The Madness of Grief

by Panayotis Cacoyannis

‘This is a magician’s house,’ said the sergeant. ‘There must be a thousand secret places where a note could have been hidden.’

  ‘And what would be the point of a note that was hidden where no one could find it?’ Jack asked the sergeant.

  ‘None,’ the sergeant agreed. ‘Unless… unless of course it was a place where only someone could find it.’

  ‘But why would it be hidden at all?’ I said.

  ‘We wouldn’t know the answer unless we found it,’ said the sergeant.

  ‘And of course we’ll let you know if we do,’ said auntie Ada.

  ‘I’m sure Jack and I would’ve found it already. But I have the Inspector’s card if we need to get in touch.’

  Our instinct for privacy might have prevailed while the sergeant and his constable were there, but as soon as they were gone, worn out by our stonewalling tactics, it was as if the full weight of the night, kept at bay until then by our effort to heed the Inspector’s advice in order to fend off the sergeant, had finally descended from the heavens to crush us. Auntie Ada hadn’t moved from her perch on the edge of my father’s double bed. Head down, she wailed almost inaudibly. Jack was standing by the door, half on the inside and half on the outside, as though uncertain of the future or of where he belonged, just as I imagined he had always felt. My sadness and my tiredness and my grief had knocked the stuffing out of me completely. I hadn’t the strength to comfort auntie Ada, and I lacked any words of reassurance for Jack. I longed for only one thing – to sleep, and then to wake up from this nightmare too.

  ‘The notes,’ said Jack. ‘After all that lying I almost forgot they existed.’

  Her wailing hadn’t made auntie Ada deaf. ‘Notes? Were there really more than one?’

  ‘There were two. One for Jane and one for me.’

  ‘But where are they, who found them?’

  ‘The sergeant was right,’ said Jack. ‘In a magician’s house it’s easy to hide things.’

  ‘I don’t understand, why would George have wanted to hide them? And how did you know where to look?’

  ‘George didn’t hide them, I did.’

  ‘I asked him to,’ I said.

  ‘They were just there, against the wall behind the lamp.’ Jack had taken one step forward and was pointing.

  Auntie Ada had pushed herself wearily off the bed, and looked around to follow the line of his finger to where it was pointing.

  ‘Behind the lamp,’ I said, ‘that’s why I didn’t see them.’

  ‘That’s where we always left notes for each other,’ said Jack.

  As she wavered in the middle of the room, all hunched up and looking at a loss, squinting at where Jack had found the notes, her eyes small and wet like her brother’s, it struck me more vividly than ever before just how old auntie Ada looked, so much older than she ought to at her age. Forty-five was young, but my father had been even younger, and my mother younger still. Numbers and death were crowding my head. My father was dead before he was forty, just shy of ten years after my mother, who had not yet turned thirty when she flew off to heaven to be with the rest of the angels. 1959 and 1969 - years that belonged in different decades but had only a decade between them, ten years of colour, and change, and faraway deaths. I had read every issue of TIME magazine since the first time I visited Karl, always one week late, as soon as Dr Schmidt had received the new edition. Borrowed news that I was urged not to believe because it was all propaganda.

  Well, I would not be reading TIME magazine any more. Overcome all at once by the littleness of life and the enormity of my loss, I felt painfully alert, my sadness and my tiredness and my grief at last giving way to a kind of retrospective nostalgia. A tall chest of drawers blocked the secret upstairs door that connected our house to Mr Magikoo’s Magik Shoppe. Without my father knowing, I had often stepped on tied up ancient bundles of The Weekly Magic News to rummage through its drawers. In one of them I had discovered photographs of Mr Magikoo and his assistant performing impossible feats, their smiles so wide as they leaned against each other or held hands that they might as well be taking a bow after conquering the world. I had seen with my own eyes and held its grainy proof in my hands, but only now was I able to feel grateful and glad on my parents’ behalf for the magic of those few ineradicable years. And I wished I could have shared my gratitude and gladness with my father. But I had left it too late; my father was dead and my wishes could not bring him back. I would ask for Jack’s help to scour every issue of The Weekly Magic News and to sift through all the clippings that I hadn’t known existed. And I would share with auntie Ada my father’s black and white exoneration. To move forward, she and I both needed to find a peaceful place for the past in our hearts. And when this night had played out, it too would be part of the past.

  ‘We should read the notes tonight,’ I said.

  Jack walked quietly to the bed, sat where he had sat while I waited at the door all those hours before. And when he touched the solid headboard somewhere just a little further up, a small drawer sprang out from its side at about the same level as the top of the bedside table. I wasn’t behind him this time, but I still couldn’t have found the exact spot Jack had pressed if he hadn’t reached out for my hand and made me run the tip of my right index finger back and forth across a shallow bump no larger than the head of an ordinary drawing pin.

  I could see the notes - or rather I could see two envelopes folded together unevenly. And when Jack let go of my hand I squeezed myself beside him on the bed and waited for him to take them out.

  ‘There are also some things of your mother’s in there. George thought I should know in case something happened to him.’

  ‘Just the notes for now,’ I told him, and with the same dexterity with which he had hidden them he now took them out. He straightened them as best he could before handing me the one addressed to Jane. Then he placed the second in his lap, the side with Jack on it face up, as though to remove from auntie Ada’s mind any shred of suspicion that perhaps he hadn’t told us the truth.

  ‘Val’s jewellery,’ said auntie Ada. When I looked up at her, startled by the sudden closeness of the shocked disbelief in her voice, auntie Ada was standing over us staring at the magic secret drawer and covering her mouth with her hands.

  ‘There’s a brooch George said he’d like your aunt to have.’

  ‘A brooch?’ muttered auntie Ada through her fingers.

  ‘You’ll remember it, he said. It’s a “V” in the shape of a heart.’

  ‘So you knew,’ I said to Jack.

  ‘Just that your father wanted Ada to have it.’

  ‘Val’s most cherished thing and he told you.’ Auntie Ada was whistling her words almost angrily now.

  ‘He told Mia-Mia,’ said Jack. ‘And he was going to tell Jane on her seventeenth birthday. Or earlier if he had to, if something happened to Mia-Mia. I made him promise.’

  ‘You made him promise. It’s been ten years since we lost Val. How long have you been around?’

  ‘It’s unfair blaming Jack, it was daddy’s decision.’

  ‘Ada’s right,’ said Jack. ‘George should’ve told her. But he found it too hard. It never stopped being raw, what happened to your mother.’

  ‘And we blamed him, auntie Ada. We blamed him for something that wasn’t his fault.’

  Auntie Ada stood as upright as she could, her eyes looking wild even as the light from the bedside table lamp made her squint. ‘It’s his fault that he’s left you; I can blame him for that. Or is that unfair too?’

  ‘I don’t know, I don’t know what’s unfair…’

  ‘Ada, we’ve lost him,’ said Jack. ‘And that’s what’s unfair, there’s no need for blame.’

  ‘“So you knew,” Jane said to you, what did she mean?’

  She had heaved her heavy gaze onto Jack, and when Jack didn’t answer she swung round to loom over me as I cowered on the bed. ‘I’ve every right to know,’ she said, ‘tell me what you meant.’ Her voice was hushed but full of thorns.
‘What did Jack know? What’s George been saying?’

  Stop and start, stop and start, Tuesday afternoon had jumped into the evening, the evening had burst into the night, the night had now careered into the morning. It was already a different day, a pile-up of the whirlwind succession of events that in less than the hours of a day had revealed, unravelled and then hidden again truth after truth after truth. And somewhere in that heap lay the body of my father, for whom the burden of the truth had proved too much to bear.

  The truth. It wasn’t all the same, a single indivisible good that ought always to be told. Yesterday I would have argued that it was, and in that respect at least, as in so many others, yesterday had been a better day. But shorn of all the lies, it had taken my father away. Lies had been told and then retracted, and smaller truths had been concealed – Karl had told a truth and omitted another, which later he must have confessed to; Mike would never have owned up to being beaten by a queer; coached by the Inspector we had all lied to the sergeant. Which of all the truths did auntie Ada deserve? Should she know that the many truths she had been hiding were no longer secret? That her brother, who could no longer speak for himself, had betrayed her? That he had told me auntie Ada had once been in love with my mother? That I knew she had not told me the truth about the “one in a million” because grief had made her cruel and unjust?

  ‘Well it’s true, it’s true…’ As though unable to withstand the heavy silence in which I was weighing up the merits and demerits of telling the truth, auntie Ada had punctured the air with a shriek. And when both Jack and I leapt up to try and comfort her, she broke away and threw herself face down onto the bed, to finally weep out into her brother’s pillow all the truth she had been keeping bottled up. ‘It’s true, it’s all true.’ She was fighting to get the words out while she sobbed without lifting her head, gasping for air she refused to breathe in. I sat beside her and was stroking her hair, as afraid for her as I ought to have been for my father.

  12

  Explanations

  The early hours of the morning had given way to dawn, and as its grey light began to spill in we were still in my father’s bedroom. Behind the fading velvet the window was open, but that trace of evening breeze had again fallen flat. With no air to let in, it was all I could do to at least keep out the sun, and I made some small adjustment to the badly drawn curtains.

  The bedspread’s neutral beige was made warmer by the light from the two bedside lamps, whose pale cream shades had unevenly yellowed because of the heat from the light bulbs. In the absence of natural light, the room’s muted redness gave the bed its orange sheen. In this lonely artificial glare, Jack and I sat beside each other on the bed to read our notes.

  ‘Are you sure these were the only two notes?’ auntie Ada had been asking Jack insistently. ‘Have you looked behind the bedside table? Maybe one of them slipped down the back.’

  ‘The police would’ve discovered it, Ada. Before they stripped the bed and turned the mattress over, the first thing they did was move those bedside tables to the middle of the room.’

  ‘Your note was the brooch, auntie Ada. Can you think of anything more precious?’

  ‘The brooch belongs to you.’

  ‘And it comes with daddy’s wish that you should have it. In fact I’m going to get it for you now.’

  To mollify auntie Ada, before the envelopes were opened I spread out on a pillow the contents of the magic secret drawer – two small boxes and just a few loose pieces of jewellery that were making sparkling doodles on the ceiling. In the first box were my parents’ wedding rings, one giant and the other petite. And in the second were the rubies of the “V” in the shape of a heart, set upon a golden leaf to make a brooch. When I picked it out of its box, I extended my other arm to auntie Ada, whose crooked fingers sought out mine and weaved themselves around them.

  And now she was quiet by the covered window, looking at her brooch as though in all the light in the world. When the telephone rang, just four or five times, no one moved. I was waiting to see if it rang again, but it didn’t.

  I tore my envelope open. Then Jack did exactly the same.

  Tonight you and Jack made me happy. I had reminded him of something his grief and self-loathing had made him forget… Was this his explanation? Could he really have imagined it might do as consolation? To Jack I owe a different explanation… I read the second paragraph quickly. He owed Mia-Mia the gift of temporarily losing his mind, and his absence wouldn’t do me lasting harm… I started again from the beginning, in case I might have missed hidden clues. This time I read through to the end.

  What my father had left me was an outpouring of love, for everyone else but not for himself. What small concession he had made to the facts, he had brushed off as the consequence of madness. But the past always has a way of catching up… Wasn’t I a part of the past? Wasn’t Jack? Be kind to Ada… At the jumble of my father’s closing words, a swelling of hardness took possession of me. Kindness should always begin with the truth.

  I stood up from the bed in a slow and deliberate way, and I read my father’s words out loud.

  My dear Jane,

  As if I didn’t already owe you too many explanations, by the time you’re reading this I will owe you one more. Tonight you and Jack made me happy. This may sound strange, coming from a man who is about to end his life, but the truth is that my life came to an end at the same time as your mother’s. It’s difficult to love when your heart’s been broken, and I know that I’ve cared for you badly, but even with a broken heart I’ve always loved you very much. Already that was more than I felt I deserved, and so by hiding my love I hoped I could deprive myself of yours. I let Ada blame me because I blamed myself, but tonight you reminded me of something my grief and self-loathing had made me forget: that your mother and I couldn’t have been happier, and that a big part of that happiness was doing what we did.

  To Jack, to whom I also owe with gratitude the debt of temporarily losing my mind, I owe a different explanation, but seeing you two together tonight, on the same day I lost Mia-Mia, has made me realise that you’re blessed with the gift of finding people’s goodness. You will never want for friends and people who love you, and when you have got over the sadness, my absence won’t do you lasting harm. From tomorrow all the decisions are yours, but if you’d like Jack to stay, as long as he could still have a life of his own I’m sure it would be good for you both. I think he’d be brilliant at running the shop, if you’d like to keep it going.

  Too many words might imply a pretence that words can make up for what we both know they can’t. And you’re better at words than I am, so the more words I write the greater you’ll find the temptation to read them again and again in search of different meanings. Because you love me I would like you not to grieve me. Try instead to be as grateful as I am to Jack for bringing a corpse back to life. Without him Mia-Mia would have been someone else, and I can see now that I lost my mind to Jack as much as I did to Mia-Mia. But the past always has a way of catching up, and I would rather go now, before it has a chance to lay my happy madness to waste.

  Be kind to Ada. All the love she’s ever felt in her life, for Jane and for your mother and even for me, has now become a part of the love she feels for you. The impurities of sadness have never made it weaker or less real. I must leave it to you to decide what you should or shouldn’t tell her you know.

  Goodbye, my little magic angel. Tonight I would have kissed you goodnight without hiding.

  By the time I had finished, I was reading out the words as though hurling back at life all the violence it had dared to hurl at me. A brittle coldness was beginning to take hold of me that I wouldn’t have been able to endure, but already Jack was standing beside me. Leaning towards me and with one arm around me, he read out the words my father had written for him.

  My dear Jack,

  I’ve just written to Jane that to you I owe with gratitude the debt of temporarily losing my mind. I see now that Mia-Mia was the sum of m
any parts, and that the best part was Jack. Jack was the part I loved most, and the part that was able to make me forget. There would have been no madness without Jack, because without him I would never have escaped from the past. But the past was only biding its time. It was never far away, and slowly it was encroaching on the madness that had kept us together.

  You mustn’t think that any of this implies I couldn’t love you enough. What I realised tonight was how impossible it had become to continue to live with that love, or without it for that matter. Instead I choose to leave with it intact.

  It makes me happy that the truth has made friends of you and Jane. Your goodness and your youth will see you both through in whatever path you each choose to take. You must also have a life of your own, but Ada will not stand in your way if you and Jane decide that you’d like not to be far apart.

  Writing these inadequate notes is painful enough, and I think that if I made myself reread them I would probably destroy them. I know they fall short of a clear explanation. But my mind at least is clear, and I hope that you’ll all find some comfort knowing that I’m choosing this freely, without either fear or regret.

  I’ve always loved the whole of you.

  George

  Jack had hurried to read out his note the moment he had made my body still, and as soon as he had finished I knew why. As the hardness subsided, I was filled with my father’s outpouring of love.

  ‘I’m so sorry, auntie Ada, that was cruel,’ I said, but auntie Ada was no longer in the room. Auntie Ada was no longer in the house.

  ‘Stay here, I’ll go after her. Jane? What is it?’

  In the shadow of the window I was looking at the brooch in the shape of a heart I had just found on the floor.

  ‘I’m coming with you,’ I said.