The Clutter Corpse

by Simon Brett

  It was a punishing routine, but once the material was in the cab, the rest of the day was his own. So, by half past ten, Oliver would be having his first drink of the day. Red wine, always red wine. If I was there, by eleven we’d be in bed, making love.

  Compared to my earlier fumblings – and experiences with Philip – I couldn’t believe how good sex was with Oliver. I think it was the first time I fully understood the meaning of the word ‘consensual’. There was no competition, no one was trying to score points over anyone, it was just a process of mutual exploration and pleasure. Skin on skin. You know when it feels right.

  Fleur accused me of deliberately getting pregnant with Jools, and though I hotly denied the charge, there may have been a grain of truth in it. I certainly wasn’t upset when I missed my period. I think I thought that everything was so perfect, having a child together would bind us even closer. I thought I could encompass Oliver with love, protect him against his dark moments, create the kind of nurturing family atmosphere that neither of us had ever had the pleasure of enjoying.

  I had certainly not anticipated his reaction to the news. I held back till I’d missed a couple of periods and done a pregnancy test. I was very joyful when I told him.

  He wasn’t. It was the first time he ever shouted at me. And it all came out. His family’s history of depression, his own battles with negativity and self-loathing from his teens onwards. His encounters with psychiatrists and medication. His despair when nothing seemed to work.

  He also spoke in more detail about his previous relationships and how few of the women could cope with the volatility caused by his depression. He then got on to the two marriages. One had ended because the wife finally said, ‘I didn’t sign up for this to become a psychiatric nurse.’

  And the issue that broke the other marriage was children. The wife wanted them; Oliver didn’t. I’ll never forget the words he said to me, newly pregnant. ‘People like me should never have children. It’s irresponsible to risk passing this illness down to another generation.’

  Oliver wanted me to abort the baby. I refused. I argued that any child we produced would have at least half of its genetic inheritance from me. And I had never felt more positive in my life. My good blood would flush away his bad blood.

  The pregnancy would have been a happy time for me, were it not for the extremes of mood that I saw Oliver going through. I’d never met a depressive before, and myself had not suffered from anything worse than bad temper. Those moods of mine came on furiously and fast and vanished as quickly. I always found anger therapeutic. Oliver almost never expressed anger against anyone else. He turned it inward, inflicted the pain on himself.

  I got to recognize the signs. He would go quiet; he would avoid eye contact. He’d go through patches of hardly sleeping at all, alternating those with sleep so deep as almost to be comatose. Sometimes I literally had to drag him out of bed and sit him behind his drawing board. I’d go through the papers with him, never pointing out subjects that I thought might make good strips but helping him to find them on his own.

  Then, depression subsumed in concentration, he would put in a couple of manic hours to produce the artwork. Whatever his mood, he never missed a deadline. How he achieved that before he had me there in bed to nudge him into action, I did not know. Perhaps I didn’t want to know. Because the answer was probably that he had had someone else there in bed to nudge him into action.

  The pregnancy was blessedly uncomplicated. Towards the end of it, Oliver became positively excited about the prospect of being a father. He insisted on being in the Labour Ward with me, and I’d never seen such radiant happiness in his face than when he first held Jools (then Juliet) in his arms.

  He never put it into words, but I think it was the first time in his life that Oliver had felt undiluted love. From hints and half-stories he told me, all of his adult relationships had been complex. The one he had with me was probably the simplest, but even there he found and talked endlessly about imagined problems. If I hadn’t been so convinced of the rightness of our being together, I don’t think we would have survived.

  His love for our baby, though, was instinctive and – to use a word later to feature a lot in my life – uncluttered.

  The first year of Juliet’s life was one of the happiest of my own. The narrowboat was an idyllic home for a relatively immobile baby. Very gradually, without upsetting the way Oliver liked things to be, I cleared the chaos in which he had grown to live. I suppose the boat was my first exercise in decluttering. I changed the curtains for something brighter, then moved on to the bed linen and towels. For his forty-third birthday, I had some of Oliver’s original artwork framed, and hung those on the walls. I ensured that there were always flowers on the tables. I added, I suppose, what, even in these enlightened times, would be called ‘a woman’s touch’.

  Oliver’s work was going well. The Teddy Blair strip was syndicated in more newspapers, and its success led to him being commissioned to create another daily cartoon series. This, Riq and Raq (short for Raquel), was about the hazards for a young couple negotiating urban life with a small child. It was about us, actually. Because it was based more on domestic trends than on the day’s news, the pressure was less. Oliver could actually stockpile strips. On a good day, having delivered his Teddy Blair, he could produce half a dozen Riq and Raqs. Then he’d take a few days off to spend playing with Juliet, an activity of which neither of them ever seemed to tire.

  Developing technology also made Oliver’s work easier. After a shaky start, he soon got into drawing straight on to the computer, which made last-minute changes much easier. And email meant that he no longer had to send his precious sole copy of the artwork off in a taxi.

  To my surprise, he allowed me to take over the management of our finances. I taught myself how to do it – and the experience of running that very small business certainly helped when I set up SpaceWoman. It also made me realize just how much Oliver was making. Previously, he knew he had money, but was never quite sure where it was. Everything went into his current account. And twice a year, there’d be a panic when the tax demand arrived.

  I reorganized that, separating our domestic account from the business one and adding a savings account to deal with tax bills. Later, I made the business into a limited company. Riq and Raq was getting syndicated extensively by then, and there was a lot more coming in. We had a very nice lifestyle.

  Given his two previous experiences of the state, I was very careful never to mention the subject of marriage. But, to my delight, when Juliet was about six months old, Oliver asked me to marry him. His approach was characteristically apologetic. He said that he hadn’t really got anything to offer any woman, that he had a bad track record with relationships, that the depression was liable to return at any time, but would I consider screwing up my life on a permanent basis by becoming his wife?

  I was ecstatic, envisioning all the church and white dress imagery which I had always pretended didn’t interest me. But it soon became clear that Oliver didn’t want anything too public. His first wedding had had all the ecclesiastical bells and whistles. The second had been a smaller-scale event at a registry office, but with everyone dressing up and a reception at a swish hotel afterwards. Ours he wanted to be even lower key than that. Registry office again, but only a couple of friends there as witnesses.

  I can’t pretend I wasn’t disappointed, but I swallowed down the feelings, unexpressed. I was, after all, about to be married to the man I adored. That was all that mattered.

  Fleur Bonnier’s disappointment was more overtly expressed. A big wedding was, for her, just another stage to dominate. And not even to be invited to her only child’s wedding was, to her mind, a slap in the face.

  I mitigated the offence by organizing a dinner in a restaurant soon after, for just me and Oliver, my mother and her current paramour, a rather wooden actor who had had a small part in Blake’s 7. Since Fleur not only went on about not being invited to the registry office, but also
had got to the snappy, coming-up-to-the-end-of-the-relationship stage with her lover, it wasn’t a great evening.

  But Oliver and I were married. We had Juliet. That was all that mattered.

  I won’t say the depression disappeared during those early years, but it was better. Oliver’s dark moods didn’t last so long. Most of the time he was on a pretty even keel. Even at his lowest, his devotion to Juliet gave him something to live for.

  I remember some people asked if I felt jealous about my husband’s overwhelming love for our daughter, and I could honestly say that I never did. We were all part of that love.

  Oliver told me many times that the depression hadn’t gone away, never would go away for good. It was always lurking there, ready to ambush him at the least expected moment.

  His illness wasn’t the result of some trauma, like the form suffered by ‘people who write books about depression’, he always said dismissively. They’re always gobsmacked by some adult shock or bereavement which had sent them into a downward spiral. ‘With me,’ he repeated, ‘it’s always been there.’ He reckoned it was genetic, ‘like having red hair’. His mother had suffered badly at a period when the subject wasn’t mentioned, and she’d had to ‘pretend everything was all right all the time’. The tension between how she was feeling and how she had to appear to be feeling was, according to Oliver, what caused her death in her early fifties. His father, a shadowy figure rarely mentioned, was also dead.

  What brought about Oliver’s next collapse, when Juliet was nearly two, was the issue of moving house. The charms of narrowboat living palled when there was an extremely active toddler around. There wasn’t enough room, for a start, and although we had put protective railings and netting all around the boat, I was still in a perpetual state of anxiety about her falling off. London life, so seductive for an untrammelled couple, was less appealing with all the paraphernalia, the troop movements of buggies and folding cots. I wanted to move back to the south coast.

  My first mention of the idea knocked him sideways. He’d never owned any property. The narrowboat, like all his previous homes had been, was rented. The thought of commitment to a mortgage, like the thought of having a child, started a cycle of imagined inadequacies and self-loathing. He kept saying, ‘Suppose we can’t pay it? Suppose the house has to be repossessed? Suppose I had a complete breakdown and couldn’t work? We’d be letting Juliet down horribly.’

  My intimate knowledge of our financial position, and a bit of research into the housing market, had reassured me that, without stretching ourselves to dangerous limits, we could well afford a nice family house in the Chichester area. And Oliver’s income from the cartoons was still rising every year. But, when he was so far down in depression, he was immune to rational argument.

  It was a tough one, but I persevered. As I knew I would, I had to do all the paperwork and negotiation on my own. It took a lot of persuasion to get Oliver to sign the necessary documentation. All he could see ahead was failure and disaster.

  I found the right place, a four-bedroomed house with a garage and large garden, in Funtington, a village some five miles north of Chichester. There was a pub, a nursery and a primary school close enough to walk to. Oliver really tried to share my enthusiasm for the project, but the depression crippled his efforts.

  The shift in his attitude was not as quick as it had been with Juliet’s birth. But, over the first few months of living in the new house, his fears were allayed. None of the disastrous scenarios he had envisaged actually worked out. Again, developing technology helped. Being out of London did not cut off his political sources. Ideas germinated and flourished. People still wanted to employ him. More people wanted to employ him. Emails flew back and forth, commissions started to come in from other countries, including America. To everyone except himself, Oliver Curtis was a major success.

  And, gradually, he relaxed into his new surroundings. He even got the confidence to do something he’d never done before – and turn down work he didn’t want to do.

  My happiness was complete when Oliver, off his own bat, suggested something which I’d been on the verge of mentioning for months. He said that we should have another child.

  Ben was born nine months to the day after the suggestion was made. From the start, he was adorable. Juliet was so proud of her new brother and loved him just as much as his parents did.

  And, as Juliet and Ben grew older, I would show them the framed cartoons in the hall and tell them what a clever Daddy they had.

  The years that followed, with Oliver working from home, sharing the upbringing of our two children in the Funtington house, were the happiest of my life.

  FOURTEEN

  When I first found out about Oliver’s depression, my youthful, optimistic, can-do attitude made me determined to find a cure for it. I read a lot of books on the subject (‘depression porn’, he called them) and, as the internet developed, looked up more and more stuff online.

  He didn’t discourage me. He monitored my efforts with a kind of weary patience. He had tried most recommended solutions and, though some had brought respite to the condition, none had eradicated it. After a few months, the depression always returned.

  But it wasn’t there all the time. From the moment of our first encounter, Oliver remained the funniest person I have ever met. The children soon caught on to his sense of humour, and our house rang with frequent laughter. I don’t think that, during their childhood years, they were aware of his illness. All right, Dad sometimes went quiet for a while, but such behaviour was just another mystery of adult life.

  He, on the other hand, worried continuously about them. Were they showing signs of depression? Had the dire prediction, which had prevented him from having children before, been realized? I was so genuinely unafraid of this outcome that it did not cause me a moment’s anxiety. Juliet and Ben were just like other kids. Yes, they had moods and threw tantrums – usually when they didn’t get their own way – but showed no signs of anything that wasn’t normal (how much Oliver and I argued about the definition of that word).

  Looking back on events in life, it is often difficult to pinpoint why they happened. Rarely is there one single factor responsible. Effects arise out of a tangle of causes.

  I was busy and perhaps didn’t notice the more permanent shift in Oliver’s mood. While the children were there, I had got quite involved in the local primary. I did a lot of one-to-one reading with the slower pupils. We were well enough off for me to do that as a volunteer.

  But the hours mounted up and, after Juliet moved on to the comprehensive in Chichester, I found myself involved in more and more school activities. I liked the fact that I was near Ben. I’d see him in the course of the day, smiling, laughing with his mates, half proud and half embarrassed that his mum was on school premises.

  Oliver’s work wasn’t going so well. Obviously, the topicality of the Teddy Blair strip was long gone. Riq and Raq survived longer, but that kind of social satire dates quickly, and soon younger cartoonists, more in tune with the contemporary zeitgeist, took over the slot. Oliver Curtis was still a name to be reckoned with in the world of cartoonists. He was often called on for book illustration and one-off commissions, but the regular bread-and-butter continuity of work had gone.

  Oliver blamed himself for this. Whatever he had once had, he had lost it. Maybe he’d never had anything in the first place. Maybe he’d just got lucky by being in the right place at the right time. He was in his fifties. There were few comebacks in the cartoon world for people of that age.

  I argued these points with him endlessly until, frankly, I got quite bored with them. It is very tiring telling someone so often that the apocalypse is not about to arrive.

  I reassured him about our financial situation, too. Though I say it myself, I had managed our money well. The mortgage on the house had been paid off early, and I had made some shrewd investments in shares and pensions. I kept assuring Oliver that, even if he never earned anything else, we wouldn’t have to chang
e our lifestyle. Such arguments did not comfort him. He saw the diminution of work offers as his own fault.

  His relationship with Juliet also changed. Inevitably, when she started having periods and turning to spotty bolshiness, she could no longer be Daddy’s little girl. Like most teenagers, she turned against her parents. For me, with whom there had always been a spikiness, that was not such a big deal. But for Oliver, Jools’s unwillingness to be hugged was devastating.

  I have relived the moment so many times, trying and failing to make sense of it, wondering what I could have done to change the outcome, but I have found no answers.

  In retrospect, I should have noticed that Oliver had seemed perkier the few days before. But I was cheered rather than worried by that. I thought he was at last coming out of his latest, long, persistent depression.

  It was lunchtime. I’d spent the morning doing my remedial reading at the primary school. I waved to Ben as I left the playground. He grinned at me. Juliet was at school in Chichester.

  The unanswering silence in the house when I called out told me something was wrong.

  I found Oliver in the garage. He’d very efficiently attached a hosepipe to the exhaust, fed it back into the car and switched on the engine. The fumes in the enclosed space choked me too, my first experience of the choking that was to haunt so many dreams. That terrible smell of petrol.

  Oliver was dead.

  He hadn’t left a note. There was no need to. He knew I’d know the reason. He just couldn’t fight the self-hatred any more.