Six Weeks

Martin rang Ellis on the Tuesday and moved his start date to the first of October.

He did it from the back room with the door open, which was new, and I heard him say, “Family thing. Nothing terrible. I’ll do the October and November block and I’ll do it well, and if you need someone for September that’s fair enough and no hard feelings.”

Then he came out and said, “Six weeks. I’m not doing a year of this. Six weeks, we try properly, and at the end of it we both say what we think.”

“That’s not very long.”

“It’s six weeks longer than most people get,” Martin said. “And I know myself. If I give it a year I’ll spend ten months being pleasant about it.”

Which is a sentence I had heard, almost exactly, on a pavement in Leytonstone, from someone else, and I want it noted that men are not as different from one another as the books pretend.

—

We saw a woman called Frances in a consulting room above a dental practice in Dalston, twice, and both times cost ninety pounds and were worth about four thousand.

She was not what I expected. I had braced for someone who would want us to hold hands and describe our feelings as weather. Instead she was about sixty, with reading glasses on a chain and an air of enormous impatience, and in the first session she let us do our prepared speeches — Martin’s took nine minutes, mine took six — and then said:

“Right. Those were both very fluent. Neither of you asked the other one a question.”

Silence.

“Mr Lund. What would you like to ask your wife?”

And Martin said, “Why didn’t you tell me you were bored.”

“I wasn’t bored.”

“Frances, she—“

“Let her finish,” Frances said.

“I wasn’t bored,” I said. “I was unasked. There’s a difference, and the difference is the whole thing. Bored is about you. Unasked is about me being someone who stopped existing between about seven in the evening and midnight.”

“That’s not fair, I—“

“You watch television with your phone in your hand.”

“Because you’d already told me about your day!”

“I’d told you the weather of my day,” I said. “I’d told you there was a meeting and it was annoying. And you’d say ‘oh no’ and look at your phone, and you weren’t being cruel, you were being married, and I let it happen for two years and then I got furious with you for a thing I never told you about.”

Frances let that sit for a while. Then she said, to me:

“And when he asked, at the sink, you didn’t answer.”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Because—“ And I found it, in the room, out loud, which is what the ninety pounds is for. “Because if I’d answered him he’d have fixed it. He’d have started asking me questions on purpose, from a list, because I’d told him to. And then I’d have had a husband performing interest in me for the rest of my life and I’d never have known if any of it was real.”

“So you preferred him to fail the test he didn’t know he was sitting,” Frances said.

Nobody said anything.

“That’s you both,” she said. “You test him and don’t tell him. He agrees and doesn’t mean it. You’ve got two different ways of avoiding the same conversation, and they fit together perfectly, which is why you’ve lasted twelve years.”

In the second session she asked what we’d each done differently in the fortnight, and Martin said he’d asked me a real question every day and I said yes, he had, and that eleven of the fourteen had been good ones.

“Eleven out of fourteen,” Frances said. “Mr Lund, how does that land?”

“Like a mark,” Martin said.

“Yes,” she said. “Mrs Anyanwu-Lund, do you hear it?”

“I hear it.”

“Then stop scoring him.”

—

Here is the part I have to be careful about, because I know what it sounds like and I need you to believe it anyway.

It nearly worked.

Those six weeks were, in places, better than any six weeks we’d had since 2018.

He asked me about the roof and listened to the answer and then asked a second question, which is the only thing that has ever mattered to me in my whole life. I went to a rehearsal and sat at the back for three hours and watched him work, which I had not done since we were thirty, and I had forgotten — I had genuinely forgotten — what he looks like when he’s counting. There is a thing his mouth does. I had forgotten it.

We had a fight about the washing machine that was just about a washing machine.

And there was one evening in the middle of September that I have never been able to file.

He came in at about eight with a bag of chips, which we have not done since we were in our thirties, and we ate them out of the paper standing up at the counter, and he said, “Tell me about the schools thing.”

So I told him about the schools thing, which at that point was nine head teachers and a ramp and a fire strategy that made no sense, and I got about four minutes in and apologised for going on.

“Why do you do that?”

“Do what?”

“Apologise in the middle.” He was eating chips. “You’ve done it since I met you. You get to about minute four and you check my face and then you wrap it up in one sentence.” He looked at me. “I’ve never once wanted you to stop. I might have looked like I did. I probably did look like I did, and that’s mine. But I’ve never wanted it.”

And I stood in that kitchen and thought: there it is. That’s the sentence. That’s the whole thing I have been starving for, and it has arrived, and it is being handed to me by the right man, eight weeks too late, and I can feel myself not being able to eat it.

I said, “Ask me the next bit, then.”

So he asked me the next bit. And I told him about the fire strategy for nine minutes, and he listened to all of it, and at the end he asked a real question about the ramp gradient, and it was good.

And I went to bed that night and lay awake and could not find the thing I was supposed to be feeling anywhere in my body, and that is when I first understood that I was not going to be able to do this, and I did not say so for another eleven days.

One night in late August we went to a pub quiz with Ruki and her wife and came fourth and argued the whole way home about a question on rivers, and I laughed until I had to stop walking, and at the corner of our road Martin took my hand, and I let him, and it was fine — it was good — and then we got in and he said, “Was that alright?” and the whole thing collapsed, because he had to ask.

That’s what six weeks of trying is. It’s ninety per cent lovely and then somebody checks the score.

I did not see Daniel at all except at work, where we were correct and efficient and where he did, twice, argue with me in a meeting properly and out loud in front of Kwame, which is the only present he could have given me and which he knew.

I did not text him once. He did not text me. On the tenth of September he sent a single message to the project group: Truss six is up. Looks right. I looked at it for a long time and then put the phone in a drawer.

—

Joachim turned seventy-four on the sixth of September, and came to London for it, and we gave him dinner.

He knew. Of course he knew. Nobody had told him anything, and he had been in the flat for eleven minutes when he stopped in the hall with his coat half off and said, “Teresa. Who is unhappy?”

“Nobody’s unhappy, Joachim.”

He looked at me for a moment with his coat hanging off one arm, and then he said, “Ah,” and put the coat on the hook and went into the kitchen and was funny for four hours.

At the end of the evening, in the hall, with the cab outside, he held my face the way he has since 2013.

“He is my son and I will say a thing about him,” Joachim said. “Martin waits. He has always waited — for the call, for the tour, for the good year. It is not weakness. It is how he has survived a life where the arithmetic is cruel.” He patted my cheek. “But no one should have to wait to be known, Teresa. Not him. Not you. Whatever it is.”

Then he kissed me on both cheeks and got in the cab, and I have not seen him since except once, across a room, at a thing, where he was perfectly kind.

—

It ended on the twenty-first of September, ten days before he was due to fly.

We were washing up. Of course we were washing up.

“I’ve got a question,” Martin said, “and I want you to not answer it straight away.”

“Alright.”

He put the glass on the rack with great precision, the way he does.

“If he’d never walked in,” Martin said. “If there was no bloke, no pool, no Thursdays. Just you and me and this kitchen and the next ten years. Would you still be here?”

The tap was running.

And I want to tell you that I thought about it for a long time, and that I gave it the weight it deserved, and that there was some enormous struggle.

There wasn’t.

I knew the answer before he finished the sentence. I had known it, I think, since a Monday in February when I sat on the floor with a man restringing a bass and loved him completely and was not, in any way that mattered, in the room.

What took the time was finding out whether I had the nerve to say it, and the honest answer to that is that I stood at the sink for eleven seconds — the same sink, the same eleven seconds, the second time he had asked me a direct question and the second time I had a choice about it.

“No,” I said.

Martin nodded slowly, and turned the tap off.

“Right,” he said. “Thank you.”