My Policeman

by Bethan Roberts

Listening to his perfectly even tone, watching him neatly tidy away the evidence of my anger, I’d started to shake. His coolness terrified me, and with every item he lifted from the floor, my own sense of shame at having torn through the house like a woman demented increased. A woman demented was not what I was. I was a schoolteacher, married to a policeman. I was not a hysteric.

By now you’ll have gathered that for months I’d tried my hardest to remain blind to what was between you and Tom. But after Julia’s naming of his disposition, my husband’s relationship with you began to come into sharp, terrifying focus. Comme ça: the words themselves were dreadful—they conjured an offhand knowingness that utterly excluded me. And I was so stunned by the truth that I could do nothing but stumble through the days as normally as possible, trying not to look too closely at the vision of the two of you that was always there, no matter how much I wished I could turn my eyes away.

As he spoke, I noticed how gentle yet firm his voice was, and how he managed to appear both casual and urgent. It was something to do with the way he leaned back very slightly as he spoke, smiled around the room and let his words do the talking, without the dramatic gestures or the shouting that I’d expected. Instead, he was quietly confident, as were, it seemed to me, most of the people in the room. What he said was so evidently sensible that I found it hard to understand why anyone should disagree. Of course survival should come before democracy or even freedom.

It was a very different picture from the one that had greeted me the morning I’d first met Tom for our swimming lessons. Now there was endless noise: the clatter of coins from the amusement arcade, gun blasts from the shooting gallery, laughter and music from Chatfield’s bar, screams from the helter-skelter. The image of Tom’s face at the top of the stairs, pale and childlike, came to me again. That had been the only time, I realized, he’d shown me any real weakness.

I’ve never mentioned to Tom that the Verona visit included a day trip to Venice. Venice is one of the many words we do not utter to each other since you took him there. I’d imagined it many times before, but nothing could have prepared me for the detail of the place, the way that everything is beautiful, even the drainpipes and the back alleys and the water buses. Everything. Wandering around the city, alone, my head was filled with images of the two of you. I saw you arriving at Santa Lucia station, stepping from the train into the sunlight like film stars. I saw you slipping across bridges together, your reflections shimmering queasily in the water below. I saw the way you’d stand close to each other at the quay, waiting for the vaporetto. In every calle and sotoportego I imagined the pair of you, backs turned to me, heads inclined toward each other. You would have looked at Tom with a new intensity in this strange and magnificent city, loving the way his blond hair and large limbs made him stand out from the dark, nimble Venetian crowd. At one moment, I found myself wanting to cry as I sat on the cool steps of the Santa Maria della Salute, watching a couple of real young men read a guidebook together, each tenderly holding the edge of a page, sharing the information. I wondered, for the hundredth time, where you were and what had happened to you. I even sought out the Carpaccios in the Accademia and stared for a long time at the two men in the English Ambassadors painti...

tried not to look at the empty space in the wardrobe where Tom’s suit had been, or the spot by the door where his shoes usually were. By some enormous effort of willpower—or perhaps it was merely fatigue—I thought only of the port and lemon that awaited me. The sickly first mouthful, the burning aftertaste. I’d arranged to meet Julia for a drink in the Queen’s Park Tavern, and had invited Sylvie to join

Lately I’ve noticed aches and stiffness in odd places—my knuckles, my groin, the backs of my ankles. But this is most likely through looking after you. The changing of sheets every day, the turning of your body to wash you, the reaching to pull on your clean sets of pajamas or to bring food to your mouth. All these things have taken their toll.

It’s easy to become very focused, I’ve found, on such small things. Especially when every day is the same, bar a few differences in the food offered (on Friday we have stale fish in thick batter, on Saturdays a dab of jam with our teatime bread) or the routines adhered to (church on Sunday, bath on Thursday). To think of larger things is madness. A bar of reconstituted soap. A clean chamber pot. A sharper razor blade than yesterday. These things come to mean a lot. They keep one just about sane. They are something to think about that is not Tom. Because to think about my policeman would be hell. I do everything I can to avoid such thoughts.

I’ve never been so aware of the dimensions of any room before this cell. Twelve feet long, nine feet wide, ten feet high. I’ve paced it out.

No way to tell exactly what time it is, but soon the lights will go out. And then the shouting will begin. My God. My God. Every night the man shouts, over and over. My God. My God. My GOD! As if he believes he really can summon God to this place, if only he can shout loud enough. At first I expected another prisoner to shout back, order him to shut his mouth. That was before I understood that once lights are out, no other prisoner will ask you to deny your pain. Instead we listen in silence, or call back our own grief. It’s left to the screws to bang on his door and threaten him with solitary.

Tom gasped, and I smiled at his wonder. But to me the wonder was the touch of his hand on mine in that cabin, which was ours alone for the time it took to reach our hotel.

Like most who experience these things, throughout the arrest and trial, and the first few days in here, I truly thought someone would appear to announce that there’d been a terrible mistake and ask that I accept the apologies of everyone involved. And all the doors that had slammed shut would open again and I would walk through them, out into the clean air, away from the strange piece of theater my life had become.

One is never sure, in Venice, what is reality and what reflection, and when seen from the back of a vaporetto, the whole place looks like a mirage, floating in an impossible mist. The silence of Torcello was a shock after the continuous clanging of bells, coffee cups, and tour guides that is San Marco.

Just from the way she’d arranged her features—in a look of distant, respectful sympathy—I knew she’d no message from Tom. The woman had nothing for me at all. Rather, I realized, it was she who wanted something from me.

I’ve never asked him anything about his time in Venice with you. And he’s never volunteered any information about it. I’ve imagined it many times, of course. But all I really know of that weekend is that Tom experienced the luxury of a handmade Italian shirt. A few days later, I took a great deal of pleasure in washing and ironing that shirt in my usual haphazard way, neglecting to starch the collar and deliberately pressing the sleeves so the creases fell in broken lines.

I imagined myself giving a shocked response, asking why and receiving no valid explanation. I then imagined myself becoming angry with Tom for this lack of explanation, and pictured him finally breaking down and apologizing to me, maybe even confessing a little of his weaknesses while I remained the strong, forgiving wife. We’ll get through this together, darling, I would say, cradling him in my arms. I’ll help you to overcome these unnatural longings. I enjoyed that little fantasy.

My rage was thrillingly complete. If Tom had been before me at that moment, I have no doubt I would have struck him repeatedly and called him every name I knew. As I ran, I imagined myself doing just this. I was almost excited by it. I couldn’t wait to get to the two of you and unleash my wrath. It wasn’t just anger at you and Tom. I’d lost Julia, too. She’d told me her secret and now she couldn’t trust me, and she was right not to. I’d failed as a friend, I could see that even then. And I’d failed as a wife. I couldn’t make my husband desire me in the right way.

You and I are really very alike, aren’t we? I knew it that time on the Isle of Wight, when you challenged Tom’s views on child-rearing. All these years I’ve known it, but I’ve never really felt it until now, until writing this and realizing that neither of us got what we wanted. Such a small thing, really—who does? And yet our ridiculous, blind, naive, brave, romantic longing for it is perhaps what binds us together, for I don’t believe either of us has ever truly accepted our defeat. What is it they’re always saying now, on TV? You have to move on. Well. Neither one of us managed that.

And it suddenly hit me: in attempting to destroy you, Patrick, I’d risked destroying Tom. When I’d written my letter to Mr. Houghton, I hadn’t given a single thought to what the consequences could be for my husband. But now I had no choice but to face them. I’d betrayed you, but I’d also betrayed Tom. I’d done this to him.

They are so obviously mismatched that I had to smile when I saw them together. I’ve always remembered that particular sentence. Your casual tone is what hurts the most. That, and the fact that you were right.

visited you in prison once, mostly out of remorse for what I’d done, but I’d be lying if I said there wasn’t a part of me that wanted to witness just how much misery you were experiencing. I didn’t tell Tom about the visit and I never suggested he do the same. I knew the mention of your name would be enough to make him walk out the door and never return. It was as though everything could continue only in conditions of complete silence. If I were to touch this wound, to probe its boundaries, it would never heal. And so I carried on, going to work, preparing meals, sleeping on the edge of the bed, away from Tom’s body. In some ways it was just as it had been before I’d married Tom. My access to him was so restricted that I began to cling to clues of his presence. When I washed his shirts, I’d press them to my face just to smell his skin. I’d spend hours arranging his shoes neatly under the bed, ordering his ties in the wardrobe, pairing his socks in his drawer. He’d gone, you see, from the house, and all that was left were these traces of him.

Mostly I’ve been sitting on my plain IKEA duvet and listening to the low hum of Tom’s voice as he reads my words to you. It’s a strange, frightening, wonderful sound, this murmur of my own thoughts on Tom’s tongue. Perhaps this is what I’ve wanted all along. Perhaps this is enough.

I won’t look in on you again. I’ll leave this page on the kitchen table in the hope that Tom will read it to you. I hope he will take your hand as he does so. I cannot ask for your forgiveness, Patrick, but I hope I can ask for your ear, and I know you’ll have been a good listener.