One Hundred Summers

by Vanessa Branson

WANNABE

  Months of writing have sharpened my focus and recall, during which the words have been flowing, but now I’m frozen. I’ve already walked the dog, hoovered the house, emptied the bins, chopped some kindling and laid the fire, so there’s nothing now to do other than go upstairs to my desk and open my laptop. But how do I go about writing the next chapters? Can I bear to recall the coming years, minute by minute? I hop around, flapping my hands and trying not to hyperventilate as I force myself to climb the staircase and face my demons.

  When I think how often two people remember the same events differently, I’m reminded of the work of David Hockney. In one of his series of photographic works, he attached six cameras at regular intervals to a scaffolding plank that was attached to the side of a Land Rover. The cameras were then driven though a landscape, each taking photos at the same time, capturing wildly varying images.

  My memories of what happened to me come from my fixed position. I’ll try to imagine images seen from other positions, but I won’t always succeed.

  ***

  Over the years, Robert and I had developed a way of making decisions that dodged any hint of confrontation. Having a positive, can-do mentality, I’d take the course of least resistance, either running with Robert’s plans or, as I also liked to get my own way sometimes, running with my own. We rarely made plans together. He didn’t share our financial situation and, in all honestly, I wasn’t that curious. We were the very definition of two separate pillars supporting our temple of love. In a curious way, our family life seemed to work rather well. There were so many decisions to make, and we generally respected each other’s judgment and shared similar values.

  In planning to have babies, we followed the same pattern. Robert had never expressed any excitement about the idea of having children, but when Noah and Floey were conceived he seemed extremely pleased when he heard the news. I had a hunch that, by not getting involved with the decision-making, he was absolving himself from some of the responsibility. Both our mothers had bemoaned the fact that they had stopped at three children and, with their words egging me on, I thought I would dive in once again.

  I’d turned a blind eye to the fact that my husband was struggling under the pressure of work and family life, but it was clear that he was becoming increasingly angry and never seemed to be satisfied. Nothing I did seemed right: I bought the wrong coffee, socks went missing, the Christmas tree was crooked…

  ‘Please Rob,’ I asked in desperation, looking for some encouragement, ‘can’t you occasionally give me some praise?’

  ‘You know I don’t give praise lightly,’ he replied. ‘It would become meaningless if I did. And besides, if I presume you’ll always get things wrong, I’ll get a pleasant surprise when you don’t.’

  I was able to cope by reassuring myself that the children were growing up and would soon become easier to manage, but Robert was finding the chaos infuriating and the noise levels uncontrollable. He felt frustrated at having to leave for work every morning and frustrated when he came home in the evening. He wanted to move to the country and live there full-time, a dream that I resisted, the words ‘deepest darkest Devon’ ringing in my ears. I’d witnessed the misery of girlfriends as they drove their offspring down country lanes to and from school, for hours each day. I could have coped with the driving and the dark winter evenings alone while Robert was working in London if I’d been happy, but the truth was that I too was miserable.

  So why did I get pregnant again? I felt our family had someone missing. In the end we obviously agreed it was the right decision, but in taking the plunge unilaterally, boy did I go about it in the wrong way.

  Facing forty often takes its toll on men. Women, their lives fulfilled with motherhood, neighbourhood and sisterhood, don’t seem to react as drastically to this turning point, but by contrast, men feel their powers diminishing: menus have to be held at arm’s length, historic rugby injuries begin to stiffen and many feel the need to clutch at straws in the hope of retaining their youthful vigour. Robert’s first straw was a mansion set in 300 acres of Sussex farmland, and when this didn’t do the trick he began saying it had always been his dream to own a Scottish island.

  To my horror, I would find copies of Country Life hidden under the bed or in the car’s glove compartment, pages turned down at the corners, depicting windswept rocks in the North Sea. Then, on the way to stay with Charlotte and Rupert de Klee on Mull, Robert announced that we were taking a four-hour detour to view an island that looked promising.

  We didn’t need another house and we certainly didn’t need an island, so I sulked as we drove the car off the Fort William Motorail. My legs were twitching, the overnight train journey having tested my pregnant body. As we drove over the brow of a hill, I raised my eyebrows and nodded to Robert as the children started fussing on the back seat. Then I looked out of the window. A golden eagle was flying low over a mountain loch, its wings reflected in the still waters below. A calmness entered the car. Thirty minutes later, our bedraggled party tumbled out onto the slipway at Dorlin and I took in the view of the ruined Castle Tioram. Apart from the peeping calls of oystercatchers as they darted by, the silence was so complete that it rang in our ears. Highland cattle were chewing at wildflowers on the mudflats and, over the water, a mere ten-minute boat ride beyond, was Eilean Shona, the island that was to become our very own Neverland.

  Buying Eilean Shona was an act of lunacy: over two thousand acres of land crying out for attention, with ten cottages in various states of disrepair, crumbling outbuildings and an eleven-bedroomed main house with a leaking roof and an ancient boiler. But there was magic there too, a magic J. M. Barrie had recognised when he wrote the screenplay for the 1924 film adaptation of Peter Pan during a summer holiday on the island. From the moment we stepped onto the island’s mossy shore, we were bewitched.

  And once again, extraordinary people came into our lives just when we needed them. Marie and Ian Lewis were only in their mid-twenties. She’d been brought up in the Highlands and studied sculpture at Glasgow School of Art. They’d been married under the ruins of Castle Tioram less than a year earlier and now bravely agreed to come and manage the island’s redevelopment for us. With their no-nonsense practical spirit, enthusiastic approach and creative vision, they set a tone of quality for the island. We respected their approach and loved working with them. It’s hard to imagine how many decisions we had to make to get the place up and running, but with this keen and capable young couple at the helm, everything seemed possible.

  On the day we completed on the purchase, aware that time was of the essence, I’d waddled through John Lewis, flanked by two anxious sales assistants, and bought pretty much everything needed to make a large house work: forty-eight pillows, ninety-six pillowcases, vast quantities of towels, duvets, knives, forks, glasses, teapots, wastepaper baskets, and so on.

  Ivo was born at home the following day, at 2.04 p.m. on 9 March 1995, weighing in at a robust 9 lbs 11 oz. When the other children returned from school an hour later, he was ready to join the gang and formed the final carriage of their train as they hauled him around the kitchen at speed by the handles of his carrycot, chuff-chuffing round the kitchen table. The kids painted a huge poster saying, ‘It’s a boy!’ and pasted it to the front of the house, encouraging a steady stream of neighbours to come and pay homage to the little chap. The family was complete.

  ***

  Dominique, Navin, Clare and I planned Robert’s fortieth birthday party on Shona, on 11 April 1995. Navin and Clare crammed a van full of provisions and drove it up to the west coast of Scotland, while Marie and Ian prepared the island for the big party.

  There has never been a party like it – forty of our precious friends, all discovering our wilderness island with us. As they arrived, the sun was setting. We chugged around Riska Island on our rusting barge, glasses in hand, revelling in the beauty of the moment. Ian cut the engine and in the golden light, the reedy sound of the opening bars of ‘The Dark Island’ floa
ted across the still water as David, the local bus driver’s son, played the bagpipes on the battlements of Castle Tioram. During the next two days, Marie spoiled us with sumptuous meals: we shucked fresh oysters on the fine white sands of Shoe Bay by day, and ate roasted haunches of venison in the dining room, lit by a hundred flickering candles by night, before dancing the night away in the village hall with local musician Fergie Macdonald setting the pace on his famous fiddle.

  ***

  A year later, Comet Hale-Bopp was shining in the night sky, its phenomenal tail playing tricks on us mere mortals below. We were at the Sussex farm one weekend. The children were finally asleep and I settled down to stick photographs from the previous year into an album that the family still pore over, memory after memory laid down for eternity. The photographs are mostly of the children: their first days at nursery as they grin through missing front teeth, snow-ploughing down ski slopes, dancing naked in rainstorms and proudly holding up school trophies. There are photographs of Robert and our four naked babies running into the sea on Shona, hand in hand, whooping as they hit the freezing water, and of him throwing each laughing child high up in the sky.

  I was feeling content for the first time in a while. Robert’s spirit had been lighter lately. He’d even taken to smoking the odd cigarette. A fortnight earlier, he’d suggested we take a break without the kids for the first time in a few years, and he’d taken me to stay at La Gazelle D’or in Morocco. I felt happy and relaxed, believing that we’d begun to turn a corner at last.

  Rob entered the kitchen. ‘Would you like a glass of wine, Ness?’

  ‘Lovely. Yes please.’

  He came back in with two glasses and sat down opposite me, not speaking for a while. Then, quite out of the blue, he said, ‘Ness, I’ve got something to tell you.’ There followed a long pause. ‘I’ve fallen in love with someone else.’

  I carried on sticking photos in the album as my stomach turned to liquid, my heart raced and our future flashed before me as if I was drowning. From this moment on, rather than having the freedom of nurturing a family built on the foundations of love and loyalty, we would be condemned to a lifetime of damage limitation.

  I couldn’t speak. Sweat began streaming down my back, as if I’d been bitten by a rattlesnake. The phone rang in Robert’s study next door, and he got up to answer it. I could hear his loud voice through the wall. ‘I’m not sure, Becky,’ he said. ‘I’m afraid she hasn’t taken it very well.’

  At that moment, I realised that this was not something the two of us could work out on our own. There was someone else in the room, and that person was intent on invading our lives.

  Robert hated the cliché of running off with a twenty-six-year-old from the office, and he hated the fact that Becky was also known to have made moves on her previous boss. In order to reconcile the misery their actions were causing, he had to prove that no one had ever experienced a love like this before.

  Robert insisted I keep his affair secret. ‘She’s like heroin – I know I have to give her up,’ he said, wringing his hands. ‘I know it’s difficult for you, but you have no idea how much I’m suffering.’ I so wanted it to be true – the giving-up bit, not the suffering. At this point I felt nothing but sadness, for all of us.

  Our friends in the Virgin Vision office had been put in an uncomfortable position: the affair had been going on under their noses, but they hadn’t said a word to me in the hope that it was a passing fling. Even my mother knew – I wondered why she hadn’t looked me in the eye recently.

  ‘Just give us three months – then I’ll know which direction to go in,’ Robert said.

  I can’t believe that I had so little self-esteem that I agreed to his plan, but I’ve since found out that this is common practice with an affair. One friend of mine told me that the only power she had over her husband during this ‘probation period’ was peeing in his bathwater before he went on a date with his girlfriend, but I didn’t even do that.

  The word was out. Our once rock-solid family was being blown apart. During those three dreadful months, adrenalin kept me going. However much I ate, which wasn’t much, I still lost weight. I could function on a few hours of sleep per night and I could drink for Britain, secure in the knowledge that I wouldn’t get a hangover. To describe the pain as torture is no exaggeration, for this is a pain inflicted knowingly on you by a person you love deeply, whose steely cruelty is incomprehensible.

  I hated lying to the kids when they asked me where Robert had gone. ‘My darlings, he’ll be home soon – he’s just gone away for a few days on a business trip to Los Angeles,’ I’d say, knowing full well that he was yomping around the Kenyan bush or languishing on a Mexican beach with his girlfriend.

  One day between their travels, the phone rang. It was Becky, asking if she could speak to Robert. ‘No, you can’t,’ I said, almost laughing at the girl’s audacity. She remained silent.

  ‘Do you have any idea of the damage you are causing our family?’ I asked.

  ‘But I love him,’ she replied.

  ‘So do we. All of us.’

  She remained silent and then I lamely, but in retrospect rather poignantly, said, ‘But you never knew his mother.’ She put down the phone.

  ‘How can she be doing this to us?’ I asked Robert. ‘How can she so brazenly set out to destroy our family?’

  ‘You don’t know what I tell her about you, Vanessa,’ was his reply. That shut me up.

  Doctor Tim thought counselling would help, but reader, never contemplate having couples therapy when your partner is high on the dopamine of furtive sex – it is, without doubt, the most humiliating experience I’ve had to endure. I could see Robert’s eyes literally roll in boredom as the therapist greeted us with ‘Now tell me, what seems to be the problem?’

  Once three months had passed, he told me that his affair was over. I wanted to believe him – he was the father to our four children and I needed to respect him, to trust him and to have faith that he was going to be the father that the children deserved. And yet he couldn’t stop deceiving us. The terrible realisation dawned on me that, as a wife, you become the enemy and are blamed for the shame that results from your husband’s lying.

  Each discovery of deception, whether a hotel receipt or some foreign change on a bedside table, was like a fresh snake bite. Knowing that the man you love is in the arms of another woman eats into your soul. Negative thoughts flooded my brain, as I lay awake in bed at night: you’re not pretty enough, not young enough, not clever enough, not wise enough, not sexy enough, not witty enough, enough, enough, enough.

  Robert describes that period as ‘driving through life without a road map’. I’m not sure what role his co-pilot played in their direction of travel, but I know their moral compasses were skewed a long way from true north.

  In retrospect I can see that I should have shown him the door the minute he told me that his heart was elsewhere and allowed him to find his own destination. There would have been fewer lies to bear, fewer stories of deception and more time to heal. Instead, our misery dragged on for years.

  Robert and I had hoped to re-engage during a holiday on Eilean Shona that summer and were cautiously tip-toeing around each other. Not realising the extent of the damage that the previous six months had inflicted, I was naively optimistic, believing that we were on the right path once more.

  Humphrey was staying with us, and the tension in the air was playing on his nerves, too. At dinner one night, Robert went to check on the sleeping children, but my stomach lurched as I heard the hall phone ping as the receiver was lifted from an extension upstairs.

  ‘Humphrey,’ I asked, ‘Do you think you could give Robert and me some time alone together tonight?’

  ‘No I will not,’ came his reply. ‘You don’t need time alone together – what you need is to just get on with your lives, and in any case, you should have the sensitivity to realise that I’m part of the family, too.’

  ‘I don’t think you understand,’ I whis
pered, trying to stay calm. ‘We’re really, really close to a precipice here.’ With that Humphrey jumped up, pushed his plate away and knocking his chair over, ran chuntering from the room.

  Robert returned. ‘What on earth have you done to upset my father?’ he demanded.

  ‘I just asked him to give us some time on our own,’ I said apologetically.

  ‘You silly girl,’ Robert hissed, his rage barely suppressed. I walked upstairs, climbed into a spare bed and lay wide awake all night, my pain too deep for tears.

  Humphrey booked himself on the sleeper train the next day, but with the time of his departure approaching, he took himself off for a long walk. Panicked, Marie and Ian ran off to try and find him, while Robert and I desperately stuffed his scattered clothes into a suitcase. We felt a surge of relief when he returned in the nick of time and waved him off from the end of the pier. Maybe now we could relax, I thought, but the damage had been done.

  The next day, Robert announced that he had an urgent business meeting in London. He took the boat over the loch and was gone. Later that night, I received a phone call telling me that he had taken Becky straight down to our farm in Sussex. I lay on the kitchen table and wailed. Marie, in an effort to find a silver lining, suggested that maybe I should view Becky as my guru.

  ‘I don’t want a fucking teacher like her,’ I groaned. But looking back, it was the beginning of a learning curve – of sorts.

  Charlotte, my loyal friend, drove across Scotland from Perth, climbed into my bed and held my hand all night, before taking the boat back across the water at the crack of dawn, in order to be at work in Edinburgh by 9 a.m.

  Unlike many young children who start to behave badly when there’s tension between their parents, ours were as good as gold. They’d do anything not to upset Robert, subconsciously not wanting to push him further away. Noah, aged nine, became the little man of the house and was always thinking of ways to help. He drove the boats and helped me make day-to-day decisions. Floey, seven, was our entertainer, there to make us laugh. Louis, aged six, was always good-humoured and kind, and Ivo, our chubby baby and the darling of us all, might have only been a toddler but he was keen to show that he was a tough guy, too.