One grows unused to things.  Realities that were once usual and unthought-of return as surprises, often unwelcome, sometimes just forgotten.  Some are like photographs we turn up while sorting through the belongings of a parent after he or she has died; the people in them are familiar, we’re sure we knew them once, but now we can only guess,  hoping for a narrative to construct itself.  Who is that between my brother and my sister, his arms around them?  Who is that girl beside me on the step?  Whose little dog am I holding, and whose was the house?    The not-knowing bothers us.  We looked happy in those photographs, or those beloved of us did.  We want to recognise that link to that moment and have all the memories flood back, warm and wistful.  We want to spot when in histories, great and small, these fell.  Before or after wars, divorces, deaths.  We want to know.

In my early forties, I sleep much as I did as a child, in a single bed in “my” room.  It is my bedroom, my study, my refuge.  I own the house, but only this room feels truly mine.  There is little place in the bed for anyone but me.

For the first several years of my marriage, I slept in a double bed, something new to me.    Even when I was growing up, double beds were normal for children of middle-class homes; as adults, those children would have found such beds small.  We become monarchs when we become adults, and sleep in queen- and king-sized beds.  Not I.  I slept in something bigger than myself only when there was a reason to:  when another person was there.  

Even when I was still sharing a bed with my husband, we were seldom in it together for more than short periods of time; he stayed up most of the night when he could, and correspondingly slept most of the day when possible.  Many nights he came to bed perhaps an hour or two before I had to rise.  We could easily have slept in shifts had the need arisen.

Deciding to move into my study was a definitive moment in my marriage.  It was the moment when I conceded that I no longer hoped for change, and, perhaps more accurately, that I no longer even wanted it.  I needed to let go of something, and I also needed to sleep; I could do neither of these things while sharing space with a man whose only link to me in that bed was, usually, to awaken me by his movements when he entered it.

I did not mourn this.  I think most of my mourning for the marriage was done by the time I crawled back to my former, unmarried self, hoping she’d take me back.  I once observed to my husband, not unkindly, that one of the essential problems between us was that he was an old bachelor and I was an old maid.  There were, of course, other problems, my husband’s problems, far more profound, but I am now content with my spinsterhood in this regard, enjoying the limited, controllable space around me at night.  Even when travelling I don’t particularly enjoy the vast expanses of mattress and duvet and long, tubular pillow now offered by hotels as a matter of course.  I feel lost or put aside, like a child laid down for a nap on a relative’s bed while the adults visit.  It is only at such times that I feel that someone else should be there, as I struggle to sleep in my small corner.  Such a bed is so obviously not for my life.  It is not for me.  I am not used to such space, and I am no longer used to sleeping beside another person.

The boy and I, in New York, sleep in what used to be called a three-quarter bed; I don’t think they are made anymore.  Before our trip in January, we had only ever spent perhaps three consecutive nights together at any one time, either in that bed, or in a double bed in some hotel room in his country.  I was concerned that two weeks in a strange bed with me would be uncomfortable for him; we emailed back-and-forth about possible arrangements within the flat, with him, as usual, encouraging me not to worry about it, about his comfort.  We would deal with it at the time, he assured me.  Then the physical change in him from the previous summer struck me when I saw him.  He was much more muscular, taking up more space.  He is a big man.  I was at pains to let him know that he should not suffer discomfort for the sake of any romantic notion that he thought I might hold.  I could easily sleep on the fold-out bed in the living room of the flat, I said.  I meant this.

And then, that first night, and for that whole fortnight, we slept sweetly, he used to a larger bed in a familiar place, I used to no-one there in the dark, neither heat nor empty space.  I am a poor sleeper and wake easily, something I usually dread, yet there, at that time, I delighted in awakening in the silence, in the gifts it suddenly offered.  I discovered a book of treasures.  To shift slightly and turn with him, my arm around his waist or his hand on my hip; to feel a drowsy kiss on my shoulder; to whisper once that I loved him, thinking him asleep, and hear him whisper back.  The scent of his skin, the sound of his breathing, the surprise of awaking to find him stroking my hair or holding my hand.  All gifts, all mine.

I was not called upon to re-orient myself to these things, for they were not recalled; I had never before known them.  They were new.  The only thing I had to summon from the past was the simple conditioning of admitting another to that most vulnerable country of sleep.  And then, suddenly, for that brief period, I was rewarded.  The stories those nights told me were clear and tender.  In the photos, all figures are known.  This was I, and that was the boy, on those nights, in that bed; my brown hair mingled with his black hair; his shoulder, my lips; his hand, my skin.

As the weeks go by and life unfolds, the chances that I will see him again are growing slimmer.  I hold the images before me now, so that I will never question, never be uncertain. 

 

I am alone in my small bed.  There is no room for another.