Anne

When Anne was a child and her parents returned late at night from a party, she liked to pretend to be asleep. It was partly because she knew the babysitter had let her stay up longer than she should but it was also because she enjoyed the feeling of play-acting, of feigning something, of playing a trick on adults.

She would hear their footsteps on the stairs, the heavy and deliberate murmur of drunken whispers and half-giggles, and she would flick the switch of her bedside lamp and shut her eyes tightly, drawing the blankets up around her. Her parents would approach her bedroom and halt for a moment outside, shushing each other with exaggerated seriousness, before pushing open the door and poking their heads round. Her mother’s voice would say her name softly, each movement punctuated by the tinny jangle of earrings and bracelets.

Her mother would tiptoe over to the side of the mattress and lower her head to kiss her daughter gently on the cheek, and Anne, her senses heightened by the darkness, would feel the dryness of face powder and the creamy texture of her lipstick and inhale the thrilling adult tang of smoke and drink. Still, she would not open her eyes. Her parents must have known that she was awake but they played along. It became a harmless childhood lie.

She thinks of this now as she looks at her husband, lying on his hospital bed, attached to various tubes and drips. It looks like a pretence, this enforced sleep. His chest rises and falls. His eyes are closed. His mouth is turned down at the corners and over the last few days stubble has appeared on the pale folds of his face, like bracken stealing across a hillside. The sleep doesn’t seem at all convincing. It looks as if he’s trying too hard. Occasionally, his left eyelid will flicker slightly, a tiny electronic pulse emitted from some unidentified synapse.

She knows the facts. She has been told by the doctors that he is in a coma and she has nodded and been serious and given the reliable impression of a woman in her mid-fifties who understands what is expected of her. She has taken care of things, informed people, she has been calm and logical on the phone when issuing necessary instructions. She has been to the police station to pick up his bicycle, eerily unmarked by the accident, its metal frame sleek and grey and cool to the touch. She has packed bags and tidied and filled in forms and arranged for his transfer to a private hospital covered by his insurance. She has frozen the beef casserole. She has carried on, knowing that this is what everyone wants her to do.

But there is a secret part of her that thinks it is a colossal joke and that this isn’t actually happening at all. Her husband is lying in front of her, pretending to be asleep and he is once again the centre of attention, just as he always managed to be when he was awake. She knows he is pretending; he is misleading her into believing in something that does not exist. Well, she thinks to herself, I’m not going to be fooled this time.

And then, looking at his prone body, she becomes all at once aware of her own absurdity. She is shocked at her casual dismissal of her husband’s condition. She tries to think fondly of him, to remember some affectionate exchange they might have had in recent days. But instead all she can remember is the last conversation they had, just before Charles walked out of the door, dressed in his high-visibility cycling jacket, the zip undone so that the sides of it flapped in the breeze as he went.

He had not told her where he was going, and when she had asked, he did not lift his head to acknowledge that he had heard her. Instead, he carried on sipping his mug of breakfast tea in a succession of noisy slurps.

‘Charles?’

He raised his eyes to meet hers with familiar indifference.

‘Yes?’

‘I just wondered where you were going,’ Anne said a second time, hearing the meekness in her voice, the whining undertone, and hating it.

He put down his mug of tea with a quiet force. The mug gave a thunking sound as it made contact with the table and some of the liquid splattered on to the pale pine. Anne stared at the thin rivulets of brown, trying not to make eye contact with him.

‘Why would that possibly concern you?’ he said, his voice perfectly level. That would probably have been the end of it, but Anne had taken a dishcloth and started to wipe away the spilled tea and something in Charles had seemed to crack. No one else would have noticed it, but for Anne the change was immediately visible: a darkening of his pupils, a deliberate relaxing of the shoulders like a boxer priming himself for the ring, the ever-so-slight whistling sound of breath through his nostrils.

After a moment he spoke, his voice carefully modulated, as if holding itself back.

‘Do you know what I think of you?’ he asked, and although the question seemed out of place amid the mundane to-ing and fro-ing of the morning, Anne knew that he would have a reason for it.

She kept silent, balling up her hands into tight fists so that she could feel her fingernails digging into her palms. She concentrated on the discomfort of it, on the effort of marking her skin to prove she existed. When she relaxed her hands, there would be a row of sharply delineated crescents pock-marked across the tender pink flesh.

Charles was staring at her, his eyes stained with contempt, his head tilted in a quizzical pose. ‘Well?’ he asked, slowly, as if speaking to a stupid child.

Anne felt each muscle tense and prick against her flesh. She knew she had to answer or there would be no end to it. ‘No,’ she said and she could feel her voice disappear almost as soon as it hit the air, evaporating into wisps of nothing. She stood still, braced and alert for what would come next, the damp cloth cupped in her hand.

Charles coughed gently, a balled-up hand in front of his mouth. He looked at her and his eyes seemed dulled, like the dustiness on a window-pane when it caught the light. When he spoke, his tone was unchanged, innocuous, smooth like wax. ‘You disgust me,’ he said, so softly it was almost a whisper, and she wondered, once again, if she were in fact going mad. ‘Just looking at you, at your dishcloths and your dirty aprons, at your pathetic face. Just listening to you, your incessant whining, your pleading, snivelling voice asking me pointless questions.’ He paused to take a sip of tea and for a moment Anne thought he might have finished, but just as she was about to turn away, he put the mug down with exaggerated caution and continued. ‘You.’ He jabbed a finger at her. ‘You. You, with your tired eyes and your wrinkles and your housewifely flab spilling over at the sides and your thin lips and –’ He broke off and shook his head, as if disbelieving. ‘You used to be so beautiful.’

Anne went to the sink and busied herself with the taps so that she did not have to look at him. She felt herself about to cry and wondered why he still possessed the capacity to wound her so deeply. She had become accustomed to his bouts of callousness, to the random outbursts of his bristling, restrained fury. Surely she should be inured to it by now, should be able to sweep his cruelties aside? Why did she not simply walk out of the kitchen? Why did she not walk out of the house, out of this man’s life for good? Why did she stand here, bound to him, receiving each verbal blow as though she deserved it?

There was something that kept her here, a silken thread that tied her to him, that twisted around her wrists, her ankles, her chest, so tightly she could not move.

She found herself thinking about her youth, her dried-up beauty and the effortless slenderness that Charles had prized so highly. Once, in the very early days when they had been in bed together, he had lifted her skinny arm up to the light so that the delicate webbed skin between her fingers glowed like oyster shell held against the sun.

‘Almost translucent,’ he had said, before dropping her arm softly back on to the sheets and turning away from her. And she remembers now how happy she had felt with that small, dispassionate compliment. Had she really asked for so little?

But that had been years ago: a different woman in a different time. When she looked round from the sink, her vision blurred with the imprecise fuzziness of tears, she saw that Charles had gone.

 

The nurse comes in to check on the drip and smiles at her with a brisk nod of the head, just as they do in hospital dramas. It adds to her notion of play-acting. Of course, she thinks, the nurse is in on it too. He has somehow paid off the entire hospital to go along with this joke of his. How typical, she thinks, that he would go to such lengths to make her feel so beholden to him. She feels a familiar surge in the pit of her stomach, a pang somewhere between hunger and pain that she recognises as the beginnings of a small but lethal rage.

She has got used to these sudden, inexplicable bouts of anger and now barely notices them until they have subsided. She seems to be able to swing from extreme sadness and self-pity one minute to uncontained fury the next. Recently, at the wedding of a friend’s daughter, she was given a sparkler from a packet and told to light it and hold it aloft as the happy couple left for their honeymoon.

‘It’s instead of confetti,’ said the mother of the bride, an officious woman who prided herself on her organisational skills.

‘Oh,’ said Anne, realising she was meant to be impressed. ‘How . . . inventive.’

The sparkler burned quickly, throwing out bright shards of flame like dandelion spores. The guests whooped and waved until it all seemed a curious facsimile of joy, and then the mother of the bride started ushering people into taxis and Anne was left with the sparkler in her hand, a limp, ashen strip that smelled lightly of sulphur. It struck her then, after too much champagne, that this is what happened to her inside when she felt that heated explosion of intense disappointment. It burned bright, and then it burned out, and no one ever knew.

She had wanted to talk to someone about this, about the feeling that her life was gradually draining itself of purpose, revolving around the same dull axes, but she could no longer share such intimacies with Charles and her limited scattering of dull suburban friends would have been shocked by her honesty. Until Charles’s accident, she had felt oppressed by the cyclical nature of her days, as though she were stuck on a roundabout in an anonymous provincial town like the outer fringes of Swindon or a place called Blandford Forum that she had been to once with Charles; a town that had sounded vaguely Roman and exotic but that turned out to be full of grubby teashops and Argos outlets.

The worst of it was that it had all been entirely her doing. She had loved Charles, loved him completely, and probably still did in spite of no longer wanting to. But instead of giving her the contentedness she had once craved, her life with Charles has left Anne with a perpetual restlessness. She finds fault with everything. She picks at the stitches of each day with a relentlessness that leaves the seams frayed and the material torn out of shape. She does not understand happiness any more, cannot remember where to look for it, as if it is something she has mislaid – a coin that has slipped down the back of a sofa. She cannot remember the last time she laughed. She feels her core has been chipped away like marble. She no longer likes herself very much and can feel herself being ground down by her own defensiveness. She wishes she could be different, but it somehow seems too much effort to try.

She hadn’t always been like this. When her mother died last year after a prolonged descent into blindness and infirmity, Anne had sorted through the overstuffed little retirement flat and come across an enormous cache of family letters. Sifting through the postcards of long-ago mountainsides and the browning edges of airmail envelopes, she had discovered a series of letters written while she was at boarding school. Each of them was so funny, covered with illustrations and jokes and witty imprecations not to forget to make her favourite flapjacks for the holidays. She had been stunned to meet this youthful version of herself: so effortlessly full of character, so unaffectedly joyful, so naively sure of who she was. There were so many exclamation marks. She never thought in exclamations any more.

 

The asthmatic, mechanical, barely-there sound of her husband’s breathing interrupts her thoughts. He is still a handsome man, she thinks, looking at the clear, pronounced angle of his jawbone jutting out from beneath his earlobe as if welded in place. The skin around his eyes has been marked by a series of fine, engraved wrinkles in the last few years, but the crow’s feet suit him; give him an approachable air of bonhomie and sunkissed good health. His eyes look like crinkles of paper, twisted at the ends like packets of picnic salt. His lids are closed now, occasionally twitching as if a small bird’s heart is thumping delicately just below the surface of his face. But when they were open, his eyes were the bruised blue of faded hydrangea petals: flat, pale, remote.

The door opens and a nurse – the nice one with the dimpled smile – peers round the door. ‘Cup of tea, Anne?’

She nods her head, just as she is supposed to.