by Alice Feeney
These last two years have taught me a lot about myself. Now I’ve left it ‘all’ behind, I’ve realised how little I had. It’s too easy to get blinded by man-made city lights, even though they could never shine as brightly as the stars in a cloudless sky, or white snow on a mountain, or sunbeams dancing on a loch. People confuse what they want with what they need, but I’ve realised now how different those things are. And how sometimes the things and people we think we need, are the ones we should stay away from. My hair is more grey than blonde these days – I haven’t visited a hairdresser since I left London, and it’s grown very long. I wear it in plaits to avoid too many tangles and knots. I do miss our home, and us, and Bob, but I think the Scottish Highlands suit me. And I’ve realised I have more in common with my father than I used to admit, even to myself.
Henry liked his privacy so very much that he bought everything in this valley, along with the old church and cottage, before I was born. The Scottish Laird Henry purchased the land from had a few too many gambling debts, and just happened to be a fan of Henry’s books, so sold it for a ridiculously small sum. Henry even bought the nearest pub a few years later, so that he could close it down. He just wanted peace and quiet and to be left alone. Completely alone.
The locals had been unimpressed by an outsider owning so much of the valley. There were petitions to stop Henry converting the church – even though nobody had used it for half a century – but he did it anyway. He was a man who always did what he wanted and got his own way. When local interference continued, he made up ghost stories about Blackwater Chapel, so that anyone who didn’t already know to stay away, would. Why he wanted to live such a lonely life, hidden away from the world in self-isolation used to baffle me. There are no shops, or libraries, or theatres, or people for miles, there is nothing here except the mountains and the sky and a loch full of salmon. The man didn’t even eat fish. But now, I think I finally understand.
I have almost nothing but almost everything I need. My father’s love of good wine meant that the crypt was crammed full of it, and his old housekeeper left a seemingly endless supply of home-cooked and hand-labelled meals in the freezer. Henry’s personal library is stocked with all of my favourite books, and the ever-changing views here take my breath away every single day. But it can be hard to enjoy the good things in life when you don’t have someone to share them with. I miss our words of the day and words of the year. I don’t eat especially well – I’m a little too fond of tinned food these days – but I feel better than I ever did in London. Maybe it’s the taste of fresh air in my lungs, or the long walks I take exploring the valley. Or maybe it’s just feeling free to be me.
It can be hard to step out from a parent’s shadow when you inherit their dreams. I often wrote stories as a child, but Henry’s shoes were always too big to fill. Plus, he let me know from an early age that he didn’t think I could write. I never thought I might be able to write an entire novel, but dreams can only come true if we dare to dream them in the first place. My self-confidence divorced me long before you did, but life taught me to be brave and to always try again. If you never give up on something you can’t ever fail.
Whenever I weighed my father’s words against my own, his seemed heavier, stronger, more permanent than the thoughts inside my head, which always seemed to come and go like the tide. Washing away my confidence. But castles made of sand never stand tall forever. I am free of his judgement now, and have realised the only person who forced me to live in his shadow was me. I could have stepped out any time I wanted if I hadn’t been so afraid of being seen.
Sometimes I sit in front of the loch when the sun is starting to set and pretend that you and Bob are here sitting next to me. I like to smoke Henry’s pipe in the evening, and watch the salmon jumping across the water, before the moon rises in the sky to replace the sun. Then I listen to the sound of frogs singing, and watch the bats swoop and soar in the sky, until it gets so cold and dark, I have to head back to the cottage. I don’t like to sleep in the chapel – too many unhappy memories haunt the rooms – but I have fallen in love with Blackwater Loch. This place never felt like home until I left it. I wish I could share it with you, along with all the secrets I was forced to keep. You promised to love me forever, but I wonder if you still think of me or miss me at all?
It’s hard to picture Amelia in our old house in London, sleeping in my bed with my husband, walking my dog, cooking in my kitchen, working in my office at Battersea in the job I helped her to get. I still can’t believe you gave her my engagement ring. Or that she’d want to wear something that was once your mother’s, and then mine. But stealing things that belong to other people seems to be a habit of hers. She’s the kind of woman who expects something for nothing, and thinks the world owes her a debt. She was always reading magazines on her lunch breaks – never books – and liked to enter all the competitions inside them, or on the radio, or on daytime TV, hoping to win something for free. That’s how I knew she’d never turn down a free weekend away. It was almost too easy to get you to come here.
I’m sure I’m not the first ex-wife to want revenge. I sometimes imagined killing you both try not to think about it. My personal variety of fury has always been surprisingly calm. I read and write instead. It’s a loneliness coping mechanism that I developed as a little girl, when my father was always too busy working to notice me. It sounds daft now, but I never realised before how alike the two of you are. I seem to have spent a lifetime hiding inside stories: reading other people’s when I was a child, and now writing my own.
There is one secret I want to share. I wrote a novel and now I am writing another. Dreams are like dresses in a shop window; they look pretty, but sometimes don’t fit when you try them on. Some are too small, others are too big. Luckily, my mother taught me how to sew, and dreams can be adjusted to fit, just like dresses.
I think my new book is a good one, and you’re in it.
Rock Paper Scissors is all about choices. I’ve made mine; the time will come when you’ll need to make yours. The only good thing about losing everything, is the freedom that comes from having nothing left to lose.
Your (ex) wife
Amelia
People tend to think that the second wife is a bitch and the first is a victim, but that isn’t always true.
I know how it looks. But ten years is a long time to be married, and theirs had run its course. I didn’t used to think it was possible to be too kind – kindness is meant to be a good thing – but Robin was the variety of kind that invited people to walk all over her: her colleagues, her husband, me. In her mind, she befriended me out of pity when I started volunteering at Battersea Dogs Home. But the truth is she needed a friend more than I did; I’ve never met a lonelier woman.
Of course I was grateful when she helped me to get a full-time job, and of course I felt guilty about sleeping with her husband. But it wasn’t some sordid affair. Their relationship was over long before I arrived on the scene, and Adam and I are married now; instead of all of us being miserable. And she was unhappy – constantly complaining about her husband, the big Hollywood screenwriter, while some of us were stuck dating life’s rejects. From the first time I met my husband, he was like an itch I couldn’t resist scratching. I stayed on the sidelines for a long time, watching, waiting, trying to do the right thing. I changed my hair, my clothes, even the way I speak, all for him. I tried to be who he needed me to be. Not for myself, but because I thought I could fix him, and I knew I could make him happier than he was with her. She didn’t know how lucky she was, and two out of three happy endings are better than none.
Robin didn’t exactly put up a fight. If anything, the divorce was surprisingly amicable given that they’d been married for a decade.
She left. He stayed. I moved in.
It was best for everyone and we were happy – Adam and I. We still are. Perhaps not as happy as we were, but I can fix that. This weekend was supposed to help, but I realise now that it was a big mistake. It
doesn’t matter. I’m sure dealing with his crazy ex will only bring Adam and I closer together again. And she is crazy. If I was in any doubt before, now I know for certain.
I tell myself that as we stand at the top of the staircase, looking at the photo of their wedding day on the wall. They are both smiling for the camera. As usual, I wonder what my husband sees. Does he see the face of someone he misses? Or is it just a blur he can’t recognise? Does he think she is beautiful? Does he look at the picture and think they look good together? Does he wish they still were?
They must have been happy, too, in the beginning. Just like us.
Changing love into hate is a much easier trick than turning water into wine.
It didn’t seem to matter that Adam and I had very little in common when I first moved into the house they used to share. He didn’t seem to mind that I didn’t love books and films as much as he did, and the sex was great for the first few months. I took better care of myself and my body than Robin ever did – I went to the gym and I made more of an effort with my appearance once I had someone to look pretty for. We did it in every room of the house that his ex-wife had so lovingly renovated – always my idea – an exorcism of the ghosts of their marriage. And, unlike so many couples, Adam and I never seemed to run out of conversation. His world fascinated me – the trips to LA and the celebrities he got to meet at readings, it all sounded so… exciting. Adam liked talking about himself and his work just as much as I liked to listen, so it was a good match. We got married as soon as the divorce was finalised. It was a small affair, and very private. I didn’t mind that it was just the two of us at the register office that day, I didn’t think we needed anyone else. I still don’t.
If Robin really is behind all of this, and has been plotting some kind of revenge, then I’m considerably less scared than I was before. I’m smarter than her. A lot stronger, too, mentally as well as physically. If this is her way of trying to win her husband back, it won’t work. Nobody wants to be with a crazy woman, and I think it’s safe to presume that’s what she has become.
‘We should just leave,’ I say.
‘She slashed the tyres.’
‘Then we’ll walk to the next town, or hitch a ride if we see a car.’
‘OK,’ Adam replies, without much conviction. It’s as though he’s gone into shock.
‘Come on, help me grab our stuff.’
I step back onto the landing, but open the wrong door by mistake – they were all locked when we arrived last night; the bell tower, the child’s room – and now I see what must have been the master bedroom – Henry’s room. There is a large bed in the middle, as you might expect, but what I wouldn’t have predicted and haven’t seen in a bedroom before, are all the glass display cabinets covering each of the walls from floor to ceiling. Unlike in other parts of the house, these shelves aren’t filled with books. Instead they are crammed full of little carved wooden birds. When I take a step closer, I realise they are all robins. There must be literally hundreds of them, all the same but different.
‘This place just gets stranger and stranger. Let’s go,’ I say, again.
Adam follows me back out onto the landing, then into the bedroom where we slept last night. I wish that he hadn’t. Robin’s presence is clearly visible in here too. There is a red silk kimono neatly arranged on top of the white sheets on the bed.
‘What is this supposed to mean?’ I say, but it is a stupid question, one which we both already know the answer to. The woman in the red kimono is what Adam has recurring nightmares about, caused by the memory of what happened to his mother. That’s what she was wearing when she walked his dog late one night and was killed by a hit-and-run driver.
‘Why would Robin do this?’ he whispers.
‘I don’t know and I don’t care. We need to leave, now.’
‘How?’ he asks again.
‘I told you already, we can walk if we have to…’
He looks away and I follow his stare. Three words have been written on the mirror above the dressing table, using red lipstick:
ROCK PAPER SCISSORS
Silk
Word of the year:
redamancy noun the act of loving the one who loves you; a love returned in full.
29th February 2020 – what would have been our twelfth anniversary
Dear Adam,
I’ve been writing you letters on our anniversary since we got married, but this is the first one I’m going to let you read, and I strongly suggest that you read it alone before sharing any of its contents. The thought of finally being completely honest feels good. The first thing I want you to know is that I never stopped loving you, even when I didn’t like you, even when I hated you so much I wished you were dead. And I confess that I did for a while. You hurt me very badly.
It is exactly twelve years since we got married, on a leap year back in 2008. You must know by now that Henry Winter was my father. There are so many reasons, good ones, why I never told you. He was there so often in our marriage, always lurking in the background, even on our wedding day. You just never recognised his face, the same way you didn’t always recognise mine. But I only lied to you to protect you. My father didn’t just write dark and disturbing books, he was a dark and dangerous man in real life.
I had a complicated relationship with my dad, especially after my mother died and he sent me away to boarding school. I knew you were a huge fan of his novels, but I never wanted what you and I had together to be contaminated by him: I wanted you to love me for me. I never wanted him to have any hold over me, or you, or us. But I did ask him to let you write a screenplay of one of his novels all those years ago. Having asked for his help, even just the once, it made me feel indebted to that monster in a way that I never, ever wanted to be. I don’t expect you to understand, but please know how much I loved you to do that. Hindsight tends to be cruel rather than kind. Looking back now, perhaps if you had known who I really was, we would still be married and celebrating our twelfth anniversary. But there are so many things I could never tell you.
In public, Henry Winter was a brilliant writer of novels, but in real life he was a collection of unfinished sentences. He bullied my mother until she couldn’t stand it anymore. When she died, he bullied me. As a child, he often made me feel as if I wasn’t really there. As though I were invisible. The characters in his head were always too loud for him to hear anyone else. His lack of belief in me as a child led to a lifelong lack of belief in myself. His lack of interest made me feel as though I were of none to anyone. His lack of love meant that I was never fluent in affection, except with you. I sometimes think he would have kept me in a cage if he could, like his rabbit. And like my mother. Blackwater Chapel was her cage, and I never wanted it to be mine.
Henry’s books were his children, and I was nothing more than an unwanted distraction. He called me ‘the unhappy accident’ on more than one occasion – normally when he’d had too much wine – even wrote it in a birthday card once.
To the unhappy accident,
Happy 10th Birthday!
Henry
The card arrived two weeks after my birthday, and I was only nine that year. He never called himself Dad, so neither did I.
Nothing I did as a child was ever good enough. We are our parents’ echoes and sometimes they don’t like what they hear. I realised that the only way for me to have a life of my own was to remove my father from it. But Henry wasn’t just exceptionally private, and a little peculiar, he was also very possessive. Of me. I felt like I was being watched my whole life, because I was. I left home when I was eighteen, changed my surname to what had been my mother’s maiden name, and didn’t come back until the day he called to say he was dying.
Everything I’ve done since, I did for you, and for us.
I’ve written a novel, two now, actually, both in Henry’s name. Nobody else knows that he is dead, or needs to. Here’s the pitch for the latest book:
Rock Paper Scissors is a story about a couple who have be
en married for ten years. Every anniversary they exchange traditional gifts – paper, copper, tin – and each year the wife writes her husband a letter that she never lets him read. A secret record of their marriage, warts and all. By their tenth anniversary, their relationship is in trouble. Sometimes a weekend away can be just what a couple needs to get them back on track, but things aren’t what or who they seem.
Sound familiar?
It’s a combination of your screenplay and the secret letters I have been writing to you every year since we got together. I’ve changed a few names, of course, and blended fiction with facts, but I think you’ll like the result. I do. When Henry sends it to his agent, he’ll include a letter to say that he wants you to start work on the screenplay straight away. You’ll finally get your own story on screen, just like we always dreamed.
But only if you end things with Amelia.
My plan isn’t as crazy is it might sound. It could be good for you, and us. I miss us every day and wonder if you might, too? Do you remember that tiny basement studio we used to live in? Back when we were still learning whether we could live with or without each other. Some couples can’t tell the difference. That’s the version of you I miss most. And the version of us I wish we could find our way back to. We thought we had so little then, but we had it all, we were just too young and dumb to know it.
Sometimes we outgrow the dreams we had when we were younger, happy when they turn out to be too small, sad when they prove to be too big. Sometimes we find them again, realise that they were a perfect fit all along, and regret packing them away. I think this is our chance to start again and live the life we always dreamed of.
There are other things that you didn’t know about Henry, aside from him being my father. He hired a private investigator for years to keep an eye on me, and you, and us.
A private investigator who knew that you were having an affair before I did.