is as tenacious as it is portable. Edwina fills my days here, much as she did in Melbourne. I left because I reached an impasse. My life was in pieces, the affair with Edwina was going nowhere, and I worried I’d make a mistake at work. The discovery of her pink pages was simply the last straw.
Pride is a peculiar business. I’ve fallen as low as a man can go, but I remember who I once was. And while I can face my shame privately, I’d hate to watch others gloating over me. So I had to leave. I wanted the anonymity of a big city, but I also wanted somewhere familiar. London was the obvious choice. I did my post-graduate study here and have returned several times since. Cynthia and I always planned to visit for a few months when I retired, to enjoy the city at our leisure. I’ve plenty of leisure now and I don’t know what to do with it. I wander the gardens, walk down by the river, I linger in museums. But it’s a listless business on your own.
I’m confident Cynthia won’t try to find me. I told her to wait and wait she will. So desperate was I and so strong my desire to escape, I was tempted not to leave a note. The dead leave traces, the living can cover theirs; I knew I could arrange it so I’d never be found. But I couldn’t treat Cynthia so badly, couldn’t leave her to wonder if I were dead or alive. And even in the chaos of that last morning, I realised I needed to leave the note for myself. I have to believe I’ll return.
I rent a small flat close to central London, much the same size as Edwina’s. Brown and grey with a hotchpotch of furniture, Cynthia would be appalled and so once would I. But I rely on its deficiencies to remind me it’s temporary. I go out for meals, often walking miles for lunch or dinner just to fill in time. Occasionally there’ll be a deadening effect, a steady flickering of houses and shops, a bit like those psychedelic lights from the sixties, flash flash flash and your mind goes numb. It’s blessed relief, but all too rare. Mostly there’s a continual roar. Edwina, events, conversations, and my own behaviour — the awful longing, the begging, my pathetic loitering in the streets around her flat. And the long past joins in too, sometimes so insistent that all I can do is take a couple of pills and put myself to sleep. And no, I’m not capitulating to the medico’s weakness, the drugs are a last resort and well under control.
The noise has been with me for months, but it was only last week as I was watching some men jogging in the park that I identified it as panic. Strange how connections are made. A couple of years ago, I was in New York for a conference and stayed an extra day for the annual New York Marathon. I’d lunched with friends a few blocks from Central Park, and as the leaders approached the final stage of the race we walked over to watch. There were two men well ahead of the field. A short way from the finish, one of them took a wrong turn and veered back into the park. He quickly realised his mistake, but by then had dropped back a good thirty metres. That moment of registering what he’d done, the confusion and horror, years of work obliterated in a moment is how I feel all the time. It’s panic and I’m stuck with it.
I want my reason back. Such a logical man I used to be and no longer in control of my thoughts. But if I write them down, separate them from the maddening noise, perhaps some sense will emerge.
I’ve tried other ways. When first I arrived, I dressed with care — suit, tie, brief-case, the full regalia. Clothes maketh the man, I thought, except they don’t. Wandering the streets and gardens I’d see other men in suits, often the same men day after day. Later I learned to vary my destination, but initially I was unaware of all but the most obvious signs of failure. The men tended to avoid one another, but occasionally as we passed on the paths or sat on the park benches with our newspapers, one or other would strike up a conversation.
I said I was in London for medical research, and must have been believed because the others hurried off once I’d told my story. Except for one fellow with much the same tale as the rest. He’d lost his job, couldn’t bring himself to tell his family, left home at the same time each morning, filled in the twelve or fourteen hours of his usual work day, then returned home at night with a bunch of recycled office stories. The money wouldn’t last much longer, he said, neither for that matter would his stamina. Pride is a lot more durable, he added. But I expect you’re well aware of this.
I was furious. I’m not like you, I wanted to say, and reached for my wallet thinking to put him in his place with a couple of pounds. Then stopped myself, for I was just like him, only less honest.
And there was another man, hand-tailored and well-groomed, who would kneel on the muddy grass in his expensive suit whispering to the flowers. For ten, fifteen minutes at a time he’d kneel there, touching the stems, bending his ear to the petals, occasionally laughing. He upset me more than the others. His beard was just like my old beard, his clothes could have been mine, and we were much the same age. Something had driven him mad. He still had money as do I, but something had driven him out of his mind.
These are my only colleagues now, and I don’t want them, so I’ve discarded my suits and make a point of varying my walks. There’s no use pretending, not if I’m to find a way out of this mess. I wish I could have stayed in Melbourne, but events had gone too far. It was not simply Edwina, although I despised the way I felt about her, it was the re-emergence of the Rosie business from long ago, a grey threat at first, and then the shame, crushing and persistent and never letting me catch my breath. And finally the remorse. What sort of man was I that I had never before suffered for my sins, had never before even regarded them as sins? What sort of man was I?
If something is not remembered it ceases to exist. A retarded aunt simply did not figure in my sort of life. So I forgot Rosie and she remained forgotten until Edwina came along. Now she and Edwina have joined forces, and they’re merciless. They remind me of a couple of tough boys at my old grammar school; outwardly I was dismissive of them, but privately they terrified me. And with Rosie and Edwina now I’m terrified. I walk in the gardens and they’re there, I sit alone in cafés and they’re there. They find me at my flat, in the cinema, on the bus, they find me wherever I am. I imagine tearing my hair out — one of Cynthia’s expressions — with Rosie and Edwina trussed up in the roots, tearing my hair out and tossing the lot away. The thought makes me cry; I, who in my former life never cried, but am now caught wet-eyed and choking almost every day.
I’ve always been a practical man, one who sees the world as it is, but with so much time and a mind on fire, I’m bombarded by such nonsense as women trussed up in my hair. And no matter how exhausted I am, my mind can still manage an extra shot. Just yesterday it fixed on Tom. I was walking back from lunch and I thought I saw him. We haven’t spoken for years, not since the day I observed him preparing two syringes, one for the patient the other for himself. It was I who made the complaint. Not that he ever knew, and anyway with the flood of pethidine in his body he didn’t stand a chance. Now I wish I’d left him alone. His addiction was of several years duration and his work had always been impeccable. I thought I was doing the right thing, a simple matter of medical ethics and patient safety. But he was a good friend and a fine anaesthetist, and the right and wrong of it is no longer so clear. I thought I saw him and ducked into a side street. Of course it wasn’t him.
This life of mine has become as mysterious and unpredictable as a virus fresh from the jungle. It’s my life, but I don’t understand it, my life yet I have no control. Even facts have become suspect. When you describe, say, a tree according to its facts, when you give it leaves and trunk and branches it sounds much like other trees. So, too, with people. They’re male or female, younger or older, successful or not. But it’s not these qualities that lend them their significance. It was not that Edwina was in her late thirties and a biographer that made me fall in love with her. It was not even that she was beautiful, intelligent and attentive to me. Perhaps little about her made me fall in love with her and everything about me.
And even if I were to identify the essential facts and put them in some sort of order as I am trying to do in this account, can I write myself into clarity? More crucially, can I write myself into change? Are words little truths? Are sentences bigger truths? Can words actually
