The Bride Stripped Bare. Nikki Gemmell

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       Lesson 33

       the great necessity of life is continued ceaseless change

      A resolution, in mid-August. You have to move beyond this mewly time, all whingy and wrong, you have to haul yourself out. A resolution that some of the momentous issues in a relationship can in the end only be ignored if you want the relationship to survive, they can’t be worked through and tossed out. Which is why, perhaps, some people in long-term partnerships have learnt to to live with what they don’t like. To reclaim the calm. You’ve seen it in marriages that’ve weathered infidelity, have seen them contract into a tightness in old age. Do you want the relationship to survive?

      It’s easier to stay than to go.

      You can’t bear the thought of parties again and singles columns and intimate dinners that don’t work, of always trying to find a way to fill up a Friday night. And you were meant to be trying for a baby soon. Cole wants to be a father some day. When you found him it was like a candle to a cave’s dark and to throw it all away after you’ve got to this point, you just can’t. You’ve had the most satisfying relationship of your life with him: you’re sure the glow of companionship can come back.

      Cole wants the marriage to last. Everything is denied. He doesn’t want to bail out.

      You don’t want Theo to win. Sometimes you fear this consideration drowns out everything else. You can beat her with this; you can’t recall beating her at anything.

      So, a resolution.

      You will live with the silences between Cole and you now. For you’ve stopped the talk, both of you, you’re away in your separate rooms: he in his study, you in the bedroom, too much. At least there’s no sex and you’re relieved at that, for the memory of it has now distilled to two things: when he didn’t come it was frustrating and when he did it was messy, often over your stomach and face, like a dog at a post claiming ownership.

      So many ways to live like a prisoner.

      But a resolution, to find a way back into a happy life. Although God knows when the fury will soften from you.

      You concentrate for the moment on making the flat very beautiful, very spare and pale, like the inside of a white balloon. To your taste, for compromise has been lost. You’ve never dared impose your will so much. The builders come to know a woman who’s never been allowed out before, especially with Cole, a woman stroppy, shorttempered, blunt.

      And the flat, the beautiful flat, fit for a spread in Elle, is as silent as a skull when you enter it.

      An emptiness rules at its core, a rottenness, a silence when one of you retires to bed without saying goodnight, when you eat together without conversation, when the phone’s passed wordlessly to the other. An emptiness when every night you lie in the double bed, restlessly awake, astounded at how closely hate can nudge against love, can wind around it sinuously like a cat. An emptiness when you realise that the loneliest you’ve ever been is within a marriage, as a wife.