The presenter asked him how he coped with it now. He said that when it comes to the anniversary, Christmas, her birthday, he had learned that you have to attack the day, ‘so it doesn’t attack you.’
Patrick seized on the principle. He started saying it all the time. He said it while he was ironing his shirt before the party. I was on our bed watching Bake Off on my laptop, an old episode I had seen before. A contestant takes someone else’s Baked Alaska out of the fridge and it melts in the tin. It made the front page of the papers: a saboteur in the Bake Off tent.
Ingrid texted me when it first aired. She said she would go to her grave knowing that Baked Alaska had been taken out on purpose. I said I was on the fence. She sent me all the cake emojis and the police car.
When he had finished ironing, Patrick came and sat seminext to me on the bed and watched me watching. ‘We have to –’
I hit the space bar. ‘Patrick, I don’t really think we should co-opt Bishop Whoever in this case. It’s only my birthday. Nobody has died.’
‘I was just trying to be positive.’
‘Okay.’ I hit the space bar again.
After a moment he told me it was nearly quarter to. ‘Should you start getting ready? I’d like to be the first ones there. Martha?’
I closed the computer. ‘Can I wear what I’m wearing?’ Leggings, a Fair Isle cardigan, I can’t remember what underneath. I looked up and saw that I had hurt him. ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry. I’ll get changed.’
Patrick had hired the upstairs part of a bar we used to go to. I did not want to be the first ones there, unsure if I should sit or stand while I waited for people to arrive, wondering if anybody was going to, then feeling awkward on behalf of the person who had the misfortune of being first. I knew that my mother would not be there because I told Patrick not to invite her.
Forty-four people came in units of two. After the age of thirty, it is always even numbers. It was November and freezing. Everyone took a long time to give up their coats. They were mostly Patrick’s friends. I had lost touch with my own, from school and university and all the jobs I have had since, one by one as they had children and I didn’t and there was nothing left for us to talk about. On the way to the party, Patrick said if anyone did start telling me a story about their children, maybe I could try and look interested.
They stood around and drank Negronis – 2017 was ‘the year of the Negroni’ – and laughed very loudly and made impromptu speeches, one speaker stepping forward from each group like representatives of a team. I found an ambulant toilet and cried in it.
Ingrid told me fragapane phobia is the fear of birthdays. It was the fun fact from the peel-off strip from sanitary pads, which she says are her chief source of intellectual stimulation at this point, the only reading she gets time for. She said, in her speech, ‘We all know Martha is an amazing listener, especially if she’s the one talking.’ Patrick had something written on palm cards.
There wasn’t a single moment when I became the wife I am, although if I had to choose one, my crossing the room and asking my husband not to read out whatever was on those cards would be a contender.
An observer to my marriage would think I have made no effort to be a good or better wife. Or, seeing me that night, that I must have set out to be this way and achieved it after years of concentrated effort. They could not tell that for most of my adult life and all of my marriage I have been trying to become the opposite of myself.
*
The next morning I told Patrick I was sorry for all of it. He had made coffee and carried it out to the living room but hadn’t touched it when I came into the room. He was sitting at one end of the sofa. I sat down and folded my legs underneath me. Facing him, the posture felt beseeching and I put one foot back on the floor.
‘I don’t mean to be like this.’ I made myself put my hand on his. It was the first time I had touched him on purpose for five months. ‘Patrick, honestly, I can’t help it.’
‘And yet somehow you manage to be so nice to your sister.’ He shook my hand off and said he was going out to buy a newspaper. He didn’t come back for five hours.
I am still forty. It is the end of winter, 2018, no longer the year of the Negroni. Patrick left two days after the party.
2
MY FATHER IS a poet called Fergus Russell. His first poem was published in The New Yorker when he was nineteen. It was about a bird, the dying variety. After it came out, someone called him a male Sylvia Plath. He got a notable advance on his first anthology. My mother, who was his girlfriend then, is purported to have said, ‘Do we need a male Sylvia Plath?’ She denies it but it is in the family script. No one gets to revise it after it is written. It was also the last poem my father ever published. He says she hexed him. She denies that too. The anthology remains forthcoming. I don’t know what happened to the money.