So Many Ways to Begin

He said, I should tell you something; I've been meaning to tell you for a while. He said, I've been speaking to your brother a little, to Donald, on the phone. She jolted, as if she'd brushed her hand against a stinging nettle, and she said oh? Yes? What have you told him?

Just, how things are, he said. That we're well. That you were working but you're not at the moment, bits and pieces. He asked me to say hello, he added. He wanted you to know that everyone's okay, that any time you wanted to get in touch you'd be welcome. He told me your dad's been ill but he's okay now.

They walked on, reaching a stile between two fields, and she turned to him as she climbed over it.

You didn't tell him where we were at all? she asked.

Well, no, David said, only that we were living in Coventry.

You didn't give them our address though? Our phone number? David shook his head.

I didn't think you'd want me to, he said.

I don't, she said. Promise me you won't, will you? He nodded.

Of course, he said. She jumped down from the stile, stumbling as she landed, and stood looking out across the rise of the field, over towards a strip of woodland with a church tower rising behind it. She brushed dry mud and grass from her hands and made a noise that sounded like the beginning of a laugh.

You don't mind that I rang him then? he asked.

No, she said, I don't suppose so. But I don't want to speak to them myself. Not yet.

He climbed over the stile and jumped down beside her, and almost without meaning to he carried the conversation further.

He said, but when do you think you will? When do you think you'll want to see them again?

She said, don't ask me that. Come on David, don't say things like that.

He said, don't you think you should at least write and tell them you're okay?

And she said, utterly unexpectedly, I have done.

A letter when she first got to Coventry, a photograph of their wedding, a Christmas card once or twice. The envelopes addressed only to her father, the messages brief and uninformative: I am well; I hope you all are well; take care. She told him this, and he wondered if there would ever be a time when they knew everything there was to know about each other.

And it was after this, walking away from the stile and up over the hill to the woods, once the echo of her confession had faded, that something slipped inside him. Perhaps because they were suddenly talking about these things, perhaps because she was answering him so calmly and firmly, in a way that made it seem fine to be talking that way at all, perhaps because he felt some kind of safety in being out of sight in the field there, with a barely clouded sky overhead and the slow groan of a tractor three hedgerows away; something slipped and he felt a rush of tears rising to the surface like bubbles of air bursting through him as he turned to her and said:

Eleanor I can't stand it she's out there somewhere and I don't know where she is or who she is or why she did it and I need to know Eleanor I so so so want to know what am I going to do why can't I know I need—

And she turned to him, immediately, and he was still speaking as he bowed his head into her embrace, and her whole body shook with the force of his shuddering tears. She didn't need to ask him what he meant, and there was nothing more she could say than I know David, I know, I'm sorry, I know.

It was the first time he'd said these things so clearly, and it was years before he said them again.

After a few minutes he lifted his head, wiped his face and said nothing more. She slipped her arm around his and they walked on, leaning together into the rise of the hill, climbing up to the small patch of woodland and out into the village. They found a bus stop at the edge of the village green, and he noticed the shop window of the potter's gallery and wandered over to have a look, and bought the vase. They went home, and although it was years before they went out to the countryside again, she did at least seem to be better for a time; leaving the house, talking about university again, letting the pills gather dust in the bathroom cabinet. He dared to hope that that might be the end of it, that they could go back to the way things were always meant to have been; so when she went back on to the medication after Christmas, dulled and shaken by a higher dosage, he began to feel that things might never really change, that this was the life he'd stumbled into, that he was trapped by something he could neither understand nor control.

35 Tobacco tin; used for storing buttons, beads, safety pins, c 1960s

She was fourteen, she told him, sitting on the quayside with two of her friends, laughing and talking about boys, enjoying the long evening and glad to be out of the house. She heard her mother's voice behind her, and was pulled to her feet. Spun around to face those hard, narrowed eyes.

Let me smell your breath child.

The words spoken low and calm, the gaze intent and steady, the grip on the arm already bringing a soft smudge of bruising to the skin. Eleanor's friends looking carefully in the other direction, edging away, brushing down the backs of their skirts with their hands. The cigarette floating away between driftwood and dead fish and polystyrene scraps, rising and falling on the swell, the paper unfurling and spilling burnt tobacco down into the dark water. Ivy leant closer into her daughter's pale face.

Breathe, she said. Eleanor looked at her. She exhaled as weakly as she could but Ivy must still have smelt the damp sour stink of cigarette smoke. She stood back and slapped Eleanor hard around the side of the face. Her friends jerked their shoulders at the sound and moved a few steps further away. Eleanor's face coloured suddenly and her eyes started to shine.

I'm sorry Mam, she whispered. I'm sorry. Ivy pulled her closer.

Don't give me sorry, she said, it's too late for sorry child. You'll get what's due and keep quiet, aye? Standing close to each other, intimately close, blind to anyone else, their world reduced for the moment to this self-enclosed space of anger and resentment and shame.

Eleanor tried to say something, sorry perhaps, or I won't do it again, or they made me, or any of the other weak responses she knew wouldn't be enough. But her words crumpled under the weight of Ivy's glare, and all that came out was something like a whimper.