Lynn lay flat in her freshly changed bed and let the tears roll freely from the corners of her eyes and down her cheeks, where they gathered in a pool of hot liquid in the crevice of her left ear. Occasionally a particularly distressing particle of a thought swam into the foreground of her musings and her face contracted in silent spasm, but the rest of the time she lay quite calmly as the sadness flowed from within her. A few feet away, in the spare room that Lynn’s mother a lifetime ago used sometimes to stay in, Emily wept in more violent bursts, but just as silently. An hour earlier she had helped Lynn into bed though they hadn’t spoken since the incident in the sitting room the previous day. The two of them had passed the time since then in quiet acknowledgement of the other’s presence: Lynn nodding her head when Emily brought her her breakfast, Emily closing the door quietly in understanding of Lynn’s morning headaches and a while later bringing her up the Sunday Times. Later Lynn had managed to make her way downstairs and switched on the TV to alert Emily to her presence, leaving the door open to convey to Emily that she was welcome to come in. And eventually, Emily had come in and sat silently, both of them taking breaths to start sentences and then never voicing them. But this friction wasn’t the cause of Lynn’s night-time tears, neither was the force of Emily’s story. The tears were in memory of another night like this long ago when Philip still shared a bed with her, in recollection of how she’d sobbed then with the same frustration and bitterness, and because, because of Emily, she was finally letting it go.
The boys had both been teenagers. Luke, she remembered, had just taken the last of his GCSEs and John had been given a lead role in the school play, a production of Romeo and Juliet in which he was to play Mercutio. Philip had taken them all out to dinner to celebrate both feats. Only during dessert did he announce his own news: after more than fifteen years at his law firm he’d finally been made a senior partner. As a bonus, he’d been given an extra week’s holiday, and, he informed them, they were going to spend it abroad. With the exception of a short trip to the South of France three years earlier, and the week they took skiing in Switzerland every January, in the years that they’d been married Lynn and Philip’s dreams of exploring the continent had somehow been replaced by trips down to Cornwall, that could be fitted in last minute around unpredictable cases. The prospect of a real, summertime holiday abroad was thrilling. She suggested Italy.
That night, she and Philip made gentle love, as they still did with reassuring frequency and afterwards, when he fit his familiar shape around hers as they lay down to sleep, her head was filled with the countless things she had to be thankful for: two successful sons, a loving husband, an upcoming holiday, health, financial comfort, God’s love. It was the rare kind of day in which everything had gone better than expected and she felt she’d caught a glimpse of heaven on earth, her heart brimming with total peace. And then, without warning, she started to cry.
It had been an unpleasant shock to discover that she was unhappy in the midst of such apparent happiness. But there was suddenly a deep wrenching in the darkest regions of her soul that could not be mistaken for mere melancholy, or too many glasses of red wine, or a hormonal punch. It was instead a profound sadness, and though perhaps most stark in its juxtaposition to the euphoria of the day, Lynn recognised immediately that it was neither cursory nor something that had appeared from nowhere as it seemed. The happiness of that day, of her whole life she realised, stemmed from forces uncontrolled and uncontrollable by her. Because she had achieved nothing for herself. She had no career, she had written no treatise, her entire contribution to society had been the production of two sons - something she could have done a century earlier and seemed barely an accomplishment at all. Yet at every turn she was trapped by her own confusions, the dichotomy that ever since meeting Philip had resided within her soul: a longing to escape the confines of the domestic life she hadn’t meant to choose, and the urge to fiercely protect it. Realistically, she hated being away from Philip and the boys, so she could never be the type of woman who flounced around the world, but, thus, she was trapped. She loved her life and also despised it. Yet she couldn’t change it without destroying the very elements she most cherished.
Throughout that night, the constant evasion of a solution haunted her. The more her mind tossed around these circular arguments, the more powerless she felt, and the more desperate. And this angered her too. Looking down on herself – a slim, pampered white woman weeping silently in bed while her wonderful husband lay next to her in their beautiful home, while others starved and suffered real problems – she felt a repulsion for the egocentric obsessions of her mind, but she couldn’t stop them. And this made her feel more incapable still, more pitiful and more disgusting. As it grew harder to subdue her whimpers she slipped from bed and sat staring into the mirror of the cool, marble bathroom. The tears staining her red face revolted her. She dabbed at them angrily and muttered to herself to pull things together, hoping desperately that Philip would not hear her. That would be the final shame. She couldn’t bear the thought of having to explain it to him, of having him think that he and the life he’d provided for her weren’t enough to make her happy. They should have been, she knew they should have been, yet she couldn’t help longing for something more, something for herself.
For three nights, this silent weeping was repeated, leaving her haggard and tired in the mornings and finally making her so ill that she had to stay in bed and let Philip call for the doctor, to whom she pretended she had a cold.
At some point, perhaps days or weeks later, and typically without a defining moment or decision, she managed to calm herself. Gradually, she was able to lock away the pain she’d been harbouring, to dull her selfish desires, and tie her happiness once more to Philip and her sons and the ups and downs of their lives, to paint her face with happiness. To layer it over the dark creases of bitterness and regret.
Lying alone now, feeling the creases of her face, Lynn realised that this was what she had been carrying openly again of late, with all the scabs and ugly symptoms of the poison exploding out of her. It was an angry, venomous emotion and she’d been levelling it at everyone. Vera the most because, as Emily had so quickly seen, she was so much like herself.
Then however, there came Emily.
Lynn had not realised at first how powerful an encounter this would be, but getting to know Emily over the past months had fuelled Lynn’s sense of purpose. Her sense of doing. Acting. Like Emily’s mother had done. Real action. Real sacrifice. So she wouldn’t have another 20-odd years; she had had 58 good ones. It had been 15 years since Philip. There had been time. It was time. If only she could last long enough to see it through…
As the pain in her side forced Lynn to roll from her back into a foetal position, she rallied herself. She had things to do, things to last for. As if in disagreement, her body gave way to another thrust of silent spasms, and a new pool of water collected on her pillow. Lynn allowed the tears to streak down her cheeks without wiping them, she allowed the self-pity, she allowed one final glance back. She knew however that in the morning she would get Emily to change the sheets, and then she would discard them, along with the last remains of all her bitterness and doubt.