All in the Mind (12 page)

‘God as an instrument of love I can believe in, God as an instrument of fear I cannot.’ That was a good way to put it. Then he would add, ‘In our house there is a God of fear, not a God of love.’ It was a big call to make, and he could feel his heart pounding as he sought to bring the words from his mind to his lips. He breathed deeply a couple of times, conscious that nobody else was speaking, so the only sound was of his breath, and the occasional clink of knife and fork on china. He ran the words once more round his mind, then again, then breathed deeply again. It was his father, though, who broke the silence. He looked directly at Aunt Jessica and said, ‘Thank you, Jess. I don’t think I will have pudding. I’m afraid the discussion has put me right off my food. I think Jan should help you with the washing-up, and Martin, you can go to your room until we’re ready to leave.’

His father stood up, pushed his chair under the table, tossed his napkin onto the side plate, turned and left the room. He thought for a moment about sharing with Jan and Aunt Jessica the thought he had stored at the front of his mind. But the moment had passed, and the target had gone.

He went upstairs and, once his rage had calmed a little, he decided to write a letter to his father. He took an age to decide whether to start with ‘Father’, ‘Dear Father’, or ‘Dear Dad’.

‘
Father
,’ he began, ‘
Jan and I try really hard to be good children. We work hard at school. We do well in exams. We get good reports. We take
part
in school plays. We both play musical instruments. We help Mum around the house. Neither of us has ever had to be sent home early, or given a detention. What more do we have to do before we have a father who looks like he wants us to be his children? As for today’s discussion, am I not allowed to have my own thoughts? And if I have doubts about something as important to our lives as God’s existence, with whom am I meant to raise them if not you? What is a father for, if not to listen to a son’s concerns?
’

There was a knock on the door. It was Aunt Jessica.

‘Are you all right?’

‘Not really, no.’

‘You shouldn’t upset your father like that.’

‘Why don’t you go to him and say, “You really shouldn’t upset your son like that”? And why did you take his side when I know you agree with me?’

She was standing at the desk, where he was sitting writing his letter. He made no effort to shield it from her view.

‘Don’t send it, Martin. Nothing good will come of it.’ And with that, she patted him on the shoulder, and walked out of the room.

As his father drove them home in silence that evening, he felt a sense of real betrayal. Just a day earlier, he would have named Aunt Jessica as the adult he felt closest to, the one he could really confide in. That closeness had vanished.

Sturrock put down his pencil and sighed. He felt exhausted. And he was frankly irritated that several of his patients, all living, all in need of his help, all people he saw regularly, were to be majorly inconvenienced because of the funeral of someone he had seen three times in five years.

He looked at the clock, and reckoned he could steal a short nap before heading to Westminster to see Ralph Hall. Phyllis had put a sandwich on his desk, but he didn’t feel like eating it. He adjusted his chair so it was reclining and shut his eyes. Immediately, an indistinct image of his father started to form in the middle distance of the darkness that his closed eyes had delivered. That was definitely his hair, before he went grey, and that was the jawline. The image faded as quickly as it came. George Sturrock had been dead five years, but
most
days Sturrock would see him, somewhere. He had very few photos of him around the house, and those he did have were put out by Stella not him, but he had a series of images that intruded on his mind, often, as now, when he was tired. In most of the images, his father was in his forties. He never smiled. He never spoke. Nor did he stay long. Other thoughts and images would crowd in and chase the image away. It was strange, he thought, that even though his father came to him as a relatively young man, it was always thoughts of his final days that these unexpected visits inspired.

George Sturrock had been well into his eighties when he died, but even a couple of weeks before his death, he seemed to be strong and healthy. Sturrock had never thought of his parents as a very close or loving couple. Their life revolved around certain constantly observed routines in their eating habits, sleeping patterns, leisure pursuits and holidays. But in his final days, George Sturrock began to show a humanity to his wife sadly lacking during the half-century they had known each other. He had liked to describe himself as a God-fearing man, and perhaps it was a fear of God, and what awaited him if indeed God’s judgement was to fall upon him, that led him to try to change his ways so late in life and he began to treat his wife with an almost embarrassing solicitude. It had been hard to watch his father fawning over his mother like that – it seemed so hypocritical. He didn’t have to put up with it for long. Once the seeming switch in his father’s personality clicked in, the decline towards death was rapid. He ate little. He resisted visits from the doctor. Sturrock and his sister Jan visited him on a kind of rota basis, and with each visit he saw decline matched by a rise in serenity and acceptance of what was coming. When finally his father passed away, quietly in his sleep, he had been at his bedside. He was unprepared for the grief. He began to cry, and after several minutes wondered if he would ever stop. Jan appeared moved, then surprised, then a little worried, then embarrassed. They had talked so many times about how cold and distant their father had been. They had talked openly about whether to try to persuade their mother to leave him. Jan had once put it this way: ‘Mum, why did you have us when it is so obvious that one of you didn’t really want us?’

His father had never been violent, though he could look it, and at primary school, a teacher was once concerned enough about a drawing Martin had done of ‘My Daddy’ to bring it to the head’s attention, so dark and violent were the images surrounding the matchstick man at the centre of the page.

He was not even particularly strict. It was worse than that. He seemed indifferent.

‘Why does he show such little interest in who we are and what we do?’ he had once asked his mother.

She looked saddened. ‘He’s not a bad man, your father,’ she said, which was not the most loving or fulsome of endorsements. ‘He’s of a very different era. His father was even harsher, and colder. Dad went to boarding school when he was four. He once went three years without seeing either of his parents, because when he came out of school for the holidays, they were then living in India and thought it was best not to have him travel out on his own, so he lived with his aunt. Imagine how that felt, that his parents didn’t want to see him when they could.’

‘So why does he want us to feel the same, even when we live with him?’

He had wondered if his mother raised what he had said with his father. Certainly, for a week or two, George Sturrock seemed a little bit warmer, asked once or twice about homework, and even tried to engage him in conversation about a film he had expressed an interest in seeing. But he then had to leave for South America for a couple of weeks, where he was involved in a major bridge-building project for the Brazilian government, and when he came back, the coldness came back with him.

Just as husbands and wives get into ruts, so do parents and children. He had seen it many times in the key relationships of his patients. They would know they had to change, but they didn’t know how. He had longed for his father to change, but it was clear that would never happen. So he and his sister tried to change instead, but every change they made just seemed to make things worse.

He tried to talk to his father about it the night before he died. It
was
obvious he was fading, and Sturrock was moved by the calm with which his father was approaching death. George talked about his wife with much greater affection than he had ever showed to her when he was healthy. Sturrock sat and listened, feeling for the first time that his father was talking to him as if he was truly his son. ‘Why?’ he wanted to ask him. ‘Why did you find it so hard to touch, or be there to listen to me when I was confused? Why did you never hold me when I was scared? Why did you never tell me I did well when I passed exams, or made things, or said things that most children are not capable of thinking? Please, tell me.’ But the scars of six decades of resistance had built up. Even as his father was seeming more human and vulnerable, Sturrock couldn’t bring himself to get the words out. So he sat by his bedside as his father drifted in and out of sleep, and just asked the questions silently to himself, as his mother fussed around, she too seeming calm and serene as the moment of death neared. And when finally his father passed away, he was sad at the loss, as any son would be, but his real sadness was the lack of love they had had for each other in life. That was what he was really grieving, and had grieved ever since. He felt his father had left him a bitter legacy – that of being a distant parent. He tried to comfort himself with the thought that he was of a different generation to his children, and that the cultural and social differences meant that it simply wasn’t possible for a parent of one generation truly to relate to a child of another. But then he saw others who seemed to be able to do it, and he was left with the thought that his father had been a bad parent and he had followed in his footsteps.

Sturrock opened his eyes. The thoughts of his father had filled him with blackness. He realised his mind was working too much to allow even a short doze, so he gathered his file on Ralph Hall, said goodbye to Phyllis and left.

It was difficult to induce himself to go into Waterstone’s for Jack’s present. The shop was crowded and it seemed unlikely he’d find a book of aerial photography with ease. In the event, there was a stack of them near the staircase on the second floor. He had a flick through it. It was interesting enough, particularly the pictures of Berlin and
Barcelona
, but not the sort of thing he would want himself, not for a birthday. He liked pictures of people, portraits which captured a moment or a feeling in their lives. This book suggested buildings, not people, were what mattered. But Jack had very different interests to his own, so perhaps it would please him.

Though he never said so, and emphatically denied it if asked, Sturrock was disappointed that neither Suzanne, Michelle nor Jack had followed him down the medicine route. He suspected his own father had felt the same about him and engineering. They never really discussed it. Sturrock’s children did not get a science A level between them, so from their late teens, it was clear they were not going to follow his chosen path. But by then, he already felt the distance between himself and them, particularly Jack. Having had two girls, he longed for a son, and it was perhaps that longing, and with it the expectations of a classic romanticised father–son relationship, that led to his disappointment being even greater when, other than fleetingly, that relationship did not materialise. And of course the biggest disappointment of all was that the children appeared to drain all the joy and energy out of his wife. Where once life had seemed to please and excite her, motherhood and the running of a home made her tired, a bit miserable, and jealous of what she imagined his life to be.

He went to the till to pay for the book. There was a woman in front of him who was rummaging around in her handbag trying to find a credit card. The shop assistant looked cross. Sturrock stood for a moment, closed his eyes and wished away his tiredness. But he was jolted back to reality by the angry shop assistant demanding payment for the book. He paid, stumbled outside and hailed a cab.

On the short cab ride to Westminster, he looked through his notes on Ralph Hall. Yet another really difficult case and the last thing he needed on a day like this. But there was no getting out of it now. He imagined Hall sitting nervously in his House of Commons office, waiting for him to arrive, gearing himself up for their secretive meeting. It had been such a huge effort for Hall to admit he needed help in the first place, he couldn’t let him down.

He had first met Hall when the politician was a Minister of State
heading
a policy review on care in the community, and Sturrock was an adviser to the review team. After that they met a few times socially, first with others, then just the two of them over dinner at the House, when Ralph admitted that he had occasional panic attacks, particularly when feeling under pressure. Sturrock gave him one or two interesting thoughts and insights about possible associations with feeling trapped, and also the link to anger. He suggested they keep in touch on the subject.

A couple of weeks after their dinner, he watched Ralph doing a difficult TV interview, and noticed that the minister’s hands were shaking slightly as he spoke. He called him the next day, said he had noticed and Ralph suggested they meet again. They had dinner at a little French restaurant not far from Buckingham Palace.

‘I feel I can trust you, Martin, so I am going to tell you something I have told nobody else.’

‘Yes, if it relates to a health issue, Ralph, I assure you that you can trust me to be one hundred per cent discreet.’

The minister took a deep breath, then rushed out the words, ‘I think I may have a drink problem.’

Sturrock could see the effort that had gone into his saying it. At the time he had thought that, with the confession having been made, the battle was half won. Now he wasn’t so sure. Ralph was more scared of his problem being made public than he was of what drink was doing to him. It explained the lengths he went to in order to conceal his drinking habits from everyone around him, even his wife. Sturrock knew from bitter experience with other alcoholics that, until someone was prepared to face their problem openly, it was unlikely ever to go away.

As the cab drew up outside the Houses of Parliament, he tried desperately to drag his mind away from its dark thoughts and into professional mode. ‘Get a grip, Sturrock,’ he said to himself. ‘Hall’s relying on you. But if you go to pieces, there’ll be no one there to pick them up.’