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

The lowest step creaks as it accepts his weight, and I hear an exhalation as first one shoe is removed, and then the other. He will be putting his slippers on now, and then he will come to find me. I feel a surge of pleasure at knowing his rituals — my journal has keyed me into them, even though my memory cannot — but, as he ascends the stairs, another emotion takes over. Fear. I think of what I wrote in the front of my journal. Don’t trust Ben .

He opens the bedroom door. ‘Darling!’ he says. I have not moved. I still sit on the edge of the bed, the bags open behind me. He stands by the door until I stand and open my arms, then he comes over and kisses me.

‘How was your day?’ I say.

He takes off his tie. ‘Oh,’ he says, ‘let’s not talk about that. We’re on holiday!’

He begins to unbutton his shirt. I fight the instinct to look away, remind myself that he is my husband, that I love him.

‘I packed the bags,’ I say. ‘I hope yours is OK. I didn’t know what you’d want to take.’

He steps out of his trousers and folds them before hanging them in the wardrobe. ‘I’m sure it’s fine.’

‘Only I wasn’t exactly sure where we were going. So I didn’t know what to pack.’

He turns, and I wonder whether I catch a flash of annoyance in his eyes. ‘I’ll check, before we put the bags in the car. It’s fine. Thanks for making a start.’ He sits on the chair at the dressing table and pulls on a pair of faded blue jeans. I notice a perfect crease ironed down their front, and the twenty-something me has to resist the urge to find him ridiculous.

‘Ben?’ I say. ‘You know where I’ve been today?’

He looks at me. ‘Yes,’ he says. ‘I know.’

‘You know about Dr Nash?’

He turns away from me. ‘Yes,’ he says. ‘You told me.’ I can see him, reflected in the mirrors arranged around the dresser. Three versions of the man I married. The man I love. ‘Everything,’ he says. ‘You told me about it all. I know everything.’

‘You don’t mind? About me seeing him?’

He doesn’t look round. ‘I wish you’d told me. But no. No, I don’t mind.’

‘And my journal? You know about my journal?’

‘Yes,’ he says. ‘You told me. You said it helped.’

A thought comes. ‘Have you read it?’

‘No,’ he says. ‘You said it was private. I would never look through your private things.’

‘But you know about Adam? You know that I know about Adam?’

I see him flinch, as if my words have been hurled at him with violence. I am surprised. I was expecting him to be happy. Happy that he would no longer have to tell me about his death, over and over again.

He looks at me.

‘Yes,’ he says.

‘There aren’t any pictures,’ I say. He asks what I mean. ‘There are photos of me and you but still none of him.’

He stands and comes over to where I am sitting, then sits on the bed beside me. He takes my hand. I wish he would stop treating me as if I am fragile, brittle. As if the truth would break me.

‘I wanted to surprise you,’ he says. He reaches under the bed and retrieves a photo album. ‘I’ve put them in here.’

He hands me the album. It is heavy, dark, bound in something meant to resemble black leather but it doesn’t. I open the cover, and inside it is a pile of photographs.

‘I wanted to put them in properly,’ he says. ‘To give to you as a present tonight, but I didn’t have time. I’m sorry.’

I look through the photographs. They are not in any order. There are photographs of Adam as a baby, a young boy. They must be the ones from the metal box. One stands out. In it he is a young man, sitting next to a woman. ‘His girlfriend?’ I say.

‘One of them,’ says Ben. ‘The one he was with the longest.’

She is pretty, blonde, her hair cut short. She reminds me of Claire. In the photograph Adam is looking directly at the camera, laughing, and she is looking half at him, her face a mixture of joy and disapproval. They have a conspiratorial air, as though they have shared a joke with whoever is behind the lens. They are happy. The thought pleases me. ‘What was her name?’

‘Helen. She’s called Helen.’

I wince as I realize I had thought of her in the past tense, imagined that she had died too. A thought stirs; what if she had died instead, but I force it down before it forms and finds a shape.

‘Were they still together when he died?’

‘Yes,’ he says. ‘They were thinking of getting engaged.’

She looks so young, so hungry, her eyes full of possibility, of what is in store for her. She doesn’t yet know the impossible amount of pain she still has to face.

‘I’d like to meet her,’ I say.

Ben takes the picture from me. He sighs. ‘We’re not in touch,’ he says.

‘Why?’ I say. I had it planned in my head; we would be a support to each other. We would share something, an understanding, a love that pierced all others, if not for each other then at least for the thing we had lost.

‘There were arguments,’ he says. ‘Difficulties.’

I look at him. I can see that he doesn’t want to tell me. The man who wrote the letter, the man who believed in me and cared for me, and who, in the end, loved me enough both to leave me and then to come back for me, seems to have vanished.

‘Ben?’

‘There were arguments,’ he says.

‘Before Adam died, or after?’

‘Both.’

The illusion of support vanishes, replaced by a sick feeling. What if Adam and I had fought too? Surely he would have sided with his girlfriend, over his mother?

‘Were Adam and I close?’ I say.

‘Oh yes,’ says Ben. ‘Until you had to go to the hospital. Until you lost your memory. Even then you were close, of course. As close as you could be.’

His words hit me like a punch. I realize that Adam was a toddler when he lost his mother to amnesia. Of course I had never known my son’s fiancée; every day I saw him would have been like the first.

I close the book.

‘Can we bring it with us?’ I say. ‘I’d like to look at it some more later.’

We have a drink, cups of tea that Ben made in the kitchen as I finished packing for the journey, and then we get into the car. I check I have my handbag, my journal still within it. Ben has added a few things to the bag I packed for him, and he has brought another bag, too — the leather satchel that he left with this morning — as well as two pairs of walking boots from the back of the wardrobe. I had stood by the door as he loaded these things into the boot and then waited while he checked the doors were closed, the windows locked. Now, I ask him how long the journey may take.

He shrugs his shoulders. ‘Depends on the traffic,’ he says. ‘Not too long, once we’re out of London.’

A refusal to provide an answer, disguised as an answer itself. I wonder if this is what he is always like. I wonder if years of telling me the same thing have worn him down, bored him to the point where he can no longer bring himself to tell me anything.

He is a careful driver, that much I can see. He proceeds slowly, checking his mirror frequently, slowing down at the merest hint of an approaching hazard.

I wonder if Adam drove. I suppose he must have done so to be in the army, but did he ever drive when he was on leave? Did he pick me up, his invalid mother, and take me on trips, to places he thought I might like? Or did he decide there was no point, that whatever enjoyment I might have had at the time would disappear overnight like snow melting on a warm roof?

We are on the motorway, heading out of the city. It has begun to rain; huge droplets smack into the windscreen, hold their shape for a moment before beginning the swift slide down the glass. In the distance the lights of the city bathe the concrete and glass in a soft orange glow. It is beautiful and terrible, but I am struggling inside. I want so much to think of my son as something other than abstract, but without a concrete memory of him I cannot. I keep coming back to the single truth: I cannot remember him, and so he might as well never have existed.