Letters to My Husband

by Stephanie Butland

  ‘I don’t think—’

  ‘Please,’ she says. Her voice is made magnetic with the memory of the day she bought it: a jeweller in Marsham, someone who didn’t know her, so when they had asked if it was for her boyfriend she’d said, yes, as though she were half of the most acknowledged couple there had ever been. ‘Our hands are the same size,’ she’d added, ‘although Mike’s knuckles are bigger,’ loving the saying of his name.

  He unwraps it. It’s a ring. His heart sinks. ‘It’s lovely,’ he says, ‘and very thoughtful, but you know I can’t take it. You know I can’t wear it.’

  Perhaps if Kate weeps, or screams, or threatens, or protests, it will work out differently. But she doesn’t. She recognizes the hopelessness of the situation. She sees the look in his eyes, the way he is measuring the distance between where he is with her, and the life, the wife, he wants, and she thinks, OK then. And the hope goes out of her, and she takes the box back out of his hands.

  And Mike feels hopelessness, and love, and acceptance pass through her – in this place that is the closest they have to a home, they are as alive to each other as a mouse and a cat – and he says, ‘Why don’t you wear it for me?’

  But his voice is too full of their scant past to make the words sound the way they should sound. They come out as softly as starlight. And so Kate, knowing that she’s playing but knowing how true this is too, takes the ring and puts it on the third finger of her left hand, and she kisses him, and he is lost once more, lost even though he had promised himself he would never take this winding road again.

  They are walking along the path that will lead them back to the main road when Michael stops, and starts to throw stones into the water. He picks big ones, the size of a child’s fist, and he hurls them as though he is trying to break windows.

  Kate steps forward, puts her hand on his arm. ‘What is it? Mike?’

  And he stops throwing, and turns, and looks at her.

  Perhaps if he hadn’t – if he’d kept facing away, if his words had lost some of their force without his eyes to vouch for them – things would have worked out differently.

  ‘Kate,’ he says, ‘I shouldn’t have done that. I’m sorry. I love my wife. You’re lovely, lovely, but – I’m going to stay away from you. You’re special, but you’re not my wife. I don’t love you. I love her. I’m sorry.’

  Kate’s bra is uncomfortable because she hasn’t done it up properly. Her thigh has a damp, cold trickle running down it. She says, ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘You do,’ Michael says, ‘you do.’

  And Kate, who cannot believe that her world can be changing so fast, tick and tock and tick again, moves to take off the ring, only silver because she couldn’t afford gold, unengraved because she had thought there was more chance of him wearing it that way, and sees Mike checking his watch.

  If he hadn’t, things might have worked out differently.

  Kate, who had been about to ask him to keep the ring, even if he never wore it, never thought about it, turns instead and throws it into the water.

  And she slips.

  Falls.

  Mike grabs for her but only reaches her bag.

  And so Kate is in the water, gulping for breath, shocked by the biting cold, feeling for the bottom of the lake, that isn’t there, reaching for the bank, which she can’t get to.

  She’s cold. Colder than she would have thought she could be, so quickly. She hears Mike shouting at her to get hold of something – she sees he is holding something out to her – but her arm can’t find it. Her legs can’t work against the cold and the weight.

  And then Mike is next to her. As soon as he’d seen her eyes unfocus, as soon as she’d gone quiet, he’d realized he had no chance of getting her from the bank, and he’d gone in.

  With her clothes, she weighs a ton. She passes out as soon as he touches her: it’s as though she knows she is safe.

  He lifts her on to the bank, lays her down, and he sees her chest rise and fall, and he wills those moon-eyes to open.

  He is dragging himself out of the water, although the water is doing its best to hold on to his freezing clothes, when Pepper, who has a dog’s instinct for a crisis and a dog’s capability for planning, hurls himself in to help.

  Mike curses, reaches for him, misses, reaches again, and then he loses his footing and he’s over and under before he knows it. He breaks the surface with a great shout, not so much as a word as a plea for things to start going right, right now, and he frightens Pepper into going further away from the bank.

  And he goes after him, even though he knows he shouldn’t.

  Of course he does.

  Mike,

  It’s almost a month since I last wrote you a letter.

  After Kate came to see me at the hospital I felt a sort of relief. I cried and cried and Mel and all of the nurses and doctors were doing worried faces at each other, but I kept on telling them I was all right. And I did feel better than I had done since you died, in a funny way. Kate brought me the bits of you that were missing, and when I had them, the picture was whole. I didn’t like the whole picture, of course – I never will – but having it meant that I knew what I was dealing with. I had the answers I needed.

  Before I was allowed to come home I was assessed by a psychiatrist. She listened to the almost-full story – everything except for you coming to see me at the hospital, I’m not ready to let that go yet. And she said, I think what’s happening to you is very simple, Elizabeth. Your husband let you down by dying and he let you down again by fathering a child with someone else. You’re grieving. There’s nothing more human than that. It would be more worrying if you weren’t sad and upset. I don’t think you made a serious suicide attempt, but I do think you need some help, to cope with it all.

  And it all seemed so straightforward when she put it like that.

  So now I see a counsellor twice a week and, after eight sessions, I feel a bit less angry and a lot more sad, but it’s part of a process. The biggest thing is understanding that I am in a process that will lead to me being all right again. For the last nine months I’ve been fighting to stay at the bottom of the pond.

  Kate and I have met, twice. Once she waddled her way round here – by prior arrangement, as our two households are like warring nations trying to figure out a truce – to see if I was all right. I think the talk we had at the hospital made her realize that I was a real person who loved you, so we have a peculiar bond forming. I don’t think I was very nice to her. I wasn’t horrible, just too sad to make an effort. I refused to talk about the baby. We sat in the garden – you know that corner where the bench is, where, in autumn, the heat sometimes gathers? We sat there. I asked her why she brought the flowers here. She said, I used to walk past your house and think about him being inside. I still did it when he had died. It felt like the closest I could get. I said, that makes sense. Well, about as much sense as me thinking Mike was leaving the flowers. Mel brought some tea out and asked Kate how many stretch marks she had. I told her off, afterwards.

  Then I went to see Kate. I’d been going through our papers, sorting things out, shredding, filing, and I found the papers and letters and reports from the fertility clinic. Everything that our blood and genes said, none of which helped us, in the end. I thought of what a waste of time it had all been, and then I thought about how Kate would know none of it. So I went round and I told her everything the reports said about you, including being a cystic fibrosis carrier. I didn’t know whether it was the right thing to do – I checked my heart, so carefully, for malice before I went, and if I’d found any I wouldn’t have gone – but I think she was relieved. And if there are problems with the baby, the more she knows the better.

  I met Patricia going in as I was leaving. (The Micklethwaites have now been added to her jam distribution list.) She looked caught out. I smiled and said, doesn’t Kate look well, which was a mighty effort, but your mother is the only family I have here, so I was prepared to make it. And it’s tr
ue: Kate is round and fat, like a big shiny apple.

  I’ve asked Mel to go home, and promised to go out there and stay with her for Christmas. We were booking flights this morning, when Richenda rang to let me know that Kate had gone into labour during the night and they were heading to the hospital. She didn’t give me any more detail. I’m not sure I wanted any more detail anyway. I knew the important thing: your baby was on her way. Kate texted me a little smiley face. (I feel so old, sometimes. Texting during labour? Really?) I texted back ‘Thinking of you’. It was the best I could manage. And it’s true. I am thinking of her.

  I had a plan ready for this. Blake and Andy and the counsellor all say it’s great that I feel I’m ready to start building a new life without you, but I need strategies. Apparently, hoping that it will all be all right somehow doesn’t count as strategy. (I can hear you saying that, too.) So I left my phone on the kitchen table, and I took my bag from the door where it’s been packed and waiting for the last week, and I rattled Pepper’s lead until he woke up. I promised Mel that I wasn’t going to throw myself in. Then our funny little dog and I walked down to Butler’s Pond, to the place where you did the decent thing, or at least a decent thing, in getting Kate out of the water. I’m starting to think that all of the decent things you did during your life, added up, might outweigh the indecent thing. (Like the letter. The letter was good. Blake had brought it round on my birthday but I was already – well. You know. Thank you. So was Kate being brave enough to tell me what happened in the end.) I haven’t finally decided on that, though, so you’re not out of the heavenly dog house just yet.

  I miss you still, so terribly. My jaw hurts when I wake up in the morning, because I’ve been grinding my teeth in the night, all through my furious dreams. You’re such an ache of absence. If I look very far ahead, I get overwhelmed, and feel tiny and weak and as though it’s not worth trying to be anything except tiny and weak.

  I tried sitting by the water and reading for a bit, but my mind wouldn’t settle, so I stowed my rucksack and ran a couple of laps round the lake. (I’m doing the London Marathon for us, by the way, for the Cystic Fibrosis Trust.) Then a couple more. Pepper was tired, so I sat on that fallen tree and looked at the water, and wondered how often we’d sat watching a sun start to set. Probably very often. Certainly not often enough.

  Your mother and I had a long talk on the day after we’d met at the Micklethwaites’. It wasn’t easy, but it was easier than the way we’ve been avoiding confronting any of this. She said that this baby is not to blame for how she came to be, and should be welcomed and loved like any other baby. I said, yes, and I meant it. I told her I wasn’t sure how good I would be at it. She said, Elizabeth, none of us know that.

  I stayed at Butler’s Pond until the sun went down. I had some biscuits in my bag and I shared them with Pepper. Blake came past with Hope but I waved them away. And when I felt, as certainly as it’s possible to feel without being faced with the reality of it, that I could do my bit of the baby-blessing, I walked home. I walked home very slowly, and I felt sad and lonely, but I always feel that way when I remember that I’m going to put my key in the door and you won’t be on the other side, waiting for me.

  There was a message, though, delivered by your mother in her special talking-to-an-answering-machine voice. (I switched it back on and changed the recording on it last week, so it’s my voice now.) Mel held my hand as I listened to it. The baby is here. She was born at 7.07pm, weighing 7lb 2oz, and she is safe and sound. So is her mother. The birth was smooth and calm, in the birthing pool with the lights dimmed.

  Her name is Daisy Gray Micklethwaite.

  Congratulations, Daddy.

  And, I think, goodbye.

  E xxx

  Questions for the Reader

  Elizabeth discovers that her husband is not the man she thought he was and that he, like many other characters, had been keeping secrets. What effect do secrets have on peoples’ lives? Are secrets always bad things?

  There are many examples of marriage in this book, not all of them happy. What do you think Stephanie Butland is telling us about love and marriage? Do they always go together?

  How important do you think Elizabeth’s letters to Mike are in her grieving process? How did they make you think about Mike and Elizabeth differently?

  Elizabeth and Kate have a complicated relationship. How do Elizabeth’s and Kate’s ideas of what love is, and their opinion of each other, change during the course of the book?

  How do different characters respond to Mike’s death? What do you think this tells us about the way people grieve and move on?

  How does Stephanie Butland use the image and theme of water throughout the novel?

  Kate’s parents are shocked to discover her secret. What does Letters to My Husband tell us about how we perceive – and what we expect of – other people?

  How does Stephanie Butland gradually reveal the secrets and lies of her characters’ lives?

  In what way does Mel differ from the other characters? Did you think the bond she and Elizabeth share was particularly important to Elizabeth’s recovery?

  Do you think you can ever truly know another person, however much you love them?

  Find out more about Stephanie Butland and the inspiration behind Letters to My Husband

  Michael’s widow, Elizabeth, is devastated when it becomes clear that there was more to his life than she knew – than anybody knew. How did you decide to use letters and different viewpoints to explore the impact of a tragedy?

  An early iteration of Letters to My Husband was written as a series of interlocking first-person narratives. If I’m honest I think that was as much to do with a lack of confidence than anything else: it felt safer to write in other voices than to find my own. But my editor suggested I explore a third-person narrative as a way of telling the story more fully. We decided to keep the letters in, though – they are such an immediate insight into what’s happening in Elizabeth’s heart.

  What inspired the story about a wife discovering her husband was not the man she thought he was?

  This story came about less through inspiration and more through evolution. It began as a comic novel about a committee trying to erect a fence after a drowning accident. Elizabeth’s letters soon changed any ideas I had about writing a comedy, and then an early reader suggested that the committee structure was holding the book back. That was the key to finding the real novel, with themes of love and grief and moving on.

  You’ve previously written two non-fiction titles about your experience of cancer. Did these influence your writing of Letters to My Husband at all, in particular Elizabeth’s IVF treatment?

  That’s a really interesting question, and not one that I’d considered. I suppose what my dance with cancer taught me is how it feels when something that is nowhere in your life plan shows up. There was no cancer in my family, and I was thirty-seven when I was diagnosed, so it was a real shock to me, and to the people around me. I think Elizabeth would have assumed that she would be able to have a baby without any problems – she is in her thirties, fit and healthy – so maybe that sense of ‘this can’t be happening’ did pass from me to her. My experience of having the first two books edited also taught me that I needed to weigh words carefully and to value my readers’ time as well as my own – books aren’t for showing off what you can do with words, they are for getting ideas across as clearly as you possibly can.

  What does a typical writing day look like for you?

  It depends which stage I’m at. My novels tend to have an initial burst of research and thinking, when a typical day might be anything from going to interview a doctor to reading a book about dressage to hanging out in Internet chat rooms asking a lot of questions of people who know the things I need to know for the book I have in mind. Then there’s the ‘back brain’ period, which might take six months, when I am mulling the book over. This involves a lot of things that occupy my hands and leave my mind free – baking, knitting, dog-wa
lking. I have to pause regularly to scribble things on post-its at odd times and in strange places. When I get on to the writing part, I tend to work quite quickly – I will do the majority of the work in about three months, writing 1,000–2,000 words a day in the studio at the bottom of the garden.

  Which fictional characters would you invite to a dinner party and why?

  Ooh. I love a hypothetical dinner party. Let’s see. I’ll have Becky Sharp from Vanity Fair – if she had been a male character she would be called things like ‘enterprising’ and ‘resourceful’ rather than being cast as heartless. I’ll sit her opposite Hilary Mantel’s Thomas Cromwell and they can be all scheming and flirty. Then I’ll invite Dorothy from Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, because I love her dry humour and sense of adventure, and try to pair her off with John Updike’s novelist character Henry Bech, who is wonderful but could do with taking himself a bit less seriously. I think I’d better have Elinor Dashwood and Edward Ferrers to bring a bit of sanity to the proceedings. I don’t think I’d get a word in edgeways the whole evening.

  If you could spend the day with any one of your characters, who would it be?

  Mel, because she’s excellent company and I’d like to show her that England isn’t just a gloomy, damp cave full of people who tut at her footwear. She’s clever, fierce, funny and sarcastic. She doesn’t own a pair of shoes that aren’t heels, she smokes like a chimney, she likes a drink – and she’d move worlds to make Elizabeth happy again. I’d take her to London, and we’d go to the British Library (she works as a translator, so she loves books) then go to the champagne bar in St Pancras station and drink too many cocktails and giggle a lot. I’d have a hangover the next day, she wouldn’t.

  Acknowledgements

  I’m very grateful to Alan Butland, Jude Evans, Emily Medland and Susan Young, who have read every word of this book in all its incarnations, and been both honest and encouraging, which is quite a difficult trick to pull off. Thanks too to early readers Anne Booth, Camille Johnson, Claire Marriott, Alison Morton and Ned Tilbrook.