Sorrow and Bliss(76)

I told her I knew that.

‘Why,’ she said, with sudden sadness in her voice, ‘why did you lie to me about not wanting children? Why couldn’t you trust me?’

‘I could trust you. I couldn’t trust myself.’

She said why not.

‘Because you could have talked me into it. Like Jonathan. If you had told me I would be a good mother, I would have let myself believe you.’

Ingrid leaned against me so our arms were touching.

‘I never would have said that.’

‘You did say it. You told me all the time I should have a baby.’

‘No, I never would have said you’d be a good mother. You’d be shit at it.’

She kicked my foot and said God, Martha. ‘I love you so much it actually hurts my body. Can you get me that?’ She pointed to the plastic bag. I picked it up off the ground and Ingrid said, looking into it, ‘This is the expensive kind. Thank you’ and for a minute I felt like we were together inside our force field.

Then, shouting. A fight had broken out over the brick.

Ingrid said well this is over and told me I was welcome to go and sort it out, she needed to go inside and make their tea.

We both got up and I went over to the boys, all now holding sticks.

She was nearly at the house when she called my name and I turned around and saw her, walking backwards over the last bit of lawn, and I just remember as she reached her arms up to tighten her ponytail, a cloud crossed quickly in front of the sun so the light was flickering on her face and on her hair as she shouted, ecstatically, to all of us, ‘My famous pasta-with-nothing-on-it.’

*

Later, while they were in the bath, we sat outside the door, leaning against the wall. We were talking about something else when Ingrid said, ‘If you have been better since June or whatever, why are you still behaving like you used to? I mean, to Patrick. I’m not judging. It’s just that, if you’re feeling more rational, why isn’t it necessarily, you know, manifesting outwardly.’ She winced like someone anticipating an explosion.

‘Because I don’t know how else to be with him.’ I said I know it’s not an excuse.

‘No, I get it. However many years versus seven months. But you need to figure it out.’

I told her I didn’t feel ready to do that, to see him, and I knew that I would not be able to forgive him anyway.

‘Do you know where he is?’

‘London.’

‘Do you know where though?’

‘No. He’s probably got the flat back.’

‘He’s getting it back but for now he’s at Winsome and Rowland’s.’ Ingrid looked grave.

I asked her why that mattered. ‘Winsome and Rowland are away.’

‘But Jessamine’s there.’

I laughed and said if there was one thing I had never worried about, it was Patrick being with someone who wasn’t his wife.

Even though I had made him leave, and punished him relentlessly for months so that he would, and I had told him that I did not love him any more – calling it out after him as he walked out of our bedroom for the last time – I felt as if I had been shoved when Ingrid said, ‘But Martha as far as Patrick is concerned you’re not his wife.’





36

INGRID MADE ME wait while she searched in a drawer for her key to Belgravia. ‘In case, in case.’

I had already accepted a muesli bar and a bottle of water and a three-disc self-help audio book that she’d turned up in the drawer first. In 21 days, I could master the art of self-forgiveness.

I told her I didn’t need the key. ‘If he isn’t there, I’ll just go home. There’s no other reason to go in.’

‘Yes there is. You might need the bathroom or something.’

She found it and held it out. When I wouldn’t take it, she grabbed my hand and tried to close my fingers around it.

‘What the fuck is that?’ She was holding my thumb.

‘The Hebrides.’

‘Right. Of course it is. Please can you just put this in your bag?’

I took the key so she would stop talking about it.

*

Patrick wasn’t there. I knocked and waited on the steps outside my aunt’s house until my face ached and my hands went numb inside my pockets. I went back to the car and sat, with my coat on, for an hour. The square was deserted. Nobody came and went. It had only been six weeks since Patrick left but, within days, time had acquired an unreal quality and my loneliness became so total that now – sitting in the car – it seemed to challenge the existence of things.

Another hour passed. Still nobody came. I began to feel delirious. There was only cold. I Googled ‘hypothermia in car’ but while my fingers were trying to find each key, my phone died and that was why, I told myself, I needed to go inside. But it was a compulsion to see, if not Patrick, then something of his. After weeks alone, culminating in these two hours in the car, seeing nothing out the window except darkness and an absence of human beings, even he no longer seemed real.

*

Everything was wrong inside. I stood in the foyer with Ingrid’s key in my hand, unnerved.

It was Winsome’s rule that personal effects were not allowed in public areas, but Jessamine’s things were everywhere, her shoes kicked into all corners of the foyer, clothes in piles down the length of the hall. I took my coat off and went into the formal living room. There was a wine bottle and two glasses, empty except for brown sediment in the bottom, sitting directly on a walnut end table.