Sorrow and Bliss(45)

As an adult, she told me that it felt so real in the moment but afterwards, she couldn’t believe she’d got so upset and thought she would never do it again. She never apologised afterwards and my parents did not make her. But, she said, it didn’t matter, she knew they were still thinking about it and her shame was so intense it made her angry at us. ‘Instead of like, hating myself.’

Throwing something at your husband is the same. I was so ashamed afterwards, it made me angrier at Patrick than I had already become for his never being around.

*

When you are a woman over thirty, with a husband but without children, married couples at parties are interested to know why. They agree with each other that having children is the best thing they have ever done. According to the husband, you should just get on with it; the wife says you don’t want to leave it too late. Privately, they are wondering if there is something medically wrong with you. They wish they could ask directly. Perhaps, if they can outlast your silence, you will offer it up of your own accord. But the wife can’t resist – she has to tell you about a friend of hers who was told the same thing but as soon as she gave up hope … the husband says bingo.

In the beginning, I told strangers I couldn’t have children because I thought it would stop them from continuing beyond their initial enquiry. It is better to say you don’t want them. Then they know straight away that there is something wrong with you, but at least not in a medical sense. So the husband can say, oh well, good for you, focusing on your career, even if, to that point, there had been so little evidence of a career being focused on. The wife doesn’t say anything, she is already looking around.

*

By summer I had read four and a half pages of Ulysses and all of Lee Child. Patrick took me out to dinner to celebrate. I told him the shit James Joyces turned out to be all of them. During dessert, he gave me a library card. He said it was a present to go with the ￡144 worth of Jack Reachers he had already given me.

I got out one book. An Ian McEwan that I thought was a novel and put it in a drawer when I realised it was short stories. I called Ingrid and told her I had accidentally invested in two characters who would be dead in sixteen pages. She said seriously. ‘Who has the time?’





23

ALTHOUGH FROM THE age of sixteen, she smoked every day at high school at the bottom of the playing fields, and although she was regularly caught, Ingrid graduated without any detentions on her record. It was so easy for her to talk her way out of them. Although from age seventeen to that summer, I was regularly ill, I had never been admitted to hospital. It was so easy for me to talk my way out of it.

It was August, nearly September. Patrick went to Hong Kong for his father’s third wedding, to the twenty-four-year-old daughter of one of his colleagues. For weeks the headlines had been about the weather, about London putting Greece in the shade and giving the Costa del Sol a run for its money. I didn’t go with him because I had started to feel unwell. Two days after he left, I woke up and everything was black.

I tried to go back to sleep, hot and tangled and sick with guilt that I wasn’t getting up and going to work. A dog was barking from the flat below, and somewhere outside road workers were breaking up the street. I listened to the relentless jangle and bleat of the pneumatic drill. It wouldn’t stop it wouldn’t stop it wouldn’t stop.

As the noise got louder and louder, it felt – it always felt – like pressure building in my skull, like air is being pumped and pumped and pumped in until it’s hard like a tyre, but still more air pushes in and in and it begins to hurt so much, knife hot and migrainous, that you cry and imagine a fissure in the hard bone becoming a crack and the air finally rushing out and then relief from the pain. You are terrified. You are going to vomit. Your lungs are closing. The room is moving. Something bad is about to happen. It’s already in the room. It is making your back cold. You wait and wait and wait and then it doesn’t happen. The thing has left the room and it has left you behind. It isn’t going to end. There isn’t day and night. There isn’t time. Only pain, and the pressure and the terror that is like a twisted cord running down the centre of your body.

Late, in the afternoon, I got up and went to the kitchen. I tried to eat but couldn’t. Water made me feel nauseous. My hips ached from lying on my side in a ball. Patrick called and I cried on the phone and said sorry, sorry, sorry. He said he would change his flight. He said, ‘Can you try and go out? Go to the Ladies’ Pond. Take a taxi the whole way.’ He said, ‘Martha, I love you so much.’ I hung up, promising to call Ingrid, but too ashamed once he had gone, imagining her arriving and finding me this way.

From above, I watched myself get up and move slowly around the flat like I was so old, a woman at the end of her life. I dragged on my swimsuit, put clothes over it, put toothpaste in my mouth, left the flat. The effort of pushing open the building’s heavy outer door took my breath away.

There was too much noise, heat, too many people coming towards me and buses thundering past me so near the curb, I went home again. Patrick called, I cried on the phone. He said his plane was leaving in an hour, he would be back so soon.

I asked him to stay on the phone and talk to me and I could just listen. I told him I was very scared.

‘Of what?’

‘Me.’

He said, ‘You won’t do anything, will you?’ He wanted me to promise. I said I couldn’t. He said in that case, Martha, please go to the hospital straight away.