She shifts, and I watch the way her hands rest over her belly, as if she’s protecting our baby from overhearing this discussion. I like that a lot, and I am momentarily taken by thoughts of the fantastic mother my wife is going to make. The distraction does not last long, because when Molly starts to talk, the stiffness has returned to her voice. I can see she’s fighting it – fighting to stay warm and open to me.
I reach down to stroke her hair gently back from her face and she looks into my eyes again.
‘You were coming home. You were going to get back the day before. I’d booked us a retreat, up in the Blue Mountains, and I thought we could ride the new bike up there.’
‘So did I at least call you to tell you I wouldn’t be there?’ I ask her.
‘You did let me know, but it was very last minute. I mean – God – we were on the phone the night before you were due to fly back and you didn’t say a word about staying longer.’
I don’t connect with this at all – it feels like she’s telling me about the actions of a deranged lunatic, which clearly a man would have to be to voluntarily miss such an occasion with this woman. My memories still refuse to come to the fore. I know I can’t force them – I spent a lot of time doing that when I first woke up and all fierce concentration seemed to do was give me a headache. Molly is my gateway to these memories. I try to focus only on her.
‘So I didn’t tell you on the phone that I wasn’t coming back?’
‘No. Actually, it was very late here, and I was lying in bed talking to you. I accidentally told you about the retreat, and you were laughing at how I had chatter-boxed my way into ruining the surprise. You told me you couldn’t wait to see me. I went to sleep and woke up and you’d emailed me to say you weren’t going to make it back.’
But I know this story only enough to know that she is missing the point. I don’t know it well enough to know what ‘the point’ actually is. I keep my hand in her hair, winding the silky locks around my fingers, watching the chestnut lengths against my hand. But then I remember the retreat and in an instant, the story stops being nonsense too and I understand it completely. My first reaction to the flood of memories that return is to lie and pretend that I am still clueless – I don’t want to tell her the truth about why I did not come home. The truth would show an insecurity in me that I’m not sure I would ever have been able to admit aloud before – not even to Molly.
I am all but squirming at the memories that arise because it is mortifying to recognise that I have allowed a weakness within myself to hurt my wife in such a brutal fashion. I can picture her waking up the day before our anniversary and smiling, and maybe checking her email on her phone as she rested in bed and finding the pathetic one-liner that I had sent.
I remember that too, now. It said something like sorry, Molly, something has come up. Can you reschedule the trip? – as if we had been talking about going to the grocery store together but now I was stuck at the office.
I remember too the punch of guilt in my stomach when I did make it home and she showed me the motorbike, and the automatic but dastardly resentment I felt at the very sight of it. I had wanted that bike forever and it was such an exorbitant purchase, but Molly could make it with a single phone call and not much thought at all. Instead of feeling blessed, I felt angry – and powerless, because this was just the reality – she was wealthy, I was not, and there was nothing at all that I could do about it. I knew that when I married her. I didn’t need it rubbed in my face every anniversary – and yet, to say anything at all would make me a bastard.
These things about me are ugly and I feel shame, and I also feel defensive. There were genuine reasons to stay in Iraq at that stage too; a ground swell of dissent against the Iraqi Prime Minister was beginning, and even now as I look down at my beautiful, hurting wife I want to focus on that because it makes me seem noble. But that is not why I stayed. And if I really want to fix things with Molly, I have to do what I have promised her and avoid the defensiveness that is my automatic reaction to these difficult conversations.
‘Molly,’ I say. ‘I remember that day.’
The pain in her eyes is heartbreaking – a stark contrast to the easy laughter and joy that I’d shared with her just minutes earlier. I realise that I am entirely responsible for the change and I feel sick.
‘It is a small thing, in the scheme of things,’ she says, obviously trying to console me, which only makes it worse. ‘I mean, I know you had genuine reasons to stay, and I felt bad… I actually felt really bad for resenting your decision. You wrote some great articles on that trip, but…’