the lady of the lake

a short story

When I was with Luke I always had a scheme. He was a corporate lawyer and sometimes talked about becoming a Tory MP but I persuaded him to join Labour for a better chance of a ministerial post. I liked that idea, being behind the scenes, hearing all the secret important information without having any responsibility to act on it. I imagined myself shopping for guanciale and great bunches of rainbow chard. I learnt to incorporate carbohydrates into my cooking, which I had long felt to be pointless.

With him, for the first time in my life, I had money. I looked to copy the habits and dispositions which had caused his life to be one of stability and mine one of chaos.

Sometimes I had dreams where I was the Lady of the Lake presenting a sword unto him, the reincarnate Arthur foretold. I made a list of names for our children like Peredur and Gwydion and Rhiannon and Heulwen. It would increase our Celtic bonafides as he had grown up in England and neither of us had the mythic Welsh names you would expect of those destined to fulfil prophecy.

I was never sure how onboard he was with my big plans. Once he told me I should go back on quetiapine but I said it made me gain 30lbs and he dropped it. Maybe I should try lithium, I texted my friend in New York, but she told me a bunch of stuff about how you have to drink the same amount of water every day and I thought that sounded impossible.

He made thumb and finger-sized bruises on my upper arms, my forearms, my calves. Mostly this was from sex. Other times it was when he would be shouting and I’d curl into a ball and he would try to prise my limbs apart and I’d curl even tighter, sealing myself shut as a seashell. I hoped staying still would make him go away but it only made him angrier because it was something he couldn’t control.

Why won’t you just follow my instructions? he asked when I was crying in public. I want to, I wish I could, I don’t know why I’m like this, I don’t want to be like this, I said back. It seemed like everything I wanted was unspooling ahead of me: a home, a real stable home with all my books in it, with my own furniture, and then marriage, a child, joint bank accounts, the jostling domestic rubbing up against each other, him remembering to pick up something from the shop that we needed, me doing tasks not for myself but for this grand project of a life together. Anything I did seemed to matter more that way. I could never see the point of doing something just for myself. Cooking a meal and eating it where no one would see, no one would remember it, not even me because nothing about it would be remarkable or worth remembering, and all my days would fade into each other like that until all the days had fed through and there was nothing left to mark any of it and it would be my own fault for not following simple instructions.

He told me he would propose to me as soon as he could afford a ring. But sometimes he would cancel on me when I was outside his house because he was at the pub and he’d tell me to go home and I’d say why can’t I just have a spare key and he’d say that’s moving too fast. I kept my things very neatly sequestered in a corner of the room where they wouldn’t cause any disturbance.

My friend who was doing her PhD on feminist artists in North Africa sat me down one day at a cafe near the river and I was talking about the same things I always did and I could see in her eyes that she was tired of it. She said I had a Josephine complex, always wanting to be the woman behind the great man, never claiming the credit. It’s safer that way, isn’t it, I said. I couldn’t deal with the stress and anyway I can’t because I’ve been sectioned and the press would find out and can you imagine the headlines? She nodded and said yes but that’s not the only kind of power. You could write a book. I grimaced. I wondered if I had dependent personality disorder or self-defeating personality disorder or pathological demand avoidance.

I had a dream where a group of women walked into a lake and drowned themselves. It was a very old story, something I’d heard in childhood. There was a drawing of it I remembered and they were beautiful and sad and their hair shaded into long shrouds which covered their bodies as they went one by one under the water.