Sorrow and Bliss(22)
Afterwards I lay on a lounger beside the pool with a towel around my shoulders, looking at the sea, which rose and fell on the other side of the low stone wall, black and straggled with bits of goldish moonlight. I stayed there until midnight. Jonathan came back early the next morning, his septum crusted with what could have been the fine white sand Ibiza’s beaches are famous for.
*
While Jonathan had conceded to stay somewhere that was far away from anything, he couldn’t bear days of it being just the two of us. I could not bear nights of it being just the five hundred of us at clubs he said he had been to once or twice, and where he would invariably turn out to be well known. He promised I would have fun if I let myself and I stayed for as long as I could each time, but when I became panicked by the music that sounded like the soundtrack to a session of electric shock therapy, we’d agree that there was probably no point. I took long taxi rides back to the villa by myself and went to bed.
The amount of sex he’d told me we’d be having – a medically inadvisable amount – was not had. Jonathan was too dazed when he came back in the morning, too haggard in the afternoons, too agitated as it got towards his standard departure time. The only time he attempted it, returning to the villa after a twenty-six hour absence once and finding me still awake, I pushed him off me and told him my period had started. He got up and struggled back into his jeans, saying too loudly that if girls got their periods at thirteen or something, surely by twenty-five I should know how to game the system. I said, ‘It’s not the fucking stock market, Jonathan.’ He didn’t respond, except to say to himself as he kicked his shirt up off the floor, that with any luck the taxi that had just dropped him off might still be outside.
A moment later I heard tyres on the gravel, and then I was alone again.
*
Although he accepted the invitation, Patrick did not come to my wedding. He called my mother in the morning and said he had fallen off his bike.
*
In the short time we’d known each other, Jonathan had never been exposed to the one of me who can cry for days and days, without being able to say why, or when I am going to stop. It began on our early flight back to London. I took the window seat and, after watching the island recede beneath us and the view become sea, I put a pillow against the cabin wall and rested my head against it. When I closed my eyes, tears started to slip down my face. Jonathan was choosing a movie and didn’t notice.
I went to bed as soon as we got back to the apartment. Jonathan said he was going to sleep in another room, since I was obviously coming down with some hideous flu thing – why else the trembling and looking like death on legs and the weird breathing – and he had no interest whatsoever in catching it.
He went back to work in the morning. I didn’t get up then, or the next day. I stopped leaving the apartment. In the daytime, I could not make the rooms dark enough. Light sliced through the curtains, found cracks under the pillows and Tshirts I put over my head and hurt my eyes even when, trying to sleep, I covered them with my hands.
In ascending order, Jonathan said when he came home in the evenings and found me still there:
Are you sick?
Should I be calling someone?
Genuinely, Martha, you’re giving me the creeps.
Ah, what the fuck?
It looks like you’ve had another productive day, darling.
Do you think we could find it in ourselves to return our sister’s calls so our husband isn’t assaulted by her messages while he is at work?
I might as well go out then. No, truly, don’t get up.
God, you’re like some kind of black hole sucking in all my energy – a force field of misery that just drains me.
Feel free to avail yourself of another bedroom if this is going to be you, in perpetuity.
Weeks passed that way. Letters came from my work, which I did not open. Then Jonathan booked a buying trip and said he would be gone for ten days; in that time, I should, with all love and respect, think about skedaddling. But, he said, hand on the door frame, he had Googled it and I would be pleased to know that my chastity had spared us the faff of an actual divorce. A downloadable PDF, ￡550 and six to eight months of twiddling our thumbs and it would be, at least in the eyes of the law, as though the whole thing had never happened.
As soon as Jonathan left the apartment, I turned my phone on and texted Ingrid. She arrived with Hamish half an hour later and helped me get up. While she worked my arms into my coat, Hamish filled my suitcases with whatever he thought might be mine.
*
The lift dropped us to the ground floor and as the lobby doors slid open, air hit my face, hot and cold and human-smelling, exhaust and asphalt. I dragged it into my lungs like I had been too long under water, and for the first time in weeks I felt like I wasn’t about to die.
My father was double-parked on the other side of the street. Behind the car was the row of commercial rubbish bins, next to an awning. I was too worn out by pain to think, any more, about what would have happened if instead of running back inside, I had run in the other direction, the way Patrick had gone.
With her arm through mine, Ingrid led me to the car and helped me into the front. My father leaned over to do up my seatbelt and at every set of traffic lights on the journey home, he reached across the divide and squeezed my hand, saying my lovely girl, my lovely girl, until the lights changed and he had to drive on.
As he parked in front of the house, I saw my mother standing in the front window. I knew everything she was going to say, if not the order in which she would say it on this – my latest – occasion. I was not sick, I was highly strung. I could not self-regulate. And if I had a depressive bent, I also had an unbelievable knack for timing my dark periods with, for example, other people’s career-making exhibitions. I thrived on negative attention and if I had to break something or scream or, she would say in this case, leave a marriage to get it, I would. But, like a toddler flailing on the floor of a shop, the best thing was to ignore me. And once I had calmed down, I could be invited to consider how my behaviour affected other people, setting back their careers, costing them a son-in-law they’d come to adore even more intensely since they first discovered him to be their fellow in the art world, a reciprocal flirt, someone who always supported the finishing of a bottle and the opening of another one.