Chapter 17: Invested
Two nights later I said, at dinner, that the scullery door looked well.
I had thought about the sentence for most of the day and I got it exactly right.
Not a question. Not a thank you. A remark about joinery.
Margot said Ken was reliable and had done the drawing room in ninety-eight.
And Julian looked up from his plate and said, “It was always meant to be there.”
Then he asked whether anybody wanted the last of the wine.
It was always meant to be there.
Four days earlier there had been a plain Victorian architrave with an eighteen-millimetre ledge on it that had been there since the house was built.
He did not say, I had it done.
He did not say, I thought it wanted finishing.
He did not lie, exactly, and he did not tell the truth either.
He simply moved the moulding backwards in time, in one clause, over a wine glass, in front of his mother.
That is when I stopped believing the thing I had believed for three years, which was that Julian Ashford did not notice.
Here is the distinction, and it took me most of December to be able to put it in words.
An ignorant man leaves the house at eight and comes back at seven and does not know what happens in between.
An invested man knows precisely what is happening, has decided he prefers it, and would rather not be asked to say so.
Ignorance is passive. Investment is a position.
Investment gets up at half past seven and telephones a joiner.
He had not stopped his mother's rule and he had not joined in with it, and I had spent three years reading that as weakness.
It was not weakness.
He had a wife who could put anybody in that dining room on the floor in under two seconds, and he had arranged his life so that she would not.
The kneeling was not his doing.
But the kneeling produced a very specific woman, and he lived with her, and she was easy to live with.
And when he found out, at one in the morning, that she was going down to the kitchen and pulling herself up on a door frame twenty-two times with one arm, he did not think: my wife is strong.
He thought: something in her is not spending itself.
I do not know that.
I have no evidence for it and never will, and I have said it out loud to two people.
But I know what he did the next morning, and he did it before breakfast, and he chose a profile that sheds.
Six weeks. That is how long I went without.
I want to describe what that does, because it is the only physical event of that December.
Sleep went first. Not insomnia; something duller.
I fell asleep fine and woke at ten past three every night, within about four minutes either way, and lay there.
The resting pulse came up.
I took it in the mornings with two fingers on the wrist, the way you do at a training camp, and over five weeks it went from fifty-two to sixty-one.
Sixty-one is a perfectly ordinary number for a woman of thirty-four.
It was not an ordinary number for me and I knew what it meant.
The counting got worse. I had always counted.
In December I counted things that did not need it.
Stairs, which I knew.
Panes in the drawing room windows, which I knew.
The number of steps from the boot room door to the yard gate, which is nineteen, and I checked it four times in one week to be sure.
There is a word for what that is.
I have since been given the word, in a room with a box of tissues on a low table, by a woman I liked very much.
I did not have the word in December.
I had nineteen steps, four times, and a pulse of sixty-one.
I tried other things.
I did wall sits in the bathroom with the door locked, which are quiet and horrible and do nothing for the hands.
I hung a towel over the top of the bathroom door and pulled on it, and the door frame flexed and made a noise like a tooth.
The garage had a beam.
I stood under it once, in the cold, and looked up at it and did not touch it.
Because the garage is across the yard, and the yard is shingle, and the shingle tells the house who is walking on it.
That is the sentence I would put on the whole of that winter.
There was a beam in the garage, and I could not use it, because the gravel would have said so.
On the eighth of December, Margot announced Christmas.
Twenty-two, she said.
Sitting down, at the long table, both leaves in.