Our Wives Under the Sea (19)

Three weeks is not a long time. One can wait three weeks for a parcel and think very little of it. For a while, I tightroped a careful normality, considered calling friends and asking them to entertain me, did my work and listened to the neighbors’ television and broadly speaking didn’t think of much at all.

When three weeks had passed and Leah did not return, the Centre called to tell me there had been a delay. How exactly can a submarine be delayed? I asked—imagined underwater toll roads, found myself on the precipice of a laugh. It was nothing, so they said, to be concerned about. Provisionally, the vessel was stocked for several months, the oxygen would continue to replenish. But it won’t be several months, will it? The voice on the end of the line assured me it would not.

I went to the movies alone on a Tuesday lunchtime, lined my wallet with contraband sweets, which I ate in the dark, unscrewing each from its polythene wrap with a noise that would have been thrillingly antisocial had there been anyone there to annoy. Afterward, I moved through the city the way one might in bad weather, though the day was clear and my head bent down against nothing. There was, as of course I now know, something terribly wrong already, but I question how much I really understood then, what significance I can attach to a bad day, to an upset stomach. In general, I was unsure of how to behave. The Centre called again to tell me there was nothing to worry about and I tried to ask questions but found it difficult to argue with the brightness of the voice on the line. OK thank you, I remember I said, somehow unable to summon the bad manners required to protest against such meaningless reassurance, I really am grateful you called. I was, I remember, anxious not to offend the person whose updates were broadly unhelpful but who might, I imagined, quite easily stop calling if I said the wrong thing.

At the two-month mark, I wondered briefly about joining a support group for military wives and dismissed this, consulted notice boards in the newsagents but found only choirs and Addicts Anonymous, a phone line for smokers, and a book group for women with GAD. I lifted up flyers that had been pinned in such a way as to obscure older ones, imagined pulling a card from some hidden place and holding it up to the light: WIFE UNDER THE SEA? HERE’S THE NUMBER TO CALL. In the end, I took a flyer advertising cleaning services at a knockdown rate and left the newsagent without buying anything.



* * *



This is not to say that I didn’t keep busy. I was still working then, of a fashion, still keeping up with Carmen, whom I apprised only a little of what was going on. I had been alone before, after all; I knew the ways in which time knit together, the hours of television and cans of soup and sleeves of dates it takes to make up a day. Leah’s friends would call at irregular intervals—most frequently Toby or Sam, both of whom had become my friends over the intervening years since our first dinner party. We talked fairly often and I filled my days this way, texted Sam about the books she was reading, kept up a string of messages with Toby over the programs playing on the neighbors’ television, a topic that never ceased to fascinate him. Do you think, he had said to me once, that they’re running some sort of illegal operation up there and the television is just to drown out the noise? For whatever reason, I was vague about the situation, told Carmen and Sam that Leah was delayed but that it was nothing to worry about, that she’d be back in a month at most. So OK, Sam said, don’t you think that you’d like to come eat with us this evening? I told her I’d love to, really, but that a friend was away for the weekend and I’d promised to look after her cat. After hanging up, I wondered why I’d said this, crossed to the fridge and peered in at the expired tubs of Chinese food, at the net bag of lemons turning black.

In the mornings, I’d go for a run, give up at some halfway point and buy a coffee, walk back with the sweat drying cold on my arms. I was tired, sore-jawed, sore-boned in the evenings. I wrote my grant applications, emailed clients, watched television, bought a cheap pair of boots online. Sometimes, I imagined calling the Centre and didn’t. Overall, I don’t believe I looked as concerned as I could have done.

This is not an attempt to sound callous. What you have to understand is that, unpleasant or not, all of this had more or less happened before. Trawlers were often delayed and dives were often extended, in the same way that evening trains to the city were canceled by hail or by somebody caught on the tracks. It was all work, with all the usual delay and frustration. More than once, Leah had been held up without explanation, had wound up home belated and weary and smelling of salt. Sometimes I think you prefer it down there, I had said to her, holding her face in my hands and wondering whether I meant it to sound like a joke or reproach, you go so deep you forget you’re supposed to come back.



* * *



I went to a party held by Leah’s friends—Poppy from the long-ago dinner party gesturing in a manner I assumed to be self-deprecating around the generous loft apartment she shared with her boyfriend, Dan. To be honest, I’m not entirely sure why I went. I had never much warmed to Poppy, to her aggressively changeable hairdo and her way of talking over the ends of other people’s sentences like the music that plays to keep acceptance speeches short. It’s possible, I suppose, that the fact of three months without Leah was working on me harder than I wished to recognize. On occasion, I would crawl under my desk at noon and sleep through my lunch break. I felt more certain than usual that something was off about the color of my tongue. Company, in whatever form, suddenly seemed more appealing than it had done. Prior to leaving the house I had smoothed my fingers across my eyebrows to flatten them and watched the rain of dead skin with some consternation. How long, I asked myself, has it been since I last washed my face?