-clad against the dressed, and gives up.

  ‘Whatever it was,’ Mel says, ‘we need to stop thinking about dying all the time. Mike’s dead. You’re not. That needs to be our starting point now.’

  ‘Yes,’ Elizabeth says,
‘yes.’ She wonders whether, if she put a little greenhouse in the sunniest corner of the garden, limes would grow.

  Richenda and Kate are leaving the hospital when they meet Patricia coming in. ‘Oh, I was just about to call you,’ Kate says, although actually she’d all but forgotten her promise, as she was so busy promising God or Mike or whoever it is who looks after these things that if Kayla is all right she’ll be the best mother, the best person, she can be. To compensate for the almost-forgetting, she launches into a word-for-word recitation of her consultation, telling Patricia about the tests that the baby will have when she is five days old, the likelihood of her being all right, all of the things that can be done to help her if she isn’t. Richenda, watching the conversation, can’t help feeling that for a woman who’s knitting enough baby blankets to fill a Red Cross helicopter, Patricia doesn’t seem to be paying a lot of attention.

  ‘Is everything all right?’ Richenda asks.

  ‘No, not really,’ Patricia says, agitation vibrating around her words. ‘Elizabeth took an overdose. She’s awake now, she’s all right, but, well, it’s given me a bit of a fright.’

  They all stand, absorbing.

  ‘I’m not sure where she is,’ Patricia says, looking around the atrium at the signs and corridors.

  ‘This place is a bit of a maze,’ Richenda says, seeing what she can do to help, and as Kayla’s two grandmothers consult the hospital map on the wall, Kate feels as though Mike is tapping her on the shoulder, he’s so clearly there. She can hear him, telling her what to do. As soon as he says it, Kate knows that it’s right: that it’s time to get it all sorted. That there’s Kayla to think about.

  When Richenda and Patricia turn back, she says, ‘Do you think she’ll see me?’

  When Patricia walks into the hospital room, she’s overcome by pity and sadness for Elizabeth, who looks like the sorrowful, lost woman she’s felt herself to be so many times, although she’s never shown it. She feels tears beginning. Then Mel is at her elbow; Elizabeth reaches out a hand. For a moment, there’s a real understanding.

  When Patricia has got hold of her feelings – when she’s stroked Elizabeth’s head, her cheek, thought of how she could have lost this sweet girl too, closed her eyes and wished for something different for all of them – she realizes that it’s going to be more difficult than she thought to do what she’s just promised to do. But she does it. She holds Elizabeth’s hand, and she says, as gently as she knows how, that she’s just bumped into Kate, who is waiting outside and wondering if she could possibly come in and talk to Elizabeth. Mel swells to about twice her normal size.

  ‘No, she fucking well can’t, and she has no business asking, and neither have you.’

  Patricia does what Elizabeth and Michael would have rated as a seven on the shocked-face scale they had for his mother. They’d only managed a ten once, one Christmas, when Mike had suggested that he and Elizabeth were going to spend Christmas away, alone, together, a plan that they hadn’t dared see through.

  ‘Well!’ Patricia says, ‘I only asked.’

  Mel raises her voice so it can be heard outside, in the corridor: ‘Get that little cow away from here before I get hold of her.’

  But then Elizabeth says, to Patricia, ‘Yes, she can come in,’ and to Mel, ‘She and I are just going to have to find a way.’

  She’s rewarded with two nine-and-a-half shocked faces. ‘Can you both go outside, please, and ask Kate to come in?’ She doesn’t know whether it’s the drugs or the sleep or the not-quite-dream about Mike, but she feels calm now, and as though, maybe, she can get through.

  Kate does a shocked face too – Elizabeth seems so ashen, diminished under the too-bright hospital light. Elizabeth smiles, a sad smile but a real one, that makes Kate realize how many pretend smiles are coming her way at the moment, and says, ‘I know, I look terrible, even for me. Sit down, Kate. It was brave of you to come in here.’

  So Kate sits. She hasn’t been sure how she will start: Mike had seemed to vanish as suddenly as he had come, before he could say anything useful. So she just says, ‘I thought I should tell you what happened that night. I feel as though I should, now. I didn’t, before. I’m sorry.’

  ‘It was wrong of me to try to make you,’ Elizabeth says, ‘but I would like to know. I’d like to know it all, from the start, if you wouldn’t mind telling me.’

  And once Kate starts, it won’t stop coming. It isn’t easy, exactly, but Elizabeth’s eyes are on her, and she feels as though what she is doing is making the most important speech she’ll ever make. Kayla is hushed inside her, as though she understands that what she’s experiencing is a piece of her own history being made.

  Sometimes Elizabeth winces, sometimes she cries, but she doesn’t stop looking and she doesn’t speak. Somewhere in the middle, she takes Kate’s hand. At the end, they are both crying.

  Hello, my darling Elizabeth,

  Sometimes I wonder what it would have been like if there hadn’t been email when I came to Australia, and when I went home again. I know we would have called each other, but I wonder whether we would have written, too. I remember, as a kid, being sent to the post office to buy those blue fold-up letters for my mum, when she used to write to her friends in Canada. I think we would have written letters, and I think because they were going to travel halfway round the world, we would have thought really carefully about what we wrote. Our instantaneous emails were lovely because they were so easy and inconsequential. But now, I wish we’d written, because I think I could have done with the practice.

  Because if you are reading this, my sweet, lovely Elizabeth, I am a very long way away again. When I’ve finished it, I’m going to seal it and give it to Blake, and ask him to keep it to give to you if you ever need it. It’s not a ‘sorry I died’ letter, because if I was going to write one of those, I would have put it in the drawer with our other papers. It’s a letter for you, for if ever you get to the point where you doubt me, or doubt my love for you, or feel as though things couldn’t be any worse, then Blake will give it to you.

  It’s nearly Christmas. Today we bought the tree, and we talked about me walking into that fire, and I was overwhelmed by the feeling of how much I love you. I know we haven’t had the life that we planned, that it’s gone off the tracks here and there, and been hard. But whatever has happened, whatever I’ve done, I don’t want you to think for a moment that I don’t love you, heart and body and soul.

  I’m writing this in the kitchen, and you’re asleep in the bedroom, so really only about six feet away. I know you’re sleeping because I can hear you snoring. I know that you’ll stop when I get into bed, because you’ll roll off your back and curl yourself into me, and suddenly you’ll be as serene as can be. We have always been like that: serene together. Even in our first weeks and months, when we were fizzing with excitement and newness, there was something very still and calm at the centre of us, like the water that you see when you look down a well. The trouble with a well is, it makes you want to throw a stone into it. I’m sorry for the times I threw stones, and for the ripples.

  If you’re reading this, my darling Elizabeth, I’m sorry that things have got so bad. I could never imagine living without you: there was no imagined future for me where we weren’t together. I promise. Nothing could be truer.

  If you’re reading this, I’m sorry I left you. I don’t know whether this letter will make things better or worse. When I sat down to write it, I was wondering how I would manage to say all that I wanted to, but now it seems quite simple. Elizabeth, I might have been able to do a better job of loving you, but I couldn’t have loved you more. Whatever this dark place is, it will end, and I promise you’ll be happy again, and you’ll be free of it.

  Mike xxxx

  ‘I LIKE IT when it all goes back to normal,’ Elizabeth had said on the ninth of January, settling in with the crossword and a hot chocolate, nape damp from her bath still, while Mike had clipped on Pepper’s lead and chucked her chin in passing.


  ‘You love Christmas,’ he’d said.

  ‘Yes,’ Elizabeth had said, ‘I love Christmas, but I also love the bit when it all goes back to normal. That’s why I’m such a delight to be married to. I’m so easy to please. Christmas, not Christmas, I’m happy.’

  Mike had grinned, said, ‘See you later.’ And then he was gone.

  Michael has grown careless in his walking. It’s more than four weeks since he had seen Kate in the garden centre when they were buying their Christmas tree, and there’d been a moment when he’d wondered what she might do. But her promise of silence had been fervent and there was something in her that he had always trusted: trusted enough for nakedness, for text messages, for something that he didn’t understand but that made him vulnerable.

  All the same, he has avoided the usual spots, until tonight.

  The moon is nearing fullness and when he sees her, a haze of moonlight and cold-air mist around her, he stops and looks, the way he would if he had come across a deer. Those eyes. She hasn’t seen him, and so he keeps looking: he can see, so clearly, the woman that she almost is. He hopes that, in the future, if she thinks of him at all, she will think well of him. Any other possibility is unbearable, in this dangerous moonlight.

  And then Pepper bounces over to her, and her face lights, and she searches Mike out and feels every bit as elated as she had known she would when he came back to her. She hasn’t gone to the usual place every night, but often enough, she has thought, for him to find her when he is ready to. And there’s something else: like the moment before exam results; the feeling that her life is about to change.

  Unwillingness is watermarked into him as he sits down next to her. ‘Kate—’ he says, but she’s faster.

  ‘I’m sorry about the Christmas tree thing. It wasn’t very mature. I was just – I was surprised.’

  ‘You have nothing to apologize for,’ he says, ‘all of this is my fault.’

  ‘Well,’ Kate says, so, so aware that this could be her last shot, that he could be about to tell her again that they can’t see each other any more, so, so determined to do what she needs to, ‘I’m glad I’ve seen you, because I’ve got your Christmas present.’