Four months before Catherine
It is your drawing of the house that snips the final thread.
I find it face-up on the doormat, instantly recognisable, as is the title, in your beautiful artist’s script: Your Gingerbread House.
I throw open the door like a wild woman, already crying, and search the streets, head swivelling left and right, but you have gone.
Now I can look at the drawing more carefully, the tight pencil strokes of our thatch, the diamonds of the windows so exact, as if you’ve counted every one.
It is fairy-tale perfection, a house to disappear into, and it reminds me instantly of one of the ink drawings in my favourite book.
And of course, you made me one of these drawings before, the seaside restaurant where we had our first lunch, and I still have it, stashed along with the photos and clippings and letters, my hidden keepsakes of you.
There’s no thought as I pull down the staircase to the attic and climb up to retrieve the shoebox.
There’s crying and looking and touching and holding as I sit downstairs on the sitting room floor surrounded by you: magazine articles, bits of lined A4, photographs, like an exploding time bomb from our past. Paris.
Bristol. The beach. We look so young and so happy; this time my heart cannot be mended.
The front door opens and Joe and Sam come through it – Daisy is at a friend’s house, I hadn’t forgotten – and it doesn’t really matter that they find me like this, because I have tipped over the edge, there’s nowhere else to go.
I need to be caught and Sam knows this, with his firm, clipped ‘Joe, go into the kitchen and start your homework. I need to help Mum.’
And then he’s kneeling on the floor beside me, picking up newspaper cuttings that have turned yellow with age, and a photo of you in your university bedroom, bare-chested and smiling at me in a way that must hurt.
‘Jesus Christ, Catherine.’ Those are his first words, but there’s no anger, just sadness.
‘This …’ his hands are full of you, cuttings, photos, letters, ‘is madness.’
‘I’m sorry,’ I say.
I do say that. To Sam I have always been able to say sorry.
‘You should have told me. Catherine, you should have said.’
I didn’t tell him, because I couldn’t.
I had no words. My punishment for what had happened was never telling the truth.
My punishment was a life lived in silence.
This is what silence does to you.
It poisons you with a slow and suffocating creep, you and those around you, husband, children, the lover you may not have.
It burns from the inside out with the chill of liquid nitrogen.
It steals not just your thoughts and words but your feelings too, so you are left like a wooden block trying to impersonate appropriate emotion.
You can switch it on like an electric light, but you won’t fool anyone.
You try anyway; every day becomes like your own private street theatre as you learn the roles of wife, then mother, and act your way right through them.
When you allow silence in, when you keep a secret, not just keep it but hold it under as I do, pushing down with both hands, then you also feed the shame that surrounds it.
And shame is deadly.
It makes a mute of you, it chokes down your unsayable truth and wraps you in a firewall of hidden anger.
And this is your life.
‘Why did you leave him when you loved him so much? Why would you have done that? I don’t understand.
’
‘I left him,’ I say, ‘because of Jack.’