Sorrow and Bliss(71)

Patrick is a man who puts oil in the car as his final act before leaving his wife. I put my hand on my chest but felt nothing.





34

I SPENT THE day and first night without him on the stripped bed; after he left there did not seem to be a reason to remake it. Life, a life involving sheets and dishes and letters from the bank did not exist any more.

Between sleeping and waking and sleeping again, I Googled Robert. Then I Googled Jonathan. His wife is a social media influencer. Her Instagram is a mixture of holiday photos, sponsored posts about a brand of collagen drink and photos of what she is wearing shot in the mirror of the lift that I used to take down to the street to breathe. She gets the most likes when she posts pictures of her little tribe, #thestronggirls, all of whom have blonde hair and names that are also common nouns. Objects and fruit. I scrolled all the way back to her wedding to Jonathan on a rooftop in Ibiza. I wondered how much he had told her about me, how much @mother_of_strong_girls knows about her husband’s forty-three-day starter marriage.

*

Ingrid texted me in the morning. She said she had spoken to Patrick. She said, ‘Are you okay?’

I sent her the bathtub emoji, the three-pin plug and the coffin. She asked me if I wanted her to come and get me. I said I didn’t know.

I was still in bed – on bed – half dressed, in the underwear and tights I had worn to London and surrounded by mugs that were empty or had become receptacles for tissues and dried-up curls of orange peel when I heard Ingrid let herself into the Executive Home. She went straight to the living room, trailed by smaller, quicker footsteps, and turned the television on to some sort of cartoon before coming upstairs.

I thought she would come and lie with me on the bed and stroke my hair or my arms as she usually did. I thought she would say, it’s going to be alright and can you try and stand up now, can you get all the way to the shower? Instead, she threw the door open, looked around and said, ‘This is quite the visual and olfactory cocktail. Wow Martha.’

*

At my party, I hadn’t noticed her stomach. Now I saw how already round it was. Ingrid crossed both sides of her cardigan over it as she entered and went to the window. Once she had wrenched it open, she turned back and pointed at the sheets. ‘How long have they been on the floor?’

I said I meant to deal with them but ending my marriage and trying to get a fitted sheet on by myself felt like too much at the same time. She stood at the end of the bed, stone-faced, and pushed the fingertips of one hand into the place where her ribs met the top of her stomach, as though she was in pain. ‘If you’re coming, come. The boys are downstairs and I’m not doing the A420 with them after four o’clock.’

I took too long to get up. I took too long finding something to wear, a bag to put things in. My sister’s rising impatience slowed me down even more. I gave up and lay back down on the bed, facing away from her.

Ingrid said, ‘Do you know what? Fine. I can’t do this any more either. It’s so boring Martha.’ She left the room and called out from the stairs. ‘Ring your husband.’

I heard her summon her children from the front door and a moment later, the door slamming shut. The television was left on.

It was the first time she had refused to do her job. I wanted her sympathy and she wouldn’t give it to me. I wanted her to make me feel like I was good, and right to make Patrick go. I was angry and then, at the sound of her car starting, lonelier than I was before she came.

I did not ring my husband. I could not call my father, who would be stricken and unable to hide it. I picked up my phone and dialled my mother.

I had not spoken to her since the day of my appointment and I did not want to speak to her then. I wanted her to answer and say, ‘Well isn’t this a turn-up for the books’ so that I could fight with her and she would hang up on me and then I could feel aggrieved and tell Ingrid and she would agree that it was classic her. Literally, so typical.

I had not forgiven my mother for what she had done. I hadn’t attempted to, or had to try and stay angry. Hating someone who was capable of seeing their daughter in pain and saying nothing, compounding it instead by drinking, was effortless.

It rang once. She picked up and said, ‘Martha, oh, I’ve been hoping and hoping you would ring.’

It was not her ordinary voice. It was from before, before I became the teenager who really brought out her bitchlike tendencies, her resident critic. The voice she used to call me Hum. She asked me how I was feeling and said, ‘Awful probably’ when I answered with a sound instead of words.

She continued on that way for ten minutes, asking questions and answering them herself – correctly. As I would have.

After we hung up, I went downstairs, found two open bottles of wine and took them back to my bedroom. I would not have called her again except her final question was, ‘Will you ring me back later? Any time. Even if it’s the middle of the night,’ and her answer to it was ‘Okay good. I will speak to you soon then.’

*

I was drunk when I called the second time, before dawn. I told her I didn’t know what to do, I begged her to tell me. She began to say something general. I said, ‘No, right now, what do I do? I don’t know what to do.’ She asked me where I was and then said, ‘You are going to stand up, and then you are going to go downstairs and put your shoes and coat on.’ She waited as I did each thing. ‘Now, you are going to go for a walk and I will stay on the phone.’