I didn’t follow him. Every cell in my body felt individually paralysed except for my heart, beating hard and too fast. A moment later, he returned with a handful of kitchen roll, dropped it over the liquid that had soaked into the carpet and stamped on it. I couldn’t do anything except watch, until I stopped feeling my heart. And then I told him to stop it. ‘Just leave it. Listen to me.’
‘I am listening.’
‘Well stop cleaning up then.’
He said fine.
‘Why didn’t you say? Why did you just let me lie. If you had said something since the appointment, I could be pregnant now. You always wanted children Patrick – I could be pregnant now. Why would you do that?’
‘Because – you just said – you should have been better. You got your diagnosis finally, you got the right meds and you weren’t any better to me. I couldn’t work it out but then I realised.’ He shifted the kitchen roll with his foot. The liquid had settled darkly into the carpet, a stain that would never be got out. ‘This is who you are. It has nothing to do with ——。 And,’ he said, ‘I don’t think you should be a mother.’
I opened my mouth. It wasn’t speech or screaming that came out. It was primal sound, coming from somewhere, my stomach, the bottom of my throat. Patrick went out and left me there. I sank to my knees, then my face was to the floor. I was gripping handfuls of my hair.
There is a gap after that, a blackout in my memory until, a few hours later, I am standing at one corner of the bed, dragging the sheets off it while Patrick puts things in a suitcase that is open on the floor. Sun is coming through the window. I’m compelled to the bathroom to throw up.
When I came back, Patrick had closed the suitcase and was carrying it out of the room. I called something after him, but he did not hear me. A moment later, I heard the car start and I went over to the window. He was backing out of the driveway. I tried to bring the blind down, pulled too sharply and it broke. For a long time, I just stood there with its slack cord in my hand, staring unfocused at the house on the other side where another woman had lived my life in mirror image.
Then Patrick was turning back into the driveway. I didn’t know why he had come back. I watched him park the car and get out. He had a bottle in his hand and once he had raised the bonnet he emptied it into the engine, closed the bonnet again and walked away, in the direction of the station.
Patrick is a man who puts oil in the car as his final act before leaving his wife. I put my hand on my chest but felt nothing.
34
I SPENT THE day and first night without him on the stripped bed; after he left there did not seem to be a reason to remake it. Life, a life involving sheets and dishes and letters from the bank did not exist any more.
Between sleeping and waking and sleeping again, I Googled Robert. Then I Googled Jonathan. His wife is a social media influencer. Her Instagram is a mixture of holiday photos, sponsored posts about a brand of collagen drink and photos of what she is wearing shot in the mirror of the lift that I used to take down to the street to breathe. She gets the most likes when she posts pictures of her little tribe, #thestronggirls, all of whom have blonde hair and names that are also common nouns. Objects and fruit. I scrolled all the way back to her wedding to Jonathan on a rooftop in Ibiza. I wondered how much he had told her about me, how much @mother_of_strong_girls knows about her husband’s forty-three-day starter marriage.
*
Ingrid texted me in the morning. She said she had spoken to Patrick. She said, ‘Are you okay?’
I sent her the bathtub emoji, the three-pin plug and the coffin. She asked me if I wanted her to come and get me. I said I didn’t know.
I was still in bed – on bed – half dressed, in the underwear and tights I had worn to London and surrounded by mugs that were empty or had become receptacles for tissues and dried-up curls of orange peel when I heard Ingrid let herself into the Executive Home. She went straight to the living room, trailed by smaller, quicker footsteps, and turned the television on to some sort of cartoon before coming upstairs.
I thought she would come and lie with me on the bed and stroke my hair or my arms as she usually did. I thought she would say, it’s going to be alright and can you try and stand up now, can you get all the way to the shower? Instead, she threw the door open, looked around and said, ‘This is quite the visual and olfactory cocktail. Wow Martha.’
*
At my party, I hadn’t noticed her stomach. Now I saw how already round it was. Ingrid crossed both sides of her cardigan over it as she entered and went to the window. Once she had wrenched it open, she turned back and pointed at the sheets. ‘How long have they been on the floor?’