The Life Situation

by Rosemary Friedman

  “Which one, sir?”

  “All of them.”

  The girl looked at him a bit queerly. She handed him a bundle.

  He sat on a bench in the square and opened the papers one by one, looking for book reviews and advertisements. Only two of them had any. Of the two neither had mentioned his small contribution to the literary world. He tried four more bookshops, looking first, hating having to ask. All blanks. He wondered if he had written a book at all or was perhaps suffering from some delusion. In one of the papers Benthorpe had actually advertised. A whacking great six-inch, double-column spread. They had not mentioned Death at the Old Bailey. He found two twopence pieces in his pocket and rang Mr Cooper at Benthorpe’s. Mr Cooper was in conference, could his secretary help? He was put through, betting Mr Cooper wouldn’t be in conference if Harold Robbins or Graham Greene called.

  The secretary greeted him warmly – she was obviously accustomed to dealing with peeved authors. Yes, the book was out. Pre-publication orders were quite good, she believed. Perhaps he had been unlucky with the bookshops he had chosen. Yes, they had certainly advertised it. He waited while she looked in her file. The pips went and he put in his last twopence. She came back. There were adverts that day in The Middlesbrough Evening Gazette, Reynolds News and the Glasgow Bulletin. She knew Mr Cooper had others in hand for the end of the week but could not be sure which. If he liked to ring again later in the day…

  He put down the receiver and threw the newspapers into a litter bin.

  Back at the hospital it was all smiles. The baby had been born half an hour ago. An episiotomy had been necessary but his wife was neatly stitched up. He looked through a glass screen at an ugly, screwed up infant they insisted stoutly was his, then went into Karen. She lay quietly, a beatific smile on her face. She held out her arms. “Have you seen her?”

  He nodded. He’d forgotten to ask the sex.

  “Isn’t she beautiful? Silky hair, soft.”

  “I should have brought flowers. I’m sorry. I never thought of it. Next time.”

  “It doesn’t matter. I want you. I’ve been lying here thinking about a name. What about ‘Rosy’?”

  “I like it. It has a nice sound. Rosy.”

  There were tears cruising down her face. He felt a heel for not having come back sooner.

  He stroked her forehead. “What is it?”

  “I’m so happy. This is quite the nicest moment in my life.”

  No one would ever understand women. All that ghastly pain and tears of happiness.

  “You’re a clever girl. And thank you. I could never have done it.”

  “You’re not supposed to.” She shut her eyes. “I’m so so sleepy. Do you mind?”

  He kissed her. “After all that! I should think you’d sleep for a week.”

  “There’s a chicken pie in the fridge,” she said. “Half an hour at 400.”

  Three

  Much water had gone under the bridge since then. Death at the Old Bailey had been followed by Death at the Embassy, Death in Piccadilly and Death in the Air, to name but a few. They came to be known as the Death books and his name was a household word. He would dearly have loved to leave the formula and did once try but with no success. His public clamoured for more Death books. He travelled abroad for material and acceded to their demands.

  With the birth of Daisy, fifteen months after that of Rosy, they had left the furnished flat and moved to Hampstead. As soon as the girls were old enough to be at all-day school Karen had taken a job as a medical secretary with a gynaecologist. They didn’t exactly need the money although it helped to put jam on their bread, but she felt better, she said, if she got out of the house with its attendant domesticity for some part of the day. It was interesting work and not too demanding.

  The arrangement worked well. Oscar was left in peace to write, apart from such small interruptions as the laundry or the meter man whose visits he usually welcomed as an excuse to knock off for a bit; also when one of the children had a cough or cold and had to stay at home it wasn’t necessary for Karen to take time off work.

  At that moment he was occupied with Death on the Riviera. He had come a long way in the past ten years. He no longer sneaked into bookshops searching for a single copy of his book which they were unlikely to have. There was no decent bookshop nor station kiosk from which his name did not stare at him either in hard-or paperback.

  Contracts rolled in from all over Europe and his sales in the USA were steady. He was, in the terms of the trade, a ‘bread-and-butter’ writer, he had not as yet hit the jackpot with a runaway bestseller. He blamed his publisher for not promoting him. They soothed his injured pride by assuring him that his steady output of successful books was worth far more than one ‘over the top’ after which the author was not heard from again.

  On the morning after the Beaumonts’ party, Death on the Riviera was giving him trouble; it was not merely the starter motor with which he had trouble each day but something else which disturbed his concentration. What was bugging him he didn’t know. Untrue. He did know. He was unable to get the image of Marie-Céleste, soft crêpe dress outlining her breasts, out of his mind. In fifteen years of marriage to Karen he had not strayed. Hadn’t wanted to. He loved Karen. As a wife and mother she could not be faulted. She ran the house and their social life with unobtrusive efficiency, tended the children with both affection and skill, bought his shirts and socks and underwear, shopped for and cooked the food he liked to eat, kept the peace when he was writing, supported him through books which refused to progress and most of all through his depression. As far as their sex life was concerned he supposed that it was, if anything, somewhat better than that of many of his contemporaries. At any rate he did not, as they did, find it necessary on one or two nights a week to ‘work late at the office’, ‘take a buyer out to dinner’, ‘play bridge with the lads’ or attend a ‘regimental dinner’. The euphemisms, he knew, fooled no one except the wives who seemed not to wish it otherwise and often expressed appreciation of the fact that their husbands ‘did not bother them too much’.

  It was not like that with him and Karen. Not of course that he went to the office like other men, but he had no reason to lie to her about his activities. Naturally over the years there had been changes. In the early days he and Karen had made love in fields, beneath a picnic rug, on the sofa in front of the television (an extra kick that!) – wherever and whenever the fancy took them. Somewhere along the line, he could not pinpoint exactly where, they had settled into more of a routine. The spontaneity had diminished; something to do, he supposed, with the birth of the children and not having the house to themselves. With Karen being working wife and mother, and tired at the end of the day. With preoccupations having to do with the children, domestic catastrophes, general laziness, age. Apart from the rare high-spot their love life had settled into a predictability both of frequency and manner which he assumed was inevitable and which he made no attempt to alter.

  He got up from his desk, went into the bedroom and stood before the full-length mirror. He saw a basically good-looking man whose contours, once taut, were yielding perceptibly to the onslaught of middle age. The hair was receding and grey at the sideboards, the skin round the eyes crinkled, there was less definition of chin and neck, a belly slightly pot, betraying a lack of willpower in exercise and diet, a mouth of filled teeth. There was a certain melancholy, he thought, in watching yourself rot. He stood sideways, tucked in his tummy, smoothed his hair. Not too bad really for forty-five; could be a lot less. When he went to Open Day at Rosy and Daisy’s school he felt he put up a fair show among the fathers. Rosy and Daisy said he looked years younger than any of the others. They were proud to show him off, Karen too. She had kept the slimness of her youth and stood out among the other mothers, often overdressed and with hard, over-made-up faces. There was a softness to her. Together they made a handsome, youthful couple.

  He went back to Death on the Riviera, tearing Marie-Céleste, crumpling it and th
rowing it into the wastepaper basket. There was something about the way she held herself, a sort of foal-like grace, slim, almost too thin, more of a gazelle really. He jabbed the carriage key, typed ‘CHAPTER THREE’ in capitals and, underlining it, dived in at the deep end.

  He was surprised when what seemed only five minutes later turned out to be one o’clock. The pattern was the same every day. He resisted getting started, but having overcome the difficulties he wrote like a demon until his back and shoulders became intolerable. Awareness of time was lost and the number of pages he had written and the lateness of the hour never failed to amaze him. His method was to get what he called ‘the bare bones’ of the story down on to paper, stopping neither for corrections of text nor spelling mistakes, then to go over the whole thing again at leisure. Once the story was in type and the almost intolerable burden removed from his head (from where he was always afraid he might lose it) he could relax. With much more enjoyment and less intensity he could then get down to corrections and cutting, screaming at Rosy and Daisy for his Sellotape and scissors which they always borrowed, crossing their hearts they would return, and making the work into a recognizable whole. In fact he generally had to change very little. He had to polish, of course, and with Roget at his side replace words and eliminate clichés. The beginning was always easy, as was the home stretch at the end. It was in the middle he became bogged down, certain he would not have enough story left to spread over the remaining pages, and becoming discouraged at this inadequacy. Once he had climbed the hump, however, he was away, his fingers scarcely keeping pace with his brain. The best moment of all was the last. He understood why Karen wept tears of joy after she had given birth.

  He wore no watch but always felt intuitively when it was one o’clock. He had found over the years that nine until one was the time of his maximum creativity. After that the rot set in, and although sometimes he did corrections or notes for the next chapters after tea, the day, as far as writing was concerned, was over. He counted the pages which he had filled, clipped them together in order with a paperclip and left them face down on the typewriter. He did not read what he had written. He got up from his chair, yawned enormously, scratched his head, rotated his shoulders to relieve the tension and thought about lunch.

  In the kitchen Karen’s note was as usual stuck under a milkbottle on the table. He picked it up. ‘Pot. Salad in fridge. Kippers in pan. Laundry money in coffee beans. Out of butter – use marge.’

  He lit the gas under the boil-in-the-bag kipper fillets which she had thoughtfully covered with water, and took the potato salad out of the fridge. It was one of his favourite lunches, especially when there were plenty of spring onions among the potatoes. Sometimes he went down to the pub, but it was always packed at lunchtime and he didn’t enjoy standing elbow to elbow while he ate his sandwich and drank his beer. It was all right on a hot day when they put little tables outside, but he usually preferred the solitude of the kitchen where he could spread the newspaper over the table and have a stab at the crossword or buy a few country estates.

  After lunch he slept until it was time to go for his analysis. It was his third year with Dr Adler. Five times a week at ten pounds a crack. It had all started after Death on the Canal. When he’d finished the book he suddenly became unable to write. The emptiness inside himself frightened him, as did the inability to concentrate, his irritability, his addiction to sleep, the conviction that all things were pointless, and his feelings of worthlessness. He lost his appetite, his libido and two stone in weight. He wondered but did not worry particularly that he might have some terminal illness. That the brain tumour or lung cancer he feared perpetually had finally caught up with him. If he had it would solve all his problems. Sometimes he felt low enough to see how many pills they had in the house and speculate how many would be needed for an overdose. It was the thought of the stomach pump that put him off. Some mornings he went to the bathroom and stood with his wrists over the basin, razorblade in hand. He did not know if it was apathy or cowardice that stopped him. In bed he’d stare at the curtain cord but there seemed too much effort involved. He wasn’t sure if it was death or oblivion that he sought. Probably the latter, some paradise where he was cared for like a helpless child not expected to make the most elementary decision. He became forgetful, slovenly, putting on the same clothes each day because he could not make the effort to find others. He tried to look at Karen and the girls with meaning but felt himself detached from the family circle – felt that even they were not worth living for. When it got to the stage that he no longer left his bed at all Karen insisted that he should see their doctor. The doctor was away. His elderly locum, finding no physical signs, said: “Get up and pull yourself together. Don’t lie there wallowing in self pity. Get dressed and go for a brisk walk, play golf or whatever you do, take your mind off yourself.” To Karen he said: “Don’t pamper him. Have to be cruel to be kind. Not a thing the matter with him. Good-day.”

  When their own doctor returned he made an immediate appointment with a psychiatrist. Oscar shrugged his shoulders; it was all too much of an effort. Karen stood by him while he dressed in dumb obedience.

  “I’m a dead loss as a husband.”

  “No.”

  “Can’t do a thing for myself, let alone for you. Haven’t written a word in months; bills everywhere. It’s all too much.”

  “Don’t be silly. It’ll pass.”

  “I think you will have to face the fact that I am never going to get better; never going to feel any different.”

  Dr Dodson listened carefully, questioned him gently. Let the long pauses hang like bubbles in the air. Oscar did not mention the tablets, the razor blade.

  “What form do your suicidal thoughts take?”

  “What makes you think I have any?”

  “You are very depressed, Mr John.”

  He shrugged and told him. It didn’t really matter.

  “It matters to me, Mr John.”

  When there seemed no more to say and only the soft noise of the comfortable gas fire filled the room, Dr Dodson said:

  “I’m going to put you on some anti-depressant tablets. I want you to take them regularly. Ring me straight away if they have any side effects. They should start to work in about a week. Come and see me in a fortnight.”

  “I’m never going to feel any different.”

  “You will. I promise you will.”

  After only two days on the tablets his hands shook, he slept continuously and his mouth felt like the bottom of a birdcage.

  Dr Dodson changed the pills. From yellow tablets he went on to multi-coloured capsules. Ten days later he was on large orange smarties. By the time he saw Dodson again his mood had lifted slightly.

  “I hate to be dependent on things,” Oscar said. “For how long will I need to take them?”

  “You’re like a car stuck on a hill,” Dodson explained. “It needs a little push to get it going but after that push it gathers its own momentum and you’re away. Believe me, please.” He gave him another appointment and told him not to hesitate to ring if something troubled him.

  It was his first experience of psychiatrists. They had always been something of a joke. There was nothing funny about his need for Dodson’s varicoloured pills.

  Karen had been instructed to tell everyone that he had a virus infection. One that would take some time to clear. He communicated with no one at all.

  At the beginning of the fourth week in treatment he got up, washed his hair, put on a clean pair of trousers, and went singing down into the kitchen to see what he could find to eat.

  By the time Karen came home he had laid the table. On his way back from the pub where he greeted his friends and drank a bitter lemon he had bought her some flowers, and had arranged them in a vase in the sitting-room.

  “I’m better,” he told her, “fit, recovered. Can’t even recall what I felt like. Must have been bloody hell for you. I’ll make it up to you.”

  He thought she looked at him a
little oddly beneath her pleasure at seeing him a changed man.

  The next morning he was back to square one, deflated, beaten.

  He phoned Dr Dodson who told him to expect these slightly manic attacks which were the other side of the coin of depression. If they persisted he would have to reduce the tablets. After three months he was well on the way to recovery. Instead of having one good day in amongst a week of hopeless ones he had one bad day and that only occasionally. Six months after the onset of his illness he began writing again and declared himself cured. He stopped his medication because he felt it interfered with his work. It was against Dr Dodson’s advice. After three weeks he was back.

  “I feel bloody awful,” he admitted to Dr Dodson. “Right back at the beginning and getting worse every day.” He now recognized his own symptoms. “I don’t want any more pills.”

  “Why?”

  “I despise myself for needing them.”

  “Would you despise yourself if you were a diabetic and had to take insulin every day?”

  “Of course not. It’s not the same.”

  “In what way?”

  “The diabetic is physically sick.”

  “So are you. It has been found that depression causes chemical changes in the brain although we are not quite sure which comes first. It’s like the chicken and the egg. You’re just as susceptible to illness, even emotional illness, as the rest of us. You’re not ‘special’. I was expecting you back. You can’t treat anti-depressant drugs so casually. They must continue to be taken after the depression has lifted; usually for quite a long period.”

  He began to tire of Dr Dodson. He gave it three more months then refused to go back. Through Karen Dr Dodson suggested analysis and Dr Adler.

  Dr Adler, a slight, featureless man, lived in a featureless house in Hampstead. He answered the door himself. The hall was dark, the carpet worn. His room faced the street and he had put frosted glass in the windows. Among the books Oscar noticed Depression and Philip Roth. There was a hi-fi with two large speakers, and a comfortable-looking couch, more like a bed really, covered in some striped material. On the pillow was what looked like a checked red-and-white duster. It was quiet. Behind the couch was an armchair and by the side of it a low table with cigarettes, ashtray, diary, appointment book, a bag of Glacier mints. There were two other armchairs and a desk. Dr Adler motioned him to one of them and sat in the other himself. ‘Wants to make me feel at home,’ Oscar thought, ‘doesn’t sit at the desk.’ Dr Adler took some cigarettes from his pocket.