I’ve been lying on the couch in my consulting room, lost in memories and rambling reflections. The Indian throw beneath me glows with rich, warm colours in the sunlight. I hear Colin’s footsteps on the stairs. He taps on the door. Nobody ever comes into this room without knocking. It’s my private space, whether or not I have a patient.
“Come in.”
“I was wondering when you want to go for our walk.”
“Whenever you’re ready.” I sit up and slide my feet into the pumps I discarded when I lay down.
He looks at his watch. “It’s nearly lunchtime. Shall we have a snack before we go?” What he means is, aren’t you going to make lunch?
“I thought we might have a picnic. I’ll make some smoked salmon sandwiches and we can wrap up well and take the picnic rug in case the ground’s damp.”
“Good idea, Bunns. See you down here in half an hour or so? I just want to finish the chapter I’m working on.”
“How’s it going?”
“It’s good. I’m on a roll. I need to get this book out so that people read it before they all start to carry on as before. I want them to see how much the quality of life is improved when we rush around less, stop flying around the world, live quieter lives, appreciate institutions like the NHS and recognise their importance. Be more kind and loving to each other. Learn to be more and do less.”
Oh yes? This, from the man who shagged his student and has spent every waking hour writing this world-changing book? Not now, Maggie. There’s a time to speak and a time to be silent. Who said that? Something about turn, turn, turn. There we go again. The windmills of your mind. Turning and turning the world goes on. That’s Engelbert again, isn’t it? Lonely table just for one. Claude. Ahhh. What a lovely man he was. Learn to see your husband through the eyes of love, isn’t that what he said? Mend the cracks in your marriage with gold. No, that was Jacob, and he didn’t say it, but maybe he guided me to think about it when he talked about kintsugi.
“Are you listening, Bunns?”
“Of course I’m listening.” My wife doesn’t listen to me. Add that to the list. I stand up and stretch, trying to focus on what he’s saying.
“Honestly, if we can just get through the next few months, this could be the start of a new era of environmental protection and different values and lifestyles. It can be the end of neoliberalism and the start of something more compassionate, more just and sustainable.”
Dear Lord, he is on a roll. It was the Bible I think. A time to live and a time to die. Turn, turn, turn. He has that boyish look—bright eyes, animated, gesticulating enthusiastically, hands sketching his grand ideas in the air as he speaks. My darling husband thinks he can start a revolution in human consciousness by writing a new book. I feel the way I used to when the children came home from school bursting to tell me something, and all I wanted to do was to retreat into my consulting room and read. I think the song used those words from the Bible. Turn, turn, turn. Whatever.
There’s a time to live and a time to die. Should I remind him of the dead and dying, the young mothers going crazy in high-rise flats with nobody to turn to and no time to read world-changing philosophy books? The homeless people huddled in doorways who don’t even have the power to find a roof over their heads, let alone start a global revolution? My mother in her care home, confused and lost amidst all those deaths, and beyond our narrow horizons, the millions upon millions who lack our luxuries and protections? Turning and turning the world goes on. I force a smile.
“I hope you’re right,” I say.
He hears all that I’m not saying. My tone deflates him.
“It’s not all optimism and good news. I know that, Bunns. I do see the darkness. I just don’t dwell on it the way you do.”
“I don’t want to dwell on it, but I can’t help worrying—about my mum, about all those people out there who aren’t as lucky as we are.”
“I know. I know.” He comes over and puts his arms around me. “I’m glad you care. The world needs people like you.”
What does he mean, people like me? I’m choking up, so I lean into him and wait until I can speak again.
“Go and finish your book while I make us a picnic. But don’t get engrossed in another chapter.”
“I won’t.” He’s grinning because we both know I’ll have to go upstairs and prise him away from his desk in half an hour.
Just as well I left the butter out for the cake. It spreads easily as I make the sandwiches. I contemplate the bottles of champagne in the fridge and wrap one in bubble wrap to keep it cold, putting it into the backpack with the sandwiches and two champagne flutes. Why not? It is his birthday, after all.
We set off for our walk with our backpacks. The A3 is uncannily quiet as we head towards Radnor Gardens and the riverside path. Only the occasional ambulance blazing past with blue lights flashing reminds us of the reason for this strange silence.
“It feels like playing truant,” Colin says, “heading off for a long walk with a picnic lunch.”
“Yes. We old codgers are supposed to stay home and behave ourselves,” I say. It feels good to be out together, feigning normality.
A few walkers straggle along the Thames path, alone or in couples, giving each other a wide berth, some exchanging rueful smiles, others deliberately looking away. An occasional jogger puffs past. The odd lycra-clad cyclist speeds by too fast, emboldened by the sparsity of pedestrians, disrupting the illusory calm. In our heads we’re all making calculations as we pass one another, holding our breath, keeping our distance, acquiring habits of avoidance that would have been impossible to imagine only a few weeks ago.
We walk in companionable silence, alone with our thoughts. He’s probably writing the next chapter of his book in his head. Les Bicyclettes de Belsize starts spooling through my mind. Why are there so many bloody songs about turning? Maybe it’s written deep into human consciousness. The earth turns, and we turn with it. The seasons turn, and we age while they just keep going. We are arrowed forward through time that circles around us. Cycles or one-way trajectories? There are so many beliefs about the meaning of it all. Maybe we spiral, turning but never returning. To everything there is a season. A time to leave and a time to return.
By the time I arrived back in London, I already had my next move plotted and planned. He could go and stay in the flat in Aldgate while we worked things out. Was there ever any doubt that eventually, I’d let him back? Part of me yearned for that. It would have been so easy to forgive and forget, to carry on as normal. But what had been unleashed in me was deeper than my hurt and rage over a brief adulterous fling.
I didn’t want my old life back. I realised how bored I’d been, quietly resigned to a life without surprises, novelties or discoveries. I wanted something new and exciting, something that would explode the boundaries of our settled existence before we reached the approaching age of dementia and Zimmer frames. Colin had set things in motion but now it was out of his control. I had made that wild, unthinkable leap over to the other side. Two could play that game. Claude was wrong. The wife is not always the long-suffering faithful partner.
I arrived at St Pancras on a glorious spring evening, ten days after I’d left. The sky over London was deepening to indigo with the city skyline silhouetted against the sunset. I took a taxi to the house, deciding it would be my last extravagance before settling back into whatever awaited me.
Putting my key in the door, I was suddenly apprehensive. All those texts and pleading messages had given me absolute confidence that he would be overjoyed to have me back, but what if I was wrong? What if he was naked upstairs in our bed with the beautiful young student with the heart-shaped face? Would they hear me and start panicking, scrambling into their clothes? Or would I go upstairs and catch them at it? What then?
There was a twinge of disappointment when he appeared unshaven and bleary-eyed from the kitchen in his slippers and a grubby sweatshirt. He paused, blinking as if I were a ghost.
“Hello Colin,” I said.
“Maggie? Oh my God, Maggie. You’re home!”
He rushed at me, arms out, wrapping me in a bear hug. There was no need to feign frigid indifference. He looked old. His breath was sour. There was a whiff of BO which suggested he hadn’t been showering often enough. Maybe I should have told him I was coming back.
My arms were rigid at my sides. I flinched away from his bristly kiss and wriggled out of his arms. He stepped back. There were shadows under his eyes, and his face was gaunt. He’d lost weight. Why hadn’t Polly taken better care of him? She knew he wouldn’t look after himself. Why did I always have to do everything to hold this bloody family together?
I put my bags down on the hall floor and looked around. There were piles of unopened mail on the table where we keep keys and letters and jumbled oddments that need to be dumped somewhere. Through the door the kitchen was a mess, with dishes piled up beside the sink and the laundry basket overflowing in the middle of the floor, abandoned en route to or from the washing machine.
The lounge wasn’t much better. Every newspaper he’d read had been dumped on the floor by his chair, along with various books, journals, and papers. There were empty mugs on the coffee table and an open bottle of red wine with an empty glass beside it. One empty glass.
What had I been expecting? My memories had carried me away, lost in reminiscences about those beautiful young lovers on honeymoon, standing in the dome of Florence Cathedral gazing up at the Last Judgement and remembering what it had been like to be twenty-five, excited by life, art, sex, and love.
Those memories had lingered as I left Florence after two nights and planned my slow return across Europe, back to whatever awaited me at home. There was just one more adventure ahead—outrageous, spontaneous, cathartic—before I stood forlornly in our neglected house with my sad old neglected husband muttering apologies.
“If I’d known you were coming back, I’d have tidied up. Sorry Bunns. I know it’s a mess. I just—I mean, you didn’t say—you should have told me.”
‘So it’s all my fault is it, Colin? First you trash our marriage, then you trash our house, and somehow it’s my fault.”
I was raging with disappointment and the cold shock of reality. How had I been so carried away that I’d forgotten who and what I was returning to? What had happened the day before had made me feel vibrant, sexy and alluring, and the memories of our honeymoon had glossed my memories of Colin with the same aura. I was going back to a suave sophisticate, seductive and alluring to beautiful young women, wowing the nation on Newsnight. I’d stopped seeing the texts and messages as pathetic. They’d become poetic expressions of yearning and passion worthy of any lovesick troubadour. A yellow emoji blowing red hearts could become a sonnet without words if one wanted to see it that way, and I had. That was the man I had decided to return to, not this moth-eaten geriatric looking at me with a hang-dog expression that made me feel rage and guilt in equal measure.
“I want you to move out,” I said.
“Maggie, please!’
“You can stay in the flat while we work out what to do.”
So he went, evicted not because he was an adulterer who had betrayed me but, and I see this now with sudden stunning clarity, because he was old.
