“But after you went sailing with Richard—”
“Yeah, you’re right, that was when I began to want to go back even though I still couldn’t imagine living without Elizabeth.” As I pause to peer again through the fog I find it’s floating away and I can see the past more clearly. “The point about Richard,” I say finally, “is that by reminding me of Hugo—the good Hugo, not the angry Hugo in my head—he reminded me of all the happy times I’d had when I was younger, the times all the later misery had blotted out.”
“So Richard rearranged the past for you. He reminded you of a world where you didn’t have to live a life so at odds with your true self.”
I nod as I watch the last of the fog disperse. “When I was sailing with Richard it was as if I was back in that world,” I say, “and Richard saw me then as I really was. Maybe that was when he fell in love with me. Before that he’d just been infatuated.”
“But what were your feelings for Richard by then? How did you feel about having sex with someone who reminded you of your brother?”
I sigh as I search for the words which will finally bury Gavin Blake Leisure-Worker, that caring bloke who performed a valuable social service. “When I worked,” I say, “Richard wasn’t Hugo. Richard wasn’t even Richard. He was just another lump of meat on the block, someone—no, something—I could manipulate for money by doing a set of routines I’d been trained to perform. It was like being an animal. Or possibly a robot. But it wasn’t like being human and doing something called ‘making love.’ ” I run out of steam but Lewis nods and doesn’t press me with another question. I’m not being judged here. He’s still on my side, still understanding.
“Even when Richard reminded me of Hugo,” I say, “he was still just a client when we got to the bedroom. I mean, how could it have been otherwise? Fundamentally I wasn’t into gay sex and Richard wasn’t sexually attractive to me. In fact even if I’d been gay I can’t imagine him turning me on—he was overweight, he didn’t work out and he wasn’t up to much in the sack, those heavy drinkers never are. Because I liked him I did make the extra effort to give him a good time, but I was still working, still acting and performing for money. So when we were together I was never having a loving relationship with a brother. I was always just ripping off a bloke who reminded me of my brother.” I stop, feeling ready to collapse. Is there anything more exhausting than telling a string of shitty truths you’d rather not face? But the paradox is I know I’m going to feel better now. Lewis still accepts me. It’s going to be all right.
With a huge effort I drum up the energy to blurt out: “I wish Richard was still alive. I wish I could tell him how sorry I am that I hurt him.”
“That, of course, is very commendable,” says Lewis at once, “but I think you should beware of turning Richard into a Victim with a capital V.”
I look up. “What do you mean?”
“Well, it occurred to me while you were talking that my Great-Uncle Cuthbert would have taken a tough line here, and he would have taken it with Richard, not with you. He would have said that a sophisticated man who consorted with a prostitute would have known exactly what he was doing and would have deserved everything he got . . . But then Great-Uncle Cuthbert was always very severe on the subject of immorality and particularly when the immorality was homosexual.”
I’m hooked on Great-Uncle Cuthbert. I just love the way he’s so politically incorrect. “Was he a closet gay, Lewis?”
“I was never able to decide and he gave no clues, but I’m quite sure he believed that his sexual preferences were between him and God and as such were in no way a subject for general discussion. In fact he would have said that modern society’s obsession with sex was unhealthy, immature and idolatrous, and created a severe distortion of reality.”
“Wow!” I’m enthralled by the sheer subversive magnificence of this fearless alternative vision.
Lewis smiles, and prepares to tell me more.
Our talks continue with this format: we discuss me for as long as I can stand it, and then as a reward Lewis gives me another instalment of his monastic soap opera. Cool. I like hearing about all the monks Great-Uncle Cuthbert ruled with a rod of iron, and I’m spherical-eyed to learn there was no homosexuality in his all-male roost. No overt homosexuality anyway. Lewis says the main sin was gluttony. But there was no anorexia or bulimia, not in Great-Uncle Cuthbert’s monastery. Great-Uncle Cuthbert would have called them spiritual illnesses, a sign that the soul wasn’t lined up right with God and in consequence was writhing in agony. Great-Uncle Cuthbert didn’t mince his words. He lived in a less wimpish age and never pulled the punches when he was speaking about God, religion and the spiritual.
I like hearing about all these blokes who did without sex, and that’s not because I’m thinking of entering a monastery. It’s because I like hearing about a lifestyle that’s totally different from the one that’s nearly finished me. Dimly it dawns on me why Lewis is keen to spin me these stories. He’s saying you don’t have to have a sicko lifestyle selling yourself for money. You don’t even have to have a conventional mainstream lifestyle, trotting off to work each day in an office and being a couch potato with your wife in the evenings as you snooze in front of the TV. And you certainly don’t have to live an isolated-bubble lifestyle, thinking only of yourself. There are other options, other ways of living—and other ways too of looking at the things you feel you can’t do without.
“Human beings love idols,” says Lewis, “because human beings love to worship, but if you worship the wrong gods, you risk being seriously cut off from reality.”
Anything can become an idol, he says: a nation, a political party, a head of state—drink, drugs, food—football, rock music, pop stars—cars, boats, designer clothes—sex, exercise, loadsamoney—you name it. All these things may be good in themselves, but once they become an obsession you squander time and energy on illusions, your priorities get rearranged, your balanced lifestyle goes down the tubes and your true self gets stomped on. Or in other words, getting cut off from reality can make you physically, mentally and spiritually ill.
I pick out my past idols from his list, the addictions I used in order to fill the worship-space in my head. What I now have to do is fill the worship-space in my head with the right stuff, the stuff that’s codenamed God, but I’m not going to be interested in the souped-up father-figure who gets wheeled out to bore for religion, and you can forget the nursery-rhyme old man in the sky. I still like the idea of God as a fraught artist, and Lewis says fine, it’s a passable image because art is about reality and God is Ultimate Reality itself—line yourself up with Ultimate Reality, Lewis says, and you become real in your turn, playing your part in the scheme of things and feeling fulfilled as your real self has the chance to flourish. But—
“—but,” warns Lewis, “remember that no image of God can give more than a glimpse of him, and that projecting images on to God can be very dangerous.” And he points out that God can be converted into an idol too, and when God becomes a false god bad religion breaks out. That’s why The Bloke’s so important, I see that now. He knows what the real God is and he can point the way to him.
I mosey around in all this spiritual stuff like a dog circling a deeply relevant lamp-post but finally I ask: “Why doesn’t The Bloke just fix me?”
“He’s not a magician, Gavin. He operates through love, not through a magic wand.”
“That’s all very well, but I want him to come along and—” I break off as I remember. He’s already here, working through Lewis. All I’ve got to do is work hard in return, but it’s so emotionally exhausting and I’m still so sick.
“You’ll get better,” says Lewis. “I’m sure of it.”
I don’t know whether I believe him or not. But I do know I’m being given the strength to stagger on.
Hugo’s fully excavated now and ready for a serious one-to-one talk, but we’re putting him on ice for a short while in order to excavate the surrounding areas more fully. We talk
some more about my parents. We talk about my father’s own brother Hugo who was killed in the war, and about my mother’s awful sisters: Pansy, who eloped with an American soldier, and Marigold, who married a millionaire and lived at St. George’s Hill in Weybridge and looked down on my mother for getting stuck with a mere country doctor.
Then I talk about Granny, Mum’s mother, who loved to gossip and who was a colossal snob, and about Other Granny, Dad’s mother, who played Edwardian songs on the piano and whom Granny called “common” just because Other Granny had once had to earn her living teaching music. Then I talk about Grandfather, Mum’s dad, who liked cricket, and about Grandad the Other Grandfather, who grew prize tomatoes in his greenhouse, and about the various cousins, all of whom had been either snotty or weird.
But we start praying for all my family, even the snotty or weird members, and at that point I tell Lewis I’d like to pray for my father, I’d like to say how grateful I am to him for teaching me to sail and how precious the memory is of that day we sailed past the Needles. And after these prayers I think I might be able to talk at last about what Hugo’s death did to my parents, but although I tell Lewis I want to try, the words still refuse to come.
So Lewis diverts me again by playing Scheherazade, and at last he goes further back than his teenage days at the monastery. He tells me his childhood was spent with an uncle and aunt at their Sussex mansion because his widowed mother was too busy having affairs to care for him. He says he loved her anyway but hated the uncle and aunt, so he got himself expelled from school in the hope that he could go and live in Paris with his mother and her current lover.
“Naturally they were horrified,” says Lewis dryly, “and in fact after that no one wanted to give me a home, but at least Great-Uncle Cuthbert believed that my salvation was his moral duty. However, he was a tough old man and overt affection wasn’t his strong suit. Life was hardly a bed of roses,” Lewis adds, finally revealing the dark side of the monastic soap opera, and of course I can identify with the pain of not being wanted.
I know I can tell him everything now.
He’ll understand.
I start by saying how after Hugo died my father withdrew from me to immerse himself in his work and my mother sank fathoms deep in depression and neither had anything to say either to me or to each other.
“But there was nothing particularly new about any of that,” I say casually, as if the memories are really not too bad once you get used to them. “Dad was always immersing himself in his work and Mum had had depressions before and neither of them had had much to say to each other for years. It was just that Hugo’s death magnified all this crap to an unbearable degree.”
“You’re saying they couldn’t cope with the loss.”
“Right . . . They’d had so much invested in him.”
“The Harley Street dream?”
“Yes, you see, Mum would have liked Dad to have been a Harley Street specialist because that would have put her on a level with Aunt Marigold in St. George’s Hill. So Hugo being a Harley Street specialist would have been the next best thing.”
“And your father wanted this for Hugo too.”
“To be fair to Dad, I have to say he wouldn’t have minded if Hugo had just wound up a GP, but he definitely wanted him to be a doctor. Dad himself had followed in his father’s footsteps—in fact in Dad’s world, the world he grew up in, elder sons followed in their father’s footsteps, no question, and if the elder son died the next son would step up to fill his shoes. That was why it was so awful when—”
“—you couldn’t fill them. I understand . . . So Hugo was sustaining your father’s world-view and compensating your mother for the fact that your father hadn’t lived up to her expectations.”
“Hugo compensated Mum in other ways as well. He was everything Dad wasn’t—outgoing, gregarious, open, straightforward . . . Dad was always working or feeling tired or going sailing or shutting himself up in his study.”
“Not the easiest of husbands, perhaps—and this wasn’t the happiest of marriages, was it, even though everyone thought it was such a success.”
“True, but Hugo made everything okay,” I say. “He kept the marriage stitched together.”
“But there must have been other crucial stitches, surely, or your parents would have separated after he died. Was it you, do you think, who then kept the marriage from disintegrating?”
“Oh no,” I say at once. “No, it wasn’t me. Couldn’t have been.”
“Why not?”
I give a little shrug, fidget with my watchstrap.
“You mentioned your mother was prone to depression,” says Lewis, moving on—or is he only moving sideways? “Was this clinical depression treated by a doctor?”
“Suppose so. She got pills. Dad said she was fine.”
“And when was this?”
“After I joined Hugo at boarding school and she was left on her own at home. But Granny the Gossip—Mum’s mum—told us Mum wasn’t nearly as bad as she was the previous time.”
“What happened the previous time?”
“Post-partum blues. Suicide attempt. Granny shouldn’t have let that slip out, naughty old girl.”
“The post-partum blues were after you were born?”
My throat starts to tighten. “Yep.”
Lewis waits. I wait. Eventually Gavin Blake Debonair Survivor cruises in and says languidly: “Mum didn’t want another baby.”
“Is that what your grandmother said?”
“No, no, no!” I sound shocked. “Granny would never have said anything like that.”
“Then who did?”
I think of all the millions of women in the world and wish I could pick one at random and lie about her. But of course I can’t. No more lies. I have to tell the truth, and the truth here is that the woman was none other than—
“Mum,” I say casually to Lewis, and smother a fake yawn as I glance away.
“Ah,” says Lewis, keeping the world turning.
“Yeah.” I try to stop fidgeting with my watchstrap before I break it. “Mum told me after I was chucked out of medical school,” I say nonchalantly. “It was when I could no longer cope with trying to be Hugo. She lost her temper and shouted: ‘You’re hopeless, you’ll never get anywhere, never achieve anything, I wish I’d never had you, I wish I’d had that abortion I wanted,’ and then she burst into tears and started screaming she wanted to kill herself, and Dad came out of his study to see what all the fuss was about and he said: ‘For God’s sake, what is it now? Shut up, the bloody pair of you!’ he said, and after my mother ran off sobbing I tried to explain to him she was disappointed I hadn’t made the grade as Hugo would have done but he just said: ‘Well, how do you think I feel? It’s a tragedy you haven’t the brains to be a doctor,’ and that was when I knew both of them were wishing I was dead and Hugo was alive. I left home that same day.”
“I’m not surprised.”
Gavin Blake Debonair Survivor begins to fragment. “I suppose you’ll want to excuse Mum by saying she was just suffering from another bout of her clinical depression,” I say defiantly, unable to fake nonchalance a second longer, “but I say fuck her clinical depressions, fuck them, she treated me as if I barely existed after Hugo died—and even before that it was all Hugo, Hugo, Hugo, she didn’t give a shit for me ever, she just pretended she did. Elizabeth was the one who gave a shit,” I say violently as the emotion swamps me, but then I have to squeeze my eyes tight shut to ward off the pain. Elizabeth the mummy-substitute and femme fatale — my grand illusion. Elizabeth hadn’t given a shit either. Elizabeth had wanted me dead.
Just like my mother.
“Oh God,” I say, “oh God—”
“Okay, we’ll stop there.”
“No!” I shout, making him jump. I tell myself I’m not going to be weak and wet and wimpish, I’m not, I’m so fucking tired of being such a fucking mess. Peeling my fingers from my face I say strongly: “My mother was a stupid bitch. She spoilt Hugo rot
ten, she slobbered over him endlessly, but at the end when he was dying she was no bloody use at all. He wanted to talk about death but she refused to listen, she always insisted he’d get well, she failed him totally—”
“And your father?”
“In denial! Worse than Mum! Do you hear that, Lewis? This man was a doctor, for God’s sake, a doctor, and he couldn’t cope with someone who was dying! He failed Hugo as well. That’s why I had to step in. I was fifteen years old and yet I had to bear the whole back-breaking burden. I was the one who had to talk to Hugo about death, I was the one who had to make that terrible promise to ensure he died in peace, I was the one who let him into my head and wrecked my life—I su fered far more than they did! And I tried so hard to make it up to them for being alive when he was dead, so hard I tried—”
“It was hell, wasn’t it? No wonder you’re angry—”
“Angry? Fucking hell, that word doesn’t even begin to describe how I feel!” I yell, and then suddenly I’m sobbing. Fucking hell again. But I’m not stopping now. Can’t. My heart’s banging, my eyes are streaming, my breath’s coming in shudders, but somehow I’m still talking, still spewing out these godawful shitty truths—only this time they’re worse than shitty, they’re so dreadful they’re sort of cosmic, like Medea killing her children or Oedipus killing his father, they’re the kind of truths that make you want to die when you’re speaking them, but at the same time you know you’re speaking them to survive.
“I hated them all,” I say in between gasps as the tears burn my face. “I hated Mum and Dad for leaving me to cope alone and making me feel so guilty that I was alive. I hated Hugo for dying and then for taking over my life. And worst of all I hated myself for not being able to become Hugo, for letting down not just my brother but the parents I loved—and I did love them, I loved them all the time I was hating them, I loved Mum and Dad, I loved Hugo, and the more Mum and Dad grieved for him and ignored me the more I wanted their love and despised myself for not being good enough to get it. It made me feel so worthless, such a failure, so absolutely undeserving of any love at all—” I break off, too awash to go on.
The Heartbreaker Page 55