by Tim Lott
The first time had been about six months previously. I had been in a strange mood, I confess. Rocking on the edge of Notting Hill Gate westbound tube platform, feeling the rush of wind from the approaching train, now, I thought to myself. No, now!
Was it before or after that that I balanced on the edge of the roof of my stucco terrace in Portobello Road, five floors up, at three in the morning? I was waiting for courage to invade me like grace, but, as at the station platform, it never came.
It was soon afterwards, I am sure, that I drove into the country-side with a pair of handcuffs and a length of rubber tubing so that I could pump carbon monoxide into the car, cuff myself to the wheel and throw away the key. It was certainly around that time that I went to see Jack and Jean, to deliver the news, in quiet, measured tones, that their second son had lost his reason. As I drove down the Western Avenue – one slip of the wheel and bang, the matter would be taken care of – I suddenly seemed to know that what I had to say would destroy Jean. It didn’t matter. Shame, consideration for others, had become vague memories. Survival was all that counted, not that there was much hope of that.
The second time I murdered Jean had been the night before her death. On that occasion, though, it was less overt, more a crime of omission. My brother James and I had gone to visit, as we often did, not out of duty but because we liked to. We were all good friends. Jean had made dinner, a curry or a continental stew of some sort. She had been taking evening classes in cookery and had transformed her once-rudimentary technique. Previously it had been white fish in white sauce, toad in the hole, kidneys in batter, roast hearts or an egg and ham flan that always made me retch slightly. Now she was modern and cosmopolitan. There was beef carbonade, chicken paprika, fish mornay with Duchesse potatoes, sweet and sour pork. Apple strudel, banana bread and flan Normande had begun to replace chocolate pudding with chocolate sauce, Eccles cakes, spotted dick and semolina pudding. She would watch the Galloping Gourmet and note down recipes. She sometimes had wine, a Liebfraumilch – Blue Nun on special occasions – a red Lambrusco or a Piat d’Or; Mateus Rosé and Black Tower were out of fashion now. Jean herself drank mainly sherry, but rarely more than a small liqueur glass. It’ll get me all tipsy, she would say, knowing perfectly well that it wouldn’t. I had never seen Jean drunk in my life.
And so it had been last night. It was an ordinary evening in every respect. We laughed, exchanged scraps of news, made fun of each other, maybe played a few hands of cards – nomination whist or pontoon perhaps. Such simple things seemed good to me since I had finally recovered from the madness that had sent me driving home that day along the Western Avenue, plotting my own extinction and praying for sanctuary. Just to be OK, to be fallow, was enough, for the time being.
Things weren’t entirely sorted out, it was true. I was still unemployed and unattached, and spent more time than I ought by myself in bed, staring at the sandstone of All Saints’ Church in Clydesdale Road through the french windows of my bedroom. I was inclined to be morose and fatalistic, and certainly appeared to have lost the sharpness, ruthlessness and drive that propelled me through the early 1980s, through business success, academic success, personal failure and finally breakdown. But the idea that I might commit suicide had disappeared. It now seemed simply ridiculous.
Against my better judgement, and at the urging of my parents, I had taken a variety of antidepressant drugs. I’d had absolutely no hope that they would work, but they did, and decisively. I rediscovered what it was to laugh. I knew what it was to feel emotions other than rage, grief, hollowness and regret, although things – for the time being at least – seemed rather softened at the edges, and damp and insubstantial underneath.
So Jean’s apparently balanced demeanour – which, as I say, was normal for her – was predictable. She had never been an obviously neurotic or a nervous woman anyway, although she thought of herself as sensitive. I had apparently recovered from a terrible crisis. She had dealt with it, got on with it, coped, as she always prided herself on doing. Now her life continued, and it was a good life, on the whole. Her family was close and she wanted for nothing in particular. She seemed to have good friends – many of whom envied her – and a full, active social life.
At the end of the meal James – or Jack, as he had rechristened himself, taking our father’s newly fashionable name in his constant attempt at reinvention and escape from Southall – left early. He was going back to the Notting Hill flat he had shared with me ever since I walked out on Becka for the last time and she had left, after smacking me in the face with an open palm and hurling a heavy glass ashtray at my head. The mark on the wall was still there.
I offered to drive Jean to the house of her old friend and workmate Irene Downhill. Her son was a car mechanic and had been repairing the dent in Jean’s Volkswagen. The accident had happened when she lost concentration one day the previous week and pulled out into the path of a motorcyclist. Jean was upset, but the rider was only slightly hurt. It was the second such accident in the last few months. Jean had begun to fret that age was making her lose her coordination, but Jack had told her not to be silly, that such things happened and were simply part of life.
We left Rutland Road at about eight o’clock. It had been dark for several hours. We drove through the centre of Southall, past sari shops and sweet centres. After five or so minutes in almost total silence we approached Irene’s house in ‘Old’ Southall. This was the smartest part, near Southall Park, where Olive and Rene occasionally played bowls on the municipal green. There were cottages with carriage lamps, detached houses called Rosewood, Cranleigh and Bona Estada. There were Vauxhall Carltons, an Audi 80 1.8, a Mitsubishi Gallant Sappho. Modest attempts at topiary surmounted wooden fences painted with creosote. Jean could not have afforded to live here, although she would have liked to. It was so English, and Jean, like Jack, loved England, or at least the ordinary, suburban England held suspended in her imagination.
Irene had married someone towards the top outside edge of our class, Bob, who was a computer whiz. Lower middle class almost, rather than upper working, a character from Butterflies rather than Terry and June. He was a nice man, except that he hated the ‘coloureds’ or the ‘brownies’ and would bang on about them for what seemed like hours.
Jean seemed to be tensing herself as we negotiated the long part of the T that led to Irene’s road. When she spoke, it was very quietly, but steadily, without any obvious tremor in her dainty, over-polite voice. She had worked her way down slightly in her seat, so that her head barely rose above the back.
I’ve been to St Bernard’s, you know.
What?
I’ve been to St Bernard’s. They’ve given me tablets.
I stopped the car, shocked. St Bernard’s Hospital was the nuthouse in Hanwell, the bin. What on earth was my mother doing going there? I found myself inspecting Jean closely, something I rarely, if ever, did. Yellow light from the streetlamp made parchment of her face. She was still a pretty woman, even I could see that, though marks of wear were becoming more insistent now, as she neared the end of her fifties. It occurred to me that there was something stretched about her, as if some force inside was forever demanding, and being denied, expression.
Why?
I don’t know. I just haven’t been feeling right. A bit down, I suppose.
I tried to think. Was she depressed? Not very seriously, that was for sure. I had been acutely depressed very recently. You couldn’t be bothered to get out of bed. You could barely be bothered to wipe yourself after the toilet. You spoke drivel, if you could manage to talk at all. You constantly threatened suicide. That was depression, not this neat, composed, defensively smiling person sitting beside me.
Jean raised her face to mine. She was a good deal shorter than me, even when we were both sitting, and the tension within her seemed to draw her down further, giving the impression that she had shrunk.
Do you think I’ve been a good mother?
I was surprised at the question an
d let this show in my face. I shook my head slightly, with an incredulity that came as a spontaneous reaction.
You’ve been the best mother anyone could ever hope for. You’re a wonderful mother. Truly. I don’t know what I would have done without you.
I was gushing, perhaps nervous, but I meant it. She had been a good mother, almost ridiculously so, or so I felt. She didn’t move or respond. I felt a pang of love, which vulnerability often elicits from me, like the sight of a misspelt word on a shopping list. I reached over to hug her and to reassure her. Oddly for her, she didn’t hug back. She was stiff and somehow limp at the same time.
I don’t.
What?
I don’t think I’ve been a good mother.
Why on earth not?
Oh, I don’t know.
Her eyes were wary. She seemed to fear saying too much, as if she had been instructed not to reveal her secrets too easily.
Come on, Mum. Tell me.
Oh, well, you haven’t been very happy, have you?
That’s got nothing to do with you. For Christ’s sake, it’s not your fault.
I said this without irritation. Jean looked unconvinced. She sat absolutely still as she talked, her voice seeming to become fainter having been challenged.
Then there’s Jeff. He got divorced from Helma.
Helma was Jeff’s German-American wife for seven years. I had liked her a great deal. The new one, Maria, was from Honduras. Jean had yet to meet her.
Yes, but now he’s married again.
Hmm.
The silence gathered charge. I didn’t quite know what to say and found myself feeling vaguely embarrassed. Jean had never really shown me her problems before.
What does Dad say?
Oh, I haven’t told him.
I pondered this. For some reason, it did not occur to me what an astonishing thing this was. Jean told Jack everything, or so she had always claimed. Why was she confessing this glaring, heartbreaking fact to me rather than to him?
Mum, I think you’re perhaps unwell. I think you are ill.
She was silent. I had decided that she was probably suffering from mild depression, which, presumably, was why she had been referred to St Bernard’s in the first place. Dr Garg, the GP from Allenby Road, would have made the referral. She would have been prescribed antidepressant tablets, some of the new generation that took over from the tranquillizers of the 1970s: imipramine, a tricyclic, most probably. I was a bit of an expert on them nowadays. They had worked well for me and I was inclined to evangelize. When I spoke again, it was with that edge of pomposity my voice often took on when I wished to assert my educational superiority over my parents.
Look, it’s an illness, like TB or something. It’s entirely curable. You know that it is. Look at what happened to me. Look what I was like three months ago – a gibbering wreck, a blob. Now I’m fine. And you’re in much better shape than I was.
Are you? Fine?
Jean didn’t sound very convinced.
Of course I am. Absolutely OK. Really.
It was true, more or less, although I was still a little punchy from being strung out for so long. I often counted up how much of my life I had wasted through what I considered to be ‘my illness’, for all that time undiagnosed. It worked out at about four solid years and was time I still grieved for.
How long have you been taking the tablets for?
I tried to look her in the eyes, but she dropped her gaze and gave a simple shrug.
I took the first ones today. I can’t sleep.
It won’t work yet. Losing sleep, it’s a classic symptom of clinical depression. They take a couple of weeks to work. You just have to wait. You’ll soon feel better, I promise you. I swear to God.
She looked at me, again not quite in the eyes.
I don’t know if I can last that long.
Something in me, a faint monitor, merely flickered where it should have glowed red. But my instincts betrayed me, gave only a slight start, because Jean was so obviously OK, so ordinarily behaved, so active, so perfectly dressed. I don’t know if I can last that long. What on earth could that mean? Only one thing. This I knew, with hindsight, but at that moment it simply wasn’t conceivable. Not after all that had happened to me. It was too ridiculous, too melodramatic by far. The gods, I knew, weren’t crazy or psychotic. They were simply indifferent, or, more probably, absent.
I hugged Jean again.
You’re going to be all right, I promise. I love you. You’re a wonderful mother. Just take the tablets. Please. Take the tablets.
Jean nodded. She didn’t speak again. So I suppose ‘I don’t know if I can last that long’ are her last words to me. That and ‘goodbye’, just an ordinary, generic ‘goodbye’. I drove the next 100 yards to Irene’s house and dropped her off, with a wave. Goodbye, said Jean. A small alarm kept sounding – not loud enough. I decided to call Jack the next day, when he came home from work, to let him know that mum was taking antidepressants, but also reassure him that she would be OK in a week or two.
I stopped waiting for the telephone to ring again and sat down in a chair that I had bought in the market. It was falling to bits already. I checked myself to make sure that I was thinking straight. I felt surprised by my lack of surprise. Because on one level I had known, or at least suspected just such a thing. So the question – of guilt, of responsibility – was the first thing on my mind after the policeman called, but it faded, almost instantaneously, blotted out by a larger and more frightening thought. It was, perhaps characteristically, a thought for myself.
It’s all going to happen again.
It was unbelievable. After four years in the darkness. Outside, such an ordinary day. There were pigeons on the balcony. The blankness that falls when something so large occurs had invaded already. I lit a cigarette.
I shall go mad again.
How could it be otherwise? I juggled my box of matches. The flat was quiet for once. Portobello Road, although you could see it from the window, was too far away for the market noises to penetrate. Upstairs they were out at work, so the whine of their television was shut off. A cigarette, all I care about is cigarettes. That was what I had written in my note. What – four months ago? I loved you all so deeply when I had a heart to love with, when I possessed a soul. Now all I care about is cigarettes. Jumping had seemed best to me, quick, decisive. Or carbon monoxide poisoning, if you had the patience. But hanging?
I decided to go and face Jack. I had heard him howling in the background when the policeman telephoned – my father, whom I had never seen cry, except at sentimental films.
My eyes still dry, I moved out into the narrowness and claustrophobia of the corridor. The flat had been a cheaply executed 1970s conversion, undertaken laterally so that four houses were linked together on each floor by winding passages. The light bulbs frequently went unreplaced as they burnt out, so you staggered along, feeling the walls with your fingertips.
The lift was out of order, so I walked down. On the landing, I met James, heading up. His eyes were round and his hair stuck out at odd angles, as if it had been cut badly. I nodded. On the stairs we held each other, waltzing slightly back and forward, then we separated. The shock was still keeping the tears frosted and buried. A sense of urgency passed between us, as if Jean could be revived if only we were capable of moving fast enough.
Do you want a lift home?
No. I’ve got to get something from the flat. I’ll see you there.
Yes.
We parted. James was white. I headed down to my car, an almost new Peugeot 205, and I set off for home. Nothing seemed very different.
The drive along the Western Avenue was neutral, suspended. I passed the bingo hall at Savoy Circus, then the Deco landmarks of Hanger Lane station and the Hoover Factory, relics of the 1930s. I passed the more typically modern cheap, sponsored, plastic shop signs of Greenford and the old Granada cinema, now a Tesco’s. The people were badly dressed, predominantly white, with complexions like pum
ice stone. There were cladding and pebble-dash, porches and school playing-fields.
Outside my parents’ house, there was an ambulance and a police car. The sense of suspension, of absence, increased. As I walked up the front path I felt, as only once or twice before in my life, the gulf between what life was and what I had imagined it to be.
My father answered the door. He was babbling and drunk. I had never seen him lacking self-possession before and it concentrated my love. We held each other and then I realized, with a shock of relief, that I was going to be OK. I felt a strength between my shoulders that seemed to tell me I would hold together.
Everything blurred into two or three scenes, out of focus, at least in my memory. Jack was telling me that she was still beautiful, she still looked beautiful, and that he loved her. Oh, I loved my Jeannie, he said again and again, sometimes staring at me as if he were making a surprise announcement that needed my acknowledgement to make it true. I loved my Jeannie. He rocked back and forth at the dining-room table. Sometimes he would modify his recital to Why, Jeannie, why? His head rested on his crossed arms. James, who had arrived minutes after me, sat several feet away. I gazed silently at ornaments and furniture, picking over fine details of the act, like a husband betrayed by his wife.
The ambulancemen began bringing my mother’s body down the stairs. I didn’t look. I hid at the back of the house while the thudding footsteps carried away Jean.
The wider family began to arrive. Some of them we hardly saw at all nowadays. I had a sense of a hidden, denied bond suddenly exposed and reasserted. These were people I thought I had nothing in common with, people from Barratt-like homes on Green Belt estates whom I had patronized, not always secretly. Now I saw that I was them, and that all the stucco terraces in Notting Hill and all the university degrees in the world formed into a moat could not deny that connection. And as we hugged each other, I was glad of it, for once. To know who I was, for a rare moment, was a comfort instead of an embarrassment.
