The Friends We Keep(66)
The warning signs were there, early on, about his drinking, but Maggie had had no experience with life, no experience with alcoholism. She chose to see what she wanted to see, turning blithely away from everything that might have been a red flag.
By the time his doctor told him his liver was shot, that one more drink could kill him, Maggie didn’t much care. And when the news came, that he had collapsed on the train on the way home, his liver having finally failed him, she felt guilty that she had just sent him the text about wanting a divorce. But she had mostly felt relieved.
And still none of their friends knew the truth about what killed him. Maggie didn’t want them to know just how imperfect their marriage was, what a disaster Ben had become by the end. Years of brief sobriety before drinking again, the whites of his eyes turning yellow with jaundice, Maggie having to regularly phone work and make excuses for him. Her official story was that Ben died from a heart attack rather than alcoholic liver disease.
She looked at the wedding picture, feeling nothing. That couple, that happy, young couple with dreams of a family and years of joy, felt like strangers, like they had nothing to do with her.
When Maggie ran into Ben that day in the cafeteria, years after leaving university, it had seemed like fate. Maggie had phoned Evvie as soon as she got home, shrieking at the coincidence of it, and Evvie had said, “This is meant to be. You’re going to marry him.”
Maggie knew she had been right. It was meant to be, and they were happy in the early years, happy even, when life stopped going their way, when they both had to accept they wouldn’t have children, they weren’t being given the life they thought was their due.
But the happiness didn’t last. Ben’s drinking put paid to that. When the police showed up at her door, gently informing her that her husband had collapsed on the train on the way home and hadn’t made it, Maggie looked at them in disbelief. She had been dreaming of divorce for years, had sometimes, in her darkest moments, thought how much easier life would be if Ben just had a fatal heart attack, then berated herself for even thinking that.
And here were the policemen, telling her that her darkest thoughts had come to pass. Initially, after the disbelief came relief. She didn’t have to dread his coming home on the weekends, the dark cloud that seemed to fall on her shoulders every Friday morning when she woke up. She didn’t have to lie in bed grinding her teeth, filled with fury at her husband who was stumbling around downstairs, drunk.
She felt . . . relief, until the shame kicked in. What would she tell people? The truth? That Ben was a high-functioning alcoholic who often passed out on the stairs on his way up to bed, more times than she could count? That she had become the last thing she had ever wanted, a cross between his mother and a detective, attempting to sniff out every drop of alcohol he consumed? Would she tell them his doctor had warned him his liver would fail if he carried on? Or would she lie, say he died of a heart attack?
She went with the heart attack.
After the shame came the guilt. Why hadn’t she done more? Or less? Was she too hard on him, or not hard enough? Wasn’t it her responsibility to check he was going to meetings when he said he was, to check in with his sponsor? Should she have carted him off to rehab as soon as he started drinking again? Should she have kicked him out properly, or left him herself? What could she have done differently? For surely she should have, could have, would have done things differently if she could turn back the clock.
Maggie spent months second-guessing herself, overwhelmed by guilt at not having done the right thing, at letting her husband go years ago, even though she knew she was no match for alcohol. Every time someone asked how he died and she responded with “a heart attack,” she was engulfed by shame and guilt afresh.
While Ben’s unexpected death may have brought her some peace after all the years of chaos, the peace was always tied together with guilt.
Initially, her friends gathered around, but soon they got on with their lives, leaving Maggie with no idea how to get on with hers. She should have been free, she was free, but secrets are hard to keep, especially from your closest friends, and soon she found herself withdrawing.
Her saving grace, she often thought, was the house, a house she loved as much as the day she first saw it, even though it was far too big for her, and every check she had to write for the upkeep was a painful one.
Her days were peaceful now. She did the occasional catering for people from home, but she pulled out of organizing the village fete after Ben died—she wanted to see people less, not more, for everyone was filled with questions as to how a young, seemingly healthy man could suddenly drop dead of a heart attack.
When Ben was alive, Maggie always thought there was nothing lonelier than being married to an alcoholic. But she was lonelier now. At least then she had a purpose, even though it was not one she relished. Now she found that she was drifting aimlessly, unsure of what to do with a life that was not what she ever expected.
She still spoke to her mother most days, her mother who had been trying to convince her to sell up and move somewhere that was not so isolated.
“Bath is divine,” she kept saying. “You’d have a lovely time in Bath. So beautiful and there’s so much to do! Buy yourself a little flat and reinvent yourself.”
But Maggie couldn’t imagine doing any such thing.
So it was, almost three years after Ben’s death, Maggie found herself going through something of a depression. It came on slowly, characterized initially by a listlessness that was unfamiliar to her. Maggie had always been a ball of energy, but suddenly she was staying in bed all day. She didn’t think of herself as depressed, didn’t cry, wasn’t consumed by dark thoughts in the way she had always thought depressives were. But nevertheless, she stopped caring about all the things that were once important to her.