soon be turned to ash. Was ash worse than the stony implacable effigy he had become in my mind? Or the phantom intruder? The night before the funeral I had worked out that the day on which he had uttered the words that had etched themselves into my mind, like a festering scar, was precisely thirty-two years after we had met.
Periodically, I would remind myself that his last words to me were simply an indication that, like so many wives, I had grown into my husband’s mother: it is mostly mothers after all who deal with babies’ smelly mess. Freud’s words in his essay on ‘The Theme of the Three Caskets’, an essay John liked to cite, often came to me: ‘But it is in vain that an old man yearns for the love of woman as he had it first from his mother; the third of the Fates alone, the silent Goddess of Death, will take him into her arms.’
The human condition doesn’t really help all that much when one is being all too human. I had thought, once the funeral was over, I would be less crazy, less alert to the perpetual babble of those inner voices, less susceptible to rage, those racing, chattering demons in my mind, that were so hard to outrun. The Furies, the ancients called them.
I wasn’t. I shouldn’t have let the need for activity take me to his desk.
IT MUST HAVE BEEN a few days before the funeral. I needed to find his will so that all the formal matters of death and the state could be sent on their way. He had told me it was in his desk.
I had never particularly liked that desk, heavy and stolid and post-war, but he was attached to it. It had belonged to his father. In all our years together I had rarely looked inside it and then only under instruction about where and for what.
I started to rifle round. I realized I was nervous. I may have written the occasional thriller, but outside books, I have a deep sense of privacy. Or at least I do in the normal course of things. I never rifled through my children’s diaries, and though I once read some letters I had found in the back of a cupboard that turned out to have been from an early girlfriend to my son, I felt ashamed doing it, as if I had turned into my own mother, a constant rifler. Or maybe, much as I want to know, I’m simultaneously frightened of finding things out, as if a trap lies at the end of every dark, twisting corridor.
He must have known that, since I didn’t need to do much rummaging. The first thing my eyes fell on in the very top drawer was an envelope full of photographs. I love photos. I picked it up, looking forward to a break from the duty of locating a will. The anticipated baby pictures didn’t materialize. These images were of a woman in a variety of fetching poses and smiling to the camera or the person holding it in the way one smiles only to intimates. I knew that woman. I knew that photographer.
I sat back and tried to take a deep breath. It caught on something. Maybe it was fury. The kind you can’t swallow. The kind that doesn’t let you breathe. I now started to look in earnest, pushing things aside, prodding, hating what I found, hating myself, hating him. I opened his wardrobe and started to heave out his clothes.
Some nine years before, we had split up. He was in the midst of what can only be called a mid-life crisis and passionate about a young woman. He was also crazy, crazier than any adolescent in the grip of lust and jealousy. Undone by it. The part of me that writes understood. This was another form of everyday madness, more familiar than so many others. He was a man obsessed.
I would have been prepared to tolerate a short burst of passion, but not the palpably self-destructive process he was engaged in and the harm it occasioned all round. In any event, the last person he wanted near him was me, with my Cassandra-like predictions, my world-weary plaints that made his trajectory more mundane than mud. Or comical, like a door slammed in a farce.
The abandonment so late in our coupled lives undid me. A hot, jealous fury attended my days, shrivelling everything in its wake, like a mountain fire. The only way I could seem to deal with the tearing apart of my life and the detritus it left behind was to throw myself into more and other ways. I was already active in English PEN: I took on the presidency. I became chair of the Freud Museum. I got Mad, Bad and Sad ready for publication. I found myself devising and editing a new series on ‘Big Ideas’ for Profile Books. On and on it went.
The rage and the need for distraction from it that attended the first parting of our ways was close kin to my mourning state, a kind of trial run of the emotions. Now, after his death, one historical moment collapsed into another. That second dismantling echoed the first. Pain always leaves deeper traces in memory than pleasure – and I was plunged back into an old, intolerable pain. I hated him and hated myself. Bits of myself and my past had to be torn out, emptied of their destructive charge and somehow sewn back in so that I could walk and run and speak as a functioning person, let alone love and still have a history.
Within both states I felt as mad and sad to myself as some of the historical figures that had peopled my books on the subject. If I didn’t quite make it to the condition of the ‘bad’, it’s only because I wasn’t altogether certifiable. The racing thoughts, the compulsions, the sudden mental absences or holes in time when I would find myself walking on a street I hadn’t set out for, these were just everyday madness inflected by loss and by grief. As long as I could get up in the morning and make a semblance of working or arranging the flowers and objects in the house, as long as the children were there, as long as I had to put on a face to greet them and to meet the faces I met, I would manage, manage it, manage myself.
The difference between the terrors of the first abandonment and the second was that after the first I could rail with friends about men’s antics and a woman’s lot. Now, there was only one person I could even begin to talk to, and then only sporadically. Back then, after a little less than a year, John pleaded that he wanted to return to his life, our life together. After a month of persuasion, I agreed. Many of my friends disapproved of what looked like my moral laxity, my lack of feminist firmness. But I preferred to be coupled, preferred my children to have their father in place. I like the familiar. I liked to have someone there to discuss days and ways and news with, to feel grounded. It was hard to laugh on one’s own. I liked to laugh. I liked ordinary life.
Already back then, I had a deep sense of the ways in which that ordinariness is so readily traversed by madness. We may be rational creatures, deeply individual, but loss illuminates just how readily the ever-uncertain fortress of reason crumbles, and how fundamentally our individuality is made up of our attachments to others.
One of the differences in the separation that mourning constitutes, apart from the major one of irreversibility, was that I wasn’t sanctioned from the outside to hate, to be angry. Composure was required; so was admiration of the lost one. And I had others to care for. Impossible for me to take on the capacious mantle of the vibrant Wife of Bath, who had buried six husbands. Or become one of those widows of whom Wilde’s Lady Bracknell could say, ‘I hear her hair has turned quite gold from grief.’ Or the amorous Merry Widow who gave her name to various bits of saucy lingerie. After all, I didn’t only hate.
I was caught in ambivalence, perhaps a deeper plight than the now fashionable term ‘cognitive dissonance’, which highlights the trap of feuding ideas, but not that of warring emotions, the kind that probably have deep roots in a time when language wasn’t to hand to make sense of things.
I was terrified that the other woman, any other woman, would turn up at the funeral. I suddenly had an acute sense of why Greek rites incorporated professional mourners – those women who, like so many Maenads, tore at their hair, wailed and keened to the elements, their dirges abstract public rituals. Part of me would have wanted to join them, or wholly to give mourning over to others.
But there were too many parts of me.
