第 29 页

I took it from her and put it in my bag. Though I did not know why, I did not want to read it there, in front of Claire. Perhaps I was worried that she would be able to read its contents reflected in my face, and they would no longer be mine to own.

“Thank you,” I said. She did not smile.

“Chrissy,” she said. She looked down, at her hands. “There’s a reason Ben tells you I moved away.” I felt my world begin to change, though in what way I was not yet certain. “I have to tell you something. About why we lost touch.”

I knew then. Without her saying anything, I knew. The missing piece of the puzzle, the reason Ben had left, the reason my best friend had disappeared from my life and my husband had lied about why this had happened. I had been right. All along. I had been right.

“It’s true,” I said. “Oh God. It’s true. You’re seeing Ben. You’re fucking my husband.”

She looked up, horrified. “No!” she said. “No!”

A certainty overtook me. I wanted to shout Liar! But did not. I was about to ask her again what she wanted to tell me when she wiped something from her eye. A tear? I don’t know.

“Not now,” she whispered, then looked back to the hands in her lap. “But we were once.”

Of all the emotions I might have expected to feel, relief wasn’t one. But it was true: I felt relieved. Because she was being honest? Because now I had an explanation for everything, one that I could believe? I’m not sure. But the anger that I may have felt was not there, neither was the pain. Perhaps I was happy to feel a tiny spark of jealousy, concrete proof that I loved my husband. Perhaps I was just relieved that Ben had an infidelity to go with my own, that we were equal now. Quits.

“Tell me,” I whispered.

She did not look up. “We were always close,” she said softly. “The three of us, I mean. You. Me. Ben. But there had never been anything between me and him. You must believe that. Never.” I told her to go on. “After your accident I tried to help out in whatever way I could. You can imagine how terribly difficult it was for Ben. Just on a practical level if nothing else. Having to look after Adam . . . I did what I could. We spent a lot of time together. But we didn’t sleep together. Not then. I swear, Chrissy.”

“So when?” I said. “When did it happen?”

“Just before you were moved to Waring House,” she said. “You were at your worst. Adam was being difficult. Things were tough.” She looked away. “Ben was drinking. Not too much, but enough. He wasn’t coping. One night we got back from visiting you. I put Adam to bed. Ben was in the living room, crying. ‘I can’t do it,’ he kept saying. ‘I can’t keep doing this. I love her, but it’s killing me.’ ”

The wind gusted up the hill. Cold. Biting. I pulled my coat around me.

“I sat next to him. And . . .”

I could see it all. The hand on the shoulder, then the hug. The mouths that find each other through the tears, the moment when guilt and the certainty that things must go no further gives way to lust and the certainty that they cannot stop.

And then what? The fucking. On the sofa? The floor? I did not want to know.

“And?”

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I never wanted it to happen. But it did, and . . . I felt so bad. So bad. We both did.”

“How long?”

“What?”

“How long did it go on for?”

She hesitated, then said, “I don’t know. Not long. A few weeks. We only . . . we only had sex a few times. It didn’t feel right. We both felt so bad, afterward.”

“What happened?” I said. “Who ended it?”

She shrugged, then whispered, “Both of us. We talked. It couldn’t go on. I decided I owed it to you—and Ben—to stay away from then on. It was guilt, I suppose.”

An awful thought occurred to me.

“Is that when he decided to leave me?”

“Chrissy, no,” she said quickly. “Don’t think that. He felt awful, too. But he didn’t leave you because of me.”

No, I thought. Perhaps not directly. But you might have reminded him of just how much he was missing.

I looked at her. I still did not feel angry. I could not. Perhaps if she had told me that they were still sleeping together, I might have felt differently. What she had told me felt as though it belonged to another time. Prehistory. I found it hard to believe it had anything to do with me at all.

Claire looked up. “At first, I was in touch with Adam, but then Ben must have told him what had happened. Adam said he didn’t want to see me again. He told me to stay away from him, and from you, too. But I couldn’t, Chrissy. I just couldn’t. Ben had given me the letter, asked me to keep an eye on you. So I carried on visiting. At Waring House. Every few weeks at first, then every couple of months. But it upset you. It upset you terribly. I know I was being selfish, but I couldn’t just leave you there. On your own. I carried on coming. Just to check you were all right.”

“And you told Ben how I was?”

“No. We weren’t in touch.”

“Is that why you haven’t been visiting me lately? At home? Because you don’t want to see Ben?”

“No. A few months ago, I visited Waring House and they told me you’d left. You’d gone back to live with Ben. I knew Ben had moved. I asked them to give me your address but they wouldn’t. They said it would be a breach of confidentiality. They said they would give you my number and that if I wanted to write to you they would pass the letters on.”

“So you wrote?”

“I addressed the letter to Ben. I told him I was sorry, that I regretted what had happened. I begged him to let me see you.”

“But he told you you couldn’t?”

“No. You wrote back, Chrissy. You said that you were feeling much better. You said you were happy, with Ben.” She looked away, across the park. “You said you didn’t want to see me. That your memory would sometimes come back and when it did you knew I had betrayed you.” She wiped a tear from her eye. “You told me not to come anywhere near you, ever again. That it was better that you forgot me forever, and that I forgot you.”

I felt myself go cold. I tried to imagine the anger I must have felt to write a letter like that, but at the same time realized maybe I hadn’t felt angry at all. To me, Claire would hardly have existed, any friendship between us forgotten.

“I’m sorry,” I said. I could not imagine being able to remember her betrayal. Ben must have helped me write the letter.

She smiled. “No. Don’t apologize. You were right. But I didn’t stop hoping you’d change your mind. I wanted to see you. I wanted to tell you the truth, to your face.” I said nothing. “I’m so sorry,” she said then. “Can you ever forgive me?”

I took her hand. How could I be angry with her? Or with Ben? My condition has placed an impossible burden on us all.

“Yes,” I said. “Yes. I forgive you.”

We left soon after. At the bottom of the slope, she turned to face me.

“Will I see you again?” she said.

I smiled. “I hope so!”

She looked relieved. “I’ve missed you, Chrissy. You’ve no idea.”

It was true. I did have no idea. But with her, and this journal, there was a chance I could rebuild a life worth living. I thought of the letter in my bag. A message from the past. The final piece of the puzzle. The answers I need.

“I’ll see you soon,” she said. “Early next week. Okay?”

“Okay,” I said. She hugged me, and my voice was lost in the curls of her hair. She felt like my only friend, the only person I could rely on, along with Ben. My sister. I squeezed her hard. “Thank you for telling me the truth,” I said. “Thank you. For everything. I love you.” When we parted and looked at each other, both of us were crying.

At home, I sat down to read Ben’s letter. I felt nervous—would it tell me what I needed to know? Would I finally understand why Ben left me?—but at the same time excited. I felt sure it would. Felt certain that with it, with Ben and Claire, I will have everything I need.

Darling Christine,

This is the hardest thing I have ever had to do. Already I’ve kicked off with a cliché, but you know I’m not a writer—that was always you!—so I’m sorry, but I’ll do my best.

By the time you read this, you’ll know that I’ve decided I have to leave you. I can’t bear to write it, or even to think it, but I have to. I have tried so hard to find another way, but I can’t. Believe me.

You have to understand that I love you. I always have. I always will. I don’t care what has happened, or why. This isn’t about revenge, or anything like that. I haven’t met anybody else. When you were in that coma, I realized just how much a part of me you are—I felt like I was dying every time I looked at you. I realized I didn’t care what you were doing that night in Brighton, or who you were seeing. I just wanted you to come back to me.

And then you did, and I was so happy. You will never know how happy I was, the day they told me you were out of danger, that you wouldn’t die. That you weren’t going to leave me. Or us. Adam was just little, but I think he understood.

When we realized you had no memory of what had happened, I thought it was a good thing. Can you believe that? I feel ashamed now, but I thought it was for the best. But then we realized that you were forgetting other things, too. Gradually, over time. At first it was the names of the people in the beds next to you, the doctors and nurses treating you. But you got worse. You forgot why you were in the hospital, why you weren’t being allowed to come home with me. You convinced yourself that the doctors were experimenting on you. When I took you home for a weekend, you didn’t recognize our street, our house. Your cousin came to see you and you had no idea who she was. We took you back to the hospital and you had no idea where you were going.

I think that’s when things started to get difficult. You loved Adam so much. It shone out of your eyes when we arrived, and he would run over to you and into your arms, and you would pick him up, and know who he was, straight away. But then—I’m sorry, Chris, but I have to tell you this—you started to believe that Adam had been taken away from you when he was a baby. Every time you saw him, you thought that it was the first time since he was a few months old. I would ask him to tell you when he last saw you, and he would say, “Yesterday, Mummy,” or “last week,” but you didn’t believe him. “What have you been telling him?” you’d say. “It’s a lie.” You started accusing me of keeping you locked there. You thought another woman was raising Adam as her own while you were in the hospital.

One day, I arrived and you didn’t recognize me. You became hysterical. You grabbed Adam when I wasn’t looking, and ran to the door, to rescue him, I suppose, but he started screaming. He didn’t understand why you’d do that. I took him home and tried to explain, but he didn’t understand. He started being really frightened of you.

It went on for a while, but got worse. One day, I called the hospital. I asked them what you were like when I wasn’t there, when Adam wasn’t there. “Describe her, right now,” I said. They said you were calm. Happy. You were sitting in the chair next to your bed. “What’s she doing?” I said. They said you were talking to one of the other patients, a friend of yours. Sometimes you played cards together.

“Played cards?” I said. I couldn’t believe it. They said you were good at cards. They had to explain the rules to you every day, but then you could beat just about anybody.

“Is she happy?” I said.

“Yes,” they said. “Yes. She’s always happy.”

“Does she remember me?” I said. “Adam?”

“Not unless you’re here,” they said.

I think I knew then that one day I would have to leave you. I’ve found you a place where you can live for as long as you need to. Somewhere you can be happy. Because you will be happy, without me, without Adam. You won’t know us, and so you won’t miss us.

I love you so much, Chrissy. You must understand that. I love you more than I love anything. But I have to give our son a life, a life he deserves. Soon he will be old enough to understand what’s going on. I will not lie to him, Chris. I will explain the choice I have made. I will tell him that although he may want to see you very much it would be enormously upsetting for him to do so. Maybe he will hate me. Blame me. I hope not. But I want him to be happy. And I want you to be happy, too. Even if you can only find that happiness without me.

You’ve been in Waring House for a while now. You don’t panic anymore. You have a sense of routine. That’s good. And so it’s time for me to go.

I’m going to give this letter to Claire. I’ll ask her to keep it for me, and to show it to you when you’re well enough to read it, and to understand it. I can’t keep it myself, I’ll just brood over it, and won’t be able to resist giving it to you next week, or next month, or even next year. Too soon.

I cannot pretend I do not hope that one day we can be together again. When you are recovered. The three of us. A family. I have to believe that might happen. I have to, or else I will die from grief.

I am not abandoning you, Chris. I will never abandon you. I love you too much.

Believe me, this is the right thing, the only thing for me to do.

Don’t hate me. I love you.

Ben

X

I read it again now, and fold the paper. It feels crisp, as though it might have been written yesterday, but the envelope into which I slip it is soft, its edges frayed, with a sweet smell clinging to it, like perfume. Has Claire carried it with her, tucked in a corner of her bag? Or, more likely, has she stored it in a drawer at home, out of sight but never quite forgotten? For years, it waited for the right time to be read. Years that I spent not knowing who my husband was, not even knowing who I was. Years in which I could have never bridged the gap between us, because it was a gap I had never known existed.

I slip the envelope between the pages of my journal. I am crying as I write this, but I do not feel unhappy. I understand everything. Why he left me, why he has been lying to me.

Because he has been lying to me. He has not told me about the novel I wrote, so that I will not be devastated that I will never write another. He has been telling me my best friend moved away—to protect me from the fact that the two of them betrayed me. Because he did not trust me to love them both far too much to not forgive them. He has been telling me that I was hit by a car, that this was an accident, so that I don’t have to deal with the knowledge that I was attacked and what happened to me was the result of a deliberate act of ferocious hatred. He has been telling me that we never had children, not only to protect me from remembering that my only son is dead but to protect me, too, from having to deal with his death every single day of my life. And he has not told me that, after years of trying to find a way for our family to be together, he had to face the fact that we could not be and take our son and leave, in order to find happiness.

He must have thought that our separation would be forever, when he wrote that letter, but he must also have hoped that it would not, or else why write it? What was he thinking, as he sat there, in his home, our home as it must once have been, and took out his pen and began to try to explain to someone he could never expect to understand why he felt he had no option but to leave her? I am no writer, he said, and yet his words are beautiful to me, profound. They read as if he is talking about someone else, and yet, somewhere inside me, under the skin and bones, the tissue and blood, I know that he is not. He is talking about, and to, me. Christine Lucas. His broken wife.