Altered States (18 page)

‘I’m the one person she doesn’t seem to want.’

‘You must accept that, though I know it’s hard. Better to keep your distance for a bit, get someone in to keep her company. Don’t leave her alone too long.’

‘What are you telling me?’

‘Just that. Time is on her side. As I say, she’s a healthy young woman. And there’s no reason why she should be kept here. If you could take her home at the end of the week?’

He turned on his squeaking rubber heel, as if his responsibilities were now at an end. I watched him disappear down the corridor. I went in to Angela, who was listening to
The Archers.
On her face was the beatific look it wore when entering the world of her favourite characters. I waited politely until the programme ended, but when I tried to take her hand she snatched it away.

‘Dr Morrison says you can come home at the weekend.’

‘Of course I can’t come home. I’m not well.’

‘You’re perfectly well,’ I said gently.

‘How do you know? You weren’t here, were you?’

‘I’m here now. Try to live in the present, darling. This place is no good for you. You don’t belong in a hospital. You look fine, quite recovered.’

And indeed she did look perfectly well, her cheeks pink, her hair slightly longer than usual. She looked almost as she had looked when we first met in the coffee bar, all that long time ago. Only now there was a new passivity about her. I always found her in bed, although she should have been up and about. I could see no sign of the depression the doctor had warned me about; that, I thought, might come later. Rather she seemed oddly defiant, sometimes humming under her breath, as though to ignore me, or to downgrade my presence.

‘We could go down to the cottage,’ I said. ‘You could finish the curtains.’

‘Don’t tell me what I could do. I’m not well.’

‘Angela,’ I said gently. ‘Please come home. Come back to me.’ There was no answer. ‘What went wrong?’

‘I fell, didn’t I? I fell in the kitchen.’

‘Why did you fall? What happened?’

‘I don’t remember. I’m tired now. Please go.’

And indeed she suddenly looked tired, as if her memory had snagged on something uncomfortable, unmanageable. The sense of her words did not come back to me for a very long while, and even when they did I tried my best to ignore them.

Now that I have so much time I ask myself what blind biological urge prompted her to avail herself of a partner, and then, when the obligations of marriage were forced on her, to renounce the entire condition, as being too much for a
still childish temperament. I had always known that she was immature, but had not understood that her immaturity was limitless. I understand now that there are women whose fear of men will always hinder their understanding of them, and will, of course, occlude their sympathy for them. Such women need men as a support, a protection, but they can offer only minimal support in return. Angela would quite probably have felt more comfortable with an older man, even an old man, one who would cherish her, but not threaten her with penetration. I have seen such couples, the husband, no doubt impotent, babying his wife and delighting masochistically in her tantrums and caprices. Such play-acting, which is appalling to witness, is a necessary part of their transaction. If Angela had entered such a union her tendency to regress would have been legitimised. But precisely because she was a healthy young woman she had harboured certain ineradicable desires, certain archaic wishes, and with the unthinking force of nature had set her sights on a partner of similar age and physical appearance. Unfortunately such impulses died once the conquest had been achieved. The white wedding dress, the marquee on the lawn of her mother’s house, had marked the conclusion of the exercise.

I did not accept this explanation for a long time, although it would have flattered me to do so. What it did throw light on was my fascination with a woman whose characteristics and whose
modus operandi
were precisely the opposite of those which delineated Angela. Sarah was not a particularly likeable woman; she was, in addition, inarticulate and unreliable. But she was not afraid of men. She was not necessarily dishonest in her dealings with them. She was their equal, as shifty and as elemental as are most men in their dealings with women. When she had wanted me it was without subterfuge; she had no personal plans which involved taking me over, subjugating me in order to pacify or neutralise some unresolved
conflict in herself. She thus represented a vista of freedom, no doubt entirely illusory, although the illusion may have been that of her partner, in this case myself. Yet she had not waited for me. It was precisely because she had not waited for me that I had been tempted to pursue her. Whereas Angela’s pursuit of me, which I had thought touching, had yielded little more than passing satisfaction for either of us, Sarah exerted no effort whatever. What Angela saw now was a husband to whom she was not only indifferent but nearly hostile. With the social satisfactions of her marriage inevitably declining, with a body which had been physically altered, her fantasy was eclipsed. Perhaps the involvement had always been with herself, rather than with a companion. Her friendships had been fleeting, founded on suspicion. I had early on in our life together come to see that she trusted no one who treated her as an equal. She accepted protection, mine included, and if she had entered my life in the first place it was because I was weak and ill and could do her no harm. Once I was returned to life and health she knew that I would threaten her dangerously precarious equilibrium. It was a self-fulfilling prophecy.

My life, as I left the hospital each evening, was illuminated only by the faintest glimmers of insight. Anything more explicit would have constituted yet another disloyalty. In any event I had more practical matters to consider. When I had returned to the flat I had found it in a state of disarray which I had not previously noticed, although it must have been deteriorating for some time. Perhaps the over-bright discipline of the hospital had left me unprepared for the layer of dust in the bedroom, and the shiny marks on the kitchen floor, as if something had been spilled and carelessly wiped away. Perhaps this was why Angela had fallen, although she normally spent little time in the kitchen, leaving it to Adelina, and latterly to Jenny. There was a smell of
stale cooking, though no cooking had been undertaken when I was away: on the table was a half-eaten bowl of cornflakes, soggy with bluish milk. In the bedroom the bed was unmade.

I was alarmed by this neglect since it suggested that in my absence Angela was disinclined to care for the flat she had once cherished. I cleaned up as best I could, changed the bed, and parcelled up the dirty sheets for the laundry. I opened the windows wide, though it was a damp and misty evening, and made myself a cup of milkless tea. It occurred to me that I was not going to be able to manage on my own. My grief, which was profound, had drained me of energy, even of the desire to bring matters to a successful resolution. Indeed, I did not see how this could be done. We had more or less admitted that our marriage was over, yet now more than ever was I obliged to remain married and to care for my wife. I saw us declining into one of those awful conspiracies in which one partner becomes the
souffre-douleur
of the other, the situation only, accepted—and tolerated—because of that inexpungible guilt for which there is neither forgiveness nor indeed excuse.

I would cherish and protect Angela, largely because I had betrayed her, and she would make use of me precisely for that reason. This state of affairs would have obtained even without the tragedy of the baby’s death. With the instinct possessed by the insecure and the suspicious she knew that, given the choice and the opportunity, I would prefer another woman. It hardly mattered that she had no proof that the other woman was Sarah; it hardly mattered that I had only left her for one night. What mattered to her now was to engineer her return to victim status and to punish me. I accepted my punishment because I felt that I deserved her resentment. I could only hope that with the passage of time that resentment would change into indifference. One thing
caused me intense pain: I should never have a child. Angela would not consider it, and I could not blame her. My light-mindedness had unfitted me for the role of father. This she knew and even welcomed.

In the meantime there was the problem of how we were to live. Clearly we could not do so without an intermediary. Angela would take some time to recover, and should not be condemned to recover on her own. She had lost touch with most of her friends, and her mother was a broken reed. It was then, with none of my former reluctance, that I thought of Jenny, although I doubted whether she would look favourably on my request for her renewed attendance. She was away, I knew; I did not know when she was expected back. I decided to wait until the weekend. I would delay Angela’s return until the Sunday night, and make my call then. I was sure that Jenny would respond to Angela’s need, not so sure that she would respond to mine. I only knew that some sort of temporary solution must be found and I could think of no other.

We were obliged to spend one night alone together before Jenny could come to the rescue, which would be on the following day. That one night was enough to emphasize our estrangement. Angela insisted on my moving my things into the spare room, and it was clear that she intended to spend her time in bed, both day and night. When my exhortations fell on deaf ears I gave up. I thought it ignoble that a woman in these enlightened times should retreat into a form of voluntary invalidism, and I began to view my wife dispassionately, as if she were a character in a play, rather than as someone who was my partner for life. Of her post-natal depression I could see no sign: what I did see was a form of passive derangement. I think it was clear to me even at that stage that she did not intend to get much better. Intent on one of her novels, occasionally humming under her breath,
she paid me no attention whatever, except to say, ‘I’m tired,’ or, ‘Leave me alone. You don’t know how I feel.’

‘You must get up, darling,’ I would urge.

‘When I’m better.’

‘But you are better. You’re perfectly all right.’

‘I’m still weak.’

‘You’ll get even weaker, lying in bed.’

‘Leave me alone. You don’t know how I feel.’

It was therefore with relief that I welcomed the presence of a third person, with something like gratitude that I accepted my portion of stuffed cabbage, or some cabbage derivative—living at the Hôtel du Départ had not done much for Jenny’s cooking—leaving the two conspirators in Angela’s bedroom with the door firmly shut against me. For they were conspirators, the motherless child and the childless mother, engaged in a monstrous pantomime of filial and maternal affection. While I saw Jenny’s presence as inevitable, I also came to see it as malign, at least in its effect on Angela. I would leave her in the morning still in bed; this I acquiesced to as being within the limits of normality. I would return home in the evening to find her in bed again—or still—her hair newly brushed, a suspicion of make-up on her face, but all this for her own benefit rather than for mine. Jenny, apparently in the best of spirits, would greet me warmly, our previous misunderstandings forgiven and forgotten. She would assure me that Angela had had a good day, but that she must not get overtired.

‘Perhaps if you could encourage her to get up and go out, Jenny? You both used to enjoy going out …’

‘She’s not ready for that, Alan. I don’t think you understand what she’s been through.’

‘But that’s all over. It was very sad, for me too …’

‘It’s always worse for a woman. If you want to sit with her don’t stay too long. I want to give her her pill before I go.’

For Jenny was both mother and nurse, though I had to keep reminding myself that Angela was a young woman with no known disease but an apparently inexhaustible desire for guardianship. Both were united in a distaste for men which in Angela’s case, and perhaps in Jenny’s too, had hardened into alienation. I did not intend to add Jenny’s case history to my repertoire: I merely noted that she had probably viewed her marriage as Angela had done, as a release from obscurity, a legitimation. Now, apparently, she had found a new métier as surrogate mother, a role in which she blossomed, to judge from her bright eyes and assumption of control, or empowerment, as the rather useful word describes it. She would arrive every day at about two o’clock, bearing in her shopping bag certain delicacies for Angela and something that she had cooked the previous evening and which I would eat for dinner. We were thus assured of nourishment, even if it were not wholly to our taste, or rather to mine. Another of Angela’s worrying symptoms was her refusal to eat what I thought of as grown-up food, that is to say lunch or dinner. She existed wholly on ephemera, nursery foods presented to her on a tray by myself in the morning, before I left for work, and Jenny in the evening before she left. This diet was probably sufficient for one who spent her days in bed, but it added to an increasing process of infantilisation. Also I suspected Jenny of indulging these tastes, and even adding to them, with cakes brought from the
pâtisserie
she patronised, and which she appeared to enjoy by proxy, having denied herself the pleasures of the table in the interests of her figure.

I viewed this partnership with the purest horror. I dreaded my return home in the evenings, when I would busy myself with the washing-machine and the Hoover, for Jenny, naturally enough, would undertake no household duties, and in addition, or perhaps as a further sign of lack of interest, would leave the kitchen untidied. Her curatorship was
markedly partisan, though to be fair I think she acted innocently. Certainly she was free from malice. She was simply obeying some blind impulse not only to serve, but to protect, and in this particular scenario I was the unacknowledged threat. Their two views of the situation exactly coincided. Of my own feelings, my own sadness, there was no acknowledgement. This hurt me greatly, since I had too much pride, or too much guilt, to proffer my situation for their perusal.