Our Wives Under the Sea (10)

The house was built into a cliffside over the water, offering wide-open views across the tops, from the Dufflin copse that covered the headland to the Davey Elms that lined the ridge. The trees around her house were always bent down, stomach-ached in the wind, her windows smeared with the bodies of insects that hurled themselves against the glass in search of respite from the weather. She had lived by the sea for some seventeen years, largely alone except for when the nurse became essential. The medication eased involuntary movements, but increasingly there arose a danger of choking, of falling, of not being able to climb the stairs. She refused almost every aspect of my help, the way women will when they’ve been bred to accept little more than the basest civility. Patronizing, my mother used to say, when her hairdresser made a joke that veered toward the familiar, when a friend invited her to join her divorcees’ coffee morning—so she’s saying I’m the kind of sad act who needs to hang around with other sad acts and weep into my tea until it’s time to go home? Well, no thank you, chum, I’m quite happy on my own. It was very easy to offend my mother. Rather in the way that it’s very easy to kill an orchid, it often seemed little short of inevitable. Visiting her brought with it the implication that you regarded her as lonely, failing to visit her was an insult all its own. Birthday presents bore about a fifty-fifty chance of misconstrual. My mother: poring over a book on French revolutionary history, pulling a pair of jade earrings from a box, pursing her lips for a second and nodding—I see, as though she quite understands the insult.

Typically, when I visited, we spoke on only very general topics: my hair, the weather, what it was exactly that I did for work again. I loved her hard and at a distance, which made it easier to do, experienced brief but powerful compulsions to hug her and almost never did. She was ill for a long time—a white-knuckled, unbecoming illness that is also, as it happens, frequently passed down from parent to child. I sent my mother flowers and boxes of Jaffa Cakes and visited her less often than was kind. Toward the end of her illness, it became too difficult for her to live on her own and she was moved into full-time hospice care. I remember the day I moved her out—a sky like scalded milk, the smell of something burning. I remember the slip of skin between her knuckles, her white-blond hair, the heavy jewelry of bones too clear beneath the surface.

But perhaps not this just yet, actually. I’m not sure I have the stomach for it.



* * *



The sofa again, and Leah talking the way she does—not at me but at some point to the general left of me, soliloquizing at the wall.

“Some people,” she says, “think the granite floor of the Pacific was torn away to make the moon. Darwin’s son, actually. He said that. That when the Earth was young it rotated very quickly—it went so fast that part of it flew off into space, and the Pacific is the scar it left behind.”

“Cool,” I say. “I’m trying to watch television.”

I sit where I am and don’t look at her. She is wearing a tank top that shows the strange silvered places in her underarms and around the base of her neck and I no longer feel much compelled to comment on this. I find that if I squint at the television hard enough, it’s easier to think about things other than how much I miss my wife.





LEAH


In the sea there’s no such thing as a natural horizon, no place for the line of the sky to signify an end. When you sink—which we did, long hours of sinking—you can’t see the bottom and you can’t see the top and the ocean around you extends on both sides with no obvious limit except the border around your own window. Earth and its certain curvature become far less clear underwater.

Jelka stopped praying after the first hour and instead started humming, which was worse. I considered saying something and then willed myself to kindness. How would you feel, I thought, forgetting for a moment that I was in the exact same position as her. Technically speaking, there was nothing to fix and so no way we could go about fixing it. Matteo continued to batter vaguely at the console and I helped him, though this was not my job and wouldn’t have had much effect even if it had been. At one point, Matteo caught his elbow on the corner of the comms deck and cursed, drawing up sharply and swearing he could break his neck in a fucking toy box craft like this. I clicked my tongue and told him to stop before he broke something worth actual money. I’m not sure why we behaved this way, to be honest. It feels odd, on reflection, to consider the very little we chose to do as we fell beyond diveable depths and still farther. I know it occurred to me, in a distant fashion, that an alarm ought to have gone off to alert us to a battery failure, however many hours ago. I know it occurred to me, too, that we’d need to release weights to slow our descent once we reached thirty-five thousand feet but now had no obvious way of doing that, nor any way of telling how far we’d dropped. It occurred to me that falling too fast and landing too suddenly—wherever we did eventually land—would surely result in a catastrophic rupture of the craft’s outer shell, with upward of six miles of water on top of us. All of this occurred to me, certainly, but only at a kind of remove. It was like the dispassionate realization that one has left the house without first turning a light out—unfortunate but hardly a disaster. I don’t remember thinking we would die, so much as noting that we wouldn’t be able to come back up again. I don’t remember thinking we could fix things, only wondering what would happen next.