The clock’s luminous dial shows five-forty five and it’s Tuesday morning again. I turn on the radio and restlessly roll around the bed, trying to get comfortable; I feel as if my life is being measured out in Tuesday mornings and meetings with Helen. When the duvet slides off the bed, I give up the hard work of trying to sleep and get up. The sound of the radio follows me as I drift down the stairs. ‘Genetic engineering is a hit and miss procedure,’ a voice calmly explains. ‘We have…’
By half-past six I am sitting at the computer in my study. As I log on, the date flashes up on the screen: 9 October.
Today is the anniversary of my first meeting with Jeff.
Those early years before we married were the happy times. I haven’t thought of them for nearly a decade and yet they sustained me for years.
After working for half an hour, I take the surprised Charlie a cup of coffee before dashing out of the house, barely in time to catch the 7.30 bus to South End Green. I am determined; I am ready to tell Helen about my marriage.
She is wearing her usual long black skirt and a black V-necked sweater that is unmistakably cashmere. Today there are white daisies in the vase on her coffee table. The room smells faintly of their fragrance. I place on the table the envelope I collected last week. It now contains my cheque; I have crossed out my name and scrawled Helen’s below it. She gracefully acknowledges the envelope and waves me to the sofa.
I waste no time inspecting my nails or gazing around the room, but at once get on with what I’ve decided to tell her. I talk continuously, my words like a water-release from an overfilled dam: faster and faster the sentences spill out, until at last I’ve finished.
I’m unaware of the tears on my face until I see Helen towering over me, with a box of tissues in her hand.
I take a handful of tissues. I wipe my eyes and blow my nose.
And then the floodgates are closed.
There is silence. Feeling strangely detached, I look through the window at the sky. The sun has come out; the first time I’ve seen it for several weeks. But the patch of blue sky surrounding it is small, and dark clouds are gathering at its edges. A shaft of sunlight streams through the window, fine motes of dust swirling in the ray of light. Even Helen has dust in her beautiful white Hampstead room, with its neat bookshelves and carefully positioned vase of white daisies.
I lift up my hand, the one that once bore Jeff’s ring. My vision blurs as I hold it up to the light. The human hand has twenty-seven bones, fourteen of which are the phalanges of the fingers. I turn the hand, a miracle of mobility. At last I’ve laid out in front of Helen the bare bones of my unhappy marriage, the bits that have lasted while the flesh of the happy times has almost completely rotted away.
Only now do I notice that the box of tissues has appeared somehow on the sofa next to me. I blow my nose again and dry my eyes. Mascara comes off onto the tissue. When it falls onto the floor I’m unable to move to retrieve it. Helen clears her throat. I wait for the words that will follow. She says, ‘You’ve had a terrible time, Sally.’
Again there is silence. I listen to the clock and its relentless tick-tick-tick, the countdown to the end of my session.
Helen coughs, before saying, ‘Did you think you deserved it?’
My heart becomes a thumping thing in my throat. I swallow and take a deep breath.
But I don’t know how to respond.
‘Perhaps you thought you deserved to be punched.’ Although Helen’s tone is gentle, she articulates each word clearly, as if she thinks I’ve lapsed into deafness.
Unwillingly I focus my thoughts. Helen deserves a response and there’s not much time left. ‘No,’ I say, quite sure of this.
‘Why do you think you stayed with him?’
‘I loved him.’ Yet I know this is not the whole truth.
‘Even though he hit you repeatedly?’
‘But I loved him! Can’t you understand that?’ I’m speaking rather too loudly. At this moment I feel a rush of anger and I channel it at Helen; it’s her fault that I’m having to defend myself. ‘I loved him,’ I repeat, slowly and – in spite of my anger – calmly, to show Helen I am in control of myself. ‘He was beautiful and charming when we met.’
‘I cannot help wondering how often he hit you.’
‘Maybe a dozen times in those first six years.’
‘A dozen times.’ Helen repeats this slowly, giving each word emphasis. ‘That’s a lot of times, Sally.’
‘Everything is relative,’ I say. But I don’t intend to be flippant.
I look at the golden patch of sunlight on Helen’s white wall. I can hear children playing in the street outside. Although their voices are clear, I can’t make out what they are saying.
‘I know you don’t condone violence against women.’ Helen’s voice is soft but the words are shards of glass. ‘But did it never occur to you that he might physically abuse Charlie as well?’
‘Never. That was another reason I stayed; I wanted Charlie to have a proper live-in father.’
‘Even a violent one,’ Helen murmurs so quietly that I can barely catch her words. When they sink in, I’m enraged by their implication.
‘I could do nothing. I could do nothing!’ I am shouting at her now, and hot tears are filling my eyes.
There is a pause before Helen continues. ‘Perhaps it was hard for you accept any failure.’ Her voice is as calm as if we are talking of the weather. ‘Academics are often perfectionists.’
I feel as if she has punched me and lie very still. After a few seconds I start inhaling deeply, calming myself with each daisy-scented intake. In and out, in and out, my chest rises and falls with the mechanical action of breathing.
It is possible that Helen has a point. A perfectionist; I am certainly that.
‘Jeff never hit Charlie,’ I say, wiping my eyes with a sodden tissue. ‘Never, ever, did he do that.’
‘He didn’t hit you to begin with, Sally.’
‘Are you suggesting I should have left him, or that I should have fought him? That it was somehow my fault that I allowed him to continue?’
Helen doesn’t reply. The patch of sunlight is moving along the wall, and there is a small fly buzzing outside the top sash of the window. My hour is nearly over. I paraphrase to myself the lines from a poem by John Donne that I haven’t thought of for years: I am two fools, I know, for marrying and for staying so.
But in fact I’m three fools for paying to talk to Helen about this. ‘So you think I’m a fool because I married Jeff, and I’m a fool because I stayed married to him.’ I can’t keep the bitterness out of my voice.
I hear her crossing her legs and the sound of her pencil on the pad she keeps by her. She is making a note of my cynicism.
‘What have you got to say about that?’ We both know my question is rhetorical.
‘I’m afraid we’ll have to stop there,’ she says. ‘Till next Tuesday, Sally.’
She ushers me out of the room, and lightly touches my shoulder as I pass. It’s the first time she’s ever done this.
I stumble down the stairs, blowing my nose on a dry tissue I find in my pocket. Before opening the front door, I dig my dark glasses out of my bag and put them on.
The sky is now grey, except for one patch of blue in which the sun is corralled. Slowly I walk along the pavement until I am out of sight of Helen’s house, and there I sit on someone’s brick fence.
It is over. My marriage is over. It’s been over for more than ten years.
When I stand up, I step on something soft. My tread releases the stench of dog turd. I lift my foot to examine the sole of my shoe; a sticky yellow mess is caught in the fine corrugations. Too many dogs in London shitting everywhere. I scrape the mess off on a pile of dead leaves caught up against a low brick wall. The smell is overpowering and I feel sickened; sickened by the excrement, sickened at the thought of Jeff.