He said, ‘It’s time to come home, Martha.’
I did not intend to go with him but Ingrid leapt up and said yes, yes definitely, and started making a lap of the kitchen, collecting up anything that was mine. I put down the fork I was holding, a little ring of sausage on the end of it that I had been trying to coax into her middle son’s mouth. I thought I had been very helpful. My sister’s relief was so plain and she was so insistent that I could just go now and Hamish could bring all my stuff later that I stood up and followed Patrick out to our car, both of us carrying the various possessions she’d put in our arms.
*
My anger towards him did not diminish in the weeks after that. When I was with him, it was acute, fed by the way he drank from a cup, his teeth-brushing, his work bag, his ringtone, his laundry at the bottom of the basket, the hair on the back of his neck, his effort to be normal, his buying batteries and mouthwash, saying you seem unhappy Martha. It made me mean and baiting in conversation, dismissive or contemptuous. I was ashamed afterwards, but I could not resist my anger in the moment. Even when I resolved to be better, to talk to him, a sentence that started well ended hatefully. And that was why, mostly, I avoided being in the same room, or home at all if he was there.
Alone, I felt grief. It was intense but not constant, and in between I felt an unnatural serenity that I had not experienced before. It was, I decided, the serenity of a cancer patient who has been fighting for so long, they are relieved by the discovery it is terminal, because they can stop now and just do what they like until the end.
The only thing Patrick said in reference to the new way of things was that it had occurred to him, the other day, that it had been a long time since he had seen me cry. He said, ‘I guess you’ve finally worn out the mechanism’ and ‘ha-ha’， the words not the sound.
That was his way of asking me to tell him what had happened. I said, ‘Can you start sleeping in a different room?’
*
My editor sent me an email about a column I had written. It was a Monday afternoon. I counted later, in my diary, six weeks since I saw Robert.
The subject was Feedback. My stomach didn’t plummet when I read it, or the first sentence of his many mistyped paragraphs. ‘Hey, apols it’s taken me ages to get back to you.’ Things, he said, had been insane. ‘Anywya,’ he went on, ‘some pretty gnarly issues with this one, think you’ve missed the mark, over all too harsh/judgy.’ He wanted me to start again. ‘Something funnier & more first person. Taek your time.’
I looked out the window, at the leaves of the plane tree, enormous and iridescent under the sun. On their passage back to the screen, my eyes stopped at a pattern of deep triangular dents in the wall above my computer. I wondered how the last email my editor had sent me like this had made me feel so humiliated and scared and hot and nauseated that I had risen out of the chair I was sitting in now, crossed to the cupboard and returned with the iron and, holding it over my head, driven it nose first into the wall over and over and over. This time I just felt very still. I said oh. That was when I knew I was better, the pills Robert gave me had worked.
I turned back to the window and looked at the tree for a while, then rewrote the column, about the time I lost my eco-cup and had to drink takeaway coffee out of a cocktail shaker because I had said so many judgemental things to my barista about people still using disposable cups and it was the only substitute I could find.
That I was able to return to it at all, to put his email out of my mind and work until I was finished, was extraordinary to me. I could not send it then, because my editor would know it had only taken forty minutes to produce six hundred funnier & more first-person words. I saved it and started writing an email to Robert.
I wanted to tell him what had just happened. I wanted to say it was the first time I had been able to decide how to react to something bad, even such a small thing, instead of coming to consciousness in the middle of already reacting. I said I hadn’t known you could choose how to feel instead of being overpowered by an emotion from outside yourself. I said I couldn’t explain it properly. I didn’t feel like a different person, I felt like myself. As though I had been found.
I deleted it all and sent one line to say I was feeling better and grateful and I was sorry for emailing him. Then I put his name into Google.
*
No matter what private morsel she could have inadvertently divulged in our countless hours together, I never would have parked outside Julie Female’s house in the hope of acquiring another precious fact about her life. I didn’t care who she was outside her converted spare room. But I thought about Robert constantly for days after that. I Google Image-searched him and clicked on photographs taken at conferences. I read journal articles he had written and watched a long presentation he had given to an audience of psychiatrists, on YouTube.