S. Watson - Before I Go to Sleep - A Novel

I slip the envelope between the pages of my journal. I am crying as I write this, but I don’t feel unhappy. I understand everything. Why he left me, why he has been lying to me.

Because he has been lying to me. He has not told me about the novel I wrote so that I will not be devastated by the fact that I will never write another. He has been telling me my best friend moved away to protect me from the fact that the two of them betrayed me. Because he didn’t trust me to love them both far too much to not forgive them. He has been telling me that I was hit by a car, that this was an accident, so that I don’t have to deal with the fact that I was attacked and what happened to me was the result of a deliberate act of ferocious hatred. He has been telling me that we never had children, not only to protect me from the knowledge that my only son is dead, but to protect me, too, from having to deal with the grief of his death every single day of my life. And he has not told me that, after years of trying to find a way for our family to be together, he had to face the fact that we couldn’t be and take our son and leave in order to find happiness.

He must have thought that our separation would be for ever, when he wrote that letter, but he must also have hoped that it would not, or else why write it? What was he thinking, as he sat there, in his home, our home as it must once have been, and took out his pen and began to try to explain to someone who he could never expect to understand why he felt he had no option but to leave her? I am no writer, he said, and yet his words are beautiful to me, profound. They read as if he is talking about someone else, and yet, somewhere inside me, under the skin and bones, the tissue and blood, I know that he is not. He is talking about, and to, me. Christine Lucas. His broken wife.

But it has not been for ever. What he hoped for has happened. Somehow my condition has improved, or else he found separation from me even harder than he imagined, and he came back for me.

Everything seems different now. The room I am in looks no more familiar to me than it did this morning when I woke up and stumbled into it, trying to find the kitchen, desperate for a drink of water, desperate to piece together what happened last night. And yet it no longer seems shot through with pain, and sadness. It no longer seems emblematic of a life I cannot consider living. The ticking of the clock at my shoulder is no longer just marking time. It speaks to me. Relax , it says. Relax , and take what comes.

I have been wrong. I have made a mistake. Again and again and again I have made it; who knows how many times? My husband is my protector, yes, but also my lover. And now I realize that I love him. I have always loved him, and if I have to learn to love him again every day, then so be it. That is what I will do.

Ben will be home soon — already I can feel him approach — and when he arrives back I will tell him everything. I will tell him that I have met Claire — and Dr Nash, and even Dr Paxton — and that I have read his letter. I will tell him that I understand why he did what he did back then, why he left me, and that I forgive him. I will tell him that I know about the attack, but that I no longer need to know what happened, no longer care who did this to me.

And I will tell him that I know about Adam. I know what happened to him, and though the thought of facing it every day makes me cold with terror, that is what I must do. The memory of our son must be allowed to exist in this house, and in my heart, too, no matter how much pain that causes.

And I will tell him about this journal, that finally I am able to give myself a narrative, a life, and I will show it to him, if he asks to see it. And then I can continue to use it, to tell my story, my autobiography. To create myself from nothing.

‘No more secrets,’ I will say to my husband. ‘None. I love you, Ben, and I always will. We have wronged each other. But please forgive me. I am sorry that I left you all those years ago to be with somebody else, and I am sorry that we can never know who it was I went to see in that hotel room, or what I found there. But please know that I am determined to make this up to you now.’

And then, when there is nothing else between us but love, we can begin to find a way to truly be together.

I have called Dr Nash. ‘I want to see you one more time,’ I said. ‘I want you to read my journal.’ I think he was surprised, but he agreed.

‘When?’ he said.

‘Next week,’ I said. ‘Come for it next week.’

He said he would collect it on Tuesday.

I turn the page, but there is no more. The story ends there. I have been reading for hours.

I am shaking, can barely breathe. I feel that I have not only lived an entire life in the last few hours, but I have changed. I am not the same person who met Dr Nash this morning, who sat down to read the journal. I have a past now. A sense of myself. I know what I have, and what I have lost. I realize I am crying.

I close the journal. I force myself to calm down, and the present begins to reassert itself. The darkening room in which I sit. The drilling I can still hear in the street outside. The empty coffee cup at my feet.

I look at the clock next to me and there is a jolt of shock. Only now do I realize that it is the same clock as the one in the journal that I have been reading, that I am in the same living room, am the same person. Only now do I fully understand that the story I have been reading is mine.

I take my journal and mug into the kitchen. There, on the wall, is the same wipe-clean board I had seen this morning, the same list of suggestions in neat capitals, the same note that I had added myself: Pack bag for tonight?

I look at it. Something about it troubles me, but I can’t work out why.

I think of Ben. How difficult life must have been for him. Never knowing with whom he would wake. Never being certain how much I would remember, how much love I would be able to give him.

But now? Now I understand. Now I know enough for us to both live again. I wonder if I ever had the conversation with him that I had been planning. I must have, so certain was I that it was the right thing to do, but I have not written about it. I have written nothing for a week, in fact. Perhaps I gave my journal to Dr Nash before I had the opportunity. Perhaps I felt there was no need to write in my book, now that I had shared it with Ben.

I turn back to the front of the journal. There it is, in the same blue ink. Those three words, scratched on to the page beneath my name. Don’t trust Ben .

I take a pen and cross them out. Back in the living room I see the scrapbook on the table. Still there are no photographs of Adam. Still he didn’t mention him to me this morning. Still he hasn’t shown me what is in the metal box.

I think of my novel — For the Morning Birds — and then look at the journal I am holding. A thought comes, unbidden. What if I made it all up?

I stand up. I need evidence. I need a link between what I have read and what I am living, a sign that the past I have been reading about is not one I have invented.

I put the journal in my bag and go out of the living room. The coat stand is there, at the bottom of the stairs, next to a pair of slippers. If I go upstairs will I find the office, the filing cabinet? Will I find the grey metal box in the bottom drawer, hidden underneath the towel? Will the key be in the bottom drawer by the bed?

And, if it is, will I find my son?

I have to know. I take the stairs two at a time.

*

The office is smaller than I imagined and even tidier than I expected, but the cabinet is there, gun-metal grey.