Looking back now, I find it hard to identify myself as that creature. In Kathleen’s pictures, from which Steven was long removed, I see a strange, lost girl with hair that wasn’t like hers and weird, docile clothes. Her eyes display a fearful determination not to recognise what she had got herself into. What was the alternative, after all? I had nothing – no home, no money, no support. I had two infant daughters and a man who was a father to them, prepared to forgive me for the mess I had made of my life. I had a mother-in-law who was prepared to tolerate me in her beautiful house, even though it was far beyond anything I had known. My domestic skills weren’t up to much and, frankly, my manners often let them down, especially since Steven had been elected to the local council and his career at the bank was taking off.
You don’t understand how easy it is to be ground down, if you haven’t been there. With his mother’s help, over the years, Steven gradually grew to acknowledge my faults. Our wedding was spoken of rarely, then never. Hannah learnt to close her mouth while she ate, and that the better she behaved the less likely she was to be scolded. I learnt that if you wore long sleeves the mothers at playgroup would stop remarking on your bruises.
I had grown up believing that that kind of thing only happened in the most desperate houses. I thought it was about poverty, and lack of education. With Steven, I learnt that it was about my own inadequacy, my failure to repay the trust he had placed in me, my inability to make myself look half-way decent and, when it was really bad, my uselessness in bed.
The first time he hurt me I was so shocked I assumed it had been an accident. We were upstairs and the girls were crying, fighting over some cheap plastic toy. I had been so distracted by them that I had forgotten the iron, which was burning through his shirt. He had come into the room, furious at the noise, yelled at the girls, and then, when he saw the shirt, he cuffed me, as if I were a dog.
‘Ow!’ I exclaimed. ‘That hurt!’ He turned to me with an expression of disbelief on his face, as if I hadn’t understood it was meant to. And as I stood, holding my throbbing ear, he walked briskly downstairs, as if nothing had happened.
He apologised later, blamed work stress or something like it, but sometimes I think that that first time was a tipping point for him. That once he had crossed the line, it was easier to cross it again. Sometimes we went months with nothing happening, but there were times when almost anything I did – peeling potatoes wastefully, not polishing shoes – prompted a fist or a hard hand. Never a fight – he was too clever for that – just enough to tell me who was boss.
By the time I realised what I had to do I was a shadowy creature, a woman who had learnt it was best not to offer an opinion, answer back or draw attention to myself, that scars fade quickly, even if their memory lingers. But then I looked at my daughter’s face on the day he hit her, hard, for failing to take her shoes off before she reached the pale green hall carpet, and my resolve began to return.
I began to stash money. I would ask for an amount to buy a coat for Letty – knowing he could refuse his daughter nothing – then would show off something immaculate I had bought from the charity shop, pocketing the difference. I squirrelled away money from the supermarket shopping. I was good at living on little, having done it for years. And they suspected nothing, because I had become such a downtrodden thing.
By then I hated him. The fog of my depression lifted, and I saw clearly what had happened to me. I saw his coldness, his arrogance, his blind ambition. I saw his determination to ensure my elder daughter knew she was a second-class citizen in his house, even at the tender age of six. I saw that other families did not live like we did and, finally, that his class, his background and financial position did not prevent what he was doing from being abuse. I saw, with relief, that my daughters loved each other regardless, that their tenderness, games and bickering were those of every other set of siblings. I saw Letty’s plump brown arms linked casually round her sister’s neck, heard her high, lisping voice telling Hannah stories about what she had done at playschool, begging her to ‘pretty up’ her hair; I saw Hannah, at night, snuggled in with Letty as she read her a story, their blonde hair entwined, their nighties a pastel tangle. He had not poisoned them yet.
But seeing the truth of my situation did not help me – I could leave with Hannah, I thought, and they would barely care. (Half the time he told me I was a waste of space anyway.) But they would never hand over Letty. In one argument, when I had threatened to leave with them both, he had laughed at me. ‘What kind of judge is going to let you look after my daughter?’ he said. ‘Look at what you have to offer, Elizabeth. Look at your history – squats and goodness knows what – your lack of education or prospects, and then look at what she’ll get with me. You wouldn’t have a bloody hope.’
I suspect he was sleeping with someone else by then. His physical demands on me were far fewer – a source of relief. He had a schizophrenic attitude towards me. If I dressed nicely he told me I was ugly, if I approached him with affection, that I was a turn-off. If another man looked at me, even if I was dressed simply in jeans and a loose shirt, he held my face tightly between his hands and told me that no other man would ever lay a hand on me. On the night when his work colleague made an admiring comment about my legs he forced himself on me so that I could barely walk the next day.
What kept me going was the money mounting up in the lining of my green coat. The hours in which they thought I spent mindlessly ironing or washing up or sitting with the girls in the park, but in which I sat, the peaceful expression on my face belying my burning intent, plotting escape.
They were creatures of habit. Every Tuesday and Thursday she would play bridge. For years, on Thursday and Friday evenings he ‘went to his club’ – a euphemism for the other woman – and on Saturdays he played golf. I cherished those Thursday evenings, when I knew I had a few precious hours alone with the girls to laugh, run around, be silly and remember who I was before the sound of a key in the door could leave me silent and cowed.
Then, one Thursday, Steven came back early and found the letter I was writing to Kathleen, telling her the truth about what he had done to me. After his initial rage was spent, I suspect he told his mother I was not to be left alone: after that, whenever I was in the house, so was one of them. And whenever I went out, they would find a reason to take Letty to the park, or keep her at home. From that point I was never alone with my two girls. I think he knew by then he was losing control; that letter to Kathleen (thank goodness I hadn’t addressed it) had shocked him, not only because it showed I might have the courage to tell someone what he had done, but because it laid his actions bare, in print, and they were not pretty. Until then I think he had convinced himself that his behaviour was reasonable, that his beatings were an inevitable consequence of my failures. To see the cruel words, the split lips and broken fingers in print, to see his actions for what they were – the behaviour of a bully – must have been unconscionable for him.