The Wife Before Me(54)

Nicholas was in London on a three-day business trip when I came back to Woodbine to see Amelia one sunny afternoon in June. Love had not served either of us well. I was pale and drained from the ending of a passionate but destructive relationship with a graphic novelist, but I was shocked by the change in Amelia. Make-up could no longer disguise her pallor and her face was gaunt from the weight she had lost. She moved slowly, as if the ground beneath her was unstable and she had to feel her way to steadiness. She was still recovering from her miscarriage but I knew that her loss had simply intensified a grief she could no longer hide.

I’d left New York by then and was living back in Ireland. My father had died and left me his house in Kilfarran, along with two ramshackle cottages situated beside each other on an isolated headland overlooking the Atlantic. The sale of his house had paid for the renovations of the cottages and the establishment of my studio on Mag’s Head.

I’d suspected, for some time, that she was very unhappy. For the first year of her marriage, I thought she was grieving over John but I’d soon realised it went deeper than that. Nicholas’s behaviour early on in their relationship had made me suspicious of his possessiveness. I’d chosen to ignore the signs then, and, though I was horrified by what she confided in me that afternoon, I was not surprised. The hairs on the back of my neck lifted as she recounted the accident that had preceded her miscarriage. Had he deliberately pushed the ladder on top of her or had it fallen accidently? She claimed it was the latter but I was unsure if that was what had happened or just what she needed to believe. Otherwise, how could she keep going?

I told her to leave him before he returned from London. Woodbine was bricks and mortar, I argued. Life was flesh and blood. She could fight him through the courts and have him evicted from her home, but once life was taken that was the end of the story. Then, I offered her an alternative solution. It swept over me in waves of certainty and an acceptance of my own future. I loved Amelia. I would do anything to protect her. But all my pleas were tearfully rejected. She put her hands over her ears, insisted that I must stop making preposterous suggestions. I could tell she regretted her decision to confide in me. By then, it was too late to put the genie back in the bottle, so to speak. We had both bared our souls to each other and were unable to return to a safer space where we could convince ourselves that we were exaggerating the awfulness of our realities.

Amelia agreed to make an appointment the following day to see a divorce solicitor. She promised to keep me informed in detailed letters about any further violence Nicholas inflicted on her. That way, she would create a record of his brutality, along with photographic evidence that we would use to discredit him when the time was right.

Later, we went outside to the garden to hang the glass butterflies from the apple tree. She held the ladder steady as I attached them to the branches. I’d crafted each one with love and their glittering hues rippled a rainbow across her upturned face. They swayed in the breeze as we made our way along the overgrown path at the end of the garden. We pushed through the overgrowth in search of the ice house. There it was, its red arch almost obscured by briar and ivy. That same mouldy atmosphere when we opened the door. The cobwebs and the cushions, the burned-out candles, the old curtains still hanging from the wall.



* * *



This scene, so instantly familiar, brought me back to an evening when I told Amelia about my father’s accusation. I was fifteen then and had carried it like an echo in my head for all those years. He’d seldom mentioned my mother’s name or divulged any information about the catastrophic event – my birth – that had caused her death. He’d snap at me if I questioned him about her or asked to see photographs of myself as a baby. The reason for the latter, I would later discover, was that he had never taken any. I spat out the words he’d shouted at me in his drunken fury. It was the first time I’d spoken them aloud and Amelia listened until I could speak no more.

She put her arms around me. We would search for my mother’s medical records and lay his lie to rest, she said. In the flickering intimacy of the ice house, I kissed her. A kiss of gratitude that turned into something else. Something neither of us were prepared to name at that stage. Her lips moved when she felt the brush of mine, but they did not open or surrender to my hunger. I pulled away and stared into her eyes. They glistened in the candlelight, tears at the corners ready to fall. Regret. Her eyes, not her lips told me I had to let the hope die, if I was to save our friendship.

That was the first time I acknowledged my yearning and accepted that this was not an erratic hormonal urge; it was something more profound. Something that would shape my future. I no longer had to pretend to enjoy the pulsating fumbling of teenage boys that I’d found to be amusing or irritating but which had never awakened me as Amelia did during that first hesitant kiss.

A week later, we found my mother’s medical records among the clutter of old documents in my father’s attic. Some secrets are best left beneath the eaves; some need to be dragged into the light. My anger grew as I read through the notes and discovered that I had just been delivered by emergency Caesarean when she, Anna Rossiter, the mother I would never know, suffered a fatal post-partum haemorrhage. How could I, a baby still gasping for breath, have caused her death? Why not blame the act of love between my parents nine months earlier? Or their mutual friend who’d introduced them to each other two years previously? How far back could I go on this interlocking chain reaction – back to the Garden of Eden, perhaps? That alluring apple? I felt light-headed, as if my father’s words had finally escaped from a poisonous crevice in my mind.