Over Read online

It’s true. Photographs of those who have recently died tell of times that are over, and make me long to have them back again, and that is no good. And I don’t need photos to conjure up the faces of the living. Images of my children are in my mind all the time. I tried to explain this to Pat. ‘And Don?’ she asked. ‘What about Don?’

  Don’s face, his image, is a different matter. Sometimes I think I’ve lost him for good. The wrong face appears before me when I think about him now (and that is still very often). I persistently see a younger man, his complexion healthy, his eyes bright, his chin clean-shaven, his hair combed. I always loved his hair, not exactly blond (though Judith told me it had been white-blond as a child) but very fair and thick. When I met him (I was twenty-two) I thought he might be younger than I was – he has one of those broad, square faces with strong cheekbones that don’t age quickly. At forty, he still looked nearer thirty. But now, at nearly fifty, he looks more like sixty. When I think of him as he was, he smiles at me. I smile back. Then I blink, and the comforting image disappears. Instead, I see a caricature of the man, the skin grey, and lined, the eyes dull, the stubble thick, the hair wild. I don’t know him, or maybe it is that I don’t want to know him, or have anything to do with him, so I banish him. I tried to tell Pat this, but it was too difficult. I ended up simply shaking my head, and she said she was sorry she had asked.

  She wanted to know what he was doing at the moment, how he was managing on his own. I said I didn’t know much about his new circumstances. He’d stayed with his sister for a while but that hadn’t worked out. Pat asked why. It was difficult to explain. They didn’t argue or anything like that. They never have done. But Judith creates around her an atmosphere of, well, heartiness, I suppose, which Don can’t stand. She’s a bit like Lynne, she wants everyone always to be happy and having a good time and she tries to make sure that they do, which is kind of her – she is a very kind woman – but she panics in the face of misery or depression, and this makes her uncharacteristically nervous. She becomes jumpy and agitated when confronted by long faces – she needs anyone who’s feeling low at least to pretend that things are improving. ‘You could try to smile a little, Don,’ she once said quite soon afterwards. ‘It wouldn’t hurt.’ She followed this by saying she’d read somewhere that the act of smiling itself released some hormone, ‘or something’, which actually did make even wretched people feel a little happier.

  Pat said she could understand how Don felt, if this was how his sister dealt with his unhappiness. It would be enough to drive anyone out. She asked if I had an address for Don at least. I told her I had his mobile phone number and an e-mail address. ‘Do you think I should call him, and maybe go and see him, or meet him somewhere?’ I shrugged, said she could do what she liked, but that probably she’d find Don had gone off on some new wild-goose chase.

  ‘You sound bitter, Lou,’ Pat said.

  ‘I am bitter. No, I’m beyond bitter.’

  ‘And what does that mean?’

  ‘Worse. I’m worse than bitter.’

  ‘Is that fair?’

  ‘Fair?’

  ‘Well, it isn’t Don’s fault, all this, he can’t help what’s happened, and how he feels. I feel sorry for him, for the mess he’s in.’

  ‘I feel sorry for him, too …’

  ‘You don’t sound it.’

  ‘But I feel more sorry for Molly and Finn and myself. He’s made the whole tragedy so much harder to bear.’

  Pat was frowning by the time I said this, and I knew I sounded resentful and hard and that any minute now she would wonder aloud where the old Lou had gone. She seemed to have forgotten how she herself had become exasperated with Don when he’d tried to enlist her help. ‘Let’s not talk about Don,’ I said. ‘It’s too distressing.’ I was feeling agitated, annoyed by Pat’s attitude, her concern for Don. I wanted her to be more concerned about me, or Molly, or Finn. She seemed different, a touch judgemental, which she had never been before. ‘I’m not criticising you, Lou,’ she said. ‘Honest, I’m not. It’s just that I always liked Don, and it breaks my heart to hear of the state he’s in, and I wish I could do something and …’

  ‘Nobody,’ I said, ‘can do anything for Don.’

  I was saved, at that point, by a call from Finn, one of his quick calls, made from his mobile while he was walking along a busy street, and the reception was appalling. The rest of the evening we talked about Molly, which was a pleasure. There was plenty to talk about and all of it easy. I got a map out and showed Pat where she was in Zambia, and where she would be going, to a village called Nambo, and, though I had no photographs of her displayed round my flat, I had packets of snaps she’d sent and I produced those. There was no more tension, thank God. But I was glad when Pat left. Something had altered between us and I hadn’t felt completely at ease with her. She’d disappointed me, let me down. Our old friendship, which I’d thought strong and solid, suddenly seemed threatened. I’d wanted something from Pat and whatever this was – I didn’t know myself – she hadn’t been able to give. I felt, in a childish way, that she had taken Don’s side against me.

  I wonder if she has gone to visit Don?

  *

  We’ve been working on families. Jeremy ran off a sheet of A4 for each child. They wrote their names at the top (or he wrote them), and then affixed a snapshot of themselves. Getting the photos was a bit tricky. Some children didn’t have a single one, but I brought my camera in and we solved that problem. Most of the photos were of the children as babies, which is what we’d asked for, and they loved looking at themselves. Then they had to draw and name their family. Great care was taken by me to emphasise that ‘family’ could be anyone close to them and could include people not their relatives. Sita had so many people on her sheet that she had to squash them in, but she knew the names of all the aunts and uncles and cousins. Lola drew her mother and that was that. Yusuf drew a row of six women then put a black cross through three. ‘They passed over,’ he said. Hearing him tell me this, Paige said that meant they were dead and if they were dead they couldn’t be his family, it wasn’t fair. Before I could say anything Yusuf said they were in the next world and they were still his family. He looked to me for support. I said of course they were still his family but, because they were not living in his house now, he didn’t need to draw them. It didn’t mean he’d forgotten them. Rather sadly, Yusuf rubbed out the three crossed relatives. Paige’s nod of satisfaction was hard for him to bear. She now has more members in her family than him though I’m quite sure they don’t all live with her. Both sets of grandparents figure prominently. She has uncles who are twins. She took great pains to draw them exactly the same.

  *

  Pat wrote as soon as she got back home. She did meet Don. She rang him, on his mobile, she said, and he was ‘surprisingly friendly’. He told her he was very busy, and about to go to Holland yet again, but that it would be good to meet up for a drink or something. She asked him to suggest somewhere because she hardly knows London, and when he heard she was catching a train back to Scotland the next day he proposed a café opposite the station. He was there before her, but she didn’t recognise him and went to sit at an empty table. He had to come over and identify himself, which made her uncomfortable. But then they chatted quite happily. He was very pleasant, as he always used to be – no sign of the madness or aggression or neurotic behaviour I had described. He asked where she’d been staying and she told him and he seemed ‘very concerned about you, Lou’. He wanted to know how I seemed, what she’d thought of me. She told him I seemed to be ‘managing better’ and he was glad. They were getting on so well that she decided to bring up the subject of his own behaviour. She started off by saying she’d been so shocked to hear that he and I had parted and sold our house. Don said this wasn’t his doing. I had chosen to distance myself from him and couldn’t bear the sight of him or the house, and had insisted on him moving out. He thought I was ‘deranged’ and it was for the sake of my mental health that he had agreed to
what I wanted.

  I hardly cared to read on after that, but I did. Pat wrote that she took a deep breath and accused Don of having neglected me and his children in his search for what he persisted in thinking was the hidden truth about Miranda’s so-called accident. She told him that I’d said he thought of nothing but his investigations, that she’d heard he hadn’t time for anything else. He had looked offended, and frowned, and told her he had only been doing what had to be done and he expected me to share his determination to find out what really happened to cause Miranda’s death. If he had alienated me with his determination to establish the truth (which he thought the inquest certainly had not done), I had alienated him with what he wrongly labelled my ‘head-in-the-sand’ attitude. The real blow was in Pat’s last bit: ‘He said you always had worn rose-coloured spectacles faced with anything nasty, just like his sister.’

  I am nothing like Judith. What he has told Pat is absolutely untrue. It indeed is Don who cannot face up to what is very ‘nasty’. Miranda, who had never sailed on her own, took out a boat and could not cope with the violent freak storm, which came out of nowhere that day. And she drowned.

  *

  It is hard, looking back (and I don’t want to look back, though I’m doing so all the time) to describe what those days afterwards were like – I mean, the exact feel of them, as week succeeded week and what is called ‘normality’ returned. It often struck me as incredible the way we obeyed the simple demands of the body – we ate, we moved, we excreted, and when our hair grew we cut it, and when our nails grew we had to cut them. We bathed, we dressed, we functioned. But we did all this in different ways. I did it for the sake of Molly and Finn. Every time I wanted just to stay in bed and howl, I was disgusted with myself. I had to show them that life, our lives, their lives, would go on. I make myself sound like some kind of martyr, but I was not. I was making constant bargains with myself: if I managed to cook a favourite family dinner and we all sat down together and chatted as we ate it, then I was entitled to shut myself in my bedroom in the afternoons when the house was empty and weep. I had to try, and I did. So, in their different ways, did Molly, before she went to Africa, and Finn. I recognised their efforts. I saw the dreadfully strained faces in the mornings, the way they moved about as though they were not quite sure which way to go, and I was touched by the little gestures they made – the pats on my back as they passed me, the squeeze of my hand when I gave them something – though they almost undid me. On and on we went, forcing ourselves to control our grief for the sake of each other until in time it began to lessen in degree.

  But Don did none of this. He sealed himself off from us. When he sat with us at the table – and I had to beg him to join us – he either gave a monologue on whatever line of investigation he was currently pursuing, or he sat quite silently, head bowed, flinching if any of us laughed or became too animated. ‘I am suffering’, his attitude said, as though we would not know about this. It took me a long time, months and months, to begin to think that I did not have to endure this. It shocked me when the first glimmer of the idea that I did not have to live with Don entered my head. But then I let it hover there and it grew and grew until it was like a blinding light – I could, if I wanted, be free of this weight oppressing me. It felt dangerous to consider the possibility of breaking out of what I felt to be a stranglehold, but the danger attracted me. Worse: it excited me. Even thinking about it, my heart would start to beat more rapidly. If Don was in the same room at the time, I would have to leave it. He never once asked me why I’d made such a hurried exit, but then he was so much in his own world he probably didn’t notice. I couldn’t have told anyone any of this.

  *

  Extraordinary, but after that outburst, I slept well. Any morning when I wake up and realise that I have slept well, I feel triumphant. It’s such a glorious feeling to open my eyes and not have a headache and for my face not to feel stiff. I treasure it, luxuriate in this victory. And of course my whole being is transformed by this good night’s sound sleep – I feel cheerful and well and more than able to face the day. That ghastly creature who cowered under the covers, aching all over, barely able to open one sore eye, is banished, and so is the memory of the ghost-like spectre wandering in her nightdress from room to room, never able to settle for five minutes even though she was exhausted, weeping with fatigue as well as misery. It makes me shudder to remember those weeks and weeks of no rest whatsoever. I dreaded every night, knowing that even if I did sleep, in snatches, the nightmares would make lack of sleep preferable.

  Afterwards, for a short while, I did take sleeping pills. We all did, even Molly, who normally won’t even touch an aspirin. Everyone urged us to, the doctor, friends, neighbours – you need to sleep, they said, you can’t go on without sleep. They were right, we couldn’t carry on then without sleep, but waking up after we’d taken sleeping pills and oblivion had descended for a few merciful hours, was almost worse, mouth dry, head heavy, limbs weighing a ton – it wasn’t worth it. Natural sleep was what we craved, and it took a long time to return. Even now, I don’t often sleep really deeply and well as I used to do, always. I have bad nights, but I have strategies to deal with them, and mostly these are adequate. It is much easier now that I sleep alone, now that I live alone. It is so sad to have to admit that.

  *

  Christmas is over again, thank God, though in an odd kind of way I quite enjoyed it this year. I didn’t have Finn – he went skiing with his cousins – or Molly to worry about. It was Molly who worried about me. I told her I was going to Ruth’s, and that satisfied her. She couldn’t bear the thought of my being alone, remembering as she did our family Christmases and how I loved them, and how …

  I planned my solitary Christmas quite cleverly. On Christmas Eve I went to Carols by Candlelight at the Royal Albert Hall, at 7 o’clock, an easy time for me to get there. As well as carols, there was other music – Handel, Bach – and I felt perfectly comfortable being on my own among so many strangers. I felt they must all be a certain sort of person, my sort of person in some way, to be there at all. I went home by bus, two buses, and the streets looked so cheerful with all the lights and the glimpses of Christmas trees through uncurtained windows. I was still humming ‘O Come all ye Faithful’ as I let myself into my flat, and when Judith rang – she’d been most upset that I wouldn’t spend Christmas with her – I answered sounding lively and energetic.

  I lied to her, too, about Christmas Day itself. She knows Ruth is an old friend, so it was plausible. I had a plan. I’d seen an advert saying ‘Celebrate Christmas Day at the Charles Dickens Museum’. Visitors to his Doughty Street home were invited to ‘take a step back in time’. Staff, dressed in period costume, would offer mulled wine and mince pies, and there was to be a film adaptation of A Christmas Carol running all day. Well, I’d never been to Doughty Street, though I’ve read most of Dickens’s novels, and I thought it would somehow be fitting to visit his old home on Christmas Day – it amused me. I wasn’t going to tell anyone where I’d been but all the same it made me smile to think how astonished and puzzled people would be if they’d known. Would it have made me seem pathetic? Maybe, but since it would remain a secret it didn’t matter.

  I drove through almost deserted streets and parked with ease. My fear that I’d be the only person there was ludicrously misplaced – the house was crowded. But this helped, it meant I wasn’t noticed and could move about uninhibited by self-consciousness. People wished each other a Merry Christmas, very politely, and smiled, but otherwise ignored each other, concentrating on what was on show. The banisters were entwined with ivy (fake) and red ribbons, and there was a Christmas tree in the drawing-room, though a caption alongside confessed that Dickens would have been unlikely to have had one. I wandered from room to room without studying the various bits of ephemera too closely, more interested in the feel of the rooms and the pieces of furniture that had been there during Dickens’s time. But one notice caught my eye, a quotation from Dickens, pinned up
: ‘Christmas is a time above all others when want is keenly felt.’

  Before I left, I went down to the bottom of the house. There was no one there. I found myself looking through a sort of iron railing at a huge tub, a dolly tub. There were some white rags hanging over the edge of it. The floor was stone. There was virtually no light. It took no imagination at all to visualise a maid on her knees, soaping and scrubbing the clothes while upstairs Dickens and his family sat in comfort. It was how things were. I stood a long time staring into the little cold washroom unable to sort out what I was feeling.

  *

  Lynne is organising our spring half-term holiday already. She bombards me with brochures, in which she has already marked places she fancies and written comments in the margins. I can’t decide whether she is deliberately highlighting coastal resorts, or whether she simply hasn’t realised that I don’t want to be near the sea. Should I say this to her? Or would it be better to get over my reluctance by facing the sea with Lynne?

  The sea she is thinking of is not the sea I am afraid of. The sea in Lynne’s brochures is calm and blue and flat. It doesn’t rage, there are no huge waves, it doesn’t look as if it could ever roar. I might like it. It looks all innocence. There are miles of white sand, or else pretty pink coves sheltered from the winds. There would be no reminders.

  Afterwards, Don had insisted that we, he and I, should go at once to where it happened. I didn’t even think of objecting. He was so in control, full of fury and energy, and I was limp, able to be programmed as he wished. Judith took care of Molly and Finn. I remember she said to me, ‘Louise, are you sure you’re up to this?’ and I looked at her in bewilderment, as though it was the strangest question. We didn’t speak all the way there, not a word between us in the car, in the plane, in the taxi. It was just a marina, a ‘yacht haven’ they call it in Dutch, crammed with boats. The police met us there, and were polite, but from the first Don was aggressive. I stood dumbly beside him while he asked questions, his voice hoarse and deep, becoming the voice of a stranger. He wanted to see the wreckage of the boat immediately. The policemen, two of them, didn’t seem to know if he would be allowed to at the moment. Don exploded. He ranted at them, and I closed my eyes, not wanting to see the pity in the policemen’s expressions. They took us to a shed, a short drive from the marina. Phone calls were made from their car and when we got to the shed a man in a white boiler suit was waiting for us. I remember he had a clipboard in his hand, and I wondered what it was for. I felt sick, and said I would wait outside, if Don didn’t mind, but he did mind. He took me by the arm and led me into the place, insisting that he needed a witness, and I hadn’t the energy or strength to shake him off.