A Habit of Dying (6 page)

Last time I wrote here it was better afterwards, so I’ll try sleep again. I will creep in beside her warmth and be as close as I can without touching for fear of her recoiling from me. She does this even when she is asleep. At least, when I think she is asleep.

3rd entry

Today I have worked late in the office, just as I have most evenings recently. There is plenty to do, but I don’t have to work in the evenings. It is
not as if it is good work. I will probably have to go over the same ground again tomorrow. But it has kept me out of the way and out of her way. It has kept us apart and separate as she seems to want to be apart and separate. She is pre-occupied by school and writing reports and marking and planning her lessons. She also works in the evenings but doesn’t need to go over the same ground tomorrow. Tonight she has gone to bed a few minutes after I got home.

Perhaps I should have an affair. Perhaps I want to. Perhaps I want to have an affair with P. She is young, nearly blond, attractive in every sense, thoroughly liberated and friendly towards me. She seems to have no regular boyfriend and she works conveniently in the next set of offices to mine. But I probably don’t have the energy. We were with our good friends H and J at the weekend and the idea of having an affair came up. The general consensus was that it would be alright if your partner never found out and that it was not long lasting. In other words, it would be alright if nobody got hurt. Like taking drugs or speeding in a thirty limit. H declared that he didn’t know where people found the time to have an affair. He has previously confided to me that he regularly sleeps with his PA and that on his occasional trips abroad he never missed the opportunity to sample the local dishes, as he puts it. I didn’t remind him of this. I think J knows about H but chooses to pretend that she doesn’t.

Perhaps she should have an affair, perhaps she wants me to, perhaps she was telling me that it would be ok so long as she didn’t know about it, perhaps she wants me to leave her. Maybe I will. Perhaps she wants to leave me. But what do I know of what she really wants? I don’t have a clue. But if she doesn’t want me I wish she would say so, I wish she had said so on any one of the thousands of moments she has said nothing. The feeling of wanting to end this waiting, this hope, one way or another is getting stronger. I can feel it gnawing away towards some resolution.

4th entry

Sunday night, usually one of the worst nights, but now it is not. She is away for a whole week on a school trip. She left yesterday morning with scarcely a word, certainly not a kiss or any embrace or touch that in another life might be expected. So I have the house to myself, and this book does not need to be hidden away when I’m done. These two things have engendered in me a kind of elation. The immediate, in-your-face tension has gone with
her out the door. Now I have begun to wonder if this is how it would be if we separated for good. Could we do it without speaking, without anger and recrimination and the opening up of all the past wounds and rejections? If I pack up now and was gone when she gets back then it could be that way. Inevitably I cannot do this even as revenge for all that I suffer because maybe just maybe she might still want me. Some tiny spark of hope remains and refuses to be extinguished. But even as I sit here knowing that I cannot leave now, I am closer to being able to leave than ever before. It is no longer inconceivable. The tiny spark blinks and is all but gone.

And another darker thought has skipped through my head. It came in slyly, masquerading as something quite different and while I wasn’t paying attention. What if she did not come back on Friday night, what if she was not on a school trip but was gone with a week’s grace before I noticed she was gone for good? And then again what if she was on the school trip but never came back because of some terrible accident? It seems that every year there is a fatal tragedy involving a school trip on a Belgian motorway or a group of children canoeing or a slip from some mountain path. I have sat here trying to imagine how I would really feel. Would I be distraught or ecstatically released from my cell? Horribly, I have concluded that I would be both, and once again trapped in the tension of diametrically opposed emotions. But even that might be better than I am now, feeling crushed under an infinite weight with life seeping slowly away.

When did we first cease any contact on meeting or parting, when did those always chaste pecks become mere approximations to kisses? And how long did it take for even those to fade away to muttered greetings half hidden for fear of underlining their insincerity. That lack of a parting kiss, that absent embrace, is another drop of acid rain slowly corroding my soul. I want to write love instead of soul but hesitated over the word. Is there love yet left? Confused by her absence, I have no equal and opposite force present to sustain my position. Maybe it is that which has allowed wandering thoughts of final separation to swim freely tonight.

5th entry

Long journeys yesterday and today and a long sleepless night ahead unless I can empty my head of some of the angst. A journey to a funeral is the worst of all long journeys. All the way to Cockermouth to stand in the grey
Cumbrian drizzle beside a grave. She was determined to go and didn’t need me there beside her, after all I hardly knew the woman, her godmother, someone that S was deeply fond of. But I went, maybe I could at least have the role of sympathetic and understanding husband. So I’d booked us into a small hotel for the night, taken the time away from work and driven through the holiday traffic. A tiny room with cold beds, cold at the height of summer, at the back of the hotel where the sun never shines and the damp of winter lingers until autumn.

Eight people listened to the service and stood round the grave for the final words. How alone can a single woman of 80 odd be? How lonely a life can it be that brings but 8 people to your funeral? Perhaps it was all her own choice, perhaps she was entirely self sufficient. S was bearing up until the first handful of earth rattled onto the coffin lid. Then she wept a little and bit her lip. As the sad little group dispersed I couldn’t help put my arm round her shoulders. Even in her sadness, even in that vulnerable moment of softness, she stiffened a little and her neck stretched almost imperceptibly away from me. And I made as if I hadn’t noticed and waited a few moments before removing the useless arm. We drifted out of the church yard, she saying her goodbyes to people she did not know, me nodding with a dull smile in the background, thinking how much I wished I was not there, anywhere but there. Then an aimless wander round the streets where her B had lived, where S had walked and explored as a child when she stayed in the school holidays. I couldn’t help but ask if it was here with her precious B, her aunt or cousin or some such, that she had learnt her own independence, her own self sufficiency. I did not think it in a kind way, I thought it in a resentful, locked out way. Drip drip more acid.

And now we are back through the remorseless traffic, exhausted and with only 24 hours before we leave for France. And she is asleep and I am awake and my mind races over the horrible possibilities of the next week or so. We are thrown together with no excuse for escape, nothing to lessen the tension I feel and which she seems to feel not at all. And dread of dreads she will make some kind advance, some touch of skin to skin and I will think how marvellous it would be at the same time as thinking why only on holiday, why not all the year, every day, every minute. And I will be cast as the rejecter, the unwilling, the cold and disinterested.

I will not try and console her for her next loss.

6th entry

Little fragments of love, mere tokens of love tossed into my begging bowl are not love at all. They are not even charity, and serve only to hint at what was, what might have been. And this is the awful dilemma now. For so long I feel like the dying man, dying of thirst in a desert of loneliness, offered the hope of life with a few drops of precious liquid at the very moment when death seems closest. Am I to take the drops and drink, prolong the death throes into a shrivelled ageing, or decline and bring forward the final ending. There that is it in a sentence. All the thinking, all the sleepless nights, all the anger and hurt, all distilled into a few words. Holidays are good for you or so they say. Maybe this one has been good for me if I can turn it all into a sentence. Or maybe it is this writing it down, here for no one but me to read that enables insight.

As ever she chooses her moments for maximum effect. A long, long drive in hot French sun all the way down to the house at La Rochelle. An early start and a late arrival, bags into the house, all unpacked, all groceries stored, pizza cooked and eaten, bottle of wine consumed, all with barely a word, all I want to do is sleep for a week. But tonight S would turn toward me instead of away, tonight she would put her hand on my face, tonight she would want contact and lovemaking. I want so much to go to sleep, so much to turn away and pay her back for the countless times that she has silently made clear that she has no interest in closeness. Through the drowsiness and the wine my tiny devil will be laughing and saying what you going to do now then, whose fault will it be when she is like ice for the next six months? Not that she is ever like ice, if only she were.

I kissed her once, in a great [despairing] effort to shake her from her indifference. Months had passed, perhaps years I can’t remember, without the slightest token. I stood furious and desolate a few feet from her and could resist no longer. I took her head in my hands and kissed her hard on the mouth. In her shock her lips were still a little apart and I tasted the instantly recognisable sweetness of her mouth. Hard and long I kissed. As I pulled away a little she stood for a second and then turned and continued with the pruning of her rose bushes. There was no resistance, no pushing me away but there was no willingness, no release of tension, merely placid acceptance.

And so we continue, she apparently sailing serenely on, unmoved, unaffected by me or by us or our deadly embrace. Maybe she thinks that this
is how it should be, how all marriages end up, maybe she has no expectation of any more, no hope of true intimacy. In the storm of confusion inside my head I wonder if it is I who have it all wrong, I who clings ridiculously to a Hollywood romance that never was and never will be.

7th entry

Again and again it is the dead of night when I write here. She never stirs when I leave the bed. Is she asleep? Sometimes I think she is awake, waiting for me to creep out. Sometimes when I lie there I think she is awake listening to me think, watching in the darkness for the tiniest movement, the smallest flicker, ever alert in case I should reach out a caressing hand. If she sleeps what does she dream of? These last few days have been harder than ever. Tonight a new quandary presented itself in my thoughts. What is it that she wants of me, wants of anything? To me she appears supremely self sufficient, I am completely irrelevant apart from bringing in some money and providing the husband badge. Is she waiting for the deserted badge, the separated badge or even the divorce badge? Is she looking forward to the widow badge? She may be trying to drive me completely out of my sanity. It is not possible for her to be unaware of the effect that this living death is having.

We walked together through the park to the shops last weekend. For a few moments our hands swung between us, synchronised in their movement. It seemed unnatural to do anything but touch and hold loosely together. In a few steps her stride altered a fraction and the synchronicity was gone. A few steps further and she wiped an imaginary hair from her eye and the connection was severed. This was a tiny, tiny thing, so tiny as to be invisible to anyone without a microscope. And it was a tiny drip of acid, doing just what acid does, burning, corroding the tattered fabric of ourselves. Once, many years ago it may be, when I was yet still full of hope and optimism we spoke of just such a moment. I forget the slight, the rejection that made me speak. She said that I was too sensitive, read too much into a meaningless word or action. Like a fool I was consoled and believed the fault was mine. Now, after all this time, the weight of evidence is too great, the probability too high. It is not my sensitivity, it is her indifference. Unless she is not indifferent, unless it is cunning and deliberate and designed. Unless she has the acid bottle firmly in her grasp and drips a drop here and a drop there to her own plan.

There is always a choice. Think about the choices and then decide on the
best course for the chosen objective. It is easy to know this is the right thing to do and another to do it. I remain paralyzed by indecision. But there is something moving somewhere, it feels as if the log jam is subtly shifting around me. Even that dim thought is enough to satisfy me for now. Nothing has moved, nothing has changed, the scene is exactly as it was a moment ago. But there is perhaps the capacity for change.

8th entry

This is the worst time, when she is completely and utterly involved in her teaching. She has no time for anything but her class, her parents, her marking, her Christmas play, her anything but us, and certainly not me. I am here every year and the practice has made it more bearable this year. The distant S is so much better than the distant S in the same house, same room, same bed. It gives me time to think of ways to be free. And it gives me time to think of the myriad reasons to be free. The thousand slights, the million rejections, the early days and her Saturday sufferance of morning love making. I hated that so much, but like a moth I was drawn to the flame every week. Surely it would be good, or at least better than last time, surely she would lie awhile and we could doze and snuggle into each other. Surely she would not stay unspeaking for a few moments before the pretext of thirst or shopping or ironing took her abruptly away. And every week a different excuse, until I got to counting them, seeing how long before one repeated, and then checking the frequency. And I can write it here, now, but never admit before, that in the end I would reach out a hand, touch and caress her to test the excuse, to provoke the action that I logged in my survey. She never disappointed in that respect.