Leaving home

Jeremy finds that leaving his wife is proving to be as difficult as living with her
May 19, 1998

At five o'clock in the evening on a wet Thursday in January, Jeremy was in the front room of his house in Parkside Road throwing things into a bag, in a hurry to finish before his wife came home. He had been married for six months. His wife was a beautiful, sensitive, red-headed, intelligent woman and he hated her. The curtains were undrawn, anyone passing might have seen him in the bright cage of the room, as cutely self-absorbed as a hamster on a wheel.

Outside it was freezing and damp. Oily snow lay in the gutters from the heavy falls at the end of 1991. Realising, even as he struggled with the bag, that this was a seminal moment in his life, Jeremy took a last look round. He hated the melted-chocolate-and-honey-swirls carpet; he hated the cheap door with the plexiglass handle; he hated the freckles of damp above the skirting board by the doorway. Now that he thought about it, he realised that he hated everything about the house, with its useless, ugly improvements and pre-war wiring. He hated all the other smug-faced houses in Parkside Road, too; in fact he hated the whole neighbourhood with its cosy park, two post offices and three pubs with royalist names. But most of all he hated his wife. They had had an argument. He fingered the bruise on his forehead where she had hit him.

In the bag were a pair of running shoes, some sportswear, the three-piece suit he had worn at his wedding, an oven-ready meal, cassettes and an economy tub of E45 cream. Since childhood his skin had been dry. Every few minutes he looked at his watch. It was 5:15pm. His wife would not be back until 7:30pm, but Jeremy always allowed himself a two hour margin for everything he did. Thus the logistics of leaving his wife, and the time it was taking, panicked him in a way that the decision to leave hadn't. In his imagination he already saw himself sleeping under one of the exotic trees in the park, abandoned and abandoning, like all lovers. It was no problem, it was even satisfactory. But the process of leaving was fraught. Rapidly scanning the bookshelves, he chose for his exile the least readable book he owned, A Short History of Romanticism, and threw it into his bag.

When he had moved into Parkside Road three months earlier he thought he was leaving one life behind and beginning another. Twenty-eight years old and newly married, he walked with his wife down the road, looking in at all the bay windows. The houses were modest, but their renovated interiors were stylish and desirable. The knocked-through front rooms had stripped floorboards, spotlit prints on the walls and restored stucco detail on the ceilings. Jeremy and his wife had counted fourteen pianos, seven original fireplaces, five chaises longues, two antique writing bureaux, eight rocking chairs, three footstools and one life-size porcelain bust of Beethoven. Women in ski pants sat curled on sofas with their feet under their haunches, men in canvas recliners watched portable televisions on wall brackets and toddlers built wooden-brick houses on Peruvian rugs in front of real fires. There was even an authentic gay couple. These were the elements of a peace no less deep for being banal. Jeremy and his wife watched the mothers going along the street with babies and children, the fathers drawing up in their mid-range Volvos and Volkswagen Golfs. In the evenings the babies fed and slept, the children played the piano, the parents opened a bottle of Pinot Noir and sat in their extensions planning the restructuring of the garden. Jeremy's neighbour on one side was an elderly man with a saintly expression and a spiteful sense of humour. On the other was a placid middle-aged woman with elegant hair who spent all her time in the garden. Jeremy and his wife thought they would feel at home in Parkside.

Now he knew that it was not possible to have a life there. His wife still had to find this out. He glanced at his watch, picked up his bag, ready to leave, and stopped abruptly. A glass lamp had fallen off the loudspeaker by the window and smashed. The wreckage of dusty shards lay like a patch of weeds on the carpet. He stared at it. Who had done this? Could it have been him? He knew exactly what his wife would think: that-like burglars who smear their excrement on the walls-he had smashed the lamp in the urge to dirty what he was leaving her with. In fact he felt precisely this urge, so he went guiltily into the kitchen, fetched a brush and pan, and began to clean up.

Jeremy, unfortunately, was a compulsively tidy person. When he finished with the smashed lamp he noticed how messy the room was. Before he knew it he was hoovering the carpet, stacking magazines, emptying the wastepaper baskets and wiping the surfaces with a damp cloth. By the time the room was clean it was 6:00pm, and he was behind schedule.

At the front door, on the point of leaving one life behind and beginning another, he allowed himself the luxury of imagining his wife arriving in an hour or so and finding him gone. He saw the hallway as she would see it (desolate, bereft); the front room (empty, tidy) where she would perhaps stop and call his name; the kitchen (quiet, deserted) where she would sit and eat her lonely meal.

Her lonely meal? Turning with a frown, he went quickly back down the hallway and opened the fridge door. The fridge was empty. For a full minute he stared at it, then at his watch, then at the fridge again. Who had taken all the food? His wife, no doubt, would think that he had deliberately left her with nothing to eat, a last mocking gesture. As she knew, mocking gestures appealed to him. Moaning, he dropped his bag and ran guiltily for the car.

When he returned from the supermarket it was 7:00pm. Leaving his wife was proving to be as difficult as living with her. The dinner-time hush lay over Parkside. Cursing his wife, he loaded the fridge: an onion tart in a plastic tray, a bag of mixed salad, three sardines in dill sauce from the delicatessen counter, a lime sorbet, a plastic pot of zabaglione, some cheddar and a few slightly bruised plums. He slammed the fridge door and shuddered. His wife would rejoice to see him dead, she would smile to see his bloated corpse dredged from the lake into which he had flung himself, his pockets stuffed with metal, rocks, gravel-but he had left her with food.

"I am a martyr," he said, "to my principles." He did not consider what these principles might be. It was 7:10pm and he was panicky. His wife was on her way home, but at last he was ready to leave.

At the front door once more, looking back on his life with a clear conscience, he again imagined his wife arriving home in about (he looked at his watch) a quarter of an hour. This time he saw her stopping in the doorway and sensing his absence, dropping her satchel and running in panic down the hall into the kitchen to find his note. It was a pleasing thought. But he paused, staring. There was no note. How could he have forgotten to write a note? Jesus Christ! Not even a note? He ran back to the kitchen.

For five minutes he turned the room upside down looking for pen and paper, and then, for a further five, he stood twitching at the table without a thought in his head. Something from Saul Bellow was on the tip of his tongue, but he couldn't bring it to mind. Eventually he scribbled, "Ever fallen in love with someone, ever fallen in love with someone, ever fallen in love with someone you shouldn't've fallen in love with?" added the postscript, "The fridge is stocked," and ran in panic out of the house. As he rushed down the path, his neighbour, the elderly virtuous-looking man, was coming the other way. He nodded to Jeremy's bag. "Leaving home?" he said, and laughed.

Many people saw Jeremy fleeing from Parkside-they came to their windows to see what the noise was. It took him five minutes to manoeuvre the car out of the space into which it was blocked. Parkside-his last view of it-appeared to him in fragments in his rear-view mirror: terrifying glimpses of claustrophobic walls and hedges, gable-heavy roofs and wedged cars, all toppling onto him, preventing escape.

Only when he had swung out onto the main road did he let out a sigh. The sight of long stretches of unsullied snow on the water meadows at the side of the road raised his spirits. "Free at last," he said out loud, and at that moment he glanced towards the pavement and saw his wife looking at him. He let out a scream. He had no chance to crouch, or cower, or to compose himself. There was an extended moment in which he felt his face run through every expression of frustration, anger, cowardice and disbelief; then he was swerving to avoid a van, driving through a red pelican crossing and accelerating in second gear out towards the ring road and the thickening sky.

the lodge at the Hill was chilly. Jeremy let himself in and stood in the whitewashed hallway, bag in hand, uncertain what to do. "Hello darling, I'm home," he said-and listened to the quiet. There was a smell of laundry, but it was only the damp. No one had lived there since he had left a year earlier. Still carrying his bag, he went up the stairs and looked round. Everything was as he remembered it, except that downstairs the dining room had been renovated and the sideboard repaired. Otherwise, with its colonial furniture and tarnished mirrors, the house gave off the same air of shabby gentility and bad luck.

The owners, Emeritus Professor Sir Ernest Booth and his wife, who lived in the big house, had decided not to let it again after Jeremy had left, preferring to keep it for guests. Jeremy had been allowed to keep his key. Why the professor and his wife should like him so much he could not understand, but they had told him that he would always be welcome to stay there. At the moment they were in Spain, where they wintered every year, and there was no need for him to explain his position until they returned in April.

After some time he found himself standing in the living room, still holding his bag. He took out all his things and arranged them neatly along the wall between the bookcase and the fireplace; he put his ready meal in the oven, opened the front door and sat on the step, smoking cigarettes in the cold, damp air. It was dark, but he could see that the garden, still covered in snow, had grown wild: visible patches of lawn were rank with clover; dead clematis hung crisply from the chestnut pole arch; the birdbath of weathered granite was listing badly and would soon collapse into the bed of roses. There was something pleasant in all this. Jeremy told himself that he was refreshed by the violence of nature, delighted by the savagery of its growth and decay. Violence, like love, was seasonal, erupting and subsiding in its time. He smoked four cigarettes, occasionally fingering the bruise on his forehead, then went inside and discovered that he had forgotten to switch on the oven.

when he returned from the off-licence he was shocked by the complete darkness of the Lodge. Darkness alarmed him: he could never sleep alone without waking in the middle of the night to listen for the slight, familiar sounds to turn into footsteps and whispers. Thinking of the night ahead, he stumbled twice as he went across the short stretch of grass to the door.

"Not yet," he said grimly. "Soon."

He put the bottle of whisky on the coffee table and took a smudgy glass from the renovated Edwardian sideboard. "Here's to me," he said. He had a couple of drinks, and said, "Free at last."

An hour later he had finished a third of the bottle and felt completely sober. The taste of the whisky nauseated him and the freezing chill of the house made him shiver. Slowly, another hour passed. The television did not work. Eventually he was forced to admit that he was not enjoying himself.

By his own admission he was an unreconstructed romantic. He appreciated the elation of abandonment and exile, but he could not concentrate on these things-the damp spoiled it for him, settling on to him like an icy dust-sheet as he fidgeted in his armchair. For forty minutes he struggled with A Short History of Romanticism, reaching page six. He lost his way in Tasso, Goethe, Schlegel's Lucinde, the Psychologische Fragmente of Novalis, Chateaubriand's Atala, Janin, H?lderlin and the impenetrable antics of the English flagellant Swinburne. It was all interesting, but revolting.

Looking at his watch he saw that it was only 9:30pm; it seemed later. He tried to imagine what Sarah would be doing. Would she have telephoned the police? Would she be walking the streets looking for him? Would they be dredging the lake? Jeremy was halfway upstairs before he crossly stopped himself and went back down to the living room. Sarah would not be walking the streets. She would be telephoning-her mother, her brothers, her best friends, her badminton partners, her acquaintances at her Modernism in European literature night classes. By morning his desertion would be as well known as if it had been announced in the local newspaper. He almost grinned. Perhaps the whisky had affected him more than he realised. With sudden lightness of heart he began to change into his sportswear. "My only regret," he said, as he jogged up and down, "is that note." Breathing deeply, he stretched, twisted, grunted. He wouldn't feel the cold so much after a jog.

country lanes are dark and most lack pavements. Melting snow made the conditions treacherous. He set out with confidence. The wet night air was freezing in his nostrils and lungs, invigorating as a cold shower. For a while he ran with a long, loping stride along the road, then took a track past a farm and down a hill. He often slipped on patches of ice, and twice fell. A pain developed in his left side. A storm was coming on. Panting badly, he entered a wood and the track narrowed until he was pushing his way through brambles. It was very dark, but he was in the mood to continue, despite his pain and the obvious futility; he stumbled on recklessly, catching his feet on rocks and logs and ducking clumsily under branches. A manic determination to force himself into the tightest, blackest corner of the wood seized him and he pushed forward, on and on, until the path petered out altogether and he was forced to a halt, bent double in the dark, up to his knees in briars. "This is it!" he thought. "This is the real thing!" The pain in his left side racked him and his head ached. He was soaked from the wet undergrowth. For several minutes he crouched there, heaving, exhausted and apathetic. Thunder broke in the distance and he wondered if he could make it back before the rain started. He remembered that he was drunk, and began to shiver.

"At least I'm not lost," he said into the darkness. Rousing himself, he cautiously went forward twenty yards, stopped, turned ninety degrees, went on for ten yards, turned about and retraced his steps until with difficulty he came back to his starting point. He paused, listening. All around him in the wood were tiny sounds, but he could see nothing beyond the immediate patch of undergrowth and he had no idea where he was. "What about Novalis?" he asked himself. "What about Chateaubriand, Janin, H?lderlin and Swinburne? Did they get into scrapes like this?"

From time to time thunder broke again and whenever it died down he heard something else, like an echo of the thunder that never faded. After a while he realised that it was traffic on the ring road, and began to move slowly towards it. He could not stop thinking about Sarah. Was she blaming herself? Had she opened the fridge door and wept to see the lime sorbet and sardines? He imagined her sitting on that chair, naked under her dressing gown split above her crossed knees. He could not stop himself thinking of her sexually; the image of her richly-built indifferent body almost made him cry, and he went more quickly through the undergrowth, not caring that his legs were slashed by brambles and his face whipped by branches, as if pain would relieve him of his thoughts. "She kills me," he thought. "She really kills me." Vaguely, he wondered what she would think if she could see him now.

By the time he reached the ring road, his legs were lacerated and his face bruised. The pain in his side was worse and he was nauseous. As he emerged from the wood the storm broke. Jeremy shivered at the side of the road, soaked and hunched, still thinking of Sarah. He was trying to work out why he had married her; he had hardly known her. In any case, as soon as they married, she had changed. In six months she had changed completely. He had not thought it possible to change so much. Several minutes went by and the traffic was dense. Rain ran down his neck, his shorts, his socks.

He remembered that at college his best friend had once attempted suicide on a busy road. Shutting his eyes, counting to fifty, he had run suddenly into the traffic. He had suffered a sprained ankle. The girl who had prompted this remained indifferent-after all, he hadn't been killed. A cautionary tale. Jeremy thought of his wife. She wouldn't be telephoning the police or searching the streets for him, she wouldn't even be telephoning her family and friends with the news. She would be curled up on the sofa watching television. Her dressing gown would be open to the thigh and she would be humming to herself.

Closing his eyes, Jeremy began to count.

He counted very slowly. In between numbers he drifted into fantastic thoughts. "She will love me," he thought, "but it will be too late."

Every few seconds he heard a car go past; there was never a moment when the road was clear. He counted the last ten numbers as if everything depended on it, every muscle in his body tense, and when he reached fifty, without moving, he opened his eyes and saw that the cars were all in the distance to the south, sounding nearer than they were, and the road was clear. He set off across it, and when he was halfway a VW Golf came suddenly round the corner, churning out spray and giving him a fright.

it took him an hour to walk back along the hard shoulder of the ring road up to the Hill. It rained all the way, and when he arrived back at the Lodge he was soaked and shivering. "Hello, darling, it's me," he said. His teeth were chattering and his voice was adenoidal. The house seemed quieter than ever. In the harsh white hallway he saw himself in a mirror, his hair plastered down his forehead, his legs blotchy and criss-crossed with cuts, his face pouched and mottled. He held his arms away from his sides and walked stiffly towards the mirror as if he had wet himself.

"Just as long as you can keep your sense of humour," he said in his mother's voice, and went upstairs to run a bath. Some time later he remembered he had not switched on the hot water and went back downstairs. It was late, 11:30pm, and he felt he had been in the House of Calamity for days. It was even colder than before. Wrapped in a duvet which he had discovered in the airing cupboard, he sat in the dark thinking of his wife. The duvet smelled of curry. The whisky bottle was two thirds empty and he was still sober. Though he tried, he could no longer remember what the argument with his wife had been about; he only remembered his rage and sense of persecution, both of which had dissipated.

Sleep was impossible. Wondering if his wife would be able to sleep, he pictured her sleeping soundly, lying on her side, her red hair like a veil over her face. Perhaps he should telephone her to let her know he was okay. He would prefer to torment her.

Shivering, he got up out of the armchair with the duvet round him, and went into the dining room where the telephone was. It was working. He toyed with it for a while, then dialled and waited.

"Hello?" Sarah said. "Is that you?"

"Mrs Wilson?" he said, holding his nose.

There was a pause. "Yes," she said.

"Is your husband Jeremy Wilson?"

"Who is this, please?"

"This is PC Philip Fenny at Thames Valley police headquarters. I'm sorry to disturb you at this time of night. I won't keep you long. But we have a slight problem you might be able to help us with."

"Is it about Jeremy?"

"We have a man here at the station, Mrs Wilson, and we need an identification."

"Oh God, what's happened to him?"

"There's no need for alarm, Mrs Wilson. As I say, what we need is an identification so that we can get Mr Wilson home. We can do it over the phone. It's purely formal procedure."

She interrupted him. "Is he all right then?"

Jeremy paused, thinking. "The problem is, Mrs Wilson, one of our officers brought him in this evening, and at present he seems rather confused."

He could hear her breathing, he imagined her mouth slightly open, her hair falling over her face, her expression clouding. He tried to imagine what she would be thinking.

"What's he done?" she said. "Has the silly idiot hurt anyone?"

He ground his teeth. "No, no, Mrs Wilson, it's nothing like that, I assure you. He's resting at the moment. If I can just ask you a few questions so we can get the identification out of the way."

She interrupted again. "He wasn't here when I got home. Where was he when you found him?"

He thought again. "Do you know the Tesco superstore out on the ring road?" he asked.

"Yes," she said.

"He was on the roof."

"On the roof? Oh God, the idiot. What do you mean 'confused'? Please let me talk to him."

"I'm afraid that's not possible at the moment, Mrs Wilson, he's with the doctor."

"The doctor? Oh God! What's he done to himself?"

"Mrs Wilson, if I can just get an identification from you we'll see if we can get him to the phone. All we need is a brief description. Take your time."

There was a silence, as if she were gesturing to someone in the room, though he knew there could be no one there.

"Mrs Wilson?"

"Jesus," she said. After a moment, she said, "He's about six foot, he has brown hair." She faltered. "Brown to fair. I mean fairish."

"Yes. Colour of eyes?"

"Brown. Or green. I'm not sure." She fell silent. "I'm sorry," she said after a moment. "I've never done anything like this before. I'm a bit emotional." She paused again. "When he went to work this morning he was wearing grey corduroy trousers and..."

"I wouldn't worry about what he was wearing Mrs Wilson, when we picked him up he was naked."

"Naked! Jesus Christ!"

"Let me ask you this, Mrs Wilson. Does your husband have any unusual features?"

"Yes, he's an idiot."

Jeremy bit his lower lip. "I mean physical features, Mrs Wilson. Any unusual physical features?"

"No. Unusual? No, of course not." Now she was becoming impatient.

"Nothing at all?"

"He's just ordinary. He's about as bloody ordinary as you can get. Not that he thinks so."

There were signs of strain in her voice.

"A final question, Mrs Wilson. Has Mr Wilson suffered any injuries recently?"

She hesitated. "No," she said.

"No blows to the head?" She was silent.

"The reason I mention it is that there's bruising on Mr Wilson's head, Mrs Wilson. He can't account for it himself. It's nothing serious, but the doctor thinks it may have caused his confusion."

He could hear Sarah holding the telephone against her chest, and muttering, as if she were talking to someone. "Hello, Mrs Wilson?"

She was crying now, making a sound like frying in a pan. "What is the bastard doing to me now?" she wailed. "Tell that bastard..." Then she broke down.

"Mrs Wilson," he said, "can you hear me? This line's very bad. Hello, Mrs Wilson, are you there? Hello?" And he cut the connection.

Some time later he found himself in the darkened living room with the empty whisky bottle in his hand; he didn't know how long he had been there. He wanted to cry, he stood there trying, but he couldn't. Instead he threw the bottle suddenly through the glass front of the Edwardian sideboard; glass flew into the room with a bang. He began to throw other things after it-his book, his running shoes, even the economy size tub of E45 cream. There was not much to throw and he soon stopped.

Then he was standing, holding a large shard of glass over his wrist. He still couldn't cry. Disgusted, he threw the glass into the wreckage of the sideboard and sat down, very tired. Wrapped in the duvet with the stink of vindaloo in his nostrils, he almost fell asleep on the carpet, but it was too cold.

At 1:30am he got up and began to retrieve his belongings. He put everything, including the remains of the whisky bottle, into his bag. He methodically wiped a cloth over the surfaces he might have touched and put the duvet back in the airing cupboard. He was exhausted, he could hardly move. His hands were numb with cold. On his way out, he fetched a screwdriver from a box under the kitchen sink and smashed the front door lock. He left the door ajar.

It was still raining heavily. For a while he sat in his car shivering, smoking cigarettes while the wind rocked the car to and fro and raindrops shattered on the dark windscreen. He told himself that he believed in forgiveness. Then he slowly drove home through the rain, not knowing that when he got there he would find nobody in.