The Madness of Grief

by Panayotis Cacoyannis

  My father George Hareman, the illusionist, contortionist, magician known as “Mr Magikoo”, fell back in his chair, gathering his arms across his waist. He was twisting and bending his fingers in turn, and it struck me as a wonder that these thick, ungraceful protrusions were as capable of magic as Karl’s.

  ‘How you feel is just words,’ my father told me, ‘but the world out there is ugly, and it doesn’t let you feel just with words.’

  ‘But I don’t,’ I said. ‘I don’t feel just with words. None of us does, it’s not true.’

  And now his heavy shoulders gave an almost imperceptible shrug. ‘I’m feeling that I’m sorry,’ he said. His voice was so leaden that it made me think of “one small step for man”. ‘But it’s no good just being sorry, it isn’t enough.’

  ‘You still want me to go,’ said Jack.

  ‘It’s got nothing to do with wanting.’

  ‘Wanting’s what got us into a mess in the first place, isn’t that right, George?’

  ‘Please, Jack,’ I said. And then with a deliberate movement I returned to my father, craning as I hunched in his direction, trying to claw back his gaze from the floor, smiling when I had it in my grasp. ‘How I feel about Jack is that I’d like you to want him to stay. But you knew that already, I think. Now I also want to tell you how I feel about you.

  ‘I remember enough of the time before we lost mum to know how much you loved her and how much she loved you – how much you loved each other. And I’ve not forgotten, either, all the many things the three of us did together. Happy things I thought I didn’t want to remember, because ever since we lost her you’ve allowed auntie Ada to blame you, even though she’s always known it was unfair. So I blamed you too, but not only because of auntie Ada. I just couldn’t make sense of mum not being here any more, and I wish you’d been able to put me on your knee and let me feel your pain every night, not just on the day she was gone. Jack’s told me about the “one in a million” strike of lightning, and I know you and mum were both happy doing your magic together, so if I say I don’t blame you, it just means that now I know you weren’t to blame. But because I think you need me to, I’ll say I forgive you, because I understand now that everything, even Little Magik Matchstick, was part of the madness of grief. Mine on one side, and then yours and auntie Ada’s, which you said was like a sister’s but I think was like yours.’

  I waited, unsure if what I had just said had been clear. It didn’t seem to have been clear to Jack, who perhaps had been too moved by my almost unconditional exoneration of my father to have even heard, let alone interpreted, what I had attempted to imply about auntie Ada. He was smiling at me fondly, as if to say that even if he and Mia-Mia and my father were all destined to part, some good had already come out of the truth. But what I wanted to know was whether there were parts of the truth that were still being withheld. Regret, gratitude, relief had all passed through my father’s eyes while I spoke; they had brimmed with every emotion at once. But then, at the end of my last sentence they had clouded, becoming illegible again.

  ‘What you and auntie Ada felt, was it the same?’

  ‘Your mum, she was so full of kindness. No one would’ve known that she suspected. And it made Ada happy.’ My father looked suddenly lost in the past, as though snapped into it by those few extra words. ‘She made so many sacrifices, she deserved to be happy.’

  ‘And that’s the secret you’ve wanted to keep. But did you owe auntie Ada a favour? Is that why she still can’t forgive you?’ And when my father’s eyes had narrowed into slits, dark like wet silverfish, I found the courage to ask him. ‘In the past, before mum, did you stop auntie Ada from loving someone else?’

  ‘I don’t understand,’ said Jack, who had again crossed his arms over his chest and was clutching at his neck with the squirm of his twitching long fingers. ‘So we think Ada suspected Mia-Mia was a man, and we know she was fond of your mum. But how did we get from the “one in a million” to this?’

  ‘Stop her?’ My father looked at Jack as he echoed my question, as if to say that it had all gone beyond how we had got there. He ran the fingers of one hand over his baldness, slowly, like he was trying to read the answer in the grain of the stubble on his head.

  ‘Did you?’ I asked him again, wondering if I was pressing him too hard; if I ought to have pressed him at all; if raking up too much of the past was a mistake. I would try and explain to Jack later that I wasn’t really sure how we had got from the “one in a million” to this; that I had heard words I hadn’t known were there until they had been formed and I had given them sound; that these words were faster than my feelings; that my feelings were still holding back, unformed or half-formed in the pit of my stomach; that if they surfaced too quickly they might interfere with the truth; that the truth must have something to do with why auntie Ada, who was not a heartless woman, had lied so heartlessly and for so long.

  My father lowered his eyes, and after bouncing them off Jack he looked at me sideways. ‘I always told her to be who she was, that there was no other way to be happy,’ he said dully, as though to neutralise his words and divest them of meaning, while the fire of the past still smouldered in his eyes.

  Jack’s arms were untangled, and his hands rubbed back and forth against his jeans. He had pulled his chair back (I hadn’t noticed when) and seemed to me so rigid that even the shrill of another harsh sound might break him. It was too hard trying to stay impassive at one corner of a triangle I myself had cut into, pulling one side or another in different directions, away from Jack as likely as towards him. Was I doing this for Jack and my father, or was I doing it for myself? Had I even for a moment thought about consequences, or had this been a pent-up unleashing, one I hardly controlled, of a mere irresponsible child’s impulsive curiosity to find out the truth at all costs? Was there even such a thing as “the truth”? But now that I had started, from this point that we had reached, however we had got there, we needed to reach a conclusion.

  ‘But did you tell her that because there was someone?’

  ‘I always used to tease her, when I was a kid and she was too much of a grown-up…’ Again my father stopped, as though compelled to return to his reverie and let it run its course, where if anywhere the answers to my questions might be found. ‘With dad away, mum couldn’t bear to part with us, she said, so all three of us stayed in London through the war. It was me she couldn’t bear to part with, of course. Well, trying to spoil your child in the middle of a war wasn’t easy, but it was just that bit easier with Ada there to help, by bringing in an extra wage and going without.’ As though weighed down by the burden of memories I hadn’t foreseen, my father bent his head, so deeply that the surface of his baldness reflected the light from the lampshade that hung low over the table. When he lifted it again, I pushed his glass of lemon squash a little closer. He smiled and took a swig. Then he nodded, once, twice, four short nods in all, as if he were readying himself to go on. ‘It wasn’t how I saw things at the time,’ he said, ‘if that counts as any kind of defence.’ And when I had returned his four nods with a more emphatic nod of my own, and Jack had reached half way to touch him but stopped, ‘Then came the end of the war, dad was dead, and so were Ada’s dreams. And I was still the same brat she was picking up from school every day, working for, washing for, always going without for, fattening me up for the grandiose plans your grandma was imagining for me, after imagining nothing for Ada. The same brat who was too much of a coward to tell his idiot friends to quit making fun of his sister as soon as they saw her, just because she looked so old and hadn’t really learned how to fit in. And to smash their faces up if they didn’t.’

  ‘Kids are cruel,’ I said like a grown-up, ‘but they don’t necessarily mean any harm. They call me names too, because they think I’m different from them, but I don’t really care, and I can’t imagine auntie Ada did either.’

  ‘What names?’ my father snapped.

  ‘Silly names,’ I told him, ‘like “bookworm” and
“clever clogs” and “Einstein”.’

  ‘I wouldn’t mind if someone called me “Einstein”,’ said Jack.

  ‘Karl says they think I’m super-clever, but I’m not, and I’m terrible at science. I just read a lot, that’s all.’

  ‘After today, I think we should all call you “Sherlock”,’ said Jack. ‘How old are you again?’

  ‘In December I’ll be seventeen.’

  ‘So sixteen,’ said Jack.

  ‘Does he look out for you, this Karl?’

  ‘We look out for each other.’

  ‘Then you’re both lucky.’ While he tapped his fingers on the table, my father’s eyes were fixed on Jack’s outstretched arm. ‘You were right before, when you said I’d hit someone I loved. The only person in my life I’ve ever hit and it had to be him. But it still doesn’t change how I feel.’

  ‘How you feel?’ If Jack hadn’t asked it already, I would have asked the same question more bluntly. At the heart of what my father had just said lay a brazen contradiction.

  ‘How I feel about the future,’ he answered. ‘We’ve both got to move on.’

  ‘You and “him”, whose name you can’t say,’ said Jack.

  ‘Me and you,’ said my father, raising his gaze to meet Jack’s. ‘We’ve both got to move on, whoever we are.’

  ‘But auntie Ada… Was there someone or not? Was that what you teased her about?’ I interrupted their exchange in the hope that the past might yet salvage even more of the present. Already it had transformed my own feelings for my father, and my perception of him was now marred only by his stubborn refusal to give in to his feelings for Jack, even after admitting he loved him. If there had been no other way to be happy for his sister, why couldn’t he be who he was?

  ‘There was someone, yes. But no, that wasn’t what I teased her about. I used to think she was too shy, with men I mean, and I teased her a lot about that, but she wasn’t really shy, she was just indifferent. Which I realised when I saw how she was with the woman she’d fallen in love with. I never teased her again after that, she was so miserable that I wouldn’t have wanted to add to her hurt.’

  ‘Did the woman know?’ I asked.

  ‘Of course the woman knew, they were as head over heels as each other. They met at the theatre, an amateur performance of Macbeth…’

  ‘“Unsex me now!”’ Jack spoke the words dramatically, before apologising with his undulating hands.

  ‘And afterwards they had a drink, then to some posh hotel where the woman was staying. When Ada came home, she couldn’t help herself, she told me everything. Your grandma was dead by then, and it was just the two of us in that house off the Seven Sisters Road, before I met your mum and we sold it, to buy this house and Ada’s flat in Tufnell Park. But you know why she told me? Because she expected me… because I think she wanted me to tell her she should stop being so disgusting.’

  ‘But you didn’t,’ I said.

  ‘I didn’t, of course not. And later when we all went out for dinner and I saw them together, I told Ada she’d be a fool to break it off. So she carried on seeing her for almost a year…’

  ‘And did she have a name, this woman?’ No comparison or bitterness had seemed to colour Jack’s question. He had said “this woman” affectionately.

  ‘Yes.’ My father looked at him head on. ‘It was Jane.’

  ‘So you called me Jane after her.’

  ‘When Ada suggested it, Val fell in love with it, and I was glad. I was glad that the woman who had made Ada act on her feelings, who’d loved her and offered to give everything up so they could share their lives together, would be acknowledged by at least being remembered.’

  ‘Imagine if her name had been Dorothy, or Mildred, or something equally awful, like Gladys,’ said Jack, after signalling to me by lightly tightening his lips that my father was in danger of being irretrievably lost to the past.

  ‘I quite like Dorothy,’ I said.

  ‘Well you would, wouldn’t you?’ said Jack.

  ‘Val would still have agreed, if she thought it was what Ada really wanted, and so would I.’

  ‘I was joking, George.’

  My father raised his head, like in an uncompleted nod. ‘She was famous, you know, your namesake.’ And half-letting go of his sombreness, ‘Not as famous as your dad, of course; in his heyday, no one was as famous as Mr Magikoo.’

  ‘Mr Magikoo and his assistant,’ I said.

  ‘Who took the country by storm,’ said Jack. ‘You should get your dad to show you all the clippings.’

  ‘And they’re not telling fibs. We did take the country by storm, year after year. We kept the show fresh, thanks to your mum. She was as full of ideas as I was, always pushing me to try different tricks – “flights of fancy” we called them in those days - researching the old greats for inspiration. Wherever we travelled, we always had you with us, and we loved having you with us, it made us feel complete. And you’ll be glad to know Val loathed my rabbit trick. She thought it was a cruelty to use animals at all.’

  ‘So did Mia-Mia,’ I said.

  ‘Yes, so did Mia-Mia,’ said my father. He rubbed his eyebrows with a forefinger and thumb, kneading them like they were dough. ‘You might as well know, I suppose. Those blades Sweeney Todd had, they were only plastic. You were never in danger. But you had to believe that you were, you had to be afraid, or no one else would have believed that they were blades made of steel, and that Little Magik Matchstick was the bravest little girl in the world. A star, just like her mother.’

  ‘But you used to slice a cucumber in half, I remember.’

  ‘That was just one small section, much higher than your height. But that’s all beside the point. It was cruel to make you frightened, the cruelty was exactly the same, so please don’t think I’m trying to make excuses.’

  ‘Even I didn’t know that,’ said Jack.

  ‘It’s not beside the point that I was safe.’

  ‘Safe means not being frightened,’ said my father.

  ‘Let’s not talk any more about Little Magik Matchstick and the blades of Sweeney Todd, tell us more about Jane,’ I said. ‘How was she famous?’

  ‘She was a writer of some sort, an intellectual Ada said. I’m not really sure what her books were about, but anyway that’s not why she was famous. She was a wealthy American who’d married very young into British high society, got lucky and lost her brute of a husband in the war, inherited a second fortune and indulged herself by buying modern art. She even took Ada to Paris once or twice, to look at things that she was thinking of buying, told her that she valued her opinion. And she’s a fast learner our Ada, from one day to the next she knew who was who and what was what in modern art, had quite an eye for it too, apparently. Didn’t like to feel like a freeloader, she said, so she needed her opinion to carry some weight. Anyone would think she’d have been happy…’

  ‘Yes, anyone would think she’d have been happy…’

  ‘But she wasn’t,’ I said faintly, wondering if interrupting Jack again meant that I was now taking sides.

  ‘I know what he’s implying.’ My father too had spoken only faintly, almost to himself, as though turning thoughts around in his head. But then he swung round in his chair to address Jack directly. ‘You’re saying that if this is what I think about Ada, then why can’t I be happy with you? And that may sound like it’s fair, but it’s only fair if you’re comparing like with like, and I’m telling you you’re not. You and me, we’ve always been a lie, and I’m not saying it was anybody’s fault. But it was different with Ada and Jane, they were more like me and Val.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Jack.

  ‘You know why? Because we shared the same beginning, which was new, and not the end of something else that hadn’t really ended.’

  ‘Three years, George, almost.’

  ‘And it’s time I don’t regret, even if I know it’s come to an end.’

  ‘You can’t know that, daddy, you can’t. And if you don’t regret it, th
en it can’t have been a lie.’

  ‘Then I’ll not say it was, I’ll just say it can’t go on. Because tonight’s brought us back to the beginning, which still feels like the end.’

  ‘Can’t you at least also say that for almost three years you were happy,’ said Jack.

  ‘Maybe. And that’s more than I could say for our Ada.’

  ‘So why couldn’t she be happy?’ Too afraid of the present, was I wrong to keep returning to the past?

  ‘Ada? Oh, the usual. Other people partly. But mostly herself, not being able to accept who she was and be happy with it.’

  ‘So much for “anyone would think she’d be happy”,’ said Jack.

  ‘Times were very different back then, she just couldn’t get it out of her head that it was wrong, that this life wasn’t really for her, that she could never give Jane what she deserved. So she wrote her a letter to end it, and the next day a package arrived. It was a small, tiny sculpture of a stretched out female figure almost as thin as a matchstick, standing on a lump of plaster that dwarfed her even more, gazing ahead and looking completely bereft.’

  ‘I’ve seen it. Auntie Ada has it on her mantelpiece. But I’ve never really looked at it properly.’

  ‘Well, you should,’ said my father. ‘That piece of nothingness is by a fellow called Alberto Giacometti. Jane bought it because Ada had fallen in love with it, and she wrote to Ada saying that if it hadn’t been for her she might never have noticed what Ada had seen in Giacometti’s work. I managed to talk Ada out of sending it back. “You’d be adding insult to injury,” I said, “and Jane deserves neither. At the very least you can allow her a gesture.” And then when you were born, she said one day it’d be yours. It’s a tiny thing, but apparently it’s worth quite a bit, Giacometti died a very famous man.’

  ‘And Jane?’

  ‘Went back to the States, Ada said. Has a wing of her own in some fancy museum in Philadelphia, with all the art your auntie Ada helped her choose. Gave it all away in the end, all except the Giacometti on Ada’s mantelpiece.’