My House Is Falling Down Page 11

  Mark says, ‘Come on. Now that you feel more what?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Say it!’

  ‘Loved.’

  He stares at me. Then he says, ‘Is that supposed to make me feel better?’

  Suddenly, I am angry.

  ‘It’s not about you, Mark! Not everything is about you, okay? Not everything is about making life easier for you, softer for you, better for you! I’m fed up with trying to do that and getting sweet nowhere for myself. So yes, I feel loved. And yes, I love him. And yes, I feel less alone. Wanted, not needed. I feel met, not bypassed.’

  ‘Bypassed? Jesus!’

  ‘Yes. He’s so open. I can talk to him about anything. Anything. He’s just so warm.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘Sorry. I’m sorry, I could have put it better.’

  ‘No, I think you put it very clearly.’

  ‘I’m just trying to answer your question.’

  He says, ‘Oh, I think you’ve done that.’

  ‘And?’

  He turns to leave.

  ‘And nothing. I hear what you’re saying.’

  We married pretty fast, Mark and I. It took less than eight months to get out from under the cherry tree in our friend’s garden to a honeymoon in Turkey, where the card on the king-sized bed addressed to Mr and Mrs Burdett, and the bowl of brightly coloured fruit decorated with a creamy silken ribbon, signalled our fresh pledges.

  We agreed we would live abroad for a couple of years. Mark would paint and I would photograph, and when we came back to England we would set up our home. And so, we played Bohemia in southern France – I spoke the language, after all – though we were neither frivolous nor lazy, and we did a lot of work. The rent from Mark’s flats meant we had just enough both to live on and pay the rent for a one-room apartment near the sea, and whenever there was enough money in our account, Mark had his paintings sent back to a gallery in London. I had managed to secure an agreement with a picture agency, and although I was only paid for my photographs once a third party requested them from the agency, I felt at last like a pro, if a penurious one: ‘pitiful’ was the word Mark used once, to describe my income. He meant it supportively, he said; he felt I was worth so much more. ‘I’ve been paid!’ I would whoop, when the agency phoned to say a photograph had been sold, which meant a royalty for me. ‘That’s my girl,’ he’d reply. Then, ‘Are we in single or double figures this time?’

  When we were not working, we washed our dusty clothes, swam in the sea, read books and played chess. I learned to gut fish and Mark taught himself to juggle with spoons and plait my hair. But we fought, and hard. Our styles differed. Mark was so partial to the high ground I had little choice but to occupy the low. When he was carelessly undermining, I would fly off the handle: a lofty aside from him – a remark as light as air – could produce an avalanche of invective from me. If he protested that my denunciation outweighed the original sin, I would berate him further: ‘It’s not just that you’re a condescending wanker. You’re a condescending wanker who’s never learned when it’s wise to keep quiet.’ To which he replied, ‘If I had the wit to keep quiet, would I still be a condescending wanker? Or does silence preclude wankerness? I just want to be clear on this.’

  Five months into our marriage, standing in the car park of a sprawling out-of-town supermarket, I was overcome with frustration so jagged that I was bordering on despair. The details of the row are sketchy now but I do recall the glowering build-up over several days, the sense of isolation, the feeling that nothing I was saying was getting through to my new husband; and worse, that he did not understand me, nor I him; that we were stuck with each other and this was disastrous. I remember shouting, ‘I never thought marriage would be like this!’ and Mark replying calmly, ‘What exactly did you think it would be like?’

  Now, I can see we were simply getting to know each other – testing the limits of marriage, and realizing them, too. But there was no one to ask, ‘Is this OK?’ and my subterranean fears took some time to dispel. Before we married, it was possible for us to dodge the parts of one another we considered difficult. Permanently united, Mark found me less tender than expected – less than I had perhaps led him to believe I would be, once hitched. Close up, his personal crusades were as wearing as they were courageous. We worked effectively alongside each other but if, under duress, either of us sought consolation, comfort was scarcer than we had imagined; and whilst I had been a keen bride, I was an equivocal early wife. My better nature was pending, suppressed by concern that in our haste to be together Mark and I had sacrificed the security of knowing a bit more about what, precisely, we were getting into. It was almost as if I believed that by arguing as thoroughly as we did, and laying the foundations of all our fundamental disagreements, we might insure ourselves against later surprises.

  What we failed to consider, however, was the importance of the context in which we were starting out. It did not cross our minds that whilst it might be recklessly satisfying to scream with frustration at your husband in a sleepy Mediterranean side street or to stride purposefully away from your wife into a crowded fish market, life in a small house in England would force us to scale down the expression of our conflicts. Indeed, married life at home did exactly that: it brought each of us into closer proximity and sharper focus, and for a good while after we returned from our travels, we both felt exposed. We found what so many people do, that despite the freedom conferred by a frank and enthusiastic union, sometimes there is not a lot of room for two people to manoeuvre in the tight space of marriage, and adjustment did not come easily to either of us.

  It probably didn’t help that wandering and caprice had featured so prominently in our previous lives. I had travelled and Mark, too, had disappeared, to paint in wild, open spaces; spaces which placed him exactly where he liked to be, uncontained by geography, four walls and even the most irregular of social arrangements. Before we met, he was evidently a man with whom it was burdensome to make plans and upon whom it was almost impossible to rely, ducking and diving in and out of numerous lives, leaving nothing substantive behind. However, he was in his mid-thirties by the time we got together and by then, returning home to a fax machine with its dangling pennant of fretful and cavilling messages had grown tiresome: a pleasingly productive week spent painting beneath a flapping tarpaulin was never enhanced by the admonition of women, assorted.

  Mark installed me fast and now that he was flush with love for just one person, the relief of monogamy was profound: for one thing, it meant that a homecoming was just that, and it made him happy. As for the fax machine itself, the long-time barometer of fidelity that was stationed in the open-plan living area of the Oxford flat (a rather risky location, I always thought), Mark announced with some considerable pride during the early days of his relationship with me that it had never been so quiet. Sure enough, not long afterwards the machine began to grind and whine, eventually discharging on a shaving of sleek, thin paper the indictment: ‘It didn’t take you long to move on, you bastard.’ ‘That’d be Caroline,’ said Mark, when I handed it to him. ‘At least it’s short.’

  So, while it’s hardly as if Mark deserves a medal for settling down, I do understand what an effort he had to make to be what he became, once married: a successful and audacious painter with friends and a wife; a well-appointed man lacking nothing visible. I see what a relief it must have been for him to feel that he could drop his guard. Now, there was someone else to do the things he found most exhausting, like deal with other people. Now, he could come and go as he pleased, knowing he had a safe haven to which he could return; and by coming and going, I don’t mean buggering off in his Land Rover to paint for hours, I mean hitting the road for days on end, which was all very well when we were just a couple, for I would often go as well, walking happily along cliff paths or climbing hills to take photographs whilst my husband worked, but when the twins were born joint trips of this kind were untenable. Even when, instead of cooking our supper on a
camping stove and sleeping under the raised canopy on top of the Land Rover, Mark and I booked into family-friendly B&Bs, with our baby paraphernalia and two self-assembly cots, it just didn’t work any more.

  It’s the story of many couples, I know that, but when the children were born things changed between us. There was the delirious joy, the immediate shock of being deposed and then the long, slow burn of disturbance and alteration. Mark and I established a routine over time, its shape governed entirely by the needs of our twins and radically different from anything we had imagined. Sleep was pitted with cries and demands. Awake, the surface of our life felt immediately agitated and anything beneath the surface too heavily overlaid with exhaustion to produce any kind of fine sensation. Enlightened and debilitated by our charges our devotion to the twins was boundless but there was an awful lot of bickering, too. Almost all of it was procedural and almost all of it dull; heated at times but dreary nonetheless.

  Communication between us had to change. Now, shorthand was necessary because we were exhausted; because one of the girls was crying; because I was depleted from feeding two babies around the clock; because there was always, always something that needed doing. Mark’s life altered too but as he never heard the babies’ shrill entreaties he was never roused from deep sleep. He did a lot to help me but I became irritated by his inability to share the way in which my world had changed. ‘You’re knackered,’ he’d say. ‘It makes sense.’ But that was not it. Now, we were divided further, by the crying of infants that punctuated my days and sabotaged my nights yet made no direct impression on his.

  It bent us out of shape – I’d say permanently. A lot of demands upon Mark from our babies came indirectly, via me, which meant that during early motherhood my already significant role as broker and intermediary increased. More demonstrably than ever before, I felt myself an agent of exigency and exchange, as well as a petitioner for my husband’s attention. Mark, in turn, would argue that he felt at a further disadvantage. He described himself as being unremittingly on call when he was working at home but without any terms having been properly agreed in the first place. In fact, it wasn’t long before he took to appearing in the house with paintbrushes still in hand – a brand new form of defence against being inveigled into unwelcome tasks. In so doing, he made a kind of absurd tableau of the artist at work, standing poised and tense in the doorway of a kitchen littered with baby blankets and mugs of tepid, half-drunk tea. He muttered and sighed. I railed. Our friends said it was the same for them, too.

  It wasn’t, though.

  Mark never wanted children. I knew this before we married but I didn’t really believe him; or rather, I chose to ignore him. What I did believe was that because my desire to reproduce was in line with natural order and driven by biological imperative, it was more important than my husband’s resistance to it. When he told me he thought himself unsuited to parenthood I told him that was rubbish. When he explained that he didn’t trust either himself or the family unit, I said, ‘Me neither,’ knowing that to be the very reason I wanted to create some individuals I could love unconditionally who might also love me back without reserve – for I had things to make up for. And actually, while it is true I had little faith in the family unit per se, I did trust myself, just as long as I looked forward to what I believed a family might be, and not backwards at my childhood.

  It took nearly a decade for Mark finally to capitulate. When I gave birth to twins, it was a double whammy of epic proportions. I fell in love with an extravagance unmatched by anything I had felt before. I was sated and whole, for the first time in my life. Mark, however, was suddenly a man with two daughters no longer than his forearm whose safety and succour depended upon him as well as me. He was elated, of course, but the more that people told him what an amazing father he would be, the more he shrank from their compliments, convinced that he lacked the essential protective responses necessary for safeguarding his young. His insecurities peaked. Only much later did he admit to me that from the moment he observed the twins’ first cries piercing the consciousness and soul of their mother, he felt, as never before, separated from me as if by a glass wall. Mark’s involuntary response to the velocious clout of parenthood was the pain of a man now less of a participant, and more of an observer, in his own life.

  Yet despite all that, our daughters could not have been gifted a closer, more attentive father. Infants learn to talk partly by lip-reading and they thrive on close visual attention. In their first year, Mark mouthed and smiled and crooned at our daughters: he watched them and held their gaze and with their soft, round heads cradled in his large palms, their legs kicking gently upwards in his lap, Mel and Miranda lay rapt as he chatted to them, eye to eye, eye to mouth. It was Mark who detected Mel’s first word. Bent over her one day, his dark curls brushing her forehead, he called me over to verify her delighted repetition of a sound, as her small, wet tongue found a consonant to click rhythmically into the roof of her mouth.

  ‘Listen, she’s saying, “Ta Ta Ta”!’

  ‘Yes! She is!’

  ‘Or, is it, “Da Da Da”? What does it sound like to you?’

  ‘Impossible to tell the difference. Oh, Mark, isn’t she amazing?’

  Mel gazed up at us, her eyes ablaze, thrilled with what she could do. ‘Ta!’ she said, and we squealed with delight. ‘Ta! Ta!’ As if to celebrate her multiplicity of skills, she lifted one foot and put it into her mouth.

  ‘Oh, Mel-belle,’ Mark sighed, kissing her toes. ‘You clever girl. But you must never learn to speak from Daddy.’

  ‘Darling! Don’t say that!’

  ‘But they mustn’t. They’ll sound wrong.’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous. Of course they won’t.’

  ‘But you must be the one, Luce,’ he said. He stroked Mel’s left eyebrow and I felt faint with love for him and our children – for the family life we had created together. ‘I mean it,’ he repeated, ‘You must be the one.’

  If the twins exacerbated Mark’s fear of being ill-equipped to cope with an amplified new world when he had worked so hard to come to terms with the one he knew already, it is unsurprising, looking back, that he felt the need to compensate. Newly fortified by self-doubt, he took on commission after commission. He disappeared for days on end for portrait sittings; longer still for landscapes. He took his car and stayed away.

  In the first four years of our daughters’ lives Mark produced enough paintings for separate exhibitions in London and Paris – for which he was praised to the high heavens. This generated more work, and at last, a little bit more money: we paid off our overdraft and for someone else to repoint the house’s sodden west wall. Yet I calculated that in those four years, Mark was away from home for nearly a full two; and if you discount the hours he was asleep or working in the barn, his time spent with his wife and daughters was negligible. He hadn’t wanted a family and his need to support us all justified not only his productivity but his absences. Whilst for me, family life was day-to-day fare, for Mark it was a rare departure from work. When he was properly at home with us all, I would hand over the children like batons in a relay race and he would take off, generated by an excess of energy garnered from the world outside. He was as invigorated, cheerful and confident as I was the opposite.

  In the end, Mark agreed to having children because he did not expect me to miss out on them on his account. He made it clear, however, that they would always be his gift to me, and I was so relieved it didn’t occur to me that indebtedness might harm us. It is true what people say, that nothing prepares you for parenthood, and it changes you in ways you cannot imagine. But what is also true for us is that even though Mark loves our daughters more than life itself, he still believes me to be ultimately responsible for the position he is in and for the strain he feels. ‘It was your call,’ he says, when we argue. ‘I never asked for this.’

  Di shoves aside a messy hillock of pillowcases and men’s shirts topped with a crumpled Trees of Britain tea towel, leans across her kitchen
table, and holds out her hand.

  I turn my phone screen towards her as though I am presenting ID to an official.

  ‘Oh, mate.’ She stares at the photo of Angus. ‘Why didn’t you tell me sooner? I wish you had.’

  ‘I thought you’d hate me.’

  ‘How could you think that?’

  ‘Because I hate me.’

  ‘That’s crazy. Oh, man.’

  Tension that has been building up for weeks, months, it feels like a lifetime, begins to release; the guilt and confusion that never really abates. I picture Mark, stiff and subdued, and Angus, unfettered, and I burst into tears.

  ‘Hey –’ Di reaches into the ironing pile, pulls out a rumpled man’s handkerchief – her husband Dave’s – and offers it to me. I wipe my eyes, leaving smears of mascara across the white cotton.

  ‘Now, look what I’ve done.’

  ‘It’ll wash out,’ she soothes. She strokes my hand: a mother wanting a child to feel better.

  I feel a fool. There are myriad ways in which a love affair is infantilizing and crying in someone else’s kitchen is just one of them.

  ‘How long?’

  ‘Six months.’

  ‘Oh, my friend. Bloody hell.’

  Two summers earlier, when Di found herself exchanging emoji-heavy texts with a married colleague after hours, it was my kitchen table that served as a confessional. She says, ‘You of all people should know you can tell me anything.’

  ‘Telling you makes it real.’

  ‘It’s already real.’

  ‘I still love Mark. That’s never changed.’

  She says, ‘Why would it?’ and then, ‘How is he, anyway?’ and there it is, in Di’s polite enquiry, all the evidence I have never actually needed – that my best friend does not like my husband.

  ‘Toughing it out,’ I reply. ‘He hardly talks about it. We did a bit in the beginning – talk. Now, he won’t.’