The Memory Book (9 page)

‘Gran, Mum’s told me she’d tell me about him when I wanted to know,’ Caitlin says sharply, protective of me. ‘Please, can we just drop it? I’ve got stuff I need to talk about too, before I … before tomorrow.’

Mum looks at me expectantly, and I wait to know what to say, but nothing comes.

‘What?’ Caitlin says. ‘Come on, Gran, say what you’re thinking. I’m sure we’d all like to know.’

‘It’s not for me to say,’ she says.

‘What’s not for you to say?’ Caitlin asks her, exasperated, rolling her eyes at me.

‘Claire?’ Greg prompts me with a frown – the frown I can’t read any more.

I close my eyes and force out the words. ‘Your dad. Paul,’ I say. ‘He didn’t walk out on me, or abandon you. I mean, if I’d known that’s what you were thinking all these years, I’d have told you sooner. I said I’d tell you when you were ready, but you never asked again …’

‘What do you mean?’ Caitlin rises from her chair. ‘What are you saying – that you sent him away?’

I shake my head. ‘No … I never told him I was pregnant,’ I tell her. ‘He doesn’t know you exist. He never has.’

Caitlin sits down again, ever so slowly, and Mum joins her, the righteous wind blown right out of her battleship sails.

‘I found out that I was pregnant, with you,’ I continue slowly, choosing words I know won’t fail me, so that I won’t say anything wrong. ‘And I knew what I had to do, for me, for you, for him. I knew I wanted to keep you, and I knew that I didn’t want to be with him. So I didn’t tell him I was pregnant. I just left. I left university, and I left him. I didn’t return his calls or letters. And after quite a short time he stopped trying to get in touch. So he didn’t abandon you: he never knew about you, Caitlin.’

Caitlin is still for a moment. Her voice is quiet. ‘What I’ve always thought,’ she says, looking at me, ‘is that you had a
choice to make that would change your life for ever, and you chose me.’

‘That was true,’ I say. ‘I still chose you.’

‘But for all these years, you’ve let me think that he
didn’t
choose me. When he never had a choice. And now …’ She stops talking. ‘What do I do now, Mum? What do I do now? In my head I thought he’d be waiting for me to arrive one day, expecting me. That maybe he might even find out about you, and maybe even come and find me!’

‘But …’

‘And now … what do I do now?’

There is silence in the room; the family I thought would be supportive seem remote and distant. I’ve forgotten how to touch them, reach out to them – even Esther, who’s crept on to Greg’s lap with her bear.

‘Whatever you want to do,’ I say calmly, carefully. I think hard before trying to speak any word; I check and double-check that I am not making a mistake. I can’t afford to make a mistake now. ‘If you want me to, I’ll contact him, tell him about you. We can do it together, if you like – whatever you want, Caitlin. I understand why you are angry with me, but it’s because you don’t know everything. You can’t possibly understand why I did what I did. Let me try to … make you see. And don’t worry, because there is time, all the time in the world for you to make everything exactly how you want it to be. I promise. I’ll help you do whatever you want.’

All colour drains from her face, and she places an arm on the table, steadying herself.

‘Are you OK?’ Greg asks her.

‘I’m not OK,’ Caitlin says matter-of-factly. She looks at me, her chin set just like it always is whenever she is doing her best not to cry. ‘I don’t think I’ll stay for dinner. I think I’ll go back to London tonight.’

‘Caitlin, please,’ I say, reaching out for her, but she withdraws her hand from under mine.

‘I just need some time,’ she says. She won’t look at me, but I know her well enough to know what she is thinking, and why her eyes are glazed with unshed tears. She can’t be angry with her poor diseased mother, and it’s not fair. ‘I just … I need to work out what to do. Away from you … all.’

It’s such a simple sentence, but the way she says it, her gaze turned away from me …

‘Caitlin, don’t go now,’ her gran says. ‘Have dinner at least. Things will seem better when you’ve eaten.’

Caitlin looks at the food, cooling rapidly on the table.

‘I’m going back tonight. I’ll call a taxi to take me to the station.’

‘I’ll take you to the station,’ Greg says, rising from his chair.

‘No, thank you,’ Caitlin says very formally. ‘You’d better stay here with Mum. I just … I think I just need to go.’

‘She just didn’t want to talk about it,’ Greg says, as he watches me untangling my hair with the hedgehog-looking thing. I
don’t like him watching me. It makes it harder somehow, more difficult to concentrate, like trying to clasp a necklace when you are looking in the mirror: everything is going backwards. And I am annoyed that I can remember that a hedgehog is a spiky little mammal indigenous to the British Isles, yet not what the name of the spiky-backed thing is. I’m sure Greg watching me makes it worse.

‘You’ve tried,’ he goes on, standing close to me with the sort of easy familiarity that I simply don’t feel. He’s wearing only his boxers. I don’t know where to look, so I turn my face from him and look at the wall. ‘You owned up, and that took guts. Caitlin will get that, eventually.’

‘I owned up?’ I say, concentrating on the smooth, empty wall. ‘I suppose I did. Sometimes, it’s never the right time to say something, do you know what I mean? I’ve hurt her, and she’s holding it all in because I’m sick. Thing is, I’d feel so much better if she’d only shout and scream, and tell me how I’ve cocked up her whole life. I could take it.’

‘You haven’t cocked up her whole life.’ Greg sits down next to me on the bed, and I tense, concentrating hard on not showing that the thought of his bare thigh so close to mine makes me want to bolt for the door. This is my husband; this is the man that I should never want to stop looking at. I know that, and yet he feels like a stranger. A total stranger who somehow has access to my family and my bedroom. He feels like an impostor.

‘Caitlin is a sensible girl, a lovely girl, she’s just shocked,’
the stranger says now. ‘Give her some space. A few days and you’ll get it straightened out.’

I sit awkwardly on the edge of the bed, waiting for him to go clean his teeth so that I can undress, put on my nightshirt, and wriggle under the covers. After a moment – I know he is debating whether or not to touch me – he gets up and goes into the bathroom. Changing quickly, I dive under the duvet, tucking the cover around me and under my legs and arms, creating a sort of pocket, so that when he climbs into bed, his body won’t actually touch mine – and even if he puts his arms around me, they won’t touch my skin. It’s easier than having to explain to him that he frightens me, and that getting into bed with him feels alien and disjointed. I can’t remember how to touch him, or how to react when he touches me. And so I wrap up my body, buffering it from his. Not just to protect me, but also to protect him from being hurt by me any more than I know he is every day. He seems like such a nice man. What did he ever do to deserve me? As I lie there waiting for him to return, his breath smelling of peppermint, I think that the saddest thing about this disease is that it makes me feel like a less nice person. I always used to feel like I was pretty nice. This time, I will be the first one to talk, I decide.

‘What I’m worried about is that we don’t make it up in time. I worry that in a few days’ time, I’ll think my name is Suzanne, and I’ll bark like a dog,’ I say, smiling shyly at him as he climbs into bed. He doesn’t laugh, because he can’t: he doesn’t find AD even the slightest bit funny, and it’s not really
fair of me to expect him to, just because black humour makes it more bearable for me. He thought he was going to have one kind of life, and look what he’s been lumbered with: a wife that likes him increasingly less and soon will mostly just drool.

He rolls over and puts an arm across my insulated body. It feels heavy. ‘A couple of days and it will have all blown over,’ he says, kissing me on the ear, making me shudder. ‘She’ll be back at uni with her friends, in the swing of it all, getting some perspective, and it will be fine. You’ll see. I mean, it’s like you say, there was never going to be a good time to tell her that, but you did it. You told her.’

‘I hope you’re right,’ I say. There is something off with Caitlin – something more than her thinness, her exhaustion, her quiet sadness – that I have, of course, put down to my diagnosis, because it’s all about me, right? A few months ago, I would have been able to decipher it, but now that time is gone. Decoding the subtle nuances of people’s expressions is lost to me: I have to guess, or hope they will say something really obvious. There is something else, though – something that Caitlin is hiding to protect me – something more.

Greg stretches over me and presses something that makes the room go dark. I feel his hand snake its way under the covers, breaching my defences and resting on my belly. There is nothing sexual in it. We haven’t … not for ages. The last time was on the day of the diagnosis, before we’d told anyone. And even then it had more to do with grief than passion – we
just clung to each other, willing everything to be different. Greg is still wishing it, and willing it. I always thought I’d fight it until my last breath, but sometimes I wonder if I’ve given up already.

‘I love you, Claire,’ he says, ever so quietly.

I want to ask him how that is even possible when I am so broken, but I don’t. ‘I do know that I’ve loved you,’ I say instead. ‘I do know that.’

Greg’s arm pinions me for a few moments more, and then he rolls over on to his side, and I feel cold. He doesn’t understand that from the moment the disease became a reality, I started to withdraw from him. And I don’t know if it’s the disease that is driving this wedge between us, or if it is me, the real me, trying to save us both from the pain of separation. But whatever the reason is, it comes from me. I close my eyes, and see the lights contorting behind my lids. I remember the love I had for him; I remember how it feels. But when I look back on those times, it’s as if it happened to another person. If I chase him away now, then perhaps in the long run all this will hurt less.

This is the parking ticket I got for parking on a yellow line the first evening I went out for a drink with Greg. I was late, of course. I’d spent a stupid amount of time, perhaps the most time ever before a date, working out what to wear, and even whether I should I go. He’d asked me earlier that day, a blazing hot day, and I’d said yes more because I didn’t know how to say no than because I wanted to go. I took everything out of my wardrobe, and tried it on. And everything I had made me look fat and old – or at least that’s what I thought. And then I found this chiffon tea dress, and I thought it showed too much cleavage; and then I put on this tie-dyed maxi sundress, and I thought that made me look my age; and then I went into Caitlin’s room, where she was lying on her bed pretending to be reading, and asked her what to wear on a date, and she picked out an outfit that made me look like a librarian – a librarian who is also a part-time nun. So I went back to my bedroom and found a pair of jeans and a white T-shirt, which made me look like I
should be in some sort of skincare advert, but at that point it was all I had. I turned around and around, looking at myself in the jeans, wondering if I could really carry them off, sitting down to check for folds of fat surging up over the waistband, wondering about the little apron of loose skin that had never bounced back after Caitlin was born, wondering if Greg knew he was asking a woman with stretch marks out for a drink.

‘It’s just a drink.’ That’s what I told my reflection. It was just a drink, but as I ran a red light in order to get to the pub on time, bringing the car to a screeching halt on a set of double yellows, my heart was racing, my skin tingling in a way I’d never felt before, or at least not for a long time.

He’d said he would be in the garden, at the back. I walked through the pub feeling like everyone was looking at me, a woman in her mid thirties wearing jeans and a white T-shirt. All around me there were younger women dressed in skimpy tops and tiny shorts, boasting their summer wardrobe with the kind of certain beauty that youth and firmness gives you. I felt so old, so much older than almost thirty-six, so foolish for agreeing to meet Greg, more foolish still for allowing myself even to think it was a date. I was sure that, after a little stilted conversation, he’d bring the topic round to how he could do some more work on the house, make some more money out of me. Or perhaps it would be like those stories you hear about on TV, or read in a magazine, in which some poor woman falls for a con artist and he takes away all of her money. I didn’t really have any money, but as I spotted Greg, sitting right at the back of the garden under a tree, I thought that perhaps
I’d give him the key to my house in exchange for five minutes to simply look at him.

As I approached, Greg rose from the bench, still straddling it like a cowboy. That’s what I thought when I saw him there: he’s like a cowboy. A cowboy builder.

‘I got you a glass of white,’ he said, nodding at the perspiring glass on the table. ‘I didn’t know if it was right, but you have a lot of empty bottles of white wine in your recycling, so … It’s Pinot Grigio. I don’t know much about wine, but there were three available by the glass and this was the most expensive.’

I laughed, he blushed; I blushed, he laughed. There were moments of not looking at each other, not knowing whether to kiss or touch in some way, and so after some awkward bobbing, left to right, missing each other every time, we did neither.

I couldn’t decide whether to sit opposite him, on the other side of the table, or on the same bench, the one he was straddling like a cowboy. In the end, I circled round the edge of the table to sit on the other side, in the full glare of sunshine. It was evening but the heat was still intense, and almost immediately, as a bead of sweat formed at the base of my neck and trickled down my spine, I wished I’d joined him in the shade. But by then it was too late to move.