‘But why were we so much wiser as kids than we are now? Why could we not keep some of that? If I truly thought you were happy, I’d go with it. But you aren’t happy, not really. You’re not. You are always tense and somewhere else. And what if we die like this. What if you just keel over.’ She had a lot to release. And it wasn’t going to stop. ‘I don’t mind that you didn’t remember the doctor or that you forgot our anniversary—’
‘Please—’
‘—I just don’t feel I fit. I don’t fit back home because Ihavemoney, and I don’t fit round here because I’m notfrommoney. They all laugh at my accent, think art is just something to buy but not actually do, think Thatcher was the greatest prime minister since Churchill, perpetually wonder why we don’t have kids like that was my only function, like life is just a pre-designed plan and I haven’t followed it, and they ask me if I feelunsafeworking with AIDS patients … and they certainly don’t like my stupid damn disaster of a fruitcake.’ Her voice cracked on the word ‘fruitcake’. ‘I will never be accepted by them. It’s not my world and it never was. None of it is real. They look down on both of us, deep down. However much you earn, we aren’t everthem. Even you. Especially you. This all came from graft, and that is ugly to them and I didn’t play lacrosse and the only Latin I know is carpe diem which is a bit ironic because the one thing I haven’t done is carpe any diem and now I’m practically fifty with health scares and bad hips. I gave up a job I liked and a city I loved. They were my choices, I know, but choices I made for you. And I’ve just sat here in the … the … sidecar of your ambition …’
‘Maggie.’
‘And now I hate myself even more for being such a spoiled, whining person.’
‘Maggie.’
She took a breath. Stared at the face on the cover ofMarie Clairemagazine on the coffee table. ‘But maybe our life was meant to be improvised and maybe both of us were bad at that.’
‘I have had so much on.’
She sighed. Not cross. Just tired. ‘When does it stop, Wilbur? When do you realise you don’t have holes in your shoes any more?’
‘Maggie.’
‘It sounds silly but sometimes I wish I was the stock market so you could pay me some attention.’
‘Maggie.’ He just kept saying her name, as if he had nothing else. ‘Maggie.’
She wiped a tear from her eye. Looked at him with a resolute face. ‘I don’t blame you. We were both trapped in our different ways. Both too wanting an order in the chaos. But I think we have to face where we are. If we had focused on us, just us two, then all the other things – work pressures, social pressures, family pressures – we could have stood it all. We could have improvised. Made it up. But that is not what we are now. And we haven’t been that for a long, long time. So I am going to Sheffield. And you can come with me. Or not. I am just saying what’s happening. What I have to do.’
Wilbur looked hurt, and still wasn’t really able to understand. ‘Is there someone else?’
She flinched at the question. Stared at a large cushion with too many tassels on it. ‘No, Wilbur.’
‘She’s telling the truth,’ the Ghost said. ‘In two years she’ll have a brief relationship with a sculptor called David up in Sheffield. She won’t be happy, but also she won’t miss being neglected by us. It will fizzle out and she will live alone, like you do. She’ll be happier doing it than you. But she’ll still wish it was different. She’ll still miss the old you. The one she always wanted.’
Maggie clasped her hands together until her knuckles whitened. She stared at her husband for a long time, as if looking for him. ‘There is no one else. But that’s not the point. There isn’t even us.’
And, as the Ghost told his dreaming companion, two days later it happened.
Maggie wrote a letter and caught a train north, with more bags than she could carry, and didn’t come back again. Wilbur had done everything to try and make her stay, except provide an actual reason. And his two alternate selves, both the one who dreamed and the one who died, stood behind him as he read the letter.
Dear Wilbur,
It feels best to write this down. The silence of words aids the understanding of them. I have always valued that about silence. That is why after a horrible week at Trapezium, I would go and stand on my own in the National Gallery and just stare at the Virgin of the Rocks in the quiet. It was a way to absorb things.
So all I ask is that you take this letter somewhere quiet and read it and absorb it. I am not trying to be overly dramatic. I am technically leaving you, but I don’t think the technicality of the situation really captures it fully.
Of the two of us, it feels like I am the only one fighting for this relationship. Although I have very little fight left in me, to be honest. I love you. I have loved you, in a way, since I first met you. Even if I didn’t realise it was love at first.
When I went away to London, I missed you. I can never imagine myself with anyone else. I am – I think – a person quite fine with my own company, generally, as much as I like people. You were someone I could be with and not lose myself. Being with you let me be a truer version of me.
There were whole years where the balance was right. You know, it wasn’t perfect. But I worked hard at the Crucible and you worked hard at the shop and we both supported each other. I felt like you were still there for me, as though the point of work wasn’t the work, but a sharedfuture. We were still young enough to imagine the time ahead of us was for ever.
But things went off course and I saw less and less of you – it was always because of work. And all the time in those days you told me, and maybe told yourself, that by expanding the business you were setting up a life of less work. That we would have more time together. When we were young we both loved Around the World in Eighty Days. A silly book, full of all sorts of outdated things, but also just a wonderful idea of adventure. I thought we could both be Phileas Fogg in our lives. But I increasingly felt like your valet. And no one wants to be the valet.
I care about you. I will always love the man I married. But now I miss him. I want to sit on a bench with him and just pass the time away like we used to.
We used to face the same direction. Whether looking at a pond or a movie or a painting in a church in Venice. So it was easy to imagine we were facing the same future.
You wanted success but you were kind and cared about people. My dad. Strangers, even. That past tense seems harsh as I write. I think you still care about people. I think you are still a good person, but you have forgotten how to act like one because you are detached from our world. I don’t know what happened and I’ve tried to find you but you are lost to me.
I can’t just be that corporate wife any more, sitting at tables at business functions and being ignored by everyone, including my husband. I chose to leave many things of my life before you to have a life for us. And now I am essentially alone at fifty years old. And so, while I still have life and health inside me, I am going to return to Sheffield. I miss my best friend and I miss myself.
