Drowning Rose (15 page)

I have a memory for rhymes. I had felt it was a good idea to quote one of Fontaine’s instructive fables so I did.

‘ “This world is full of shadow-chasers, most easily deceived.

Should I enumerate these racers, I should not be believed.

I send them all to Aesop’s dog,

Which, crossing water on a log,

Espied the meat he bore, below;

To seize its image, let it go;

Plunged in; to reach the shore was glad,

With neither what he hoped, nor what he’d had.” ’

And my husband had listened to me, standing still and silent as the enthusiasm drained from his eyes and his shoulders hunched. That night, for the first time, he had slept wearing pyjamas. Now I know a lot of men do that, sleep in pyjamas. To those men and their partners that was fine, how it was and no questions asked. It didn’t mean a thing. But to us, who had slept side by side for eight years naked as the day we were born (apart from the time the central heating went on the coldest night of the year and he had brought me his cosiest sweatshirt) that wearing of pyjamas had been as significant as if he had gone to work on a little brick wall down the middle of the bed.

‘Shall we go in?’ the estate agent asked me.

I paused by the gate, then I turned to Beatrice and whispered, ‘Now, don’t get carried away. Remember we’re only here so I can tell Uncle Ian I’ve been but that I don’t like it after all.’

‘Speak for yourself,’ Beatrice whispered back as I held the gate open for her. ‘
I’m
here because I’ve never been inside a house with this price tag before.’

I felt it as soon as I stepped inside: the sense of a place at peace with itself, and I found myself smiling without really knowing why.

‘As you can see it’s in need of updating,’ Neil said as we walked though the ground floor.

I felt as defensive as if he’d been talking about me. ‘I think it’s lovely, nevertheless,’ I said. ‘It has lovely bones and that’s what matters.’

‘Updating?’ Beatrice said as we walked upstairs. ‘I think you mean rebuilding. And you’re asking
how
much for this?’

Neil gave her a slow considerate look over before turning to me. ‘Your mother?’

‘You must be very confident of selling this property,’ Beatrice said.

I ignored them and asked, ‘It’s listed, yes?’

‘Grade two star.’

Beatrice turned to me with a helpful smile. ‘That means you can’t put up a spice-rack without the permission of English Heritage.’

Neil narrowed his eyes at her before saying. ‘Of course, many people feel that it’s a privilege to own an historic building.’

‘Really?’ Beatrice said. ‘Of course, I wouldn’t understand about that sort of thing, working as a museum conservator.’

I frowned at the bickering pair. Like a mother wanting to shield her infant from harsh voices and cross exchanges I wanted to shield the little house from discord. I was sure it was not accustomed to that sort of carry-on.

‘I love it,’ I said.

Neil spun round. ‘Really? I mean, excellent.’

‘ “Ours not to reason why?” ’ Beatrice muttered. She turned to Neil. ‘Admit it, you think she’s out of her mind?’

He shot her a steely glance. ‘Not at all. There are many people who value character over convenience.’

Once Neil was out of earshot Beatrice asked me, ‘I thought you weren’t buying.’

‘I’m not.’

‘Of course you’re not. You’ll just phone up that Fairy Godfather of yours and say, “Golly gosh! House Charming is even more gorgeous than I thought it would be so I’ve decided most definitely to decline your generous offer.” ’

‘Shall we go back to the office?’ Neil asked. I hated to dash his hopes but I told him I needed time to think.

Giving me a firm handshake, the kind that speaks of honesty and integrity, he said, ‘I’ll give you a courtesy call tomorrow.’

As we crossed the cobbles we were forced back on to the pavement by a large black car coming round the corner at speed. ‘What the hell?’ I shook my head. The car swung into a tight space in front of Number 12, the house opposite.

‘Meet the neighbours,’ Beatrice said.

Sixteen

Ruth handed me a booklet entitled
Free Yourself from Toxic Guilt
published by an organisation called The Living Life Group. ‘Read it,’ she ordered. ‘It’s all very well poo-poohing these kinds of things but in your situation I think you’d be wise to be open-minded.’

Ruth and I had been seeing more of each other lately. She said it was because we had ‘cleared the air’. I assumed she was referring to the time she’d told me what a lousy stepsister I’d been for the past twenty years. I had laid in a store of peppermint tea for her and she was drinking some now, looking at me over the mug, as she told me she was now pretty sure that Robert was after all having an affair. She had no proof but all the signs were there, she said. Lottie didn’t want to hear a word against her father and Ruth didn’t trust her friends not to gossip so I was the only one she could confide in. I told myself that I should be grateful to be needed. I was alive and I was needed and if I wasn’t careful I might end up with the house of my dreams, too. Any more to be grateful for and I might have to call my old friend Dr Herbert at the clinic.

‘It’s like living with a stranger,’ Ruth said. ‘He comes through the door at night and he doesn’t look at me, he looks through me. Did Gabriel do that?’

I shook my head. ‘But he left really soon after he’d started seeing Suki. In a way it was a relief. I couldn’t have coped with any more of his torment.’

‘His torment?’

‘Not many people appreciate how hard it is for a good man to do bad things. He didn’t sleep, tossing and turning and waking up soaked in sweat. He lost weight, he drank too much. It was awful.’

‘I wore a red dress and red feathers in my hair the other night and I might as well have been wearing my jeans and a T-shirt.’

‘Did you? Did you really. Good for you. You suit red.’

‘Every time he’s . . . well, you know . . . strayed, he’s done the same thing, just removed himself from our life bit by bit.’

‘Leave him.’

‘I couldn’t.’

‘Why not?’

‘Why not? You need to ask me why not? Well, I’ll tell you why not.’ She paused. Then she took another breath. ‘Oh yes, I’ll tell you all right.’

‘You tell me,’ I said.

‘I couldn’t do that to Lottie.’

‘Lottie will cope better than you think. She’s got her own life now. She’s twenty, after all. Of course it will be upsetting for her but she’ll cope. Anyway, she wouldn’t want to see you be unhappy.’

‘That’s what people say when they want an excuse to do the wrong thing. “It’s better for the children to have happy divorced parents than unhappy married ones.” But it’s not true, you know. They’ve found that out.’

‘But Lottie’s not a child any more, that’s the point.’

Ruth frowned at me. ‘And where would we live?’ She gesticulated round the kitchen in my little flat. ‘Somewhere like this?’

‘Well, yes.’

‘I’m sorry but I couldn’t do that to Lottie. No, I’ll have to soldier on. There’s nothing else for it.’ She was looking almost excited. ‘I must say that Daddy and Olivia have been extremely supportive. They call all the time. Daddy even sent me flowers the other day. The last time I had this much attention was when I was expecting Lottie. You weren’t there, of course, but it was wonderful. Like being a princess. Anyway,’ she shook herself, ‘I want you to really take a look at this.’ She pushed the brochure from the Living Life Group towards me on the table.

‘Each course lasts six weeks. The next one begins in a couple of days so it would work perfectly. Go on. It can’t hurt.’

‘No, no, I don’t suppose it can.’

‘So, how are things going with your godfather?’

I wondered if it would be mean to bring the subject back to her cheating husband. I expected it would be. So I just said, ‘It’s going fine. We get on very well.’

‘And?’ Ruth looked at me, her head to one side.

‘And nothing else really.’

‘That’s not what Olivia tells me.’

‘Isn’t it? So what has my mother told you?’

‘The house. He wants to buy you your own lovely home. I mean, how wonderful is that. Robert and I worked sixty-hour weeks for ten years before we were able to own our first home.’

‘I can see that doesn’t seem fair,’ I said. ‘When all I had to do was kill someone.’

Ruth shook her head. ‘Really, Eliza, now you’re being silly.’

‘Yes. Yes, I am. I’m sorry.’

She got up. Nodding at the booklet, she said, ‘So you’ll go? For me.’

I picked it up once she had left and started reading. I learnt that ‘most of the misery faced by affluent Western people these days was self-inflicted and therefore avoidable, caused by neuroses and illogical concerns and obsessions and that this was a kind of obesity of the mind’. And like obesity, the solution to the problem almost always lay ‘in the hands of the individual concerned’. I also learnt that the Thirteen Steps embraced by the LLG were thirteen because it was a number feared by many and overcoming illogical fears was an important part in ‘taking control’. Among other things, attendance at the ‘workshops’ would teach me to ‘reverse ingrained assumptions and turn a negative into a positive’. That last one, I thought, they had just gone and pinched from Pollyanna.

The booklet went on to say that ‘Everybody suffers from anxiety; anxiety is a normal and necessary part of being human. For some, however, it can affect us more intensely, occur more easily and more often, thereby giving rise to problems such as toxic guilt, persistent apprehension, obsessive thoughts, panic and depression.’

It finished by saying that ‘Before we can truly cure these problems, before we can say goodbye to them for ever . . . we need to know what happened to us and why. We NEED to know. To want to know is a basic human urge and we’ll search for ever for the answers.’

Of course humankind is defined by its hunger for knowledge. That’s how all the trouble started in the first place, allegedly. But knowing didn’t always help. For example I knew exactly what had happened to Rose. If I hadn’t known, if I thought that Rose was alive and well, living in New Zealand, there would be no problem. But Uncle Ian wanted me to be happy. And if that was what he wanted, however strange it was that he should, well, then I owed it to him at least to try. It would please Ruth too if I took her advice. Bossing me around probably gave her some light relief now she was going through a bad time.

The meeting was held in the basement of a large red-brick house not far from Dr Freud’s house. This fact, also mentioned in the booklet, lent the whole enterprise a certain credibility, I thought, as I walked along Maresfield Gardens.

The large room was furnished like a mix between an opium den and a school assembly hall. A tall man seated on a floor cushion unfurled himself and greeted me.

‘You must be Eliza.’

I was intrigued. ‘How did you guess?’

‘Everyone else’s already here. Being late,’ he paused, glancing at a large clock on the wall opposite, ‘often indicates a reluctance to attend. I’m Marcus, by the way.’

‘Really?’ I said. ‘Does it really?’

‘Why don’t you have a seat over there, next to Sam.’ He pointed at a floor cushion with room for two.

Sam, a round-faced blonde woman in her thirties who looked as if the only thing she might have to feel guilty over was having second helpings, gave me a welcoming smile and patted a space next to her, so I smiled back and sat down. Looking around me, I noticed more smiles in my direction so I kept mine in place. If that’s what guilt did to you, I thought, then death row must be one smiley place.

Marcus sat back down on his cushion. It too was a cushion made for two but he was there alone. I suppose no one wanted to be seen as therapist’s pet.

‘So what then is Toxic Guilt?’ he began. I was happy to see him do those little quotation marks in the air thing when he spoke. I’d always wanted to see that done in real life.

‘Toxic Guilt is inappropriate guilt – guilt that comes from self-judgement. Judgements that say you have done something wrong when there is no actual wrongdoing.’ He paused and looked around him. There was a lot of nodding back at him.

‘Do you feel responsible for everyone around you?’ His voice was carrying and intimate both at once, like a trendy teacher saying; ‘I’m one of you, just in charge, that’s all.’

‘Do you value the feeling of others more than your own? Do you have unrealistic expectations of yourself: then you may be trapped by Toxic Guilt.

‘Trying to win the approval of others – parents, spouse, co-workers, friends, children can strain your relationships, drain your energy and dominate your life. The five easy-to-follow steps in escaping Toxic Guilt can liberate you from self-defeating patterns and put you on the path to living life fully, joyfully and on your own terms.’

I put my hand up. Marcus nodded at me. ‘Eliza, yes?’