Over

by Margaret Forster

  *

  There seemed, at the start of this, too little to write, or not enough that I could manage to write, but now there seems too much. Too much has happened suddenly, too much has changed, and all in one week. I don’t know how to set it down, or even if it will help, to set it down.

  *

  Yes, it will. I want to try to trace how we got here, and I want to try to decide where exactly it is that we all are. How awkwardly I’ve put that, but then awkward is just how I feel. Days now since Don arrived and I haven’t got used to it. I don’t know if I want to get used to it, but what can I do? He seems so content. He seems so much more like his old self. That should be good news, and it is, but it’s also, somehow, dangerous. I think he imagines we can put the clock back. Maybe we could, but do I want to? The trouble is, it can’t be rewound far enough back. But does Don realise this?

  He looks better. That was the first thing to happen, the change in his appearance. When he appeared, all haggard and unshaven, in the kitchen doorway that afternoon he caught sight of himself in the mirror hanging opposite it, behind the main door, and said, ‘God, I look awful.’ He seemed shocked, as though he hadn’t looked at himself for months, and maybe he hadn’t, or maybe he’d looked without seeing, his eyes dead. ‘Can I use your bathroom?’ he asked, and I nodded, registering how normal he sounded. The shower ran for ages, and when he re-emerged he’d shaved. His razor can’t have been strong enough to give him the close shave he needed, but the worst of the stubble was gone. He’d washed his hair too, and brushed it straight back, the way I liked it. But he had no clean clothes, and was still in the creased trousers and a shirt with a grimy collar. ‘Sorry,’ he said, gesturing at his clothes. Then he went to the kettle, as easy as anything, and asked could he make some tea, and maybe some toast, and I nodded again, bewildered, wondering when he would say something to explain himself. I was the one who was tense. And awkward. That was when the awkwardness began and it still hasn’t lifted. He seemed not so much to take over my kitchen – I had to remind myself it was my kitchen – as to inhabit it naturally. He located the tea without needing to ask where I kept it and he reached up to take a mug from its hook as though he didn’t need to look, he knew where it would be. Then he sat, smiling, at my table. Smiling.

  My voice sounded hoarse when I said I’d bought food to make a proper meal, he didn’t need to have toast. He said that was thoughtful of me and he’d appreciate it, he hadn’t had a real meal for so long he’d forgotten when that was. I began peeling the potatoes, my back to him as he sat there. ‘Can I help?’ he asked. I shook my head. Slowly, mixed with the feeling of awkwardness, which I resented but couldn’t get rid of, there was another feeling growing, of anger. He’d disappeared, had all of us worried, and then had the gall to turn up in the middle of the night and sleep in my bed without offering a word of explanation. And now he was being very much at home, still without apologising for his behaviour. He appeared so pleased with himself and seemed to want me to respond and welcome him with open arms. Well, I was not going to. I was suspicious.

  But he knew all that. We had been married twenty-two years. He knew me, he knew how to interpret my silence and my turned back. ‘Lou,’ he said, ‘there’s so much to tell you.’ His voice was soft, but I just waited, busy now with trimming the beans. ‘I’ve finally got somewhere,’ he said, ‘I’ve proved that …’ And I stopped him. I said that if he had come to tell me about his investigations I did not want to hear. I said I couldn’t bear it, and that I’d told him this again and again and again. Didn’t he understand? I didn’t care any more what he’d proved. To me, it would be irrelevant. My voice was shaking then, and he heard, and started to get up from the table to come to me, but I moved away. He tried again to talk, managing a few words – I think along the lines of ‘it changes everything’ – before I said no, and put my hands over my ears, dropping the knife I was holding. He picked it up for me, and retreated to his chair at the table.

  I cooked. For a whole twenty minutes neither of us said a word. I set the table. The vegetables bubbled in their pans, the salad was tossed in its bowl, the steak spat on the grill. When it was all ready, I sat down at the table with him. I thought about opening a bottle of wine – I had two or three bottles in the rack – but decided it would be too much like a celebration, so I just filled a jug with water and offered it to him. He ate carefully, slowly, as he always does. I kept my eyes on my plate. ‘Delicious,’ he said, when he’d finished. ‘You’ve no idea how delicious that was, Lou. Thank you.’ I had struggled to clear my own plate and hadn’t quite managed. None of it tasted delicious to me. I couldn’t go on not looking at him, once I’d stacked the plates and pans in the dishwasher, but when finally I turned towards him, his expression infuriated me – he looked so sorry for me, there was pity in his eyes. And that decided me. ‘You can’t stay here, Don,’ I said. ‘It’s my flat, there isn’t room. Molly’s in the spare room.’

  He nodded. He said, of course, he understood, he’d go. It was just, he said, that he’d arrived back so late and he’d lost the key to his bedsitter and he hadn’t known where to go except to Judith’s and he hadn’t wanted to face her, and besides he had so much to tell me. ‘I didn’t mean to fall straight asleep,’ he said, ‘not without telling you what you won’t let me tell you. It’s good news, Lou. You needn’t be afraid, you …’ But I stopped him again. I knew I was behaving childishly, but I couldn’t help it. I was so afraid he would come out, as he always did, with some crazy theory; that his ‘proof’ and his ‘good news’ would turn out, as before, to be delusional nonsense. Yet at the same time I knew perfectly well that he no longer seemed demented. He sounded rational. His face had relaxed, it wasn’t taut with strain. Something had happened to cause this transformation and I knew I was being silly, perverse even, not to let him tell me what it was.

  We went into the sitting-room and I put the television on. It was still early, only just after six o’clock. ‘Coffee?’ I asked, and went to make it without waiting for a reply. When I took it back in, I didn’t sit beside him on the sofa. I sat at right angles, on the easy chair. He seemed to be listening and watching with rapt attention but that was always how he treated television – if it was on, even if he hadn’t turned it on himself, he had to concentrate. It drove him mad when the children had it on as mere background and talked over it or even went out of the room leaving the television still on. When the news is over, I thought, I will ask him to go. If he can’t get into his bedsitter, he will have to go to Judith’s. I don’t have to feel responsible for him, I’m not turning him out into the cold.

  But as the news ended, as I opened my mouth to say what I had practised, I heard the door of my flat open. It was Molly.

  *

  That was it, the point at which everything changed – it’s suddenly so obvious. If Molly hadn’t come in then, Don would have left, I’m sure. Maybe he would have had one last attempt to tell me what he’d found out but if I’d stopped him again, and I would have done, he would have gone.

  Molly was, of course, astonished. She stood in the doorway, stock-still, gaping. Don got up and smiled at her and said, ‘Molly!’ and held out his arms, but still she didn’t move. For a moment, he looked uncertain, his arms falling to his side, but still he smiled and at last she moved towards him, half-stumbling, saying, ‘Dad?’ with almost a question in her voice. Then they did embrace, but tentatively. Don, I’m sure, reminding himself that, unlike Miranda, Molly was not a great hugger – in that one respect she was like him, and not like me. She looked so small beside him, her head only up to his chest. She’s the same height as I am, and as he gave her this hug I felt the strangest sensation of pressure on my own chest, as though I was being enfolded in his arms.

  So, Molly took over. She asked all the questions I hadn’t asked, and I had a choice then: either I stayed and listened to the answers or I went into another room and deliberately ignored them. I stayed. I heard Don tell Molly where he had been, and why, an
d what the result had been. I don’t think I took half of this information in, probably because I didn’t want to.

  Then I heard Molly ask, ‘So are you satisfied? Can you stop now? Are your investigations over?’ I saw Don was looking straight at me, and that he was addressing what he said next to me, not to Molly. ‘I’ll never be satisfied,’ he said, ‘but yes, I can stop. I needn’t carry on. There’s a lot more could come out, should come out, but the crucial thing is …’ I hardly understood the rest. Whatever this crucial thing is, it is also complicated and I didn’t understand what Don was talking about – nothing new there, then. Molly seemed to, though. It was all to do with weather reports and how from now on no one would be able to take a boat out from that marina without being made aware, automatically, of the latest update. Don explained how this would be done and Molly nodded. There was a strange expression on her face. She was looking at her father as though she was struggling to hold something back because it might upset him – her lips kept constantly folding in, disappearing, and then she’d relax them and almost pouted before she did the same again. Words, I thought, were being swallowed. Her eyes were not so much narrowed as intently focused on Don, weighing him up, deciding something. And then it began to occur to me, in the most peculiar way, that Molly knew her father was a fraud. She knew he was making no sense at all with this rigmarole about inventing a new system of weather reports being passed on to boat owners in the marina. He was improvising, finding a way out of the mess he’d got himself into. He’d decided to find an escape route, unable simply to admit he had been deluded all along. I was suddenly sure of this, and sure that Molly had realised it and was deciding whether to expose his fantasy.

  How had it happened, this coming-to-his-senses? When? After the blow to his head, when he’d collapsed and ended up in the Middlesex? Had he brought himself to the point of complete breakdown and then negotiated this strategy with himself to make a climb-down acceptable? It was so elaborate – why couldn’t he just have admitted Miranda’s death was an accident? – but it would appeal to Don’s mind. Nothing was ever simple with him, he liked concocting scenarios. I thought about how he’d turned up that night, exhausted, of how he’d fallen onto my bed and slept so deeply and then, when he’d woken up, been transformed. He’d gone to Durham, seen Alex, asked his absurd question about the weather, and then probably returned once more to Holland and persuaded the authorities that it was their duty to issue storm warnings to every boat. They must have thought he was mad.

  But maybe not. Maybe I am the deluded one. Maybe I was reading into Molly’s expression more than was there. Perhaps Don really had thought of a way of the people at the marina becoming responsible for storm warnings. Just because it was unlikely, and seemed fanciful, didn’t mean it was not feasible. What did I know? Nothing. I tried to listen more carefully. Molly was talking now. But she was not, I noticed, asking him how this new system he claimed to have invented would work – she wasn’t being suspicious, she wasn’t cross-questioning him. Instead, she was concentrating on getting him to state, unequivocally, that the investigations which had dominated his life for three years were definitely, definitely, over – that was all that mattered. I knew she was right. What would be the point in deliberately humiliating Don, forcing him to admit what I believed to be the truth? Why shame him into confessing that after bringing himself to the point of complete breakdown he’d had to acknowledge he’d been misguided? The cost of my being right was far too high. Molly instinctively knew that. I should keep quiet.

  Yet Molly had apparently decided not to let him off the hook so completely, after all. She returned to questioning him about the state of the boat. She said, ‘So the mast wasn’t faulty? The engine was OK?’ She was still watching him closely, as though this was a test he had to pass. Don hesitated. Here we go, I thought, he can’t keep it up. I was waiting for the tirade that would follow, but it never came. ‘Maybe not,’ he said, ‘it’s impossible to prove either way. I tried. I don’t know.’ He then launched into a little lecture about masts and engine parts and I could tell that this time Molly understood no more than I did. She repeated – ‘Can you stop now?’ Don said, yes, he could. He hesitated. Did he look shifty, or was I imagining it? He went on that Miranda should never, in view of the storm warning, have been allowed out and now no one ever would be again. Molly didn’t ask him how this could possibly work, though she did frown. In addition, the makers of the mast and of the engine were checking the finished products even more rigorously just in case there had been a fault.

  I should never have spoken. I should have gone on keeping silent. I should never have said, ‘So, no one was to blame, really. There isn’t any justice to be done. Miranda took a boat out without knowing a storm was coming and she wasn’t experienced enough to cope. That’s it. Human error. Hers. The inquest said so. You just couldn’t accept it, and now you do. Well, I’m glad something has brought you to your senses.’

  *

  Molly was angry with me. She defended her father, saying he’d only been trying to establish the truth. ‘Was it worth it?’ I asked. ‘Worth putting himself, and us, through the last three years? I don’t think so, Molly.’ Molly started to say something, but Don stopped her. The smile had certainly been wiped from his face by my nasty, sarcastic words and tone, but he was still calm and looked almost relaxed. ‘I had to do it, Lou,’ he said, ‘you know that. However mad, I couldn’t rest, I couldn’t …’ I interrupted. ‘Oh, you don’t need to tell me that. Nothing else mattered to you. No one’s suffering was as great as your own. You couldn’t stop your investigations for our sake, seeing what they did to us, you couldn’t admit they were pointless.’ Don spread his hands out. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I’m so sorry.’

  What was wrong with me? My God, what was wrong? Why wasn’t I thrilled that at last my husband had seen sense and accepted the truth we’d all known? It didn’t matter, surely, that he was deluding himself in a different way, convincing himself with all this nonsense about weather reports, that he’d done some good so that others wouldn’t die as Miranda had done, that all his investigations had been worthwhile. As he said, he had to do it. It was a process, which for some stubborn reason he had had to go through, and now he was through it, and all was well. But that was precisely the trouble – all was not well, and it still is not. He is still too proud to admit there was no need for his investigations, that they were quite unnecessary.

  *

  Molly gave him her bed. When Don said he was leaving, she was startled and asked why. He said, without looking in my direction, that I wanted him to leave. She turned to me and asked, ‘It’s not true, is it, Mum? You don’t want him to leave, do you? He’s got it wrong.’ ‘No,’ I said, ‘he’s got it right. There’s nowhere for him to sleep.’ I hated my own defensive tone. ‘He can have my room,’ she said, ‘the spare room. I can stay with Judith. I promised I would, anyway, before I go back. That’s settled, I’ll ring her now and tell her Dad’s here and he’s fine.’ Out came her mobile and she rang Judith. And then, to make things even worse, Judith said she would come and pick her up and see Don with her own eyes.

  There was nothing I could do, short of creating the kind of ugly scene I detest. I felt beaten. It wasn’t Don who had beaten me but Molly. She didn’t want me to throw her father out. As far as she was concerned, he was the old Don, restored to life, as it were, she didn’t care how or why, and she now thought I would rejoice and we would all be a happy family again. Except that Miranda is dead. Except that everything that has happened has changed me, not just Don. He is ‘back’. I am not.

  9

  DON SAID HE could do the cooking, do the shopping, do anything to make himself useful, but I refused his offer, said there was no need. I’ve no intention of slipping into a chummy setup. I don’t want him to imagine that we are going to become a unit again. We are not. If he doesn’t want to return to his bedsitter, and he doesn’t – who would? – he will have to find himself somewhere else. He may ha
ve spent a lot of money on his investigations and, of course, he’s now lost his job, but he can’t surely have spent everything he got from his share of the sale of our house.

  He isn’t embarrassed about being here, in my flat. I expected him to be, I even thought it right that he should be. I would have been, if the situation had been the other way around. I’d have felt an intruder, an interloper, but Don seems alarmingly at ease. Well, he alarms me. I don’t want him to be comfortable here. When I come back from school he is sitting in my kitchen drinking coffee and reading the newspaper and he looks up and smiles and says, hello, had a good day, as though we are an old married couple. What have I written? Of course that is what we are, it is exactly what we are: married, still.

  Nothing has been said about our marital status, by either of us. I’m not even sure if we are officially separated. How official does it have to be? When the house was sold, and the money divided, I signed some sort of agreement, but I don’t think it amounted to a declaration that Don and I are officially separated. Neither of us cared about that. I wanted to be free of Don but I wasn’t looking far into the future – I just wanted a new life, afterwards, when it was over. And I’ve got it. I’ve made a new life, by myself, in this flat, and I want to keep it as it is.

  Molly and Finn and Judith are all here often. We have what they all seem to think are enjoyable family meals. Judith brings the food and Molly helps her prepare it, in my kitchen. There’s that very air of celebration I don’t want. Suddenly, against my nature, I am the quiet one. I can’t stand being round my own table with them all for very long and keep making excuses to go into my bedroom or sitting room. It is crowded in the kitchen, anyway – the table there was never meant to cater for five people. It isn’t like our old kitchen, which was spacious and had such a big pine table that it could, and did, accommodate a dozen people easily. But they don’t seem to mind the crush. They like it, or at least there are no complaints. The very fact that Judith is here, and sitting next to Don, seems remarkable. He hasn’t snapped at her once, he hasn’t winced when she’s gone off into one of her long-drawn-out, completely boring anecdotes. I even saw him put his arm round her at one point as though he’d forgotten that she irritated him. And Judith knows Don must have forgiven her even if he will never say so – she senses the change.