The anniversary, p.1
The Anniversary, page 1
Contents
Title Page
Epigraph
Book One
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Book Two
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Book Three
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Book Four
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Acknowledgements
Copyright
‘To be sure, the future of the woman I have been may turn me into someone other than myself.’
– Simone de Beauvoir, All Said and Done
Book One
1
We must have taken fifty photographs for that book jacket. At least fifty. Go on, my husband said, Do it for me? Say it?
I rolled my eyes, and then did as Patrick wished. Honey-honey-honey. I said. Money-money-money. He clicked away. It was a joke, and it was true what he said – repeating the phrase made me laugh. It got him what he wanted, a sly grin of sorts, if not exactly a smile, a reasonable photograph. I don’t know why they need a photo anyway, I said, complaining while I took up a new pose. You know why, he told me. Because if we make you look beautiful people will buy the book. And if the reader can’t put a face to a character, they can at least give them yours. I know, he said. But we have to do it. Now go on, say it for me again.
I was nervous. I hated photographs. And soon this one would be printed thousands of times over. Patrick didn’t know this then, or not exactly. A week earlier I had received a phone call from my publisher who told me, in a state of great but hushed excitement, that I had won a major prize for the book that the photograph was intended for. No, Ada said. I’m not joking. This is not a joke. She had entered it as a manuscript, the release date was not supposed to be until spring. I’d not long ago handed in the final corrected proofs. But now they would go to press earlier. It will be tight, Ada said. We’ll have to bring everything forward by four months to make sure there are copies for the awards ceremony, and we’ll need to increase the print run. The news, she said, was under embargo, you cannot tell anyone, not even Patrick, she warned.
Not even him? I said. Why?
Because he is a total gossip, and because he loves you so much. I know things have been hard lately, but he really does, and because he couldn’t help but go tell people, and if word gets out that you’ve leaked the news – well, I don’t know. She was speaking quickly, but in a whisper. Her office was made of glass, and although it was thick safety glass, if she cried out with joy she would arouse people’s interest and suspicion.
Are you sure? I asked. This was not something I was expecting. It was a different kind of book to those I’d written before – more personal and sprawling, and it had taken a ridiculously long time to write.
My hands were trembling. I could feel sweat collecting under my armpits, my shirt dampening. Are you sure you’re right? I said again. I felt drunk, unsteady, a little sick.
Yes, she replied. I have the letter right here in front of me. The awards ceremony is in New York on December second. They say they’ll send more details in a couple of days. She had been speaking in a breathless gush, and now said, Wait, someone’s waving at me: there’s a meeting. Oh my God, I forgot about the meeting! I have to go, I’m so sorry, I’ll call you back.
I kept my word and didn’t tell Patrick, not before the photograph and not after. But I did tell my sister, May. After all, it was a book in which she herself featured as a character, a fact she liked to boast about even before the thing went to print. But I knew she could keep a secret if I asked her to. And of course I told Valerie, my agent. Normally, Ada had explained, the awards ceremony was held in London. But that year, in an attempt to curry favour with the Americans, it would be in New York. This was to the chagrin of many committee members, but somehow the power of American opinion held sway. It was, without doubt, the biggest event in the international literary calendar. The whole thing seemed so extraordinary to me, so unexpected. I felt almost afraid of what was happening, superstitious even, maybe paranoid – to the degree that I couldn’t bring myself to say the name of the award aloud or even in my own head, less I jinxed it. In conversation with Ada, and in my private thoughts, I called it just The Prize. It made taking the photograph seem so much worse.
Come on, Patrick said. Just one last picture for luck. Smile for me!
My publishing house had offered to pay for a professional photographer, but I could think of nothing I wanted less. If anyone asked me to put on a smile the left side of my mouth froze and the muscle beneath my right eye started to twitch. I tried it once for a previous book at Ada’s request, when I was too naïve to know I could refuse, and spent three hours in a room chilled by air conditioning, repeating this phrase, Honey-honey-honey. Money-money-money. It keeps your lips open at the right aperture, the photographer said. If you don’t want to actually smile, I mean. Because you want to appear inviting, he said. Like you’re about to speak, a slightly open mouth is what we want. Like you’re talking to the person who is looking at the photo, confiding. Open, but not overly friendly, like that, yes, perfect, if you could just hold that. Then we changed position and I repeated my mantra: honey-honey-honey, money-money-money, as the camera clicked away. Later we laughed about it, Patrick and I. But you never say that for me, he said. Won’t you, please? Go on. Say it, just once? Please? And then he did a kind of rumba in the living room, Honey-honey-honey, he said. Money-money-money.
So it was an old favour I owed him, to say these words while he clicked away. Afterwards we looked through the photographs together. Whatever, I said. I hate them all. You choose, I told him in the end. I really don’t want to know. And don’t tell me – which one, I mean.
This was just over a month before we were due to depart on a cruise that I had booked for our wedding anniversary, and I had other things to see to: visas to organise and insurance forms to fill out – that photograph was just one more task to deal with. We were coming up to our fourteenth anniversary, although we’d been together in one way or another for a couple of years longer than this, and that year I had wanted us, just once, to have a proper celebration. The cruise was elaborate: eighteen days and starting from Alaska. We were to fly out from London then board the ship at the port of Homer before crossing the Bering Sea and travelling down the coast of Russia towards Hokkaido, in the north of Japan. From there we’d head south, ending up in Osaka, where we’d take the train to Kyoto. I had planned all this very carefully so that we would arrive in Japan in time for the last of autumn. We would celebrate in the gold and crimson forest and he would kiss me as red star-shaped leaves drifted down and landed in my hair. I only needed to tweak the itinerary a little to get a flight to New York, in time for the prize ceremony. I was going to surprise him with this.
It would have made more sense, I suppose, to start in Japan and sail to America. But that would have meant celebrating our anniversary at sea, which wasn’t what I had in mind. Not for such a special one, fourteen being the year of ivory: patience and stability. A lucky year, some say, because the number is made up of two lots of seven. More to the point, I’d booked the cruise before the news of the prize came in. And although I had thought about trying to reorganise the trip, in the end I decided against this. The timing was tight but we could make it; we’d have two full days in Kyoto before I needed to be in New York.
We’d not done anything like this before, never been so extravagant. In fact, we’d hardly celebrated the date in any way. Each year, when our anniversary had come round we’d been too busy to do much more than have a meal out, maybe see a movie. Everything so casual. We talked about work. He was a film director with an honorary position at a prestigious university, and over time, as his films gained attention, pressures increased. Everyone wanted something more from him. Give something up, I’d said, over and over, let something go. He was exhausted. And things hadn’t been easy of late. Something needed to change. He would have been the first to admit that his schedule, at least initially, was a question of personal choice: doors were being opened, he had to step through them. If a script or a storyboard treatment was requested, he would deliver it. An occasional film became regular films, short films became feature-length films, each one accompanied by increasing publicity: interviews, panels, columns in the newspaper. It was, he explained without shame, just a case of capital. In those corridors one had to fight to make one’s name ever bigger and louder, more widely known – laying claim to the territory, buying it up, seizing power when necessary. Our anniversary was at the end of November; it had been a beautiful autumn wedding, but at that later stage in our marriage it meant the date fell in the middle of the pre-Christmas rush to meet release dates set for the new year, and Patrick was always too frantic to go away. So we would just eat out, maybe have a couple of drinks, and he’d fall asleep on the couch watching television. But that year I insisted on something else.
When I suggested the cruise, he was close to being completely burnt out. He’d let his hair grow long. He didn’t shower as often as he used to. He was important enough by then that these things didn’t matter so much. Really? he said. You really want to do that? He was reluctant at first, claiming that a holiday was too much effort: to pack, to travel to the port and stand in queues, deal with strangers at mealtimes and at the pool. He wasn’t up for this.
When we first met, he was one of the most beautiful and elegantly dressed men I had known: crisp shirts and shiny Italian shoes. A leather jacket for the winter and the rain. Now, just the feeling of a shirt collar made his shoulders tense and caused a pain down the left side of his neck. The collar need not be tight, just the possibility of something constraining him in any way was too much to bear. He turned up to major meetings in a T-shirt, jeans and sneakers. We made light of this, citing for each other Virginia Woolf’s diary entry where she pines for a pair of rubber-soled shoes so that she might go walking in comfort without her feet getting wet, and in this way we elevated my husband’s sartorial standards, describing them as an act of artistic emulation. Really, it didn’t matter that much to others, he could show up in whatever he wanted and still be admired, still taken seriously. Sometimes his T-shirt even had a hole in it. On his favourite black one the neck ribbing was coming unstitched. But between us we recognised the depth of his exhaustion. Let’s take those rubber-soled shoes travelling, I teased, just as Woolf would have liked.
Although it wasn’t only work. We had both been strained lately and things were bad with his son, Joshua, who was spending more and more time at our house. This too was taking its toll. At that point, we were living in a terrace next door to a vet. It was in a busy residential pocket of the city. Up the hill were rows of grand houses, owned by celebrities and bankers, all of whom possessed at least one very fine pure-bred dog. They were perfectly groomed, both the dogs and our neighbours, and perfectly trained: well mannered and chic. Down the hill the properties deteriorated, but the bookshops and cafés continued to proliferate, and everybody who visited these cafés also owned dogs, although these were mutts, as they say, rattier and less well behaved: bohemian dogs. So it was a crowded vet’s practice.
In recent months Joshua had started to throw horrifying tantrums. He was seventeen at the time and a late bloomer. His tantrums were those of an enraged teenager: hostile, sensitive, at odds with the world in the worst way. He hated easily, trusted no one, blamed his father, You ruin everything! he screamed. Up until this point he had been placid – even-tempered and amenable. Always a gentle child. But lately that persona had fallen away and he had become someone I hardly recognised. The smallest thing could set him off – a meal he didn’t like, the music his father played, a request to wear a jacket in the middle of winter – and he would start to yell. How much he hated us. How fucked up everything was, how everything was a fucking joke. It’s all your fault, he said. Patrick’s attempt to reason him down only made it worse until Joshua would just scream. These were not ordinary screams. They were not shouts of refusal or cries of protest. They were sustained, grating, high-pitched screams, animalistic yells that were uttered incessantly; louder and louder, almost without a breath between them. They were terrifying to hear, so full of adolescent pain, as if occurring in response to a repeatedly inflicted wound. At the commencement of these tantrums Patrick would speak calmly, asking Joshua to please quieten down, It’s OK, he’d say. Tell me what the problem is and I can fix it. But the problem was not the meal, or the jumper, or the blunt pencil or whatever object Joshua had projected his misery on to, the problem was the existence of his misery, something he struggled to articulate and could only express by fixing it to an inanimate thing in the world. The more Patrick tried to appease him, the worse Joshua’s tantrums became, until the volume and pitch of the screaming grew too much to bear, and Patrick would start to shout back. This only made it worse, the two of them eventually yelling insensibly at each other, beyond all control. Joshua did not respond to Patrick’s fury by calming himself, allowing himself to be shouted into submission. And Patrick’s rage only continued to escalate, until, in order to expel the demon, he’d leave the room and punch a door frame or kick the wide skirting boards, letting Joshua holler himself into exhaustion as if he were a small child.
The side effect of this was the issue of the dogs next door; the many dogs that were boarded at the vet’s. In the opening bars of Joshua’s tantrums the dogs paid him no attention: his voice expressed ordinary human rage. But as the tantrum progressed, increasing in volume and rising towards its sustained, sometimes unending crescendo, the dogs became distressed. They yelped and whined and howled. Between the noise of the animals and the noise of my husband and stepson, the situation was unbearable. I would sit at the kitchen table with my hands over my ears and cry.
It was in the summer when I came home late to one of the most extreme tantrums: I heard the shouting halfway up the street, the wind carrying their voices. This was only a couple of days after I’d handed in the final manuscript for the book, and I was feeling dazed and tired, absent-minded. When I got to the front door, I realised I had forgotten my phone and keys and that I must have left them at the house of the friend with whom I’d spent the afternoon. I knocked, but no one answered. I pressed the doorbell, but the battery was flat. I knocked again and again, louder. Still no reply. They were so consumed by their anger they couldn’t hear me. It started to rain. I banged and banged on the door, but still nothing. Eventually I accepted defeat and crossed the road to the phone booth and called the landline. Patrick answered and then let me in. But still the arguing continued – between Joshua and Patrick and then between Patrick and me because I’d told Patrick he should calm down – until at last a neighbour, the old woman from the adjoining terrace, knocked at our door. While Patrick dealt with this, Joshua wailed for me, and I went to him. Look, he said, pointing to a red welt on his calf. Dad hit me with a rolled-up magazine, he cried. He whacked my bare legs.
Did you? I asked Patrick when he stepped back inside, stunned at the vision of this, at the possibility.
He looked at me, his gaze loose and dark with exhaustion. I really can’t remember, he said.
Joshua went back to his mother’s house then and it was some time after this, later that day or maybe the one following, when I said to Patrick, Look, you might not want a holiday, but I have to get away from all this. For my sake – can you agree for my sake? He rubbed at his forehead, and at the skin just above the bridge of his nose. Yes, he said. I can do that. In his perpetual exhaustion, Patrick had become averse to adventure. What I would have liked more than anything was for him to have said, I’m so sorry for all this, for everything, I know this is not what you want. Let me take you away. Instead it fell to me to reply: Good then, I’ll make the arrangements.
2
There is something unimaginable about setting sail, the vast ocean stretching out ahead. It can make you feel that your whole life still lies before you – the blue vista bewitches. Our ship was named Adventure of the Seas. We stood on deck in the sunshine sipping our drinks and thought of this: what the future might be like. He had his arm slung about my waist, his hand rested on my hip. I could feel the heat of this, his body close to me. These were our halcyon days when real life could not touch us, although I knew it would have to begin again soon; I had promised him that we would be back for Christmas. Despite their arguments, Joshua had asked if he could spend those few days with us, much to his mother’s dismay. She makes too much of a fuss, he had said, with the meal and the presents, still insisting that they wore the stupid paper crowns that were always too big and slipped down to the bridge of his nose. He liked all this as a kid, but now it was just embarrassing. Patrick and I, on the other hand, went to no such efforts, preferring a walk in the park and a movie at home. I had always enjoyed these quiet days when we could be alone, but Patrick was flattered that Joshua wanted to spend the time with us. He liked the idea that his son was coming home for Christmas; there was something filmic to it, archetypal, even though Joshua lived in the same neighbourhood and we really didn’t do Christmas at all. But that was Joshua’s point, the thing that pleased him, and Patrick wanted to make amends.
