yet still you lied. You have deceived me again,’ he said in a low voice.
On the bedside drawers she saw an empty glass and a sodden flannel. He tapped his finger against the glass.
‘Did you think you were drowning? It’s shocking how effective a glass of water can be. You’ve made me do something I’m not proud of, but after seeing you sleeping and seeing tablets left out on the sink… Then the relief when I realised you hadn’t taken them all. The relief of putting them safely away, only to be shocked again as my fumbling hands knocked things. Your lies fell out into the sink.’
He stood over her and held the blister pack of contraceptive pills. He shook his head at her sadly and flicked them towards her face slowly, one at a time, while he talked.
‘Lies, Tess, have got you to here. Lies even on our honeymoon as you so deviously demonstrated when you spat out that pill.’ He let the empty packet drop on her face. ‘You’ve made me not trust you after this,’ he said bleakly.
Tess felt her insides buck, forcing her to pitch sideways as more water came up her throat. Coughing, with a heave of breath she spluttered out a sorry, desperate for him to go and to leave her alone.
‘I won’t again,’ she wheezed in a high thin tone. ‘I’m sorry.’
‘Are you?’ he said, looking in her eyes. ‘I wish I could believe you. After all I’m trying to do for you with this mess you’ve made at work. Tell me, Tess, do you think that’s fair?’
She numbly shook her head.
He stared at her and then at the wet on the bedside drawers, on the pillow and sheet. His eyebrows rose.
‘What a mess. What a mess. You’d better clean this bed up. It’s not fit to lie in.’
Through stunned eyes, Tess watched him walk towards the door. Too shocked to cry, too drained to find the energy.
He carried on walking to the door, before stopping and turning to look at her. ‘You’re breaking my heart, Tess.’
Then he closed the door on her.
He was gone when she went down the stairs at five o’clock, and she was surprised it was so early. She’d thought when he woke her in that terrifying way it was evening, that she’d slept for hours, but it was only the middle of the afternoon. He must have left work early to check on her, and having punished her gone out somewhere.
She had been upstairs for what seemed like hours cleaning her mess and didn’t hear him leave. She’d dragged herself out of the bed and moved like someone recovering from an operation as she bundled up the linen. Now the bed just needed remaking. She downed a glass of water and climbed wearily back up the stairs.
She was down on her knees by his side of the bed, exhaustedly pushing the overhang of sheet under the heaviest mattress imaginable. She had too much of it over this side and was too tired to get back up and pull more the other way. She wanted to stop having to move altogether and climb into a bath, then into a clean bed.
Making one last effort, she pushed the sheet in further and was surprised when her fingers touched something solid. She groped to get a hold of it and ended up pushing it away. Raising an edge of the mattress she was able to get her head beneath it and hold it up while she pushed her arm in up to her shoulder and stretched her fingers until the palm of her hand landed on it and she pulled it out.
Breathless from exertion, she slumped back against the side of the bed staring down at the small black book in her hand. It had a black ribbon tied around it to keep it closed. She fleetingly wondered if it was his, a notebook bought perhaps at another time then discarded as too small to write down all his lists of ‘Improvements’. Tess undid the ribbon and opened it to the first page. The book did not belong to her husband. The three lines of cursive handwriting bore no resemblance to his penmanship whatsoever, which was choppy and hard to decipher most of the time. This handwriting was quite beautiful.
She could see no name written anywhere. Not on the inside of the cover, nor at the back of it. Yet flicking through she saw lots of pages filled with writing. She