The Secrets of Married Women (31 page)

We don’t say much after that. Rob lies down on the bed, on top of the duvet, the sunken shadows under his eyes seeming to darken the more I stare at them. I remember my mother once saying that marriage is a series of tests. How’s he going to stand up to this one? I curl up at his feet, feeling bled of all energy. We stay like this, me waiting for what is going to happen next, vacantly watching the red numerals of the clock click over as though they’re the last moments of my life. I am praying for a stay of execution.

‘Rob,’ I eventually say, startling him from his thoughts. ‘I have to know what you’re thinking. Talk to me. Will you tell me what we're going to do?’

He stares, unblinking, at the ceiling. Then his eyes slide to mine. ‘Well, what are you going to do is more the question.’

I struggle to sit up. His face has a ruthless sadness to it that panics me. ‘What d’you mean?’

‘Well,’ he says, with an almost flippant finality. ‘Obviously you’re moving out.’

I have to keep pinching myself as I load my car with the six boxes and three suitcases that contain everything that’s ‘mine’ and not ‘ours’. ‘Make sure you’re not here when I get back,’ Rob said as he went off to work with his dog.

I’m moving in with my parents for now. Until I can think how to get him back. But it won’t be easy. Rob may be a bit more sophisticated than your average northern male, but like all hard working men whose grandfathers were miners, Rob is a no-messing bloke. Once he’s made a decision, he rarely goes back on it. In ten years of marriage, I can’t think of a time when he has.

We’ve already agreed to sell the house. He says he wants to get on with his life! ‘What?’ I asked. ‘You mean try to meet somebody else?’

‘Maybe. Or maybe you’ve put me off women. Maybe I’ll be just fine on my own. Me and the dog.’ He gave Kiefer’s collar an overzealous rub.

I stand on the curb, fish in my pocket for my handkerchief, look back at my house and am hit with an overdose of separation anxiety. I don’t blame him for wanting rid of me. I’d be the same if the shoe were on the other foot. But the point is, it’s not. And I’m not feeling very fair and square and noble right now. I go back inside and plonk myself on the sofa. I look around at our sparse but solid furniture that Rob made, the bare rectangles on the walls where the framed photos of us used to hang until I packed them to take them with me. Taking them down felt like emptying a house after a death. No, I think, Jill and Rob live here. Not Rob on his own. Not some other lover who might move in and have the luck we didn’t.

‘I love you,’ I told him, after our terrible fight.

‘I love you too,’ he said. ‘And I’m sure that, in a way, I always will. But Jill you’ve sickened me. My pride won’t let me be with you anymore.’

If he’d said he didn’t love me, I would have felt this situation had hope.

I hug a cushion and try to squeeze those horrible words from my brain. I will make him change his mind. And if he never fully forgives me, I’ll make do. It's a small price to pay to go to bed with him, wake up beside him, live my life alongside him as he lives his.

‘You’re still here,’ he says, when he comes in and finds me attempting to put together a tuna fish salad. I’ve unpacked the photos and hung them back up again. ‘I can’t go,’ I tell him. The dog pads over to me and slurps a tongue up the backs of my legs.

Rob rakes in the cupboard and opens a can of salmon as though defiantly showing me that he’s not about to eat anything I’ve touched. I abandon slicing cucumber, and sit down and watch him eat the un-drained fish that he’s just dunked on a plate, complete with bones and skin. Kiefer’s two moist, black, twitching nostrils are pushed under his elbow.

‘Go,’ he says quietly when I follow him upstairs to bed. I try to snuggle him but he rounds his spine, pushing me away. ‘Please Jill. Just leave me alone.’ His tone is angry. When I don’t he flings the duvet off, grabs his pillow, storms into the spare room, locks the door.

I spring out of bed, rifle in the wardrobe for a wire coat-hanger. Many a time Rob will pick the lock when I’m on the loo. His idea of being funny. I go to the door, and jiggle the end of the wire in the handle. ‘Shit,’ he says when I go in. ‘If you’re going to do this, I’m leaving.’ He gets up, storms back into our bedroom, starts filling his sports bag.

I follow him. I cling on to the doorframe, feeling close to collapsing. I see him being available for somebody else the second he walks out of this door. Falling in love again. Replacing me. ‘Don’t leave me.’ I cling to his shoulders as he zips his bag, recognising that I’ve lost every last thread of my pride. He stands there, clearly not wanting to go—because there really is nowhere for him to go, except to his mother’s, and I can’t see him doing that and having to explain everything. He abandons the bag, takes hold of me and gently shoves me out of the room and locks the door. I bang on it for a bit, ashamed at my appalling behaviour, but relieved too, that he has changed his mind. Then I suddenly feel so exhausted. I slump to a heap on the floor.

In the morning, I wake up still in the same position, sore all down my right side. I can hear him in the shower in our en-suite. When I try our room door, he has unlocked it so I go in. His bag is on the floor. I go into the bathroom, sit on the toilet lid watching his moving silhouette through the glass door. When he comes out, he towels off, as though I’m not there. I sit across from him in the kitchen as he eats his Rice Krispies. The air has a sad, silent understanding to it. I’ve been bad. This cold-shoulder treatment is my punishment. I have to weather it because I’m praying that forgiveness will be the silver lining to this storm.

On his way out, he turns and fixes me with a frank, unforgiving face. ‘Jill, if you're not gone before I get back, I’ll just move out myself. Your choice.’

‘My God, you really do want rid of me.’ I don’t know why it’s taken until now for me to realise it.

His eyes hold mine over his shoulder before he disappears out of the door. ‘I want rid of you, yes.’

Those words, they engrave on my heart as I drive through to Sunderland. I switch the radio on as I swing off the roundabout and head toward the Board Inn, and Linda Ronstadt is singing “Blue Bayou.” I don’t even notice the traffic light. I sail right into the back of a red Toyota. I register the clench of metal, the slight throw of myself forward. The driver, a middle-aged chap with a big gut, is out of his car, having words with my unresponsive face through the glass. As I wind my window down, he mumbles something about having to get to hospital because his wife has just gone into labour. I look at his belly, catch words: damage, insurance, phone number. He waggles a pen and paper at me. My lack of reaction flusters him. I mechanically take his pen. Before he cocks a leg into his car, he looks back at me and shakes his head as though he thinks I’m nuts. Then off he drives to his wife and new baby. I realise I've just given him Rob's and my number.

When I get to my parents’ bungalow I put my big dark sunglasses on like a fallen Hollywood starlet. My dad opens the door, does a double take. ‘Good God, are you going on holiday, or is this your impression of Ray Charles?’ I peel my glasses off so he will see that I have been crying. ‘Gaw!’ he says. ‘What’s happened to you?’

‘Everything,’ I tell him. But I’d never tell him what. My dad has some pretty old-fashioned ideas about women behaving like ladies. His ladylove looks up from the telly when I walk in the sitting room. ‘Hello sweetheart,’ she says, in some mental twilight of detached recognition. I want her to stand up, hold me and make everything better. But with her pretty, transparent gaze she feels gone from me. Elizabeth Mallin might be sat here but she’s just a shell in which my mother doesn’t live anymore.

And that about characterizes the next little while. We are shells in which we don’t live anymore. I try to settle into the clutter of the spare room among all the old furniture that my parents brought with them from their last much bigger house. I sleep in my old single bed, the one I slept in when I dreamt of meeting a man like Rob. My first night I wake up and it’s dark and I don’t know where I am. I struggle to sit up and smack my head off a wall that I’m not expecting to be there. As I clutch at the pain, it dawns on me why I am here, and I fill with plainspoken loss. I peer at my watch in the moonlight. Four a.m. Will he be lying there like me, besieged with grief for us, wanting to run to me, forgive me and take me back? Somehow I doubt it.

My first morning, I come out of the bedroom to find my parents having a fight in the hall. My mother is trying to get out of the door with four carrier bags filled with clothes. My dad has her arms in his grip and there’s a tussle going on.

‘She’s packed her bags and she says she’s leaving. She said she’s going to stay with her mother in York.’

My mother breaks free of his grasp and reaches for the front door handle and I immediately rush to stop her.

‘It’s locked,’ my dad tells her, patiently, but like he’s reasoning with an imbecile. ‘You can’t go anywhere Bessie. I’ve got the key.’ But my mother keeps rattling away at the handle, like a tormented prisoner who has found a window of opportunity to break out. ‘Bessie,’ my dad calmly strokes her hand. ‘Come on now love. Come on. Settle down.’

‘You brought her here!’ my mam turns and fixes me with her gaze, that is today, unfairly lucid.

‘She thinks you’re my girlfriend,’ my dad explains.

‘Tramp!’ she spits at me with sharp contempt. ‘Can’t keep your own man so you want to take somebody else’s!’

I throw a hand to my mouth in shock. ‘That’s it! I’m calling the doctor! We can’t go on like this! This is mad! It’s a madhouse in here!’ I fight the urge to cry. I should be coming down on one of their sides, but it feels like I’m coming down on my own.

‘Don’t be coming here and ordering us about! If it’s a madhouse it’s our madhouse so go home, we don’t want you here.’ Then he looks at me, shocked, apparently. A purplish colour rushes over his face. ‘Oh I’m sorry lass. You know I didn’t mean that.’ He wraps my mother in a big cuddle. ‘They’ll take her away from me!’ he wails, and my mother stares out at me, across his shoulder, quietly triumphant.

When she settles down, I manage to get my dad to at least let me ring the doctor. I phone the health centre and they send Dr. Reilly, a good-looking young man with smiling eyes and red hair that looks steam-rolled straight. ‘Irish,’ my dad whispers. ‘Don’t they have room for him in Ireland? How old do you think he is, thirteen?’ Dr. Reilly says that the last entry on my mother’s file was in 1976. ‘That’s because our family doesn’t believe in doctors,’ my dad tells him. The doctor asks my mother her name. And she tells him, ‘Elizabeth. Or, Bessie, as my husband calls me.’ She gives my dad a fond smile. ‘Makes me sound like a black Labrador’. The doctor looks at me, sceptically, as if to say, Y
ou’re sure there’s something wrong with her?
My dad looks at me as though to say
I win
. Dr. Reilly gives us some pills to supposedly calm her, and an emergency phone number. He tells us that, of course, the very best thing would be for my mother to be admitted to a home where they can take proper care of her. ‘Yeah, right lad,’ my dad takes hold of him—one hand on the seat of his pants and the other on the scruff of his neck—and frogmarches him out of the door, then down the garden path. He runs him so that the doctor stumbles with ‘cartoon’ legs, trying to keep up. ‘Go push your prescriptions on some other poor unsuspecting bugger.’ Free of my dad's clutches, the doctor fleas to the safety of his car, turning only once to catch my apologetic expression, and giving me a thin, aghast smile.

I can’t face work again. So I ring in sick, rattling off some rubbish about a bug. Wendy phones. I had almost forgotten about her. So this is where I have to start telling people. I stare at her number on my call display. I don’t pick up. I just can’t do it.

At some point I throw up. My dad keeps feeding me tea. Then he messes around in the kitchen and somehow produces mincemeat and Yorkshire puddings. We eat by the small bay window that overlooks the grassy lawn that’s bordered on all sides by two sets of old-person’s semi-detached bungalows. ‘What happened to her place?’ I nod to the house across from us, with newspaper up at the window.

‘Dolly Oliver? She snuffed it love. Stroke. About a month ago.’

I look at my dad’s fingers curled around his tea mug and feel a horrible shortening of opportunity. ‘Is it strange, Dad, to see people you’ve known all your life die? People who were young with you, had kids when you had kids…’

He leaves his carrots. ‘Not really love. We all have to do it. So long as we’ve lived a good life and we’ve treated those we love well, there’s no need to be frightened to leave this world.’ He searches my face.

Who will I grow old with now?

More to the point, who will Rob?

‘What you doing the Ray for again?’ When I cry, I tend to put my sunglasses on and he says I am “doing the Ray Charles.” He squeezes my hand. ‘She never knew you cared.’