I said earlier that Mary was uneasy, although she knew nothing about her father’s infidelity. I was the one making her uneasy. Because I had shared our correspondence with her, she had begun to understand the distance separating Edward and me. She had seen the possibility that our marriage would break down, not because of anything he had said or done, but because of what I was saying and doing.
I cannot tell Edward I am leaving and walk out with my head held high. I have to think carefully about where both of us have ended up. It is possible that the timing of his affair, soon after I started writing to you, is not a coincidence; that I may have withdrawn further from him because I was more interested in what we were saying to each other than in what Edward was saying to me. More interested in you than in him. I have to make an effort to see if there is a route back to where we started from. I owe it to him because I am not innocent. Do you understand? There. I have asked you a question. You have the right to reply to it. Whatever reply you send, I will read.
No matter what happens next, you must know this correspondence has been important to me; life enhancing, liberating. I do not know if I have expressed to you how much it has meant to me; I have been, I think, less generous and more reserved than you have been. Now I feel I must tell you: it has filled all the crevices in my heart and mind. But it has moved me away from the place I stepped into when I married Edward forty years ago, and that is not right.
Tina
Silkeborg
March 8
Dearest Tina,
I do understand. But I do not agree. This may be a long letter. I know you will read it to the end. I have put together my ideas as best I can and hope that this will be enough.
Let me say a few words first about grief. This is something I understand. When you describe how it is to be in your friend Bella’s flat, it reminds me of an office Birgitt rented in Aarhus. Did I ever mention this? I believe not. She was a designer by training, and when we were first married she worked for an agency designing advertisements and posters and leaflets, but it did not suit her to be employed, so she began to do freelance design jobs, when she was well enough. At first she worked at the house, but she wanted to keep this part of her life separate from her home and her family, so we rented an office in Aarhus. When she had a commission, she would go by train in the morning and come home in the evening. They were bad days for me. I would wait at the station, and until the very moment when I saw her coming toward me, I would be certain I would never see her again. I hated that her office was in Aarhus—it is too far off for me to be able to reach it quickly, and also, it is by the sea. I imagined she would one day, leaving her office, turn away from the station and go instead to the shore, to the harbor, and find a way to drift off in search of whatever she had lost as a child. But she never did. I think I misunderstood how her work fitted into her life. She was always trying to keep her balance, and later I thought that this office was at one end of the seesaw (I have had to look this word up; I like it), and was the dull, detailed weight against the pull of the ocean and freedom from depression at the other end. The children and I were in the middle, so she would never have gone from the office to the sea without passing me on the way.
After she died, I did not go to the office for some weeks. I almost forgot about it, but then I noticed I was still paying rent, and I drove over to Aarhus to empty it. I had not been there for years, and it was completely unfamiliar, when I opened the door, yet it was as if Birgitt had that moment just left. Or rather, as if she were still there but hiding from me. Although the room was small, it was arranged in such a way that whoever was in it could be tucked away behind a chair, under the desk, between the blind and the window. By the time she died, all Birgitt’s work was done on a computer; she designed websites, mostly, and did not need the drawing boards and cupboards full of paper and card and pencils and paints she had used when she first started. In their place, she had brought in cushions and blankets and created nests. I have never been in a room so full and so empty. I could not leave, but it was too hard to move. As I stood there in the doorway a young man came up the stairs with a cup of coffee, going to his own office on a higher floor. He rescued me. He sent me to buy a cup of coffee for myself, and when I came back, he had drawn up the blinds and folded the blankets and picked up the cushions so it looked like a room full of nothing but furniture. He stayed with me all morning, and other people from the building came to help, bringing boxes to pack away the files and bags to put rubbish in. There were objects, too. I had never seen any of them before, but if someone had laid them out on a table in the street I was walking along, I would have been able to say, as I passed, “My wife collected these together.” They had nothing to do with me and nothing to do with each other, and I put them in a box and left them with the kind tenants of the other offices, to throw away or give away or keep as they wished. As we did at last with the objects she left in the house (with some help from you).
I did not mean to talk about this at such length, only to describe my own feelings about a room like Bella’s flat, both full of a person who has gone and yet empty. But it has made me think, as I am writing, of other points I will make, further on.
You say you cannot believe yourself to be innocent because of the letters you have written to me and received from me. My first thought was: this is not so. What if, I thought, I was a young man of twenty-four or an old man of eighty-four, as I might well have been. Then no one would find any fault in the letters we have exchanged. You would have been guilty of nothing except kindness, to a boy with everything to learn or to an old man with nothing to fill his days. But as I tried to develop this thought into an argument I could put to you, to stop you from rejecting our friendship, I saw it was weak. Our letters have meant so much to us because we have both arrived at the same point in our lives. More behind us than ahead of us. Paths chosen that define us. Enough time left to change. So I will say at once—these letters have made a connection between us that puts us in a position of being the closest of friends. Even though we have never met. I am more interested in your opinion than I am in the opinions of people I meet every day. I like you more than the people I meet every day. If we were to meet, I believe the feelings I have for you could go beyond liking to love. I will rewrite that sentence. When we do meet, I believe the feelings I have for you will go beyond liking to love. Despite what I have just written, I am still not agreeing with you that you are in some way guilty. Guilt is a matter of circumstances. Circumstances are never straightforward. Let me tell you a story from my childhood.
When I was sixteen years old and still living with my parents in Aarhus, I was walking through the park one evening when it was growing dark. There was no one about. A child ran out of some bushes beside where I was walking, a young child, maybe three or four years old. When she saw me, she ran up to me, crying because she had lost her mother. I looked around. No one. I took hold of the child’s hand and walked round the bushes, and then, as I could still see no one and the child was so upset, I set off to walk to my home with her. I could not think of anything else to do. I have a sister, younger than me, and I acted as if this child was my sister. I left the park and had gone three or four hundred meters along the sidewalk when the child’s mother rushed up behind me, screaming the girl’s name, snatching her hand from mine. It seemed she had been only a little distance away at the time the little girl came out of the bushes. She was just outside the park, strapping her baby into the car, and while she was distracted, the girl had run away, back into the park, to carry on the hiding game they had been playing. When she realized the child had gone, the mother thought first of the traffic and the busy streets and ran up and down the sidewalks, calling out to passersby to help her look for her daughter. So as well as the mother, there were other people, men and women, crowded round me. I thought (I was only sixteen and not very mature) they would congratulate me for having found the one who was lost. But of course they only saw a youth holding the hand of a child and walkin
g that child away from her mother. One of the crowd declared himself to be a policeman and took my name and address, then put me into his car and drove me home, to confirm my story. He told my mother what had happened, condemning what I had done. I should never have led the child away from the park. I should have stayed where I was and shouted for help, or walked to the nearest gate and stopped the first person passing, asked them to contact the police. I was technically, the policeman said, guilty of abduction.
While he was in the house, my mother agreed with what he said, but when he had gone, she told me “guilty” was the wrong word. It implies knowing what is right and choosing the opposite path. She said I had—now I am sure there is a perfect English word for it that you will tell me but I can only guess—stumbled. I had done a wrong thing but believed it to be right. (I realize at this point in the story that you must think there are always children being lost in Denmark, because I have also told you the story of Birgitt as a child, but the two events do not connect themselves in my mind. The child I found was playing at being lost.)
When I think of what happened that evening, I can see that, if I was guilty, if I did stumble, it was because the circumstances had made it inevitable. If the mother had been more careful to keep the child close to her, if the child had been taught not to run away even in fun, if I had not been brought up to believe it was my responsibility to take care of my sister, then this would not have happened.
I am sure you are so far ahead of me. Understand just what I am trying to say, with this little story from so long ago. The mother was a good mother, the child was a good child (we met, later, when everything was calm, and I know this), and I was a good boy. Despite this, what might have been a tragedy for all of us or some of us nearly happened.
Edward, you have told me, although before you knew the truth, is a good man. You are an honest woman. It is the circumstance of your marriage to each other that has created the situation where he has, quite definitely, betrayed you and you have stumbled (I will use that word again) into behaving in a way you, as an honest woman, do not feel you should behave toward the man you married. In the story I have told you, the responsibility for the events was mainly the mother’s. She admitted this after it was all over. Whose is the responsibility for the events in your story, would you say? You are both guilty of wanting more than you were getting from your marriage to each other. Perhaps you should have tried to find more, but that would have required one of you or both of you to sacrifice something, and you have already told me that the life you have led as a result of the decision to marry was a sacrifice.
Your parents, his parents, you, Edward were all involved in putting together this marriage. If it is failing, who can say where the blame for that lies—with those who conspired to make it happen in the first place, or with whoever took the first step that risked bringing it to an end? And I am not sure that is you. We may have been writing to each other for longer than Edward has been sleeping with Daphne Trigg, but Edward knew he was acting outside the rules, from the start. You were only looking for some way to understand who you had become. It is lucky—for once, the English word seems weak to me—lucky that through this need for understanding we found each other. You cannot believe that there is an equal fault in what you are doing, writing to me, and what Edward is doing. So now I will be practical. Use the approach I would take to making decisions at work. What are the options? What are the implications of each of the options? Let me list them.
* * *
1. No Change. You and Edward stay living together at the farm. He continues to see Daphne Trigg and you continue, quite openly, to write to me. The only change is that now you both know the truth.
When you went to the chicken hut on the day you found out, this would have appeared to be impossible, not to be thought about. But it is my experience that compromise is the easiest option for everyone to agree to. “All right,” the conversation goes, “it might not be the perfect solution, does not address the root of the problem, but, after all, it is a workable alternative without any major negative implications.” So meetings that start with a certainty that whatever else happens, things have to change, end with a decision to shift just a little to one side or the other but otherwise leave everything just as it was.
You will understand why this is a bad idea, but I will just remind you: you would surely lose your self-respect; you would know that you could not trust to the future, for change might still be unavoidable; nothing would change for the better. On the other hand, it would preserve your marriage, which is something I do not want to appear to suggest is not important.
Although I know you have described yourself as always on the side of balance, which means compromise, I cannot believe you are the sort of person who would agree to this option.
* * *
2. Restoration. You and Edward stay living together at the farm. He ends his relationship with Daphne Trigg. You stop your correspondence with me.
This path is the one an optimist would take. Someone with a belief that, with a little effort and goodwill, what has not worked in the past can be made to work in the future. It is the option that would seem to have no drawbacks. It is like restoring a corrupted computer to an earlier setting, when everything was operating normally. It assumes that the virus can be eliminated. This choice would be a catastrophe for me, but I want the best outcome for you, and if this is what you hope for, I would like it to be the one that you and Edward choose. I will only say, before you do: no chance of finding the raspberries left unpicked. No new fronds unfurling.
* * *
3. Retribution. You stay at the farmhouse and Edward leaves, goes to live with Daphne Trigg but continues (it is his job) to run the farm.
When I first thought about the options, I overlooked this one. It would be the choice of someone who likes the role of martyr, likes to punish, even if the pain of the punishment is shared. I cannot imagine you as this person.
* * *
4. Revolution. You leave.
Where you go, what life you create for yourself, these are decisions that, having made the first decision, you would need to come to in time. The options are too many to list. Too many raspberries to count. You would have to decide just two things at the beginning: where to go at first and how much time you needed to make the next choice. (Which could, of course, include a version of any of the above.)
It takes courage to go down this path. I am hopeful you have courage. We are different, I realize, in the way we respond to bad news. You had the courage to be angry, where I think I would have fallen into sorrow, melancholy. In a way, Birgitt was only pretending to be married to me, as Edward has pretended faithfulness to you. Our lives together were full of tenderness, but sad. The children were impatient with her sometimes, even angry, but I was only ever able to respond to her with sympathy and care. Maybe I allowed her to indulge herself. She might have been better able to cope if I had been more forceful, insisted coping was possible. I like it that you are angry. You can be forceful with Edward, insist on an end to the relationship.
I cannot hide from you how much I hope, for your sake as well as mine, that you choose the revolutionary path.
* * *
I said I would refer back to Birgitt’s empty office. It is the emptiness I wanted you to think about. If, as a result of a decision you make now, there will be absences of those now present in your life, which of those absences will leave the greatest emptiness in the room?
I will wait.
Love,
Anders
Scotland
March 20
My dear Anders,
I have chosen. I think I was always going to make this choice. Or maybe not without you. I am somewhere unknown to me where I am unknown. I am in a cottage on the west coast of Scotland watching the weather arrive from across the Atlantic and change the appearance of the hills, rocks, and sea as it passes. This is all I can see from the windows—hills, rocks, and sea. I have been nowhere since I arrived, four
days ago now. Tomorrow I will drive up and down the folds of empty land to reach a place where I can buy the few things I need for comfort—bread, milk, cheese, and wine. I have enough books. I have enough firewood. I have passed through the anger and anguish and have found something like contentment. Sadness may be over the horizon, but it has not yet blown in.
I had made no decisions when I read your last letter; I was not in a state of mind to make a decision. In fact, I had hardly grasped that it might be mine to make. It was in my mind, as I said in my last letter to you, that I was not innocent, and that I owed it to Edward to try and find a way through this that held our marriage together. I was waiting, I think, for him to declare what he was prepared to do, what promises he would make, what compromises he might suggest to allow us to go forward. Or go back, rather, to some version of the life we had led before. When I read the choices you suggested were open to me, I began to think about my marriage, for the first time, as something that was not fixed. If this were so, I thought, how might I alter it? I was still thinking in a detached way, as if the decisions were not mine to make, as if I had to wait for something else to happen that would make the next thing happen and so allow life to go on without a decision ever having been made.
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