A Traitor to Memory

“It's all right,” he said. “You don't need to …” To what? Saying the words would take them somewhere neither wanted to go. Webberly settled on, “You don't need to coddle me. I can manage with cornflakes.”


She smiled. “Of course you can manage with them, darling. But every once in a while, it's lovely to have a proper breakfast. You've the time, haven't you?”

“There's the dog to walk.”

I'll walk him, Malcolm. But that was an announcement she could not make. Not after yesterday's proclamation about gardening. Two defeats in a row would be an injury that she wouldn't want to risk inflicting on herself. Webberly understood that. The hell of it was, he'd always understood it. So he was unsurprised when she said, “Let's see how the time goes, shall we? I expect there's enough. And if there's not, you can cut short Alfie's walk. Just down to the corner and back. He'll survive.”

She crossed the room, kissed him fondly on the top of the head, and left. In less than a minute, he could hear her banging about in the kitchen. She started to sing.

He pushed himself off the edge of the bed and plodded along the corridor to the bathroom. It smelled of mildew from grout round the tub that needed cleaning and a shower curtain that needed replacing, and Webberly shoved open the window fully and stood in front of it, breathing in the sodden morning air. It was the heavy, tubercular air of an approaching winter that promised to be long, cold, wet, and grey. He thought of Spain, of Italy, of Greece, of the countless sundrenched environments round the world that he would never see.

Roughly, he shook off the mental pictures of these places, turning from the window and shedding his pyjamas. He twisted the hot water tap in the tub till the steam rose like an optimist's hope, and when he'd added enough cold water to the mix to make it bearable, he stepped inside and began to work lather vigorously round his body.

He thought of his daughter's reasonable question about insisting that Frances return to the psychiatrist. He asked himself what harm it could do simply to make the suggestion to his wife. He hadn't mentioned her problem for the past two years. On the twenty-fifth anniversary of their marriage—with retirement looming—how unforgivable would it be to imply that the opportunity for a different life was fast approaching them, and in order to have that different life, Frances might want to consider how best to address her problem? We'll want to do some traveling, Frannie, he could tell her. Think of seeing Spain again. Think of Italy. Think of Crete. Why, we could even sell up and move to the country as we once talked of doing.

Her lips would form a smile as he spoke, but her eyes would show the incipient panic. “Why, Malcolm,” she'd say, and her fingers would clutch: the edge of her apron, the belt of her dressing gown, the cuff of her shirt. “Why, Malcolm,” she'd say.

Perhaps she'd make the attempt at that point, seeing that he was in earnest. But she'd make the attempt that she'd made two years ago, and it would doubtless end where that attempt had ended: with panic, tears, a phone call by strangers on the street to nine-nine-nine, paramedics and ambulance and police dispatched to Tesco's, where she'd taken herself by taxi to prove she could do it, darling … and afterwards a hospital, a period of sedation, and reinforcement for every terror she felt. She'd forced herself out of the house to please him. It hadn't worked then. It wouldn't work now.

“She has to want to get well,” the psychiatrist had told him. “Without desire, there is no exigency. And the internal exigency that demands recovery cannot be manufactured.”

So it had been, year after year. The world went on while her world shrank. His world was joined inextricably to her world; sometimes Webberly thought he would suffocate in its smallness.

He rinsed long in the water. He washed his thinning hair. When he was done, he stepped out of the tub into the bone chill of the bathroom where the window still gaped, letting in a last few minutes of the morning air.

Downstairs, he found that Frances had been as good as her word. A full breakfast was laid out on the kitchen table and the air was redolent with the scent of bacon. Alfie was sitting at the corner of the cooker, looking hopefully at the frying pan from which Frances was removing the rashers. The table, however, was laid only for one.

“You aren't eating?” Webberly asked his wife.

“I live to serve you.” She gestured with the frying pan. “One word from you and the eggs go on. When you're ready for them. Any way you want them. Any way you want anything.”

“D'you mean that, Fran?” He pulled out his chair.

“Scrambled, fried, or poached,” she declared. “I'll even do them deviled for you, if you've a mind for that.”

“If I've a mind for it,” he said.