Sorrow and Bliss(83)

I asked him if he had known today was our wedding anniversary when he texted about meeting.

‘Yes, sorry. It wasn’t on purpose. I just needed to get things done.’

I said, ‘Anyway, I should go.’ He handed me the journal.

We both stood up.

‘Okay, well.’

‘Yes, great.’

I said goodbye and it wasn’t enough, one word, too quotidian to contain the end of the world. But it was all there was. I started walking towards the lift.

Patrick said Martha, wait.

‘What?’

‘You were right. I did know there was something wrong. Not to start with but the last few years.’ He looked, suddenly, ill. ‘I knew it wasn’t you. I knew there was something wrong but I was just trying to keep going. I felt like I couldn’t face the whole process. Or I was scared that we’d find out and it would be something we couldn’t deal with and it would be the end. And sometimes, you’re right as well, I didn’t mind everyone thinking I was this incredible husband, because I felt useless, most of the time. But the thing –’ He broke off and then, with uncut anguish, Patrick said, ‘The thing I am most ashamed of is saying you shouldn’t be a mother. It’s not true. I was so angry.’ It was just the worst thing he could think of.

I asked him to stop talking but he didn’t. ‘I can’t ask you to forgive me. It’s beyond apology. I just want you to know that I understand what I did, and that whatever we both end up doing, I have to rebuild my life with that reality in it, that I was intentionally cruel, to my own wife.’

There was a noise from another aisle. Something being dropped on a metal floor, someone shouting. After it echoed out I said, ‘I should have told you I wanted her. At the time. I should have told you then.’

‘How do you know it was a her?’

‘I just did.’

‘What would you have called her?’

I said, ‘I don’t know.’

But her name was written down, so many times in the book.

Patrick spoke it aloud. He said, yes. It would have been good.

I looked at the ceiling and pushed my hands upwards over my face to get rid of more tears from what seemed like a special well of them reserved for her and apparently, fathomless. ‘You must think I’m despicable.’

‘I don’t,’ Patrick said. ‘You thought it was the right thing to do. You thought it was best for her, even though you wanted her so much. That’s how I know –’ he said, sorry, maybe this is a bad thing to say ‘– but that’s how I know you were supposed to be a mother. You put her above yourself. That’s what mothers do, isn’t it?’ He said obviously, I’m only guessing.

I could not keep standing up. Patrick moved aside and I took steps back to the sofa. And he sat next to me, and let me lie with my head on his lap, and put his arm over me, it felt like a weight, and I cried and cried and cried, from the bottom of myself, and when I finally sat up again, I saw tears in his eyes too – Patrick, who once told me that he hadn’t cried since his first day of boarding school when his father shook his hand and said goodbye then drove out the school gates while his seven-year-old son ran after the car. I pulled my sleeve over my hand and wiped his face then mine. I couldn’t think of what to say. Just, eventually, ‘This is all such a big pity.’

I meant it seriously. I asked him why he was laughing.

He said he wasn’t. ‘You’re actually not like the rest of us. That’s all.’

‘Neither are you, Patrick.’

Then it was over and we stood up and said goodbye again. It was something else, the whole world was in it.

I was a distance along the corridor when Patrick called out. ‘It makes a good story Martha. The way you wrote it.’

I glanced back and said okay.

‘Someone – they should make it into a movie.’

There was more noise from the other aisle, I turned and walked backwards, shouting. ‘I don’t think in a movie, the denouement – I don’t think the final parting can take place at EasyStore Brent Cross.’

Patrick said, ‘You’re probably –’ I spun back to the lift and ran. I didn’t want to hear the rest.

*

The man behind the desk pointed out that I was off again. Presumably I’d be back later. I pushed through the doors without acknowledging him. The light outside was so bright I walked into it with my hand shielding my eyes.

*

I was on the platform waiting for the next train, with my bag on my lap, holding my phone. If I believed that the universe communicated with human beings through signs and wonders and social media I would have thought when I opened Instagram, that the first, minute-old post on my feed was a supernatural message, channelled through @author_quotes_daily, meant solely for me.

A headlight appeared in the tunnel. I screen-shotted it – I would write it down once I was on the train, in letters large enough so that all the empty space on the last page of the journal would be filled. But the train stopped and I got on and there were no seats. I never wrote it down. I can’t remember where it came from. But it plays all the time in my head, repeating itself like a phrase of music, the recurring line of a poem. ‘You were done being hopeless.’

You were done, you were done, you were done being hopeless.