Nine Years

To understand why I did not simply ask him, you have to understand the nine years, and the nine years are difficult to summarise, because nothing happened in them. That was rather the point. Nothing happened, lavishly, for a very long time. We had married late, both of us, and both for the second time. My first husband had died of a heart that gave out on a train platform; Gerald's first wife had left him, and he spoke of her exactly twice, both times to say she had been "unwell in her thinking," which I took at the time for tact and now take for something else. We met at a recital. He held my coat. He had a way of holding a coat that suggested the coat, and by extension the woman in it, was a thing worth attending to. I was lonely in a manner I had grown too proud to name, and he noticed, and he was kind about it, and kindness aimed precisely at a lonely woman is a powerful instrument. He was older than me by eleven years. He had money, not flagrantly, the quiet kind that lives in the walls of a house and the cut of a shoe. He did not work, not in the sense of going anywhere, but he had interests — investments, he said, and a few "concerns" that occasionally took him to the city for a night. I did not interrogate the concerns. I had a husband again, and a house with a garden, and a routine that closed over my days like water over a stone. The house was called Wraydon. It had come to Gerald from an aunt, and it was the kind of house that has more rooms than a couple needs and resents them for not using it fully. Three storeys, a cellar Gerald said was unsafe, a garden that ran down to a line of poplars and then to a field that belonged to someone else. The east wing had been the aunt's sewing rooms. When we moved in I had imagined, briefly, making one of them mine — a place to read, to keep my mother's letters. But Gerald said the wing was damp and not worth heating, and the matter went the way of so many of my small intentions, quietly, without a funeral. I tell you all this so you will not think me a fool for the slowness of it. Nine years is long enough to stop seeing a man. You see instead the shape he has worn into the day. You see the time he comes down for breakfast and the side of the bed and the particular sigh he gives when the post is dull. You stop seeing the man and you would swear in court that you knew him completely, and the swearing would be honest, and it would be wrong. What I knew of Gerald, after nine years, was this: he was careful, he was kind in the rationed way of a careful man, he disliked surprises and the telephone, he had a temper he kept folded away like the newspapers, and he had never once raised a hand or even a sentence against me. What I did not know was anything at all about where the money truly came from, what the concerns in the city concerned, why a man with no enemies kept his petrol receipts in case, or why his first wife had been unwell in her thinking, and where, precisely, she had gone to be unwell. I had not known I did not know these things. That is the part that is hard to forgive in myself. Ignorance you can excuse; it is the comfort I had built on top of the ignorance that shames me. I had been happy. Or — let me be exact, since exactness is all I have left to offer — I had been unbothered, and I had let unbothered stand in for happy because the substitution cost me nothing and the real article was no longer on offer. Then the door went up in the east wing, and the smell came under it, and unbothered was over. I did not know that yet, the Tuesday of the smell. But I had begun, without permission, to look at my husband. And a woman who has started looking does not stop because the view is unwelcome. She slows down. She leans in.