Claustrophobia Read Online Free

into things with her eyes open. At least he wasn’t married …
    Later, so many times, he would say, ‘If I hadn’t had that breakdown, I would never have met you,’ and that was true, because his family lived way on the other side of Perth. So it seemed good fortune out of bad, felix culpa , Derrick said.
    As for his emotional collapse, Pen didn’t ever press him for details, even when she burned to know. But he did tell her the name of a woman: an older woman, his lecturer at uni over east, who had dropped him after a long affair right throughout his student years. Fearing exposure, perhaps – the threat to her career.
    â€˜It wrecked me,’ he said. ‘You know, I was only seventeen when that started.’
    â€˜She exploited you,’ Pen said firmly, and that was that.
    Neither of them had ever discussed Kathleen Nancarrow again.
    Two urges were at war in Pen over it, right from the start, but the pragmatic urge won out. She’d always been practical, always had to be, fending for herself. And this natural attitude was bolstered, over the years of their marriage, by old platitudes of her mother’s like Least said, soonest mended, and Out of sight, out of mind . Her mother was a firm believer in self-control.
    Whatever she might feel inside, Pen was quite capable of harnessing it to her greater purpose. So she had coaxed Derrick through his add-on year of a teaching diploma, and seen him into his first appointment. She had worked and scraped to build him the kind of buffer against the world that he’d need if he was to thrive. Pen had never met anybody so intelligent, but brilliance alone wouldn’t do it.
    Derrick was from what people called a ‘good family’, but most of their money was tied up in properties, and they weren’t about to give him a leg-up. His illness had embarrassed them, almost as if it were a reflection on their genes, or their parenting. They’d distanced themselves after that, so he and Pen saw very little of them.
    â€˜Got yourself the discount version,’ Pen’s mother sniped. ‘The markdown. Social climber meets social backslider.’
    â€˜I love him,’ was all Pen could say, hoping that would shame her mother into silence. Underneath, she suspected, her mother was jealous.
    But there was no doubt Derrick required pushing. Gentle pushing by someone who could see what he was capable of.
    Pen watched, then, and monitored, and kept her eye on vacancies till the time came for him to move out of the public education system into an altogether better situation. One that appreciated and rewarded his exceptional talents.
    So much easier to do this for Derrick because he was a man. None of the inch-by-inch scraping of her own attempts to rise. Men were expected to. Their ambitions were not vanity, not arrogance. For them, lack of ambition was a fault …
    Pen had seen instantly, that day they first went for coffee together, that they were each other’s best chance, and she had made sure they took it. There was no going back.
    Now Pen unsealed the fat envelope carefully. The first page was dated just over a decade ago, written from Perth. She was aware of her heart pounding, the pulse at her ear and temple. There was a kind of tinnitus but it seemed outside her.
    She eased backwards into a beanbag and held the letter upright, as if it could somehow become transparent, a window.
    Kathleen, my only Kathleen, you know who you are, and you know who I am even if you will not acknowledge me – you are wrecking me with this silence. How can I believe it all means nothing to you? What can I do to prove that you must not cast me off, that you can’t do it?
    I will recognise no obstacle, you should know that. You are both the brightness and the bane of my life: you have consumed me and spat out the wretched pieces – can’t you feel how wretched I am? You said you had never felt this way about anyone else.