After you’ve walked through the kitchen (it can be done in two steps, one if you have long legs), you pretty much land on the double bed. That’s it. That’s the next room. I am practically camping here. You, my darling Bo, live a life of unimaginable bourgeois luxury compared to me. I live in boho hell.
So, let’s move on. I read your stories. They broke my heart and made everything clear. But do not worry. I will never mention any of it again, unless you want to. Thank you for telling me that stuff. xxx
I suppose I had better go. My boss has given me more work, so I have lessons on the finer points of the the first and second conditional to prepare. Actually, it’s interesting, in a way. Here’s a lesson for you. I will give you two sentences. Think about the difference in meaning between them:
1) If Bo Luxton marries me, I will live happily ever after.
2) If Bo Luxton married me, I would live happily ever after.
Have you got it? You probably have because you are a woman of deep genius, who can work these things out without the assistance of your protegée. However, just in case, here is the explanation:
You use the first to talk about something which is quite likely to happen.
You use the second to talk about something you don’t believe will happen. It’s wishful thinking.
Many people think I am incredibly boring to find the rules of grammar so exciting, but there are times like this when you can read a person’s mind, simply by the language they choose. You can also work out whether they are delusional. ‘If Bo Luxton marries me, I will live happily ever after.’ There it is. Me. Totally delusional but I can’t let the idea go…
Love you,
Alice xxx
I read the email on my phone and sighed. I didn’t reply. Not straight away. Dear, sweet Alice. So desperate to be with me.
I looked around – at my kitchen, at the magnificent view of the fells from the window, and thought of Alice, alone and lonely in her tiny flat. ‘Totally delusional, but I can’t let the idea go…’ There it was, the quiet request for commitment. I could read between the lines. I was adept at it, and what I read here was, ‘Please tell me we have a future.’
Oh, God. This was where it had got to with Christian. I still remembered his beautiful young face, so trusting, wanting me to follow him into that wide trench of intimacy. And I tried. God, I tried, but I couldn’t. I stood on the edge and peered in and all I could see was love and squalor: suffocation; disaster; death.
I put my head in my hands and wept.
12
I told myself, The only cure for desire is distance, and didn’t contact her for a week. I hoped she might sense it, understand my worries and then take some steps back. Get this love to a place of sanity and start again.
But she didn’t.
The emails came thick and fast. Every morning, every afternoon, every evening. ‘Please let me know how you are. If you want to end this, that’s OK. I’ll understand. Just talk to me about it.’
How could I? This young woman had her wellness wrapped up in me. If I walked away from her, she would break. Besides, I didn’t want to walk away. What I needed – what we both needed – was just to back off, slowly and carefully.
After six days without contacting her, I sent her a text message: Call me, I said.
She phoned at 11 am on Saturday. She sounded flat, slightly hoarse, and I wondered if she was hungover, turning to drink after my silence.
I said, ‘Gus is out. He’s in Manchester again this weekend. The girls are at their music classes. I wanted to talk to you.’
I could hear the unsaid words: ‘If he’s away, why haven’t you asked me back there?’
Out loud, Alice got straight to the point, ‘Have you got cold feet?’
‘No.’ I spoke immediately. I didn’t have cold feet. I wanted this. I did. I loved this young, clever and troubled woman, but there was too much at stake. Lola and Maggie, just six and eight years old, and so happy they didn’t even have to think about happiness. It was just who they were: stable, happy girls. I couldn’t destroy that.
Alice said, ‘That’s good,’ and I could hear the relief in her voice. Then she said, ‘It sounds serious, though.’
‘It is. I think we need to stop the emails.’
‘What?’
‘Listen, you’ve met Gus. You know he’s not an easy man, and he’s always been jealous, but it’s been worse over the last few years, ever since my career took off and he hasn’t … Anyway, he uses my computer and it’s normal for him to read my emails. Can we agree to just talk on the phone instead? Every morning. I’m free then, and he won’t know.’
‘But I work.’
‘Evenings, then. Please, darling. I can’t risk this.’
Alice paused. After a long moment, she said, ‘OK.’
‘And if you have any of my old emails, could you delete them? I know that sounds paranoid, but you just never know…’
Alice paused again. Then again, she said, ‘OK.’
‘Do you understand why I’m asking you to do this?’
‘Yes. I do understand. Of course.’
‘We’ll be together again soon. I’ll make sure of it,’ I said.
Alice said nothing. I said I had to go and ended the call.
13
At nights, now, I lay awake and tried to return to my family.
It would be a lovely summer. Summers were always lovely here, even without the warm sun of the south. Almost every morning, we’d be out on the fells, or down at the lake to swim, then we’d come home for a late lunch and the girls would spend the afternoon in the garden while I sat on the terrace and read a novel or wrote ideas in my notebook. Now and then, Gus would come and join us. Last year, the evening before the girls had gone back to school, he’d brought a tray of sandwiches and cakes, and a jug of lemonade, and the four of us had stayed out there for hours, eating and drinking until the sun collapsed and night fell, and the moon rose out of the lake and silvered the mountains. I had felt deeply happy.
I thought now, What is wrong with me?
Next week, the girls would be finishing school. There’d be no time to write and no space in my head for anything but them. I wasn’t sure where I’d be able to fit Alice in. There was no possibility of us stealing time together before Christmas.
Alice.
She made the whole world brighter and more meaningful than it had ever been before. It reminded me of those days in my awful twenties when I’d eaten magic mushrooms and been flooded with a sense of calm and wellness that later turned to ecstasy. All around me, everything would grow brighter: the sky bluer, the grass greener, the turning autumn leaves a deeper shade of russet, as though someone had turned up the colours of the earth and then bathed it all in light.
It was like that now. Just ecstasy. I tried to rationalise it, even tried to control it, but it couldn’t be restrained, and went beyond the reach of language. I hadn’t the words to describe it, except that it was overwhelming and exquisite and right. But sometimes the joy would turn and the sharp ache of despair take its place. There was always grief in love. It was bound in with it – the quiet threat of loss. It was why I’d never loved before, I knew that.
Apart from my babies. Of course. But those first few weeks and months after Lola was born … they were awful. Wild, hormonal emotion, like falling into an abyss, fragile and about to be broken by it. I was so naïve and the baby so helpless, and always, I was terrified I wouldn’t be able to feed her, or keep her alive, or that someone would take her, and then I would die from the pain of it. Motherhood was a place for me. A terrible, vulnerable place. For weeks I wept, knowing it was all grief for the first baby. Grief and fear and shame. God, so much shame, even then. But I pushed on, took control, and it wore off after a while, and I was able to look after the baby steadily and carefully, without panic.
Never have your well-being wrapped up in someone else – that had always been my mantra. Never. And if you do, retreat or get rid of them.
I wasn’t stupid. I knew Alice’s age. The baby’s age now. The baby I called Willow. That was what I put it down to. This lovely young woman, like me in so many ways, could have been that baby. I’d thought my feelings were maternal, but they raged on, until I grew exhausted from trying to push them back and I just collapsed and let love erode me.
Because it had eroded me. It had ground down my energy and my sense. And now I was here, debilitated, and really thinking of risking all this, all that I had: this home, this family, this normality. God, the normality – the precious ordinariness that I’d waited so long for.
When I’d been reading all those biographies for the Wordsworth project, trying to decide my answer to the age-old question of whether the great man had been shagging his sister, I’d read that family members who were separated and reunited years later often fell in love. That mix of strangeness (someone unknown, mysterious) and familiarity (so like you, in so many ways) was a potent one. It went straight to their heads and wrecked their lives.
Something like this had happened between Alice and me. We weren’t family, but we were wounded; and the wound in each of us was gaping and was shaped exactly like the other. Alice was my missing piece, the beautiful girl that made me whole again.
And I knew what I was to Alice: the shape of the mother.
14
When I was young – in those years before Gus – I’d loved men. I’d loved them with obsessive, unrequited emptiness. Unrequited love had been all I was capable of. It gave me all the emotional jolts of real love, without ever having to drown myself in intimacy. Now, I realised, that drama had been reversed. Now, I drew people in and then retreated. Their hearts broke and I watched from the sidelines, guilty and ashamed, but with all the satisfaction of knowing I was deeply loved, while never having to make any of it real.
For all my success, at base I was deeply dysfunctional.
I sighed. I’d just had another letter from Lucy Winter. The type-written envelope fooled Gus into giving it to me, and me into opening it, instead of leaving it for him to deal with, as I usually did. It contained her usual hate-filled diatribe. But her letters were becoming less frequent now. More time passed between each one, and I assumed that one day, eventually, they would just stop altogether.
‘Some power greater than me will make sure you pay for my son’s death’, she wrote.
I wanted to write back to her, but had no idea what to say. The story was settled in my mind. Christian had been a lovely young man. I had been very fond of him – in a maternal way. I’d tried to help him, not realising he would fall in love with me. When I had to set him straight, he wouldn’t accept it and became obsessed, a stalker. It went on and on. He made my life a misery, and in the end, I had to come down hard on him. And he killed himself. That was what happened. It was tragic, awful, but Christian was troubled and it wasn’t my fault. I was not guilty. No judge would have ever found me guilty. I was a good woman, a kind woman, a woman that people loved. I was not guilty.
That was how I remembered it, and that was how it was.
I watched the girls in the garden. I’d set the sprinkler up for them and they were running through it, shrieking and getting wet and cold. We could only do this when Gus wasn’t around. He disapproved of such a frivolous use of water. By 2050, he said, half the planet would be suffering from famine and water shortages. We had no right to fritter it away like this.
I said, ‘Then don’t we owe it to ourselves to just make the most of the time we have? If all we have is now, I’m going to let my children jump through as much water as they can.’
Gus ignored me. He probably didn’t want to dignify my remark with a response. I was too selfish for him, not galvanised enough to take my part in the massive collective effort to preserve a healthy, living Earth. It was true. I wasn’t. The thought of it exhausted me. Besides, what was the aim of all this? Was it to protect the planet, or to protect humans from dying out? Humans had had their day. We were peaking, right now, anyone could see that. Why not just wipe ourselves out; give plankton a chance?
‘There will be no plankton before long,’ Gus murmured darkly, citing figures about plastic in the oceans – more plastic than fish by mid-century. The Great Barrier Reef was falling apart as we spoke. In the last hour, six thousand acres of rainforest had been felled and another section of the Arctic had plunged into the sea. Everything was dying. The girls were going to inherit an environmental catastrophe.
Gus suffered from a permanent depression that had been brought about when he decided to read about the state of the planet. I wished he’d never done it. It filled our house with gloom.
Lola abandoned the sprinkler first. ‘I’m cold,’ she announced, standing in front of me and shivering.
I reached for a towel from the pile on the table beside me, wrapped her in it then hauled her onto my lap to warm her up. We sat together like that, quietly, for ages, and again I thought, What is wrong with me?
If Gus were to go on my computer now, catch sight of my emails (which Alice went on sending, despite what I’d said), then life here would be over. He would leave me, and the girls would become just two more children from a broken home, so common these days people could easily fool themselves into thinking it was OK, that the children would be fine. But I’d read the articles, the data, the research that covered half a century. The evidence was there, irrefutable: If you want happy children, stay together. Always. Even if it’s killing you. Better that you die from a lack of emotional fulfilment than you inflict a separation on them. And they will surely punish you for pursuing your own happiness. They will grow into depressed adults and you’ll watch them fail and fail and fail, and it will all be because you left their father, thinking the children would be fine, that they’d be glad to see you away from the bastard and happy at last. The truth was the children didn’t give a shit about your happiness. They gave a shit about their family being together.
I couldn’t do it.
I couldn’t.
But the thought of not doing it made me sob.
Instead of myself, I tried to focus on Alice. To be with me, she would have to give up everything. All that longing for children of her own, that need she had to put her own damaged childhood right, to heal with the next generation. I couldn’t let her abandon that, just for me. It mattered. It mattered to her. It mattered to me that she could do it.
Someone here needed to take control. And I was the elder of the two of us. It needed to be me.
15
I washed my hands and washed my hands. I felt sick. My guilt was everywhere. Gus, the children, Alice, I’d betrayed them all, every one, and now I had to stop. I needed to take control of this and head away from it, down the path that would destroy the fewest lives.
There was only one choice, only one sacrifice. Alice had to go.
I dried my hands and sobbed.
Alice. Dear, sweet, beautiful Alice, whom I adored with every cell in my body. Alice, who had been so deeply hurt, who loved me like I had never been loved before … and now I was going to take that girl’s heart in my hand and crush it.
Alice wasn’t going to recover from this easily, I knew that much. It would set her back years. It would be too much pain for her to bear.
I buried my face in my hands. What was I doing? Dear God, what had I done?
I can’t face her, I thought. I cannot do it.
The emails kept coming. Needy, angry, desperate. God, there was something abhorrent in distress like this. It was vile, like shit or guts. I had some primal need not to see it.
One night, I lay awake, thinking of the best words I could use to break my decision to her. But no matter what I said, the result would be the same: Alice, knocked to the floor, shocked, devastated. I shook my head, and for a moment allowed myself to think how she must be feeling right now. My heart snagged on it.
I got out of bed at 4 am and went down to my study, where I googled ‘mid-life crisis.’ I needed to find a reason for this love I had for
Alice. That was the first step, the first stage of rationalising it all away.
Yes. A mid-life crisis was probably all this was. I’d seen it happen to friends. Marriages that had seemed happy and stable for years and years suddenly fell apart as someone started craving excitement, passion, a new direction. Secretly, smugly perhaps, I’d watched other lives crumble and felt absolute certainty that it wouldn’t happen to me. Never in my life had I desired love or passion or excitement. All I wanted was to be ordinary. I wanted marriage, a home and a family so I could blend in with everyone else, but I did not need to love or be loved. It was much easier to be ordinary when you banished yourself from the roaring world of emotions.
But here, where I was now, was not ordinary. It was not normal, or sensible. It was foolish, risky, dangerous. For the first time in my life, I understood what it meant to be madly in love. That was what I was; what we both were: we’d been rendered insane with emotion.
On the screen in front of me, it appeared: ‘Top ten signs of a mid-life crisis.’ I clicked the link:
1. Going to Glastonbury
2. Taking up a new hobby
3. Wanting to make the world a better place
4. Buying a motorbike
5. Looking up ex-lovers on Facebook
6. Switching from Radio 2 to indie stations like 6 Music
7. Dyeing your hair
8. Quitting your job in the city and moving somewhere rural
9. Questioning your sexuality
10. Having an affair
So there it was in black and white. I was having a mid-life crisis. Of those ten things, I had done eight in the last two years, and the final three on the list were deemed by its author (a psychotherapist) to be the most dangerous. They could tear homes apart, and lead to lifetimes of regret.
I needed to stop it. I couldn’t abandon the father of my girls and bring up my children with another woman. That sort of thing was fine in forward-thinking, youthful Brighton, but here in Grasmere, it was not. The girls would stand out, they’d be talked about. They would not be like everyone else. They would not be normal.
Exquisite Page 16