Someone to Watch Over Me by Madeleine Reiss

had thought about it at all, that women who let themselves be hit were creatures very different from herself. Becoming a woman whose husband hurt her was as strange and unlikely as becoming one of those shapeless forms under bits of boxes or in the doorways of office blocks that you saw in every major town.
    Rupert’s reaction to what had happened was to say nothing for the first few days and then get drunk and cry out his remorse in great big gasping heaves. He knelt at her feet, his face wet with tears, his mouth slack with contrition, and begged her to forgive him.
    â€˜It wasn’t me. It wasn’t me,’ he cried. ‘It was like there was someone else inside my body making me do it. And you know, Moll,’ he said, rubbing his face with the back of his sleeve, ‘you know how to push my buttons, you really do.’
    Molly remembered him as the quick bright fox and held him in her arms, as if he was a wounded animal, until he stopped sobbing.
    For a while afterwards she thought of the sound his fist had made against her skin and the way he had stretched the fingers of his clenched hand out afterwards, almost thoughtfully, as casually as if he had caught his hand against the edge of a window frame. Then as the days and weeks passed Molly began to think she had imagined the whole thing, or at least its impact on her began to lessen. The more time that passed, the more outlandish it seemed that such a thing had happened to the pair of them.
She
wasn’t the sort of woman that got hit.
He
wasn’t the sort of man who would do the hitting. What Rupert had done to her somehow became less about his violence and more about the state of their relationship and therefore partly her responsibility. In the end, what she did was redouble her efforts to please him and to ensure that nothing irritated or upset him. As long as she maintained the equilibrium, Rupert was the old, easy Rupert, full of charm and life.
    Then when Rupert finally admitted two weeks later that he had been sacked from his job rather than left it voluntarily, this seemed to her to be a perfect explanation of why he had behaved in the way he had. He had been under enormous stress and he had cracked, as anyone would under that sort of pressure. When she then found out after a phone call with the bank that he had maxed out three credit cards due to an online gambling habit that had got out of control, Molly did her best not to show him the utter terror the news plunged her into. How were they to survive, with a sizeable mortgage on their house and Rupert finding it difficult to get another job, when all they had coming in was the money she made if she was able to sell one of her paintings? The obvious answer was that she had to go back to teaching, and despite Rupert’s protestations that it was unnecessary because he would surely get another job soon, she approached her old school and they were only too glad to have her back.
    Keeping a promise that he had made to address his gambling problems and determined to atone for his behaviour, Rupert joined a local support group for people with addictions. He paired up with a sad-looking man with a ponytail who had lost his house gambling on scratch cards. He would come and pick Rupert up for their meetings and, despite repeated invitations from Molly to come in and sit down, would insist on waiting in the hall, his hands firmly jammed into the pockets of his coat as if he didn’t quite trust them to do what they were told.
    For a while they managed to hold on to the house. Molly spent all of the money left to her by her mother on the mortgage arrears. She painted as much as she could at the weekends and managed to sell a few of her paintings to a gallery in town. She sat at the kitchen table writing lists of numbers onto clean, squared paper, feeling that by doing so she could somehow take back some control. But in the end, despite all her meticulous totting up, despite the small, careful