The Headland: Part 6

Once she was home from the colliery, Alice put her shopping in the fridge and lit the fire in her sitting room. Hetty had hurried upstairs to bury the bones from the butchers under the blankets of her bed. Alice sank into her battered, claret-velvet sofa and watched as the fire began to catch and crackle. She thought again about Bakewell, the one-eared cat who had travelled the world and even walked around the rings of Saturn in order to find his own fireside companion. Alice hadn’t taught Esther again but the girl had always remained in her thoughts, and in her heart, like a treasured and much-loved book that had its own special place on a shelf. Eventually, Esther left the tiny church primary school to go to the vast comprehensive school in the colliery. When they waved Esther’s class off for the last time, even Gillian Howard, never known for her sensitive or poetic nature, was affected, ‘Poor little Esther Wright, she’s going to be like a dandelion seed caught in a hurricane when she gets to that place.’ 

 

In fact, the year Alice taught Esther was a tempestuous one for many reasons. It was the year he had come into her life, with the ferocity of a whirlwind, his torrent of words brimming with love and adoration. Her mother had not yet had cause to speak of the dangers of mistaking pain for love. If Alice had been able to step outside of herself, she might have noticed all the tears she shed during the two years they were together. She might have asked herself why that was, why she suddenly cried at everything: at an old lady struggling with her shopping trolley, at a smashed cup or a broken egg yolk, at a poster for a lost dog or a television advert for the Yellow Pages. She might have wondered where all those tears came from. She might have detachedly observed that all of her tears were for other people. There were no tears for herself. Not then. They were to come later.

Now, with the clarity of years passed, when she looked back at time spent with him, she saw a blasted battlefield, a tangle of barbed wire and stifling silence. When she had met him, she had been flattered by the immediate intensity of his feelings. They had never lived together, yet he wanted to be with her always. One night, after a particularly tiring day at school, he had called to say he was setting off to see her. Alice said she was exhausted and wanted a bath and an early night, and that she had a pile of books to mark before bedtime. He wept down the phone, ‘But I need to see you, don’t you understand. I needto see you.’ It was exhilarating to feel so needed, so adored. ‘He’s like Heathcliff,’ she once foolishly said to her mother. ‘A brutal thug? I certainly hope not,’ her mother had replied. But yes, that is exactly what he turned out to be. He buoyed her up upon the balmy currents of his words and devotion, only to bring her crashing down by hours or days of chilling indifference. He could switch between the two extremes of emotion with the casual apathy of a man on a train flicking the pages of a newspaper.

The signs were always there, Alice had come to understand, right from the very beginning. She had chosen to look the other way. One Saturday morning early in their relationship, they were sitting at the kitchen table eating breakfast. Atticus, Alice’s enormous silver tabby cat, was balanced on her knee, nonchalantly pretending to ignore the scraps of bacon left upon the plates. He sat opposite Alice reading the newspaper. He had barely spoken all morning. He sat in a sour fug of unarticulated disapproval. Alice had tried ignoring this, brightly cooking breakfast and chatting about her plans for the day; she had arranged to meet her mother in the city for lunch and shopping. He silently sat, loaded with internalised rage like an unexploded grenade. Alice picked a piece of bacon rind from her plate and fed it to Atticus. The cat took it haughtily, as if he were doing her a great favour and cast a diffident glance at the plate to assess the potential for more exhausting rewards. 

‘I wish you wouldn’t feed the cat at the table. It’s disgusting. This house is dirty enough as it is,’ he had said it coldly, provocatively meeting her gaze. It was true that Alice was naturally disorganised and her house was cluttered with last night’s clothes discarded on the floor, books and papers piled on tables and tea cups in the sink, but to hear he thought he house was dirty was shameful. She could not remember a time as an adult she had been spoken to with such unabashed nastiness.

‘What’s wrong?’ she asked, struggling to understand the source of his aggression. She reached out to touch the pink roses he had brought her the previous night. She had arranged them in a cobalt blue earthenware vase and put them on the table, ready for their drowsy weekend breakfast. She hoped that by touching the waxy frailty of the petals, she could somehow rediscover the tender and loving man who had brought them to her and banish the person who had just spoken to her like she was a disagreeable child. He stood up abruptly and left the room without speaking. When he returned he was shrugging on his coat. He didn’t look at her as he spoke. He simply stared into the middle distance, as if one glance in her direction would be too painful for him to bear. 

‘I came over last night to see you and I discover that behind my back you’ve made plans for today. . .’

‘But I said on the phone. . .’

‘Don’t interrupt . . .you’ve made your priorities clear. That’s fine.’ He walked around the kitchen table and stood behind her chair. Atticus scooted from her knee and slinked out of the kitchen, his body was low to the ground, his tail was bristled and full. She could hear him breathing behind her. Feel his looming presence. She was nervous. Frozen. This is ridiculous, she thought. How did we get here? What did I do wrong? She felt his hand on her shoulder, at first the touch was light and gentle, yet it was anything but reassuring. If anything, its spurious tenderness chilled, making time stand still, freezing everything in the room in its discomforting benevolence. Then he began to press his fingers deeply into her skin. ‘It’s such a shame. I thought we were spending the weekend together. I love you, but you’re so cold. I’m always last on your list of priorities. You’ll learn though. You’ll never find anyone else who loves you like me. Never.’ And with one final squeeze of his fingers into her flesh, he left the cottage. 

That night he called her, asking questions about her day: where had she gone, what time had she returned, whom had she seen? He told her how much he had missed her. She began to feel she had imagined the looming dread she’d felt at the breakfast table. She had overreacted. He had been disappointed not to spend the day with her, that was all. But the template of that Saturday, like a carefully choreographed dance of tenderness and brutality, became the template of the relationship. At first, the moments of sweetness and intimacy vastly outnumbered the demeaning comments and flashes oppressiveness. Slowly though, very slowly, the balance began to shift and the golden, warm moments began to diminish. It was a gradual process, insidious, like the creeping of an icy fog under the door of a warm, glowing kitchen. Looking back, Alice understood his manipulation. He gave meagre scraps of affection in order to keep the relationship alive. She tolerated the coldness and hunger, waiting to bask in the warmth of his loving approval once again, like a mistreated dog. At the end, all she was left with was the relentless, bone-aching fatigue of living with dread, day in day out. Joy for her, became simply the lack of pain. It was no longer a singular emotion in its own right. She would cry for the blackbird with the broken wing or the motherless child in her class. For herself, she felt nothing. She lived in a vacuum. Like a tightrope walker, she existed only in the moment, focused only on cautiously taking one more step. Focused on keeping everything balanced. On keeping everything steady. On keeping everything calm.

 

Alice sat by the fireplace, her feet tucked underneath her body, her hands wrapped around a mug of tea. She thought about her morning. During her conversation with John she’d experienced the fluttery, delicious ache of attraction. But then, in remembering what happened to John’s daughters and hearing such unsettling news of Esther, darker memories had been stirred within her. Memories of him. Memories of her own unravelling. A door had opened that morning, a door that she had successfully kept closed, locked and bolted for many years. Emotions and remembrances rushed towards her like a clamouring mob, demanding to be heard. Outside, the afternoon was darkening. Hetty snored in front of the fire. Her front legs quivered as she chased squirrels through the autumnal woodlands of her dreams. In her dreams, she is a pup again, Alice thought. She stood up and went to the hallway to find the blue phonebook. She set it on the kitchen table, ready. It was just three o’clock, but she was exhausted. Her raging thoughts needed to be quieted, mulched down into the dark tenderness of sleep. She’d have a nap. She’d look in the phone book later to find the address she needed. Tomorrow, she had a job to do.