Divinity Road (26 page)

Despite his apparent interest, I hadn’t expected our relationship to develop. Not that anyone else had taken his place. Between graduating in French from Trinity College Dublin and my overseas volunteering, I’d spent three years teaching English to foreign students in a private language school in Cork. Arriving in London after Cork and Asmara felt like being thrown from a paddling pool into an ocean. There was so much to discover and the girls I was living with were more interested in partying than romantic relationships. Clubs, concerts, museums, pubs, badminton and tennis, but always as a female gang. True, I’d got drunk at a party in Camden Town and enjoyed a one-night stand with an American who did something in insurance. I can scarcely remember anything about him apart from his magnificent mane of hair. And I’d been on a couple of dates with a colleague from work, a rather uptight Mancunian with a barking laugh and receding hairline. But that was all, and for the time being, this single status suited me.

Why should I have thought that my fling with Greg had meant anything significant? After all we’d only been together a week in Nairobi before heading back to our respective postings. When my contract had come to an end, he’d already extended his. He made it clear he was enjoying a footloose life in Harare and was in no hurry to return to the gloom of insipid Britain. But the letters had continued, and when he’d finally headed home a year after my departure, he’d made straight for London. He’d called me up a few days later, we’d met up in a pub on the Archway Road and I’d surprised myself when, catching sight of him standing at the bar as I’d walked in, I’d felt a kick of pleasure, of tenderness, as if he already belonged to me.

He was looking for a teaching job and I’d kept an eye on vacancies at my college. I found a post for him covering someone’s maternity leave that was soon upgraded to permanent. So without quite knowing how, I discovered that my temporary overseas fling had become a more serious domestic relationship. Three months later, when my tenancy came to an end, I found myself setting up home with Greg in a studio flat in Willesden.

And just before my departure for Tunisia, he threw a bombshell, an out-of-the-blue marriage proposal. When he put the question to me, I experienced a curious sensation, something between nausea and a spasm in my gut, like the first sign of dysentery. It was an awkward moment to propose, just as I was about to take pleasure in a period of independence. So the exhilaration I felt I ought to be enjoying seemed soured by traces of resentment. It was supposed to be three weeks of personal time, an opportunity to show the world, and myself, that I was still a cool, reflective, adventurous individual: back-packing, sightseeing, a blend of culture-vulture and beach bum, but what I hadn’t planned for was to have Greg’s proposal hanging over me. If truth be told, though a little inopportune, the proposal was exciting, and I felt genuinely stirred. It was just bad timing, I felt.

At the time I wondered why he couldn’t have waited until my return. Now, in hindsight, I suspect that perhaps Greg’s action was deliberate. His choice of timing was probably a reaction to his own insecurities, an attempt to tie me down before I headed for the liberating and, in his mind, inhibition-loosening sunshine.

Not that I was looking at the holiday as a means of escape. Even before my departure, I knew in my heart of hearts that I would say yes to Greg. Still, in the meantime, there was an adventure to be had, and it’s this that I want to write about.

She describes the disastrous beginning to the holiday – her bout of diarrhoea and vomiting a day after arriving in Tunis, the falling-out with Liz, their decision to go their separate ways, meet up again only on the eve of their return to Britain. Then she writes about her tourist experiences, the sweeping circle she’d made through the country, her growing confidence travelling alone, using the local minibuses and coaches, staying in cheap hotels, haggling for food in the markets, coping with the daily irritations she’d been subjected to as a lone foreign female.

And she describes her life-changing experience towards the end of the three weeks, an episode she’s never shared with anyone, not even Greg to whom she told everything. She describes her meeting with a young Algerian, hardly more than a boy, broken in spirit by the civil war in Algeria, by the damage it had done to him. She describes their fleeting friendship, a night of comfort shared in her bed. When she returns to Britain, she has changed. She writes about the after-effects of that encounter, her self politicisation. It’s a process over the following months in which she educates herself on development issues, commits herself to various left-wing causes, shifts her job from teaching affluent Europeans and Japanese to more vulnerable asylum seekers and refugees.

And when she returns home, another development: she says yes to Greg. Within six months they are married. Less than a year later, Beth is born.

She tells the counsellor about the postcard she’d sent Greg from Tunisia, the one of the Grand Erg Oriental. She tells him of its effect on Greg, the inspiration for his first exhibition.

And then she’s talking about Greg, his character, his habits, an odd assortment of details that pop into her head, that she shares without editing: his special names for the kids, Bethanina and Sammalamadingdong; the emails he’d send to her at her work, sometimes silly, sometimes rude; his habit of breaking into song at the drop of a hat,
Dirty Old Town
as he washed the car,
The Bare Necessities
on country walks,
Food Glorious Food
as he made bread; the way fluff would always gather in his tummy button, the times she’d scoop it out, hold it up like a magician, and he’d laugh and kiss her on the mouth. And soon there are tears and more tears, and she can no longer speak, the session is over.

For the third text she tries to write about a week’s trip they’d made to San Francisco, the longest time away from the kids. But as soon as she gets to their departure, the flight from Heathrow, she finds it too painful. She remembers how Greg always used to say how he hated flying with her and the kids, the fear that something would happen to them, but that when he flew alone he loved it, the terror giving way to exhilaration, a momentary liberating celebration of his own mortality. She wonders whether this was a premonition. A thought process germinates, a question in her mind about how Greg must have felt in those seconds between bomb blast and crash landing, but she cuts it off before it’s fully-formed.

And then she’s telling the doctor about the thousand daily traps she has to avoid – his favourite radio station, the programme he always watched on TV, the music he loved, the recipe he used to cook, the shop they always went to together, the restaurant and pub. All designed to ambush her, to ensnare her when she least expects it

This referral to Greg plagues her life. How many times a day does she get the urge to share a piece of news with him, to ask his advice? Imaginary conversations are a bitter-sweet habit she fails to kick, exercises in exquisite masochism.

***

One day she arrives at Dr Ahmad’s house in a particularly awful mood. She’d been ill-prepared for a lesson at college and had been short with her colleagues in a meeting. At home Beth had asked her if she could go shopping in town with a couple of friends, her first independent excursion into the city centre.

She’d got it all planned, had been saving her money, researched the bus number to catch, the stops to board at and descend. Her friends often travelled in groups to town and were careful to stay together at all times, and besides, they all had mobile phones.

But Nuala dismisses the idea out of hand, and instead offers to accompany the girls, promising to allow them a long rein. Beth says nothing, but the look of loathing on her face is a shock to Nuala, a look that seems to scream, You’re a crazy suffocating bitch and I hate you! Nuala carries the image with her into Dr Ahmad’s room. She describes her day, ending with her daughter’s furious contempt.

I’m going to damage something permanently in our relationship if I don’t snap out of it soon. I’m going to lose her, she says. Jesus, since Greg went, things have never been worse for me.

Dr Ahmad gives her a long look and smiles.

I don’t agree, he says. If you ask me, things have never been better.

You must be joking!

No, I’m not. Think about it. For the first time since you’ve been coming to me, you’re talking about how other people feel. Up to now, you’ve been living in a bubble, oblivious to your impact on their lives. That’s only natural, of course, part of the process. It may not feel like it, but I think this is real progress.

Nuala considers his words in silence. She recognises the accuracy of his revelation, the madness she’s been living with these past months. She nods and talks to him for the first time about what she has named her Doomsday Theory, that compulsive over protectiveness towards her children that has been growing since she first heard the news of the crash.

At the time, befuddled by the rawness of her emotions, she had understood little of what she felt, but over the months that followed, as she has begun to make sense of her calamity, she has started to formulate an explanation for her obsession. Today, at the end of her session with the counsellor, he asks her to go home and draft a summary of her side of the conversation. She writes:

What happened to Greg was one of those One in a Billion events. For most of us, for most of our lives, One in a Billion events actually mean Never events – they may happen, but not to us. If we do worry about them, the anxiety is buried deep in our subconscious. When the One in a Billion event does indeed happen to me, those odds change radically. Henceforth, in my mind, One in a Billion is transformed from Never to Quite Likely. So if the odds of Greg plunging out of the sky become Quite Likely, then so too does the odds of my daughter drowning at the swimming pool, my son falling out of a tree in the park and snapping his neck, one of them being abducted by a psychopathic child killer somewhere between the house and the shop at the end of the street. Faulty plugs, dodgy toasters, lightning storms and rabid dogs. The dangers are everywhere.

Like the crash that robbed me of Greg, there’s only a One in a Billion chance of something happening to the children when I’m not around to protect them. But those odds are no longer worth taking.

Even as she scribbles these words she realises that in identifying and analysing her Doomsday Theory, she has begun to move beyond it.

***

There are days when she makes a conscious effort to ‘progress’.

Sometimes it’s a step forward, sometimes a step back. A day off, the children at school. Nuala wanders around the house aimlessly, eventually finds herself in the utility room off the kitchen. She opens the cupboard above the washing machine. The breadmaker sits on the top shelf, its cable coiled around its body like the tail of a contented tomcat. She reaches up, brings it down and carries it into the kitchen. She puts it on the table and surveys the appliance with a mixture of pain and nostalgia. The machine hasn’t been used since Before. It’d always been Greg’s thing, the breadmaking, a mid-morning ritual, a break from his painting, the mixing and measuring carried out while the kettle boiled for coffee.

She roots around again in the cupboard, finds some powdered yeast, two half packets of flour. The weighing scales are on the shelf next to the CD player. Amongst the recipe books she finds the breadmaking guide and flicks through until she finds a basic recipe. Flour, yeast, sugar, salt, olive oil, water. She props the guide up on the table and begins to weigh out the ingredients. There’s something comforting in resurrecting one of Greg’s old practices.

The phone rings. It’s Mary checking that it’s her turn to do the school pick-up. On the way back to her baking, Nuala stops at the radio, flicks it on and surfs the stations looking for something of interest. There’s an extended news broadcast on one of the national stations, and she listens to the stories with growing gloom: a tanker spillage off the coast of Alaska; hundreds killed by a series of car bomb attacks in the Middle East; ethnic clashes on the Indian subcontinent; new figures showing an increase in malaria deaths, a rise in HIV infections.

When she reaches over to flip the off switch, she hits the radio with such force that the shelf judders and two cookery books fall to the floor. With her one flour-free hand, she selects a CD, an Ella Fitzgerald compilation, and for the first time removes the one inserted by Greg those months before.

At four o’clock Mary drops both Beth and Sammy home as arranged.

I’m starving, says Sammy. What’s for tea?

Look, says Nuala. Look what I’ve made.

She’s put the loaf on a grill to cool down. The aroma of fresh baking still fills the kitchen. The children gaze at the bread. There’s a long pause as the associations are made.

What about some nice toast? Nuala begins brightly. She’s already sensing the depth of her error. Beth, you’ll have peanut butter, won’t you? she adds, though in her mind she’s saying, Please don’t think badly of me. This is meant to be a good thing. I’m not trying to usurp him.

OK, says Beth, finally. Is that an accusatory look that Nuala reads in her expression?

Sammy?

Jam please, says Sammy. Nuala detects in his tone a combination of reluctance and hesitation and doubt.

She cuts the loaf, slides slices into the toaster. When it pops, she spreads butter, passes around the plates. The appearance of food silences the children. Nuala busies herself microwaving a jug of milk for hot chocolate