Turn Us Again (24 page)

‘I will phone Louise,' she thought. ‘I will take all the money out of the kitty and talk for as long as I damn well please. Therapy.'

Louise's sympathy and wisdom seemed to reverberate down the receiver.

“It's like he's teaching a child how to behave when they take liberties — ‘That'll teach you' — for Christ's sakes! Like he's a righteous judge doling out punishment! There was always that side to him, even in Cambridge when he was trying to get you into bed.”

“I feel a subtle change now, as though it's even more important to keep me in order. Maybe he thinks you have to keep women down and show them who's boss right from the beginning, because of his mother. Maybe he feels trapped because he's no longer a young man looking after himself. Maybe he just doesn't love me anymore.”

“I can't believe that. He loved you so much.”

“Well then, maybe he's paranoid and has convinced himself that I don't love or respect him. So he takes offence at any silly little thing that I say. It's such a mistake to try and control me. I'm not that young, flitty thing anymore.”

“You were always more than just a flitty young thing, Anne.”

“I could have had anyone,” Madelyn said. “I could have done anything.” She thought of her neglected diaries, which had once seemed to hold the seeds of great literature.

“Oh don't be so maudlin,” Louise retorted sharply. “Why do you think marriage to anybody else would be any different? It's always difficult. People just don't talk about it.”

Madelyn thought of her parents. She thought of all the married people she knew. Were any of them happy? “I always thought it would be different for me. Maybe every young person thinks it's going to be different for them.”

Again, Louise's voice sounded a note of impatience. “Your life isn't over yet. You are a beautiful woman, a compassionate soul. I think you will give great joy to many people.”

A few days later Sam received a telegram.

Father dead. Come to London straight away
.

Sam left immediately, and Madelyn travelled to Newcastle to stay with her parents. She didn't hear anything for several days. Then an aunt descended for a surprise visit with a newspaper in her hand, which claimed that Frank Golden had committed suicide. While the aunt waited for enlightenment, Madelyn thought of the gentle man with the sad face. Why would he do such a thing?

Dear Madelyn,

When I first heard that my father was dead, I thought he had died of a heart attack or something. I was shocked, but if you remember I didn't react very much. I suppose I was occupied with the practical side of packing and getting the train.

I assumed the whole family would be assembled at our house in Golders Green, but when I got there the only person to greet me was the caretaker. Our conversation still seems surreal to me.

He told me, “Nobody is here, son. They are all at Aunt Dotty's house.”

I asked him, “Why did they go there?”

And he answered, “Your mother is distraught.”

“I would have thought she'd have found the strength to stay in her own home, like most people do when there's a death in the family,” I said with some bitterness.

“Did you not know, son? Your father committed suicide.”

Madelyn, I started to sob. I sobbed all the way to my aunt's house, where I found my mother sedated in bed. I was reluctant to enter the room with her. My whole being was filled with the most debilitating hatred. I knew that both blaming and feeling guilty are common with normal deaths, let alone suicides, but the way she had poisoned his life seemed exceptional to me. Bitter memories and incidents crowded into my mind.

Once he brought her some flowers and she asked him how much they had cost. When he told her, she said ‘you could have got them cheaper at the flower shop down the road.' He never bought her flowers again. And yet that is trivial compared to the contempt she sowed in her sons for this large, gentle man. It's true. I always thought he was just the breadwinner, a little less clever, a little inferior, spending his life doing something slightly shameful, making money. A big, slow businessman dominated by his wife. But we didn't complain when he kept us in the pink, did we? His brothers didn't complain when they came back from the war without anything and he set them up in business.

I had to steel myself to enter the room where she was lying (as I knew she'd be) in a state of excessive mourning. Pressing handkerchiefs to her eyes, moaning and groaning. She looked up at me, but she didn't speak. Daniel said, “Hold her hand,” but I could barely bring myself to touch her, because I blamed her. Just as she blamed me. Within minutes she had started, “Your circumstances...”

I glanced at all the people in the room, my relatives who had not been allowed to mention my name for the past year or so. I allowed her to rant about how I had left the law and was living in poverty, how I had married out of the faith, but I knew she was blowing off her own steam and none of this had anything to do with my father. She had little effect on me. I would not hold her hand. As soon as she had done I turned on my heel and left the room. Daniel, of course, followed me and remonstrated.

“Could you not show a little more love than that? To a bereaved widow who also happens to be your mother?”

“Since I hold her responsible for this suicide, I am showing considerable restraint.”

“Rubbish. His business failed. Nobody can afford fancy hats anymore since the war ended. He gambled on the dogs. He augmented his income for years that way you know. He had a complicated system worked out. But in the end you always lose. He became bankrupt, and he couldn't face telling the world.”

“She limited him to the role of breadwinner. If he failed at that, he was nothing. She despised him and made us despise him.”

Daniel leaned on a chair and smiled indulgently. That look of his drives me mad.

“I think it was as important for his ego to be wealthy as it was for hers. They were still living as wealthy people. He pretended he was rich.”

I couldn't pursue this track. My mind leapt from image to image without control. “Madelyn said he seemed sad when he visited us in Evercreech. I expect he wanted to help us and couldn't, and this depressed him.”

“Oh, so now you're feeling guilty? I wouldn't, these things are so complicated. Personally, I think if he'd fought in the First World War instead of hiding to avoid the draft, he would never have committed suicide.”

So you see Madelyn, everybody has their theories, according to what they want to believe. At least I wonder if I had some part of the blame, unlike dear mother, who apparently went into hysterics when they told her. Even if she denies her culpability in the attitude of her sons — two bright boys putting their father down
— some part of her must be aware that she has spent the past years groaning about reductions to her extravagant way of life. She knows she might have helped him. Maybe if she'd tried, things would have been different. Whereas for me, I must live my life the way I am destined to — I was meant to marry you, and I was not born or raised to be happy in an occupation like the law. Ironic, really. They were so ambitious for their children. They envisioned a new world for them. My mother says that Father told her it was the happiest day in his life when I got my degree at Cambridge.

I will join you in Newcastle after the funeral. What do you say to moving to London?

Love Sam

P.S. My darling, I fear that the wound has been patched, even though it hemorrhages ever more heavily within. I'm afraid we will have to see my mother from time to time, now.

For the first few days Sam seemed to need to talk about his father all the time, while the whole family listened with sympathy. Not the dark stuff hinted at in the letter but pleasanter memories. He told them how skilled his father was at games and how they would have enjoyed playing bridge with him. He described their long Sunday walks, just the father and his sons, and the pleasure Frank got from exploring twisty country roads. His shyness. He launched into anecdotes out of the blue, in the middle of a bridge game or after a question about an entirely different subject.

“My father, Daniel and I used to take the train to different rural destinations for our Sunday outings. I used to set off with father, who got up at least an hour earlier than Daniel, prepared a nice breakfast and walked leisurely to the train. He would get there ten minutes early, buy a newspaper and find himself a corner seat facing the direction the train was travelling in. Putting his coat on the seat beside him to reserve it for Daniel, he'd look at his watch.

“‘Just right,' he would say to me.

“Just as the train began to chug out of the station, Daniel would come flying through the barrier with his coat half-buttoned and his cap askew, leaping towards a door and clinging like a monkey. A few minutes later he'd plop into the seat Dad had saved for him, sweating and gasping for air.

“Then he'd turn to father and say, ‘Just right.'”

Madelyn was dying to know the details of the suicide. Although she recognized that this was macabre curiosity, she felt it was natural. So after several days of endless tea and sympathetic expressions, she raised the subject.

“Don't talk about this if you don't want to, Sam, but I was just wondering about … the day it happened. Who found him and how were they sure it was suicide and everything.”

“What, do you think it was murder? An anti-Semitic killing, maybe?”

“No, of course not.” Madelyn could not credit that he was serious. Everything seemed to lead back to that bloody Jewish stuff, even subjects that couldn't possibly have a connection. Would this be so throughout their marriage? “I didn't mean it like that. It's just base curiosity, never mind. ”

Sam reacted with generous expansiveness, as he always did whenever she admitted to a weakness. “At the end of his workday he walked to the train station with one of his employees. Then he told him he'd forgotten something and had to go back to the factory. The next day they found him. He had shot himself, and he had a letter to his wife clasped in his hand, thanking her for thirty wonderful years.”

Madelyn went over and knelt in front of her husband, looking up into his face earnestly.

“When he saw us together he knew we possessed the potential to be happy. That made him feel better, Sam. He could feel our love.”

Sam stroked her face tenderly, “Do you know how many people have told me that we have one of the best marriages they've ever seen?”

“Who told you that?”

“People at Cambridge, Philip. Our neighbours in Evercreech.”

“We do have something. Love. That's what your father saw.”

After the first few days of outpouring, Sam never mentioned his father again.

TWENTY

M
y mouth and throat are so dry from reading out loud that frequent sips of beer are no longer helping. My own discomfort forces me to stop for a minute, and I look over at my father. He is fast asleep. Next I glance at my watch, which informs me that it's two in the morning. I have been reading for hours. Instant transfusion of guilt. What type of selfishness allows a son to get so involved in mere words that he forgets the needs of his dying flesh and blood father?

A dose of anxiety closely follows guilt transfusion. Am I supposed to carry him to bed? I don't think I can, nor, God help me, do I want to. The act of hoisting him in my arms would wake him up anyway, so why not just wake him up and escort him to bed? Or just wake him up and assume he can get himself there by himself, as he has every evening of his life? Or just go to bed myself and assume that he's comfortable enough where he is?

Either the cessation of my drone or the onslaught of my worries pierces my father's consciousness. He gives a snort and opens his eyes. I don a facetious smile.

“I'm afraid it's late. I lost track of time.”

My father lurches heavily to his feet and staggers towards the door. I prepare to face a night of torture wondering if he was too furious to even say good night, but luckily he turns at the door. “Same place, same time tomorrow night.”

“It's a date.”

The following evening finds us ensconced in our chairs. I can't help wondering how similar this position is to the two facing chairs in Evercreech. I flip to the next section with trembling hands — I have been waiting for this all day — and begin to read.

“Wait a minute. What about my father's death?”

“I've read that already. Maybe you'd already fallen asleep.” Surely he wasn't going to ask me to read that whole section again?

“You must have encountered my marks, since you seem to have covered a vast number of pages?”

“Marks? Yes, I think I did see some marks.”

My father slams his beer down on the table, scattering froth. “Those marks indicate that I have something to add! The whole fucking point of this exercise is to give me a chance to input, despite your blatant disinterest!”

Why does it sound so awful when my father says fuck? I say it all the time. “But father, I thought we were reading it together so you could give input as I read, rather than waiting for me to come up with questions.”

“If you'd noticed that I was asleep, maybe you would have reached the conclusion that I was unable to initiate input.”

“I'm sorry.” I didn't want to have an unpleasant argument, nor admit that I got so caught up in the manuscript that I balked at interruptions for tedious justifications. “Let's talk about the marks now.” I start to flip the pages back, skimming the margins for the first mark of yesterday's lengthy reading session. And back and back. Jesus, he couldn't have been asleep this long.

“Umm, there's a mark beside her conversation with the taxi driver when she's in labour. She suggests you let her go to the hospital alone because you wanted a good night's sleep.”

“Unpleasant conjecture. Husbands weren't invited into the delivery room then like they are now. They had no part in the process.”

“I expect she wanted you to go with her, anyway.”

“Then she should have said that. It is evident from her manuscript that I was overcome with excitement when she told me she was in labour. It just didn't enter my head that I should accompany her to the hospital, where I assumed she'd be whisked into a room with a large ‘Husbands Keep Out' sign. I certainly wasn't thinking about getting a good night's sleep — I doubt I slept at all that night.”

“I get your point.” I hope there aren't too many marks. I just want to get on with the manuscript. The ‘whys' screeching in my head from the moment I received the fax ‘
Dying, would like to see you again'
were poised: clarification was imminent. The sense of anxiety that always permeated our house when I was growing up, the anger when my mother died because I felt he had ruined her life, the fact that I hadn't seen him for eighteen years. Why? It's like something momentous has been forgotten, and the manuscript is about to enlighten me. My father's elaborate explanations and justifications feel like a deterrent to this goal. I know he wants me to understand him, but I'm more interested in understanding myself. At the same time I'm totally aware that I must hide this and listen patiently. This is important to him, and he is dying.

I find the next mark. “When she comes home after giving birth, she's not too impressed by the cot and stuff, because they're old. I think I know why you marked this, because you'd gone to a lot of trouble to get everything for the new baby and she wasn't appreciative?”

“She was relentlessly negative all the time. I could have made hundreds of marks in this manuscript, and pointed out hundreds of occasions in our married life not mentioned here, where she destroyed my efforts with useless disapproval. She undermined my desire to make her happy and then blamed me when I ceased to try.”

“Well, dissatisfied men bellow and dissatisfied women freeze you out with silent disapproval. That's a pretty typical man-woman interaction, isn't it?” I say, already flipping to the next mark.

“Are you getting this? Is there any point in doing this?”

My hand jerks. “What?”

“You act like you just want to get this over with.”

“Really? I don't mean to, but your points aren't very complex. There're pretty obvious, actually. I do know you both, and I can imagine you rushing around getting everything ready, proud of yourself. And I can imagine Mum wanting brand new stuff.” I remember how Jenny advised me to remain neutral, as though I were witnessing a clinical experiment rather than being set up as some type of judge.

“I'm not just talking about this incident, but about an entire aspect of our relationship which isn't covered in this book. She was consistently negative, about the places I found to rent or buy, about our cars, in fact about most of my choices. It was impossible for me to differentiate between what mattered and what was just a daily bitch session. She has selected specific incidents for this manuscript, in order to paint a picture of a man who ignored her needs. But it wasn't like that. A new cot was a worthless desire, moving out of Farmer Brown's house was a need, but her discontent was equally great in each case, so I learned to dismiss all her feelings as unimportant.”

“At the beginning she didn't paint you like that. She said you had noble ideals and loved her.”

“You're referring to our Cambridge days, before our marriage? That was different. I was noble and she was a beautiful saint. A saint never bitches. Can't you see how things deteriorated over time?”

I wrack my brains for something to say that will show that I have absorbed his point and agree with it, even though I think the manuscript does struggle to put Sam's actions in perspective. I sit there nodding for so long that he tells me to find the next mark. Relieved, I comply.

“There's a mark beside her comment ‘We are all beautiful people,' when you tell her she's talking rot, in the pub after she came back from Newcastle and you failed to meet her train.”

“Yes. Her feelings as she waits are described poignantly. And then her efforts to reconcile with me — despite the fact that the transgression was mine — followed by a chat with Louise where she fears I love her less. There is something dishonest about all of this. Mummy knew that I was abjectly dependent on her at the time, terrified that she would stop loving me and I'd lose her. She knew I hated her going away and suffered while she was gone, sure she was enjoying herself more than she did with me. I made it clear before she left that she must come back in time, and I tortured myself over whether to meet her or not. I wanted to hurt her like she had hurt me by her brief telegram. That is not a noble sentiment, but it doesn't put me irrevocably in the wrong. I think she knew it too, hence her efforts towards reconciliation.

“As for the ‘Don't talk such rot' conversation, I don't remember it. I do recall that she often maintained frigid silences lasting for days and indeed created an unwelcoming home for the most trivial of reasons. If she was trying to be nice here and I rejected her efforts, it just proves that she knew she was in the wrong.”

“I wouldn't say she was in the wrong,” I answer, goaded into abandoning my ‘absorb, listen and keep quiet' rule. “You were always trying to control her.” I flip through the manuscript. “Here, just after she becomes pregnant and you leave, telling her you expect her to be a bigger person when you return. Or after your marriage when you say, ‘We'll see who wears the pants in this family. ' Or saying ‘That'll teach you' when you didn't meet the train.”

“I've explained the train episode! I was fearful she would start buggering off whenever she felt like it, because everywhere else was so much better than being with me…”

“So you wanted to control her.”

“I didn't want her to disappear for as long as she felt like without talking it over with me. And the time I told her to be a bigger person — she was going on and on about me leaving law. She had no understanding of the cutthroat side of the profession. She was only thinking of the money. It seemed such a base way of looking at things — this profession pays more so you should do it, even if you hate it. I have deep reservations about the shady side of the law, the wheeling dealing and dishonesty. I don't think I could have succeeded as a lawyer. I have never met a principled man among them. Yes, it's true, I wanted her to have the same attitude towards money as me. I wanted her to accept me whether I was a lumberjack or a lawyer. Is that so bad?”

“And the ‘We'll see who wears the pants in this family' comment?”

“I have nothing to say about that. It was a rotten thing to say on our wedding night. I don't recall the incident, so I don't know why I was in such a foul mood. I would like to leave it at that, but again I must remind you that the events chosen in this manuscript are hand picked. If it were my manuscript, I would write about how I was brought up thinking yelling and arguing were healthy, normal forms of expression. How everyone in my family fought freely. Then I would recount how my wife maintained frozen silences for days if I raised my voice during an argument. Weeks would pass without any communication other than disapproving looks, because I had dared to do what it was normal for me to do. I would insinuate that she was trying to control me, by forcing me to abandon the behaviour I'd imbibed with my breast milk.”

My father sighs and supports his heavy head in his hands. “This is so exhausting, and also so pointless. Who cares anymore, these silly things we did to hurt and control each other? Our lives could have been so different. I did love her. I still do. I have never loved anybody else.”

“You said a couple of nights ago that you have suffered from your mistakes and wish you could start the marriage over and do it differently, remember? I understand that that is what you really feel — and you are being forced into self-justification when you counter the details in the manuscript.”

“I did some terrible things; the worst when I was drinking. Speaking of which, let me refill your glass.”

I jiggle my leg on my knee until he returns and then ignore the glass of beer and start to read. Finally.