Tricia loved being a mother and loved Doug beyond reason, but she had been very unwell in her first pregnancy and now found herself even more unwell and with a toddler to deal with. Doug was a year old, crawling, beginning to talk, totally demanding of his mother’s attention. Tricia was constantly queasy and easily exhausted. She miscarried in August 1951, in her fifth month, waking in the night to a tide of blood which terrified her. Mark left Doug with a neighbor and called an ambulance. In the hospital they could not help her until she had expelled the fetus, for fear of being considered accomplices to abortion. She felt sure she was dying, and demanded to see Mark to make him promise to have her mother bring up Doug. Of course Mark was not there. She wrote him an incoherent bloodstained letter, which she destroyed the next morning. She survived, but had to be given a transfusion. Two days later, back at home, she fainted when alone with Doug, but fortunately he was strapped into his high chair and did not come to any harm.
Two months later, in October, Mark brought home a bottle of wine once more. Nothing was said, but she heard his footsteps approach her door with dread. “Please, no,” she said when he came in.
“It is our duty to God,” Mark replied. “We don’t want too big a gap.”
His book was finished and sent off to a press. They heard nothing for some time. Tricia was pregnant again. Doug was eighteen months old and more demanding than ever.
Seven months into this pregnancy, at the end of the academic year of 1952 and with nothing heard about the book, Mark snapped at her when she asked about it. Tricia was nauseated and tired. She had entertained Doug all day and made a meal for Mark. “Why will you never talk to me about it?” she asked. “You used to talk about philosophy in your letters. I’m not stupid, you know.”
“Oh, you throw that in my face now, do you?” Mark spluttered.
“What?” Tricia asked, genuinely confused.
“My Third, when you had an Upper Second. It doesn’t make you better than me or cleverer than me.”
“I never thought it did!” Tricia protested. “The thought never crossed my mind. Mark, you’re clearly brilliant and the Third was a fluke. Everyone knows it. Elizabeth said so.”
“You shouldn’t discuss me with Elizabeth Burchell,” he said, but he seemed mollified.
“You’re a brilliant original thinker,” she said. “I’m nowhere in your league.”
“Well as long as you know that,” he said, leaning forward to stir the fire.
“I do. And the parts of the book I could understand really showed your brilliance. I wish I could have understood more of it so that we could talk about it. I could help you in more ways than just typing it. You know we used to discuss these things. In your letters—”
“I wish I’d never written you those letters,” Mark said. “You constantly bring them up in this way and throw them in my face. I believe you care more about them than you do about me. What did I say in them anyway? I can hardly remember them. Go and get them.”
Tricia could not believe that he really couldn’t remember them, but she made her ungainly way upstairs to retrieve them from the drawer where she kept them. She took off the ribbon which she used to tie them, a pink ribbon given her by little Rosemary Burchell on her wedding morning. She didn’t want him to scoff at her sentimentality. She did feel sentimental about them. They were the best part of Mark, so fluent, so passionate, so beautifully expressed.
Going downstairs with the letters under her arm, two years’ worth of letters, in careful chronology, she began to believe that they would melt his heart. They were the real Mark, she knew that. Surely seeing them again he would remember how he loved her, over all the everyday irritations of living together and being married, and Doug crying in the night and the fire smoking and dinner being burned or undercooked again.
He took the bundle from her without remark and drew one letter out from the center of the pile at random. He read a few lines, and she saw his face relax into a half smile. Then he looked up and saw her, there in front of him, her distorted belly making her stand awkwardly. “No, I should never have written these things to you,” he said, and thrust the whole bundle of letters into the heart of the fire.
Tricia stood gaping as the papers blackened and then caught flame and flared up. For a moment she couldn’t believe what he’d done, then she was weeping, on her hands and knees scrabbling at the fire with the poker trying to rescue any fragment she could. Mark watched her, bemused.
“They shouldn’t have meant that much to you,” he said, pulling her away from the fire. “Come on now, you’ll hurt yourself. You’ll hurt the baby.”
“I can never forgive you for this,” she said.
She looked at him, this terrible smug man she had bound herself to, Doug’s father and the father of her unborn child, her only financial support. He did not love her, he never had. She had loved him, but he had destroyed her love. He had burned her letters and she hated him for it.
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