‘I should have realised, you have bad memories of this place, I’m sorry. It’s different for me.’
‘I can’t, I can’t.’
‘That’s fine, darling.’ He strokes my hair. A long, mesmeric stroke. ‘Your happiness is everything to me. Everything. Why don’t you choose one of the other rooms? I’m sure we can find you somewhere else.’
I hold his hand, follow him out. Each step through the hallway makes me feel stronger, better, this isn’t the cottage, not the narrow corridor of memory, it is wide and broad, well-lit and thickly carpeted. There is no study to my left with the trestle tables and killing jars, no single box room at the back. In their place are four huge bedrooms with high, sumptuous beds. I don’t want any of them. A breeze blows through the house, I follow it, up a flight of stairs to a level that wasn’t there before. A loft space opens before me, it is the entire length of the house, the walls, a cream clapboard. There is a bathroom to the left, a seating area and then, all the way at the end, a pair of neat twin beds fittedsnugly under the sloped alcoves. The breeze is coming from an open window. I look through. The view is entirely different from the French windows downstairs, I can still see the water but there are no pines. I could be anywhere.
‘Here?’ he says, incredulously, just like he was when I chose the box room eighteen years ago. He doesn’t like it. The loft is too low, he has to crouch beneath it.
I pull back the quilt. Slide into bed.
55
Estuary
Now
‘Where’s my phone?’ I say to Daniel the next day after breakfast. Staring at the estuary, I am seized by the urge to identify its colour, I know how names can capture an object, hold them fast. But water is not an object, the limits of ordinary language insufficient to describe that chimeric blue, so I think again of the botanists, they came up with the first colour charts, they understood the importance of identification, categorisation.
He is arranging my plates on a tray, I’m not sure he has heard me. ‘Daniel, where’s my phone.’
He stops, clears his throat. ‘I’m not sure that’s a good idea.’
‘What?’ A single strand of anger vibrates in me. I am not asking for permission. ‘Why not?’
‘Darling.’ He lays down the plates, comes back to my bedside. ‘I don’t want anything to upset you. Your husband, your daughter, the baby . . . you had a breakdown and no one noticed—’ A sobrises in my throat. ‘—I’ve got you a little better, but you’re still so fragile.’ He kisses me on my forehead. ‘What do you want it for? Is there something I can help you with?’
I raise my chin to the water. ‘The blue.’ My voice is strange and soft. ‘I want to look up colour charts. Saccardo’sChromotaxia, Burchell’s for Brazilian plants.’
He smiles, relieved that I am speaking about botanists again, not the law or banks or regulation. ‘I will get these for you. You just tell me what you want and I’ll get it for you. That is all you ever need to do.’ He covers his hand over mine.
A day later, he brings me a package, slides out the books from the cardboard, parts the pages to show me the charts. I learn all the names for blue. But, as I watch the sea, I go beyond blue. The water is verditerwhen the estuary is full. Verdigris when the tide is low. Streaked with dragon’s blood, vermillion and yellow ochre at sunset. Almostindigo before the light falls.
Daniel is right. I get better. I still dream but I don’t shout anymore. The dreams have changed. Now, there is a man standing behind Millie on the bus. When I first saw him, I thought he was a stranger and I’d scream, but soon, the identity settles – it’s Kit. Sometimes, he wears his light grey suit he’s always looked so handsome in, other times, he’s in jeans and the baseball cap I bought him. But although I wave at him, he doesn’t recognise me, he reacts like I’m a crazy person, wrapping his arms round Millie, shielding her from me, from the desperate way I call after the bus.
Kit said,‘Dreams don’t mean anything, they’re just mental admin, the brain processing the day.’ How true that is. Because eventually, I stop running after Millie. I blow her a kiss and, with my bursting heart, I wish her all the love in the world. I am processing that she is better off without me. I am processing that I am gone.
56
Shampoo
Now
The first time Daniel orders take-out, I think he’ll ask me what I want – Kit and I always order from different places, he’ll want burgers when I’ll want Korean. But Daniel doesn’t. He just hums ‘The Girl from Ipanema’ while he looks at his phone. He is choosing. This is what I’ve wanted all along. To have no responsibilities, to make no choices. I am not a wife, not a mother, not even an adult. Just a child.
He tidies up after me, cooks for me, feeds me, in these simple, domestic tasks, there are no glimpses of the vulnerability he showed me in London. He doesn’t seem anxious, he doesn’t sit in the dark, there are no migraines. He devotes himself to caring for me, he draws up a meal plan, cooks, cuts my food up into bite-sized portions. At lunch, he makes protein salads – heirloom tomatoes with prosciutto, cress overlaid with slices of beef, so rare, I taste the sharp iron of blood. Dinner is usually fish – lemon sole, sea bass, haddock – with a single glass of wine from the cellar. No carbs. I crave hunks of soft white bread,slathered with butter. Oven chips. Kit’s Sunday morning waffles thick with chocolate spread.
At breakfast, he never brings coffee, only freshly squeezed juices or smoothies and, without fail, he’ll make eggs, which I cannot stand. Kit knows why, once, Mama chased me around the kitchen with a sliced-openpídànpreserved egg, an Asian delicacy, the white a brown jelly, the yolk an ashen grey and, since then, I haven’t been able to eat egg on its own, cannot separate the preserved egg from a normal one.
Today, he brings sourdough soldiers and half-boiled eggs. I dip the bread into the eggs, open my mouth. The yolk oozes from the bread, slides over my tongue. I think,Look at what’s happened. Your old hates, old desires, gone.I meet Daniel’s eyes and swallow.
‘You should probably get a shower.’
He says that to me after he dabs egg whites from my mouth. He is staring at my empty plate, trying hard not to look at me, and I think I have broken down too much, I have let myself go too far. There was indulgence for me when we arrived but now, two days later, the novelty’s worn off. Breakdowns are exhausting. Not just for the people having them.
I push back the covers. Daniel has sat down with a lepidoptery journal but I know he is watching me and I try to be any version of the person I was before I lost Faye, I can do it, the walk to the shower is no more than a few seconds, I lift my head up, try not to stumble. But, in the bathroom, any sense that I might have fooled Daniel is dispelled. Days-old eyeliner is smudged across my temples, mascara crusts at the corners of my eyes. My hair is lank and oily.
I peel off my T-shirt, the same one I wore at his mews house. My breasts are full and heavy, my nipples dark; even though I never breastfed, my whole body remains on high alert for Faye. I run my fingers over my stomach. The spasms have stopped now, it doesn’t hurt as much but it’s still numb. The midwife said this was nerve damage from the C-section, completely normal, it will get better if I sensitise it, rub it.Rub it?There is only one person who would have done that for me and he is in London with my daughter. I can’t even look at it, the sad flop of skin, the angry scar. And I remember being here in this cottage, watching myself pull up my swimsuit, the flatness of my abdomen, my small breasts.