Sorrow and Bliss by Meg Mason

Author:Meg Mason
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2020-07-25T00:00:00+00:00

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At Heathrow, waiting for our bags, Patrick said, ‘Remember that wedding we had?’ I had just asked him how he was planning to get back to his flat. He had his arm around me and kissed the side of my head. I said, ‘Sorry. I’m so tired.’ It had been so much effort, telling myself and making myself believe that coming back from a honeymoon is when marriages start, not when they end.

I did not know how to be a wife. I was so scared. Patrick looked so happy.

22

IN THE TAXI and again as I followed him up the stairs, Patrick told me I could do whatever I wanted to the flat to make it feel like mine. It was a Friday. On Saturday he went to work and I took everything out of the kitchen cupboards and put it all back in, one cupboard along, so that if Heather visited, she would not know where anything was. I couldn’t think of anything else.

I had decided to be neat and I was for a number of days. But Patrick preferred the flat the way it was now, he said, with clothes on the floor, magazines and hair elastics and an astonishing number of glasses, and everything so generally accessible because cupboards and drawers were never, ever shut. The way he laughed as he spoke did not make me feel guilty, and he made no effort to move anything. Maybe that was why his flat felt like my home so quickly.

The only things he asked if I could do, a few weeks later, was not to leave medication lying around – he said, ‘It’s just my training’ – and try to use the spreadsheet he had made me for financial record-keeping, instead of my method which was stuffing receipts into a ragged A4 envelope, then losing it.

He opened it on his computer to teach me how it worked. I told him that seeing numbers in such concentration caused an invisible membrane to come down from underneath my eyelids, blinding me until the numbers went away. There were many categories. One of them was called Martha’s Unexpecteds. I said I had not expected him to be so Stasi-like in his financial oversight. He said he didn’t realise anyone would suggest a Word document and the calculator on their phone as an alternative to a spreadsheet. I told him I would try and use it, but it would be in a spirit of self-denial. Patrick said later, it was genuinely incredible how many Unexpecteds one person could attract.

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