Sorrow and Bliss

by Meg Mason

  *

  There was a café, a minute or two from the Executive Home, which I used to go to every morning. The barista was very young and looked like a non-specific famous person. One day I made a joke about it as he pressed the lid onto my coffee. He said something disappointingly flirtatious in response and by the end of the week I had entered into a mandatory banter relationship with him. It quickly became onerous and I started going to a café that was further away, where the coffee was less good and where I did not have to talk.

  *

  Alone again, I got off the sofa and tried to find something to read. There was only a Radio Times and a fully revised and updated edition of The Complete Whippet on the coffee table, and some sheet music on my aunt’s writing desk.

  I already knew that she had got into the Royal College of Music ‘at the tender age of sixteen’ because, according to my mother, she would have whispered it over my crib. As such, it had never struck me as extraordinary. I had never thought about how she had managed it with a depressed seaside mother and a pointless father and no money. And, I realised, picking the music up and turning through the pages, astonished by the concentration of notes, that I had no memory of ever hearing her play. The grand piano in the formal living room I only thought of as something not to put drinks or anything else wet on.

  While I was standing there, the door opened half way and Winsome edged in with a tray. She was wearing an apron, wet with dishwater. I put the music down and apologised but as soon as she recognised what I had been holding, she looked delighted. I told her I had never seen such complicated music. She said it was just a bit of old Bach but seemed reluctant to turn the conversation to the topic of the tray and what was on it, only doing so once it became clear that I did not have anything else to say.

  I went back to the sofa and sat down. It was, in her description, a little bit of leftovers but once she had set the tray in my lap, I saw it was an entire Christmas lunch in miniature, arranged on an entrée plate, a linen napkin in a silver ring beside it, and a crystal glass of fizzy grape juice. My eyes filled with tears. Immediately, Winsome said I was under no obligation to eat it if I didn’t feel like it. Since the summer, the sight of food had been unbearable to me but it was not why I could only stare at it. It was the care in my aunt’s arrangement, the still-life beauty of it and, as I think about it now, the sense of safety that my brain construed from the child-sized portions.

  My aunt said alright, well – perhaps she’d pop back later – and went to go.

  As she got to the door, I heard myself say, ‘Stay.’

  Winsome wasn’t my mother, but she was maternal – expressly not my mother – and I didn’t want her to leave. She asked if there was something else I needed.

  I said no, slowly, while trying to invent an alternative reason that would prevent her from going. ‘I was just wondering – before you came in, I was thinking about you getting into college. I was wondering who helped you.’

  She said, ‘No one helped me!’ and charged softly back into the room after I picked up the tiny fork and speared a small potato and asked her how she did it in that case. Sitting in the space I tried to smooth out for her, Winsome began her story, undistracted by the fact that I was now eating the potato exactly the way her children weren’t allowed to, off the end of the fork as if it was an ice cream.

  She said, she had taught herself to play on a piano in her school hall. Somebody had written the names of the notes in pencil on the keys and by the time she was twelve, she had finished all the grade books in the library and started sending away for sheet music. The Royal College of Music and its address on Prince Consort Road, London SW, was always printed on the back and she became, over time, desperate to see the place her music came from. At fifteen, she went to London on her own, intending only to stand in front of the building until her return train. But the sight of the students coming in and out, dressed in black, carrying instrument cases, made her jealous to the point of feeling sick and, somehow, she roused herself to go inside and ask the person on the front desk if anyone could apply. She was given a form, which she filled out at home that night, in pencil before pen and, two weeks later, she received an invitation to audition.

  I interrupted and asked how she could prove what level she was, if she hadn’t done any exams.

  My aunt closed her eyes, lifted her chin, took a deep breath and said as her eyes sprung open, ‘I lied.’ Her exhale was glorious.

  On the day, she played flawlessly. But afterwards the examiners asked her to produce her certificates and she confessed. ‘Anticipating arrest, but,’ Winsome said, ‘they gave me a place on the spot, as soon as they discovered I had never had a lesson.’ She brought her hands together and placed them one over the other in her lap.

  I put my fork down. ‘If I came out, would you play something?’

  She said she was far too rusty, but was instantly on her feet and whisking the tray off my lap.

  I got up and asked her if she needed the music on the desk. My aunt laughed and ushered me out.

  *

  From where she told me to sit, I watched her open the lid of the piano, adjust the stool, then lift her hands, soft wrists rising before her fingers, and hover them there for some seconds before letting them fall onto the keys. From the first devastating bar of whatever it was she was playing, the others began drifting into the room one by one, even the boys, even my mother.

  Nobody said anything. The music was extraordinary. The sensation of it was physical, like warm water being washed over a wound, agonising and cleansing and curative. Ingrid came in and wedged herself into my chair, as Winsome was entering a section that got faster and faster until it no longer seemed like the music was being manufactured by her. My sister said holy shit. A series of violent chords followed by a sudden slowing down seemed to signal the end but instead of stopping, my aunt melted the final bars in to the beginning of O Holy Night.

  My perception of Winsome belonged to my mother – I thought of her as old, punctilious, someone without an interior life or worthwhile passions. That was the first time I saw her for myself. Winsome was an adult, someone who took care, who loved order and beauty and laboured to create it as a gift to other people. She lifted her eyes to the ceiling and smiled. She was still wearing her wet apron.

  The first person to say anything aloud was Rowland who had come in last and was standing in front of the fireplace with his elbow on the mantel like someone posing for a full-length portrait in oil. He called out for something a bit bloody cheerier and Winsome took a brisk turn into Joy to the World.

  My mother stopped it by singing – a different song that my aunt could not follow her into because she was making it up. Her voice got higher and higher until Winsome improvised an ending and took her hands away from the piano, saying it was probably time for the Queen. But, according to my mother, we were all having fun. ‘And,’ she said, ‘I need to tell all of you, please, that when she was a teenager, my sister here was so convinced she was going to be famous, she used to practise with her head turned to the side – didn’t you Winnie? – in preparation for when you’d have to play while gazing out at your vast audience.’ Winsome tried to laugh before Rowland said right, and ordered everyone born after the coronation to make themselves scarce, unnecessarily since Ingrid, my cousins and Patrick had started evacuating during my mother’s speech. I got up and walked to the door. I wanted to apologise to Winsome but as I passed her, I looked at the floor, and went back to the downstairs room. I didn’t come out again until it was time to leave. In the backseat of the car, Ingrid told me she had unwrapped my presents for me. She said, ‘So much shit for the Don’t Like pile.’

  I wasn’t better. I had just been given some of Christmas Day off. The next time I went to Belgravia, the piano was closed and covered.

  *

  I went back to university in January and did my exams. Foundations of Philosophy 1 was a take-home. I did it on the floor in my father’s study, pressing on the Shorte
r Oxford.

  The paper came back with a comment at the bottom. ‘You write exquisitely and say very little.’ My father read the essay and said, ‘Yes. I think you chewed more than you bit off.’

  Here lies Martha Juliet Russell

  25 November 1977 – TBC

  She chewed more than she bit off

  *

  The pills did not make me feel like the old Martha when they took effect a month after I started them. I was not depressed any more. I was euphoric, all the time. Nothing scared me. Everything was funny. I started second semester and made friends, by force, with everyone in my classes. A girl said, ‘It’s weird, you’re so fun. We all thought you were a bitch.’ The boy with her said, ‘They thought that – we just thought you were cold.’ ‘The point is,’ the girl said, ‘you didn’t speak to a single person for like, the whole start of the year.’ Ingrid said I was less weird when I was under my desk.

  *

  I lost my virginity to a doctoral student assigned when my probation was lifted, the dean said, ‘to find any gaps and fill them in’. I left his flat as soon as it was over. It was the afternoon but still winter and already dark. On the street I only saw mothers with prams. It felt like a parade, converging from multiple directions. Passing under streetlights, their babies’ faces looked pale and moonlike, tinged with orange. They cried and twisted uselessly against the straps that held them in. I went into a Boots and was told by the disapproving chemist that I needed a prescription for the morning-after pill, he couldn’t just sell it to me like headache tablets. There was a clinic down the road that did walk-ins; if he was me, he’d go straight there.

  I waited for hours to be seen and reassured by a doctor who did not seem much older than me that I was well within my window of opportunity – she said, ‘So to speak’ and giggled.

  That night, I did not take my medication. I did not take it the next day or the next, until I was not taking it at all. The doctor who had given it to me was non-specific about the harm it would cause, she could not tell me how long it ‘lingered in the system’. But all I could think about was the way she had whispered the word foetus.

  And so, I did a pregnancy test, every day until I got my period, convinced despite the precautions I had taken during and afterwards, despite the fact that every test was negative, that I was carrying a writhing, moon-faced baby. The morning my period came, I sat on the edge of the bath and felt sick with relief.

  Without my medication, I was not euphoric any more. I was not depressed, the old me or a new me. I just was.

  *

  I told Ingrid that I had slept with the student, none of what had followed for me in case she laughed and told me I was paranoid. She said wow. ‘Consider your gaps found and filled in.’ When she asked me what it was like, the first time, I made it sound brilliant because she was actively looking, she said, to have her own gaps filled in.

  *

  After I graduated, late, I got a job at Vogue because they were starting a website and I said, in my application, that as well as being a qualified philosopher, I was au fait with the internet. Ingrid said I got the job because I am tall.

  The day before I started, I went to the Waterstones on Kensington High Street and found a book about HTML, which I stood reading in the aisle because the cover was such an aggressive shade of yellow, I couldn’t bear the idea of owning it. It was so confusing, I got angry and left.

  We – me and the one other girl who did the website – sat far away from the magazine people but unnaturally close to each other in a cubicle made out of shelving units. We were both, it transpired, anxious not to annoy the other, which was why I worked out how to eat an apple in absolute silence – by cutting it into sixteenths and holding each piece in my mouth until it dissolved like a wafer – and why, whenever her phone rang, she would lunge for the receiver, lift it an inch out of the cradle and put it straight back down to stop it ringing. The calls could not have been for us since no one knew we were there. We started calling it the veal crate.

  In my first six months I lost two stone. Ingrid said I looked amazing in a gross way and could I try and get her a job there too. It wasn’t on purpose – I was told it happened to everyone as though subconsciously, we were all preparing ourselves for the day we’d come in and find that the doors had been modified in such a way that only girls with approved dimensions could pass through them. Like the baggage-sizers at airports; hand luggage must be able to fit in here.

  I loved it there. I stayed until they found out I was not au fait with the internet and arranged for me to move downstairs to World of Interiors where I wrote exquisitely about chairs and said very little. Ingrid says it’s thanks to hard work and determination that I have been steadily descending the career ladder ever since.

  After her A levels, Ingrid did the first year of a marketing degree at a regional university, which she said left her dumber than she was to start with, then moved back to London and became a model agent. She resigned as soon as she got pregnant and never returned because, she says, she has no interest in paying a nanny so she can spend nine hours a day looking at Eastern European sixteen-year-olds with negative BMIs.

  *

  On holiday one year, I read Money, thirty pages of it until I remembered that I do not understand Martin Amis. The main character in the book is a dedicated smoker. He says, ‘I started smoking another cigarette. Unless I specifically inform you otherwise, I am always smoking another cigarette.’

  Unless I inform you otherwise, at intervals throughout my twenties and most of my thirties, I was depressed, mildly, moderately, severely, for a week, two weeks, half a year, all of one.

  I started a diary on my twenty-first birthday. I thought I was writing, generally, about my life. I still have it; it reads like the diary you are told to keep by your psychiatrist, to record when you are depressed or coming out of a depression or anticipating the onset of one. Which was always. It was the only thing I ever wrote about. But the intervals in between were long enough that I thought of each episode as discrete, with its own particular, circumstantial cause, even if most of the time I struggled to identify it.

  Afterwards, I did not think it would happen again. When it did, I went to a different doctor and collected diagnoses like I was trying for the whole set. Pills became pill combinations, devised by specialists. They talked about tweaking and adjusting dials; the phrase ‘trial and error’ was very popular. Watching me dispense such a quantity of pills and capsules into a bowl once, Ingrid, who was with me in the kitchen, making breakfast, said, ‘That looks very filling,’ and asked me if I wanted milk on them.

  The mixtures scared me. I hated the boxes in the bathroom cabinet and the bent, half-used blister sheets and scraps of foil in the sink, the insoluble feeling of the capsules in my throat. But I took everything I was given. I stopped if they made me feel worse or because they had made me feel better. Mostly they made me feel the same.

  That is why eventually I stopped taking anything and why I stopped seeing so many doctors, and then none for a long time, and why eventually everyone – my parents, Ingrid and later Patrick – came to concur with my self-diagnosis of being difficult and too sensitive, why nobody thought to wonder if those episodes were separate beads on one long string.

  6

  THE FIRST TIME I got married was to a man called Jonathan Strong. He was an art broker with a focus on pastoral art and sourcing it for oligarchs. I was twenty-five and still Vogue weight when I met him, at a summer party put on by the publisher of World of Interiors who was in his sixties, white-haired and, in wardrobe terms, partial to velvet. His first name was Peregrine and, people in the office said, his surname had been set as a keyboard shortcut on all the computers at Tatler because it appeared so often in the social pages. As soon as he found out that my mother was the sculptor Celia Barry, he invited me to lunch because although, he said, he was unmoved by my mother’s work, except on the occasions he was actively repelled by it, he cared for artists and art and beauty a
nd madness and he assumed I would be interesting on all four subjects.

  I expended what material I had before Peregrine had finished his oysters but he asked me to lunch again the following week, and every week from then on because he claimed to be captivated by my childhood, the stories I told about it – the parties, my father’s artistic and domestic travail, the unfinished opus, the Umbrian Sunrise and foil mille-feuille. Most of all, he was thrilled by my brushes with insanity. He said he did not trust anyone who hadn’t had a nervous breakdown – at least one – and was sorry his own was thirty years ago and, unimaginatively, following a divorce.

  I told him about my father’s alphabet game. Peregrine wanted to try his hand at it straight away. It became our habit after that to write them once he had ordered for us, on cards supplied from his breast pocket.

  The day I produced – I do not remember all of it – one that began with A Bronze-Cast Degas Excites Feeling – Peregrine told me I’d come to feel like the daughter he had never had, even though he had two. But, as he went on to explain, instead of becoming artists as he’d hoped, at university they’d both come out accountants. He said ‘to the heartbreak of their father’. Even now, years later, he found it difficult to accept their chosen lifestyles, which involved much hoovering of semi-detached houses in unbeautiful parts of Surrey and buying things from supermarkets, having husbands and so forth. Peregrine’s lifestyle was sharing a Chelsea mews with an older gentleman called Jeremy who did all their shopping at Fortnums.

  At the end of his talk, I asked Peregrine to read what he had written. He said, ‘Far from my best but as you wish. All Bernard Can Digest Easily, French Gammon. His Intestinal Juices –’ and then he was cut off by the arrival of our oysters.

  *

  Ingrid’s eldest son went through a period of writing pretend menus. She texted me pictures of them. On one he had written,