Lessons in Heartbreak

by Cathy Kelly

  ‘You made a mistake?’ It was what she wanted to hear. Jamie had married the wrong woman. But she was Catholic. Mistakes didn’t matter when it came to marriage. Marriage was for life. God was watching, He was tallying it all up. If she disobeyed the rules, she would pay with her immortal soul. That was absolute: there were no grey areas when God talked to you.

  ‘Tell me,’ she said.

  Lying in each other’s arms, he told her about Miranda, the girl he’d grown up knowing as almost a best friend. Their mothers had been bridesmaids at each other’s weddings. In 1937, they’d got married.

  ‘I knew it was a mistake even then,’ Jamie said. ‘On our wedding night –’

  Lily flinched in the bed beside him.

  ‘– Miranda locked herself in the bathroom and cried. She wouldn’t come out. I told her we didn’t have to do anything, that I wouldn’t touch her, but she refused to come out.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘She was frightened of me, frightened of making love. She’d led a very sheltered life and she had no idea what was going to happen. Whatever her mother had told her had terrified her. She’d kept up the façade until we were alone and then it all spilled out.’

  Lily hugged him more tightly.

  ‘What did you do?’

  ‘I slept on the floor,’ he said. ‘It was hardly the ideal wedding night, but that wasn’t what worried me: it was the thought of the future. A woman who’s that scared of you isn’t going to get over it easily. She loved me well enough during the day, but at night, she was terrified of me.’

  Lily could hear the remembered pain in his voice.

  ‘She’d been led to believe that men were like beasts, that once the doors closed, we couldn’t control our appetites. She told me that, later.’

  ‘Couldn’t you talk to her about it?’ Lily asked. ‘Or speak to her mother…?’

  ‘Her mother was the problem,’ Jamie said. ‘She was the one who’d told Miranda about men being beasts. There was no one I could ask for help. We had to get through it.’

  ‘And did you?’ Lily asked quietly.

  ‘No,’ he replied. ‘We didn’t. My mother and, ironically enough, Miranda’s, are always enquiring about the patter of tiny feet and when we’re going to start filling the nursery. Before the war, I thought about divorce, but then I joined up and it was easier to do nothing. Divorce felt like failure and I’d never failed at anything in my life before Miranda. Then I met you…’

  He turned to face her. ‘I fought it, Lily, because it wasn’t fair to flirt with you when I was still married. That’s why I didn’t write to you after the wedding. You deserve someone who’s free, you deserve the best. But…’ He kissed her face, moving from her forehead to her eyelids, down the bridge of her nose, to the softness of her lips. ‘I couldn’t help myself. That’s why I made up my mind to talk to you tonight, to tell you I could get a divorce. Miranda wasn’t a failure after all – our sham of a marriage meant I was waiting for you. You’re my future.’

  Lily felt her heart ache.

  ‘I’m sorry, Jamie. There can’t be any future for us. Even if you divorced your wife, I couldn’t marry you. A Catholic cannot marry a divorced person. I’d be excommunicated. I can’t do that, I can’t live without my faith.’

  Jamie didn’t say anything for a while and Lily felt angry, angry that he didn’t want to understand.

  ‘You must see how it is for me,’ she said. ‘I was raised like that, my faith is part of me, part of my family. It’s different for you. God’s important to me.’

  As she said it, she could see her parents at Mass on a Sunday, praying, believing utterly. She could see herself in the virginal white of her First Holy Communion dress, her heart bursting with pride on this special occasion. Didn’t he see that she couldn’t marry him because she’d never be part of her church again? God might forgive her this, but not more, not marrying a divorced man.

  ‘Do you honestly believe that?’ he demanded. ‘That God gives a damn who you marry? How does He work it out, then? Remember when we first met and you told me about those little boys you saw in the hospital, looking like they were asleep in their pyjamas. Who decided they would die? God? Did He make a good choice? I don’t think so, and I bet their parents don’t think so, either. Who decided that war was a good idea? Are you telling me that ordinary people want it?’ He was almost shouting now. ‘Ordinary people in Germany, do they want their sons killed and their daughters bombed? No.’

  Lily felt shocked. She’d often questioned the concept of war. Mopping up blood and comforting patients who’d woken to find themselves facing life as an amputee, had that effect. But she’d kept her doubts to herself. To question would be disloyal, as if she was undermining the war effort.

  ‘If God is running the whole world, then I don’t like the way He’s doing it,’ he said grimly. ‘This war isn’t solving anything. If the Allies had done the right thing about Hitler a long time ago, we wouldn’t be here now. We behave like sheep, Lily. Somebody else will work it out, somebody like God or the Government. If you cede power to somebody else all the time, then you get what you deserve.’

  ‘I still believe in God,’ she said.

  ‘But why does there only have to be your precise God? Why can’t somebody else’s God be enough? It’s fear, you see: I don’t like religions that rule by fear. Believe us or else you’ll burn in hell. That’s not a loving religion. We’re all living in fear right now and I can’t believe that it’s the right way to live. I should add that I’m not saying that to get my hand on your leg, Lily,’ he said gently.

  Lily smiled, grateful that his anger had dissipated. ‘You got rather further than my leg,’ she said.

  ‘Did I? Hmm, I might have to try that again.’

  He began caressing her again and Lily felt her blood stir. They didn’t have much time.

  Diana and Maisie would be home soon.

  ‘I’ll be gone before they come, I promise,’ he said and then quieted her with a kiss.

  Lily lay under him, revelling in the feel of his body on hers, and wished she could quiet her racing mind as easily as he’d quieted her talking. This was wrong, so wrong, screamed her head, but still, she couldn’t stop. There was no going back now.

  He left at twelve, heading off in black streets with only a torch to find his way. Lily didn’t ask if she would see him again: she knew she would.

  She climbed the stairs and got into a bed still warm from the imprint of his body, hugging the sheets where he’d lain close to her. She felt exhausted and sated, but sleep wouldn’t come. All she could think about was what she’d done.

  She’d betrayed her upbringing, her religion, by being with Jamie. She didn’t have to tell anyone to be cast out from the Church; the Almighty already knew.

  She thought of the picture of the Sacred Heart of Jesus that decorated every Catholic home in Ireland. A red lamp was always lit under the Sacred Heart and beside it would be a beautiful box-frame with Pope Pius XII’s picture, and the papal seal underneath.

  She could see her mother blessing herself each time she passed it, and the guilt overcame her.

  But one question remained in her mind: if their love was such a powerful lightning strike and made her feel whole like nothing ever had before, then how could it be so wrong?

  She’d never really questioned her religion before, even after all she’d seen at the hospital. Questioning was the enemy of faith. But were the old instincts so wrong, the powerful instincts that drove her as a woman?

  A strong voice from a little old lady came into her mind.

  ‘Trust that,’ said the voice, laying a small hand, clawed from the ravages of arthritis, on her breast bone just over the heart. ‘The heart never lies, mo chroi.’ Mo chroi, Gaelic for my heart. Like saying ‘my love’.

  Granny Sive, Dad’s mother. Lily hadn’t thought of her in years. She was dead, God rest her, had died when Lily was only nine or ten. And even though Lily had been a child, she’d known that her
grandmother’s death was like the end of an era of some sort. The passing of history, her dad had said.

  Indeed, Granny Sive – Lily had lisped the name when she was a small child, could barely say it: Sii and then Va, all rolled together into one syllable – had been the last of what her father called ‘the old people’, and he wasn’t talking about age.

  Granny Sive had gone to church and was on nodding acquaintance with the priest, but her Christianity sat side by side with the old mother earth religion of the Celtic peoples.

  She could tell the time without heed to the kitchen clock, she knew what way the weather was going to turn from looking at the way the birds were flying back to their nests, and she studied the phases of the moon carefully.

  Granny Sive told Lily tales of the warrior goddess Brigid, who had powers to heal the sick. For the old people, Granny Sive explained, lighting candles to honour Brigid on the first of February was as important as Easter to the priest. Imbolg, the Celtic festival around Brigid’s day, heralded the birth of spring, the lambing season and the prospect of warmth. Mountain ash and whitethorn grew outside her house: magic trees, she told Lily.

  And she told stories of the mother of all the Irish goddesses, Danu or Dana. Lily’s middle name was Dana. Mam had favoured Lily, the name of one of Lady Irene’s sisters, but Granny Sive had pushed for Dana. In the end, they’d compromised. She became Lily Dana Kennedy.

  What would Granny Sive have made of Jamie? Would she have invoked the crucifix and eternal damnation? Or would she have pressed her old hand to Lily’s heart and said, ‘Trust that’?

  Lily wished she was more like Granny Sive.

  TWENTY-ONE

  The hospital psych ward in Tamarin was tiny and consisted of a small four-bed section in the middle, with a further four rooms leading off from the communal area. Overlooking the sea was a television room, a ‘quiet room’, the nurses’ station, and a consulting room.

  Anneliese had been there for five days and she was fed up with asking the chief psychiatrist, Dr Eli, if she could go home. Once again he was dragging his heels.

  ‘I’m fine,’ she said. ‘It was an error of judgement brought on by numbing myself with tranquillisers,’ she added as they sat in the small consulting room and Dr Eli gave her his grave but friendly look.

  ‘Trying to drown yourself is quite a statement,’ he said, in a voice so calm and measured that Anneliese would have hit him over the head with something, if only there had been a single blunt object in the room that wasn’t nailed down. Clearly people had tried this before. In the psych ward, the knives and the chairs were plastic. There was nowhere to vent any anger.

  ‘Lapse of judgement,’ she insisted. ‘I can’t believe I did it. I’m not mad, right. Plus, if I wasn’t mad before I came here, I’m going mad now. I hate, hate being in rooms where I can’t get out, and there’s nothing to do and nobody to talk to. It’s like being stuck on a reality TV show without the cameras or the choice about food. Let me go home.’

  ‘You know you’re only in the locked ward because we’ve no beds anywhere else in the hospital,’ Dr Eli said. ‘I’d like to keep you in for a few more days to make sure you’re doing as well as you say you are.’

  ‘I am well,’ Anneliese groaned. ‘You can’t fake it – I tried and, believe me, I now know the difference between not being well and being well. I want to go home, breathe fresh air and feel healthy again.’

  She wanted to leave because the atmosphere of sadness that permeated the ward was hard to live with. Compared to the teenage boy locked in his own head from drug addiction, and the young woman with empty eyes and bandaged wrists from trying to cut them, Anneliese knew she was basically well. Her being here was a stupid mistake. With those kids, it was much, much more and she knew she couldn’t heal until she was away from the ward.

  ‘Plus,’ she added, ‘I never want to see a tranquilliser again in my life. I don’t want to be out of my mind. I’ve decided I like being in it. Numbing my brain was the problem. I numbed too bloody much and stopped thinking straight.’

  ‘How does it feel, talking about this, about why you did it?’ he asked.

  Anneliese had regretted her walk into the sea many, many times. Trying to explain her actions to Beth was the worst, but telling Dr Eli came a close second. The man was a bloody monolith of calm, nothing upset him, and he asked the same questions again and again, as if the repetition would make her give in and supply the real answer.

  Except Anneliese had given the real answer already: I don’t really know why I kept walking into the sea, it’s sort of hazy in my mind. I wasn’t thinking properly, but I know I don’t want to do it again. I made a mistake, really, a mistake.

  ‘Oh, Dr Eli,’ she said wearily, ‘what is the correct answer to that question? What’s the answer you want to hear? That I’ve got Dalí-esque shapes in my head bleeding their life out on to the floor? That giant cockroaches are under my T-shirt? You know what was wrong with me? Life.

  ‘My life sucked. I haven’t lost my marbles, I didn’t have a hallucinogenic dream where Noddy French-kissed me or where I turned into a horse and wanted to trample my mother and marry my father. I don’t want to be a paper on Freudian analysis for the middle-aged woman. My problem is simple: I reached rock bottom, tried to numb my head, and ended up in a happy blur that saw me walk down the beach and keep walking.’

  There was a pause before the doctor slid seamlessly into the space with a question: ‘How does it feel to say that?’

  A roar of laughter bubbled up inside Anneliese and escaped. The noise shocked her for a second because it was so long since she’d laughed. How does it feel to say that? You couldn’t make it up, she decided. She felt as if she was trapped in an episode of Frasier crossed with One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.

  ‘Do you ever watch Frasier, Dr Eli?’ she asked. ‘You know, the sit-com with the psychiatrist who has a radio talk show in Seattle.’

  ‘Not really –’ muttered the doctor. ‘I don’t watch much television.’

  ‘It’s very funny,’ Anneliese said. ‘You should watch it. You’d love it, although you’ve got to be able to laugh at yourself to enjoy it, and that’s not always easy –’

  ‘Back to you –’

  ‘No, not back to me,’ Anneliese interrupted. ‘Not trying to be rude, here, Dr Eli, but I’d like to go home and stop this. Can you discharge me?’

  ‘One more day?’ he said.

  Anneliese thought it would be easier for Beth if she was discharged properly instead of her just charging out by herself, saying she was fine. Legally, Anneliese knew she didn’t have to stay, but she felt guilty for stressing her pregnant daughter out, and playing by the rules seemed a good solution.

  ‘One more day,’ she agreed. ‘Now, I Love Lucy is on – you need satellite television in here, Dr Eli. Paramount Comedy would help a lot of us get better much faster.’

  ‘You think so?’ he asked.

  She nodded. ‘Sit-com therapy should be a recognised form of analysis, part cognitive behavioural, part laughing-at-yourself. And I’m smiling just thinking about it, so isn’t that progress?’

  After Dr Eli had gone, Anneliese wandered into the television room and sat in one of the windows, looking out at the sea. The windows had bars on the outside. To keep the crazy people in or keep the rest of the world out – Anneliese didn’t know which. Strangely, she was used to the bars now. Those first twenty-four hours, when she’d lain numbly in her bed, she’d hated them and all they represented. Her downfall.

  It had been instantaneous: one moment, she’d been standing on the beach, still being Anneliese, mother of Beth, sort of wife to Edward, stalwart of the Lifeboat Shop. And a fraction of a moment later, she was the woman who’d tried to drown herself in the deceptive currents of the bay. Just a flicker of doubt and her whole life had changed.

  Edward had come to the hospital after she’d been brought in and she hadn’t cared about him seeing her.

  ‘Go away!’ she’d cr
ied hoarsely at him, clad in a hospital gown because her sea-sodden clothes had been removed. ‘Go away.’

  He’d gone and even though Anneliese knew he was devastated by what had happened, she didn’t care about his hurt. Let him hurt. Let him feel what it was like.

  Beth was different.

  ‘Your daughter’s coming to see you, Anneliese, isn’t that nice?’ said one of the nurses, the tall one with the dark hair, the next morning. That was when the shame coursed through her. Her darling pregnant daughter was driving to see her and had presumably been phoned the night before with the sort of news nobody ever wanted to hear. Anneliese pictured the confusion and hurt on Beth’s face; she could imagine her leaning against the wall to rest her back, hand on the mound of her baby, asking: ‘No, it can’t be true?’

  She’d done that. Her. The woman who’d spent her life taking care of Beth had spectacularly abandoned taking care of her. Beth could have gone into early labour with shock, anything, and it would have been her fault.

  For the first time since she’d been admitted to Tamarin Hospital the day before, Anneliese emerged from her locked-in state and began to cry. She’d thought she could simply disappear off the planet and nobody would care. But she’d been wrong.

  Beth hadn’t arrived until nearly lunchtime. From her bed where she was propped up against the pillows because she felt so bone-numbingly weary, Anneliese could see Marcus and Beth enter the ward. Even the strain on her face couldn’t diminish the glow of imminent motherhood. Beth’s skin really was blooming and her hair fell lustrously around her shoulders. She looked like an advert in a pregnancy magazine. Except that pregnancy magazines never featured pictures taken inside psychiatric wards.

  Anneliese gulped and the gulp turned into a sob.