The Last Act of Love

by Cathy Rentzenbrink

  THE LAST REFUGE OF THE DIRECTIONLESS

  Less than three years after we had married, John and I decided to split up. We’d always agreed to have children when I was thirty, and as that birthday approached I knew it was impossible. I was hardly capable of looking after myself, and continually had dreams where I had a baby but got drunk and forgot about it or left it in the back of a taxi. I didn’t know what my future held, but I realized I was going to have to work it out alone.

  Our separation was amicable. We were full of love for each other, just not the right kind any more. I’d been behaving like John’s depressed sister for years, so it was easy to transition to a sibling-style friendship.

  I didn’t tell my parents. After a few more violent incidents in the pub, they’d decided enough was enough and had found a manager for it so they could retire down to Cornwall. They lived in the house Mum had grown up in, a beautiful granite cottage in Ponsanooth that had once been a council house. My parents had given my grandparents the money to buy it and had then inherited it when they died. They lived a quiet life, sailing and walking the coastal paths near where they first met. I didn’t want to be a burden to them, so I only called when I knew I could sound cheerful. They didn’t know anything about my struggles and thought I was happily settled with John, living a glamorous jet-setting life.

  One day, Mum phoned to say they wanted to go away somewhere warm for a month in the winter as Dad’s chest was playing up, thanks to various respiratory problems he had from all the years working underground around coal dust. She wanted to know if we would be able to look after their cat.

  For a moment I considered continuing the deceit. I’d been living in a tiny rented room on the top floor of a house in Parson’s Green in London for a few months by now. Maybe I could get John to look after the cat by himself. But it didn’t seem fair not to tell Mum the truth.

  I didn’t do a good job of explaining because I didn’t know what to say. I could hear she was shocked and I knew Dad would be disappointed. I’d tried to be happy so they wouldn’t have to worry about me, but I just couldn’t fake it any more.

  I suppose our family was a bit like a car. When all four wheels were in place, we drove along for miles very happily. Then Matty’s wheel got punctured and the rest of us compensated to keep him going. But now Matty’s wheel was gone, my parents were still rolling along up front, and I was a problem wheel, half flat and no longer balanced by my brother, just scraping along the road.

  I needed to get a job but there were great gaping holes in my CV. I couldn’t bear the thought of having to explain about Matty, so I tried to fudge it to extend the period I’d been unable to work due to travelling with John. I went to a couple of recruitment agencies but could see they weren’t impressed. I didn’t present myself well, wasn’t qualified for anything, and no one liked that I hadn’t worked for so long.

  The only thing I was good at was reading, and the only thing I knew about was bookshops, as I’d sat around in them all over the world, so I decided to fill out lots of online applications for all the shops I’d heard of; but got no response. Then, someone told me of Harrods’ book department, so I borrowed a suit from Sophie and went down to Knightsbridge to try to speak to the manager. When I got there I saw it was a Waterstone’s. I especially liked their shops – I had once nearly got locked into the one in Piccadilly when I’d wandered off in the wrong direction after coming out of the bar on the top floor.

  ‘Have you got a CV?’ the manager asked.

  I handed it over. ‘It’s awful,’ I said. ‘Full of holes, but I love books and I promise I’ll be really nice to your customers.’

  He told me to come back the next day for an interview, and when I did, he offered me the job, starting immediately. That’s it, I thought, I’ll work in a bookshop and write my novel.

  It was a shock at first – much harder work than I’d imagined. Many of the customers were rude, and my feet and my back ached. After a few terrifying days during which I realized that I was nowhere near as well-read as I’d thought, and that I knew nothing about anything – Madeira was owned by Portugal? – it all clicked into place, and I felt a joy at discovering I was a good bookseller. I swelled with an emerging professional pride that I had found a place for me to be.

  I thought up novel plots in my head as I shelved books, but I never got much further than that. There were enough books in the world already; nobody needed me to add to the pile. I had very little money and lived off bread and Cup a Soup for the last ten days of every month, but the upside was that I could read for free because publishers sent us advance copies of new books. I got through a book a day, sometimes two or more if it was one of my days off.

  The best thing was talking to strangers about books, and I built up a group of customers who would seek me out for recommendations. There was one sweet, posh, elderly lady who would arrive in the department, lean her walking stick against the desk, and demand, ‘Where’s the girl who reads?’

  I made lots of good friends at Harrods and learned about their lives as we manned the front desk together. There was an art to this: we couldn’t obviously face each other, but would stand shoulder to shoulder, each scanning the room for customers as we swapped secrets in discreetly low sideways voices. I read Intimacy by Hanif Kureishi, in which he describes teaching English as a foreign language as the last refuge of the directionless. I told my bookseller friends about it, and we all laughed at the realization that lots of us aspired to teach English as a foreign language. Many of us felt directionless, that we had washed up together for no discernible purpose.

  There was a continual carnival atmosphere. We were next to the pet shop and Christmas World, and there was much mumbling in the staffroom when we realized that the elves from Santa’s Grotto got paid more than we did. There was a staff canteen, roof terrace and smoking room up on the top floor, and the posh food from the famous food halls would often be sold cheap upstairs, so sometimes my lunch would be a slice of Beef Wellington or a lobster mousse for a pound.

  On Christmas Eve I cried three times on the shop floor when customers were mean to me. I spent Christmas Day – the first since we had separated – with John. He gave me a Tiffany heart necklace. He was so kind. It would be easy in some ways, I thought, to go back to him. I’d no longer feel I needed to have a purpose of my own and could take up following him around the world again, supporting his career and ironing his shirts. But I knew it wasn’t the right thing for either of us. He’d started dating and was enjoying himself. I felt no jealousy at all, just wanted him to be happy, and only hoped that whoever he met wouldn’t be difficult about him being friends with me. I didn’t know what I’d do without him.

  As 2003 began, I sank further into a depression. My parents were still upset with me for splitting up with John and for not telling them about it for so long. My thirtieth birthday felt like a slap, a brutal reminder that I’d achieved nothing with my life. It was a cold and rainy day. I had holes in my shop-girl shoes and my feet got wetter and wetter as I walked home from work among the discarded Christmas trees left out in the street to be collected by the council.

  I became obsessed with the idea that it would have been so much better for everyone if I’d been knocked over instead of Matty. I’d been much less fit than he was, and smoked, so perhaps I wouldn’t have survived the injury and surgery. There would have been no coma, no eight years. Matty would have been better able to cope with loss than me – he wouldn’t still be drunkenly droning on and on about it all these years later to anyone who would listen. If it was Matty who had survived, he’d have lived properly, not been stunted like me. He’d be leading a fuller life, be less handicapped by grief and guilt. He would have achieved things, have an important job and be married to a beautiful, intelligent woman who would give my parents the beautiful and intelligent grandchildren they deserved.

  I was stuck. I felt guilty that I couldn’t get over it, and guilty that I might ever be able to get over it. I took no pleasure
in life and embarked on a grim flirtation with the idea of suicide, though I didn’t think I could do that to my parents. I fantasized about opportunities for dangerous self-sacrifice, wishing I could run into a burning building to save a child or go to fight in a foreign war. I tried to think of ways in which I could die accidentally, but there didn’t seem to be a method that wouldn’t inconvenience or distress someone else. I don’t think I ever really wanted to be dead, though. I just wanted not to hurt. I wanted to be able to go to sleep for a very long time and then wake up feeling better.

  I remember seeing a demonstration of a vacuum packer in a shop around this time. I stood and watched how this machine sucked all the air out of a plastic bag so that clothes could be neatly packed away and not be at risk of being eaten by moths. That’s what I need for my heart, I thought. I need to be able to vacuum-pack away my heart, make it tiny and protected and put it in a cupboard or under the bed so I can get it out again and open it when time has passed and it’s safe to feel.

  There were times when I didn’t think I would need to take action to die. That my poor, beleaguered heart might just stop beating. That the effort of pumping sad blood around my sad body might become too much. My heart might literally break, not in a dramatic way, not with any whizz-bangs or jumping off bridges. It might just decide it had had enough.

  By then I was frightened of Matty. He used my dreams to reproach and berate me. Often he appeared thin and gaunt in a blue-and-white striped uniform. Once he banged and banged my head on a table, telling me that I should have killed him when I had the chance, and I woke up to find that the banging was happening on the front door of the other top floor flat, that my neighbour’s drunken boyfriend, begging to be let in, had provided a soundtrack for my nightmare. I lay there, shaking and smoking and wondering how I would ever get over the fact that I’d wanted my brother to die.

  All I ever did, apart from reading, was get drunk and cry about Matty. I resolved to talk no more about him and I locked the story away. I’d reached an age where people asked less about siblings, and when they did I had a prepared answer.

  ‘I had a brother. He died,’ I’d say. If people looked like they might ask questions, I’d add, ‘It was a long time ago,’ and then change the subject to something jollier.

  The diaries and notebooks I’d written my novel into when I lived in France were all in two bags under my bed, and one day I dragged them out and threw them into the rubbish bins outside. I felt weighed down by the existence of all those words, all that sadness. I had too much backstory, I decided, and wanted to liberate myself from it.

  I tried speed-dating, Internet dating and even answered an ad in Private Eye and went out with a man who wanted a mistress. I got asked out by customers a lot and often said yes.

  One night John came over for a drink in the Beauchamp, one of our regular pubs. A few of my Harrods friends came along, including Lizzie, a sweet girl from Hebden Bridge who I’d become fond of.

  John rang me up the next day. ‘How would you feel if I asked Lizzie out?’ he asked.

  ‘Fine,’ I said. ‘But only if your intentions are honourable.’

  Luckily, Lizzie liked him, too, and because she’d had the whole story from me before ever meeting him, she understood our friendship. They started seeing each other.

  In general, the discipline of work was good for me and the forced routine and contact with the outside world helped me feel less mad. As time went on, I thought that I might not have found the way to live, but I had found a way to live.

  In the summer of 2004 I got a transfer to the brand new shop about to open on Oxford Street and went to an induction day in the Simpson Room at Waterstone’s Piccadilly. As an ice-breaker we had to find out about the person sitting next to us, including the first single they bought, and then introduce them to the rest of the room. Mine was ‘Don’t You Want Me, Baby’ by the Human League, and my neighbour’s, a Dutch boy called Erwyn, was ‘Pump Up the Jam’ by Technotronic. He was tall and shy and had the remnants of a black eye, which he told me he’d got playing squash. I looked at him and thought, If you’ve ever played squash in your life, my friend, then I’m the Dutchman.

  We got to know each other as we worked in the new shop. I looked after events and loved having to organize the huge celebrity book signings. Erwyn was in charge of operations. He was quiet and didn’t say very much, but he knew everything, and I was always impressed by how hard he worked. He was very cooperative and would always lend the services of his team to come and move furniture around and shift crash barriers. Once, when a signing was less well attended than we’d hoped, he and all the goods-in boys put on their coats and swelled the queue to a more respectable number.

  Several months later, after a drunken snog, I found myself sitting in the Cock Tavern north of Oxford Street explaining why I didn’t want to go out with him.

  ‘Work is the only thing in my life that isn’t fucked-up,’ I said. ‘Besides, I don’t want to go out with anyone, or get married, or meet anyone’s parents, or own property with someone. And I don’t want children.’

  ‘We should go out for another drink and discuss it some more,’ he said.

  So we started going out. He was kind and incurious, he didn’t seem very interested in people, preferring animals and birds, and I liked that he didn’t ask me a lot of questions about the past. My loneliness lifted. Eventually I moved in with him in Chiswick, and we stopped smoking and spent a lot of time walking along the riverbank and going to Kew Gardens, where he taught me the Dutch words for different types of geese. After a while I decided I’d like him to meet my parents and I told him the very basics about Matty.

  ‘I had a brother and he died,’ I said. ‘I don’t want to talk about it, but I thought you should know before meeting my parents just in case.’

  Of course, neither my parents nor I would mention Matty because we never did – we’d stopped talking about him as we found it too distressing. I thought it unlikely that Erwyn would ask any probing questions, but I wanted to make sure.

  A few months later we went on holiday down to my parents’ house in Cornwall and spent our time cliff-walking and swimming. We were all having breakfast one morning when Lilly, next door’s cat, came in and jumped up onto my lap.

  ‘It’s been a very sad time for Lilly,’ Mum said. ‘Her brother Leo was knocked over by a car and she’s been all moping and listless.’

  ‘She’s a bit more herself now, though,’ said Dad, reaching over to stroke under her chin.

  ‘You could have a little chat with her about it,’ said Mum. ‘You could say “Oh, Lilly, my brother was knocked over by a car and I was sad too.”’

  It was a rare mention of Matty, but a sweet and safe one, and we all giggled.

  ‘It’s taken me a bit longer to get over it, though,’ I said.

  ‘That’s OK,’ said Erwyn. ‘Just the difference between cat time and human time.’

  I hoped I’d finally achieved a measure of acceptance. That holiday I wrote a short story in which we buried Matty’s ashes in the garden. I based it on us, but the burying itself was imaginary as I wasn’t sure what had happened to his ashes. I didn’t think we’d ever picked up them up from the undertaker, but it was just about possible that we had done and there’d been some kind of ceremony that I’d blocked out or been too drunk to remember. It was also just about possible that my mother would tell me they’d scattered them into the sea years ago but didn’t want to bother me about it and I wasn’t sure how that would make me feel. So I wrote my story and showed it to my parents. They liked the story, and were happy that I seemed to be getting over it, though they didn’t volunteer any information about what had happened to the ashes and I couldn’t bring myself to ask.

  NEW LIFE

  For some years now I’d thought I wouldn’t have children. I’d survived losing Matty by the skin of my teeth and was still mired in grief and guilt, so the risk of creating a new life to love seemed too great. How could I survive the loss of
anyone else?

  Things changed not long after my thirty-fifth birthday. There was no vulgar-sounding tick-tock; I went to a book launch and the author told me about looking down at her grandchild and recognizing her daughter in the new little girl’s face. ‘I know you,’ she said to her. ‘I’ve seen you before.’

  In that moment I knew I wanted a child.

  It wasn’t the plan to name a baby after my brother. I had always thought it a bit mawkish to name a child after a tragically dead loved one, so we went into the scan ready to see Charlotte Rose or Daniel Jan. But the moment the sonographer said we were having a boy – she was from Miami with a light Southern drawl: ‘Oh yes, ma’am, he’s all man, all right’ – I changed my mind.

  ‘Daniel, then,’ said Erwyn as we tried to see our baby on the fuzzy screen.

  ‘Actually, I want to call him Matthew,’ I said. ‘Is that OK?’

  ‘Of course,’ he agreed, without hesitation.

  Erwyn adapted well to my ever-changing point of view. Soon after that, I asked him what he’d think if I changed my mind about getting married.

  ‘Fine by me,’ he said, and a few weeks later we went to Richmond registry office and then to a restaurant overlooking the river with thirty guests. John was a witness and Lizzie did a reading. Sometimes people were confused that I was still close to John. I would simply explain that I saw him as a replacement brother.

  Matt was born in the summer of 2009 after an induction that went a bit wrong and ended in an emergency caesarian after hours and hours of painful labour. It was the first time my dad ever read a whole book in a day, as he sat and waited for news in the hospital coffee shop. Erwyn and Mum were both with me, but only one of them could come to surgery and I felt in need of my mother, so she put on the blue scrubs, which rather suited her, and was the first person to hold Matt when he was lifted out of me.