8. What curse did I labour under? Nothing other than an inability to enjoy happy relationships, possibly the greatest misfortune known to man in modern society. Exiled from the shaded grove of love, I would be compelled to wander the earth till the day of my death, unable to shake off my compulsion to make those I love flee from me. I sought a name for this evil, and one night, in tears, found it contained in a dictionary of psychoanalytic terms under the entry for repetition compulsion:
... an ungovernable process originating in the unconscious. As a result of its actions, the subject deliberately places himself in distressing situations, thereby repeating an old experience, but he does not recall this prototype; on the contrary, he has the strong impression that the situation is fully determined by the circumstances of the moment.*
* The Language of Psychoanalysis, J. Laplanche, J. B. Pontalis (Karnac Books, 1988).
9. No philosophy is further from the thought that what happens to us is random than psychoanalysis (even to deny meaning is meaningful). I did not simply love Chloe and then she left me. I loved Chloe in order that she would leave me. Buried deep in my unconscious, a pattern had been forged, in the early months or years. The baby had driven away the mother, or the mother had left the baby, and now the man had recreated the same scenario, different actors but the same plot. It was not for the shape of her smile or the liveliness of her mind that I had chosen Chloe. It was because the unconscious, the perverse casting director of my life, had recognized in her a suitable character to leave the stage after inflicting the requisite amount of suffering.
10. Unlike the curses of the Greek gods, psychological fatalism at least held out the promise that it could be escaped. Where id was, ego might be. Had I had the strength to rise from my bed, I might have made it to the couch, and there, like Oedipus at Colonnus, begun to build an end to my sufferings. But I was unable to summon the necessary sanity to make it out of the house and seek help. I was unable even to talk, I could not share my grief with others, hence it ravaged me. I lay curled on the bed, the blinds drawn, irritated by the slightest noise or light, unduly upset if the milk in the fridge was stale or a drawer failed to open first time. Watching everything slip out of my grasp, I concluded that the only way to regain at least a measure of control was to kill myself.
21
Suicide
The Christmas season arrived, bringing with it carol singers, cards of good will and the first snowfalls. Chloe and I had been due to spend the Christmas weekend at a small hotel in Yorkshire. The brochure sat on my desk: 'Abbey Cottage welcomes its guests to warm Yorkshire hospitality in exquisite surroundings. Sit by the open fire in the oak-beamed living room, take a walk along the moors, or simply relax and let us take care of you. A holiday at Abbey Cottage is everything you always wanted from a hotel – and more.'
Two days before Christmas and hours before my death, at five o'clock on a sombre Friday evening, I received a call from Will Knott:
'I thought I'd ring to say goodbye, I'm due to fly back to San Francisco on the weekend.' 'I see.'
'Tell me, how are things with you?' 'I'm sorry?'
'Is everything all right?'
'All right? Well, yes, you could put it that way.'
'I was sorry to hear about you and Chloe. It's really too bad.'
'I was happy to hear about you and Chloe.'
'You've heard. Yeah, it just worked out. You know how much I always liked het, and she gave me a call and told me you guys had split up, and things moved from there.'
'Well, it's fantastic, Will.'
'I'm glad to hear you say it. I don't want this to get between us or anything, because a great friendship is not something I like to throw away. I always hoped you two could patch things up, I think you would have been great together, it's a real pity, but anyway. What are you doing over Christmas?'
'Staying home, I think.'
'Looks like you're going to get a real snowfall here, time to bring out the skis, eh?' 'Is Chloe with you now?'
'Is she with me now? Yes, no, I mean, she isn't actually with me right now. She was here, but she's just gone off to the store actually, we were talking about Christmas crackers, and she said she loved them, so she's gone to buy some.'
'That's great, give her my regards.'
'I'm sure she'd be delighted to hear we spoke. You know she's coming with me to spend Christmas in California?'
'Is she?'
'Yeah, it'll be great for her to see it. We'll spend a couple of days with my parents in Santa Barbara, then maybe go for a few days to the desert or something.'
'She loves deserts.'
'That's right, that's what she told me. Well, listen, I'd better leave you to it, and wish you a happy holiday. I've got to start sorting my stuff out around here. I may be back in Europe next fall, but anyway, I'll give you a call, and see how you're doing . . .'
I went into the bathroom and took out every last tablet I had collected, and laid them out on the kitchen table. With a mixture of pills, several glasses of cough syrup, and whisky, I would have enough to end the whole charade. What more sensible reaction than this, to kill oneself after rejection in love? If Chloe really was my whole life, was it not normal that I should end that life to prove it was impossible without her? Was it not dishonest to be continuing to wake up every morning if the person I claimed was the meaning of existence was now buying Christmas crackers for a Californian architect with a house in the foothills of Santa Barbara?
My separation from Chloe had been accompanied by a thousand platitudinous sympathies from friends and acquaintances: it might have been nice, people drift apart, passion can't last for ever, better to have lived and loved, time will heal everything. Even Will managed to make it sound unexceptional, like an earthquake or a snowfall, something that nature sends to try us, and whose inevitability one should not think of challenging. My death would be a violent denial of normality – it would be a reminder that I would not forger as others had forgotten. I wished to escape the erosion and softening of time, I wished the pain to last for ever only so as to be connected to Chloe via its burnt nerve endings. Only by my death could I assert the importance and immortality of my love, only through self-destruction could I remind a world grown weary of tragedy that love was a deadly serious matter.
It was seven o'clock, and the snow was still falling, starting to form a blanket over the city. It would be my shroud. The one reading this will be alive, but the author will be dead, I reflected as I penned my note. It was the only way I could say I love you, I'm mature enough not to want you to blame yourself for this, you know how I feel about guilt. I hope you will enjoy California, I understand the mountains are very beautiful, I know you could not love me, please understand I could not live without your love... The suicide text had gone through many drafts: a pile of scrapped notepaper lay beside me. I sat at the kitchen table, wrapped in a grey coat, with only the shivering of the fridge for company. Abruptly, I reached for a tub of pills and swallowed what I only later realized were twenty effervescent vitamin C tablets.