by Rebecca Wait
She did her best to be polite to Heather, while wanting her gone.
“It must be tough,” Heather said to her once, sipping coffee awkwardly in the living room. “Having a new baby, especially so far from home in a place like this.”
Katrina was surprised at the rage she felt. Heather had no children herself. She had no right to judge Katrina.
“Is there anything I can do to help?” Heather added.
Katrina raised her chin. “No thank you. We’re fine.”
It wasn’t normal, though, to cry this much. Even before she got out of bed in the mornings, Katrina would feel the tears starting to roll down her face as though she’d lost all control of herself. It was pathetic. If John was around, she’d have to wipe them away quickly while he wasn’t looking. Once he’d left for work, or retreated to his study if he was working from home (Katrina would be under strict instructions not to disturb him), she would be able to let the tears fall freely. She almost laughed sometimes at the ridiculousness of it, herself crying as she held the crying Nicky, two babies instead of one.
This was how her nearest neighbour Fiona found her one day when John was away: crying in the living room as she held her distraught baby. Katrina ignored the doorbell because she was in no state to see anyone like this, and didn’t want to in any case, but she hadn’t reckoned on the woman’s persistence. Moments later, Fiona had loomed up at the living-room window and was tapping on it gently.
Katrina had no choice but to let her in. Stupid, nosy woman.
“You poor dear, look at the state of you,” Fiona said.
Katrina tried to wipe her tears and give Fiona a smile that would show she was fine, but Fiona was having none of it. She took the crying baby off Katrina and bustled into the kitchen to make tea.
Katrina was still crying when Fiona came back into the living room.
“Come on now, it’s all right,” Fiona said. Nicky, unbelievably, seemed to have gone to sleep, and Fiona laid him down gently in his cot without him stirring. “I’ll just get the tea,” she said, and returned a moment later with two mugs. How she’d managed to make it while lulling Nicky to sleep, Katrina could not fathom. She felt even more useless by comparison.
“Well, of course you’re overwhelmed,” Fiona said as she settled into an armchair. “All the way out here on your own with a new baby.”
Katrina wished people would stop saying she was on her own.
Then Fiona said something unexpected. “You know, I think I cried every day during Stuart’s first year. He’s five now, thank God. It does get better.”
At these words, Katrina felt the first glimmer of hope she’d experienced in months.
She said, “I don’t feel like I’m coping well.”
“My dear,” Fiona said, “nobody does. If you’re managing to keep yourself and the baby alive, I’d say you’re doing just fine.”
After that, Fiona took to bringing meals round a couple of times a week: a lasagne or casserole or pie that could easily be heated up.
“It’s no trouble,” she said when Katrina protested. “I’m making the food anyway. It’s no bother to make a few extra helpings.”
She was a kind woman, Katrina thought. Sometimes, tearfully swallowing down Fiona’s food (which she sometimes simply ate cold, straight from the dish) during a short respite as Nicky slept, she felt she’d never loved anyone more than she loved Fiona.
And it did get better, though very slowly. Spring came and although the weather was still cold, the sun was bright and made the sea sparkle. Everywhere, colour returned. Katrina started spending more time with Heather, and felt herself beginning to relax in her presence. She got to know the other islanders—she didn’t have much choice in the matter, so determined were they to include her—and as Katrina grew happier, John seemed warmer towards her again, telling her sometimes how pretty she looked.
When Nicky was just over a year old, Katrina discovered she was pregnant again, and she wasn’t as frightened as she might have predicted. She found she was actually looking forward to having another baby, or if not to the day-to-day reality of it, then at least to the idea of having two children instead of one. She hoped they would love each other and play together. At the thought of this, she felt a pang for Jill, whom she was barely in touch with now. Their phone conversations had become increasingly stilted over the past year, as Katrina found she had less and less she wanted to say to Jill about her life on the island; she couldn’t tell Jill she was unhappy because Jill had predicted it all along. When Chris had left Jill some months before, Katrina had been too exhausted and overwhelmed herself to know what to say, or to offer anything much in the way of comfort. She thought relations had been even more distant between them since then, but nevertheless, when Jill called her up after a couple of months of silence to say she’d taken Henry and moved down to England with him, Katrina was hurt not to have been told about this plan in advance.
“It’s natural that you’ve grown apart,” John said. “You’re very different, and you live very different lives. Besides, I think she’s always been jealous of you.”
“Me?” Katrina said. “No she hasn’t.”
“Jill can be quite difficult sometimes,” John said.
“She’s my only family, really.” Her mother, Katrina had decided, didn’t count. Katrina almost never rang her now—she’d had no energy left for another dependent after Nicky was born—but she did send her occasional postcards, to which her mother did not reply.
“I’m your family now,” John said. “You don’t need anyone else.”
And feeling the truth of this, settled in her own house with her husband and son and another baby on the way, finally believing she had got the hang of it all, Katrina experienced something close to contentment.
But a ghost of unease remained. Katrina felt, alongside her new calm, that the world was contracting and narrowing until it consisted only of the desire for her husband to be happy and her two babies, born and unborn, to be healthy. She didn’t know if this just meant she had everything she wanted already, or if it was true for everyone that after you became a proper adult you stopped looking forward the way you once had.
4
She never did work out what went wrong between her and John after Tommy’s birth, why he suddenly seemed to lose all patience with her after that second baby. It had been a difficult labour, and Tommy was eventually delivered by C-section (thank God Katrina had held out for a hospital birth on the mainland, not a home birth, as John had wanted). Katrina was weak for a long time afterwards and couldn’t do much around the house, though she tried her best. She managed, just about, to care for Nicky and the new baby, but she had to let many other things go. Fiona helped for a while, but John, when he realized how much Fiona was doing, didn’t like it. He said it made it look like he wasn’t caring for his own wife. Katrina had to withdraw from Fiona, to tell her that she was managing fine now and that John was around more.
But maybe it wasn’t this weakness that irritated him. Maybe he had been waiting all along to see which way she would fall, and up until that point he had still believed she could suit him; maybe he had even believed she could save him. Whatever his dream had been, he was thoroughly disillusioned by the time their second son was six months old.
“You’ve put on so much weight,” he said to her. “I know some women let themselves go after they have children, but I didn’t think you’d be one of them. You didn’t seem lazy when I met you.”
Katrina wondered if she had deceived him in this. She hadn’t intentionally, she thought. But she was starting to feel that she was lazy. Everything was such a struggle.
When she cried, which was often again now, John said she was unstable, and perhaps she was. “You’re hard work,” he’d tell her, and sometimes he’d seem to say it fondly, but it always made her ashamed.
Katrina tried to change herself to fit wi
th John’s idea of how she should be. She ate very little so she could lose the baby weight as soon as possible, and tried to be bright and cheerful when he came back from Oban, or out of his study in the evenings, tried not to burst into tears when he made the mildest of criticisms. “You’re so sensitive,” he’d say. Katrina wasn’t sure where all the love and joy of their early relationship had gone, but she thought that if she’d only tried harder, paid better attention, it wouldn’t have slipped away like this without her noticing.
Despite her best efforts, they often argued now, and Katrina knew John was right when he said she was to blame. She lost her temper with him in ways she never had in her life before, and then he would stand back, watching her with that rueful half-smile on his face, as though he’d known all along she would end up shouting like this, but had still hoped to be wrong. How regularly she disappointed him. When she was angry like this, Katrina couldn’t even remember how it had happened, except that John seemed so cruel sometimes in the things he said, and the more she tried to defend herself, the worse she came to seem to herself and to him. She, who had always been so calm and self-contained as a child, discovered what it meant now to be “beside yourself”.
She couldn’t believe how she shouted at him. He never raised his voice to her.
“You’re from a broken home,” John told her. “You don’t know how to have a normal relationship. It’s not your fault really. But it’s hard for me. Your mother warped you.”
Was she warped? Katrina thought about this word, this ugly word with its too-long vowel sound, as though it too were twisted out of shape. She carried it in her head as she went about her daily tasks. Perhaps that was what caused her to make silly mistakes, burning food and shrinking John’s favourite shirt (she had not even known he had a favourite shirt until she shrank it).
“I told you not to put it in with the others,” John told her, holding it up with a frown. The sleeves were too short now and the body looked oddly slim.
“I didn’t know it was hand wash,” Katrina said. “I’m sorry. I thought it was the same as the others.” What kind of shirt was hand wash only?
He shook his head, doing that smile again. “Darling, I told you.”
“You didn’t.” She was certain of this, knew that he was mistaken. This time, she told herself, she would hold her ground.
“Yes I did. You never remember. Your head’s like a sieve.”
Katrina steeled herself. “John, you didn’t tell me. I’m sorry I shrank it. But you honestly didn’t tell me.”
His smile vanished. “Surely it isn’t worth lying about, Katrina.”
And reality tilted. She didn’t think she was lying. But she was so tired and he was always so certain. She said, less confident now, “I don’t remember you telling me.”
“All right, darling, I believe you.”
She was relieved at this.
Then he said, “But why didn’t you check the label?”
He pushed her too far.
“I don’t check the label of every item I wash, John! There’s so much laundry to do every day.”
“There’s no need to lose your temper.”
“I haven’t lost my temper,” she said, keeping her voice deliberately level.
“Yes you have. You’re practically shouting at me. It’s only a shirt, for Christ’s sake.”
“Only a shirt! You were the one making a . . . a huge fuss about it.” And now what always happened was happening: her voice was rising and her words were tripping over each other.
“No I wasn’t,” he said calmly. “I simply noticed that my shirt had shrunk. I’m not sure why I’m the one who’s suddenly under attack. Anyone would think I’d shrunk your shirt, not the other way around.”
He maddened her. She really thought she was going mad. She tried to calm down, but the tears were already starting and her thoughts were incoherent, not ranged neatly like his. “I wasn’t attacking you,” she said, and her voice sounded high like a child’s. Of course he couldn’t take her seriously.
“Well, I’m sure you didn’t mean to,” he said. “But I’ve had a long day at work and the last thing I need is to come home and be shouted at.”
“I’m sorry.”
He put out his hand to her. “That’s all right, my love. I know you’re tired. And it really doesn’t matter. It’s only a shirt.”
He was so patient, even when she lost his things.
“Where are my car keys?” he’d call to her from the living room.
“I don’t know,” Katrina would call back. “I haven’t seen them.”
“I put them on the side table like always,” John said, coming into the kitchen. “You must have moved them.”
“I haven’t, love. I haven’t touched them.”
“Are you suggesting,” John said, speaking slowly as though addressing an imbecile, “that they’ve got up and walked off of their own accord?”
“No. But perhaps you misremembered where you put them.”
“Do you think that’s the most likely explanation, Katrina?”
She wasn’t sure. “I haven’t moved them,” she said.
But later he found them on the coffee table, underneath one of Katrina’s books. She was certain she hadn’t put them there—almost certain.
“It doesn’t matter,” John said, when she protested. He held out his hands wearily. “At least we’ve found them now. But you’re getting so scatty, love.”
This was true—she was often tired, often forgetful. And yet sometimes after one of these incidents the idea would come to her that he might be misplacing his things deliberately: moving them himself and then accusing her. Whenever this thought occurred to her, even if only fleetingly, she knew she must really be losing her grip.
It wasn’t until years later, when she was pregnant with Beth, that Katrina saw, or perhaps allowed herself to see, the full cold sweep of her husband’s nature. She had realized not long after Tommy’s birth that she was afraid of him. But now she saw it all. Although he never shouted, was never physically aggressive, she began to see that his contempt was a violence in itself. Katrina felt it wind around her and constrict her breath. And his scorn wasn’t reserved for Katrina alone. It stretched wide and encompassed almost every other person he knew, from his colleagues at the accountancy firm to his own brother (Malcolm, John said, was slow and unimaginative; a bore; good with his hands but not good at much else). Everything with him became a fierce struggle to prove his superiority, the loathsome deficiency of others.
Katrina tried to sneer with him at the people and things he despised. He made fun of Fiona, who he said was a pathetic busybody, and Katrina could see his point, though it pained her when Fiona had been so kind. She thought Malcolm was kind too, and she liked his gentleness, though she knew he wasn’t quick and clever like John. She tried to appreciate the distinction between them. John said she wasn’t sharp herself, not discerning enough about people, and it was true, certainly, that she was more easily pleased than him. It seemed a comfort at first when his scorn was directed outwards, not at her. But before long, Katrina felt its polluting effects within herself. Everywhere she looked she began to see inadequacy and weakness as he did.
And it was Katrina herself he hated most of all. He had believed once that he could be happy with her, she thought. That was at the root of it. When he finally realized he could not, he quietly began to despise her. In one sense, she could hardly blame him. She had presented a hope to him, even though she had not known it, and then she had failed him, again without knowing it, just as everyone else had. There had been a few times in his life, she perceived, that had seemed to offer a glimmer of something else: something that might help him, might make him like everyone else. All had proved to be illusions, and all had to be punished for the deceit.
Outwardly he was very different, with everyone except for her. He turned a
smooth, smiling face to the world, and it troubled Katrina how charming she could see other people finding him; it made her feel again as though she was going mad, as though all the coldness in him, if not imagined by her, was at least caused by her. Of course he wanted people to like him; everybody did. But it worried Katrina that he seemed to care so little for her opinion, that she was the only one allowed to see him as he truly was. Perhaps he saw nothing wrong in the way he behaved towards her, his coldness and his criticisms. He appeared to believe she deserved it. Sometimes she agreed with him.
But she would not bring her children up with this kind of rage. Not sensible Nicky and sweet, anxious Tommy. Not darling Beth, who was already starting to show a more lively personality than her brothers, and who might, if she were allowed to continue like this, grow up to be far more sociable and cheerful than the rest of them. Although her daughter was so young, it was her sons whom Katrina feared for the most. They were both sensitive, both thoughtful and so considerate of one another that Katrina sometimes felt a lump in her throat when she watched them together. They were not made for conflict, and Katrina knew instinctively that they could never be the kind of sons John wanted. As they grew older, this would become more and more apparent, and then nothing would protect them from his disappointment. Katrina knew the chilling quality of this disappointment only too well. Somehow, she thought, she would have to save them. But she knew, hopelessly, that there was no defence against John. Not so long as you were near him.