I abandoned myself to a masseuse who was using a technique called reiki. I was in a smallish room with two peers of whom I was categorically afraid, one a big talker from a family of nine sons in south London who teased me by stealing things from me; and the other, a displaced semi-posh boy with a heroin habit that had used up his mother’s jewellery and his father’s money. He was as proud as a knife out of a stone. In the background there was the customary uncommitted music that goes with massage and that makes me faintly cross in a Colin McWilliam-ish way. It was, nonetheless, in this company and within the aroma of a really cakey lemon-scented candle, reminding one of a lifetime’s washing-up, that I unbuttoned sufficiently to shed tears, which is, for the counsellors, a place to start.
Each evening we had to fill in our diaries of the day and write how each day had struck us. Several hardy souls played Scrabble. John the pimp was fantastically intelligent and as beautiful as a cat; what a life he could have had, maybe is having. Quite soon I was hauled into the staffroom to talk about my diaries. ‘What is this word “pulchritudinous”, Candia?’ I mumbled and said that it meant good looking.
‘Well, we’re going to have to change your diary keeping. You can write the diaries for the guys who don’t know how to write as long as you let them use their own words, but you are to keep your diaries, which have already covered more than a hundred sheets of paper and said nothing at all about yourself, to eight lines a day, only about yourself.’
I felt very much like crying.
They had me caught.
But looking at it from now, I see what they mean. Reading and writing were a kind of drug to me.
In order for the message of total abstinence to stick, those clinics where it is practised recommend no reading at all that is not concerned with the programme of Narcotics Anonymous and/or Alcoholics Anonymous. I was allowed my Christening Bible, King James, given me at Rosslyn by the Kuenssbergs four decades and more before.
It is true that I have consoled myself (the programmatical word might be ‘medicated’) with books and with reading and writing, but I am not prepared to accept that these are malign. I was, however, prepared to suspend them for those weeks during which I was, because I am, ultra obedient to our counsellors. The highlight of our week was a sing-song with the vicar, and the highlight of that–truly–was singing ‘Angels’ by Robbie Williams. I hadn’t heard it before. I hadn’t heard of him before. I was that disconnected.
For a start, there was the fact that almost without exception the counsellors were good looking (that’s where the pulchritudinous slipped in). Many of the male peers hungered for the beautiful, Spanish, booted, stern lady who took us through our character flaws with practised discipline on a daily basis. They vied for her white smiles. Romances were led in the head and added to the already electric atmosphere which sometimes exploded into a fight or a shouting match of incredible vituperation between women, but for a lot of the time people just shook and said, ‘I’m in bits, me, in bits, d’you hear, in little bits. I’m fucking fucked. I’m fucking FUCKing fucked.’ One boy who arrived in a state like this, left having built upon the good he had found within himself. He could have got a job at the Foreign Office, so great was his ability with every level of equivocation.
I wish any government would dare to institutionalise NA and AA rehabilitation programmes in prisons.
There’s a commonsensical and rather trite saying that goes around about addicts. The idea is that we are capable of enormous workloads because we in the past put so much effort into getting, using, recovering from, etc. our drug of choice. We are certainly obsessive, which is at its healthier end known as ‘applied’. When I left Clouds, I felt as newly hatched addicts do, skinless and terrified that I would find myself taking a drink.
One Monday after Clouds my literary agent came to see me and suggested that I write about the experience of detoxification. The people at Clouds had said the same. This book is not it. I would like to address a book that might be of use to an addict who is not sure whether they are one, and I’m fairly sure this book will be, if useful, useful in a more diffuse psychological way.
I will tell quickly, because I am so ashamed, the fact that after my agent had gone I saw the migrainous aura in the air that tells me that I am going to have a drink. For the next two weeks I drank to die, to the despair of all who had invested love, patience and trust, not to say a large sum of money, in my sobriety. Entirely drunk and responding, no doubt, to what had been there all along, I ran from my isolated house at the end of the cul-de-sac to Fram’s house that had been our marital home. Perhaps that is not true, perhaps Fram came and collected me. At any rate, after as many as five years without seeing each other in other than strainedly civil circumstances, we were together again. And there was Claudia. For, I think, two days, they nursed me. I stole two bottles of wine because I was having DTs. In front of Claudia, who is dry, witty, confident and intelligent, I was everything I had I thought managed not to be: maudlin, sentimental, snobbish, bitchy, envious of her solid yet elegantly raffish background, the lot. She took it all. Claudia is one of nine siblings from two marriages. I am one of one sibling from one marriage, really.
After that last bender, once more, and without complaint, the Farleigh household rallied around the woman who had never been its head. I was nursed for perhaps ten days in ‘my’ bedroom at Farleigh. Every day the sway of the trees made me a little less sick. Every day I could more easily fight off the racing thoughts of the urgent necessity of suicide. I could even see, in person at the bottom of my bed, my older two children, who were, if you can believe it, offering to drive me to meetings. The last drink I had in my life I could not finish. It was a can of Special Brew, taken from the refrigerator in my first husband’s morning room. I poured the rest away, squashed the can and wrapped it up. Later when I was returned to Oxford and having my second try at a sober life that has, so far, while undermined from many angles, not cracked, I threw the can away.
What seems to have happened is this, and Fram will correct me if I am wrong. When I left our marriage, Fram said his mother was ‘on the verge of beginning to be able to contemplate thinking of coming around to me’; Minoo insisted that she loved me. After I left, I received a letter from my mother-in-law begging me to reconsider and saying that she was sorry. I was very touched by this letter and have hidden it somewhere so deep that I can’t find it. I know now that Fram dictated it, but my late mother-in-law was willing to write it.
In a way, my departure was all my mother-in-law’s fears and dreams come true. She had her son back and she had her proof that I was as delinquent as the culture that I represented. She cannot but have been agonised by the pain in which she saw her son, but she also knew that he blamed her in part for the catastrophe, and that blinded her with fury. It was Avi and Minoo and, later, Claudia who got Fram through.
During the years in which I had imagined Fram all-powerful, plotting, arranging for my book to get bad reviews, talking the brilliant streak of malice that he can, and always, always outflanking anyone in argument, Minoo had made mention of Daddy’s ‘horizontality’. They had taken holidays together in Greece, in Sansepolcro, in Menton, and ‘Daddy has gardened and we did a lot of Gibbon/Plato/Donne together.’ Minoo would not be used as an informant and nor did I ever approach him with the intention of so using him. It was Claudia who told me later that Fram had, during these years that I was drunk, a nervous collapse.
At once all feuding and all stiffly held positions melted for me and I was struck at heart that this person with whom my mind was most involved had been dealing with such pain over such time. I bought a quantity of books on bipolarity and read them properly. I wanted to know everything that retrospectively might mend him.
My mother-in-law’s father, who looked very like Fram, died young driving home one evening on a road he knew very well. Mehroo’s mother, Ratu, remarried quite soon. She was the first woman in India to get a pilot’s licence. Home movies show her beauty but also
shyness veiled to some degree by the fashions of the time–a cocktail or cigarette holder never too far away–and a Leonardo smile. Mehroo found it difficult to come to terms with her mother’s remarriage, and though they remained close, there was a touchiness between them. After her mother died, Mehroo cried every morning for several years. When Eddie died she berated herself for having done so and her own widowhood was almost impenetrably sad. When Fram returned from weekends spent with his mother, it was often as though he needed draining of the gloom he had ingested. In fact his patient, tranquil sister, who lived with Mehroo and increasingly looked after her, protected him far more than he cared to admit.
When Fram introduced Claudia into his life, which was long after I left him, Mehroo said that ‘even that one’ (me) would be better than ‘this one’. It is possible that she saw that Claudia (who hates me to say this, remarking that it makes her sound like a breakfast cereal) was authentic in ways where I, who had trained myself, in order, as I thought, to please my mother-in-law, seemed not to be.
The language of disgust came easily to my mother-in-law. It was the dark side of her noticing eye and impulse to order her surroundings to make them fresh, light and airy. It is a language perhaps available to women who have not allowed their sons to grow up. Fram was much more her construct than his father’s. Perhaps I am still in a swoon of honeymoon with my sons, or perhaps I am smug, but I don’t see why their loving other women should spell infidelity to me; I think it might even mean that they must like me, or some category to which I belong, that of being female.
It was Claudia who saw that Fram must choose between her and his mother and enabled him to make the necessary transition without any unnatural break. Throughout all this, Avi nursed her brother, took no sides, exhibited perfect tolerance and when the time came, with Fram, nursed their mother in her swift last illness right up till the end, which Minoo and I missed by a few hours. In her last weeks, she was allowed to remain at home, consumed by cancer and read to by her children. I sent her a short letter saying that I was sorry that she was ill, that I had loved her and that I was very sorry that I had hurt her.
Fram chose life. Claudia is life in the many. With her came Toby Buxton, father of her twins, and tutelary spirit of the household. I was lucky enough, and this is not invariable, to love their twins Xavier Buxton and Yvo FitzHerbert, on sight. They are dissimilar twins yet their sense of a shared life saturates their relationship. Tall strawberry roan Yvo has cornered climate-camp and chess, and blue-eyed auburn Xavier is that rare thing, a born classicist. By lucky chance, though his school offered no Greek, he attached himself to a retired don, Margaret Howatson, from whose private lessons he would return with shining, sharpened eyes. Curiously, through their father, Yvo and Xavier have, like my son Minoo, a brother seven years older, also named Olly and with a poll of red hair.
When first I heard of these domestic arrangements, my reaction was envious, I suspect, and petit bourgeois, I know. The truth is that it works very well. Toby does the cooking and lives in the coach-house. Fram does the gardening and emanates power from his elegant drawing room. Claudia does far more than she pretends to and emanates an equal power that contains Fram’s own and protects him from it, from her large, wood-stoved study. Bysshe, the standard poodle, a redhead himself, has the best manners of any dog I know. Segolène the cat seldom settles save to scratch or to burrow into her fleecy manger next to Claudia’s computer.
As you will imagine, I’m defensive when people ask the sort of questions you can conceive they might. On the whole I do not speak to people about it unless I’m fairly certain that they will understand, and the key to their understanding must be that I wholly accept all of this, since it is the source of Fram’s happiness, and to love someone properly is to wish them that.
When eventually I went stone-blind and I was still too scared of Claudia and of her and Fram’s felicity to go to their house (it made me shake since it was all I had failed to make with my husband), Claudia came round to my house with a bunch of flowers. Her colours are autumnal–warm Victorian reds, blues and browns. She also brought for me Antonia White’s Living with Minka and Curdy. This was a perfect present. Claudia herself is a convent girl like Antonia White and clever and teasing in a similar way. The book was a pretty edition with its decorative dust-wrapper, and Minka and Curdy were, of course, cats. For good measure, Curdy was short for Coeur de Lion.
In February 2007, I received a letter from Claudia. Once we had seen one another plain, I believe we immediately trusted one another, but for ten years before that I feared the Claudia I had invented: ferocious, social, branchée and able to mobilise, I chippily thought, platoons of literati, wits and heart-struck young men bound to her frank beauty and disgusted at my putrid, tarty, fat, pretentious artifice. I used words to describe myself that hurt.
It occurred to Claudia, as I grew blinder, that I should come to live with her and Fram. This was brave. The first time I had visited their house I was wobbly with grief and envy, for what I saw was my own exact life, but relaxed. I felt shredded and like a fat ghost, an undisposed-of Rebecca. I do not think that Claudia has any Mrs de Winter feelings about me, nor need she have. She wrote:
Dear Candia
I felt that I should write to you directly about my reported suggestion that you think of Winchester Road as a base. I wondered if you felt you could not think of leaving Beaumont Buildings for as long as Minoo was Oxford based, and I thought that might seem an age given how unhappy you are and have been there and how impossible it feels to turn things around from there. You know that I have thought often, in the last few months, that it was quite wrong for you to be stumbling around alone and wished that you could see a way of stumbling around Winchester Road until the eyes were brought under some sort of control. But I also saw that Winchester Road seemed no solution to you, and was in fact a sort of torture. ‘I am alone’, you say, ‘that is the truth’. Well you are and you aren’t. If you can bear to take a place in our loose family structure then you would be a strengthening rather than a straining element. I think you know this, perhaps you resent it, why should you prop up our structure? Only because in becoming a prop it would become your structure too. I don’t know any other way, except to prop and be propped. But I also know, in some quarters, that this is regarded as a sick way forward. Still, I reiterate–we haven’t anything cosy and nuclear for you to disrupt–you must see that. Toby and I failed as a partnership–now we are back on course. I have no doubt at all that Fram and I would have failed if we had tried for anything tighter or steppier than we have got. You say the place for you at the table is still an outsider place and that is the story of your life. I say it is as outsiderish as you choose to make it. There are bonds between you and Fram which make me the outsider and bonds between Toby and me which make Fram the outsider and I don’t doubt that we too could grow some bonds of our own that would make outsiders of them both, not to mention all the bonds we have with our own and make with other people’s children to pass the life. I know that Doctor X and Doctor O have both warned against what is on offer here, to which I can only say what do they know and what do I know. Well I know–sort of–what is on offer and why–but of course cannot be the judge of whether it is what you want or need. I have, I suppose because of my mother, a horror of endings. All sorts of mess and experiment seem to me preferable to losing sight of loved ones. But that is my wing, I cannot make it yours.
I have no sense of anything but gratitude for this letter, with its beautiful sense of ‘passing the life’, a phrase she has coined, and its generous reference to her own mother, a Margaret like my own, who died young in a road accident. But I am I think too old and conventional and under-confident to enter such a collegiate way of life. I know myself too well and that I would fit in around the edge of yet another family while significantly being in some sense dead or absent, as I felt it. Am I wrong? I don’t know.
What to Look for in Winter Page 28
