The Only Story

TWO

Susan’s running-away fund contained enough to buy a small house in Henry Road, SE15. The price was low – gentrification, and juice bars, lay far in the future. The place had been in multi-occupation: a euphemism for locks on every door, asbestos panelling, a squalid kitchenette on a half-landing, personal gas meters and personal stains in every room. Through that late summer and early autumn we stripped it all back, joyfully, the dandruff of distemper in our hair. We threw out most of the old furniture, and slept on a double mattress on the floor. We had a toaster, a kettle, and dined off takeaways from the Cypriot taverna at the end of the road.

We needed a plumber, electrician and gas man, but did the rest ourselves. I was good at rough carpentry. I made myself a desk from two broken-up chests of drawers topped with cut-down wardrobe doors; then sanded, filled and painted it until it stood, immovably heavy, at one end of my study. I cut and laid coconut matting, and tacked carpet up the stairs. Together we ripped off the parchmenty wallpaper, back to the leprous plaster, then roller-painted it in cheery, non-bourgeois colours: turquoise, daffodil, cerise. I painted my study a sombre dark green, after Barney told me that the labour wards of hospitals were that colour, to calm expectant mothers. I hoped it might have the same effect on my own laborious hours.

I had taken to heart Joan’s sceptical ‘And, to start at the beginning, what would you do for money?’ Given that I didn’t care about the stuff, I could have lived off Susan; but, given that our relationship was going to last a lifetime, I acknowledged that at some point I would have to support her rather than the other way round. Not that I knew how much money she had. I never asked about the finances of the Macleod household, nor whether Susan had a traditional Auntie Maud who would conveniently leave her all she had.

So I decided to become a solicitor. I had no exaggerated ambitions for myself; my exaggerated ambitions were all for love. But I thought of the law because I had an orderly mind, and a capacity to apply myself; and every society needs lawyers, doesn’t it? I remember a woman friend once telling me her theory of marriage: that it was something you should ‘dip into and out of as required’. This may sound dismayingly practical, even cynical, but it wasn’t. She loved her husband, and ‘dipping out’ of marriage didn’t mean adultery. Rather, it was a recognition of how marriage worked for her: as a reliable ground bass to life, as something you jogged along with until such time as you needed to ‘dip into’ it, for succour, expressions of love and the rest. I could understand this approach: there is no point demanding more than your temperament requires or provides. But as far as I understood my life at this time, I required the opposite equation. Work would be something I jogged along with; love would be my life.

I began my studies. Each morning, Susan cooked me breakfast; each evening, supper – unless I fetched us a kebab or sheftalia. Sometimes, when I arrived back, she would sing at me, ‘Little man, you’ve had a busy day.’ She also took my washing to the launderette and brought it home for ironing. We still went to concerts and art exhibitions. The mattress on the floor became a double bed, in which we slept together night after night, and where some of my cinematic assumptions about love and sex became subject to adjustment. For instance, the notion of lovers falling blissfully asleep in one another’s arms resolved itself into the actuality of one lover falling asleep half on top of the other, and the latter, after a certain amount of cramp and interrupted circulation, gently shifting out from beneath while trying not to wake her. I also discovered that it wasn’t only men who snored.

My parents didn’t reply to my change-of-address letter; nor did I invite them to visit the house in Henry Road. One day I returned from college to find Susan in agitated mood. Martha Macleod, Miss Grumpy herself, had descended without warning for a tour of inspection. She was bound to have noted that whereas in the Village her mother had slept in a single bed, now she had a double one. Fortunately, in my dark green study, the sofa bed had been pulled out, and left unmade by me that morning. But then, as Susan remarked, two doubles hardly make a single. My own attitude to Martha Macleod’s likely disapproval of our sleeping arrangements was – would have been – one of pride and defiance. Susan’s was more complicated, though I admit I didn’t spend much time on its nuances. After all, were we living together or were we not?

When she reached the two undecorated attic rooms at the top of the house, Martha had apparently said,

‘You should have lodgers.’

When Susan had demurred, her daughter’s reply, delivered either as argument or instruction, was:

‘It would be good for you.’

Quite what she meant by this we debated that evening. True, there was an economic argument for lodgers: they would make the house more or less self-sufficient. But what was the moral argument? Perhaps that lodgers would give Susan something more to do than wait for the return of her shameless lover. Martha might also have intended that lodgers would somehow dilute my noxious presence, and camouflage the reality of number 23 Henry Road – of Fancy Boy Number One living brazenly with an adulteress still more than twice his age.

If Martha’s visit had troubled Susan, it also, on further thought, troubled me. I had failed to consider her future relations with her daughters. My focus had all been on Macleod, on getting Susan away from him, and now, from a safe distance, divorcing him. For our joint sake, but mainly for hers. She had to scrub this mistake from her life and give herself the legal as well as the moral freedom to be happy. And being happy consisted of living with me, alone and unfettered.

It was a quiet neighbourhood, and we received few visitors. I remember one Saturday morning being stirred from the law of tort by the front doorbell. I heard Susan invite someone – two someones, a man and a woman – into the kitchen. About twenty minutes later, I heard her say, as she shut the front door,

‘I’m sure you feel a whole lot better now.’

‘Who was that?’ I asked as she passed my door. She looked in to see me.

‘Missionaries,’ she replied. ‘God damn and blast them, missionaries. I let them get it all off their chests and then sent them on their way. Better to waste their puff on me than someone they might convert.’

‘Not actual missionaries?’

‘It’s a general term. Actual missionaries are the worst, of course.’

‘You mean, these were Jehovah’s Witnesses, or Plymouth Brethren, or Baptists, or something?’

‘Or something. They asked me if I was worried about the state of the world. It’s an obvious catch question. Then they bored on about the Bible as if I’d never heard of it. I nearly told them I knew all about it and that I was a flaming Jezebel.’

And with that she left me to my studies. But instead I mused on these sudden bursts of fierce opinion, which so endeared her to me. I had been educated by books, she by life, I thought again.

One evening, the phone went. I picked it up and gave the number.

‘Who is that?’ said a voice I immediately recognised as Macleod’s.

‘Well, who’s that?’ I replied, with fake casualness.

‘Gor-don Mac-leod,’ he said with extended heaviness. ‘And whom might I be having the honour of speaking to?’

‘Paul Roberts.’

As he banged the receiver down, I found myself wishing I’d said Mickey Mouse, or Yuri Gagarin, or the Chairman of the BBC.

I didn’t tell Susan about this. I didn’t see the point.

But a few weeks later we received a visit from a man called Maurice. Susan had met him before, once or twice. He might have had a connection to Macleod’s office. There must have been some arrangement made. It seemed he had picked a time when I would be there too. I’m not sure about it all, at this distance – maybe it was just luck on his part.

I failed to ask any of the obvious questions at the time. And if I had, perhaps Susan would have had the answers, perhaps not.

He was a man of fiftyish, I suppose. In my memory I have given him – or he has acquired over the years – a trenchcoat, and perhaps a broad-brimmed hat, underneath which he wore a suit and tie. He was perfectly cordial in behaviour. He shook my hand. He accepted a cup of coffee, he used the lavatory, he asked for an ashtray, and he talked about the bland, general topics adults went in for. Susan was in her hostess mode, which involved tamping down some of the things I most loved her for: her irreverence, her free-spirited laughter at the world.

All I can remember is that at one point the conversation turned to the closure of Reynolds News. This was a paper – Reynolds News and Sunday Citizen, to give its full title – which had fallen on hard times, relaunched itself as a tabloid Sunday, and then finally closed – presumably not long before this conversation.

‘I don’t think it matters much,’ I said. I didn’t really have any view on the matter. I might have seen a copy or two of Reynolds News, but was mainly just reacting to Maurice’s tone of deep concern.

‘You don’t?’ he asked civilly.

‘No, not really.’

‘What about the diversity of the press? Isn’t that something to be valued?’

‘All the papers seem much the same to me, so I don’t see that one fewer of them matters much.’

‘Are you by any chance part of the Revolutionary Left?’

I laughed at him. Not at his words, but at him. What the fuck did he take me for? Or perhaps, Who the fuck? He might as well have been a member of the tennis club committee, back at the Village.

‘No, I despise politics,’ I said.

‘You despise politics? Do you think that’s an entirely healthy attitude? Do you find cynicism a comfortable position? What would you replace them with? You’d close down newspapers, you’d close down our way of doing politics? You’d close down democracy? That sounds like a Revolutionary Left position to me.’

Now the fellow was really annoying me. I wasn’t out of my area of competence so much as my area of interest.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘It’s really not that at all. But you see,’ I added, looking at him with melancholy seriousness, ‘it’s just that I’m a member of a played-out generation. You may think we’re a bit young for it, but even so, we’re played out.’

He left shortly afterwards.

‘Oh, Casey Paul, you are one wicked person.’

‘Me?’

‘You. Didn’t you hear him say he’d worked for Reynolds News?’

‘No, I thought he was a spy.’

‘You mean, a Russki?’

‘No, I just mean he was sent along to check up on us and report back.’

‘Probably.’

‘Do you think we should worry about that?’

‘Not for a couple of days at least, I’d say.’

You decide that, since you are a student, and all your fellow-students, apart from those who live at home, pay rent, then you should do so too. You ask a couple of friends how much they pay. You take the mid-point: four pounds a week. You can afford this out of your state grant.

One Monday evening, you hand Susan four pound notes.

‘What’s that?’ she asks.

‘I’ve decided I should pay you rent,’ you reply, perhaps a little stiffly. ‘That’s about what others pay.’

She throws the notes back at you. They don’t hit your face, as they might do in a film. They just lie on the floor between you. Awkward silences follow, and you sleep on your sofa bed that night. You feel guilty about not having introduced the subject of rent with more subtlety; it was like when you gave her that parsnip. The four green pound notes lie on the floor all night. The next morning you pick them up and put them back in your wallet. The subject is never mentioned again.

As a result of Martha’s visit, two things happened. The attic rooms were let out to lodgers, and Susan went back to the Village for the first time since we ran away together. She said it would be necessary and practical to return from time to time. Half the house belonged to her, and she could hardly rely on Macleod to pay the bills or remember to get the boiler serviced. (I didn’t see why not, but still.) Mrs Dyer would continue to serve and thieve on a daily basis, and would alert Susan to anything that needed her attention. She promised that she would only go back when Macleod wasn’t there. Grudgingly, I agreed.

I said a bit ago that ‘This is how I would remember it all if I could. But I can’t.’ There’s some stuff I left out, stuff I can’t put off any longer. Where to start? In the ‘book room’, as they called it, downstairs at the Macleods’. It was late, and I was unwilling to go home. Susan might already have been in bed; I don’t remember. Nor do I remember what book I was reading. Something I’d picked off the shelves at random, no doubt. I was still trying to get my head round the Macleod collection. There were leather-bound sets of the classics, old enough to have been handed down through maybe two generations; art monographs, poetry, a lot of history, some biography, novels, thrillers. I came from the sort of household where books, as if to confirm that they should be respected, were put in order: by subject, author, even size. Here, there was a different system – or rather, as far as I could see, no system at all. Herodotus was next to The Bab Ballads, a three-volume history of the Crusades next to Jane Austen, T.E. Lawrence sandwiched between Hemingway and a Charles Atlas manual of bodybuilding. Was it all an elaborate joke? Mere bohemian muddle? Or a way of saying: we control the books, they don’t control us.

I was still musing when the door banged back against the bookcase, then rebounded far enough to be kicked again. Macleod stood there in his dressing gown, which – and this I do remember – was plaid, with a maroon cord tied and dangling. Below were his elephant pyjamas and leather slippers.

‘What are you doing here?’ he asked, in a tone of voice normally attached to the words ‘Fuck off’.

My default position of insolence kicked in.

‘Reading,’ I replied, waving the book in his direction.

He stomped across and ripped it from my hand, briefly inspected it, then threw it like a frisbee across the room.

I couldn’t help grinning. He thought he was chucking my book away, when it was one of his own. Hilarious!

That was when he hit me. Or rather, aimed a succession of blows – three, I’m pretty sure – one of which landed as a wrist slapping the side of my head. The other two flailed past.

I got up and tried to hit him back. I think I aimed one blow, which skidded off his shoulder. Neither of us was doing any snappy defensive work; we were just equally incompetent attackers. Well, I’d never hit anyone before. He, I assume, had, or had at least tried to.

While he was concentrating on what to say, or where to hit, next, I squirmed past him, ran to the back door, and escaped. I was relieved to get back to a house where I hadn’t been assaulted since a few doubtless-merited spankings a decade and more previously.

No, that wasn’t quite true – about never having hit someone. In my first year at school, the gym master had encouraged us all to enter the annual boxing competition, which was organised by weight and age. I had absolutely no desire to inflict or receive pain. But I noticed that, with only a few hours to go, there were no entrants listed under my category. So I gave my name in, expecting to win by walkover.

Unfortunately for me – for both of us – another boy, Bates, had the same idea at almost the same time. So we found ourselves in the ring together, two skinny, scared things in plimsolls, vests and house shorts, with these big bobbly gloves suddenly at the end of our arms. For a couple of minutes we each did a reasonably good job of feinting attacks and then back-pedalling at great speed, until the gym master pointed out that neither of us had yet landed a blow.

‘Box!’ he had commanded.

Whereupon I leaped at the unprepared Bates, whose gloves were down near his knees, and punched him on the nose. He squealed, looked at the sudden blood on his clean white vest and burst into tears.

And so I became school boxing champion in the under-12, under-6-stone category. Naturally, I never fought again.

The next time I went to the Macleod house, Susan’s husband couldn’t have been friendlier. Perhaps that was when he showed me how to do the crossword, making it some kind of exclusive male preserve. Or at any rate, a Susan-excluding one. So I put the book-room incident down as an aberration. And anyway, it might have been partly my fault. Perhaps I should have engaged him about which version of the Dewey system his library was organized under. No, I can see that might have been equally provoking.

How much time then went by? Let’s call it six months. Again, it was lateish. At the Macleod house, unlike my own, there was a main staircase near the front door, and a narrower one near the kitchen, presumably for those mob-capped servants now replaced by machines. Often, when I visited Susan during term time, I would sleep in a small attic room which could be reached from either direction. Susan and I had been listening to the gramophone – preparing for a concert – and the music was still in my head when I reached the top of the back stairs. All of a sudden there came a kind of roar, and something which might have been a kick or a trip, accompanied by a thump on the shoulder, and I found myself falling back down the stairs. I managed somehow to grab the banister, wrenching my shoulder but just about keeping my balance.

‘You fucking bastard!’ I said automatically.

‘Whatski?’ came an answering bellow from above. ‘Whatski, my fine and feathered friend?’

I looked up at the squat bully glaring down at me from the semi-darkness. I thought that Macleod must be absolutely, certifiably mad. We stared at one another for a few seconds, then the dressing-gowned figure stomped away, and I heard a distant door close.

It wasn’t Macleod’s fists I was afraid of – not principally. It was his anger. We didn’t do anger in my family. We did ironic comment, snappy rejoinder, satirical elaboration; we did exact words forbidding a certain action, and more severe ones condemning what had already taken place. But for anything beyond this, we did the thing enjoined upon the English middle classes for generations. We internalised our rage, our anger, our contempt. We spoke words under our breath. We might have written some of those words down in private diaries if we kept them. But we also thought that we were the only ones reacting like this, and it was a little shameful, and so we internalised it all even further.

When I got to my room that night, I placed a chair at an angle, wedged under the door knob, as I’d seen done in films. I lay in bed thinking: Is this what the adult world is really like? Underneath it all? And how close beneath the surface does it – will it – lie?

I had no answers.

I didn’t tell Susan about either of these incidents. I internalised my anger and shame – well, I would, wouldn’t I?

And you’ll have to imagine long spells of happiness, of delight, of laughter. I’ve described them already. That’s the thing about memory, it’s… well, let me put it like this. Have you ever seen an electric log-splitter in action? They’re very impressive. You cut the log to a certain length, lay it on the bed of the machine, press the button with your foot, and the log is pushed on to a blade shaped like an axe-head. Whereupon the log splits pure and straight down the grain. That’s the point I’m trying to make. Life is a cross section, memory is a split down the grain, and memory follows it all the way to the end.

So I can’t not continue. Even if this is the hardest part to remember. No, not to remember – to describe. It was the moment when I lost some of my innocence. That may sound like a good thing. Isn’t growing up a necessary process of losing one’s innocence? Maybe, maybe not. But the trouble with life is, you rarely know when that loss is going to happen, do you? And how it will be, afterwards.

My parents were away on holiday, and my granny – my mother’s mother – had been drafted in to look after me. I was, of course, twenty – only twenty – so obviously couldn’t be left in the house by myself. What might I get up to, whom might I import, what might I organize – a bacchanalia of middle-aged women, perhaps – what might the neighbours think, and who might subsequently refuse to come for sherry? Grandma, widowed some five years, didn’t have anything better to do. I had naturally – innocently – loved her as a child. Now I was growing up and she seemed boring. But that was a loss of innocence I could handle.

At this time, I used to sleep quite late during the holidays. It could have been mere idleness, or a belated reaction to the stress of the university term; or, perhaps, some instinctive unwillingness to re-enter this world I still called home. I would sleep on until eleven without compunction. And my parents – to their credit – never came in and sat on my bed and complained that I was treating the place like a hotel; while Grandma was happy to cook me breakfast at lunchtime if that’s what I wanted.

So it was probably closer to eleven than ten when I stumbled downstairs.

‘There’s a very rude woman asking for you,’ said Grandma. ‘She’s rung three times. She told me to wake you up. Actually, the last time to “B” wake you up. I said I’m not interfering with his beauty sleep.’

‘Good for you, Grandma. Thanks.’

A very rude woman. But I didn’t know any. Someone from the tennis club, persecuting me further? The bank about my overdraft? Maybe Grandma was beginning to lose her marbles. At which point, the phone went again.

‘Joan,’ said the very rude voice of Joan. ‘It’s Susan. Get over there. She wants you, not me. You, now.’ And she put the phone down.

‘Aren’t you having your breakfast?’ asked Grandma as I rushed out.

At the Macleods’, the front door was open, and I walked around until I found her fully dressed, handbag beside her, on the sofa in the sitting room. She didn’t look up when I greeted her. I could only see the top of her head, or rather, the curve of her headscarf. I sat down beside her, but she immediately turned her face away.

‘I need you to drive me up to town.’

‘Of course, darling.’

‘And I need you not to ask me any questions. And absolutely not to look at me.’

‘Whatever you say. But you’ll need to tell me roughly where we’re going.’

‘Head for Selfridges.’

‘Are we in a hurry?’ I allowed myself that question.

‘Just drive safely, Paul, just drive safely.’

We got to near Selfridges and she directed me down Wigmore Street, then left up one of those streets where private doctors practise.

‘Park here.’

‘Do you want me to come with you?’

‘I’d rather not. Get yourself some lunch. This won’t be quick. Do you need some money?’

I had indeed come without my wallet. She gave me a ten-shilling note.

As I turned back into Wigmore Street, I saw ahead of me John Bell & Croyden, where she had gone for her Dutch cap. A terrible realization came upon me. That the system had failed, that she’d found herself pregnant, and was even now dealing with the consequences. The Abortion Law was still going through Parliament, but everyone knew there were doctors – and not just at the backstreet end – who would perform ‘procedures’ more or less on demand. I imagined the conversation: Susan explaining how she had got herself pregnant by her young lover, hadn’t had sex with her husband for two decades, and how a child would destroy her marriage and endanger her own mental health. That would be enough for any doctor, who would agree to what went down euphemistically in medical records as a D&C: dilatation and curettage. Just a little scraping away at the lining of the womb – which would also scrape away the embryo attached to its wall.

I was working all this out as I sat in an Italian café having my lunch. I didn’t know what I thought – or rather, I thought several incompatible things. The notion of being a father while still a student struck me as terrifying and crazy. But it also struck me as, well, kind of heroic. Subversive yet honourable, annoying yet life-affirming: noble. I didn’t think it would get me into the Guinness Book of Records – no doubt there were twelve-year-olds hard at work getting their grannies’ best friends pregnant, but it would certainly make me exceptional. And irritate the hell out of the Village.

Except that now it wasn’t going to happen. Because Susan was getting rid of our child at this very moment, just around the corner. I felt sudden rage. A woman’s right to choose – yes, I believed in that, theoretically and actually. Though I also believed in a man’s right to be consulted.

I went back to the car and waited. After an hour or so she turned the corner and came towards me, head lowered, scarf pulled around her cheeks. She averted her face from me as she got into the car.

‘Right,’ she said. ‘That’s that for the moment.’ There was something slurry about her articulation. The anaesthetic, presumably – if they used any. ‘Home, James, and don’t spare the horses.’

Normally I was charmed by her turns of phrase. Not this time.

‘First tell me where you’ve been.’

‘The dentist.’

‘The dentist?’ So much for my imaginings. Unless this was just another euphemism among women of Susan’s class.

‘I’ll tell you when I can, Casey Paul. I can’t tell you now. Don’t ask.’

Of course not. I drove her home, as carefully as I could.

Over the next days, she told me bit by bit what had happened. She had been sitting up late, listening to the gramophone. Macleod had gone to bed an hour previously. She kept playing over and over again the slow movement of Prokofiev’s third piano concerto, which we’d heard a few days before at the Festival Hall. Then she put the record back in its sleeve and went upstairs. She was just reaching for the handle of her bedroom door when her hair was seized from behind, and with the words, ‘How’s your fucking musical education coming along?’, her husband smashed her face into the closed door. Then he had gone back to bed.

The dentist’s examination showed that her two front teeth were broken beyond repair. The two teeth on either side of them would probably have to go as well. There was a crack in her upper jaw which would, over time, heal itself. The dentist would make her a plate. He asked if she wanted to talk about how it had happened, but didn’t press her when she said she would rather not.

As the bruising came up in all its furious colours, and she powdered over it as well as she could; as I drove her up to town and back for appointment after appointment; as I wasn’t able to get her to look at me for days, or kiss me for weeks; as I realized I would never again be able to tap her ‘rabbit teeth’, long discarded in some Wimpole Street waste bin; as I understood that I now had greater responsibilities than before; as I found myself wondering, and not idly, how I might kill Gordon Macleod; as first my Grandma and then my returning parents drove me mad with their careful, safe, banal views of life; as Susan’s bravery and lack of self-pity nearly broke my heart; as I absented myself from her house a good hour before Macleod’s daily return; as I accepted her word – or was it his word? – that nothing like this would ever happen again; as anger and pity and horror washed through me; as I realized that Susan would have to leave the bastard somehow, with me or without me, but obviously with me; as at the same time a kind of impotence overcame me; as all this was happening, I learned a little more about the Macleod marriage.

Of course, that bruise on her upper arm had not just been the size of a thumbprint, it was the imprint of an actual thumb as he forced her to sit in a chair and listen to his denunciations. There had been grabbings and slappings, and more than a punch or two. He would put a glass of sherry down in front of her and order her to ‘join in the fun’. When she declined, he would grasp her by the hair, pull her head back and hold the glass to her lips. Either she drank, or he poured it down her chin, and throat and dress. It was all verbal and physical, never sexual; though whether there was anything sexual behind it… well, that is beyond my competence, or, indeed, interest. Yes, it was usually connected to his drinking, but not necessarily; yes, she was frightened of him, except that mostly she wasn’t. She had learnt to manage him over the years. Yes, every time he attacked her, it was of course her fault – according to him; she drove him to it with her airy bloody insolence – that had been one of his phrases. Also, her irresponsibility; also, her stupidity. At some point after he had smashed her face against the door, he had gone downstairs and bent Prokofiev’s third piano concerto until the record broke.

It was, I suppose, ignorance and snobbery on my part which had hitherto made me assume that domestic violence was confined to the lower classes, where things were done differently, where – as I understood from my reading rather than from a close familiarity with backstreet life – women would rather their husbands hit them than be unfaithful to them. If he beats you, it shows he loves you, and all that crap. The idea of violence being inflicted by husbands with a Cambridge degree seemed to me incomprehensible. Of course, it was not a matter I’d had reason to think about before. But if I had, I would probably have guessed that violence among working-class husbands was connected to inarticulacy: they fell back on their fists whereas middle-class husbands fell back on words. Both these myths took some years to dispel, despite the present evidence.

Susan’s dental plate caused her constant trouble; there were many drives up to town for adjustments. The dentist had also made the four new prosthetic teeth better aligned than the original ones, and shortened the central pair by a millimetre or two. A subtle change, but one always manifest to me. Those teeth I used to tap so lovingly were gone for ever; and I had no desire to touch their replacements.

One thing I never swerved from was the certainty that Gordon Macleod’s behaviour was a crime of absolute liability. And his responsibility was also absolute. A man hits a woman; a husband hits a wife; a drunkard hits a sober spouse. There was no defence, and no possible mitigation. The fact that it would never come to court, that middle-class England had a thousand ways of avoiding the truth, that respectability was no more shed in public than clothes, the fact that Susan would never accuse him to any authority, not even a dentist – all this had no relevance to me, except sociologically. The man was as guilty as hell, and I would hate him until the end of his days. This much I knew.

It was about a year after this that I went to see Joan and announced our intention of moving up to London.

You are an absolutist for love, and therefore an absolutist against marriage. You have given the matter much thought, and come up with many fanciful comparisons. Marriage is a dog kennel in which complacency lives and is never chained up. Marriage is a jewellery box which, by some mysterious opposite of alchemy, turns gold, silver and diamonds back into base metal, paste and quartz. Marriage is a disused boathouse containing an old, two-person canoe, no longer water-worthy, with holes in the bottom and one missing paddle. Marriage is… oh, you have dozens of such comparisons to hand.

You remember your parents, and your parents’ friends. They were, on the whole, and without giving them too much credit, decent people: honest, hard-working, polite with one another, no more than averagely controlling of their children. Family life meant for them much what it had meant for their parents’ generation, though with just enough extra social freedom to let them imagine themselves pioneers. But where was love in all of this, you asked. And you didn’t even mean sex – because you preferred not to think about that.

And so, when you had come into the Macleod household, and inspected a different way of living, you thought first about how circumscribed your own home seemed to be, how lacking in life and emotion. Then, gradually, you realized that the marriage of Gordon and Susan Macleod was actually in far worse shape than any marriage among your parents’ circle, and you became all the more absolutist. That Susan should live with you in a state of love was obvious; that she should leave Macleod was equally obvious; that she should divorce him – especially after what he had done to her – seemed not just an acknowledgement of the truth of things, not just a romantic obligation, but a necessary first step towards her becoming an authentic person once more. No, not ‘once more’: really, it would be for the first time. And how exciting must that be for her?

You persuade her to see a solicitor. No, she doesn’t want you to come with her. Part of you – the part that imagines a free, and freestanding, Susan in the near future – approves.

‘How did it go?’

‘He said that I was in a bit of a muddle.’

‘He said that?’

‘No. Not exactly. But I explained things to him. Most things. Not you, obviously. And, well, I suppose he thought I’d just bolted. Done a bunk. Maybe he thought it was all to do with the Dreaded.’

‘But… didn’t you explain what had happened… what he did to you?’

‘I didn’t go into detail, no. I kept it general.’

‘But you can’t get a divorce on general grounds. You can only get a divorce on particular grounds.’

‘Now don’t get shirty with me, Paul, I’m doing my best.’

‘Yes, but…’

‘He told me that, for a starting point, I should go away and write it all down. Because he could see I found it hard to tell him about it directly.’

‘That sounds very sensible.’ Suddenly, you approve of this solicitor.

‘So that’s what I shall try to do.’

When, a couple of weeks later, you ask how her statement is coming along, she shakes her head without reply.

‘But you’ve got to do it,’ you say.

‘You don’t know how hard it is for me.’

‘Would you like me to help you?’

‘No, I have to do this by myself.’

You approve. This will be the start, the making, of the new Susan. You try some gentle advice.

‘I think what they need are specifics.’ You know a bit about divorce law by now. ‘Exactly what happened, and roughly when.’

Another two weeks later, you ask how she’s doing.

‘Don’t give up on me just yet, Casey Paul,’ is her reply. And whenever she says this to you – and you never think it is calculated, because she is not a calculating person – it tears at your heart. Of course you won’t give up on her.

And then, some weeks later, she gives you a few sheets of paper.

‘Don’t read it in front of me.’

You take it away, and from the first sentence, your optimism disperses. She has turned her life, and her marriage, into a comic short story, which sounds to you like something by James Thurber. Perhaps it was. It is about a man in a three-piece suit, called Mr Elephant Pants, who every evening goes to the pub – or the bar at Grand Central Station – and comes home in a state which alarms his wife and children. He knocks over the hatstand, kicks the flowerpots, shouts at the dog, so that there is a spreading of Great Alarm and Despondency, and he rackets away until he falls asleep on the sofa and snores so loudly that tiles fall off the roof.

You don’t know what to say. You say nothing. You pretend you are still considering this document. You know you have to be very gentle and very patient with her. You explain again about them needing to know specifics, the where and the when and, most importantly, the what. She looks at you and nods.

Slowly, over the next weeks and months, you begin to understand that it is not going to happen, not ever. She is strong enough to love you, strong enough to run off with you, but not strong enough to enter a court of law and give evidence against her husband about the decades of sexless tyranny, alcoholism and physical attack. She will not be able – even via her solicitor – to ask the dentist to describe her injuries. She cannot attest in public to what she is able to admit in private.

You realize that, even if she is the free spirit you imagined her to be, she is also a damaged free spirit. You understand that there is a question of shame at the bottom of it. Personal shame; and social shame. She may not mind being thrown out of the tennis club for being a Scarlet Woman, but she cannot admit to the true nature of her marriage. You remember old cases in which criminals – even murderers – would marry their female accomplices because a wife could not be compelled to give evidence against a husband. But nowadays, far away from the world of criminality, in the respectable Village and many, many similar, silent places across the land, there are wives who have been conditioned, by social and marital convention, not to give evidence against their husbands.

And there is another factor, of which, strangely, you have not thought. One calm evening – calm because you have officially given up on the project, and all false hope and annoyance have drained from you – she says to you quietly,

‘And anyway, if I did do it, he’d bring up the matter of you.’

You are astounded. You feel you had nothing to do with the break-up of the Macleod marriage; you were just the outsider who pointed out what would have been obvious to anyone. Yes, you fell in love with her; yes, you ran away with her; but that was consequence, not cause.

Even so, perhaps you are lucky that the old law of enticement is no longer on the statute book. You imagine being called as a witness and asked to explain yourself. Part of you thinks this would be wonderful, heroic; you play through the courtroom exchange, in which you are dazzling. Until the final question. Oh, and by the way, young enticer, young seducer, may I ask what you do by way of a job? Of course, you reply, I am studying to be a solicitor. You realize that you might just have to change profession.

You know that sometimes, after checking on the house she owns half of, she goes to visit Joan. This is a good idea, even if on her return her hair smells of cigarette smoke. Once, you catch sherry on her breath.

‘Did you have a drink with Joan?’

‘Did I? Let me think… Quite possibly.’

‘Well, you shouldn’t. Drink and drive. It’s crazy.’

‘Yes, sir,’ she agrees satirically.

Another time, she has smoke in her hair and Polos on her breath. You think, this is silly.

‘Look, if you’re going to have a drink with Joan, don’t insult my intelligence by chewing a few Polos afterwards.’

‘The thing is, Paul, there are parts of the drive I don’t like. They give me the jitters. Blind corners. I find that a little nip of sherry with Joan calms my nerves. And the Polos aren’t for you, darling, they’re in case I get stopped by a policeman.’

‘I’m sure policemen are just as suspicious of drivers smelling of Polos as when they smell of alcohol.’

‘Don’t you turn into a policeman, Paul. Or a lawyer, even if you are going to be one. I’m doing my best. That’s all I can do.’

‘Of course.’

You kiss her. You have no more taste for confrontation than she does. Of course you trust her, of course you love her, of course you are far too young to be a policeman or a lawyer.

And so you both laugh your way through several uncomplicated months.

But one February afternoon, she is late back from the Village. You know she doesn’t like driving in the dark. You imagine the car off the road, in a ditch, her bloodied head against the dashboard, Polos spilling from her handbag.

You ring Joan.

‘I’m a bit worried about Susan.’

‘Why?’

‘Well, what time did she leave you?’

‘When?’

‘Today.’

‘I haven’t seen Susan today.’ Joan’s voice is steady. ‘I wasn’t expecting her either.’

‘Oh fuck,’ you say.

‘Let me know when she’s back safely.’

‘Sure,’ you say, your mind only half there.

‘And Paul.’

‘Yes?’

‘If she comes back safely, that’s the main thing.’

‘Yes.’

It is the main thing. And she does come back safely. And her hair is clean, and there is nothing on her breath.

‘Sorry I’m late, darling,’ she says, putting down her handbag.

‘Yes, I was worrying.’

‘No need to worry.’

‘Well I do.’

You leave it at that. After supper, you pick up the plates, and, making sure your back is to her, ask,

‘How’s old Joan?’

‘Joan? Same as ever. Joan doesn’t change. That’s what’s nice about her.’

You rinse off the plates and leave it at that. You are a lover, not a lawyer, you remind yourself. Except that you are going to become a lawyer, because you need to be solid and stable, the better to look after her.

The log of memory splits down the grain. So you can’t remember the quiet times, the outings, the jollity, the running jokes, even the legal studies, which fill the gap between that last exchange and the day when, worried by a succession of late returns from the Village, you say to her, quietly and unchallengingly,

‘I know you don’t always go and see Joan when you say you do.’

She looks away.

‘Have you been checking up on me, Casey Paul? It’s a terrible unloving thing to do, check up on people.’

‘Yes, but I can’t stop worrying, and I can’t bear to think of you alone in the house with… him.’

‘Oh, I’m quite safe,’ she says. There is a silence for a while. ‘Look, Paul, I don’t tell you about it because I don’t want the two parts of my life overlapping. I want to build a wall around us here.’

‘But?’

‘But there are practical matters to discuss with him.’

‘Like divorce?’

Immediately, you feel ashamed of your sarcasm.

‘Don’t badger me like that, Mr Badger. I’ve got to do things in my own time. It’s all more complicated than you think.’

‘OK.’

‘We – he and I – have two children together, don’t forget that.’

‘I don’t.’ Though of course, you do. Often.

‘There’s money to discuss. The car. The house. I think the place needs repainting this summer.’

‘You discuss painting the house?’

‘That’s enough from you, Mr Badger.’

‘OK,’ you say. ‘But you love me and you don’t love him.’

‘You know that’s how it is, Casey Paul. I wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t.’

‘And I suppose he would like you to return.’

‘What I hate,’ she says, ‘is when he gets down on his knees.’

‘He gets down on his knees?’ In his elephant pants, I think.

‘Yes, it’s awful, it’s embarrassing, it’s undignified.’

‘And, what, begs you to stay with him?’

‘Yes. You see why I don’t tell you about it?’

The Fancy Boys used to turn up at Henry Road and sleep on the floor, dossing like dogs on piles of cushions. The more of them there were, the more busily relaxed Susan became. So this was all good. Sometimes they brought their girlfriends, whose reactions to Henry Road used to intrigue me. I became expert in sensing covert disapproval. I wasn’t being defensive or paranoid, merely observant. Also, I was amused by the orthodoxy of their sexual outlook. You might have thought – mightn’t you? – that a girl or young woman in her early twenties would be rather encouraged by the notion that something exciting might happen to her nearly three decades on: that her heart and body would still be excitable, and that her future didn’t necessarily have to be a matter of rising social acceptance combined with slow emotional diminution. I was surprised that some of them didn’t find my relationship with Susan a cause for cheer. Instead, they reacted much as their parents would have done: alarmed, threatened, moralistic. Perhaps they were looking forward to being mothers themselves, and imagining their precious sons being cradle-snatched. Anyone would have thought Susan was a witch who had entranced me, fit only for the ducking stool. Well, she had entranced me. And to feel the disapproval from women of my own age merely increased my pleasure at Susan’s and my originality, and my own determination to continue offending the prim and the unimaginative. Well, we all have to have a purpose in life, don’t we? Just as a young man needs a reputation.

Around this time, one of the lodgers moved out, and Eric, having broken up with his (moralistic, marriage-demanding) girlfriend, took over the free room on the top floor. This brought a new dynamic to the house, perhaps even a better one. Eric thoroughly approved of our relationship, and would be able to keep an eye on Susan when I couldn’t. He was allowed to pay rent, which made it seem the more illogical that Susan wouldn’t take any from me. But I knew how she would react if I renewed my offer.

A few months passed. One evening, after Susan had gone to bed, Eric said,

‘Don’t like to mention this…’

‘Yes?’

He looked embarrassed, which was unlike Eric.

‘…but the thing is, Susan’s been nicking my whisky.’

‘Your whisky? She doesn’t even drink whisky.’

‘Well, it’s her, or you, or the poltergeist.’

‘You’re sure?’

‘I put a mark on the bottle.’

‘How long’s this been going on?’

‘A few weeks. Maybe months?’

‘Months? Why didn’t you tell me?’

‘Wanted to make sure. And she changed her tactics.’

‘How do you mean?’

‘Well, at some point she must have noticed that there was a mark on the bottle. She’d have her nip or glug or however much it was, and then fill the bottle back up to the mark with water.’

‘That’s clever.’

‘No, it’s standard. Banal, even. My dad used to do that when my mum was trying to get him to stop.’

‘Oh.’ I was disappointed. I wanted Susan always to be as entirely original as she still appeared to me.

‘So I did the logical thing. I stopped drinking from the bottle myself. She’d come up, have a swig, fill up to the pencil mark with water. I let it run and run, until I could see the colour of the whisky fading. Eventually, to confirm it, I had a glass myself. One part whisky to about fifteen of water would be my guess.’

‘Fuck.’

‘Yes, fuck.’

‘I’ll have a word with her,’ I promised.

But I didn’t. Was it cowardice, the hope that some alternative explanation might present itself, or a weary refusal to admit my own suspicions?

‘And in the meantime, I’ll keep my booze on top of the wardrobe.’

‘Good plan.’

It was a good plan, until the day when Eric said quietly,

‘She’s learnt to climb up to the top of the wardrobe.’

He made it sound like a kind of monkey trick rather than a normal piece of behaviour involving a chair. But that’s how it felt to me too.

You notice there are times when she seems, not squiffy, but out of focus. Not bleary of face, but bleary of mind. Then, by chance, you notice her swallowing a pill.

‘Headache?’

‘No,’ she replies. She is in one of those moods – lucid, unself-pitying, yet somehow beaten-down – which bend your heart painfully. She comes and sits on the edge of the bed.

‘I went to the doctor. I explained what had happened. I explained that I’d been feeling depressed. He gave me some cheering-up pills.’

‘I’m sorry you need them. I must be letting you down.’

‘It’s not you, Paul. And it’s not fair on you either. But I think if I can get through the… adjustment, then it’ll get better.’

‘Did you tell him you were drinking a bit too much?’

‘He didn’t ask about that.’

‘That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t have told him.’

‘We’re not going to quarrel about this, are we?’

‘No. We’re not going to quarrel. Ever.’

‘Then it’ll all come out right. You’ll see.’

Thinking about this conversation later, you begin to understand – for the first time, really – that she has more to lose than you. Much more. You are leaving behind a past, much of which you are happy to let go. You believed, and still believe as deeply, that love is the only thing that counts; that it makes up for everything; that if you and she get it right, everything will fall into place. You realize that what she has left behind – even her relationship with Gordon Macleod – is more complicated than you had assumed. You thought chunks could be cleanly amputated from a life without pain or complication. You realize that, if she had seemed isolated in the Village when you first met her, you have made her more isolated by taking her away.

All this means that you must redouble your commitment to her. You must get through this tricky patch, and then things will become clearer, better. She believes that, and so you must believe it too.

You take the back route as you approach the Village, to avoid passing your parents’ house.

‘Where’s Susan?’ are Joan’s first words as she opens the door.

‘I’ve come by myself.’

‘Does she know?’

You like the way Joan always gets straight to the point. You quite enjoy having cold water dashed in your face before sitting down with a streaky tumbler full of room-temperature gin.

‘No.’

‘Then it must be serious. I’ll shut the little yappers up.’

You sink into a dog-scented armchair and a drink is put next to you. As you are gathering your thoughts, Joan gets in first.

‘Point One. I’m not a go-between. Whatever you say stays in this room and it doesn’t get leaked back. Point Two. I’m not a shrink, I’m not some kind of advice centre, I don’t even much like listening to other people’s woes. I tend to think they should get on with it, stop moaning, roll up their sleeves and all of that. Point Three. I’m just an old soak whose life hasn’t worked out and who lives alone with her dogs. So I’m not an authority on anything. Not even crosswords, as you once pointed out.’

‘But you love Susan.’

‘Course I do. How is the dear girl?’

‘She’s drinking too much.’

‘How much is “too much”?’

‘In her case, anything at all.’

‘You may be right.’

‘And she’s on anti-depressants.’

‘Well, we’ve all been there,’ says Joan. ‘Doctors hand them out like Smarties. Especially to women of a certain age. Do they do any good?’

‘I can’t tell. They just make her woozy. But a different kind of woozy from what the drink does.’

‘Yes, I remember that too.’

‘So?’

‘So what?’

‘So what should I do?’

‘Paul, dear, I’ve just told you I don’t give advice. I took my own advice for so many years and look where it got me. So I don’t do that any more.’

You nod. You aren’t too surprised either.

‘The only advice I’d give you…’

‘Yes?’

‘…is have a swig of what’s at your elbow.’

You obey.

‘OK,’ you say. ‘No advice. But… I don’t know, is there something that I ought to know and don’t? Something you can tell me about Susan, or about Susan and me, that would help?’

‘All I can say is that if everything goes belly-up and pear-shaped, you’ll probably get over it and she probably won’t.’

You are shocked.

‘That’s not a very kind thing to say.’

‘I don’t do kind, Paul. Truth isn’t kind. You’ll find that out soon enough as life kicks in.’

‘It feels as if it’s kicked in pretty hard already.’

‘That may be all to the fucking good.’ Your face must look as if it’s just taken a slap. ‘Come on, Paul, you didn’t come all the way down here so that I’d give you a hug and tell you there are fairies at the bottom of the garden.’

‘True. Just tell me your thoughts on this. Susan goes back to see Macleod every so often. Probably more than she says.’

‘Does that trouble you?’

‘Mainly in the sense that if he ever lays a finger on her again, I’m going to have to kill him.’

She laughs. ‘Oh, I do so miss the melodrama of being young.’

‘Don’t patronise me, Joan.’

‘I’m not patronising you, Paul. Of course you’d do no such thing. But I admire you for the thought.’

You wonder if she is being satirical. But Joan doesn’t do satire.

‘Why don’t you think I would?’

‘Because the last murder in the Village was probably committed by someone wearing woad.’

You laugh, and take another sip of gin. ‘I’m worried,’ you say. ‘I’m worried that I shan’t be able to save her.’

She doesn’t reply, and this annoys you.

‘So what do you think about that?’ you demand.

‘I told you I’m not a fucking oracle. You might as well read your horoscope in the Advertiser & Gazette. I said when you ran away together, you’ve got guts, the pair of you. You’ve got guts, and you’ve got love. If that isn’t good enough for life, then life isn’t good enough for you.’

‘Now you are sounding like an oracle.’

‘Then I’d better go and wash my mouth out with soap.’

One day, you return to find her with cuts and bruises to her face, and her arms held defensively against her.

‘I fell over that step in the garden,’ she says, as if it were a known hazard you had previously discussed. ‘I’m getting very trippy, I’m afraid.’

She is indeed getting ‘trippy’. Nowadays, as a reflex, you take her arm as you walk with her and keep watch for uneven pavements. But she also has a giveaway flush to her face. You call the doctor – not the private one she went to for her cheering-up pills.

Dr Kenny is a fussy, inquisitive middle-aged man, but the right sort of GP – one who believes that house calls provide useful background when it comes to diagnosis. You take him upstairs to Susan’s bedroom; her bruises are coming into full colour.

Downstairs again, he asks for a few words.

‘Of course.’

‘It’s rather puzzling,’ he begins. ‘It’s unusual for a woman of her age to take a fall.’

‘She’s been getting very trippy lately.’

‘Yes, that’s the word she used to me. And, if I may ask, you are…?’

‘I’m her lodger… no, more than that, kind of godson, I suppose.’

‘Hmm. And it’s just the two of you here?’

‘There are two more lodgers in the attic rooms.’ You decide not to promote Eric to the status of second godson.

‘Does she have family?’

‘Yes, but she’s kind of… estranged from them at the moment.’

‘So she has no support? Except for you, that is?’

‘I suppose not.’

‘As I say, it’s rather puzzling. Do you think there was drink involved?’

‘Oh no,’ you say swiftly, ‘she doesn’t drink. She hates the stuff. That’s one of the reasons she left her husband. He’s a drinker. Flagons and gallons,’ you add, without being able to stop yourself.

You realize two things. First, that you lie automatically to protect Susan – even if the truth might have helped her more. You also begin to see how your relationship, or rather, your cohabitation, might appear to an outsider.

‘So, if I may ask, what does she do all day?’

‘She… does some volunteer work for the Samaritans.’ This isn’t true either. Susan has mentioned the idea; though you are against it. You think she shouldn’t try to start helping others when she is the one needing help.

‘That’s not much, is it?’

‘Well, I suppose she… keeps house.’

He looks around. The place is clearly in a mess. You realize that he is finding your answers inadequate. And why shouldn’t he?

‘If it happens again, we’ll be obliged to investigate,’ he says. Then picks up his bag and leaves.

Investigate? you think. Investigate? He can tell you’ve been lying. But investigate what? Perhaps he guesses you are her lover, and suspects you might have been beating her up. Christ to that, you think: in your desire to protect her from being thought a drinker, you seem to be opening yourself up to a charge of assault. Perhaps he was giving you a final warning.

Not that the police would necessarily be interested. You remember an incident from a year or two before. You are in the car with Susan and have scarcely gone a quarter of a mile when you notice a couple rowing on the pavement. As you see the man bearing down on the woman you have flashbacks to the Macleod household. He is not exactly hitting her, but looks about to do so. Maybe they are drunk, you can’t tell. You wind down the window and the woman yells, ‘Call the police!’ Now he is holding her. ‘Call the police!’ You speed home, dial 999, and are picked up by a patrol car which takes you to the scene of the reported possible crime. The couple have moved on, but you soon track them down a couple of streets away. They are ten yards apart, bellowing obscenities at one another.

‘Oh, we know them,’ says the young constable. ‘It’s just a domestic.’

‘Aren’t you going to arrest him?’

The two of you are probably about the same age, but he knows he has seen more of life than you have.

‘Well, sir, it’s not our policy to interfere in domestics. I mean, not unless it really kicks off. They’re just having a bit of a barney by the looks of it. Friday night, after all.’

And then he drives the two of you home.

You realize that you want official interference into other people’s lives but not into your own. You also realize that your truthfulness has become dangerously flexible. And you wonder if you should have got out of the car and tried to pull the man away from the woman.

One of your problems is this: for a long time it remains inconceivable to you that she is a drinker. How could she be, given that her husband is a drinker, and drink disgusts her? She hates even the smell of it, as she hates the bogus emotions it sets off in people. It makes Macleod coarser, angrier, more crudely sentimental; when he grabbed her hair and forced a glass to her lips, she would rather the sherry went down her dress than her throat. Nor has anyone in her life ever offered a credible counterexample: alcohol as glamorous, as usefully disinhibiting, as fun, as something you can control, knowing when to give the stuff its hour and when to refuse it.

You believe her. You never query her increasing lapses and latenesses. When you come in to find her blank-faced and bleary, you tell yourself that she has mistakenly swallowed an extra cheering-up pill – which is sometimes the case. And because you inevitably believe that one of the reasons she is on anti-depressants is because you are failing to make her so happy that she doesn’t need them, you feel guilty, and this guilt forbids you from questioning her. So when, out of her bleariness, she looks up, pats the sofa beside her, and asks,

‘Where’ve you been all my life?’

you feel a ripping and a tearing inside you, and there is nothing you want more in the world than to make everything all right for her, and on her own terms, not yours. So you sit down next to her and take her wrists.

Just as you believe your love to be unique, you believe your problems – her problems – to be unique. You are too young to understand that all human behaviour falls into patterns and categories and that her – your – case is far from unique. You want her to be some kind of exception, rather than any kind of rule. If anyone had ventured such a word as co-dependency to you back then – assuming the term had even been invented – you would have laughed it off as American jargon. However, you might have been more impressed by a statistical linkage of which you were then unaware: that the partners of alcoholics, far from being repulsed by the habit – or rather, despite being repulsed by the habit – frequently succumb to it themselves.

But the next stage for you is to accept a percentage of the evidence in front of your eyes. You understand that in certain, very limited circumstances, she needs the small lift of a small drink – as she now occasionally admits. Obviously, she has to keep Joan company when she goes to the Village; obviously, she’s sometimes frightened by the increasing traffic on the roads, and by that sudden twisty climb over the hills, so a little nip helps her; obviously, she is sometimes very lonely when you’re away at college for most of the day. She also has ‘my bad time’, as she calls it – usually between five and six in the evening, though as the days draw in and dusk falls earlier, so her bad time accordingly starts earlier, and, obviously, extends just as late as it did before.

You believe what she says. You believe that the bottle she keeps beneath the sink, behind the bleach and washing-up liquid and silver polish, is the only bottle she drinks from. When she suggests that you put a pencil mark on the bottle so you can both monitor how much she drinks, you are heartened, and think these pencil marks are quite different from the ones on Eric’s whisky bottle. Nor do you imagine there are other bottles elsewhere. When friends try to tip you off – ‘I’m a bit worried about Susan’s drinking,’ says one, and ‘Boy, you could smell the booze from the other end of the phone,’ says another – you react in various ways. You protect her by denying it; you admit there are occasional lapses; you say the two of you have talked about it and she has promised ‘to see someone’. You may even say all three things in the course of a single conversation. But you will also be offended by your friends’ attempted helpfulness. Because you do not need help: the two of you, since you love one another, will be able to sort the matter out, thank you very much. And this slightly alienates your friends, and also alienates them from her. Increasingly, you find yourself saying, ‘She was just having a bad day’, and you believe it yourself by dint of repetition.

Because there are still many good hours, and good days, when sobriety and cheerfulness fill the house, and her eyes and smile are just as they were when you first met, and you do something simple like drive for a walk in the woods, or go to the cinema and hold hands, and a sudden rush of feeling tells you it is all very easy and straightforward, and then your love is reaffirmed, yours for her, hers for you. And you wish you could display her to your friends at times like this: look, she is still herself, not just ‘underneath’, but here, now, on the surface too. You never suspect that one reason your friends tend to see her half-cut might be because she has persuaded herself, by some tortuous argument, that she needs a little Dutch courage before facing them.

Each stage rolls seamlessly into the next. And here comes a paradoxical one that you initially struggle with. If you love her, as you unwaveringly do, and if loving her means understanding her, then understanding her must include understanding why she is a drinker. You run through all her pre-history, and recent history, and current situation, and possible future. You understand all this, and before you know where you are, you have passed somehow from total denial of the fact that she drinks to total comprehension of why she might do so.

But with this comes a brute chronological fact. As far as you know, Susan only drank occasionally in all her years with Macleod. But now that she is living with you, she is – has become, is still becoming – an alcoholic. There is too much in this for you to entirely acknowledge, let alone bear.

She is sitting up in her quilted bedjacket, the newspapers around her, at her elbow a mug of coffee long gone cold. She has a frown on her, and her chin is pushed forward, as if she has been ruminating all day. It is now six in the evening, and you are in your last year of law studies. You sit on the side of her bed.

‘Casey Paul,’ she begins, in an affectionate, puzzled tone, ‘I’ve decided that there’s something seriously wrong.’

‘I think you may be right,’ you answer quietly. At last, you think, perhaps this is the moment of breakthrough. That’s what’s meant to happen, isn’t it? Everything comes to a moment of crisis, and then the fever breaks, and all becomes clear and rational and happy again.

‘But I’ve been searching my wits all day and can’t get a handle on it.’

Now where do you go? Do you start straight in again with the drinking? Suggest seeing the doctor again, a specialist, a psychiatrist? You are twenty-five, and quite untrained for this kind of situation. There are no articles in the newspaper headed, ‘How to Cope With Your Middle-Aged Female Alcoholic Lover’. You are on your own. You have no theories of life yet, you only know some of its pleasures and pains. You still believe, however, in love, and in what love can do, how it can transform a life, indeed the lives of two people. You believe in its invulnerability, its tenacity, its ability to outrun any opponent. This, in fact, is your only theory of life so far.

So you do the best you can. You take one of her wrists, and talk about how you met and fell in love, how you were chosen by lot and then threw in your lot together, how you had run away in the finest tradition of lovers, and you continue like this, meaning and believing every word, and then you gently suggest that she’s been drinking a little too much lately.

‘Oh, you’re always going on about that,’ she replies, as if this were some tedious and pedantic obsession of yours, nothing really to do with her. ‘But if you want me to say so, then I will. Maybe I occasionally take a drop or two more than is good for me.’

You quell the prompting inner voice which says: No, not a drop or two, a whole bottle or two more than is good for you.

She goes on, ‘I’m talking about something much bigger than that. I think there’s something seriously wrong.’

‘You mean, something that causes your drinking? Something I don’t know about?’ Your mind heads towards some terrible, defining event in her childhood, much worse than a ‘party kiss’ from Uncle Humph.

‘Oh, you really can be a Great Bore at times,’ she says mockingly. ‘No, much more important than that. What’s behind it all.’

You are already losing a little patience. ‘And what do you think might be behind it all?’

‘Maybe it’s the Russkis.’

‘The Russkis?’ You – well, yes – you yelp.

‘Oh Paul, do try and keep up. I don’t mean the actual Russkis. They’re just a figure of speech.’

Like, say, the Ku Klux Klan or the KGB or the CIA or Che Guevara. You suspect that this one brief chance is slipping away, and you don’t know if it is your fault, her fault, or nobody’s fault.

‘OK,’ you say. ‘The Russians are a figure of speech.’

But she takes this only as sly impertinence.

‘It’s no good if you can’t follow. There’s something behind it all, just out of sight. Something which holds it all together. Something that, if we put it back together, would mend it all, would mend us all, don’t you see?’

You give it your best shot. ‘You mean, like Buddhism?’

‘Oh don’t be absurd. You know what I think about religion.’

‘Well, it was just an idea,’ you say jokingly.

‘And not a very good one.’

How quickly it has gone from something tentative and gentle and hopeful to something irascible and mocking. And how far away from what you consider to be the problem, not just behind it all but on the surface and at all points in between: the bottles under the sink, under the bed, behind the bookshelves, in her stomach, in her head, in her heart. It may be true that you don’t know the cause, if indeed there is a single, identifiable cause, but it seems to you that you can only work with – against – the manifestations that erupt every day.

You know what she means about religion, of course. There is her adamantine disapproval of missionaries, whether they seek to convert in distant lands or on suburban doorsteps. And there is also the Malta story, which she has told you more than once. When the girls were small, Gordon Macleod was posted to Malta for a couple of years. She went out and lived there for some of the time. And her abiding memory was of the priest’s bicycle. Yes, she would explain, it’s terribly Catholic out there. The church is all-powerful, and everyone’s very obedient. And the church keeps them down by making the women have as many children as possible: it’s absolutely impossible to obtain birth control on the island. They’re very backward in that regard – John Bell & Croyden would be run out of town – so you have to take the equipment out with you.

Anyway, she goes on, it sometimes happens that a young bride doesn’t get pregnant immediately after marriage, say for a year or two, despite all her prayers. Or maybe there’s a woman who has two children and desperately wants a third but it isn’t happening. And in such cases, the priest will come round and prop his bicycle outside the front door, so everyone – especially the husband – knows not to interfere until the bicycle has gone. And when, nine months later – though of course it may take several goes – the family is blessed, that blessing is known as ‘the priest’s child’, and thought of as a gift from God. And sometimes there is more than one priest’s child in the family. Can you imagine that, Paul? Don’t you think it’s barbaric?

You do think it’s barbaric – you say so every time. And now part of you – the doomful, despairing, sarcastic part of you – wonders whether, if it isn’t the Russkis who are behind it all, then it might be the Vatican.

You still share a bed, but haven’t made love for a long time now. You don’t ask yourself how long in calendar terms, because what counts is how it feels in terms of the heart. You discover more about sex than you want to – or more than you should be allowed to discover while still young. Certain discoveries should be kept for later in life, when they might hurt less.

You know already that there is good sex and bad sex. Naturally, you prefer good sex to bad sex. But also, being young, you think that even so, all things considered, taking the rough with the smooth, bad sex is better than no sex at all. And sometimes better than masturbation; though sometimes not.

But if you think these are the only categories of sex that exist, you find you are mistaken. Because there is a category which you had not known to exist, something which isn’t, as you might have guessed had you heard about it before, merely a subcategory of bad sex; and that is sad sex. Sad sex is the saddest sex of all.

Sad sex is when, the toothpaste in her mouth not fully disguising the smell of sweet sherry, she whispers, ‘Cheer me up, Casey Paul.’ And you oblige. Though cheering her up also involves cheering yourself down.

Sad sex is when she is already doped by a cheering-up pill, but you think that if you fuck her, it might cheer her up a bit more.

Sad sex is when you are yourself in such despair, the situation so insoluble, the pre-history so oppressive, the very balance of your soul in doubt from day to day, moment to moment, that you think you may as well forget yourself for a few minutes, for half an hour, in sex. But you don’t forget yourself, or your state of soul, not for even a nanosecond.

Sad sex is when you feel you are losing all touch with her, and she with you, but this is a way of telling one another that the connection is still there, somehow; that neither of you is giving up on the other, even if part of you fears that you should. Then you discover that insisting on the connection is the same as prolonging the pain.

Sad sex is when you are making love to a woman while thinking about how to kill her husband, even if this is something you would never be able to do, because you are not that sort of person. But as your body continues, so does your mind: you find yourself thinking, Yes, if you discovered him in the process of strangling her, you can imagine hitting him on the back of the head with a spade, or maybe stabbing him with a kitchen knife, though you realize that, given your hopelessness at fisticuffs, you might end up with the spade or the knife skidding off him and striking her instead. Then this parallel narrative in your head gets even madder, proposing that if you were to miss him and hit her instead, then it might be that you secretly wanted to harm her, because she – this woman now naked beneath you – has got you into this insoluble morass so early in your life.

Sad sex is when she is sober, you both desire one another, you know that you will always love her regardless, just as she will always love you regardless, but you – both of you, perhaps – now realize that loving one another does not necessarily lead to happiness. And so your lovemaking has become less a search for consolation than a hopeless attempt to deny your mutual unhappiness.

Good sex is better than bad sex. Bad sex is better than no sex, except when no sex is better than bad sex. Self-sex is better than no sex, except when no sex is better than self-sex. Sad sex is always far worse than good sex, bad sex, self-sex and no sex. Sad sex is the saddest sex of all.

At college you meet Paula – blonde, friendly, direct – who has switched to law after a short-service commission in the Army. You like her handwriting when she shows you a case summary from a lecture you missed. You invite her for coffee one morning, then start having sandwich lunches in the nearby public gardens. One evening you take her to the cinema and kiss her goodnight. You exchange phone numbers.

A few days later, she asks, ‘Who’s that madwoman who lives in your house?’

‘I’m sorry?’ Already there is a chill spreading through you.

‘I rang you up last night. A woman answered the phone.’

‘That would have been my landlady.’

‘She sounded as mad as a hatter.’

You take a breath. ‘She’s a little eccentric,’ you say. You want this conversation to stop, immediately. You wish it had never started. You wish Paula had never phoned the number you gave her. You very much don’t want her to be specific, but you know she is going to be.

‘I asked when you’d be back, and she said, “Oh, he’s very much the dirty stop-out, that young man, you can’t rely on him from one moment to the next.” And then she came over all genteel and said something like, “If you will excuse me while I fetch a pencil, I shall pass on any message you may choose to leave.” Well, I put the phone down before she came back.’

She is looking at you expectantly, sure that you will provide her with an explanation that will satisfy her. It doesn’t have to be much; a joke might even do it. Various extravagant lies cross your mind until, preferring the quarter-truth to the self-interested obfuscation – and also feeling stubborn and defensive about Susan – you repeat,

‘She’s a little eccentric.’

And that, unsurprisingly, is the end of your relationship with Paula. And you realize that such a pattern is likely to repeat itself with other friendly and direct girls whose handwriting you admire.

Around this time, you stop thinking of her family by their nicknames. All that Mr Elephant Pants and Miss Grumpy stuff was fine and funny at the time, part of the first silliness and proprietoriness of love. But it was also a facetious minimising of their presence in her life. And if you are beginning to think of yourself as grown-up – however forcedly and prematurely – then they should be allowed their own maturity as well.

Another thing you notice is that you no longer fall easily into the private, teasing love language that used to pass between you. Perhaps the weight of what you have taken on has temporarily crushed out love’s decorativeness. Of course, you still love her, and tell her so, but in plainer terms nowadays. Perhaps, when you have solved her, or she has solved herself, there will be room again for such playfulness. You can’t be sure.

Susan, however, continues using all the little phrases from her side of the relationship. It is her way of maintaining that nothing has changed, that she is fine, you are fine, all is fine. But she, you and it aren’t, and those familiar words sometimes cause a prickle of embarrassment, more often lurching pain. You let yourself into the house, deliberately making enough noise to alert her, and as you come down the short flight of stairs into the kitchen, you find her in a familiar pose: red-faced by the gas fire, wrinkling her brow at a newspaper as if the world really does need to sort itself out. Then she looks up brightly and says, ‘Where’ve you been all my life?’ or ‘Here’s the dirty stop-out’, and your cheerfulness – even if briefly assumed – drains like bathwater. You look around and take stock of the situation. You open the store cupboards to see if there is something you can make into something. And she lets you get on with it, while offering occasional remarks designed to convey that she is still well capable of understanding a newspaper.

‘Things seem to be in a frightful mess, don’t you agree, Casey Paul?’

And you ask, ‘Where exactly are we talking about?’

And she replies, ‘Oh, just about everywhere.’

At which point you might throw the emptied tin of plum tomatoes into the bin with some force, and she will chide you,

‘Temper, temper, Casey Paul!’

By months of manoeuvring, you get her first to a GP and then to a consultant psychiatrist at the local hospital. She doesn’t want you to come with her, but you insist, knowing what will probably happen otherwise. You turn up at a quarter to three for a three o’clock slot. The waiting area already contains a dozen other patients, and you realize it is the hospital’s policy to book everyone in for the same time, which is when the consultant’s session begins. You can see their point: mad people – and at your age you use the term pretty broadly – are presumably not among the world’s most punctilious timekeepers: so it’s best to summon them all en bloc.

She makes what might be an attempt to escape, heading off to the ladies. You let her go with a fifty–fifty expectation that she won’t return. But she does, and you find yourself reflecting cynically that she probably went to the hospital shop to check if they stocked booze, or maybe asked a few nurses where the bar was, only to receive the annoying news that the hospital doesn’t have one.

You realize how sympathy and antagonism can coexist. You are discovering how many seemingly incompatible emotions can thrive, side by side, in the same human heart. You are angry with the books you have read, none of which have prepared you for this. No doubt you were reading the wrong books. Or reading them in the wrong way.

You feel, even at this late, desperate stage, that your emotional situation is still more interesting than that of your friends. They (mostly) have girlfriends and (mostly) have peer sex; some have been inspected by their girlfriends’ parents, receiving approval, disapproval, or judgement suspended. Most have a plan for their future life which includes this girlfriend – or, if not, one very similar. A plan to become furrow-dwellers. But for the moment, they have only the traditional clear-skinned joys, sane dreams, and inchoate frustrations of young men in their mid-twenties with girlfriends of the same age. Yet here you are, in a hospital waiting area, surrounded by mad people, in love with a woman who is being characterized as potentially mad.

And the strange thing is, part of you feels exhilarated by it. You think: not only do you love Susan more than they love their girlfriends – you must do, otherwise you wouldn’t be sitting here among all the nutters – but you are having a more interesting life. They may measure their girlfriends’ brains and breasts, and their future parent-in-laws’ deposit accounts, and imagine they have won; but you are still ahead of them because your relationship is more fascinating, more complicated, and more insoluble. And the proof of this is that you are sitting here on a metal stacking chair, half-reading some discarded magazine, while your beloved dreams of – what? Escape, no doubt: escape from here, escape from you, escape from life? She too is staggering beneath the weight of extreme, unbearable and incompatible emotions. You are both in deep pain. And yet, aware as you are of the stupid, bolloxy world of male competitiveness, you tell yourself that you are still a winner. And when you get to this point in your thoughts, the next logical stage is this: you’re a nutter as well. You are obviously one stark staring, complete and utter nutter. On the other hand, you are the youngest fucking nutter in the whole waiting area. So you have won again! Former under-12, under-6-stone school boxing champion becomes Hospital’s under-26 nutter champion!

At this moment a round, bald, suited man opens the door of the consulting room.

‘Mr Ellis,’ he calls quietly.

There is no reply. Familiar with the inattention, selective deafness and other failings of his patients, the consultant raises his voice:

‘Mr ELLIS!’

Some old fool wearing three sweaters and an anorak gets to his feet; a towelling headband restrains the ten or so wisps of white hair that sprawl from his crown. He stands looking round for a moment, as if perhaps expecting applause for having recognized his own name, then follows the consultant into his office.

You are not prepared for what happens next. You hear the psychiatrist’s voice, quite clearly, say,

‘And how are we today, Mr Ellis?’

You look at the closed door. You see that there is a three-inch gap between the foot of it and the floor. You guess that the consultant must be facing the door. You do not hear a reply from the deaf old fool, but perhaps there hasn’t been one, because next, loud enough to rouse the other nodding nutters, come the words,

‘SO HOW’S THE DEPRESSION, MR ELLIS?’

You are not sure if Susan has been paying attention. For yourself, you think this is unlikely to work.

There is her shame, which is ever present. And then there is your shame, which sometimes presents itself as pride, sometimes as a kind of noble realism; but also, mostly, as what it is – just shame.

You come back one evening to find her pie-eyed in a chair, the water glass by her side still containing a good inch or so of non-water. You decide to behave as if all this is completely normal – indeed, what domestic life is all about. You go into the kitchen and start looking around for something to turn into something. You find some eggs: you ask if she would like an omelette.

‘It’s easy for you,’ she answers belligerently.

‘What’s easy for me?’

‘That’s a clever lawyer’s answer,’ she replies, taking a swig right in front of you, which she rarely does. You are about to go back to cracking eggs, when she adds,

‘Gerald died today.’

‘Which Gerald?’ You can’t immediately think of a Gerald among your mutual friends.

‘Which Gerald indeed? Mr Clever. My Gerald. My Gerald that I told you about. The one I was engaged to. This was the day he died.’

You feel terrible. Not because you have forgotten the date – she has never told you it before – but because, unlike you, she has her dead to remember. Her fiancé, the brother who disappeared out over the Atlantic, Gordon’s father – whose name you no longer remember – who had been soft on her. You have no such figures in your life, no griefs, no holes, no losses. So you don’t know what it’s like. Everyone should remember their dead, you believe, and everyone else should respect this need and desire. You are in fact rather envious, and wish you had a few dead of your own.

Later, you become more suspicious. She has never mentioned the day of Gerald’s death before. And there is no way for you to check. Just as, in happier days, there was no way for you to check when she told you how many times the two of you had made love. Perhaps, when she heard your key turn in the lock, and she was unable to get up and also unwilling to hide the glass at her elbow, she decided – no, this is perhaps too deliberate a verb to describe her mental processes that evening – she ‘realized’, yes, she suddenly realized that it was the day of Gerald’s death. Though it could equally have been Alec’s, or that of Gordon’s father. Who could tell? Who knew? And who, in the end, cared?

I said I never kept a diary. This isn’t strictly true. There was a point, in my isolation and turmoil, when I thought writing things down might help. I used a hardback notebook, black ink, one side of the paper. I tried to be objective. There was no point, I thought, in merely venting my feelings of hurt and betrayal. I remember that the first line I wrote down was:

All alcoholics are liars.

This was, obviously, not based on a huge sample or broad research. But I believed it at the time, and now, decades later, with more field experience, I believe it to be an essential truth about the condition. I went on:

All lovers are truth-tellers.

Again, the sample was small, consisting mainly of myself. It seemed to me evident that love and truth were connected; indeed, as I may have said, that to live in love is to live in truth.

And then the conclusion to this quasi-syllogism:

Therefore, the alcoholic is the opposite of the lover.

This seemed not just logical, but also consistent with my observations.

Nowadays, a lifetime later, the second of these propositions seems the weakest. I have seen too many examples of lovers who, far from living in truth, dwelt in some fantasy land where self-delusion and self-aggrandizement reigned, with reality nowhere to be found.

Yet, even while I was compiling my notebook, searching to be objective, the subjective kept undermining me. For instance, I realized, looking back at our time in the Village, that whereas I thought of myself as both lover and truth-teller, the truths I had told were only to myself and Susan. I told lies to my parents, to Susan’s family, to my own close friends; I even dissembled at the tennis club. I protected the zone of truth with a rampart of lies. Just as she was now lying to me all the time about her drinking. As well as lying to herself. And yet she would still affirm that she loved me.

So I began to suspect that I was wrong in considering alcoholism as the opposite of love. Perhaps they were much closer than I imagined. Alcoholism is certainly just as obsessive – as absolutist – as love; and maybe to the drinker the hit of booze is as powerful as the hit of sex is to the lover. So could the alcoholic be merely a lover who has shifted the object and focus of his or her – no, her – love?

My observations and reflections had filled a few dozen pages when I came home one evening to find Susan in a state I knew all too well: red-faced, semi-coherent, quick to take offence, yet at the same time genteelly pretending that all was for the best in this best possible of worlds. I went to my room and discovered that my desk had been inexpertly rifled. I had, even then, a habit of orderliness, and knew what lived where. Since the desk contained my Notes on Alcoholism, I assumed, wearily, that she had probably read them. Still, I thought, perhaps in the long run the shock might have a useful effect on her. In the short run, evidently not.

The next time I went to my notebook to make an addition, I saw that Susan had done more than just read it. She had left an annotation beneath my last entry, using the same black ink from the same pen. In an unsteady hand, she had written:

With your inky pen to make you hate me.

I didn’t accuse her of rifling my desk, reading my notebook, writing in it. I could imagine her saying, in a tone of polite protest, ‘No, I don’t think so.’ I was weary of constant confrontation. But then, I was equally weary of a constant pretence that all was well, a constant evasion of the truth. I also realized that it would be impossible for me to write anything down in the future without picturing her at my desk studying my latest denunciations. This would be intolerable for both of us: the annotation of pain on my part, the dim yet irate acknowledgement of pain caused on her part. So I threw away the notebook.

But that half-formed sentence of hers, written by a wonky hand with an unfamiliar pen, remained with me, and always has. Not least because of its ambiguity. Did she mean, ‘You use your inky pen to write down things which will then make you hate me’? Or did she mean, ‘I have left my mark with your inky pen because I want to make you hate me’? Critical and aggressive, or masochistic and self-pitying? Maybe she knew what she meant when she wrote the words, but there was no subsequent clarity to be found. You may judge the second interpretation over-subtle, and designed to let me off the hook. But – and this formed the basis of another of my long-lost notes – the alcoholic, in my experience, wants to provoke, to push away help, to justify her own isolation. So if she managed to convince herself that I hated her, all the more reason to turn for comfort to the bottle.

You are taking her somewhere in the car. There is no need for her to fear the journey, and you will pick her up later and drive her home. But there are the usual delays before you can get her into the car. And as you are about to release the handbrake, she rushes back into the house and returns with a large, bright yellow plastic laundry bag, which she puts between her feet. She does not explain. You do not ask. This is where things have got to.

And then you think, Oh Fuckit.

‘What’s that for?’ you ask.

‘The thing is,’ she replies, ‘I’m not feeling entirely well, and it’s just possible I might be sick. What with the car and all that.’

No, you think, what with being drunk and all that. A doctor friend has told you that alcoholics sometimes throw up so violently that they can perforate their own oesophagus. As it happens, she doesn’t need to vomit, but she might as well have done. Because she has already filled your head with an image of her throwing up into this yellow bag, and you cannot stop seeing it. You might as well have listened to her dry-retching and then wet-retching, and can hear the vomit trickling into the bright yellow plastic. The smell, too, of course, in your small car. The excuses, the lies. Her lies, your lies.

Because it is no longer just a question of her lying to you. When she does so, you have two choices: call her out on it, or accept what she says. Usually, out of weariness and a desire for peace – and yes, out of love – you accept what she says. You condone the lie. And so become a liar by proxy. And it is a very short step from accepting her lies to lying yourself – out of weariness, and a desire for peace, and also out of love – yes, that too.

What a long way you have come. Years ago, when you started off lying to your parents, you did so with a kind of relish, reckless of consequence; it almost felt character-building. Later, you began to tell lies in all directions: to protect her, and to protect your love. Later still, she starts lying to you, to keep you from knowing her secret; and now she lies with a kind of relish, reckless of consequence. Then, finally, you begin lying to her. Why? Something to do with the need to create some internal space which you could keep intact – and where you could yourself remain intact. And this is how it is for you now. Love and truth – where have they gone?

You ask yourself: is staying with her an act of courage on your part, or an act of cowardice? Perhaps both? Or is it just an inevitability?

She has taken to going to the Village by train. You approve: you think this comes from a recognition of her unfitness to drive. You take her to the station, she tells you the time of her return train, though, as often as not, she doesn’t turn up until the next one, or the one after. And when she says, ‘Don’t bother meeting me,’ she is protecting her inner world. And when you reply, ‘Fine – sure you’ll be all right?’ you are protecting yours.

The phone goes one evening.

‘Is that Henry?’

‘No, sorry, wrong number.’

You are about to put the phone down when the man reads your number to you.

‘Yes, that’s right.’

‘Well, good evening, sir. This is the transport police at Waterloo Station. We have a lady here in a… slightly distressed condition. We found her asleep in the train and, well, her handbag was open and there was a sum of money in it, so you see…’

‘Yes I see.’

‘She showed us this number and asked us to call Henry.’

In the background you hear her voice. ‘Call Henry, call Henry.’

Ah, her shorthand for Henry Road.

So you drive to Waterloo, find the office of the railway police and there she is, sitting up, bright-eyed, waiting to be collected, knowing that it would happen. The two policemen are courteous and concerned. They are doubtless used to helping drunk old ladies found snoring in empty carriages. Not that she is old, just that when she is drunk, you think of her, suddenly, as a drunk old lady.

‘Well, thank you very much for looking after her.’

‘Oh, she was no trouble at all, sir. Quiet as a mouse. Look after yourself, Madam.’

She gives a rather stately acknowledging nod. You take the arm of this piece of left luggage, and off you go. Your annoyance and despair, however, are cut by a certain pride in her having been ‘no trouble’. Though what if she had been?

Eventually, more out of despair than hope, you try tough love, or at least what your understanding of that concept is. You don’t let her get away with anything. You call her out on her lies. You pour away whatever bottles you find, some in obvious places, some in such strange locations that she must have hidden them there while drunk, and then forgotten where she had put them. You get her banned from the three local shops which sell alcohol. You give them each a photo to keep behind the till. You do not tell her this; you think the humiliation of being refused service will jolt her. You never find out, and she merely gets round the obstruction by travelling further afield.

You hear reports. Some people are shy about mentioning things to you, others not. A friend, on a bus a mile or so away from Henry Road, has spotted her down an alleyway next to an off-licence, raising a newly bought bottle to her lips. This image burns deep, and transforms itself from another’s account into your own private memory. A neighbour tells you that your auntie was in the Cap and Bells last Saturday night, downing five sherries in succession until they stopped serving her. ‘It’s not the kind of pub someone like her should be in,’ the neighbour adds concernedly. ‘They get all sorts in there.’ You picture the scene, from her ashamed first order at the bar to her unsteady walk home, and this too becomes part of your memory bank.

You tell her that her behaviour is destroying your love for her. You do not mention hers for you.

‘Then you must leave me,’ she says. She is flushed, dignified and logical.

You know that you are not going to do this. The question is, whether or not she knows it too.

You write her a letter. If spoken words of rebuke fly unhindered straight out of her head, perhaps written ones will stick. You tell her that the way she is going on, she will almost certainly die of a wet brain, that there is nothing more you can do for her, except come to her funeral, whenever that might be. You leave the letter on the kitchen table, in an envelope with her name on it. She never mentions receiving it, opening it, reading it. With your inky pen to make you hate me.

You realize that tough love is also tough on the lover.

You are taking her to Gatwick. Martha has invited her out to Brussels, where she is working as a Eurocrat. To your surprise, Susan agrees. You promise to make it as easy as possible for her. You will drive her to the airport and see her through check-in. She nods, then says straightforwardly,

‘You might have to let me have a drink before getting on the plane. Belgian courage.’

You are more than relieved: almost encouraged.

The night before she is half-packed and half-drunk. You go to bed. She continues packing and drinking. The next morning she comes to you with a cupped hand over her mouth.

‘I’m afraid I don’t think I shall be able to go.’

You look at her without speaking.

‘I’ve lost my teeth. I can’t find them anywhere. I think I may have thrown them into the garden.’

You don’t say anything except, ‘We have to leave by two.’ You decide to let her go on destroying her life.

But perhaps your failure to respond – to offer neither help nor rebuke – is, for once, the correct approach. An hour or two later, she is walking around with her teeth in, never alluding to either having lost them, or found them.

At two o’clock you put her case in the back of the car, double-check her ticket and passport and set off. There have been no last-minute diversions, no scurrying for a bright yellow laundry bag. She sits beside you quiet as a mouse, in the railway policeman’s words.

As you are approaching Redhill, she turns and says in a demurely puzzled way, as if you were more her chauffeur than her lover,

‘Would you mind very much telling me where we are going?’

‘You’re going to Brussels. To visit Martha.’

‘Oh, I don’t think so. There must be some mistake.’

‘That’s why you’ve got your ticket and your passport in your handbag.’ Though they are actually in your pocket, as you don’t want them going the way of her teeth.

‘But I don’t know where she lives.’

‘She’s meeting you at the airport.’

There is a pause.

‘Yes,’ she says, nodding, ‘I seem to remember about this now.’

There is no further resistance. Part of you thinks she should have a large label round her neck with her name and destination written on it, like a wartime refugee. With perhaps her gas mask in a box as well.

At the bar you buy her a double schooner of sherry, which she sips with inattentive gentility. You think: it could be worse. This is how you react to situations nowadays. You have the lowest of expectations.

The trip turns out to be a success. She has been shown the city, and brings you some postcards. Miss Grumpy, she announces, is nowadays Much Less So, perhaps influenced by a charming Belgian boyfriend who was in attendance. Her memories are clearer than usual, a sign that she has been temperate. You feel happy for her, if slightly resentful that she can clean up her act for others more easily than for you. Or so it seems.

But then, she tells you that on the last morning, the real reason why her daughter invited her out became clear. She, Miss Grumpy, is of the opinion that her mother ought to go back to Mr Gordon Macleod. Who is now very contrite and promises to be on his best behaviour if she returns. According to Susan, according to her daughter.

To save time, and to save emotion, you address her, straightforwardly, as a drinker. No longer, There seems to be a problem, Do you know what it might be, Perhaps I can suggest… none of that. So one day you suggest Alcoholics Anonymous, not knowing if there is a branch near you.

‘Not going to the God-botherers,’ she replies firmly.

Given her dislike of priests, and extreme disapproval of missionaries, this response is understandable. No doubt she thinks of AA as yet another bunch of American missionaries interfering in other countries’ belief systems, bringing the foreign halt and lame into the radiant presence of their God. You do not blame her.

Mostly, you can only deal with the day-to-day crises. Occasionally, you look to the future, and find one outcome which has a terrifying logic. It goes like this. She doesn’t drink all the time. Not every day. She can go a day or two without the comfort of a bottle. But her memory, as a result of the drink, is getting poorer. So the logic runs: if she carries on destroying her memory at the present rate, maybe she will reach the stage when she has actually forgotten she is an alcoholic! Might that happen? It would be one way to cure her. But you also think: you might as well simply blast her with ECT and be done with it.

Here is one of the problems. You don’t, at bottom, think of alcoholism as a physical disease. You might have heard that it is, but you aren’t really convinced. You can’t help thinking of it as many people – some of whom you might not want to be associated with – have thought about it for centuries: as a moral disease. And one of the reasons you do so is because she does too. When she is at her most lucid, her most rational, her most gentle, and as much tormented by what is happening to her as you are, she tells you – as she always has – that she hates the fact that she is a drinker, and feels deep shame and guilt about it: so you must leave her, because she is ‘no good’. She has a moral disease, which is why hospitals and doctors cannot cure her. They cannot fix a flawed personality from a played-out generation. She urges you again to leave her.

But you cannot leave Susan. How could you bear to withdraw your love from her? If you didn’t love her, who would? And maybe it is worse than this. It is not just that you love her, but that you are addicted to her. How ironic would that be?

An image comes into your head one day, an image of your relationship to one another. You are at an upstairs window of the house on Henry Road. She has somehow climbed out, and you are hanging on to her. By the wrists, of course. And her weight makes it impossible for you to pull her back inside. It is all you can do to stop yourself being pulled out with her, by her. At one point she opens her mouth to scream, but no sound emerges. Instead, her dental plate comes loose; you hear it hit the ground with a plasticky clatter. You are stuck there, the two of you, locked together, and will remain so until your strength gives out, and she falls.

It is only a metaphor – or the worst of dreams; yet there are metaphors which sit more powerfully in the brain than remembered events.

Another image, based on a remembered event, comes into your mind. You are back at the Village, the two of you, in the flush of love, quietly but entirely intent on one another. She is wearing a print dress and, knowing that you are watching her – because you are always watching her – she goes over to the chintzy sofa, plumps herself down, and says,

‘Look, Casey Paul, I’m disappearing! I’m doing my disappearing act!’

And, for a moment, as you look, you can see only her face and the stockinged part of her legs.

Now she is doing another disappearing act. Her body is still there, but what lies inside – her mind, her memory, her heart – is slipping away. Her memory is obscured by darkness and untruth, and persuades itself towards coherence only by fabulation. Her mind oscillates between stunned inertia and hysterical volatility. But it is the disappearing act which her heart is doing, oh, that is the hardest part to bear. It is as if, in her thrashing about, she has stirred up the mud that lies at the bottom of us all. And what is now coming to the surface is unfocused anger, and fear, and frustration, and harshness, and selfishness and mistrust. When she tells you solemnly that in her considered opinion your behaviour towards her has been not just beastly but actively criminal, she really thinks it is true. And all the sweetness of her nature, the laughingness and trustingness central to the woman you fell in love with can no longer be seen.

You used to say – when putting off friends who wanted to visit – ‘Oh, she’s having a bad day. She’s not herself.’ And when they saw her drunk, you’d say, ‘But she’s still the same underneath. She’s still the same underneath.’ How many times did you tell this to others, when the person you were actually addressing was yourself?

And then comes the day when you no longer believe such words. You no longer believe that she is still the same underneath. You believe that being ‘not herself’ is her new self. You fear that she is, finally and utterly, doing her disappearing act.

But you make one final effort, and she does too. You get her admitted to hospital. Not the National Temperance, as you had hoped, but a general, all-female ward. You sit her down on a bench while they are admitting her, and explain gently, once more, how it has come to this, and what they will do for her, and how it will help.

‘I’ll give it my very best shot, Casey Paul,’ she says sweetly. You kiss her on the temple, and promise to visit her every day. Which you do.

At first they put her to sleep for three days, hoping to peaceably flush the alcohol out of her system, while also calming her disturbed brain. You sit by her lightly sleeping form and think that this time, surely, it will work. This time, she is under proper medical supervision, the problem has been stated clearly – even she isn’t ducking it – and at last Something Will Be Done. You look at her calm face and think of the best years of your time together, and imagine that everything you had back then will now return.

On the fourth day she is still asleep when you go in. You ask to see a doctor and some twenty-year-old houseman with a clipboard presents himself. You ask why she is still sedated.

‘We woke her up this morning, but she immediately became disruptive.’

‘Disruptive?’

‘Yes, she attacked the nurses.’

You don’t believe this. You ask him to repeat it. He does.

‘So we put her under again. Don’t worry, it’s a very light sedative. I’ll show you.’

He adjusts the drip slightly. Almost instantly, she begins to stir. ‘You see?’ Then he adjusts the drip again and sends her back to sleep. You find this deeply sinister. You have yielded her care to the authority of some youthful technocrat who has never met her.

‘You’re her…?’

‘Godson,’ you reply automatically. Or maybe you say ‘Nephew’, or possibly ‘Lodger’, which at least contains four correct letters in it.

‘Well, if we wake her up and she’s that disruptive again, we’ll have to section her.’

‘Section her?’ You are horrified. ‘But she’s not mad. She’s an alcoholic, she needs treatment.’

‘So do all the other patients. And they need the nurses’ attention. We can’t have nurses being attacked.’

You still don’t believe his initial allegation.

‘But… you can’t just section her by yourself.’

‘You’re right, there have to be two signatures. But it’s just a formality in cases like this.’

You realize you have not brought her to a place of safety after all. You have delivered her over to the kind of zealot who in the old days would have prescribed a straitjacket plus a course of electroconvulsive therapy. Susan would have called him a ‘little Hitler’. Who knows, perhaps she did. You partly hope so.

You say, ‘I would like to be there when you next wake her up. I think it would help.’

‘Very well,’ says the curt young man whom you have already come to hate deeply.

But – such is the way of hospitals – this arrogant little shit isn’t there when you next come, and you never see him again. Instead, a female doctor operates the drip. Slowly, Susan wakes. She looks up, sees you and smiles.

‘Where’ve you been all my life?’ she asks. ‘You dirty stop-out.’

The doctor reacts with slight surprise, but you kiss Susan on the forehead, and the two of you are left alone together.

‘So you’ve come to take me home?’

‘Not just yet, darling,’ you say. ‘You’ve got to stay here for a while. Until you’re cured.’

‘But there’s nothing wrong with me. I’m perfectly well and insist on being taken home at once. Take me to Henry.’

You grasp both her wrists. You squeeze very hard. You explain that the doctors won’t release her until she is cured. You remind her of the promise she made when you brought her here. You say that the last time they brought her round, she attacked the nurses.

‘No, I don’t think so,’ she says, in her most distant, genteel manner, as if you are some ill-informed peasant.

You talk at length to her, asking for her promise to behave until you come back tomorrow. At least until then. She doesn’t respond. You press her. Then she promises, but with a stubbornness of tone you are all too familiar with.

The next day, you approach the ward expecting the worst: that she’s been sedated again, or even sectioned. But she is looking alert, and her colour is good. She greets you rather as if you were her guest. A nurse walks by.

‘The maids here are frightfully good,’ she says, giving a wave to the passing figure.

You think: What’s the right tactic? Go along with it? Challenge it? You decide that you mustn’t indulge her dream world.

‘They’re not maids, Susan, they’re nurses.’ You think she might have confused ‘hospital’ with ‘hotel’, which after all would not be much of a verbal slippage.

‘Some of them are,’ she agrees. Then, disappointed with your lack of perspicacity, adds, ‘But most of them are maids.’

You let it go.

‘I’ve told them all about you,’ she says.

Your heart sinks, but you let that go as well.

The next day, you find her agitated again. She is out of bed, sitting up in a chair. On the tray in front of her are five pairs of spectacles and a copy of a P.G. Wodehouse novel she has mysteriously acquired.

‘Where did you get all those glasses?’

‘Oh,’ she replies casually, ‘I don’t know where they come from. I expect people have been giving them to me.’

She puts on a pair which are evidently not hers and opens the book at random. ‘He’s frightfully funny, isn’t he?’

You agree. She has always enjoyed Wodehouse, and you take this as a good, if slightly confused, sign. You tell her what’s in the newspapers. You mention a postcard you’ve had from Eric. You say that all is well at Henry Road. She listens idly, then seizes a different pair of glasses – though still not her own – opens the book at random again and, probably seeing it no more in focus than the previous time, announces,

‘It’s frightful rubbish, this, isn’t it?’

You think your heart will break, now, here, immediately.

The following day she is again under sedation. The woman in the next bed chats to you and asks what’s wrong with Your Nan. You are so weary of it all that you answer,

‘She’s an alcoholic.’

The woman turns away in distaste. You know exactly what she is thinking. Why give a good hospital bed to a drinker? Furthermore, a female drinker? One thing you have discovered is that male alcoholics are allowed to be amusing, even poignant. Young drinkers of either sex, when out of control, are indulged. But female alcoholics, old enough to know better, old enough to be mothers, even grandmothers – these are the lowest of the low.

The next day she is awake again and refusing to look at you. So you just sit there for a while. You glance at the tray in front of her. This time, her nocturnal ward-rambling has netted only two pairs of other patients’ glasses, plus a tabloid newspaper she would never have in the house.

‘I do think,’ she announces finally, ‘that you will be remembered as one of the greatest criminals in the history of the world.’

You are tempted to agree. Why not?

They do not threaten to section her – that little Hitler is off practising his black arts on other, less disruptive patients. But they tell you that they cannot treat her further, that the rest may have done her some good, that this is not the appropriate place for her and they need to free up the bed. You see their point of view entirely, but ask yourself: Then what is the appropriate place for her? Which stands in for a wider question: What is her place in the world?

As the two of you leave, the woman in the next bed pointedly ignores you both.

It has taken some years for you to realize how much, beneath her laughing irreverence, there lies panic and pandemonium. Which is why she needs you there, fixed and steadfast. You have assumed this role willingly, lovingly. It makes you feel grown-up to be a guarantor. It has meant, of course, that for most of your twenties you were obliged to forgo what others of your generation routinely enjoyed: the mad fucking around, the hippie travelling, the drugs, the going off the rails, even the stonking idleness. You were also obliged to forgo the drinking; but then, you were hardly living with a good advertisement for the stuff. You didn’t hold any of this against her (except perhaps the lack of drinking); nor did you treat it as some unfair burden you were assuming. It was just the given of your relationship. And it has made you age, or mature, if not by the route normally taken.

But as things begin to fray between you, and all your attempts to rescue her fail, you acknowledge something you haven’t exactly been hiding from, just didn’t have time to notice: that the particular dynamic of your relationship is triggering your own version of panic and pandemonium. While you probably strike your friends at law college as affable and sane, if a little withheld, what roils beneath your own surface is a mixture of groundless optimism and searing anxiety. Your inner moods ebb and flow in response to hers: except that her cheerfulness, even when misplaced, strikes you as authentic, your own as conditional. How long will this present little stretch of happiness last, you are continually asking yourself. A month, a week, another twenty minutes? You can’t, of course, tell, because it doesn’t depend on you. And however calming your presence is on her, the trick doesn’t work the other way round.

You never think of her as a child, not even in her most selfish delinquencies. But when you watch an anxious parent tracking its offspring – the alarm at each bandy-legged footstep, the fear of each ‘trippy’ moment, the wider fear of the child simply wandering off and getting lost – you know that you have been there yourself. Not to mention the child’s sudden switches of mood, from blissful exaltation and absolute trust to rage and tears and a sense of abandonment. This too is familiar. Except that this wild, shifting weather of the soul is now passing through the brain and body of a mature woman.

It is this, finally, which breaks you, and tells you to move out. Not far, just a dozen streets, into a cheap one-room flat. She urges you to go, for reasons good and bad: because she senses that she must let you go a little if she is to keep you; and because she wants you out of the house so that she can drink whenever the mood takes her. But in fact, little changes: you are still living just as closely. She doesn’t want you to remove a single book from your study, or any knick-knack you have bought together, or any clothes from your wardrobe: such actions will throw her into a fit of grieving. Sometimes you sneak back into the house to remove a book, shuffling others along the shelf to cover the theft; occasionally, you stuff in a couple of cheap paperbacks from Oxfam to disguise the betrayal.

And so you live an oscillating life. You continue to have breakfast with her, and also supper – which you mostly cook; you go on expeditions together; and you get reports from Eric on her drinking. Eric, being merely fond and concerned, rather than in love with her, is a more reliable witness than you ever were yourself. Susan continues to do your laundry, and some of your best shirts come back lovingly scorched. Drunken ironing: that is one of the lesser, but still painful, things life has surprised you with.

Then, almost without your noticing it, what is close to the final stage kicks in. You may still desperately want to save her, but at some level of instinct or pride or self-protection, her devotion to drink now strikes you more sharply, and more personally: as a rejection of you, of your help, of your love. And since few can bear to have their love rejected, resentment builds, then curdles into aggression, and you find yourself saying – not aloud, of course, because you find it hard to be overtly cruel, especially to her – ‘Go on, then, destroy yourself, if that’s what you want.’ And you are shocked to discover yourself thinking this.

But what you don’t realize – not now, in the heat and dark of it all, only much later – is that, even without hearing you, she will agree. Because what she is leaving unspoken is this reply: ‘Yes, that’s exactly what I want. And I am going to destroy myself, because I am a worthless person. So stop bothering me with your well-intentioned meddling. Just let me get on with the job.’

You are working for a South London practice which specializes in legal aid. You enjoy the range of cases you handle; you enjoy the fact that in the majority of them you can solve things. You can get people the justice they deserve, and thereby make them happy. You are aware of the paradox of this. Also, of another, longer-term paradox: that in order to support Susan, you need to work, and the more you work, the more you are away from her, and the less able to support her.

You have also, as Susan predicted, found yourself a girlfriend. And not one who will run off at the first phone call. Anna is, perhaps inevitably, also a lawyer. You have told her some of Susan’s history. You have not tried to get away with merely saying she is ‘eccentric’. You introduce the two of them, and they seem to get on. Susan says nothing to embarrass you, Anna is brightly practical. She doesn’t think Susan looks after her diet well enough, so once a week takes round a loaf of proper bread, a bag of tomatoes, a pound of French butter. Sometimes the door remains unanswered, so she leaves her offering on the step.

You are home one evening when the phone goes. It is one of the lodgers.

‘I think you’d better come round. We’ve had the police. With guns.’

You repeat the words to Anna, then run for your car. In Henry Road there is an ambulance outside the house, its blue light revolving, its doors open. You park, walk across, and there she is, in a wheelchair facing out towards the street, with a broad bandage around her forehead which has pushed her hair up into a Struwwelpeter shock. Her expression, as often when a sudden crisis has worked itself out, is one of slightly amused calm. She surveys the street, the ambulance men fixing the wheelchair in place, and your own arrival, as if from a throne. The blue light revolves against the steadier sodium orange. It is real and unreal at the same time; filmic, phantasmagoric.

Then the chair slowly rises on its hoist, and as the ambulance doors are about to be closed, she lifts her hand in a pontifical blessing. You ask the ambulance men where they are taking her and follow in your car. When you get to the A&E department, they are already taking preliminary details.

‘I’m her next of kin,’ you say.

‘Son?’ they ask. You nearly agree, for speed, but they might query the difference of surname. So, once again, you are her nephew.

‘He’s not really my nephew,’ she says. ‘I could tell you a thing or two about this young man.’

You look at the doctor, lying to him with a slight frown and a tiny movement of the head. You collude in the notion that Susan is temporarily off among the nutters.

‘Ask him about the tennis club,’ she says.

‘We’ll come to that, Mrs Macleod. ‘But first…’

And so the process continues. They will keep her in overnight, perhaps run a test or two. It may just be shock. They will call you when they are ready to release her. The ambulance men have said it was just a cut, but as it was on the forehead there was a lot of blood. It may need a stitch or two, maybe not.

The next day, they release her, still in full dispossession of her faculties.

‘About time too,’ she says, as you walk her to the car park. ‘It really has all been frightfully interesting.’

You know this mood only too well. Something has been observed, or experienced, or discovered, which has little to do with anything, yet is of extreme, overwhelming interest, and must be reported.

‘Let’s wait until we get you home first.’ You have slipped into the language of the hospital, where everything is done or asked for in the name of ‘us’.

‘All right, Mr Spoilsport.’

At Henry Road, you take her to the kitchen, sit her down, make her a cup of tea with extra sugar and give her a biscuit. She ignores them.

‘Well,’ she begins, ‘it was all so fascinating. Such fun. You see, these two men with guns got into the house last night.’

‘With guns?’

‘That’s what I said. With guns. Do stop interrupting before I’ve barely even started. So yes, two men with guns. And they were going round looking for something. I don’t know what.’

‘Were they robbers?’ You feel you are allowed to ask questions which don’t challenge the essential veracity of her fantasy.

‘Well, that’s what I thought might be the case. So I said to them, “The gold bullion is under the bed.”’

‘Wasn’t that a bit rash?’

‘No, I thought it would put them off the scent. Not that I knew what the scent was, of course. They were both quite polite and well mannered. For gunmen, that is. They didn’t want to bother me, they would just go about their business if I didn’t mind.’

‘But didn’t they shoot at you?’ You indicate her forehead, now decorated with a large gauze patch.

‘Lord, no, they were much too polite for that. But it was rather an interruption to the evening, so I felt obliged to call the police.’

‘Didn’t they try and stop you?’

‘Oh no, they were all in favour. They agreed with me that the police might help them find what they were looking for.’

‘But they didn’t tell you what that was?’

She ignores you and continues.

‘But the thing I really wanted to tell you was that they had these feathers everywhere.’

‘Gosh.’

‘Feathers sticking out of their bottoms. Feathers in their hair. Feathers everywhere.’

‘What sort of guns did they have?’

‘Oh, who knows about guns?’ she says dismissively. ‘But then the police came, and I answered the door to them, and they sorted everything out.’

‘Was there a gunfight?’

‘A gunfight? Don’t be ridiculous. The British police are far too professional for that.’

‘But they arrested them?’

‘Naturally. Why else do you think I called them?’

‘So how did you cut your head?’

‘Well, of course I can’t remember that. It’s the least interesting part of the story in my view.’

‘I’m glad it all worked out in the end.’

‘You know, Paul,’ she says, ‘sometimes I’m really disappointed in you. It was so enjoyable and so fascinating, but you keep coming up with these banal comments and banal questions. Of course it all worked out in the end. Everything always does, doesn’t it?’

You don’t answer. After all, you have your pride. And in your opinion, the notion that everything works out in the end, and the counter-notion that nothing ever does, are both equally banal.

‘Now don’t sulk. It’s been one of the most interesting twenty-four hours of my life. And everyone – everyone – was very nice to me indeed.’

The gunmen. The police. The ambulance men. The hospital. The Russkis. The Vatican. And all’s right with the world, then.

That evening, over takeaway pizzas, I recounted the whole lurid episode to Anna. I told it fondly, concernedly, almost amusedly, if not quite. The fantasy gunmen, the real policemen, the gold bullion, the feathers, the ambulance men, the hospital. I omitted some of Susan’s strictures on my character. I was also aware, however, that Anna was not reacting as I had expected.

Eventually, she said, ‘That all sounds a great waste of public money.’

‘That’s an odd way to look at it.’

‘Is it? Police, firearms squad – Special Branch – ambulance, hospital. All of them dashing around making a fuss of her, just because she’s gone on a bender. And that includes you too.’

‘Me? What do you expect me to do when the lodger calls and says there are armed police in the house?’

‘I didn’t expect you to do anything different.’

‘Well then—’

‘Just as I wouldn’t expect you to do anything different if we were going out for a meal, or a film, or leaving for a holiday and already running late for our flight.’

I thought about this. ‘No, I don’t expect I would. Behave differently.’

We were reaching a stand-off, I realized. One of the reasons I’d gone for Anna in the first place was that she always spoke her mind. This had a downside to it as well as an upside. I suppose all character traits do.

‘Look,’ I said. ‘We talked about… all this when we first got together.’ Somehow, I couldn’t say Susan’s name at that moment.

‘You talked. I listened. I didn’t necessarily agree.’

‘Then you misled me.’

‘No, Paul, you didn’t explain the full extent of it to me. Maybe in future when I get out my diary to write in a dinner date or a play or a weekend away, I should always add a note saying: subject to the extent of Susan Macleod’s alcoholic intake.’

‘That’s very unfair.’

‘It may be unfair but it also happens to be true.’

We paused. It was a question of whether either of us wanted to take it further. Anna did.

‘And while we’re about it, Paul, I may as well say that Susan Macleod… is not really my kind of woman.’

‘I see.’

‘I mean, I shall always try to be kind to her for your sake.’

‘Yes, well, that’s very generous of you. And while we’re about it, I may as well say that I once promised her there would always be room in my life for her, even if it was just an attic.’

‘Paul, I don’t want an attic in my life.’ And then she said it. ‘Especially not with a madwoman in it.’

I let that last remark fill the silence that was growing between us. Eventually, no doubt sounding prim, I said, ‘I’m sorry you think she’s mad.’

She didn’t withdraw her assertion. I realized that I was the only person in the world who understood Susan. And even if I’d moved out, how could I abandon her?

Anna and I continued for a few more weeks, each of us half-concealing our thoughts from the other. But I wasn’t surprised when she bailed on the relationship. Nor, by then, did I blame her.

And so, by the end, you have tried soft love and tough love, feelings and reason, truth and lies, promises and threats, hope and stoicism. But you are not a machine, switching easily from one approach to another. Each strategy involves as much emotional strain on you as on her; perhaps more. Sometimes, when, lightly drunk, she is in one of her airy, exasperating moods, denying both reality and your concern for her, you find yourself thinking: she may be destroying herself in the long term, but in the short term, she’s doing more damage to you. Helpless, frustrated anger overwhelms you; and, worst of all, righteous anger. You hate your own righteousness.

You remember the running-away fund she gave you when you were at university. You have never thought to make use of it before. Now, you take it all out, in cash. You go to a small, anonymous hotel towards the bottom of the Edgware Road, just up from Marble Arch. This is not a fashionable or expensive part of town. Next door is a small Lebanese restaurant. In the five days you are there, you do not drink. You want your mind to be lucid; you do not want either your anger or your self-pity to be exaggerated or distorted. You want your emotions to be whatever they are.

You remove a bunch of prostitutes’ business cards from a nearby telephone box. They have been attached with Blu-Tack, and before laying them out on the small desk in your hotel room, you roll off the sticky little balls of adhesive and drop them in the wastepaper basket. You do this in a deliberate way. Then you lay the cards out like a game of patience and decide which of these glamorous women who do ‘hotel calls’ you wish to fuck. You make your first phone call. The woman, naturally, looks nothing like the photo on the card. You note this, without caring, let alone protesting: on the scale of disappointment, this is nothing. The location and the transaction are the exact opposite of all you have previously imagined love and sex to be. Still, it is fine for what it is. Efficient, pleasurable, emotion-free; fine.

On the wall is a cheap print of a Van Gogh cornfield with crows. You enjoy looking at it: again, an efficient, second-rate, counterfeit pleasure. You think there is something to be said for the second-rate. Perhaps it is more reliable than the first-rate. For instance, if you were in front of the real Van Gogh, you might get nervous, be full of jacked-up expectations about whether or not you were reacting properly. Whereas no one – you, least of all – cares how you respond to a cheap print on a hotel wall. Perhaps that is how you should live your life. You remember, when you were a student, someone maintaining that if you lowered your expectations in life, then you would never be disappointed. You wonder if there is any truth in this.

When desire returns, you order up another prostitute. Later, you have a Lebanese dinner. You watch television. You lie on your bed, deliberately not thinking about Susan or anything to do with her. You do not care how anyone might judge you if they could see where you are and what you are doing. Doggedly, and almost without actual pleasure, you continue to spend your running-away fund until all that remains is enough for your bus fare back to SE15. You do not reproach yourself; nor do you experience guilt, now or later. You never tell anyone about this episode. But you begin to wonder – not for the first time in your life – if there is something to be said for feeling less.