On the Heroism of Mortals

by Allan Cameron

  Now it was her mind that was spinning between two possibilities: the final acceptance of an early death as a not altogether uninviting destiny, or the absolute struggle to free herself from that unjust fate by whatever means. The first was the languid desire for release that comes from a tiredness accumulated over nearly two decades of hard work at home and at the law firm where she was a senior partner, and the second came from an instinct so deep within our psyches that it pushes all aside – the will to live that comes most fiercely in the moments of fiercest danger. The will to live has no rational basis; it springs from our animal nature but it does not last. It is all instinct and all moment, and when it comes, time itself seems to slow down.

  The knife-block was on the work surface just next to the fridge, and her hand quickly grasped the first handle she could find. Fortunately the blade was short, and in a second it was in his gut.

  His expression switched immediately to one of surprise and disbelief, quickly followed by terror. It partially sobered him up and he detached himself to wander clumsily around the kitchen, noisily kicking or stamping on the various items he’d thrown or tipped on to the floor. “The little whore has killed me,” he said, as though there were someone else in the room, “that’s women for you. No loyalty, no gratitude.”

  When she studied him in his hospital bed, she found it very difficult to feel sorry for him, although he made up for that by feeling very sorry for himself. He looked absurd. Like the giant who fell from the beanstalk, but with less right to complain, she thought. Nevertheless, he did, although he interspersed his lamentations with pleas for her understanding. “Don’t leave me. I couldn’t manage without you. This may seem strange, but I couldn’t live without you and it has not been easy for me to admit that. I shouldn’t have hit you; I know that now. But then again, you shouldn’t provoke me. I’m not someone to provoke, you know,” he said simply.

  But the simplicity didn’t work. He revolted her. Dear God, did life have to be this difficult, she thought, though she was not a religious woman. Indeed her values very much reflected her own times, so how come she had ended up in a situation that belonged to a different age? He was, she told herself endlessly, the father of their son who’d been killed in a hit-and-run incident at the age of eleven. He’d been abusive before that, but the death of his child had made things worse. Was he also a victim? In that moment, she thought not.

  He had not been a good father. Detached and ambitious at the time, he seemed hardly to notice the boy, but no doubt his son was an important part of his identity. Dealing with her husband’s pain had distracted her from her own. That was a kind of balm. But then again she failed there too. He started to drink heavily and eventually lost his job. There had always been something theatrical about her husband: his booming voice in a slightly exaggerated upper-class accent, his flamboyant dress, his long, Oscar Wilde locks and, most of all, his absolute belief in the importance of what he had to say. He projected himself onto others as though they were a screen – an inanimate object that served to reflect his glorious self. This character might be defined as Churchillian, but somewhere along the thread of his life it took a different turn: it lacked the public element of the statesman, which might mean that at least he didn’t suffer from megalomania or might mean, more simply, that his horizons were more limited. Beneath the bluff exterior, some detected a weakness, a terror, a lack of self-belief rather than a surfeit. She often thought that, and it was the only thing she loved about him. Her love then was based on a doubtful hypothesis, as she well knew. The precision of her analysis did not help her to make sensible decisions.

  A policeman had come round to tell her that they would not be pressing charges. He explained that her husband had been insistent on dropping the case, but the police could still have proceeded. Given, however, her husband’s insistence and his repeated claim that the marriage could survive the violent encounter, the procurator fiscal had decided to drop the case. “But it was self-defence,” she said, struggling to understand. The policeman stared at her, as though having his own difficulty with that inability of hers. “The knife was embedded in two inches of flesh; a thinner man might have died,” he explained with no reference to her own point, which, thus dismissed, appeared to have no relevance. That was the first she’d heard of her husband’s desire to continue the relationship. It disappointed her. She thought that the events of that evening must mean the end of that phase of her life. He too disappointed her once more, as his behaviour showed a lack of dignity. But surely she had shown a lack of dignity by remaining all those years with a violent husband until eventually she had felt obliged to react. Violence degrades both perpetrator and victim, but in different ways. Or that was what she felt. She also felt that leaving home was not a particularly attractive proposition, especially now she knew that he would be forever pestering her to come back, using moral blackmail and evoking their dead son.

  Had she been present when her husband was visited by his drinking pal, Bill, she would have had no difficulty in deciding what to do. After all, she earned a good salary and could quite easily start again. Many women in her situation did not share that luxury.

  Bill had lost his job about the same time as her husband did. They simply made him redundant along with a thousand other workers at the plant producing sanitary goods for public toilets. Her husband had avoided dismissal for years: he was listened to sympathetically and the practice even hired a psychologist. He was given compassionate leave, and then given it again and again. In the end it was his erratic and violent behaviour towards patients that finally convinced his employers that they had to let him go. Still he did entertain the possibility of taking them to a tribunal, but after some research his lawyer decided that, on balance, it would be better not to. Bill was given the minimum of everything: a pitiful redundancy payment based on a pitiful salary, a few weeks’ notice and a written request for the return of his company-issue work jacket. Alcohol took Bill in a different direction. He was at last able to give free rein to his fecklessness. After six months, his wife had had enough and she showed him the door. Always a mild-mannered man, he dutifully left without a scene. He was supposed to take the children out once a week, but it was more like once a month. He wanted to be a good father, but he always wanted to be a good father next month. This month, he had to drink, as though it were a duty, a job, even an imposition.

  Bill and her husband were an unlikely pair. The latter liked to play the bounteous friend to the only person left he could talk down to. Bill on the other hand thought that he had found a lost soul badly in need of a helping hand, and he was closer to the truth, although he did have one ulterior motive: an endless succession of free drinks, which she probably paid for.

  “The little whore nearly killed me,” he said, quoting himself, “that’s women for you. No loyalty, no gratitude.” Bill nodded, but disagreed. He knew his friend had a violent temper, and he knew his wife was a petite and attractive woman, whose attractiveness was not sexual or aesthetic so much as decency enclosed within a gaunt and noble exterior. She was as energetic as they were lackadaisical. It hurt him therefore that she clearly considered him to be part of the problem – to be leading her husband astray. “We’re both looking after him,” he wanted to say, “and I’m keeping him out of your road.” But of course he didn’t. In fact he didn’t say anything to her, and on the few occasions they met, it was because his friend had forced him to come back to the house, clearly against her own wishes.

  Seonag came round with the obligatory bottle of red wine. “It’s time you listened to your friends. This can’t go on,” she said with proprietorial kindness.

  But she, the woman apparently in need of friends, didn’t feel she needed them. Her life was not so good that it merited raking over. Besides, she had always slightly envied Seonag’s good luck in life: widely admired, she had children and a doting husband, a little dull perhaps and a new man – possibly. Seonag would have wanted a dull husband anyway; she had to shine. Seon
ag wasn’t even that good to look at, she thought rather basely. An unsisterly thought she was supposed to have placed in the dustbin of history, which would be overflowing if it weren’t for the fact that everything you throw in it immediately leaps out again. Things were bad, and the last thing she needed was Seonag telling her how to live her life. They sat in the sitting room – a lacklustre and featureless expression of a marriage so troubled it could never express anything except a void. Seonag made a great play of pouring the wine to emphasise her feisty and upbeat role in her friend’s crisis. “You’ve got to leave, you must know that. What you’re doing visiting him in hospital, I can’t imagine.” Seonag allowed herself a momentary glance of disapproval in her direction, but she didn’t react to Seonag’s prodding. She wasn’t going to answer, partly because she hadn’t made up her mind – something she was ashamed of. It’s not that simple, she thought, but didn’t say. She knew what Seonag’s reply would be, “But it is that simple. It’s cut and dried. The man is off his head. What is it with women who always think they can reform their men, even after decades of absolute proof to the contrary?” Unlike her forename, Seonag’s surname and Seonag’s accent did not betray a Gaelic background; her wealthy parents had chosen Gaelic names for their children as a nod towards their nationalist instincts. She had been educated at a private academy and her genuinely well-meaning campaigns were often invasive, as they failed to take account of their beneficiaries’ subjectivity. There was something a little faux about Seonag: she seemed to be made up of disparate elements that she had laboriously welded together to construct a self that might or might not have worked, but certainly acted as a veil to her true nature; she seemed to be the archetypal product of a fragmented age, and that too must have required a degree of courage on her part.

  Her petite friend was not unappreciative, but she needed time to think and was perfectly aware of the arguments. She sipped her wine and said little. This only made Seonag say more, and by the time she left, her friend was almost convinced that she had to stay with her husband. Life didn’t seem to offer much else, and the world outside her ghastly marriage seemed to be populated by the judgmental.

  The hospital rang in the morning. It was a chirpy young nurse who clearly didn’t know the background to the case. “Mrs …,” she said; it was “Mrs” and not “Ms” as though to emphasise the bond. “Mrs … the consultant says your husband can come home this afternoon. Any time after three. Is that all right?”

  She said nothing. She could not reply.

  “Mrs …, are you all right?” the nurse said nervously.

  “I’m fine. That’ll be fine,” she said flatly, unthinkingly. “I’ll be there to take him home.”

  She had hoped for more time, even though she knew she would never resolve the problem. As long as he was away, the thoughts would just keep spinning around in her head. Spinning and spinning. Interrupting her work, distracting her and wearing down her already threadbare nerves. What she feared most was not his violence – that would come later – but the theatrical scene with which he would greet her. Exactly what form it would take was hard to say. What was certain was that he would write his part well and extract the maximum pathos. He would be the Christ whose flesh had been torn; he would be the magnanimous husband who receives his penitent wife. She would turn red with shame, speechless and unable to defend herself for fear of aggravating the excruciating spectacle. Always that threat hanging over her, but could she live without it now? The last nineteen years of her life had been marked by the continuous presence of that threat. It had become an integral part of life; how would she fare without it? And what about him? He really did need her, she knew that. Even if he was capable of killing her – of that she was now certain – death in the sadness and ugliness of her life did not seem so terrible. They shared a lot, man and wife, and what they shared was a past she was not sure she could ever be free of. He too was a soul in pain. The strong have to suffer for the weak, and she was strong enough to carry him through life. On his own, he would not go far. She would have no more children, so he was the only person in absolute need of her sacrifice. Hadn’t he promised never to hit her again? If he kept that promise, surely everything was bearable – but only bearable.

  As the afternoon progressed, she became increasingly convinced that to abandon a human being with whom she had jointly suffered and delighted in so much was wrong. Not only were there those moments of strife, but also those to be relished: the birth of their son, family holidays abroad, encounters with friends, and yes, love, especially in the early years. Was it not childish to think that life is like an advert – a continuous thread of unalloyed joy? True, her love was long dead, and his physical touch revolted her, but her compassion for him was not entirely extinguished. Emotions are not like rational concepts: the contradictory can cohabit very easily.

  She opened her umbrella and ran to the car. The drab weather of the west coast clung to everything. The sodden ground shifted under her tread and her bones felt the sharpness of the wind. We are born into an alien world whose trials would make the immortal gods weep, if they had any compassion; yet we must bear them in solitude precisely because we are not alone. Indeed she was lucky when compared with so much of humanity and of womankind – she had, some might say, little to complain about in a world of smart bombs, sweatshops, sex slaves, people-trafficking, famine and brutal, unremitting physical labour that does not earn a living wage. To feel sorry for oneself is to lose that last shred of human dignity. She straightened her secular Presbyterian back, and decided she was definitely going to the hospital.

  Just before a T-junction she pulled into a lay-by and took a deep breath. This needed more thought, she told herself. Once we pretend to be returning to normality, it will be so much harder to break free, and this is someone I have stabbed. For the first time, she felt the enormity of having almost killed someone. Why put herself in a position where that same dynamic of violent attack and violent defence could repeat itself?

  She also rebelled against the way others would inevitably interpret their continued marriage: “Of course, it was six of one and half a dozen of the other.” She could also hear people say, “You can hardly blame him, she’s as dull as ditchwater.” It was true, she thought, she was a little dull, as so many overworked and reliable people are. The ebullient couthieness so valued in our society had been drained out of her long ago. But surely, where there is violence, all blame must be with the perpetrator. Absolute rules are dangerous, but this one must stand. It is not even three of one and nine of the other; it is all blame on one side. And yet there could be no doubt, she had always felt more diminished by his violence than he did. Perhaps he didn’t feel diminished at all.

  The now heavy rain flooded the windscreen, isolating her in the car interior that felt like the whole universe. She was alone in it, with only her pain for company. She turned the ignition far enough to restart the wipers, and they revealed a monochrome drabness in which the junction and its choices could only just be discerned. The two directions – left towards the hospital or right towards Seonag’s comfortable detached villa and a different kind of humiliation. Outside the car was a world so strange and unnatural that she couldn’t feel part of it. Others in her situation might have been tempted by suicide, but she, still a practical and resourceful woman in spite of her suffering, wrestled with a deep sense of alienation like someone unsettled by a particularly obscure cryptic crossword puzzle.

  Did it make sense to climb into bed or even share a house with someone who at one level repelled her? If love means anything at all, it is not eventually about a loved one’s looks. If he were like Adonis or even his youthful self, he would still repel her, just as a kindlier, more admirable or more fascinating man would have retained her love even if he had grown into her husband’s current appearance. Love that endures is not only proximity and habituation; it is also a unique culture, a system of communication, a world view, a sense of humour and, in its highest form, a complete lack of po
ssession. Their marriage lacked all those things. Better to be alone, much better.

  She switched the ignition off so that the rainwater could obscure the dullness and unattractiveness of her choices.

  But wasn’t most of her rejection of Seonag’s kind offer just pride? Was she rejecting it, simply because it was so unfamiliar: an unknown bedroom and outside it the sense of intruding in the privacy of other lives, the exaggerated attentiveness of Seonag’s husband, the exuberance of their children, and the bitter taste of other people’s food day after day? But not forever.

  She could go to a hotel. She was not poor, although the cost would soon clock up. Practical as she was, she knew that she wouldn’t resist him if he turned up at the hotel. She hated scenes in public places. If he came to Seonag’s, Seonag would send him packing. Seonag was good at that kind of thing. He would scream and plead and threaten, and Seonag would stand her ground, while she would sit in her bedroom in anguish, embarrassed that her friend was fighting her battles. But it would not go on indefinitely.