A thirtieth birthday is meant to be a milestone, but Tilda
wakes in the morning on that crucial first day of November, having obliviously
negociated the milestone in the night. She realizes, unsurprised, that she has
done so without any sort of bump, or certainly not enough to disturb her sleep.
She is now - she checks her watch, which is carefully tilted and easy to view
on the bedside table - seven hours into her thirty-first year. Much to her
annoyance as a child, she missed by half an hour having a Hallowe’en birthday.
Later she was glad of that. (though the Day of the Dead? That’s not too good,
she suddenly thinks). Anyway, today she feels not one whit different from her
usual self. Definitely she is unchanged and unfazed.
She is lying beside her darling husband of ten years, and
Magnus of course looks his own sweet and same self. He is still asleep - but
lightly snoring. Now that is a brand new phenomenon. Perhaps he is aging faster
than she is: surely snoring is an old-man thing. As if he has sensed her unkind
thought, he snorts and shifts his position, and thereby creates no more snores.
His breath is soft as a child’s again.
His face looks as smooth, as sweetly lovable as it always
has. More so, really. He actually became even handsomer since he shaved his
beard. Now she can see his nicely-shaped mouth properly and his good jaw.
Though, and this is odd given how she likes his new face, she sometimes misses
the beard. It’s as if he slightly became a new person without it, not the boy
she had married.
He is still lightly tanned from the summer sun, and she
notices, peering more closely, that the tan makes visible the merest threads of
white lines that ray out at the sides of his eyes. Hmm. She must check in her
mirror if such wrinkles are happening to her too, but she is fairly sure they
are not. She would already have noticed them on her own face. She is someone
who pays attention to details.
Magnus is two years older than she so will be a
bell-weather for her regarding what getting older will mean, in some ways at
least. They are different, of course, physically, she being small and dark, he
tall and fair. In deeper ways they are even more different. He is less complex
than she is, and, because he is, is unaware of the fact.
Anyway, so far, it seems that aging is a non-issue for
her. She experienced no dread in advance of this birthday, has had no sense of
some alarming threshold she was about to be pushed through. As with many
things, she was going to flit through this doorway without a problem and now
she has. Of course thirty is not forty, or, even more serious, fifty, by which
time everybody’s face, breasts, and bottom will have softened and begun to
droop.
She extends her arms out from under the covers and
inspects them. The loose sleeves of her nightdress fall back to her shoulders
and she flexes her hands: her skin is as smooth, her flesh as firm and her muscles as vigorous as they ever were.
Then she slips her hands back under the covers and feels her breasts: they are
still round, small, high. No one would guess she nursed twins for ten months.
But being thirty now is interesting all the same. She
feels there may be a significance in some small inner way that she cannot quite
put her finger on, or not yet. It may be just that she is no longer in her
twenties. She has always had a way of vaguely seeing decades in colours: the
teens were green, the twenties, a not quite-yellow, really a deep cream, the
colour of her favourite roses. What shade is hovering now? Will it be something
darker? Mustard? Brown? Over the next few days it will float into her mind.
What she doesn’t want to entertain yet is....that she may
have to face that she is no longer a girl. Girl.
That word, so incorrect these days to be applied, aloud, to anyone over
about twelve, has been still, secretly, an identity she has felt to be hers.
Being ‘only a girl’ has given her a certain leeway. To
allow herself to be a girl has meant seeing herself as someone still evolving,
not quite jelled into a mature, adult and responsible person. A girl is still
able to decide who she wants to be. A girl has not trapped herself, not really,
into a final mold. A girl can leap aside from a path is on. She can easily toss
away a behaviour, a way of reacting, that in a more settled-down person might
have to be considered habitual. Tilda wonders if, now she is thirty, the
freedom to try on different selves will turn out to have gone. Surely it need
not. Not if she is careful. She is not ready for burnt sienna, indeed any
bitter colour.
She has been fine with some kinds of change. It’s been
part of being still fluid. Her name has changed more than once. Marrying,
Matilda Moss became Tilly Stuart and cut her hair. As Tilly, she had hair that
it curled tightly in a black cap around her head. Then, a couple of years back,
she felt her period of being Tilly was over, and determined she was now Tilda.
The sound suggested a more serious, more complex person. Someone to be reckoned
with. Her hair altered too. She grew it long, began to wear it up in a tall,
curly fountain of a top-knot, or tied back in a wild bush of pony tail. These
styles make her look considerably more dramatic. Someone to reckon with. Maybe
on some long away day she will realize she is ready for the full Matilda again,
and have a long, fat, grey braid, become a witch. She’ll see. Nothing need be
final.
She has always known that, whatever small (or even what
less-exceptional others might consider fairly large) deviations she has allowed
herself, at bottom she is a good
woman, loyal, moral, and loving.
Truthfully, she relishes playing her various worthy and
demanding roles. She accepted with a whole heart her responsibilities as wife
and as mother, as well as her working identity as a teacher. Any breaks from
that pattern of being an exceptionally dutiful person have been mere blips.
Necessary, but of no very great significance. For her, they have been
exceptions that prove the rule.
Exceptions that prove a rule: she has
laughed about the irrationality of that empty saying when she has been teaching logic to her students. Yet,
outside the realm of pure reason, inside herself, she has lived it, and made
it work. Yes, she truly has. From time to time she has stepped aside from her path of simplicity and virtue, and
after each episode she has returned, refreshed, to her husband, her children,
and to her students and her classroom. Other people might not be able to maintain such a skillful balancing
act, but she can. She is someone who
thrives on a life that contains secrets. Variety, she finds, strengthens
her. She is such an honest person,
really, that she is excellent at deceit.
Amongst their
original academic circle of about twelve couples, eight have shifted
marital allegiances. Tilda
and Magnus are amongst the solid and satisfied minority who have stuck to their original mates and seem likely to
continue in the same manner. Many envy them. Even people who barely know them, point to
them as the prime example that it is possible for a marriage to work, and in a lively
way. They are attractive and clever and there is still a spark dancing between them. They are not
simply dulled into a routine of accepting what is easy and pleasant. They chose each other ten years
ago and are still making that same choice. It is a conscious matter, their electing
to continue loving each other. Or so it seems. Or so Tilda thinks it seems.
Lying there beside Magnus she is cosy and will stay a
moment longer. The twins are not up yet or at least are very quiet, if they
are. She hopes they are not up to some naughtiness in the house. She listens
hard but all is silence except for a passing car and some birds busy snatching
mountain ash berries in the tree outside the open window. The leaves, after
their brilliant display in early October, have almost all fallen, but the
bright orange berries still hang in clumps.
The twins have promised to rake today the last of the
leaves in the back yard. It would be fun to be able to have a bonfire but fires
in the city have not been permitted for years.
Now she hears the children. They are whispering and
giggling and they are running along the hall towards their parents’ bedroom,
bare feet pounding on the hard wood floor; they both scorn slippers now.
They are in the room within two seconds of her first
hearing them and they leap across the rug in three bounds like dancers, and are
onto the bed. She moves her legs in the nick of time to escape their full
weight. Not that they are heavy children. They are leaner than most of their
friends, and not tall, not yet. Magnus and Tilda both hope that if one is to be
tall and one small, each following a parent it will the right way round, with
Imogen the small and Sam the tall. But the children are still very much the
same shape and size. Otherwise they look quite different, Sam with Magnus’s
eyes and colouring, and Imo.Who is Imo like? She has dark hair as does her
mother, but hers is straight. It is thick and springs back from her brow with a
kind of smooth richness of texture that is unlike either of her parents, and
her eyes too are different. They are very dark and set a little aslant. Both
children are handsome but they do not look particularly like brother and
sister, let alone twins. People find them fascinating, in their difference, as
do they themselves.
Tilda knows who Imogen looks like; she knew as soon as her
daughter looked up at her on the day she was born.
*
Magnus is aware that Tilly has been awake for a while and
has been deliberately keeping his eyes closed, feigning sleep. He has been hoping for at least the last half
hour that she’ll get up and go downstairs, leaving him alone. He yearns to lie
there quietly, awake, yet free of her presence. He isn’t ready to assume the
self he has to be with her. And - oh God - it’s her birthday, too: special
attentiveness will be required of him.
There’s something about the alert way she is lying there
that seems to exude the kind of self-certainty he has long found nigh
intolerable. He senses that she is aquiver with the sheer thrill of being
herself, the Glorious Tilda. He tries to keep his breathing even, his eyelids
from betraying him. His thought of her are cruel. So far, all he has allowed
himself.
But he hates to hide in fake sleep from the children. Sam
is jouncing up and down on his mother’s stomach and any second now will jump
onto his father.
The children. For ages Magnus has been inching his way
towards making an announcement that will bring their world down around their
ears. He keeps delaying taking such an irrevocable step. There will be such a
harrowing period to push through, for all of them, once he has done so.
Though when he thinks ‘for ages’ - that is, that he’s been
planning this ‘for ages’- it’s not
precisely accurate. Hovering it has been for several - how many he can’t say,
now - years but It’s only been over the past ten months that the situation has
become starkly impossible.
Choosing and buying a present for her, to mark today, has
felt wrong. It has been, is, wrong. A person should only give a present because
he wants to, because it’s a symbolic expression of caring. In the case of a
wife, loving.
The sad and unavoidable truth is that he no longer cares,
let alone loves. Indeed it is stronger than that; he actively does not care. He
dislikes his wife. He cannot respect her. He doesn’t hate her. That would be
too strong and imply, at bottom, love. Despising and hating are quite different
things. He’s some sort of throwback but can’t help the fact: if someone is
dishonourable, he can’t like them. Honour is a dated word in the world. But
lies sicken him.
*
Imo of course will not let him continue his pretence of
sleep. She has danced around to his side
of the bed, and ‘Daddy! Daddy!’ She bounces up to lie his chest, and pulls the
quilt down to fully expose his face. With her thumb and forefinger she gently
prises open his tightly closed eyes. ‘I know you’re awake in there,’ she says.
Her springy dark hair is tousled from her pillow and her cheeks are pink. His
sweet Imo. He clasps his arms around her and pulls her down against him, and
can feel her heart beating through the two layers of her nightie and his
nightshirt. They all have the same kind of night wear, Swedish, ordered by
Tilly from a catelogue. It’s part of her notion of them, a smiling quartet like
a catelogue family, and she often orders sets of things for them. The current pajamas are bright green and blue
stripes. Permanently smiling, such a family is meant to be. Well, he has to
smile at Imo.
And he watches Sam who shouts, ‘Catch!’ and throws high
into the air a small round package, and laughs as his mother catches it and
turns it in her hands. He has done the wrapping himself, using a lot of Scotch
tape. She shakes it; she smells it. She is grinning. She has always loved
presents.
‘Oh, I want to guess a little. I won’t open it till we go
downstairs.’ She leans over and kisses
Magnus. ‘Let’s be up! You’re awake at last. I’ve been lying here for ages while
you were still sounders.’ She kisses his
cheek. ‘I wanted to give you a little shake but I didn’t. Wasn’t I kind?’
Of course she’d not have guessed he was shamming. She’s
not the most observant of creatures, despite her conviction, often spoken, that
she is singularly so. It’s not just spoken by her, either. Other people often remark on ‘Tilda’s’ intuition, her
attention to little details, her astute sizing up of a situation, not realizing
that it is she who has claimed the talent rather than ever displayed it. It,
somewhat blackly, amuses Magnus the way people so often will accept the
statements uttered by someone with a forceful personality. Tilly is far from
the only person he knows who puts about a smoke screen. In her case, there’s the
added irony that she even believes it herself. So - is it even a smoke screen?
‘I do seem to notice things that others miss, just the little subtle messages -
body language, tone of voice,’ she often says, or something along those lines.
‘I’m funny that way.’ She’ll add a little self-mockery, underlining the
lightness with which she wears her mystique.
He staggers out of bed, Imo clinging to him. ‘You go down
with Mummy,’ he says, peeling away her hands. ‘I’ll be down in a few minutes.’
Imo looks up at him frowning. And then smiles.
‘Okie-dokie.’ He
and she have a tight bond: they’re never really cross at each other. Sam is a
darker horse.
‘Oh, but I want to open my pressies!’ Tilly puts on a
plaintive voice making Magnus wince inwardly.
‘Well, go ahead,’ he says, ‘but I have to go pee. And
maybe I’ll shave. I won’t be long.’
Having indulged himself in some anti-Tilly thinking, he needs some
minutes alone. Needless to say, she’s picked up nothing of his reluctance to
enter a day where she is ‘special.’
Her obliviousness of others’ separate and distinct
emotional worlds, specifically of course, his, will make what is coming a
lightning bolt out of nowhere. She’ll have picked up no clues in advance. Such
complacence as she possesses makes for terrifying vulnerability. Sad, really.
He feels pity for her. Contempt, yes, but he does have
room for pity as well. He can’t help it.
One feels dread to inflict a blow, however deserved, on someone so
insouciant, so oblivious of harm poised to strike. Soon. But not today. He’ll
give her a day’s grace. Yet one more! He’s said that to himself many times, and
again postponed having to see her incredulous face, to bring down upon his head
her tears and fury. One more day, for himself, then, as well as Tilly.
He never thinks of her by the tiresome new moniker she has
moved to, Tilda. ‘I am beginning a new chapter,’ she had announced.
Her ability to move into different roles is part of her
cleverness and why people find her exciting.
It is also, and more significantly, what has destroyed
them.
She said, ‘I will now be Tilda,’ and thereafter assumed
the appearance of a new dignity. She walked holding her head higher, moving
more slowly and with longer steps. Her entrance into a room took on a new
significance. People looked up.
Up to then her main role had been as Sweet Tilly, his
slightly childish, adorable and adoring wife. But even then there were
sometimes other lightning-swift switches of identity. There was another person
that he glimpsed sometimes for a dislocating moment. Yes, he can call up those
occasions of bewilderment even from quite early in their marriage. But when
exactly the first time was he can’t recall. Her shifts back and forth were so
sudden, her ‘normal’ mask in place so swiftly, he’d lose, till much later, the
memory of what he’s seen, if only for a second or two. Soemtimes he’d wake in the night and the most
recent incident would pop into his mind, as if it were a photograph. Tilly’s
face. She is coming in the door and there is a sly and amused and sensual look
on her face. She is lighted up by something, and he thinks, what has happened?
And then she is hers usual self again and he forgets. Until the image jolts him
awake at two in the morning.
But he knows now that he was in some subliminal way aware
of her betrayal of him long before he had had the full evidence before his
eyes. He had not been entirely surprised and that made it easier, both to cope
with inwardly, and to hide outwardly.
That had been almost exactly a year ago. His coming upon
her that day was a complete surprise, a fluke.
It had taken a second or two for him to take in what he
was seeing, to realize that it was actually her. She did not see him: his
existance had no relevance to who she was being just then - and those moments
of bemusement he’d experienced over the years all lined up. Click. He knew.
It was the purest chance, his coming into that cafe just
then. It was nowhere near his work and not the sort of place he frequented,
especially at lunch time. It was very French, very white-tableclothed, fussy,
with the kind of fancied-up, besauced food he didn’t care for. He had only
popped in because Nigel, a graduate student who worked with him, had been
stuck, needed a message taken to his mother-in-law who was most probably, but
not definitely, to come here for lunch today. Magnus had wanted a walk to clear
his head. Walking swiftly for miles through the city was the way he liked to
let an intransigent problem start to untangle itself. He would get back to his
lab, sit down and his computer, and find something had been released and he
could carry on. So - here he was, on the look-out for a woman he’d just met
onceto give her the news that her daughter was in labour and had gone up to the
hospital. The back of his mind was on his work and the forefront on Nigel,
Lillian, and Lillian’s mother. He was hoping that he’d recognize her, if indeed
she was within this too-warm, rather crowded restaurant. He stood just within
the narrow entrance-way. It was a sunny day outside which made the place seem
dark and shadowy, apart from all the white napiery.
He didn’t see any sign of the woman he was looking out
for, no back-of-head was sporting her looped up golden hairstyle.
But then - he saw someone far more familiar to him than
Lillian’s mother. Tilly. Tilly sitting over near the window. Her profile was at
first too dark against the light behind for him to make out her expression. But
then he saw how her cheek lifted in a closed-mouth smile and how she dropped
her lashes looked out from under them and leaned towards the man she was seated across from.
She was holding one of his hands. She she lifted it, turned it over and pressed
her lips to the man’s palm.
The man: Magnus’s eyes took in that other profile, the
face so close to his wife’s. It was no one he knew. He saw dark hair, thick,
worn rather long. Tousled even, and falling in a swath over his forehead. Hair
that might not have seen a brush since rising from his pillow. A shadowed jaw
indicated carelessness about shaving, or, again, a hasty tumble out of bed.
Was it a handsome face? He wouldn’t say that, but even he,
as another man, could pick up an aura of sexuality. The wide mouth was closed,
smiling very slightly. The man reached out the hand unclasped by Tilly and stroked
the side of her neck, his fingers slipping a little under the edge of her loose
shirt. He himself was wearing a somewhat grubby-looking fisherman’s-style
sweater. The cuffs were stretched and completely covered his wrists, even part
of his hands. They were narrow hands. There was something catlike, almost
genderless, about him. Magnus himself was never able to stand a sweater falling
over his hands like that. Or to sit in that folded over way, as this man did,
leaning towards Magnus’s wife and whispering to her.
He realized that Tilly’s hair was messy too. He hadn’t
taken that in at first. Curly hair can often look wild. But generally not as
wild, as poking up at the back, as at this moment.
Magnus backed out of restaurant. The details, stared at
for perhaps only one full minute, stayed before his eyes for the rest of the
day.
*
Shaved and dressed, he enters the kitchen on this
thirtieth birthday morning of hers. He sees the trio seated at the long oak
table in the window where they always have breakfast, the two sweet children on
the window seat, his terrible wife with back to him. Her hair is piled and
pinned up and the tender back of her neck is exposed, rising above the bright
blue of her dressing gown collar.
He finds himself suddenly very clear in his head. He cannot imagine how he has waited so long
to do this.
‘Children,’ he says. ‘I need to talk to your mother and I
need you both to stay here and finish your breakfast while I do so.’ They look up in surprise at his tone of
voice, so serious.
But, ‘Okiedokey,’ Imo says. He knows she is thinking it is
something to do with a birthday surprise, that his seriousness is of the mock
variety. Sam frowns but then waves his
milk-dripping spoon. His mouth is too full for speech. For her part, Tilly
leaps up and laughs, and sweeps ahead of him out of the room.
She too thinks a treat is afoot.
‘The den?’ she asks, ‘will that do?’
He feels none of the pity he’d thought he would, when this
moment was only in prospect.
It is the vivid recalling he just did while shaving that
has done it. Reliving that moment in the restaurant. And other moments, other
glimpses, other phone calls overheard. Many others, once he was alerted to
them.
He discovers there is something satistfying about
savouring incipient cruelty. He closes the door of the den behind them, slowly.
Slowly he turns to her.
A pleasure delayed is a pleasure multiplied. He waits a
little longer. He smiles.
And then he speaks.
Eeeeeeh! I'm having emotions!
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