by Anna Raverat
“No! Well, I won’t lie—it’s not the first time I’ve ever spoken to anyone.”
“I think I’m going to go now,” I said. “Bye.”
Ten minutes later he sent a text: Is this how you treat everyone who tries to be nice to you? What a waste of space …
33
Jo adopted me as a project, of which she was the director. Every time I saw her she wrote a list of things I should do or buy.
— A lipstick in Barbie pink (this season’s color)
— Hair in a ponytail (makes you look younger)
— A new jacket fitted at the waist (sexy)
— Chicken, fish, or steak with veg—no carbs (stay thin!)
— Exercise, for fitness and relaxation—twenty minutes a day (will help you sleep)
She was bossy, Jo, but her lists were loving.
* * *
I lost weight. Even my feet went down a size, which I still don’t understand, unless the shock somehow made them arch more and then they just stayed that way. My bum shrank but so did my cheeks, which made me look older. Jo said I looked better than ever, though I worried she was humoring me. People say that at forty you have to choose between your arse and your face but they don’t mention breasts; what happens to them—do they go with the bum or the face? Mine got even smaller. “You’re not forty yet—don’t think about it,” said Jo, but if there’d been a book called Your Arse or Your Face I probably would have bought it.
34
In the cupboard under the stairs I found a box set of The Sopranos, which we used to watch together; Tony Soprano having a midlife crisis, suffocating under the weight of his triple life: waste-management consultant, strip-club owner, Mafia boss. Carmela incensed every time she found out about a new “gumah.” Wife, kids, girlfriend, the Mob all making demands, Tony falling slowly apart. Perhaps all midlife crises are to do with the gap between who you wished to be and who you really are; the life you’d hoped for and the life you’ve actually got. You feel it as an ache, this gap, and the crisis happens when, in increasing desperation, you try to fill it—cars, motorbikes, handbags, and shoes—and not just any old ones; this is where branding and marketing get a foothold. Someone sees themselves on a Ducati; for someone else it’s a Harley-Davidson, a VW camper van, a Porsche, or a Mercedes-Benz. Chanel handbags, Jimmy Choo shoes, Tiffany earrings. Younger lovers, older lovers, online lovers: any lover will do as long as they won’t see us as we really are. Botox, detox, a new job, a new hairstyle, chocolates, gardens, grand pianos: you can throw ten thousand things into the gap; it will never close.
* * *
In the same box as The Sopranos were three sets of negatives from a weekend photography course at Central Saint Martins that I’d given Adam for his birthday not long after his collapse. I thought it would help him to become absorbed in something and he’d always said he loved photography. I had a sense that Adam wasn’t very proud of himself or where he was in his life. Outwardly he was doing fine but he had fallen short by his parents’ estimation and, crucially, his own—hadn’t lived up to the early promise of his brilliant youth, though nobody ever said so.
Most of the negatives were head-and-shoulders shots of a young woman, apparently also in the course. She looked vaguely uncomfortable, unsmiling, almost sulky, sitting side-on with a backward glance to the camera, long dark hair coming over a bare shoulder. Peering at the negatives, I thought at first she was wearing a camisole and then I remembered the course took place in high summer, so it must have been a sundress.
When he came home on the Sunday night, he said it had been great. He made no mention of anyone else in the course, but finding these portraits made sense of a cache of emails he’d written afterward to a woman called Janey in which he’d asked whether she wanted to meet up for a drink.
I’m not sure, maybe. Are the others going to be there? Janey had replied, sounding uncertain.
* * *
After I found Janey in the cupboard under the stairs, I asked Adam about her. He refused to discuss it, said it was nothing. I had the feeling I would stop finding things only when I stopped looking. He’d hidden so much—not just from me, from everyone—and he was still holding back, wanting to prevent things from coming fully out into the open, wanting to keep things hidden. Hiding was the main thing, I realized.
35
The instructions on the back of the Mr. Muscle drain cleaner read:
1. Pour the entire contents down the plughole
2. Allow to work for one hour
3. Flush with hot water
Exactly what I wanted to do, and not just with the contents of that bottle. The instructions made it sound so easy: all I had to do was open the bottle and like a genie the product would come out and do all the hard work; no scrubbing, brushing, scraping, or swilling necessary, in fact no effort whatsoever required on my part. All I had to do was open the bottle and wait.
* * *
The dejunking books had similarly clear instructions. When clearing out a drawer, for example:
1. Empty the drawer
2. Clean it thoroughly
3. Sort through contents throwing away anything broken, ugly, duplicate, or unused
4. Put the remainder neatly back into the clean drawer
A kind of madness seeped out from the small hours. My perception fell slightly out of step with reality. It was as though surreal was a color, like teal or cerulean blue, and everything took on its strange hue.
I lost my appetite; the only time I wanted to eat was after the night shift—a couple of digestive biscuits with a cup of tea at 6:30 a.m. Everything I ate tasted like cardboard, including the biscuits, but at least they were sweet cardboard.
I sorted meticulously through drawers and shelves. By 6:00 most mornings there were two bags by the door, rubbish and charity shop—but the charity shops didn’t open until 10:00 so that bag went to Peter. A couple of times I had to book a taxi-van for things I couldn’t carry on the Tube: an armchair, a small sofa, beanbags—the worst furniture idea ever—a large rug, a side table. Peter would often be outside his shop by 8:00 a.m., sweeping the street, setting up for the day, but if he wasn’t I’d leave my offerings tucked in by the door.
36
The bulbs in the backyard had not fared well, due to the clay in the ground, I supposed. A few weaklings with limp, pale shoots were all they yielded, no flowers. One weekend our neighbor David came over with tulips—he and his partner Edward had a beautiful back garden, and a surfeit. Edward was still besotted with the younger man and though David had decided to bide his time and wait until the infatuation passed, that didn’t seem to be happening very quickly. I told David about my emergency crush on Ben from the bookshop.
“I’ve got a massive crush on him too,” said David. “Everyone has! It’s the eye contact—he gives such good eye contact—you really feel like he’s interested, like he really cares.”
“Maybe he does,” I said.
“Maybe he does,” David conceded.
We dug out the dense, sodden mud and replaced it with sacks of soft, crumbling compost. It was immensely satisfying to bury the new plants in the earth, pat them down, water them in. You could feel the good it did.
“There should be a book on how gardening can heal your broken heart,” I said.
“Oh, there is,” said David. “Why do you think our garden is so gorgeous?”
* * *
On Amazon—so that Ben wouldn’t see the kind of person I really was—I bought Gardening for the Soul: Blossoming Again After Blight, Mend Your Broken Heart: How to Get from Hurt to Healing, and Get Over Your Breakup: How to Turn Devastating Loss into the Best Thing That Ever Happened to You.
Embrace your newfound freedom, the books advised. Make a list of the things you can do now that you couldn’t do before. Have fun. You can do whatever you want. Experiment, the authors encouraged—have your own ideas, see what feels right. I could eat all the things he didn’t like, have cake for breakfast, spend as much money as I
liked on a single bottle of wine, buy a cocktail shaker and take up martinis.
37
Muscle of the Month: The Heart. A large screen in the leisure center displayed a picture of the heart with its four chambers, main entrance and exit veins clearly labeled: vena cava, aorta, left ventricle and atrium, right ventricle and atrium. Very simple, very spacious—not how my heart felt at all.
* * *
“Try something else,” the doctor had said, refusing to renew my prescription. “Swimming might be good, or a relaxation class—yoga, perhaps. You’ve got to get a good night’s sleep on your own; you can’t rely on these pills forever. If it doesn’t work, you can come back in a month.”
“Find a still place,” said the yoga teacher. He meant a place inside. I did not feel still. There was a heaviness in my chest, a weight I felt but could not find. “Yoga is not competitive,” said the teacher. “Focus your awareness on the subtle body—the invisible double of the physical body, the vehicle of the vital force. It’s always there. You can’t see it but you can feel it.”
Never mind the subtle body; the actual bodies of the people in the room were something to behold. Apart from a few stragglers at the back like me, this class seemed to be where all the perfect people go. Dancing around on their mats in hot-pink shiny leggings and tiny weeny shorts designed to show off exquisitely rounded buttocks, they even had beautiful shoulder blades and backs of their necks. It was like arriving in a country populated by off-duty ballerinas. I knew I shouldn’t have been looking, but I wasn’t the only one—the blonde in the fuchsia leggings glanced over at the redhead in a lime-green leotard to see how high her leg went, and both of them looked when the shorter, bouncier brunette lithe in her navy-blue bodysuit flipped like a pancake between handstand and back bend. Yoga may not be competitive, but people are.
The subtle body of the yoga class incorporated Scotland, Wales, Ireland, and the jungles and temples of Far East Asia. I’d never seen so many tattoos: twelve Celtic crosses, eleven Buddhas praying, ten tigers leaping, nine eagles soaring, eight dragons roaring, seven snakes a-coiling, six roses blooming, five “Om” symbols, four hummingbirds, three French hens, two turtle doves, and a dolphin in a blue sea. Many people had writing on their body: Chinese characters, phrases in scripts I could only guess at—Sanskrit, Hindi, Tibetan, perhaps. One guy in a baggy T-shirt at the back near me had Love and Hate tattooed on his knuckles, but I think perhaps he was in the wrong room.
Toward the end of the class the teacher told the regulars to start their closing sequence and the rest of us to wait for guidance.
“If you’re waiting for instructions…” he said, and proceeded to tell us how to move into a shoulder stand. I was waiting for instructions. I wanted to be told the right thing to do and the right way to do it, the right way to live.
38
I went to buy a new swimsuit. I needed a new swimsuit because I didn’t want to be reminded of Adam’s comment every time I got into the pool. I picked out a couple to try on and there was one I liked; an updated 1920s style. When I put it on it was horribly baggy, especially round the crotch. I stepped out of the changing cubicle, went to find an assistant, and asked for a smaller size. A bikini across the shop caught my eye and I went over to flick through a whole new rail. There were not many other shoppers that morning, though I thought I saw a young woman look quickly away from me at one point. Eventually, the shop assistant returned. He looked embarrassed.
“I’m sorry, there are no other sizes in that style.”
That style? What style? Oh, God. I was still wearing the swimsuit; no wonder the assistant looked uncomfortable. I darted back into the changing cubicle. At first, I felt as though I had woken from a familiar nightmare in which I had been walking down a crowded street in my underwear, and then I realized that I had actually just done this in real life and there was nothing to wake up from.
So I went somewhere else and bought a swimsuit and a sports bra, called a Determination bra; aptly named because you needed quite a lot of determination just to get it on. On the Tube home I saw someone reading a book called The Escape Manifesto. The blurb on the back said: Have you spent your life jumping through hoops? Do you try to please others by doing what’s expected of you? Do you wish for something more?
Perhaps Adam wished for more, and didn’t know how to say that, even to me, his wife—especially to me, perhaps—and didn’t know where to find it. Maybe that was why he constructed alter egos to hide behind: for Louise he was Prince Charming, the kindly and experienced older man; for Lorna his disguise involved a new name, Adam Norton—it sounded pretty good. Over the years, several people had told him he looked like the actor Ed Norton. Anyone could have guessed the film-star reference, but what it meant that he used this name was something only a wife would know, something to do with his collapse on the sitting-room floor and why he never threw anything away: he needed all those things to shore up the leaks in his self-image like the boy at the dyke, but he couldn’t hold back that sea forever.
Perhaps it would have been better had I not seen him fall to the floor in his suit and tie, though he’d done that right in front of me. He needed a witness, but I also saw too much. Poor Adam, he couldn’t have known—neither of us could—that being seen in despair was even more painful than the despair itself. He couldn’t endure me having seen him as he really was. Seeking relief, he became Prince Charming to Louise and another new man to Lorna. As Ed Norton to her Judy Garland, his real life melted away—no more mortgage, no money troubles, no wife and kids—and he assumed film-star qualities: mysterious and un-pin-down-able, loyal to his dog.
39
I read a review of a book written by a woman who had crossed the Atlantic on a windsurfer. I thought enough time had elapsed for me to go back to the bookshop. Instead of my usual sneaky walk-past check, I would enter the bookshop regardless of who was in that day. Ben was not in. I found the book and took it up to the till.
“That’s a display copy, it’s a bit dog-eared,” said the nice woman. “I can order you a new one if you like—it’ll be here tomorrow.” So I ordered the book and while she was putting the details into the computer, I noticed some new paintings high up on the wall above the bookshelves; small landscapes and seascapes, one of a forest. I remarked on them.
“They’re Ben’s,” said the woman.
“Oh!”
“He’s just finished this series, so we thought we’d display them while he finds a gallery.”
“They’re really good,” I said, and I meant it. I left the bookshop feeling elated; I was right! OK, so Ben was a painter and not a poet, but it’s more or less the same thing, isn’t it?
I went to collect the book the next day, paid, and then said, very fast, “I like your paintings especially this one this one and this one they are really good goodbye.”
Ben said, “Thank—” but I was out the door before he could say “you.”
* * *
The book about crossing the Atlantic on a windsurfer read like a thriller to me. The very idea was appalling—why would anybody in their right mind spend weeks alone atop a tiny board in the middle of a vast ocean? At night the sailor slept inside the specially designed board knowing that it was too small to be picked up by any ship’s radar, so there was always the possibility of being run through and splintered by small- to medium-sized yachts and boats or completely submerged by huge vessels. Storms thundered over her, she was slapped and bruised by the water, her tins of food were dented, her sail ripped; but other nights she was lulled by the wind and waves, and watched the phosphorescence glow in the darkness, the stars bright overhead. Sometimes she raced with dolphins, swam in the Gulf Stream, was visited by whales. She began to feel the moon in the ebb and flow of the water, could tell tides without the tables, learned the positions of the stars: there are signs that we can learn, to place over the heavens, to read the sky, to predict the weather and how long it will last. She tested the old proverbs and found them true.
I liked what the sailor knew. When crossing an ocean aboard a small craft there are a great many things to be aware of. Learn to sort these things into three buckets and you will be a lot happier:
— Things that require your immediate attention
— Things you need to keep an eye on
— Things you can’t do a damn thing about
40
One bedtime, Hester picked We’re Going on a Bear Hunt, an old favorite because of the way the words rolled along and because the drawings were so appealing.
Uh-uh! A river!
A deep cold river.
We can’t go over it.
We can’t go under it.
Oh no!
We’ve got to go through it!
This could have been a mantra from one of my self-help books. “Girls,” I said, “this book is exactly right—it’s telling us how to deal with our situation, with Mummy and Daddy’s separation. We can’t go over it, we can’t go under it, we’ve got to go through it.”
“Shut up, Mummy! I just want a story!” said Hester.
“I don’t want to listen to this,” said Milla. She slid off the bed and locked herself in the bathroom.
* * *
On my insistence, Adam moved two carloads to store in the loft and garage at his parents’ house, but many of his things were still in the house; there wasn’t enough room where he was and besides, that arrangement was temporary. Three times I’d bagged up things of his and, remembering they were not mine to throw away, put them back.
* * *
There are signs that we can learn, the sailor said. How had I not noticed any change in Adam? Perhaps because there wasn’t one; he hadn’t fallen in love with her, he said, and there was no glow, no quickening, no new shine in his eyes, so perhaps his loyalties were not with another woman. But in any case he deserted us, and maybe he also deserted himself. I felt his absence like a closed-up, empty room but he denied it, didn’t want to talk about it. So I allowed myself to be confused—here was his physical form walking the dog, making pasta, folding laundry at midnight, eventually coming to bed, and yet he was not present. There were signs; I ignored them.