STUART, SEVEN YEARS EARLIER
It’s a bright February morning, and I should be feeling that swell of hope and anticipation that this time of year can sometimes bring, those little pinpoints of light when the sun feels warm for a moment against your skin, when the daffodils push through. I’ve always loved the changing seasons, the cyclical rhythm of things happening in the same order, at the same time; it keeps me grounded, but it also inspires me, makes me feel as if anything is possible.
But I am feeling none of these things today, two years after I first moved into this house. As the sun tentatively touches the bare branches of the trees in the back garden, I feel the weight of every recent decision I have made bearing down on me, like a cartoon anvil, casting me in shadow.
Jessamine is in bed, sleeping off the night before. I have given up trying to guide her toward sobriety, and I have given up trying to guide myself toward sobriety; drink, it seems, is all we have left.
I call up the stairs to her. “Tea or coffee?”
“Tea,” comes the reply in a pained, reedy voice. “And toast.”
I make the tea and toast and bring them slowly up the stairs, my breath caught in my chest. The smell in the room is metabolized rum, garlic burps, stale sheets. Jessamine drags herself up to sitting and stares at mewanly. She looks horrible. Her skin is sallow and drawn, she has gray circles beneath her eyes, and her hair is tangled and greasy. She’s been wearing the same nightdress for weeks. I’ve put a fresh one out for her but she refuses to wear it, as though it’s a matter of principle.
“Sun’s out,” I say, laying the tea and toast on the bedside table next to her. I pass her two painkillers and a glass of water and watch her down them.
“Has Daisy gone?”
“Yes. She left about forty minutes ago.”
Jessamine nods, passes me back the water glass, and then turns to pick up a slice of toast from beside her. She doesn’t ask how her child is. She hasn’t gotten up to see her off since her first week at secondary school last September.
Hugo appears and jumps on the bed. Jessamine frowns, so I snatch him up and put him on the floor.
“You should get up,” I say. “It feels like spring out there. Daffs coming through in the garden.”
She throws me a withering look. “Do I look like I am about to get up to admire daffodils?”
“No,” I say softly. “No, you don’t. But you should. It would do you good. Clear out the cobwebs.”
“Clear out the cobwebs.” She mimics me in a horribly camped-up estuary accent. “It’s all right for you,” she snaps. “You’re not fucking ill.”
I blink slowly. She’s playing the “ill” card again. She says she’s got some kind of post-viral thing. She had a bad cold just before Christmas, and ever since she’s stayed in bed all day, but she miraculously gets out every afternoon to the little shop on Grove Place and buys herself two bottles of organic wine and half a liter of dark rum that she somehow manages to carry all the way back to the house, come rain or come shine.
The wine is opened at 4 p.m. By 5 p.m., when Daisy returns from school, Jessamine has had half a bottle and is reasonably together, relaxed enough to ask Daisy about her day, express an interest in her schoolwork,in what she might want to eat for her dinner. By 6 p.m. she has had a full bottle and likes to pretend that she has finished drinking wine for the day and says something like, “It’s happy hour! Who wants a rum and Coke?” Nobody will want a rum and Coke, but she will pour herself one anyway and make noises suggestive of a special treat, an earned reward. When dinner is ready she will open the second bottle of wine, pour a small glass for her mother and a large glass for herself, and she will sit and talk loudly and unpleasantly, complain about the food, push it around her plate, pretend that everyone is against her, start an argument, tell everyone maybe they’d prefer it if she just killed herself, then storm off to bed with the rest of the wine, telling everyone to fuck themselves on the way.
At some point she will come downstairs with the empty wine bottle and pour the rest of the rum into a tumbler, neat, then take the rum up and drink it until she sleeps. Often the sleep will need assistance. Annie gives her things that her own GP gives her. I wait until she is asleep before I come up. If it’s been a particularly awful night, I’ll just take a duvet to the sofa and sleep in the living room. But usually, I’ll walk into our room to find her slack-mouthed, rancid with drink, comatose, snoring, drooling, the monster quelled for another day.
“You should see the GP,” I say now. “Maybe it’s something serious. You need to get yourself checked out.”
“I haven’t got a fucking GP, Stuart,” she says. “You know that. I’ve told you a hundred times.”
“Well, sign up for one then. But seriously, it’s been nearly eight weeks since you got ill. You shouldn’t still be feeling like this.”
She knows and I know that she’s not ill, that she’s hungover, but this is the stupid game we play, because I am not, under any circumstances, allowed to refer to Jessamine’s drinking. If I refer to Jessamine’s drinking then I am the enemy, and if there’s one thing I’ve learned over the past two years, it’s not to be Jessamine’s enemy.
“Find me a GP who hasn’t got a three-year waiting list, and I’ll sign up.”
“OK,” I say then, “I will.”
She sighs and drops the toast back on the plate. “It’s cold,” she says.
I don’t tell her that of course it is, that if she wants hot toast, she needs to come downstairs and eat it quickly straight out of the toaster while the butter is still melting on it.
“What?” she asks me pointedly.
“Nothing,” I say with a sigh. Then I say, “Listen, my daughter’s coming over next week, from Australia. I’m going to take her out on the town, have a few drinks, a fancy dinner.” I lick my dry lips.
“That’s nice,” she says acidly.
