CORRESPONDENCE

Pen gripped between stiff fingers, she bites words into the paper – long spikes and crude curves replacing her usually mellow hand. She stands hunched over the table, loath to pull out one of the four chairs and settle; loath, in fact, to do anything which might bring her comfort. She is ready to roll her anger out over days, weeks. In this moment, she is certain she will never know happiness again.

How could she? Despite her best efforts, the world has denied it her.

She scratches three short sentences through the paper and into her table top, scrawls her signature, and stuffs the letter into an envelope without rereading it. Sealing the envelope, she splits the skin of an index finger, but rather than sucking it dry, she drops the letter onto the table and squeezes more blood from the cut. She allows a red bead to fall and burst over the paper then, whilst it is still wet, she sweeps it quickly lengthways with a thumb – for the drama of it. She does not let her tears dilute the drying stroke.

Eventually, a boisterous sob escapes her, fracturing the silence and Matilda stops, breathless, and sinks to the floor, letting the noises come. Around her, the flat is in darkness. She did not stop to turn on a lamp. She ran all the way from Henry’s, ankles twisting, coat snagging. She watches the windows tremble with rain and waits for Grayson to come to her. And barely a breath passes before he is stumbling from their bedroom, eyes small, hair stabbing outwards, pyjama trousers twisted sideways around him so that he appears, as he steps towards his hysterical wife, to be a contorted doll, his body facing in one direction, his legs in another.

‘Gray,’ she manages to howl between sobs, the one syllable stretching ridiculously.

‘Yes. Yes,’ he says, ‘I’m here.’ And he crouches in front of her and holds her knees while she struggles to keep her chest from heaving like furiously pumped fireplace bellows. He holds her, though he knows where she must have been at one o’clock in the morning. And, when she is calm enough, Matilda presses her hands over her husband’s, because it is not only for Henry that she is crying. Not only for Henry. Grayson was two hours late home from work again this evening.

‘What is it, love?’ he whispers finally, once her tears are falling silently. The ‘love’ makes her stomach crunch in on itself like a balled fist.

‘Everything,’ she answers. ‘Everything, everything, everything.’ Grayson is afraid to question her beyond those ‘everythings’. Instead, he humours her. He coos and shushes and strokes. ‘That bad?’ he says. ‘Why don’t you get some sleep, then? It’ll all seem better in the morning.’

He lifts her and, wrapping his arms around her middle, steers her to bed. He does not disturb the bloodstained letter on the table. He does not see it. He is busy, unpeeling her sopping clothes, pulling her into her nightdress, kissing the parting of her perfectly straight, silver-toned hair. Even before the guilt of the last few weeks blanketed him, he had always admired the smooth silvery sheen of Matilda’s long, brown bob. It was – is – he thinks, the best parts of her shining through.

Matilda falls abruptly into sleep, dropping heavy, exhausted by her antics. Occasionally, she shudders – perhaps she is already getting ill from roaming around in the wet night – and moves apart from Grayson, closing around her own linked arms. When she grumbles, Gray touches her bent back, and again she shifts from his reach. He assumes then that what she wants to escape is him. He tucks himself into his pillow, facing away from her. And when he shuts his eyes, he is relieved – though it has led to so many of these nights, sleeping back to back – that he and Matilda cannot see into each other’s thoughts. Henry and Ruby had been the sort of couple who could share ideas and hopes without the need for words. Grayson saw it a hundred times. They would sit in Monty’s garden together and throw glances back and forth and the air between them would physically tauten with meaning. Grayson had envied that. But now, now, what would Tilda see or hear if she could tap into her husband’s senses? A woman half her age whose smile would hit her like a punch: a series of punches. Once glimpsed, Sally Emory’s smile alone would become Matilda Steck’s lifelong adversary. Gray knows it. Just as he knows, or has come to know with age, that love is sometimes nothing more than a long succession of different degrees of pain: a wound of the most splendid sort.

He does not love Sally. She is beautiful, yes, and there is a gravity about her, especially for so young a woman. But at almost twenty years his junior, she is still so close to being a child. Last week, tangled in bed, he had considered her make-up-free face – the last hints of roundness in her cheeks, the even skin surrounding her eyes and brows – and felt rising within him an equal mix of revulsion and lust. The revulsion was directed inward.

‘Sally,’ he said.

She groaned in response, smiling without opening her eyes and stretching out her back. As she shifted, her leg, slotted between Gray’s, pulled at the skin of his thighs, sending a flash of need through him. He breathed it away.

‘I have to tell you something.’

‘Go on, then,’ she replied.

‘I’m sorry … about this.’ He shrugged to indicate that he meant them, the situation they had blundered into. ‘But, I’m never going to love you. I thought I should tell you that. I’m not sure what you –’

‘How do you know?’ Sally asked slowly. Her eyes were still closed.

‘What?’

‘That you’re never going to love me. How do you know?’

Grayson thought about this for a long while, running his hand over her china-white shoulder as he took in, for the first time, the layout of her single rented room. All of her belongings were contained here, but the space was not cluttered. It was, conversely, quite bare. A small desk, positioned at the window and heaped with books, was the only untidy spot. He imagined Sally sitting in the glare of midday light, face contorting over words she could not cover quickly enough. Though she had pushed the desk under the window so that she could watch the street below – busy with beeping cars and working men and pigeons, all battling for their strip of city space – she did not look up from the pages before her, dimmed by her own shadow, yes, but so much more, potentially, than what was outside her panes of wood-panelled glass.

Of course, he did not know that she lost herself to books this way. He only wanted it. He wanted Sally – he preferred to think of her as Miss Emory still – to be someone extraordinary, so that he could excuse his actions.

‘I know because I made a promise,’ he answered finally.

‘So now you’re promising not to love me?’ Sally sat up, baring her breasts to him then piercing him with those emerald eyes. She knew how to use her body.

‘I promised that a long time ago,’ Gray said.

She leant forward and blew her next question onto his lips. ‘When?’

Grayson held up his left hand. ‘When I married my wife,’ he said.

True to the fashion of a man his age, who is just beginning to fear the rest of his life, Gray had not dawdled with Sally. She had offered herself to him that day she asked to meet after school hours – in the most diplomatic way possible, naturally, with a single brush of her hand across his arm – and Grayson had accepted, graciously and gratefully, understanding all at once that he had wanted this for months. Maybe even years. Not necessarily with Sally, but right now, he thinks, she is the perfect candidate. There is no echo of Matilda in her. She is dissimilar in every way.

He turns over and traces Matilda’s curved outline in the dark. Her hair has opened out into the long teeth of a garden rake, resting black on her night-greyed pillow. He plucks up a strand of it between his fingers. On their wedding day, they had pledged these bodies to one another: bodies, he thinks, which keep on changing. What of all those other pledges, though? Forgiveness. Loyalty.

The sting of at least one promise broken has not lessened as he thought it would. He should call it off with Sally. Though perhaps after just one more meeting, since that has already been arranged for Monday evening, and it would be more difficult now to abandon the agreement than to fulfil it.

He turns back over and tucks the blankets under his chin, searching sleep amongst memories of Miss Emory, her milky skin exquisite under his hands, her pink-rose lips reaching for his.

He hopes he will not hurt the girl.

Morning drizzles through the window. The white ceiling, cream walls, polished floorboards are all freckled with watery specks. Caught in occasional shafts of weak, ashen light, the specks dance towards and away from each other, forming little rivers of luminosity which flow over the dining table. At the table, which stands proud in the centre of the room, Matilda is slumped, fingering the envelope. On the front, she has scribbled Ms I Fairclough, but she does not know the address. She hadn’t recognised that problem until she shifted the pen down to mark the first line.

Matilda sighs. It has been raining forever. Forever.

At dawn, she had pulled on a cotton day dress and coat, ready to face the day, but she had failed, like a defective motorcar engine, somewhere between clothing herself and propelling herself out of the flat. She had neglected to brush her hair. Now, she stands and creeps towards the door in her stockinged feet. There, she drags on a plain felt cloche hat, avoiding her reflection. It does not matter what she looks like. No one cares. No one sees her.

She pauses and listens in case Grayson is stirring. When she is convinced he is still deeply asleep, she opens the door and slips out, pulling it closed behind her inch by silent inch. At the bottom of the stairs, she hauls open a second door and regards the sagging city. Funny, she thinks, how on occasion London can lift and refine and make everything that bit more exciting. Funny how, on others, it can be the limpest, weightiest place in the entire world. This city, Matilda decides, it lives with you. And as she steps out of her front door onto the shining pavement, it does, it lives with her. It is grey. The tramlined buildings, the chimney-smoking flats, the arrow-straight street darting ahead of her – it is all grey.

Matilda does not lift an umbrella to it. Today, she wants to feel it.

Next week, at Monty’s, the Bright Young People are holding a Kings and Queens Party – one of the naughtiest of all, Matilda is told, since kings and queens are governed by no one – and London will again be a place of laughter and shimmying and stolen kisses. Monty has already forwarded Matilda and Gray’s invitations, and Matilda will go, she determines now, with or without her husband. She wants nothing more than to be one of those careless girls who swap lipsticks and husbands with smiles; who dance like nobody is watching them; who run the streets, lengths of beaded silk or chiffon or satin shining under streetlamps, teasing men and each other. She will have taken up smoking by then. She purchased a cigarette holder after the White Party – an expensive one, already anticipating the need to emulate those wealthier, freer women – but she has not used it yet. Cocktail-length and carved from warm tortoiseshell, it will fit perfectly at the Kings and Queens Party, held casually apart from her, the cigarette releasing its coiling breath into the sky.

Matilda is not concerned with whose company she might manage to acquire at the event. She only wants to feel at the core of something again – the way she had at her school, before she’d married Gray and had to leave teaching; the way she had at Monty’s, when Ruby was alive and she hadn’t yet started loving Henry or stopped loving Grayson, and they were simply five friends, drinking themselves towards the brilliant possibilities of tomorrow.

She could calculate, if she wanted to, how long ago all of that had ended. But the time would total only months, and those months could not begin to demonstrate how distant it feels, so she does not. More than that, though, Matilda feels herself to be distant, removed, as though all of that friendship had been a falsity. One only she had been tricked by.

Sometimes, when she can’t stand her own company any longer, she packs the gaps in her days with false memories of Ruby. Or, if not entirely false, then much altered. She sets them up, like stage actors, at Monty’s or a café or a party – places they really did visit together – but she removes the words they truly spoke and substitutes them with those she would rather hear. Sitting at a Park Street café on an early summer evening, leaning on a palm, her head tilted to one side, Ruby smiles sympathy at Matilda and tells her not to worry. ‘I’ve known all along,’ Ruby says. Always the same simple words. I’ve known all along. That is the solicitude Matilda calls, again and again, from between Ruby’s perfect petal lips: against the brassy boom of a jazz band on a sharp winter’s night; in the still, foggy breath of a London morning as they step, arm in arm, along echoing pavements; with the last swilling of drinks on a gentle weekday evening; or with the first fat drops of spring rain; or in the darkened hush of a row of theatre seats. Matilda imagines and reimagines the conversation they never had. She tortures and consoles herself with it. But most times, it goes her way. She tells Ruby that she is sorry for falling in love with her husband, and Ruby responds with a smile and a forgiving touch on Matilda’s arm and a promise that she has known all along; and, coming from the memory of Ruby’s dainty, wide-eyed face, Matilda can’t help but believe the words.

And Ruby had known. Of course she had. She had known, and still she had agreed to meet her terrible friend. Because if the memories are false, their friendship was real. Though Matilda had grown increasingly jealous of Ruby’s looks and love and life, they had laughed together at the start. They’d shared shoes and worries and lipsticks and secrets. They’d delved hand in hand into each other’s pasts. They’d conspired against the men when they needed to win an argument. And so Ruby had said yes when Matilda asked her to leave her flat that January morning.

That is why Matilda hasn’t admitted to anyone that it was she who begged a pregnant woman to walk to Monty’s to receive her apology for acting so disgracefully: for flirting with Henry, and being less of a friend than she ought to have been to Ruby, and embarrassing them all with her treatment of Gray. Matilda had asked and, as usual, Ruby had answered. And that kindness had taken her under a bus. That kindness had robbed her of her daughter.

Matilda cannot disentangle in her mind now whether she is sending this letter to Ida because, having seen a man usurping Ruby’s place, she feels duty-bound to ensure there is a Fairclough woman in Libby’s life, or because she knows it will impact Henry’s new life in some irreparable way.

As she walks towards the Thames, though, intent on crossing its murky waters onto the south side, she hopes it is the former. She decides that it should be the former. What kind of woman has she become otherwise?

Eventually, late that night, an address is obtained from Daisy in Strawberry Hill, who arrives home to find Matilda curled up on her doorstep, chin to her knees, and invites her in for tea.

An hour later, Matilda pushes the letter into the dark mouth of a red postbox on a street she doesn’t know. Blood and all, the envelope drops invisibly away. And then, to Matilda’s mind, it is already on its way to its recipient, flying over London’s stone-built web and outwards over spring-dewed fields, moon-silvered rivers, sprawling, half-lit villages, and the odd tight-centred city, all the way to Wales.

She will try to forget the particular words she has indulged in.