The Art of Not Falling Apart

by Christina Patterson

  By working every waking hour, he managed to sort out a multimillion refinancing deal in many different countries, but the deal came at quite a cost. ‘I felt like a shadow,’ he said, ‘and in some senses I was. The CEO was a bully. I didn’t trust him. I felt like a little appendage hanging off this machine. You get pulled along by a little ball on a string. And then I started to feel as if I was being frozen out.’

  I have known Jonathan for fifteen years. He lives near me, so we usually bump into each other quite a lot. During this time, he seemed different. His voice was a whisper and he had a hunted look in his eyes. Was he, I asked, depressed? Jonathan grimaced. ‘I wasn’t sleeping and I think that’s a symptom of depression. It was difficult to get out of bed. I tried to do some mindfulness and stuff like that, but it wasn’t really effective.’ I gave a sympathetic nod. You know what I think about mindfulness. Brilliant if you love counting, but count me out.

  Soon, he told me, he was battling not just with the pressures of legal difficulties in many countries pouring into his inbox, but with a sense of shock. ‘The figures were massaged to present a façade,’ he said, ‘and there just seemed to be more and more distance between the surface presentation and the true picture. There were people in positions of power who were behaving in ways I couldn’t believe. Not illegally, but in terms of decency. I thought: “I’m working with these people and they’re horrible!”’

  After one particular meeting, something in him snapped. A friend put him in touch with a psychiatrist who specialized in stress. The doctor signed him off and persuaded him to go on a mild antidepressant. When Jonathan sent in the letter from the doctor, the HR person asked him to do handover notes. ‘I said, “I could,”’ he told me, ‘“but I’m not going to.” I didn’t say that, actually, but I wanted to so much!’ The glint was back in his eye. I was so pleased to see that the glint was back in his eye. ‘I had actually structured everything as I went along,’ he said, ‘so it’s not like I left a great big pile of crap. The crap was in little boxes, for each country, this little piece of poo, that little piece of poo, so it was all neatly arranged like little pebbles, little mineral samples, like some geeky archaeologist, but it was still all smelling away, so at least it was there for somebody to deal with.’

  That’s the Jonathan I know and love. I was so relieved when he escaped, but he’s a very bright guy and he’s not exactly strapped for cash. Why, I asked, had he felt he had to stick with this god-awful job? Jonathan sighed and the expression on his face was pained. ‘It’s a good question,’ he said. ‘I just felt that there was no way out. I really did. I was trapped. It felt very dark. I felt that there was nothing I could do.’

  Jonathan was lucky. He’s a lawyer and lawyers, damn their eyes, know how to get good pay-offs. He got himself a very nice deal, with a gagging clause, which is why I can’t give his real name. He had the best part of a year off, seeing friends and catching up with the culture he felt he’d missed. He’s now doing another contract, earning more in a day than I sometimes do in a month. But for most of us, resigning from a job we hate feels more like leaping off a cliff into a pool of sharks.

  Rolien van Heerden works at a company that specializes in communications training. I did a couple of days’ work for them and thought she was one of the calmest people I’d met. She’s so cheerful you’d think her professional life had been a gentle glide on a still lake in soft, early-evening sun. Over coffee in her office overlooking Hyde Park, she put me right.

  ‘I came over to England from South Africa with two hundred pounds,’ she said. ‘My father had died, and I just wanted to get away and start to pay off my student debt, which I knew would be easier in sterling than in South African rand. I had no money and I stayed in a house with six other people and one bathroom. It was terribly cold. I was miserable. I was just going to put my head down and work my butt off for however long I needed to, to stay at a better place.’

  Through someone she had known in South Africa, she got a job in a training company. At first, it all looked pretty good. ‘We were a big team,’ she said, ‘we made a ton of money and then the recession knocked us all over and it just kind of spiralled out of control. It went downhill from there. People left, one after the other, but I had to stay because the company had sponsored me for a work permit. If I left, I’d have had to go home.’

  When someone in Nigeria signed documents on Rolien’s behalf, she didn’t know what to do. It was her first proper job and no one had told her what you should do when your employers appear to be crooks. ‘It was shortcuts,’ she said, ‘small things that added up to the bigger scheme of things. It would be something like providing visa support letters for people to come from abroad to enter the country when they were only going to be with us for a couple of days. Initially, I just thought “oh, that’s the way we do things”, until I started figuring it out. You gradually realize that this is not how other people operate.’

  She felt trapped. She was trapped. ‘Unfortunately,’ she said, ‘the only other person who worked with me in the end was the company owner’s sister. She kept a close eye on pretty much everything I did. There was always someone looking over your shoulder, clocking your time. I just literally felt like a slave.’ You could see as a white South African she wasn’t using the word lightly. ‘Insignificant,’ she added. ‘I felt insignificant.’ The word seemed to take on a weight of its own.

  Rolien worked out how long she had to stay, and literally ticked the days off. You can, she told me, only apply for ‘indefinite leave to remain’ after five years, but her first two, on a working holiday visa, didn’t count. It took King Solomon seven years to build a temple to replace the tent the Israelites had to worship in before. Rolien had to get through seven years, too. When I was the age she started that job, I jacked in a permanent post to take up a six-month contract because I thought six months sounded like a really long time.

  Luckily, she had studied drama. The lecturers at her university had told her she wasn’t good enough, but she had phoned her mum, who told her to thank them for their opinion, and tell them that she would be doing drama anyway. She now carries those skills wherever she goes. ‘It was important,’ she said, ‘that I had to show that I was not unhappy. Carry yourself in a certain way. Look the part, fake it till you make it. It’s also to protect yourself. Don’t show your weakness. Especially with bullies.’

  She had nearly reached the end of her seven years when she walked out. ‘I just knew,’ she said, ‘that I couldn’t do it any more. Resigning was probably the scariest thing I’ve ever done. I can still recall that sensation in the pit of my stomach. I could have been kicked out of the country.’

  That night, when she got home, there was a package waiting on the doorstep. ‘It was,’ said Rolien, and now her smile made me smile, ‘the documents stating that I have jumped through all the hoops successfully. “Here’s your indefinite leave to remain and welcome to the country.”’

  I never understood how bright, independent women could get stuck in abusive relationships. I didn’t understand why they didn’t just walk away. Then I met a very bright woman who did both. I had been asked to run a communications workshop at a business. I made such a mess of it, and was in such a state afterwards, that one of the organizers took me out for a drink. I’ll call her Laura. You’ll soon see why she can’t give her real name. We got on so well that we agreed to meet again. This time she told me some of her story.

  ‘I met my husband,’ she told me, ‘when I was twenty-four. He had a great sense of humour. He was a personal trainer, an exsoldier. We were good in the early days and then my career really took off.’ Laura was offered a big job in Belgium, and her husband, who I’ll call Jon, went with her. ‘From there on,’ she said, ‘he never actually found his groove. He didn’t learn the language very well. I got headhunted several times and my salary got bigger, but he was just doing bits and pieces. Very gradually, I was ending up earning the money, but then doing all of the home-making. So that built up
a little bit of resentment.’

  A little bit? I’d have been spitting. But things, she said, soon got worse. ‘Even though he wasn’t pulling his weight in the home, he had a very dominant personality. He kind of called the shots, in terms of how things should be in the home. He took over the cooking. Logically, I should have been pleased, but I was gradually made to realize I wasn’t a good cook. Which,’ she added, in a tone that still sounded wounded, ‘isn’t true!’

  Meanwhile, Jon was pushing her to get bigger and better jobs, because he was getting used to the money. ‘He had a large collection of designer watches,’ she explained, ‘and he was mad about cars. By the age of thirty, he had his Porsche. Our holidays got more and more expensive. I just sort of let him take over. I lost control over finances, over the way our money was spent.’

  If you met Laura, you’d find this as hard to believe as me. She has that glossy sheen of competence you sometimes find in the business world. She has done tough jobs in male-dominated worlds. ‘It was almost as if I had two personas,’ she said. ‘At work, I was this super-confident professional woman. At home, it got to the point where I was no longer confident in any area. I couldn’t choose the things I wanted in the home. He had to have his say in everything. It got to the point where – it sounds really stupid – I didn’t even have the confidence to fill my own car up with petrol.’

  I looked at Laura, who is very attractive, and has the air of someone who is used to being admired, and had to force myself not to gasp. ‘If I ever stood my ground on something . . .’ she said, and her voice tailed off. ‘He had a very short temper. He often used to do this game where he’d show me that he could actually kill me quite quickly. He used to do this move where he tied my hands, not with a rope or anything, and did this movement at the back of my neck.’

  I tried hard not to look as shocked as I felt. Did she, I asked, ever feel that he might actually hurt her? Laura sighed. ‘Yes, because his eyes changed. They changed to pure ice.’

  I bought us both another drink. What she told me later was much worse.

  I have never had to work for a crook. I have never been stuck in a marriage with someone who shows me how they could kill me as their eyes turn to ice. I have had, in all kinds of ways, an easy life.

  But pain isn’t scientific. It isn’t carefully calibrated to its cause. Some people take an overdose when they fail an exam. Other people seem to take it in their stride when they lose an arm or an eye.

  In that dark church in Stoke Newington, I tried not to cry. I knew that I should feel lucky to have a flat to let out, and some redundancy money in the bank. That was not how I felt. What I felt, most of all, was shame. Every time I sent an email that wasn’t replied to, or heard myself described as ‘former’ or ‘ex’, I felt my cheeks burn.

  When the man and his children left, I lay down on a pew. After a while, I shut my eyes, but I jumped up when I heard a woman’s voice. ‘I’m about to lock up,’ she said. ‘Could you please leave?’ I nodded and grabbed my bag. I hoped the vicar’s wife – if she was the vicar’s wife – didn’t watch Sky News. I hoped, in fact, that if she switched it on that night, and saw me chatting about the next day’s front pages, she wouldn’t recognize me as the person she had found trying to sleep on a pew.

  Octopus pot

  It’s a shock to see a heart in a jar. I saw one in a medical museum when I was doing some research for an essay I’d been commissioned to write about skin. The veins looked like something you could use to plumb a sink.

  It was the Greek philosopher Galen who first did some serious studies on the heart. He did it by cutting up monkeys and pigs. He thought that moods were due to balances of bile, that the soul was made up of three parts, and the ‘spiritual’ bit was found in the heart. For almost 1500 years, medical students learnt that the circulatory system was a kind of dual carriageway, but in 1628 William Harvey proved Galen wrong. He tied the veins and arteries of snakes and fish, which must have been quite fiddly, and worked out that it was veins that allowed the blood to flow to the chambers of the heart.

  When you see a heart in a jar, you don’t think this is something that could easily break. You don’t think, as Anna Karenina did, when she talked about her broken heart, that that slab of meat could ever be like ‘the pieces of a broken vase’.

  At a private view in Piccadilly, I glimpsed the man who, four years ago, broke mine. After he told me that I should stop crying because I was ‘not an eight-year-old child, but a middle-aged woman’, I preferred to think of him as dead. I thought I’d never see him again. I thought he was 6000 miles away. In the time since I’d last seen him, I had had the shadows and the operations. In the time since then, I had seen my star on the newspaper rise and then, dramatically, fall. In the time since then, I had learnt that there are so many things other than a failed romance that can break your heart.

  The great works of literature often seem to tell us that the most important thing in life is romantic love. They are packed with examples of what happens when it’s lost. Anna Karenina leapt in front of a train. Romeo drank poison when he thought Juliet was dead. Dido stabbed herself with Aeneas’s sword when he left her to set sail. Young Werther shot himself because the girl he loved was married to someone else. Ophelia was so fed up with Hamlet – and who wouldn’t be? – that she threw herself in a river and drowned.

  When the writer Diana Athill’s fiancé stopped writing to her, the pain of the silence was like ‘a finger crushed in a door, or a tooth under a drill’. After two years of silence, he asked to be released from their engagement. Her soul, she says in her memoir Instead of a Letter, ‘shrivelled to the size of a pea’. She felt that her unhappiness was ‘not a misfortune, but a taint’, one that ‘substitutes for blood some thin, acrid fluid with a disagreeable smell’. I first read the book when I was twenty-five and thought it was a tragic portrait of a middle-aged spinster who had been forced to find solace in books. When I read it again, for an interview for The Independent, it sent shivers down my spine.

  When I talked to Diana Athill, at her care home in Highgate, she was ninety-three. I found myself telling her that I, too, had been dumped by my first love when I was nineteen. (But I didn’t say ‘dumped’. Like a Victorian governess, I said ‘jilted’.) I told her that, for many years afterwards, I, too, kept my heart locked up. I told her that I, too, thought I would marry and have children, but have not.

  Diana Athill gave a regal nod. It isn’t just her prose that’s cool. She did, in fact, eventually find happiness in a relationship, with the Jamaican playwright Barry Reckford, but she never fell in love with him, and when she found out he was having an affair, she invited his mistress to move in. ‘Where spouses are concerned,’ she said crisply, ‘it seems to me that kindness and consideration should be the key words – not loyalty – and sexual infidelity does not necessarily wipe them out.’

  Well, maybe. But most people I know have not been quite as relaxed as Diana Athill when they have found out that their partner is having an affair.

  It sounds like a French farce to find your girlfriend in bed with your best friend, but my friend Andrew really did. ‘She was very much my first and biggest love,’ he told me. ‘We were together for a few years. It felt very good and how a relationship should be.’ And then, one day, he went round to see his friend. ‘It was the sort of place where everyone kept their doors open,’ he said. ‘I walked into the house and found the two of them in bed together in the back room.’

  Andrew has a quiet voice, and as he told me this, I had to strain to hear. The memory of the humiliation was written all over his face. ‘I’ve probably blotted the precise details out of my mind, but I remember being very upset and running off home in tears. She moved out and I wrote long, agonizing letters to her, saying how much I loved her. The next two or three years were hell. I found it very difficult,’ he said a bit stiffly, ‘to come to terms with it.’

  My friend Patsy is much more cheerful about her husband’s infidelities, but
she certainly wasn’t at the time. I met her when we were both working in a bookshop. I was twenty-two. She was forty-two. She has been a close friend ever since. ‘I was a virgin when I got married,’ she told me, when we met for whitebait and chips at the Wolesley. ‘The nearest I had got to sex before that was when my dad caught my first boyfriend, Daniel, in his house, in my bedroom, and chased him out. And then we broke up after that.’ When she was nineteen, a builder called Jason jumped out of his van and started ‘stalking’ her. A few months later, she married him. ‘I was waiting for my father to ask, “Are you sure about this? It’s not too late to change your mind.” I was waiting for that speech, so I could say no, I’m not sure. But he didn’t ask and I went through with the whole thing. It was as if I was in a fog or a dream, or just stupid. I think,’ she said and she laughed her infectious laugh, ‘I was just stupid.’

  The marriage lasted a couple of years and then she left him, moved into a basement flat with a friend, and worked in a publishing company just across the road from Francis Bacon’s studio. ‘The first Laura Ashley shop had just opened,’ she said. ‘We’d go to the Mary Quant shop in the King’s Road. I was reading a lot of Herman Hesse. It was all Swinging London. But I wasn’t really part of that.’

  When she moved back to her parents’ house for a while, in 1968, she bumped into her teenage sweetheart, Daniel. ‘He drove me off down to Windsor,’ she told me. ‘It was the hottest day ever recorded. I was wearing a mini dress and I stuck to the seat. We just kept driving. We got to Windsor, and his favourite pub.’ She smiled at the memory. Patsy has big, blue eyes and one of the most open faces I have ever seen. To me, she still looks like the woman I met, and was in awe of, when I was twenty-two. ‘It was really amazing,’ she said, ‘like being given a present you didn’t know was coming. It was like my birthday. And that was it!’