“I’m very sorry to hear that.”
“She’s in…” and cited the mental health department of a local hospital. He knew its reputation. A doctor friend, with professional dryness, had once told him, “You have to be really mad to get in there.”
“Yes.”
“It’s a terrible place. It’s like Bedlam. Lots of people screaming. Either that or they’re zombified with tranquillizers.”
“Yes.” He didn’t ask which category Susan was in.
“Would you go and see her? And see the place?”
He thought: this is the first time in a quarter of a century that Martha has asked anything of me. Disapproval at first; quiet superiority thereafter; though she had always been polite to him. She must be at the end of her tether, he thought. Well, he had been there in his time too; and knew how elastic the end of a tether could be. So he considered her request.
“Maybe.” He was going up to town in a couple of days, as it happened. But he wasn’t going to tell her that.
“I think it would do her good to see you. In the place she’s in.”
“Yes.”
He’d left it like that. After he put the phone down, he thought: I looked after her for years. I tried my best. I failed. I handed her over to you. So it’s your turn now.
But he didn’t believe his own bitter logic. It was like saying, “Find a policeman, find a policeman.” The truth was, he couldn’t face it: he couldn’t face seeing her, the remnant of her, whether screaming or zombified, among the screaming and zombified. He tried to think of his decision as an act of necessary self-protection; also, protection of the picture he had of her in his head. But he knew the truth. He was scared of going there.
* * *
—
As he grew older, his life turned into an agreeable routine, with enough human contact to sustain and divert, but not disturb, him. He knew the contentment of feeling less. His emotional life was recast as a social life. He was on nodding and smiling terms with many, as he stood in his leather apron and tweed cap in front of a colour photograph of happy goats. He prized stoicism and calm, which he had achieved less through some exercise of philosophy, more from a slow growth within him; a growth like coral, which in most weathers was strong enough to keep out the ocean breakers. Except when it wasn’t.
So his life consisted mainly of observation and memory. It was not a bad mix. He viewed with distaste those men in their sixties and seventies who carried on behaving as if they were in their thirties: a whirl of younger women, exotic travel and dangerous sports. Fat tycoons on yachts with hairy arms round thin models. Not to mention respectable husbands who, in a turmoil of existential anguish and Viagra, left their wives of several decades. There was a German expression for this fear, one of those concertina words the language specialised in, which translated as “the panic at the shutting of the doors.” He himself felt untroubled by that shutting; though he saw no reason to hurry it up.
He knew what they said of him locally: Oh, he likes to keep himself to himself. The phrase was descriptive, not judgemental. It was a principle of life the English still respected. And it wasn’t just about privacy, about an Englishman’s home—even a pebbledash semi—being his castle. It was about something more: about the self, and where you kept it, and who, if anyone, was allowed to fully see it.
He knew that no one can truly hold their life in balance, not even when in calm contemplation of it. He knew there was always a pull, sometimes amounting to an oscillation, between complacency on one side and regret on the other. He tried to favour regret, as being the less damaging.
But he certainly never regretted his love for Susan. What he did regret was that he had been too young, too ignorant, too absolutist, too confident of what he imagined love’s nature and workings to be. Would it have been better—in the sense of less catastrophic—for him, for her, for them both, if they had indeed had some “French” relationship? The older woman teaching the younger man the arts of love, and then, concealing an elegant tear, passing him out into the world—the world of younger, more marriageable women? Perhaps. But neither he nor Susan had been sophisticated enough for that. He had never known sophistication of the emotional life: anyway, to him it sounded like a contradiction in terms. So he didn’t regret that either.
He remembered his own early attempts to define love, back in the Village, alone in his bed. Love, he had ventured, was like the vast and sudden uncreasing of a lifelong frown. Hmm: love as the end of a migraine. No, worse: love as Botox. His other comparison: love feeling as if the lungs of the soul had suddenly been inflated with pure oxygen. Love as barely legal drug use? Did he have any idea what he’d been talking about? Some years later, as it happened, he’d been with a group of friends when an excited junior doctor joined them, having just “liberated” a cylinder of nitrous oxide from the hospital where he worked. They were each given a balloon, which they inflated from the cylinder then held tightly by the neck. Emptying their lungs as much as they could, they put the balloon to their lips, and released into themselves the roar and lift of a sudden, rushing, eye-blinking high. But no, it hadn’t reminded him at all of love.
* * *
—
Still, were the professionals any better? He took his little notebook from the desk drawer. He hadn’t written anything new in it for a long time. At one point, frustrated by how few good definitions of love he could find, he started copying down at the back all the bad definitions. Love is this, love is that, love means this, love means that. Even quite well-known formulations said little more than, in effect: it’s a soft toy, it’s a puppy dog, it’s a whoopee cushion. Love means never having to say you’re sorry (on the contrary, it frequently means doing just precisely that). Then there were all those love lines from all those love songs, with the swooning delusions of lyricist, singer, band. Even the bittersweet ones and the cynical ones—always true to you, darling, in my fashion—struck him as the mere counterfactuals of sentimentality. Yes, it was this bad for us, buddy, but it needn’t be this bad for you: such was the song’s implicit promise. So you can listen with sympathetic complacency.
Here was an entry—a serious one—which he hadn’t crossed out in years. He couldn’t remember where it came from. He never recorded the writer or the source: he didn’t want to be bullied by reputation; truth should stand by itself, clear and unsupported. This one went: “In my opinion, every love, happy or unhappy, is a real disaster once you give yourself over to it entirely.” Yes, that deserved to stay. He liked the proper inclusivity of “happy or unhappy.” But the key was: “Once you give yourself over to it entirely.” Despite appearances, this wasn’t pessimistic, nor was it bittersweet. This was a truth about love spoken by someone in the full vortex of it, and which seemed to enclose all of life’s sadness. He remembered again the friend who, long ago, had told him that the secret of marriage was “to dip in and out of it.” Yes, he could see that this might keep you safe. But safety had nothing to do with love.
The sadness of life. That was another conundrum he would occasionally ponder. Which was the correct—or the more correct—formulation: “Life is beautiful but sad” or “Life is sad but beautiful”? One or the other was obviously true; but he could never decide which.
Yes, love had been a complete disaster for him. And for Susan. And for Joan. And—back before his time—it might well have been so for Macleod as well.
He skimmed through a few crossed-out entries, then slid the notebook back in the drawer. Perhaps he had always been wasting his time. Perhaps love could never be captured in a definition; it could only ever be captured in a story.
* * *
—
Then there was the case of Eric. Of all his friends, Eric had truly been a man of good intentions, and therefore had always ascribed good intentions to others. Hence the lack of rebuke after he’d received a kicking at the fair. In his early thirties, w
orking in a local planning department, and with a decent little house in Perivale, Eric had become involved with a younger American woman. Ashley said she loved him; a love which expressed itself as wanting to be with him all the time and never wanting to meet his friends. And Ashley wouldn’t sleep with him, no, not now anyway, but certainly later. Ashley had her faith, you see, and Eric, having been religious himself in his youth, could understand and appreciate that. Ashley wasn’t a member of an established church, because look at all the harm established churches had caused; Eric could see that too. Ashley said that if he loved her, and agreed with her contempt for worldly possessions, then he would surely join her in such beliefs. And so Eric, temporarily cut off from his friends, put his little house up for sale, planning to give the proceeds to some cockamamie sect in Baltimore, after which the couple would move there and be married by some cockamamie religious theorist, or shaman, or sham, whereupon Eric, in exchange for his Perivale house, would be granted squatter’s rights in perpetuity in his new wife’s body. Fortunately, almost at the last minute, some survival instinct asserted itself, and he had cancelled his instructions to the estate agent, whereupon Ashley vanished from his life forever.
It had been a real disaster for Eric. He had lost his belief in the good intentions of others, and with it the ability fully to give himself over to love. If only he’d been inoculated with Susan’s suspicion of missionaries. But that hadn’t been part of Eric’s prehistory.
* * *
—
It was odd how the long-dead Gordon Macleod still nagged at him. More than Susan did, in truth. She was now resolved in his mind, and would remain so, even if she would also continue to cause him pain. Whereas Macleod was unresolved. So he would find himself imagining what it was like in Macleod’s head during those last, mute years, goggling at the wife who had left him, at the housekeeper and nurse whose presence irritated him, at his old pal Maurice, who said, “Down the hatch, chum,” then poured whisky straight from the bottle until it soaked his pyjamas.
So, there was Macleod lying on his back, day after day, knowing that this was not going to end well. Macleod was thinking back over his life. Macleod was remembering when he had first set eyes on Susan, at some dance or tea party, peopled with girls who on the whole wanted to have fun, and men who on the whole were not in respectably reserved occupations. And she was dancing with these spivs and black-marketeers—that’s what his envy turned them all into. Even the honest ones were just fancy boys and fancy men. But she went for none of them. Instead she chose that twerp with the goofy grin who could really dance—about the only thing he could do—yet whose flat feet or heart flutter had kept him out of uniform. What was his bloody name? Gerald. Gerald. And then the two of them had danced while he, Gordon, looked on. Then the twerp had died of leukaemia—they’d have done better to send him up in a bomber and let him do a hand’s turn before he pegged it, in Gordon’s view.
Susan was of course upset—inconsolable, they said—but he, Gordon, had stepped in and declared that he was the sort of chap she could rely on, both during the war and after. She had struck him as not exactly flighty, but a bit—what? irresponsible? No, that wasn’t quite right. She eluded him, and she laughed at some of the things he said—and not just the jokes, either—and such improbable, indeed impertinent reactions had made him fall smack in love with her. He told her that it didn’t matter how she felt now, because he was confident that she would come to love him in time, and she had replied, “I’ll do my very best.” Then they’d just thrown themselves into it, as many did during the war. At the altar, he had turned to her and asked, “Where’ve you been all my life?” But it hadn’t worked. The being together hadn’t worked, the sex hadn’t worked, except for successful impregnation; but otherwise, it led to no intimacy. So, their love was a disaster. But that of course was no reason not to stay married, back in those days. Because one could still be fond, couldn’t one? And there were the girls. He had long craved a son, but Susan hadn’t wanted any more after Martha and Clara. So that was the end of that part of their life. Separate beds to begin with; then, as she complained about his snoring, separate rooms. But one continued to be fond; if increasingly exasperated.
So he ventriloquised Gordon Macleod, in a way he could never have done while he still hated him. Was he getting anywhere nearer the truth?
* * *
—
He remembered another angry man: the furious driver with red, hairy ears, hooting and shouting at him on the Village’s zebra crossing. And in reply he had sneered, “You’ll be dead before I will.” At the time he believed that the function of the old was to envy the young. So, now that his turn had come, did he envy the young? He didn’t think so. Did he disapprove of them, was he shocked by them? Sometimes, but that was only fair: what they deserved, what he deserved. He had shocked his mother with the cover of Private Eye. Now he was himself shocked when some YouTube thread took him to a woman singing of love gone wrong: her title, and refrain, was “Bloody Mother-Fucking Asshole.” He had shocked his parents with his sexual behaviour. Now he was shocked when sex was so often portrayed as mindless, heartless, thoughtless shagging. But why the surprise? Each generation assumes that it has got sex just about right; each patronises the previous generation but feels queasy about the succeeding one. This was normal.
As for the wider question of age, and mortality: no, he didn’t think he felt a panic at the shutting of the doors. But maybe he hadn’t yet heard their hinges creak loudly enough.
* * *
—
Occasionally, people would ask him, either slyly or sympathetically, why he had never married; others assumed or implied that he must have been, back there, back then. He would deploy an English reticence and an array of demurrals, so the enquiries rarely came to anything. Susan had predicted that one day he would have an act of his own, and she had been proved right. His act, which had developed without his really noticing, was that of someone who had never—not really, not truly—ever been in love.
There was nothing between a very long answer and a very short one: this was the problem. The long answer—in an abbreviated form—would involve, of course, his own prehistory. His parents, their characters and interaction; his view of other marriages; the damage he’d seen families do; his escape from his own into the Macleod household, and the brief illusion that he’d fallen into some magical world; then a second disillusionment. Once bitten, twice shy; twice bitten, forever shy. So he had come to believe that such a way of life was not for him; and had never subsequently found anyone to change his mind. Although it was true that he had proposed to Susan in the cafeteria of the Royal Festival Hall, and later to Kimberly in Nashville. This would require a parenthesis or two of explication.
The long answer was too time-consuming to give. The short answer was too painful. It went like this. It was a question of what heartbreak is, and how exactly the heart breaks, and what is left of it afterwards.
* * *
—
When he remembered his parents, he often visualised them in some old television play from the black-and-white days. Sitting in high-backed armchairs on either side of an open fire. His father with a pipe in one hand, flattening a newspaper with the other; his mother with a dangerous inch of ash at the end of her cigarette, but always finding the ashtray a few seconds before it would drop onto her knitting. Then his memory would cut to her in that pink dressing gown, picking him up late at night, and flicking her lit cigarette disdainfully out onto the Macleods’ driveway. And then the suppressed resentment on both sides, as they made their silent way home.
He imagined his parents discussing their only child. Did they wonder “where they had gone wrong”? Or merely “where he had gone wrong”? Or how “he’d been led astray”? He imagined his mother saying, “I could throttle that woman.” He imagined his father being more philosophical and forgiving. “There was nothing wrong with The Lad, or how we
brought him up. It’s just that his risk profile hadn’t stabilised yet. That’s what David Coulthard would say.” Of course, his parents had died long before Max Verstappen’s exploits at the Brazilian Grand Prix; and his father took no interest in motor sport. But perhaps he might have found some parallel form of exoneration.
And he, in turn, now felt retrospective gratitude for the very safety and dullness he had been railing against when he first met Susan. His experience of life had left him with the belief that getting through the first sixteen years or so was fundamentally a question of damage limitation. And they had helped him do that. So there was a kind of posthumous reconciliation, even if one based on a certain rewriting of his parents; more understanding, and with it, belated grief.
* * *
—
Damage limitation. He found himself wondering if he had always misconstrued that indelible image which had pursued him down his life: of being at an upstairs window, holding on to Susan by the wrists. Perhaps what had happened was not that he had lost strength and let her fall. Perhaps the truth was that she had pulled him out with her weight. And he had fallen too. And been grievously damaged in the process.
* * *
—
I went to see her before she died. This was not long ago—at least, as time goes in a life. She didn’t know that anyone was there, let alone that it might be me. I sat in the chair provided. Playing through the scene beforehand, I had hoped that in some way she might recognise me, and that she would look peaceful. These hopes were as much for me as for her; I realised that.
Faces don’t change much, not even in extremity. But she didn’t look peaceful, even though she was asleep, or unconscious, whichever. Her forehead was pulled into a frown, and her bottom jaw pushed out a little. I knew these ways her face worked; I’d seen them many times, when she was in obstinate denial of something, denying it to herself even more than to me. She was breathing through her nose, occasionally giving a small snore. Her mouth was clamped tight. I found myself wondering if she still had the same dental plate all these decades on.