This Must Be the Place

by Maggie O'Farrell

There is the sensation that a window somewhere has blown open or a single domino has fallen against another, causing a cascade. A tide has rushed forward, then pulled back out, and whatever was beneath it is altered for ever.

You were amazed that, at the end of the month, money appeared in your empty bank account. The miracle of work! The next month, there it was again. It seemed such a simple, alchemical transaction.

The itch, the discomfort, the rash, the inflammation, the redness, the maddening, distracting ailment: this is not him. It is not who he is. There is him and there is his condition. They are two entities, forced to live in one body.

He gives me a smile and he looks so happy to see me, his eyes travelling all over my face, and a sudden wave of something crashes over me and I can’t tell if it’s happiness or sadness. It kind of feels like both.

As I stand there, hesitating, wondering what to do, I recall something my mother told me, as a child. Apologise, she would say, apologise, and people’s defences come down and everything will be better.

She has the kind of headache where it hurts to turn her eyes, to move her jaw. She cannot tell yet whether it is an ordinary pain or if it will bloom into the kind that takes her over, replaces her with itself, consumes that part of her that is still her.

The key to life with Claudette is knowing that her default setting is overreaction and outrage. If cornered, she will become livid. It’s only when she calms down that she can think clearly and form an appropriate response. It’s just a matter of sitting it out, waiting for the storm to pass.

I grip the bench in something close to terror, wanting to close my eyes but not being able to, wondering, as she stands there, looking towards the fountain, if I am witnessing the beginning of the end, if this is it, the tipping point we all dread.

Am I living through the moment when all the tiny lights begin to be extinguished, when her love for me begins to falter, shrink, lose ground? I have been through the demise of enough relationships to know such moments arise, but would I know how to recognise it when it came? Is this it? What have I done?

There was something that set apart a man who had grown up among women – a strong mother and a clutch of sisters, in Daniel’s case – from a man who hadn’t. Men of this ilk were, in Nicola’s opinion, much more evolved and therefore made much better lovers.

Just a whiff of those smoky, dark, aromatic granules – heated up they always were, at length, lovingly, every morning in this kitchen, for all the years he lived here, the way he would stand waiting for them to brew, looking out of that window, that robe of his loose over his pyjamas, a child, usually, on his shoulder or his arm – would be enough to tip her over the edge. She isn’t going to do it. Certainly not.

(A strange comfort it had been, to find a word for the very thing that lies in the core of your being, in the most secret alleyway of the heart.)

Overreacting. Emoting. Crying. He had never expressed that he felt hers was a peculiarly female response but the implication was there. The correct response, he seemed to be thinking, the male response would be rationality, calm, order.

It’s none of my business but if you want her back, if –’ ‘If?’ He sighs, with all the longing and regret of a much younger man, as if he’s only just realised, as if he’s only now willing to admit it. ‘– then you must get her back. Or, at the very least, try.’ Rosalind taps him on the arm with her camera strap. ‘Life comes to us but once, Daniel.’

I have a theory,’ she says, looking far ahead, at where salt meets sky, ‘that marriages end not because of something you did say but because of something you didn’t. All you have to do now is work out what it is.’

And two, about a year ago, when she turned thirteen, when her life and the way she felt about it and the way she viewed it suddenly tilted, like the deck of a ship in a storm.

Everything felt like a stage set: she kept viewing herself as if from the outside. Instead of just acting, just doing, just running or speaking or playing or collecting, she would feel this sense of externalisation: and so, a voice inside her head would comment, you are running. Do you need to run? Where are you going? You’re picking up that rock but do you want it, do you really need it, are you going to carry it home?

Marithe had looked up at the stars and asked her mother, who was sitting in the chair opposite, whether it would come back, this sense of being inside your life, not outside it?

To never feel that again, that idea of yourself as one unified being, not two or three splintered selves who observed and commented on each other. To never be that person again.