‘Oh, we know them,’ says the young constable. ‘It’s just a domestic.’
‘Aren’t you going to arrest him?’
The two of you are probably about the same age, but he knows he has seen more of life than you have.
‘Well, sir, it’s not our policy to interfere in domestics. I mean, not unless it really kicks off. They’re just having a bit of a barney by the looks of it. Friday night, after all.’
And then he drives the two of you home.
You realize that you want official interference into other people’s lives but not into your own. You also realize that your truthfulness has become dangerously flexible. And you wonder if you should have got out of the car and tried to pull the man away from the woman.
One of your problems is this: for a long time it remains inconceivable to you that she is a drinker. How could she be, given that her husband is a drinker, and drink disgusts her? She hates even the smell of it, as she hates the bogus emotions it sets off in people. It makes Macleod coarser, angrier, more crudely sentimental; when he grabbed her hair and forced a glass to her lips, she would rather the sherry went down her dress than her throat. Nor has anyone in her life ever offered a credible counterexample: alcohol as glamorous, as usefully disinhibiting, as fun, as something you can control, knowing when to give the stuff its hour and when to refuse it.
You believe her. You never query her increasing lapses and latenesses. When you come in to find her blank-faced and bleary, you tell yourself that she has mistakenly swallowed an extra cheering-up pill – which is sometimes the case. And because you inevitably believe that one of the reasons she is on anti-depressants is because you are failing to make her so happy that she doesn’t need them, you feel guilty, and this guilt forbids you from questioning her. So when, out of her bleariness, she looks up, pats the sofa beside her, and asks,
‘Where’ve you been all my life?’
you feel a ripping and a tearing inside you, and there is nothing you want more in the world than to make everything all right for her, and on her own terms, not yours. So you sit down next to her and take her wrists.
Just as you believe your love to be unique, you believe your problems – her problems – to be unique. You are too young to understand that all human behaviour falls into patterns and categories and that her – your – case is far from unique. You want her to be some kind of exception, rather than any kind of rule. If anyone had ventured such a word as co-dependency to you back then – assuming the term had even been invented – you would have laughed it off as American jargon. However, you might have been more impressed by a statistical linkage of which you were then unaware: that the partners of alcoholics, far from being repulsed by the habit – or rather, despite being repulsed by the habit – frequently succumb to it themselves.
But the next stage for you is to accept a percentage of the evidence in front of your eyes. You understand that in certain, very limited circumstances, she needs the small lift of a small drink – as she now occasionally admits. Obviously, she has to keep Joan company when she goes to the Village; obviously, she’s sometimes frightened by the increasing traffic on the roads, and by that sudden twisty climb over the hills, so a little nip helps her; obviously, she is sometimes very lonely when you’re away at college for most of the day. She also has ‘my bad time’, as she calls it – usually between five and six in the evening, though as the days draw in and dusk falls earlier, so her bad time accordingly starts earlier, and, obviously, extends just as late as it did before.
You believe what she says. You believe that the bottle she keeps beneath the sink, behind the bleach and washing-up liquid and silver polish, is the only bottle she drinks from. When she suggests that you put a pencil mark on the bottle so you can both monitor how much she drinks, you are heartened, and think these pencil marks are quite different from the ones on Eric’s whisky bottle. Nor do you imagine there are other bottles elsewhere. When friends try to tip you off – ‘I’m a bit worried about Susan’s drinking,’ says one, and ‘Boy, you could smell the booze from the other end of the phone,’ says another – you react in various ways. You protect her by denying it; you admit there are occasional lapses; you say the two of you have talked about it and she has promised ‘to see someone’. You may even say all three things in the course of a single conversation. But you will also be offended by your friends’ attempted helpfulness. Because you do not need help: the two of you, since you love one another, will be able to sort the matter out, thank you very much. And this slightly alienates your friends, and also alienates them from her. Increasingly, you find yourself saying, ‘She was just having a bad day’, and you believe it yourself by dint of repetition.
Because there are still many good hours, and good days, when sobriety and cheerfulness fill the house, and her eyes and smile are just as they were when you first met, and you do something simple like drive for a walk in the woods, or go to the cinema and hold hands, and a sudden rush of feeling tells you it is all very easy and straightforward, and then your love is reaffirmed, yours for her, hers for you. And you wish you could display her to your friends at times like this: look, she is still herself, not just ‘underneath’, but here, now, on the surface too. You never suspect that one reason your friends tend to see her half-cut might be because she has persuaded herself, by some tortuous argument, that she needs a little Dutch courage before facing them.
Each stage rolls seamlessly into the next. And here comes a paradoxical one that you initially struggle with. If you love her, as you unwaveringly do, and if loving her means understanding her, then understanding her must include understanding why she is a drinker. You run through all her pre-history, and recent history, and current situation, and possible future. You understand all this, and before you know where you are, you have passed somehow from total denial of the fact that she drinks to total comprehension of why she might do so.
But with this comes a brute chronological fact. As far as you know, Susan only drank occasionally in all her years with Macleod. But now that she is living with you, she is – has become, is still becoming – an alcoholic. There is too much in this for you to entirely acknowledge, let alone bear.
She is sitting up in her quilted bedjacket, the newspapers around her, at her elbow a mug of coffee long gone cold. She has a frown on her, and her chin is pushed forward, as if she has been ruminating all day. It is now six in the evening, and you are in your last year of law studies. You sit on the side of her bed.
‘Casey Paul,’ she begins, in an affectionate, puzzled tone, ‘I’ve decided that there’s something seriously wrong.’
‘I think you may be right,’ you answer quietly. At last, you think, perhaps this is the moment of breakthrough. That’s what’s meant to happen, isn’t it? Everything comes to a moment of crisis, and then the fever breaks, and all becomes clear and rational and happy again.