The Only Story Read online

  “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 unfocussed 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 realise 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, Sus
an 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 realise 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 l
ove 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 realise—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 specialises 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.