Chapter 88
Something Changed
‘I just think it’s quite exciting. The plans for the shopping centre. It’s good for the city. It’s actually where the second Sheffield shop is going to be …’
Maggie smiled a distant smile. ‘Isn’t that strange, how the cinema is being knocked down and a Budd Books is going to be in its place.’
Wilbur was beginning, slowly, to realise he was in some kind of trouble.
His mind shifted away from thoughts of the initial public offering he was preparing towards his wife.
‘I’m sorry I’ve been so busy recently.’
‘Recently? You’ve been busy since the seventies.’
‘Well, yes, I have. I underestimated how much it would take of me.’
The Dreamer noted the way Maggie was staring at her husband. Like she wanted to see more in him than was there.
‘Something changed inside you when your mam died,’ Maggie said.
‘I should have recognised it, but I didn’t.
Obviously Dougie dying was the root of it all, and never knowing your dad, but I think there was still hope you could get through that.
Even inside your ambition. But when your mam died the lights went out.
Before that I liked you focusing on work because I believed you when you said it was about us.
You were wanting to make a better future for us.
We were going to retire young. And travel the world. ’
‘That can still happen.’
‘My dad has Parkinson’s.’
‘Oh God, poor Alfred,’ said the Dreamer.
But the Wilbur in the room said nothing.
‘I found out a month ago but there was never the right moment to tell you. I want to be near him. I want to go to Sheffield. I want to move back.’
The Ghost told his younger dreaming self to watch closely. ‘Look. Look at our first reaction. It isn’t about Alfred. It isn’t about Maggie. Look.’
And, indeed, it wasn’t.
‘I can’t move back, Mags. I can’t. I need to be in London to oversee the IPO. The company’s going public. We’re going to be on the stock market. After that I can take a back seat. But right now, I have to be in London … There’s no way I can’t be here.’
Maggie stared at him as tears glazed her eyes. ‘There is a way. You just can’t see it. We’re nearly fifty. You always said you would quit at fifty.’
‘Well, I’m nearly able to. I just have to make sure everything is handled right, and if the market flotation goes well—’
‘You didn’t used to talk like this.’
Wilbur looked around at their plush living room. ‘Look what we’ve achieved, though. Look at this place.’
‘This wasn’t my dream, Wilbur.’
‘It’s a comfortable life. A dream life.’
Maggie laughed bitterly. ‘Whose dream? I haven’t worked for this.
You know I never wanted this. To rattle around all day, in guilty luxury, with nothing to do apart from Tuesdays when I go to Newham and help out at the trust …
That’s it. I don’t have any contact with old friends.
I haven’t seen Doreen in years, and have only met her Rosie once.
Claudette won’t speak to me because of the Charlie business.
And everyone round here is a millionaire’s wife … ’
‘You are a millionaire’s wife. It doesn’t define you.’
She stared at him as a tear fell. ‘To be a wife you have to have a husband. Someone who doesn’t want to avoid you. Someone, you know, who looks out for the broken glass.’
‘Broken glass? What are you talking about?’
The Ghost and the Dreamer knew what she was talking about. But the middle-aged Wilbur in the room was struggling.
‘Remember when we were kids and I first met you? When I was with Doreen on Glossop Road.’
‘When I denied I had a brother,’ Wilbur said, full of self-loathing.
‘No. I don’t mean that part. I mean the part where you told me to look out for some broken glass on the street. I thought it was the most romantic thing ever. To have a boy think of me like that.’
‘I can’t remember. But, Maggie, you are still everything.’
She shook her head firmly. She shut away tears. ‘No. I am just a woman who makes macaroni cheese for one till the rest of time. I just sit here reading and trying not to go insane.’
‘You do tons. You have your art, you have the charity, you have the book club—’
‘The book club?’
Of all the stupid and patronising things Wilbur was saying, the one he regretted most was bringing up the book club. She didn’t like the book club. She had told him that. She wanted to get out but was too polite to leave.
‘Do you ever feel this isn’t our real life?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I mean, this wasn’t the plan. This wasn’t what we got married for.
To spend no time together. I feel like there is a real us, somewhere else …
An us that was content with the world we had and didn’t need the moon and the stars as well.
An us that is happy at least some of the time.
We left that couple somewhere else. We aren’t us any more.
We didn’t need luxury once upon a time. We just needed a bench. ’
‘Maggie, this is just life. This is just midlife … stuff. We’re not teenagers any more.’
‘But why were we so much wiser as kids than we are now? Why could we not keep some of that? If I truly thought you were happy, I’d go with it.
But you aren’t happy, not really. You’re not.
You are always tense and somewhere else.
And what if we die like this. What if you just keel over.
’ She had a lot to release. And it wasn’t going to stop.
‘I don’t mind that you didn’t remember the doctor or that you forgot our anniversary—’
‘Please—’
‘—I just don’t feel I fit. I don’t fit back home because I have money, and I don’t fit round here because I’m not from money.
They all laugh at my accent, think art is just something to buy but not actually do, think Thatcher was the greatest prime minister since Churchill, perpetually wonder why we don’t have kids like that was my only function, like life is just a pre-designed plan and I haven’t followed it, and they ask me if I feel unsafe working with AIDS patients …
and they certainly don’t like my stupid damn disaster of a fruitcake.
’ Her voice cracked on the word ‘fruitcake’.
‘I will never be accepted by them. It’s not my world and it never was.
None of it is real. They look down on both of us, deep down.
However much you earn, we aren’t ever them.
Even you. Especially you. This all came from graft, and that is ugly to them and I didn’t play lacrosse and the only Latin I know is carpe diem which is a bit ironic because the one thing I haven’t done is carpe any diem and now I’m practically fifty with health scares and bad hips.
I gave up a job I liked and a city I loved.
They were my choices, I know, but choices I made for you.
And I’ve just sat here in the … the … sidecar of your ambition … ’
‘Maggie.’
‘And now I hate myself even more for being such a spoiled, whining person.’
‘Maggie.’
She took a breath. Stared at the face on the cover of Marie Claire magazine on the coffee table. ‘But maybe our life was meant to be improvised and maybe both of us were bad at that.’
‘I have had so much on.’
She sighed. Not cross. Just tired. ‘When does it stop, Wilbur? When do you realise you don’t have holes in your shoes any more?’
‘Maggie.’
‘It sounds silly but sometimes I wish I was the stock market so you could pay me some attention.’
‘Maggie.’ He just kept saying her name, as if he had nothing else. ‘Maggie.’
She wiped a tear from her eye. Looked at him with a resolute face.
‘I don’t blame you. We were both trapped in our different ways.
Both too wanting an order in the chaos. But I think we have to face where we are.
If we had focused on us, just us two, then all the other things – work pressures, social pressures, family pressures – we could have stood it all.
We could have improvised. Made it up. But that is not what we are now.
And we haven’t been that for a long, long time.
So I am going to Sheffield. And you can come with me.
Or not. I am just saying what’s happening. What I have to do.’
Wilbur looked hurt, and still wasn’t really able to understand. ‘Is there someone else?’
She flinched at the question. Stared at a large cushion with too many tassels on it. ‘No, Wilbur.’
‘She’s telling the truth,’ the Ghost said.
‘In two years she’ll have a brief relationship with a sculptor called David up in Sheffield.
She won’t be happy, but also she won’t miss being neglected by us.
It will fizzle out and she will live alone, like you do.
She’ll be happier doing it than you. But she’ll still wish it was different.
She’ll still miss the old you. The one she always wanted. ’
Maggie clasped her hands together until her knuckles whitened. She stared at her husband for a long time, as if looking for him. ‘There is no one else. But that’s not the point. There isn’t even us.’
And, as the Ghost told his dreaming companion, two days later it happened.
Maggie wrote a letter and caught a train north, with more bags than she could carry, and didn’t come back again.
Wilbur had done everything to try and make her stay, except provide an actual reason.
And his two alternate selves, both the one who dreamed and the one who died, stood behind him as he read the letter.