‘Will I see you again?’ she said.
I smiled. ‘I hope so!’
She looked relieved. ‘I’ve missed you, Chrissy. You’ve no idea.’
It was true. I did have no idea. But with her, and this journal, there was a chance I could rebuild a life worth living. I thought of the letter in my bag. A message from the past. The final piece of the puzzle. The answers I need.
‘I’ll see you soon,’ she said. ‘Early next week. OK?’
‘OK,’ I said. She hugged me, and my voice was lost in the curls of her hair. She felt like my only friend, the only person I could rely on, along with Ben. My sister. I squeezed her hard. ‘Thank you for telling me the truth,’ I said. ‘Thank you. For everything. I love you.’ When we parted and looked at each other both of us were crying.
At home, I sat down to read Ben’s letter. I felt nervous – would it tell me what I needed to know? Will I finally understand why Ben left me? – but at the same time excited. I felt sure it would. Felt certain that with it, with Ben and Claire, I will have everything I need.
Darling Christine,
This is the hardest thing I have ever had to do. Already I’ve kicked off with a cliché, but you know I’m not a writer – that was always you! – so I’m sorry, but I’ll do my best.
By the time you read this you’ll know, but I’ve decided I have to leave you. I can’t bear to write it, or even to think it, but I have to. I have tried so hard to find another way, but I can’t. Believe me.
You have to understand that I love you. I always have. I always will. I don’t care what has happened, or why. This isn’t about revenge, or anything like that. I haven’t met anybody else. When you were in that coma I realized just how much a part of me you are – I felt like I was dying every time I looked at you. I realized I didn’t care what you were doing that night in Brighton, or who you were seeing. I just wanted you to come back to me.
And then you did, and I was so happy. You will never know how happy I was, the day they told me you were out of danger, that you wouldn’t die. That you weren’t going to leave me. Or us. Adam was just little, but I think he understood.
When we realized you had no memory of what had happened I thought it was a good thing. Can you believe that? I feel ashamed now, but I thought it was for the best. But then we realized that you were forgetting other things too. Gradually, over time. At first it was the names of the people in the beds next to you, the doctors and nurses treating you. But you got worse. You forgot why you were in the hospital, why you weren’t allowed to come home with me. You convinced yourself that the doctors were experimenting on you. When I took you home for a weekend you didn’t recognize our street, our house. Your cousin came to see you and you had no idea who she was. We took you back to the hospital and you had no idea where you were going.
I think that’s when things started to get difficult. You loved Adam so much. It shone out of your eyes when we arrived, and he would run over to you and into your arms, and you would pick him up, and know who he was, straight away. But then – I’m sorry, Chris, but I have to tell you this – you started to believe that Adam had been away from you when he was a baby. Every time you saw him you thought that it was the first time since he was a few months old. I would ask him to tell you when he last saw you and he would say, ‘Yesterday, Mummy,’ or ‘Last week,’ but you didn’t believe him. ‘What have you been telling him?’ you’d say. ‘It’s a lie.’ You started accusing me of keeping you locked there. You thought another woman was raising Adam as her own while you were in the hospital.
One day I arrived and you didn’t recognize me. You became hysterical. You grabbed Adam when I wasn’t looking and ran to the door, to rescue him, I suppose, but he started screaming. He didn’t understand why you’d do that. I took him home and tried to explain, but he didn’t understand. He started being really frightened of you.
It got worse. One day I called the hospital. I asked them what you were like when I wasn’t there, when Adam wasn’t there. ‘Describe her, right now,’ I said. They said you were calm. Happy. You were sitting in the chair next to your bed. ‘What’s she doing?’ I said. They said you were talking to one of the other patients, a friend of yours. Sometimes you played cards together.
‘Played cards?’ I said. I couldn’t believe it. They said you were good at cards. They had to explain the rules to you every day, but then you could beat just about anybody.
‘Is she happy?’ I said.
‘Yes,’ they said. ‘Yes. She’s always happy.’
‘Does she remember me?’ I said. ‘Adam?’
‘Not unless you’re here,’ they said.
I think I knew then that one day I would have to leave you. I’ve found you a place where you can live for as long as you need to. Somewhere you can be happy. Because you will be happy, without me, without Adam. You won’t know us, and so you won’t miss us.
I love you so much, Chrissy. You must understand that. I love you more than I love anything. But I have to give our son a life, a life he deserves. Soon he will be old enough to understand what’s going on. I will not lie to him, Chris. I will explain the choice I have made. I will tell him that although he may want to see you very much it would be enormously upsetting for him to do so. Maybe he will hate me. Blame me. I hope not. But I want him to be happy. And I want you to be happy, too. Even if you can only find that happiness without me.
You’ve been in Waring House for a while now. You don’t panic any more. You have a sense of routine. That’s good. And so it’s time for me to go.
I’m going to give this letter to Claire. I’ll ask her to keep it for me, and to show it to you when you’re well enough to read it, and to understand it. I can’t keep it myself, I’ll just brood over it, and won’t be able to resist giving it to you next week, or next month, or even next year. Too soon.
I cannot pretend I don’t hope that one day we can be together again. When you are recovered. The three of us. A family. I have to believe that might happen. I have to, or else I will die from grief.
I am not abandoning you, Chris. I will never abandon you. I love you too much.
Believe me, this is the right thing, the only thing for me to do.
Don’t hate me. I love you.
Ben
X
I read it again now, and fold the paper. It feels crisp, as though it might have been written yesterday, but the envelope into which I slip it is soft, its edges frayed, with a sweet smell clinging to it, like perfume. Has Claire carried it with her, tucked in a corner of her bag? Or, more likely, has she stored it in a drawer at home, out of sight, but never quite forgotten? For years it waited for the right time to be read. Years that I spent not knowing who my husband was, not even knowing who I was. Years in which I could never have bridged the gap between us, because it was a gap I had never known existed.
I slip the envelope between the pages of my journal. I am crying as I write this, but I don’t feel unhappy. I understand everything. Why he left me, why he has been lying to me.
Because he has been lying to me. He has not told me about the novel I wrote so that I will not be devastated by the fact that I will never write another. He has been telling me my best friend moved away to protect me from the fact that the two of them betrayed me. Because he didn’t trust me to love them both far too much to not forgive them. He has been telling me that I was hit by a car, that this was an accident, so that I don’t have to deal with the fact that I was attacked and what happened to me was the result of a deliberate act of ferocious hatred. He has been telling me that we never had children, not only to protect me from the knowledge that my only son is dead, but to protect me, too, from having to deal with the grief of his death every single day of my life. And he has not told me that, after years of trying to find a way for our family to be together, he had to face the fact that we couldn’t be and take our son and leave in order to find happiness.
He must have thought that our separation would be for ever, wh
en he wrote that letter, but he must also have hoped that it would not, or else why write it? What was he thinking, as he sat there, in his home, our home as it must once have been, and took out his pen and began to try to explain to someone who he could never expect to understand why he felt he had no option but to leave her? I am no writer, he said, and yet his words are beautiful to me, profound. They read as if he is talking about someone else, and yet, somewhere inside me, under the skin and bones, the tissue and blood, I know that he is not. He is talking about, and to, me. Christine Lucas. His broken wife.
But it has not been for ever. What he hoped for has happened. Somehow my condition has improved, or else he found separation from me even harder than he imagined, and he came back for me.
Everything seems different now. The room I am in looks no more familiar to me than it did this morning when I woke up and stumbled into it, trying to find the kitchen, desperate for a drink of water, desperate to piece together what happened last night. And yet it no longer seems shot through with pain, and sadness. It no longer seems emblematic of a life I cannot consider living. The ticking of the clock at my shoulder is no longer just marking time. It speaks to me. Relax, it says. Relax, and take what comes.
I have been wrong. I have made a mistake. Again and again and again I have made it; who knows how many times? My husband is my protector, yes, but also my lover. And now I realize that I love him. I have always loved him, and if I have to learn to love him again every day, then so be it. That is what I will do.
Ben will be home soon – already I can feel him approach – and when he arrives back I will tell him everything. I will tell him that I have met Claire – and Dr Nash, and even Dr Paxton – and that I have read his letter. I will tell him that I understand why he did what he did back then, why he left me, and that I forgive him. I will tell him that I know about the attack, but that I no longer need to know what happened, no longer care who did this to me.
And I will tell him that I know about Adam. I know what happened to him, and though the thought of facing it every day makes me cold with terror, that is what I must do. The memory of our son must be allowed to exist in this house, and in my heart, too, no matter how much pain that causes.
And I will tell him about this journal, that finally I am able to give myself a narrative, a life, and I will show it to him, if he asks to see it. And then I can continue to use it, to tell my story, my autobiography. To create myself from nothing.
‘No more secrets,’ I will say to my husband. ‘None. I love you, Ben, and I always will. We have wronged each other. But please forgive me. I am sorry that I left you all those years ago to be with somebody else, and I am sorry that we can never know who it was I went to see in that hotel room, or what I found there. But please know that I am determined to make this up to you now.’
And then, when there is nothing else between us but love, we can begin to find a way to truly be together.
I have called Dr Nash. ‘I want to see you one more time,’ I said. ‘I want you to read my journal.’ I think he was surprised, but he agreed.
‘When?’ he said.
‘Next week,’ I said. ‘Come for it next week.’
He said he would collect it on Tuesday.
Part Three
Today
I turn the page, but there is no more. The story ends there. I have been reading for hours.
I am shaking, can barely breathe. I feel that I have not only lived an entire life in the last few hours, but I have changed. I am not the same person who met Dr Nash this morning, who sat down to read the journal. I have a past now. A sense of myself. I know what I have, and what I have lost. I realize I am crying.
I close the journal. I force myself to calm down, and the present begins to reassert itself. The darkening room in which I sit. The drilling I can still hear in the street outside. The empty coffee cup at my feet.
I look at the clock next to me and there is a jolt of shock. Only now do I realize that it is the same clock as the one in the journal that I have been reading, that I am in the same living room, am the same person. Only now do I fully understand that the story I have been reading is mine.
I take my journal and mug into the kitchen. There, on the wall, is the same wipe-clean board I had seen this morning, the same list of suggestions in neat capitals, the same note that I had added myself: Pack bag for tonight?
I look at it. Something about it troubles me, but I can’t work out why.
I think of Ben. How difficult life must have been for him. Never knowing with whom he would wake. Never being certain how much I would remember, how much love I would be able to give him.
But now? Now I understand. Now I know enough for us to both live again. I wonder if I ever had the conversation with him that I had been planning. I must have, so certain was I that it was the right thing to do, but I have not written about it. I have written nothing for a week, in fact. Perhaps I gave my journal to Dr Nash before I had the opportunity. Perhaps I felt there was no need to write in my book, now that I had shared it with Ben.
I turn back to the front of the journal. There it is, in the same blue ink. Those three words, scratched on to the page beneath my name. Don’t trust Ben.
I take a pen and cross them out. Back in the living room I see the scrapbook on the table. Still there are no photographs of Adam. Still he didn’t mention him to me this morning. Still he hasn’t shown me what is in the metal box.
I think of my novel – For the Morning Birds – and then look at the journal I am holding. A thought comes, unbidden. What if I made it all up?
I stand up. I need evidence. I need a link between what I have read and what I am living, a sign that the past I have been reading about is not one I have invented.
I put the journal in my bag and go out of the living room. The coat stand is there, at the bottom of the stairs, next to a pair of slippers. If I go upstairs will I find the office, the filing cabinet? Will I find the grey metal box in the bottom drawer, hidden underneath the towel? Will the key be in the bottom drawer by the bed?
And, if it is, will I find my son?
I have to know. I take the stairs two at a time.
*
The office is smaller than I imagined and even tidier than I expected, but the cabinet is there, gun-metal grey.
In the bottom drawer is a towel, and beneath it a box. I grip it, preparing to lift it out. I feel stupid, convinced it will be either locked or empty.
It is neither. In it I find my novel. Not the copy Dr Nash had given to me – there was no coffee ring on the front and the pages of this look new. It must be one Ben has been keeping all along. Waiting for the day when I know enough to own it again. I wonder where my copy is, the one that Dr Nash gave to me.
I take the novel out and underneath it is a single photograph. Me and Ben, smiling at the camera, though we both look sad. It looks recent, my face is the one I recognize from the mirror and Ben looks as he did when he left this morning. There is a house in the background, a gravel driveway, pots of bright-red geraniums. On the back someone has written Waring House. It must have been taken on the day he collected me, to bring me back here.
That’s it, though. There are no other photographs. None of Adam. Not even the ones I have found here before and described in my journal.
There is an explanation, I tell myself. There has to be. I look through the papers that are piled on the desk: magazines, catalogues advertising computer software, a school timetable with some sessions highlighted in yellow. There is a sealed envelope – which, on an impulse, I take – but there are no photographs of Adam.
I go downstairs and make myself a drink. Boiling water, a teabag. Don’t let it stew too long, and don’t compress the bag with the back of the spoon or you’ll squeeze out too much tannic acid and the tea will be bitter. Why do I remember this yet I don’t remember giving birth? A phone rings, somewhere in the living room. I retrieve it – not the one that flips open, but the one that my husband gave to me ??
? from my bag and answer it. Ben.
‘Christine? Are you OK? Are you at home?’
‘Yes,’ I say. ‘Yes. Thank you.’
‘Have you been out today?’ he says. His voice sounds familiar, yet somehow cold. I think back to the last time we spoke. I don’t remember him mentioning that I had an appointment with Dr Nash. Perhaps he really doesn’t know, I think. Or perhaps he is testing me, wondering whether I will tell him. I think of the note written next to the appointment. Don’t tell Ben. I must have written that before I knew I could trust him.
I want to trust him now. No more lies.
‘Yes,’ I say. ‘I’ve been to see a doctor.’ He doesn’t speak. ‘Ben?’ I say.
‘Sorry, yes,’ he says. ‘I heard.’ I register his lack of surprise. So he had known then, known that I was seeing Dr Nash. ‘I’m in traffic,’ he says. ‘It’s a bit tricky. Listen, I just wanted to make sure you’ve remembered to pack? We’re going away …’
‘Of course,’ I say, and then I add, ‘I’m looking forward to it!’ and I realize I am. It will do us good, I think, to get away. It can be another beginning for us.
‘I’ll be home soon,’ he says. ‘Can you try to have our bags packed? I’ll help when I get in, but it’d be better if we can set off early.’
‘I’ll try,’ I say.
‘There’re two bags in the spare bedroom. In the wardrobe. Use those.’
‘OK.’
‘I love you,’ he says, and then, after a moment too long, a moment in which he has already ended the call, I tell him that I love him too.