(2002) Deception aka Sanctum (10 page)

She was my sweet, soft-hearted Susie, and then, quite suddenly, she was someone else.

chapter ten

WHEN I WENT BACK TO COLLECT MARGIE AT NURSERY YESTERDAY, the tanned young assistant was embarrassingly overfriendly. She kept patting my arm and back and grinning unhappily. They had obviously had a staff chat about me and decided I was a pathetic, unknowing mug.

It’s rare for people to pity me. I did well at school, had pals, wasn’t crap at sports, and got straight into medical school. I had good-looking girlfriends, met Susie, and we both graduated. Even though I didn’t go into practice, everyone knows that was because I chose not to. I don’t think they even pity me for giving up work and staying at home. The women love it because they think I’m caring. Most men my age have realized that seeing patients day after day after day isn’t the unmitigated joy they had supposed. They try to pretend that I’m missing out, but they know, most of them, that their careers will climax in a whimper of boredom. At least being at home there is a possibility that I will write something one day, something important and useful. I’m just not ready yet. I have to let the ideas form first.

Anyway, the women at nursery pitied me, and I have to say, I rather liked it. I don’t know if it’s because they’re female, so I don’t feel threatened, or if I’m too bigoted to think women could possibly challenge my position in the social hierarchy. The pity felt like a comfort, like empathy, as if they understood. Some other mums came in while I was there, and they felt sorry for me too. They all came up to talk to me and rubbed Margie’s hair, cupping my elbow and issuing distant invites to bring Margie over to play. I found myself standing bravely, nodding sadly and sighing quite a lot. My tragic tableau was spoiled when Margie bit another child on the head and we had to leave. I used to get Yeni to drop Margie off on Thursdays, but I might just go myself tomorrow.

* * *

I keep thinking about Harvey Tucker. What an utter, utter bastard. Is there any need for him to snub me now, at this moment when I couldn’t be more down? Mum phoned from Marbella this morning. I told her she didn’t need to phone every day and reminded her that it would be costing a fortune. It didn’t work. It was just the usual: more nagging and coughing and needing to be reassured.

It is just possible that Harvey Tucker has the wrong number and is leaving kind, considerate messages on someone else’s machine. I don’t ever recall his phoning here for Susie. One digit out and he could be doing that. Psychiatrists’ writing is awful, so it wouldn’t be hard to get a scribbled phone number wrong if Susie had written it down for him. But that’s crap, because I’ve left him our number every time I’ve phoned. So that’s crap. Tucker, Tucker, you motherfucker.

* * *

Yeni has gone out for the afternoon with her friends from the English class, a pimply boy who may or may not be her boyfriend and a fifty-year-old hermaphrodite woman with a jolly-hockey-sticks attitude. Margie’s having a nap now, but before she went down I got our wedding pictures out and we looked at them together. I told her the story of our wedding. About the big cake and dancing with Mummy, and the big car. She said “Vroom” and spluttered orange juice on the couch. Margie’s teeth have come in quite sharp with gaps between them. Her head is big as well, or maybe her hair is just so thin and dark that it makes her head seem unusually big and square. I hope she won’t grow up ugly.

Looking at the wedding photos, I can see nothing untoward in them. Susie’s not brandishing steak knives or anything. We are a normal happy couple, standing stiffly on church steps, in a garden, by a tree, wearing stale smiles. The photos took hours.

The whole wedding felt like it had nothing to do with us. Susie’s parents, her father really, took over. He ordered the biggest, fanciest everything, with knobs on the knobs and extra bells. Both sets of parents were beside themselves with joy; two only children, each marrying a soon-to-graduate doctor. Her parents told me several times they were pleased— even though I was a Catholic. Susie and I laughed about it behind their backs: the joke was on them because I’m a lapsed Catholic. She didn’t want to tell them about that. She said it made me seem even more dangerous.

Mr. Wilkens ordered the biggest dress, the biggest dinner (five courses in a plush Glasgow hotel by the river, free wine, and liqueurs at the end), the biggest kilt outfit for himself and me. In the pictures I’ve got the kilt and shoes and the socks, skean-dhu, sash, jacket, and I’m holding a silly bonnet-type thing. I’m so over-Scottish I look like a visiting American. Mr. Wilkens (call me Alan) measured everything by the size of the bill. Susie ended up lying to him and saying that the return to Corfu cost thousands, just so we didn’t need to go to Barbados. He was pushing for us to get a prenuptial agreement— he pushed quite hard behind the scenes— but I insisted that I wanted Susie to have anything I owned. It didn’t make any sense until he died.

Her mother worried about money. She was alarmed by the cost of everything, even the price of the inscription inside the rings. Once, when we were ordering the cake and the favors out of a catalog, she inadvertently let off a little worried squeal. Mrs. Wilkens didn’t know that her husband was loaded. She didn’t find out until he died two years later. Mr. and Mrs. Wilkens and little Susie Wilkens went to Portpatrick for their fortnight’s rainy holiday every year and used his old undershirts for dusters. The old bastard had almost three-quarters of a million sitting in different accounts and the same again in a low-risk shares portfolio. The money came from way back, and he’d always kept it quiet. Double lives seem to be something of a theme in her family.

Susie was furious with her mother for never questioning him, never finding out. Her mother said that the money was her husband’s business; it wasn’t her concern. No matter what happened in the family, Susie got furious with her mother. The family cat died, blame Mrs. Wilkens; Aunt Trisha broke her foot, blame Mrs. Wilkens; father lied to his family consistently during his thirty-seven-year marriage, blame Mrs. Wilkens. She had a lot more respect for my mum, who I think is a bit of a bully.

Surprise killed Mrs. Wilkens. She was fine when her husband died, but finding out about the money upset her desperately. She had always assumed they were on the verge of poverty and had fetished watery baked beans and walking everywhere into a kind of fiscal piety. She found herself facing a massive windfall when she was just too old to change her values. Her psyche sort of short-circuited, and six months after her husband’s will was settled, she had a series of heart attacks. We were with her in the hospital at the end. She looked so surprised. I’m sure she saw his bank statement during her final seizure.

Looking at our wedding pictures has made me feel quite happy, as if I were back in that time when everything made sense. There were good times, I’m sure of that, before we forgot one another and got caught up in endlessly meeting work and domestic obligations. Susie didn’t always keep secrets from me. Sometimes we got Saskia, the old nanny, to baby-sit and went out alone together. Over dinner we’d reassure each other that the relationship was still alive, tell each other how great it was to have someone to depend on, like beautiful background music. Maybe she was lying, I don’t know, but I meant it.

Once we went to the Pecorino for dinner; it must have been a birthday or anniversary, I forget which. We were both dressed up and enjoying the food and I looked up at her and fell in love all over again. She had that white sweater on, the fluffy one with the wide neck, and a diamanté starburst on a chain. It was her hair that made me catch my breath, as thick as a pillow. She had recently given birth to Margie and still had that formless softness. I knew that her body was flooded with relaxin and even her joints were soft. She was sheepish, vulnerable, and unsure. It was so unlike her and completely precious. They were really good times.

Looking at the wedding photographs has made me miss her. My breastbone aches, but not, I realize, for her now. I miss her then. The verdict and the difficult phone call have left me exhausted at the thought of seeing her. I’m supposed to be going out to visit her in two days’ time, and I don’t want to. I’m angry at Susan-now for ruining my relationship with the Susie I thought she was. I won’t be able to face her if I go into the visiting hall with this attitude. I need to remember her as she was before.

Memories to Consider Previsit

1. Honeymoon: the hot nights and days. Sleeping on the balcony. Having drunk sex in the grassy hills behind the beach on the way home from a nightclub.

Neither of us really wanted to go to a nightclub; we only went to feel young, and then we got fed up because there was nowhere to sit down. It was just a boring disco, lots of bam-bam-bam music we didn’t recognize, and then, within the space of fifteen minutes, everyone there became incredibly drunk. People were shagging on the banquettes: girls with miniskirts up around their waists, tits out, guys half-coming, one guy finishing himself off in the cubicle in the toilet.

Susie was drunk and thought it was funny; she found it exciting, and we had a shag on the way home. It was just a quick one and we got up quickly afterward and kind of ran home, but we never forgot it. It was the highlight of the honeymoon. She wondered if she was pregnant afterward. I didn’t like that. I didn’t want us to conceive after having dirty sex, which is stupid and prudish. I felt it should have been more missionary somehow. Prim. We never touched on that sort of thing again, never went there together again. Susie didn’t like to talk about it. In truth, if she had, I think I wouldn’t have liked it.

2. The first summer in this house, the day the kitchen arrived. We got the suppliers to fit it, and they did it all in one day. It cost extra and they were rude and sulky, but they were quick. Afterward, sitting with the French windows open, looking out into the garden, sipping wine (cheap wine— not nice, as I remember, but it added to the pastoral picture). Looking out past our perfect kitchen units and beechwood worktop, thinking how lucky we were, to have each other and everything else anyone could possibly want.

3. The day Margie arrived. No, that’s a bit of a scary blur actually.

4. Just before Margie arrived. Lying in bed next to Susie, who was gigantic and propped up on a pillow, talking about the sound of the river in Otago Street and how she wished she had taped it and could play it now to calm herself. She was scared and couldn’t get comfortable.

When she told Dr. Mackay at the Queen Mother’s Maternity that she was frightened, he said it was too late to back out now, ho ho ho. Susie gave him a rocket. What a stupid thing to say to patients; did he think it helped? What was he thinking, saying things like that to women? I think he gave her an elective caesarean because of it. She was jumpy until she got out of the hospital. There was never any question: she wouldn’t do it again. Even though we both know how hard it is to be an only child, she wasn’t going through that again. She couldn’t wait to get back to work.

5. The best night we ever had: there are so many nights it’s hard to say what the best night was.

Best for being madly into each other: the first time in Corfu. One night in the first weeks when we went for dinner with everyone else and then went to a disco. We might as well have been alone. I don’t remember who else was there or what anyone else said or anything. Just Susie, slinky and slim, sitting on my knee, slipping her fingers through my hair, tilting my head back when she caught a tangle, pulling quite hard as if she were annoyed, and her face breaking into a smile as she kissed me. I knew then that I didn’t ever want anyone else. The knowledge that I had found her bloomed warmly in my gut. I never told her that, and to be honest, I’m glad now.

Her best night for telling other people about: the night I proposed. New Year’s Eve and I was working as a resident in the emergency room at the Western. She missed a party and came to meet me for the bells. We sat on a bench in front of Glasgow Uni, high on Gilmorehill, watching the fireworks go off in the city below, and I took her hand and asked her to marry me. She laughed and said we’d already decided to get married, but I wanted to ask her properly. She liked it. She’s very conventional, deep down. When she tells the story to other people, when her dad told the story during his speech at the wedding, they didn’t mention her laughing at me.

6. Best sex: the night in Corfu on the beach. Definitely.

* * *

I’ll remember the beach at Corfu before I go in to visit her. I don’t want her sensing rejection from me or feeling that I’m tentative about her in any way, because I’m not. She’s my wife.

chapter eleven

IT’S THREE-THIRTY IN THE MORNING AND FREEZING UP HERE. MY finger joints are aching, and I’ve got two sweaters on over my pajamas. Mentally and physically, I’m completely exhausted.

I was thinking about Harvey Tucker while I fed Margie her tea. I’ve been leaving messages for a week now. All he needs to do is pick up the phone. I started rehearsing what I’d say to him if he did, what I’d tell him if I was clearing my mind, which is always a mistake. I used to do that in the Western and invariably ended up having fights with people when it would have been much better just to shut up.

I was thinking about how unnecessary it was to be unkind and not return the call, how it was kicking a man when he was down, etc. I got really angry and lost my temper with Margie for knocking over a plant pot and treading soil into the crack in the kitchen lino. I should have known then that I was losing control. I kept coming back to Tucker, thinking about him and getting hot.