by Tim Lott
Faith, like some tiny plant macadammed over, begins to push back towards the air. Revelations seem to press forth. I see that what you feel leads to how you think; that it drafts out your conclusions in advance. I see – feel – that life is not a thing, but an unstoppable process. I see that conscience is different from guilt. I see that the future must always arrive and that it is never wholly predictable. Thus my habitual pessimism is no truer than optimism, only more uncomfortable, self-important and, finally, life-denying. It occurs to me that you do not have to be Mickey Mouse or Cliff Richard to be positive about life. You do not have to be an idiot, or self-deluding, to be happy. And so this is the choice I make, the choice to be happy. Maybe I have the right after all.
The stone in my chest has dissolved. Unaccustomed feelings begin to flex. There is warmth there, a certain half-forgotten responsiveness. It is true all the same that a death has taken place. The angles and planes of the person I once was – intensely wilful, relentlessly ambitious, over-intense, self-punishing and cocksure – have either softened, cracked or gone for ever. I feel a sense of deep fatalism about nearly everything, but it is not an unhealthy fatalism; more an acceptance that there are powers larger than my will that have to be accommodated.
I continue to see my mother and father regularly. My father seems more cheerful, convinced that I have passed the moment of crisis. My mother remains doubtful. I try to tell her that I am better, but on one occasion she looks right at me and says, No. No, you’re not.
But I have few doubts. My powers of concentration have returned. My self-confidence is flowing once more, like oxygenated blood. I have even tried to win back Becka, telling her briskly that it can work out now, because I have simply been ill and that this illness has been at the root of all our problems. I neglect to mention the possibility that she might have been in love with my symptoms, just as, in a way, I was.
She is deeply sceptical, and it does occur to me once again that this packaging of my experience into something called ‘depression’ is very convenient, lets me off the hook. Instead of weakness, emotional cowardice and casual cruelty, I can simply blame a sort of brainstorm. Becka turns me down and I can’t really blame her. Perhaps I am being over-forgiving of myself, but I don’t care. I understand now that to be over-forgiving of yourself is far less destructive than to be over-punishing. That self-hatred is the root of nearly all evil. Nor does it take long for this freshly minted hypothesis to be confirmed.
The first part of 1988 makes for an average English winter: cold, lead skies, dull sheets of rain. I view each with equanimity. Now it is no longer tundra inside, everything seems to speak of possibilities, even frost and wind. I have the sense that the grimness and waste of the last four years, an unnecessary ruination as it turns out, must be redeemed. I have lost a coveted job, I have lost Becka, I am unemployed, I am single, I have mislaid my self-respect. Yet I have decided that life now should be lived to the full, that depression, whatever it is, whatever its cause, should take nothing more away from me.
If Jean seems fragile during the first months of the New Year, nobody in the family or among her friends really notices. She remains apparently full of energy and plans for the future.
There is, with hindsight, the odd clue. On one occasion Jean phones up Olive and asks what she is doing, and Olive, who has nothing in her diary, invites her over to the house in Acacia Avenue. But by the time she arrives, Olive has remembered that she has been invited to a coffee morning that day, so she apologizes and says she cannot spend time with Jean after all. To her surprise, Jean looks crushed and desolate. Her head drops. Olive immediately rings the organizers of the coffee morning and secures Jean an invite, but she does not think of it again.
Bertha Staple, who has lived next to Jack and Jean since 1958, has become something of a mother-substitute for Jean since the death of Grace. In her eighties now, exactly as old as the century, she is still healthy and has a sharp mind. Jean often drops in for a chat – it has always been open house between them – but most particularly once a week, when Jean cuts, perms and blue-rinses Mrs Staple’s hair, a service for which payment is always offered and always refused. Around the middle of January, Mrs Staple gets a funny idea that Jean is ‘not herself’. She can’t put her finger on it, but there is a fragility there, a fear of being alone.
And Jean has begun to complain, always with a defensive, apologetic smile, that she is no good at gardening, that she is no good at tennis, that she is no good at painting, that she cannot enjoy these things. She is given to sighs and stares out the window, but only momentarily. Then she snaps back into persona: chirpy, purposeful, doing. Her clothes and turn-out, as ever, are immaculate. Mrs Staple begins to think her fears are all in her own imagination.
On a Monday at the end of February, Jean, as is her custom, lets herself into Mrs Staple’s house to ‘do’ her hair. They sit together at the back of the lounge, Jean preparing her scissors and rollers. She touches Mrs Staple’s neck, and her hands are freezing. Jean appears to be shivering, even though it is warm in the room. Mrs Staple sees that she is hugging herself.
Mrs Staple – Stapes, as Jean always calls her – beckons Jean to sit down.
Jean. I don’t like to see you like this. What’s the matter?
Jean does not answer directly, but puts her head on Stapes’s knee, and says, It’s nice to have a friend like you. Then she pulls her chair up and they hold hands. Jean’s hands are icy.
Stapes repeats, What’s the matter with you? and when Jean says, Oh, I don’t know – nothing that a cuddle wouldn’t solve, they hug. Stapes is now holding back tears, for she senses the depth of Jean’s distress, but she does not cry, for fear that she will ‘start Jean off’ and that the toxin of embarrassment will ensue. She instead rubs the back of Jean’s hands and says, Can’t you tell me about it?
There is a long pause, as if Jean is weighing the pros and cons of something very important. Then she says, quite brightly, Well, I’d better be going.
And at this, despite Stapes’s protestations, she gets up and leaves.
The next day, Jean is parking her car in Rutland Road and decides to turn it around, so that it will be facing the right way for the next time she goes out. She is not concentrating; she pulls forward without checking her mirror and another car smashes into the side of her blue Jetta, badly damaging the panelwork. She admits blame, and is shaken and upset. This is the second accident in recent months.
On the Thursday morning of the same week, a neighbour sees a car coming down from the Top Shops. The car is veering madly from side to side, hitting each kerb in turn. The neighbour thinks the person inside must be drunk or mad. She thinks there is going to be a crash, but somehow the car makes it to the bottom of the hill without doing any damage. The neighbour can now see through the windscreen. The driver is Jean.
An hour or two later, Mrs Staple’s daughter, Eileen, who always visits her mother on a Thursday, hears a knock on the door of No. 33. It is Jean, who normally gives her a lift up the hill to do her mother’s shopping. She apologizes and says she cannot use the car because there is something wrong with it, and that she is going to do her own shopping in Greenford, some three miles away, by bus.
Later that afternoon, Eileen sees Jack working on the car. He says he can find nothing wrong with it. Eileen walks up towards the shops. She sees Jean coming down Somerset Hill, pulling a great shopping trolley full of groceries. She has walked all the way to the supermarket in Greenford and is now on the way back.
How are you? Jean says.
Going up the wall, what with a new grandchild and my poor old mum. I shall end up in the loony bin, Eileen replies.
At least you’ve got something to occupy your time all the while.
Well, you’ve still got your garden.
Oh, I’ve even lost interest in that.
That same evening, Jean goes around to Margaret’s for her art class. Ellen, the art teacher, is there, but Olive is absent. Jean is working on a p
ainting copied from a calendar. It is washed of colour, with low-lying hills and faint, perpendicular trees. There are greens, browns, yellows, and the sky is very pale. The trees are reflected in the water of a narrow river which stretches to a bridge. It does not seem to continue, oddly, after the bridge. The river is very still. There are no people, no wind in the trees. Fat yellow clouds are pinned to the horizon. But mostly it is sky, grass and water. Ellen thinks it is extraordinarily still and hollow as a painting, yet compact, neat and dainty, as Jean herself is.
Jean seems the same as ever, in perfectly good spirits, although Ellen thinks she sees some wistfulness in her eyes. Jean talks of her disappointment at not having grandchildren. But Ellen has no particular reason to shift her accustomed view of Jean as a happy and positive, fulfilled person.
The painting is unfinished. Jean says that she will leave it there and finish it next time. This is the first occasion she has not taken a painting home with her, but no one thinks anything more of it.
The following morning, Jean goes round to see her brother Alan, with plans to take him to a model railway exhibition which is on at Greenford Town Hall. The house in Rosecroft Avenue, although still a mess, is bearably tidy now, and Alan is quite himself, talking nineteen to the dozen, enthusing about his model boats and planes, his collection of big band records.
On this occasion, unusually, Jean brings around a gift for Alan. It is a watercolour she has painted herself. She has never given him a painting before. Being still in his mind a kind of child, he has not lost his sense of childlike excitement and is thrilled and loudly grateful. However, he cannot make it to the model train exhibition, as he is sailing his model boats that day, so he says goodbye to Jean at the door. He is still holding the painting. It is a portrait of model boats on the Serpentine in Hyde Park, where Alan sails his own miniature yachts and schooners, tiny, working imitations that he has made himself. The most recent model he has christened Lady Jean.
Jean kisses Alan’s unshaven, old man’s cheek and says, Cheerio then, for this is the last time they will meet and Jean knows it.
The next day, the Saturday before the Monday of Jean’s suicide, Jean and Jack play golf, and then in the evening meet up with Helen and John at their house in Weybridge. Helen cooks a chilli con carne, and they all sit and plan a golf holiday together. Jean goes through the advertisements in Golf World excitedly. She is chatty and seems to be looking forward to it.
Later on, as usual, they play cards, nomination whist and Black Queen. Jean is not doing well and begins to look down-hearted. She says, Look. I can’t even play cards any more.
And Helen says, Oh, Jean. It’s only a game.
Jean nods, smiles and makes a random discard. At the end of the round, she has made the lowest score.
Chapter Seventeen
What does it mean to a family when the mother takes her own life? Was it really a sacrifice, as Jean imagined? Or was it vengeance of some sort? Or was she just mad? Perhaps it means whatever you decide it means, and nothing else. Of course, the stories must attempt the best connection with reality. But so many explanations fit the facts, so many meanings are sustainable. You make a choice, in the end. Each version has its profits and penalties.
My story is this: that while Jean, in that darkest moment, took much away, she has yet given us gifts. To understand these gifts, we must finish the story, or at least trace it forward. For we are good at telling stories now, we survivors, Jack and my brothers and myself. We each have different stories, but they all work in their own way, and keep us afloat and capable of happiness.
Jean’s suicide was hardest of all, as you might expect, for my father. He truly did love Jean, and for a different man her death in such a manner would have been a hammer blow from which there could have been no recovery. But in his quiet, unexcitable, dull, English way, my father loves life, although he would never say so. His games of tennis and bridge, his dinner-dances, his park bowls. His straightforward library books in which good still always triumphs, his tea in a mug, his Cheddar cheese and crusty bread, his children, his small house in its terrace of six. And he has faith, although he would not call it faith – he would just call it common sense – that things move forward and life goes on, that things change, and that change cannot, finally, be resisted.
So Jack, after an initial period of intense mourning, in which he cried at night, and alone in the day, and yet felt ashamed that he did not cry more, works out a strategy – a narrative, if you like – for survival. He decides that without question he has had a good life, far better than most, and that if this is the only disaster that befalls him, it will still have been a good life. He continues – although it seems meaningless at first – his daily round of hobbies and sports, and book-reading. He refuses counselling; it is not for our kind of people, he decides.
He cannot help but feel guilty, wondering why he did not see what must have been in some way clear. He turns the past over and over in his mind, looking for clues that he might have taken more notice of, or signs or subtle cries for help. But all he can remember is Jean’s eyes, which, now that he thinks of it, were, in the last month or so, hollowed out and empty. He cannot stop seeing her eyes, which, he understands now, were terrified.
He fears that the family will break up, and that without Jean he will lose his sons. Already, his network of friendships is falling apart under the blow. The old gang – Bert and Barbara, Helen and John, Irene and Bob, and Olive, now without Arthur – are stricken by Jean’s suicide and cannot make sense of it. They have a wake, before the funeral, to remember Jean. Not a single one can recall a clue that might have told them what was in her mind. Her death affects them all and things are no longer the same between them. They gradually see each other less and less often. Helen and John eventually divorce, for John, always a reticent man yet very fond of Jean, retreats into himself in a kind of shock and is never really the same again. The death, as an event, ripples outward, touching families and clusters of families. For if Jean – happy, sociable, perky Jean – is not safe from despair, then who can be?
Birthdays and anniversaries are the worst for Jack. Following the lead of our practical father, James, Jeff and I try to put Jean’s death behind us, although always the most communicative of the brothers, I will more frequently try to talk about it. Yet the simple mention of Jean’s name, for years afterwards, immediately makes James start to cry and so not much discussion is possible, not without opening wounds. We try, in our pragmatic English way, simply to forget.
And it works, in a way, although not on anniversaries and birthdays, when Jack feels his loss most sharply, and we, being in some ways insensitive though loving sons, do not make a point of remembering these dates. So it is on the first anniversary of Jean’s death that my father sits at home with no one to share the grief with him, as James and I have wilfully forgotten the exact date. Yet there is a knock on the door and a distant neighbour to whom Jack has hardly ever spoken appears. She hands him a bottle of wine and says, I thought you might need this, tonight. She asks how he is, smiles sweetly and walks out into the night. For she has made a note of this date and cared enough about a stranger to remember through a whole year, and it reminds Jack of what he has always, in his heart, believed, which is that people, though often stupid and often blind, in the end wish to be good.
Having this belief, Jack finds it possible to carry on. He still thinks of Jean much of the time, and grieves at all the empty air in the house and at the part of him that died when his wife died, but he has had the courage to let that part die and so he can live once more, changed but still alive.
Guilt continues to nag at him, but he is convinced there is no way in which he could have known and nothing he could have done. Also, he chooses to believe that my mother was ill, as the coroner has said, and that therefore her death was not really a choice, a rejection of him, but an act of chemical dysfunction. And on the days when he does see it as a choice, he sees it as a noble one that reinforces his idea o
f his wife as a heroic woman who was responsible, in the end, for her own destiny. So Jean’s death, although without doubt a terrible thing, is processed and made manageable. Life inescapably continues and Jack tries to go with it.
After a few years, Jack meets another woman through his bowls club. She is some years older than him and, to his own amazement as much as anything else, they form a passionate relationship. She is wealthy, educated at the Lycée in Cairo, a high Tory and dripping with jewels. The rest of us do not understand the relationship, but it is enough that Jack is, if not happy, then clearly well on the way to a sort of new life.
The relationship runs for a couple of years and then Jack, now in his late sixties, leaves her and takes up with another woman, this time in her early forties, and a professional, a solicitor. He finds the relationship delightful and stimulating. They live together, eventually, and are happy. When I see her, and I see the kind of fulfilling relationship my father, always cleverer than my mother, now has, I cannot help but think once more of my mother’s note: You have so much to give such a bright mind and I am holding you back… and think, though it is heresy, perhaps, perhaps…
No, I cannot bring myself to write it, for it might suggest that any part of any one of us might have embraced my mother’s death, and that is not true. I simply wish to assert, what is plainly the case, that bad things can have good consequences. Nothing is of itself entirely terrible.
As for my younger brother, he also takes my mother’s death hard, but carves out a story he can live with. As I say, when we meet – as we, as a family, continue to do once a week – it is he who finds it the most difficult to talk about what is so clearly not being talked about. When we first have our family dinner together after Jean’s death, we just go about the meal in the way we might have done had she been there, but unlike Jean’s careful, tasty, inventive meals, we make a mess of the whole thing and sit down to eat it, then simply all burst into tears at this attempt, and this failure, to reassert normality. But still, we do not really talk about it. We finish the meal. James and I go home.
