Sorrow and Bliss(43)

I read them during the flight home. The cabin light was low and Patrick was sleeping with his arms folded and his shoulders drawn up. He was six when he wrote them. He had signed all of them ‘Lost of love, Paddy’. I touched his wrist. He stirred but didn’t wake up. I wanted to say, if you ever write me a letter, please sign it that way. Lost of love, Paddy.

*

He chose St Petersburg for our honeymoon, and the hotel because although I had said I could do it, I fell at the first hurdle, which was the travellers’ photos on TripAdvisor: an infinity of towel swans and seafood platters and unacceptable stray hairs.

On the plane, he asked me if I was going to change my name. He had just finished a crossword in the in-flight magazine that a previous passenger had already started.

I said I wasn’t.

‘Because of the patriarchy?’

‘Because of the paperwork.’

A steward came past with a trolley. Patrick asked for a napkin and told me he was going to write a list of pros and cons about name changing. Ten minutes later he read it to me. There were no cons on it. I told him I could think of some and took the pen out of his hand. He said I should press my button and ask for a packet of napkins since I was a pro at thinking up cons.

*

We lost each other in the Hermitage on our first morning. I went to the café and ordered jasmine tea and waited for him to find me. Before it arrived, I heard his voice on the loudspeaker. ‘Mrs Martha Friel, née Russell. Your husband would like you to come to the main lobby.’

Next to the desk, a stand of brochures, doing something with his collar – Thank God.

*

On the Nevsky Prospekt, Patrick bought me a figurine of a horse from a teenage girl who was selling them. She had a baby with her. Waiting as he chose, I felt like I couldn’t breathe for the sorrow of its smiling at me, and the way it grabbed its little feet at the same time, happy even though its life was sitting for hours a day in a metal pram with dirty white wheels while its mother sold horses.

Patrick paid ￡50 for the worst one, not the 50p she asked for it, pretending he didn’t realise his mistake. We walked away and he handed me the horse. He asked me what I was going to call it. I said Trotsky and burst into tears. Afterwards, I apologised for not being fun. Patrick said he would have been worried if I was fun in this scenario.

*

That night it was snowing too hard to go out. We ate in the hotel restaurant. Instead of going in by the lobby, Patrick led me out onto the street. The air was so cold, it made me cover my eyes. He took my elbow and we ran along the short stretch of pavement to an external entrance. Back inside, Patrick said, ‘Totally independent restaurant.’ I could not remember if or when I had told him that my reaction to hotel restaurants ranges between ennui and despair.

I finished reading my menu and told Patrick who was on the second page of his that I would be taking his name after all.

He looked up. ‘Why?’

‘Because,’ I said, thanks to my mother obviously, ‘I am expert in all forms of passive aggression and I can’t let such an emotionally manipulative public announcement go unrewarded.’

He leaned across the table and kissed me, even though I had just put a piece of bread in my mouth. He said I’m so glad Martha. ‘I had to give the man a hundred dollars to let me use the microphone. I mean, American dollars.’

I swallowed. ‘You’re probably going to Siberian prison.’

He said absolutely worth it and went back to his menu.

Out loud, because I had nothing else to do, I analysed the particular pathos of hotel restaurants. I said maybe it was the lighting, or the fact they were always carpeted, the higher than usual concentration of people eating alone, maybe it was just the concept of an omelette station that made me question the meaning of everything.

Patrick waited for me to finish, then asked me if I’d ever had borscht.

I said, ‘I love you so much,’ then a ma?tre d’ came over with two green glass bottles and said, ‘Water with gas or no gas?’

*

At Heathrow, waiting for our bags, Patrick said, ‘Remember that wedding we had?’ I had just asked him how he was planning to get back to his flat. He had his arm around me and kissed the side of my head. I said, ‘Sorry. I’m so tired.’ It had been so much effort, telling myself and making myself believe that coming back from a honeymoon is when marriages start, not when they end.

I did not know how to be a wife. I was so scared. Patrick looked so happy.





22

IN THE TAXI and again as I followed him up the stairs, Patrick told me I could do whatever I wanted to the flat to make it feel like mine. It was a Friday. On Saturday he went to work and I took everything out of the kitchen cupboards and put it all back in, one cupboard along, so that if Heather visited, she would not know where anything was. I couldn’t think of anything else.

I had decided to be neat and I was for a number of days. But Patrick preferred the flat the way it was now, he said, with clothes on the floor, magazines and hair elastics and an astonishing number of glasses, and everything so generally accessible because cupboards and drawers were never, ever shut. The way he laughed as he spoke did not make me feel guilty, and he made no effort to move anything. Maybe that was why his flat felt like my home so quickly.

The only things he asked if I could do, a few weeks later, was not to leave medication lying around – he said, ‘It’s just my training’ – and try to use the spreadsheet he had made me for financial record-keeping, instead of my method which was stuffing receipts into a ragged A4 envelope, then losing it.