Saving Grace

by Jane Green

  Grace has always loved food. She loves lemon and almond cake and chocolate mousse and apple pie, and roast beef and sizzling pork sausages, and melting fondues. She has always indulged, never overindulging, which is perhaps the secret to her remaining svelte. Everything in moderation, she has always said, and by everything she meant real butter, real sugar, real food, lovingly prepared.

  Now, all she can think about is junk food. The very foods she has spent her life avoiding. She is filled with blind cravings that are all-consuming, that are all she can think about. She has made furtive trips to Northvale, to food outlets where she can indulge her cravings. She orders six doughnuts, figuring she will eat one and give the others to Ted and Beth. She finishes the first, barely tasting it, then sits in the car, unable to think of anything but the remaining doughnuts. Whatever willpower she might have had for the past twenty years has disappeared. The doughnuts do not have a chance against her insatiable hunger, and sure enough, they do not last five minutes, let alone the ride home.

  Bread. Cheese. Cookies. Anything salty, crunchy or sweet. She is terrified about putting on weight, has spent her entire life ensuring her weight never changes, her dress size remains exactly the same as when she first married Ted, but nothing seems to matter in the face of her starvation.

  Tonight they are going to Sybil’s for dinner. Sighing, Grace thinks about cancelling it, as she has cancelled just about everything they were supposed to do during the last few weeks.

  The thought of getting out of bed, getting dressed in anything other than a robe, doing her hair and makeup, is too exhausting to even contemplate, but it is just Sybil and Fred, and she won’t have to make too much of an effort.

  Downstairs she makes herself strong black coffee, looking outside the window to see the dogs scampering around Beth’s feet as she walks up the path that leads to the barn.

  Good. She doesn’t have to see Beth. She doesn’t have to see anyone. She doesn’t want to see anyone, wants just to climb back into bed, pull the covers up and sleep.

  The coffee gives her something of a boost, enough to get her back up the stairs and into her wardrobe, where she pulls out a loose sweater and linen drawstring trousers.

  She doesn’t have a hope in hell of getting into her tight clothes, that much she knows, hanging the trousers and sweater on a hook while she goes in to shower.

  Grace can’t look at herself in the mirror naked anymore and dares not step on the scales. She suddenly has breasts – breasts! – and a stomach that no amount of sucking in can hide. She is terrified of how much she has put on, even though Frank keeps saying this too, along with the tiredness, shall pass.

  I must have put on three stone, she thinks. Too much to think about. Certainly a reason to stay far away from the scales, terrified of what they would say. She had hoped the Metformin would make a difference to her appetite, a difference to her weight, but so far there has been no difference at all. Frank had mentioned another pill, Topamax, which Grace wanted to try immediately, desperate for anything to stop this ravenous hunger, but Frank doesn’t do anything quickly.

  ‘I’m putting you on Lexapro as well,’ he says. ‘And we’ll see how that goes. You have to give these medications a chance to work,’ he says.

  ‘How long?’ Grace pleads.

  ‘Let’s try it for a month.’

  He cannot hear the wail of anguish inside her body and chooses to ignore the look of horror in her eyes.

  ‘Grace,’ he has said more than once, his voice gentle. ‘I want you to focus on the good that the Depakote is doing. Look at how calm you’ve been. Look at how stable your moods have been. You’ve been sleeping all night, and all in all I’d say you’re in a much better place. I want you to acknowledge that, Grace. It’s very easy for you to slip into binary thinking, for you to focus only on the bad, but it’s really important for you to see the good that it’s doing.’

  ‘But I’m not just sleeping at night,’ Grace said. ‘I’m sleeping all the time. I can’t get out of bed.’

  ‘What I’ve just given you should change that. And if it doesn’t, we’ll give something else a try.’

  For someone who has resisted taking medication her entire life, Grace has succumbed to the will of Frank Ellery surprisingly quickly. He is a wonderful listener. He is, she can tell, quite brilliant. And clearly wise.

  As he said himself, who is she to question him?

  Showered, her hair blow-dried Grace slips the sweater over her head, aghast at how this loose, flowing Eskandar sweater has now become – oh God, please say this is a dry-cleaning mistake, or a washing mistake, or some kind, any kind, of mistake – tight.

  It is tight. There is no mistaking it. Not skin-tight, but tight enough to show her curves, and since when did she have curves? It looks terrible. There’s no way she can wear it tonight.

  She pulls her trousers on – the biggest ones she owns, cinching in the waist with the drawstring every time she has worn them in the past, liking how baggy they are, how they flatter her.

  They pull up, but they no longer cinch in. Her legs still seem . . . normal, but this excess weight she has suddenly gained has all gone, she now realizes, to her stomach. Her taut, flat, hard stomach is now extended to the point where Grace actually realizes she could almost pull off being pregnant.

  She looks tubby. Grace, who has never been anything other than reed thin, looks tubby, as, from the corner of the bathroom, the scales begin to taunt her.

  No, she thinks. I will not weigh myself. I cannot weigh myself. From now on I’m just not going to give in to the cravings. I’m going to stop eating flour and sugar once again, and this weight will go.

  I can do it. I’ve always done it. I am stronger than the cravings and I’m going to start now.

  LEMON AND ALMOND CAKE

  INGREDIENTS

  2 lemons

  240g butter

  150g sugar

  4 large eggs, beaten

  40g all-purpose flour

  130g ground almonds or almond flour

  1 teaspoon almond extract

  2 tablespoons icing sugar

  Preheat oven to 180°C/gas mark 4.

  Put the whole lemons in a pan, cover with water, bring to the boil, and simmer for an hour, or nuke in water in the microwave for around 25 minutes, until soft. Cut lemons in half, remove pips, and puree in food processor with skin, pith and all. This gives the cake an intense lemony flavour.

  Cream butter and sugar together until almost white. Beat in eggs, one at a time, adding flour 1 tablespoon at a time.

  Gently stir in almonds, almond extract and lemon mixture.

  Pour into a greased 9-inch springform cake tin, bottom lined with parchment paper.

  Bake for ½ hour, then cover with foil and bake for a further ½ hour.

  Cool on a wire rack, and when cool, decorate with icing sugar sprinkled through a sieve, and some additional lemon zest.

  Twenty-one

  ‘Grace! Ted!’ Sybil flings her arms around Grace, then Ted, welcoming them into her house, taking them straight into the kitchen where she immediately starts pouring a glass of Ted’s favourite red wine.

  ‘I miss you!’ Sybil links her arm through Grace’s as they walk, Ted in front of them. ‘I feel like I haven’t seen you in weeks. What’s going on?’

  Grace hasn’t shared her diagnosis with anyone. She feels, most of the time, locked down with shame at having bipolar disorder. When she isn’t feeling humiliated and ashamed at being crazy – for it is hard to think of this in any way other than being crazy – she is sceptical.

  I don’t have a mental illness, she tells herself.

  ‘I don’t have a mental illness,’ she tells Frank Ellery, who tells her not to think of it as a mental illness, but as a way to explain some of her mood swings.

  The thought of telling anyone other than her family that she is bipolar – and whatever her shrink said, she thinks of it as something she is, not something she has – fills her with horror, and yet s
he isn’t sure this is something she can do alone. Sybil is her closest friend and she knows there is something going on. Their cosy last-minute lunches have come to a grinding halt, Grace having no energy to go out to lunch, no desire to go out in the world and be seen, particularly feeling as awful as she now does, having gained the weight she has.

  ‘Look at me.’ She unlinks her arm from Sybil and steps back, gesturing at her body with a frown. ‘The reason you haven’t seen me is because I seem to have crawled into my fridge and stayed there for the past six weeks.’

  Sybil hoots. ‘About damned time there was some flesh on those bones.’ She peers at Grace closely. ‘So you’re no longer a size eight. So what? The question is, why have you crawled into the fridge these past few weeks, and why have you disappeared from life? I keep showing up at Harmont House and finding Beth there dropping off food and you’re not in the kitchen, and everyone’s missing your lessons, and Beth won’t tell me anything other than you’re busy.’

  Grace breathes an inward sigh of relief. Whatever reservations she may have had about Beth, hearing this, her discretion, her loyalty soothes Grace’s soul.

  ‘Shall we go into the living room?’ Grace says. ‘I have to tell you privately.’

  ‘Is this really bad?’ The colour has drained from Sybil’s face.

  ‘No! No! I’m not ill. Well, not cancer or anything like that.’

  ‘Oh, thank God!’ Sybil breathes. ‘Let me just grab a couple of glasses of wine and we’ll go and sit down. I’ll tell the boys to leave us alone for a few.’

  Minutes later, Grace takes a deep breath, unsure of how to tell her best friend, terrified it will change things, push Sybil away, frighten her. Terrified that she, Grace, has spent her entire life striving for perfection, has built her life on presenting an image of being able to do everything, and yet all the time there has been this glaring flaw, a flaw that, once people discover it, will make everything else a sham.

  Perfection. Grace isn’t even sure when she decided she had to be perfect in the eyes of the world, only that the thought of being seen as imperfect, flawed, broken, makes her instantly ashamed.

  Her childhood was chaos. When Beth spoke of her own childhood, the alcoholism, the drama, Grace said nothing, unwilling to reveal secrets she has spent her whole life trying to bury.

  It was her mother who was the cause of all the chaos. Her mother, who could be the warmest, sweetest, most loving woman in the world, but who would then turn, in the blink of an eye, into a vicious, punitive, shrieking wreck.

  Her mother, who made Grace’s home unsafe, who created an environment in which walking on eggshells became the norm; where Grace learned to walk into a room and instantly take the temperature, judge who she was supposed to be and, how she was supposed to behave in order to try and keep the peace, try and allay her mother’s rages.

  She has been talking about this a lot with Frank Ellery. Grace has spent her whole life believing her mother’s mood swings, her bipolar disorder, was due to her drinking, but Frank has begged to differ. This is the missing genetic component, he says. This is where her mother’s drinking came from, and indeed where Grace’s own bipolar disorder comes from; just as he is not wrong about Grace, nor is he wrong about her mother.

  They have talked endlessly about her childhood. Grace tried so hard to be perfect, convinced that if she was, if she cleaned up after her mother, if she took the place of the grown-up in the family, then everything would be fine.

  If she was perfect, no one would judge her, or blame her, or shame her.

  She couldn’t wait to leave home, moved across the Atlantic to get away from her family, convinced that as soon as she got away everything would be fine and she could leave all her problems behind. The curse of perfectionism followed her to this country and has stayed with her all these years.

  Which is why it is so hard to sit here as she does now, ashamed of the weight she has gained, feeling she is no longer good enough, humiliated at not being able to manage her life in the way that has always come so easily to her.

  The Grace that sits here today is vulnerable, and being vulnerable, Grace knows from her childhood, means she will get hurt. Being vulnerable means she will be screamed at, diminished, told she is stupid, ugly, incapable of doing anything right.

  Being vulnerable, in Grace’s eyes, means weakness, and she has spent her whole life pretending to be strong. Building this perfect life with the bestselling author Ted Chapman, telling the world their great love story, hosting elaborate parties that are frequently featured in magazines. She has spent her whole life doing this so no one sees that underneath the veneer, the persona, Grace is still the scared little girl she was back in London all those years ago, sinking into the floor as her mother screamed at her, wanting, wishing, to be anywhere other than there.

  Grace takes a deep breath and looks at Sybil. ‘You know I’ve been having a hard time lately? I started seeing a doctor, a psychiatrist, a few months ago, and after a while he told me that there’s a reason for all the . . . mood swings, and lack of sleeping, and losing my temper. Well, you know. All the stuff I’d been going through.’

  Sybil nods. ‘Hormones?’

  ‘Well, no. He’s pretty clear that I have bipolar disorder.’

  There is a shocked silence as Sybil just stares at her.

  ‘What did you just say?’ says Sybil eventually.

  ‘I have bipolar disorder.’

  Sybil just stares at her. ‘I’m sorry,’ Sybil says. ‘Did you just say you have bipolar disorder?’

  ‘Apparently,’ Grace says. ‘I know. I didn’t believe it either.’

  ‘Grace!’ Sybil barks. ‘Bipolar? Are you nuts? I’m sorry, I didn’t mean that. I meant . . . I know someone who’s bipolar and they are cuckoo. You are not cuckoo. In any way, shape, or form. There is no way in hell you’re bipolar. That’s just not true.’

  ‘Syb, there are apparently two kinds of bipolar. I should know. It . . . it runs in my family.’ For a second, Grace thinks about telling Sybil; what a relief it would be to let someone else in on her secret, let someone other than Lydia and Patrick, so far away in England, know the one secret that has always defined her.

  But no. Even with Sybil, who she trusts implicitly, she is only able to be vague, to talk around it

  ‘You never told me.’

  ‘I never told anyone. I don’t talk about it because it’s just too damned painful. But I grew up with it and it’s . . . genetic. But I don’t have exactly the same thing, the kind of bipolar we immediately think of when we hear the term: celebrities going off their meds and suddenly getting caught with prostitutes, or going on mad spending binges, or just being completely manic in every way. That, sadly, was my experience growing up, but apparently there’s another kind, which is what I have. Bipolar two. Which is when you don’t have mania, you have something called hypomania, which is less dramatic, but still bad.’

  ‘I don’t care!’ Sybil is getting in a rage. ‘Hypo, hyper. You don’t have mania. Grace? This is wrong. There’s no way you’re bipolar. I’ve known you for years and this just doesn’t fit. It doesn’t feel right in any part of my body, and you know I would tell you if I thought it did.’

  Grace gives a sad smile. ‘I know. I feel the same way much of the time, but he’s very sure, and I trust him. He’s a psychology professor at Columbia, and up to date on everything that’s happening in the psychiatric world. He was involved in the new DSM . . .’

  ‘DSM?’

  ‘The Diagnostic and Statistic Manual of Mental Disorders. He knows his stuff, Syb. Really. I feel much the same way as you do about this, but I have to trust him.’

  ‘Oh, Grace.’ Sybil’s face starts to crumple. ‘Really? You really think he’s right? He could be head of psychology at Harvard for all I care, but you really think this is a correct diagnosis?’

  ‘Yes. No.’ Grace sighs. ‘Most of the time I don’t, but he says that’s incredibly common. Apparently all newly diagnosed people question
it; we all feel that this is wrong, and that’s when people get into trouble.’

  ‘So . . . what are you doing about it?’

  ‘Other than getting fat? Taking medication. That’s been part of the problem – the weight gain and then this utter exhaustion. Honestly, that’s why you haven’t seen me these past few weeks. No one has seen me. I’ve barely got out of bed.’

  ‘Grace! That’s terrible. You? Not get out of bed? You have more energy than anyone I know!’

  ‘That’s the hypomania, apparently. I certainly don’t have much energy anymore, but he keeps reassuring me that will pass. Everything will supposedly settle down, but it’s really difficult. He’s given me different pills to try and help with the tiredness, and more to try and cut my appetite, because I am starving. Literally, all the time I am hollow with hunger.’

  ‘Do you want some cheese and crackers?’ Concerned, Sybil leans over the coffee table and pulls the tray of cheese closer.

  ‘No, I’m fine,’ Grace says. ‘I’m trying really hard to get back on track. Nothing fits. Honestly, if I wasn’t depressed before, I’m definitely bloody depressed now.’

  ‘Tell me about it,’ says Sybil, slicing a thick chunk of cheese, laying it on a cracker, and slathering it with fig jam. ‘At least you know you can borrow anything of mine, and you’ve got pounds and pounds left before my dresses will fit you. Are you sure you won’t have some cheese?’

  ‘Maybe just a small bit,’ says Grace, reaching for the knife and making herself a cracker of her own.

  ‘Good Lord!’ Ted walks into the living room. ‘Where’s all the cheese?’

  ‘We were hungry,’ says Sybil. ‘Sorry. There’s more in the fridge. Let me go and get it.’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ says Ted. ‘We’re probably better off without it.’ He catches Grace’s eye, and Grace wants the floor to open up and swallow her whole.

  So much for turning over a new leaf.

  Later that evening, when food has been eaten, bottles of wine consumed, conversation and laughter bouncing off the corners of the dining room, Sybil whisks Grace into the kitchen, ostensibly to help her wash up, wanting to talk to her privately.