How did I know that he no longer loved me?
This question torments me.
If I could answer it, I would be so much happier, so much more contented, but contentment is a rare commodity, worth killing for perhaps. I would be happy because then I would be certain in my mind, and uncertainty is killing me.
But it is not to be. Certainty is second only to contentment in scarcity.
Yet, without a doubt, I knew that he had a lover.
It was like something seen out of the corner of my eye, a dancing spectre that teased me by leaping away as I turned my head to catch it.
But that did not mean that it does not exist.
The knowledge was there in his smile, his kiss, his kindnesses.
All I lacked was proof.
But I still loved him. I will always love him. He had his faults but so do I. I thought to learn to live with it.
Because I love him.
The cottage had once been whitewashed, was now flaking. The faded blue front door is half off its hinges, the windows without glass. There are the remains of a garden with a path in front of it.
There is even a well.
Breathless from the exertion, Greg says, “The gingerbread’s fallen off.”
Gilly laughs. “I hope the witch has gone, too.”
Greg looks around. There is no hallway and they are standing in the sitting room. There is no furniture and leaves are piled in the corners. The ceiling is low and beams cross it.
“It would have been a nice house, once.”
“I guess.”
He is taking every detail in, examining it, almost as an architect might, seeing possibilities in the decay. “We could live here,” he says but he does not say it loudly, although she hears it.
“I couldn’t.”
He looks around and the thing that she sees is a good-humoured smile. “It’s wonderful! What’s wrong with it?”
“It’s small and pokey and probably subsiding and almost certainly damp. And it’s nowhere near anywhere.”
He laughs. “But it’s charming, too.”
“I don’t want to live in charming, Greg. I want to live in convenient, warm, spacious and cheap.”
A shrug of the shoulders. “You can’t have everything.”
“And what about work, Greg? We’re in the middle of nowhere here.”
“You know that I can do most things remotely. If I arranged matters properly, I would only need to be in the office one day a week.”
“Does that send the right message? I mean, does that tell your clients that you’re completely committed?”
He becomes angry. “My clients understand that commitment is nothing at all to do with sitting in a box in a city.”
Wondering why he is so defensive she backs away, changes the subject. “What about children? I’m not sure that this would be a particularly suitable place to raise a family.”
At once he says, “Maybe not.”
And she is puzzled. Such acquiescence is unusual for Greg. He likes to win arguments.
“I didn’t know that you wanted to move.”
“I was just thinking.”
“If you’re not happy where we are, we can start to look around.”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“If you’d said something...”
“I said, it doesn’t matter.” His tone is abrupt, annoyed and she is forced into timid silence.
Gilly thinks that she has come to terms with Greg’s infidelity. She believes that love will overcome everything and that whatever his reasons for the affair, love is not one of them. She fears that she has failed him in some way, that this is a message to her to improve. Her logic starts from the premise that he loves her; if he loves her, then he must need something more, or something different, from a relationship than he gets from her. All she needs to do is find what that thing is and supply it.
She has gone through in her mind everything that seems to her to be likely, but cannot think of anything. She is certain that he enjoys the sex, that her cooking and housekeeping are a reasonable standard. The only thing that she wonders about is the number of rows that they have had in recent months and she has made a conscious decision to be less confrontational. This is hard for her, for she is by nature combative, but she calculates that it is worth trying.
“I wonder why this is deserted,” he says.
“It’s probably unsafe,” says Gilly.
Greg has begun to explore, examining recesses and alcoves; when he moves out of the sitting room into the darkness beyond she says, “Be careful, Greg.”
“I will.” He says this with marked irritation chiselled into the words and she bites down on her own annoyance at his retort because she thinks that perhaps she is being too maternal towards him.
She waits nervously, glancing around her and then back to the corridor down which he has disappeared.
“Greg?”
His voice comes back from the dimness, replete now with a hinted reverberation, “I’m fine.” The reverberation does not disguise the tone.
She looks around again.
There is something pink on the dirty floorboards. It seems hard and out of place and she succumbs to her curiosity.
It is the leg of a doll.
A child.
My God! A child.
“Gilly! Gilly!”
At once, she is so scared that she drops it. Her breath is caught, her eyes are wide. She turns back to the darkness of the corridor down which Greg had walked.
Gilly does not know it, but she has had a nervous breakdown.
“Greg? Greg? What is it?” She walks forward but stops at the threshold to the darkness beyond. “Are you all right?” she calls into the heart of the house.
“Come and look at this. Out the back.” His voice is some way off, a slight echo its handmaiden.
“Is it safe?”
“If you’re careful.”
How typical of a man, she thinks as she gingerly picks her way down the corridor.
The plaster has fallen in patches, exposing rotten wooden battens; the floorboards are a landscape of dirt, leaves, rubble and shapes that she cannot recognize but fears are rat droppings.
“Which way?” she calls tentatively.
“The hall turns right and leads into the kitchen. I’m out the back.”
As she moves forward, she makes out light coming from the right and she can also hear a rushing sound. As she turns the corner, she sees the light is coming through a doorway from grimy windows.
The kitchen is as laden with melancholy and decay as the rest of the house. A range cooker stands resolutely to her left and a butler sink accompanies it. The only other occupant of this space is a single half-glazed cupboard, bowed by age and oblivion, staring blearily at its companions from the opposite wall.
Ahead of her are the windows, some of them broken, and a door to the outside. The rushing sound is louder now.
“Greg?”
But the rushing sound is too loud and she has to repeat herself.
“Outside.”
She barely hears this word.
What is that noise?
When she moves outside, her question is answered.
The stream over which they had crossed now passed below her into a narrow, man-made gully. She steps out on to a rickety wooden balcony about fifteen feet above the crashing water and to her left is a huge waterwheel. Greg is on the balcony by the wheel; he is beckoning her excitedly. Rain falls steadily but the balcony is overhung by a sloping roof; bright sparkling drops of water hang and then fall from its edge.