Tom didn’t reply, instead allowing Esme to take his silence as
tacit agreement.
‘And I’ve been thinking a lot about it, and about us. And I think
that it may have been not ideal, but also that we can’t let it define
us or ruin this year, can we?’
‘No . . . no, you’re right.’
‘We have to recover a bit of us, don’t we? Be Esme and Tom again instead of some couple who have been dealt some pretty shit luck.
I won’t be defined by having a miscarriage,’ she said. ‘It’s ten years for us in a few weeks. So I think we have to remember why most of
that has been fun and bril iant. And why we love each other. I know
it’s only a haircut, but . . .’
Tom was on the verge of tears. But he kept himself composed
enough to squeeze her hand, a small gesture of acknowledgement
and support so often needed throughout their relationship.
‘Basically I’m saying that we should start 2017 afresh. Again.’
‘Okay. I’m not sure I—’
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‘Spring is the time of new life and all that. So I think that we should draw a line under the last few months and start the year
again – tomorrow. The first of May.’
‘Which makes today New Year’s Eve.’
‘Exactly.’
‘Well, happy New Year,’ Tom said.
That today was not the day to talk to Esme. Nor tomorrow.
But there would have to be a time. Eventually, one day soon,
there would have to be a time to tell the truth.
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CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
11 am – midday
11.am – Midday
OUR 10TH ANNIVERSARY
June 2017 – Stow-on-the-Wold, Gloucestershire
‘A relapse?’ Esme said, standing over Tom, who remained sat on the
end of the bed.
She looked shocked. As though just told about the sudden death
of a family member. This erstwhile certainty in her life – his sobriety
– had been removed. Whipped out from beneath her. Leaving Esme
to process and respond to it as quickly as she could. He had told her
almost as soon as they got into the hotel room.
‘When?’
‘February. In Liverpool,’ he said. And again there was the shock
and the almost visible processing. The going back through what he
told her had happened, what she now knew had really happened and
the gap between the two.
He was there when I . . .
He told me that he . . .
‘Okay,’ she said, trying to sound calm, elongating the end of the
word.
‘I’m sorry I didn’t tell you before. I just—’
‘You just what?’ she snapped. ‘You just thought that ten years of
sobriety ending like that wasn’t worth mentioning?’
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‘No, I . . . I tried to say.’
‘When?’
‘That day on Hampstead Heath. When you—’
‘That was still two months after it happened! I’m talking about
the day after, Tom. The day. Fuck, even the night of. Why did
nobody call me?’
‘I told them not to.’
‘Who? Who did you tell not to?’
‘You don’t know them.’
Esme turned away from him. For a moment, he thought that
she was going to leave the room. That this would be it, the end.
When she did turn back, her eyes were full of tears. Her face full of
anger and hurt, somehow magnified by the fact that it was no longer
framed by her wavy hair.
‘The last time you drank, you tried to kill yourself. Since the day
you told me that, I have worried about it happening. I mean, I don’t
even know if you’ve been feeling like that again.’
Tom thought for a moment, but said nothing.
Almost immediately her anger became sadness and Esme fully
broke down in tears. Tom stood up off the bed and went to comfort
her, but the hand on her shoulder was brushed off as though it
belonged to a stranger.
‘I’m sorry, Es.’
Esme swallowed a tear and looked up at him.
‘It’s not enough,’ she said.
‘What do you mean?’
‘Sorry. You lie and lie and lie. And all you can say after is sorry.’
Tom went to speak, but Esme cut him off.
‘Everything I have worried about for ten years happens. And
instead of telling me, you lie—’
‘I didn’t lie,’ he interrupted.
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At this, she turned and made for the door. Tom called for her to stop.
‘Why should I?’ she shouted. ‘Why should I not just go now?’
‘Because we have to sort this out,’ he said, adding a hopeful,
‘Don’t we?’
Esme thought for a moment and stepped away from the door.
‘And what if there is nothing to sort out?’ she said, the words
emptying all the colour from Tom’s face.
‘What do you mean?’
‘Come on,’ she said, almost scoffing at him. ‘How little respect
do you have for me – for us – if all that happens and you can’t bring yourself to tell me?’
‘It’s not like that.’
‘Well, what is it like then?’ she snapped. ‘You’re not telling me
anything. All I know is that you started drinking again while I was
getting over a fucking miscarriage.’
‘We,’ Tom said.
‘What do you mean?’
‘ We had the miscarriage. We always said that I didn’t want you to manage it alone.’
‘Yes but it is I, Tom. Isn’t it? I was carrying the baby. I lost the baby. You were just there. “It’s an us thing, not a you thing”, wasn’t it?’ she said, recalling what he said to her outside the early pregnancy unit. ‘Well that was fucking bullshit, wasn’t it?’
Esme turned away from him and stalked across the room. Part
of Tom was angry about this sudden division, the instant breaking
of a promise they had made to one another about how they would
deal with the loss and carry on after it.
‘Did anything else happen that night?’
Tom said nothing to this. Unsure of what he could say.
‘Es . . .’
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‘I want to know!’ she said. ‘I mean, I don’t think I can stand to hear it all. But I want to know what happened that night.’
And so Tom told her.
He told her about how his depression had crept back into his
life, and by proxy, theirs. And that instead of telling her about it, he had tried to close the door on it, breaking the verbal contract they
had made years ago, one afternoon on Hampstead Heath, that he
would always let her in.
He told her that he had been feeling on the verge of some pre-
cipice – endlessly, teeth-grindingly anxious for months. But that he
had tried to carry on as though it were something he could ignore.
Lapsing into the behaviour of an entire former generation, when
anxiety was solved by
pulling one’s self together and stiffening the
upper lip.
Crying openly now, he told her about the bar in Liverpool, the
urge. How he had tried to call her. How he had stepped outside to
try to bring himself down. How none of it was enough.
Then came his attempted kiss with Louisa, the waking up next
morning, feeling her beside him. Worrying about what else he might
have done. Not being able to remember if he did, and being relieved
when he discovered that he hadn’t. This was the hardest part.
Finally, he told her about coming home – how it all felt different
suddenly, and all of it grew worse and worse. How his self-hatred
snowballed with each new remembrance. How he had found himself
lurching towards the lowest ebb again, desperately trying to pull
himself back with therapy sessions and AA meetings.
Esme listened without blinking. She did so seemingly without
judgement. Tears came sporadically – perhaps at the idea of Tom
suffering alone, at his pushing her away, at the vision of him drunk
and helpless.
When Tom finished, Esme’s face was wet from crying, red from
the irritation of wiping her eyes with the back of her hand.
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‘I’m sorry,’ he said, and she took his hand. ‘I don’t know what to do next.’
‘Neither do I,’ she said.
They sat together for a moment, both of them silent until Esme
released his hand and stood up.
‘I’m going to go for a little walk. I need to process this all.’
‘Okay. Do you think—’
‘Don’t ask me what I want to do, Tom,’ she said. ‘Because I really
don’t know myself.’
And with that, Esme turned away from him and left the hotel
room, leaving him sat on the end of the bed.
Now, on his own in the room, Tom wondered if this might be
it. The end. Ten years. He confessed about the relapse shortly after
they arrived in the bedroom at Byron House, the luxury hotel she
had booked for them. When they came out, the words were urgent,
having been building up in him for almost half of the year.
But it wasn’t necessarily that need to speak that made him do it.
Rather, it was a series of prompts from the moment they left Islay
Gardens to the moment they arrived at the hotel. The memory of
the last time he was in a hotel room, and what happened in it.
He had watched Esme bustle around the room, excited as she
always was when they stepped into a hotel – their home from home
for the night. She was pointing out the fresh ground coffee, the
roll-top bath, and the posh toiletries. But he was barely listening.
Instead, he sat on the end of the bed, looking down at the floor with
his bags at his feet.
‘Tom,’ she said, emerging from the bathroom. ‘Is everything okay?
Do you feel alright?’
Tears formed in his eyes as he looked up at her. ‘Not really, Es.
There’s something I need to talk to you about.’
Now he could see her outside, sat on a bench that overlooked a
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small green where two children were throwing a ball to one another.
Though he knew she needed time, Tom couldn’t bear to give it to her.
He got up from the bed, hurried through the hallway away from
their room and down into the lobby, busy with waistcoated staff
sycophantically fawning over weekending couples. Ignoring a ‘Can
I help you, sir?’, Tom ran out of the double doors and onto the high
street. She was not far from him now. He could see her looking up
at the sky, her short hair fluttering lightly in the gentle breeze.
Esme turned as he neared, and the look on her face immediately
told him he’d done the wrong thing.
‘You couldn’t give me five minutes?’
‘Es, I—’
‘You what, Tom? Thought that my thinking about the future of
our relationship could be hurried along?’
‘No. I just hated the idea of not knowing.’
‘And I hate the idea of you fucking lying to me,’ she shouted,
standing up from the bench and attracting the disapproving glares
of an elderly couple walking their basset hound. ‘Again!’
‘Esme. I didn’t . . .’ Tom was about to say the word lie. However, he knew that doing so would only make things worse. He had lied.
He hadn’t wanted to. But intent was meaningless now. It was all
about actions. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, instead.
Tom and Esme were now facing each other. The sun was shining
down, catching one side of her face. She had rolled up the sleeves of
the Breton top she was wearing, showing her pasty white arms and
the watch she always wore with the face on the inside of her wrist.
He could sense that something intangible had changed. Once a
team, they were now adversarial. The years that should have strength-
ened them had done the opposite.
‘If you need time, Es.’
‘It’s not about time,’ she said quickly. ‘I don’t need to think about
it anymore.’
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‘Okay,’ he said, apprehensively.
‘You know just then, before you came down here and interrupted
me? I was trying to imagine what things would be like six months
from now. Whether I could see us getting past this.’
‘And?’
‘I was thinking: what if you get another gig somewhere far away?
If you meet some fucking friend from the good old days. Or I’m at
some conference for a while? How do I know it won’t happen again?’
‘It—’
‘I can’t be with someone I can’t trust, Tom. I just can’t. Part of
me actually blames myself for allowing you to go. As if you’re a
teenager. Not a fully grown man who knows better,’ she said, her
voice breaking. ‘Who knows he has responsibilities.’
‘I know.’
‘Who knows he has a life . . . with me.’
Esme pulled her sleeve down over her watch and dabbed at her
eyes with the cuff. She collected herself with a deep breath.
‘You promised you’d always let me in, Tom. But when it comes
to it you don’t say a word. Half a year you’ve had this. And you let
me think you were just sad about the baby.’
‘I was. I am. That was part of it.’
‘But there was more, wasn’t there? It had all come back again and
you didn’t say. Just like you didn’t say until your mum made you.
Just like you didn’t say until we met that bloke at my birthday. Just
like you didn’t say until you fucking broke down on New Year’s Eve
at Neil’s house.’
‘Esme.’
‘No. You have lied and lied and lied. I get that it’s hard. I get it.
But if you don’t let anyone get close to you, how the fucking hell
are you going to deal with it?’
Tom wanted to speak again, but for the first time he had nothing
much to say. She was right.
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‘The baby . . . the miscarriage,’ he said, trying to find something, anything, that would help him. ‘That did make it worse. So did . . .’
He wasn’t sure whether he should say it, if it might make things
worse. ‘Cornwall.’
‘Right. So the fact that I wouldn’t—’
‘No. I mean that when you’re low, these . . . things. They make it worse. They confirm what all the anxiety is about.’
‘Well thank you for telling me this now,’ she said, looking around.
Then she turned to face him with a serious expression.
‘I can’t believe we’re doing this here.’
The words hit Tom like a punch to the gut.
‘What do you mean?’ he said.
‘Here. In a town square. On our bloody anniversary.’
‘But what do you mean when you say “this”?’
Now Esme hesitated. She looked away from him for a second.
‘I can’t be the one who finds you, Tom. If you get bad again and
you try to . . .’ she said, unable to reach the word. ‘If you try.’
‘Es.’
‘And you can’t promise me that won’t happen.’
‘I can!’
‘You can’t, though. You just said earlier. You’ve been feeling . . .
that way again.’
‘But I didn’t. I pulled back.’
‘How far did you get?’ she said, the confrontational tone gone for
a moment, and in its place a sort of resigned compassion.
Tom hesitated for a moment. ‘I looked at the pills. The big bottle
Jamilla brought back from America.’
At this, Esme broke down: the anger, the hurt, and the guilt of
being angry with him for something he couldn’t control, all proving
too much. Tom had seen it before in his parents, that same complex
mix of emotions people feel when so deeply affected by the behaviour
of the depressed or anxious. The anger they are told is selfish.
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‘And how much of that . . . How much of what you felt affected what happened in Liverpool?’
Again, Tom hesitated. But he knew the answer.
‘Tom,’ she said, firmly. ‘I want to know. Which came first. The
depression or Liverpool?’
‘Neither!’ he snapped. ‘I was feeling bad and then . . . that. Each
made the other worse. It’s not as fucking simple as one following
the other. Things just magnify, don’t they?’
‘I don’t know. I really don’t,’ Esme said, pulling a tissue from her
pocket to dab dry her eyes and nose.
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