She did my washing once, which I did not ask for, including two work blouses that are dry-clean only and which came out of
that machine the size of a child’s.
She answered my landline. She told a colleague of mine that I was resting.
And she sat in my chair. The one by the window. She sat in it every evening from about seven, with the television on, and when I came in she would look up and say “there she is” in a voice like a hand on the top of your head.
None of that is anything. That is the point of it. Every single item on that list, said out loud in a room, makes the person saying it sound unhinged.
She reorganised a cupboard. She sat in a chair. She is sixty-four and she has nowhere else to be.
That is the whole architecture of it, and any woman who has lived it knows exactly what I am describing and any woman who has not thinks I am describing
a cupboard.
What the marriage actually was.
Ivan and I met in 2017 and married in 2019 and by about 2023 we were two people who were very polite to each other.
There was no affair. He never lifted a hand. He was not cruel, exactly; he was absent in a way I could not photograph.
We had stopped talking about anything that mattered some time around the spring of 2022, after we stopped trying for a baby, which is a sentence I have written four times and deleted three.
And by 2025 I was doing a thing I now recognise as a whole category of behaviour. I was building a case.
Not out loud. Privately. A little accumulation. He did not ask about the Braemer contract. He booked the tickets without checking my diary. He said whatever you want about the kitchen and then sulked for a fortnight.
Nothing
on that list would survive being said out loud to a third party. Together they were, in my head, a verdict.
And I had the verdict and I did not have the nerve. That is the truth of the March, the April and the May.
