At this moment a round, bald, suited man opens the door of the consulting room.
‘Mr Ellis,’ he calls quietly.
There is no reply. Familiar with the inattention, selective deafness and other failings of his patients, the consultant raises his voice:
‘Mr ELLIS!’
Some old fool wearing three sweaters and an anorak gets to his feet; a towelling headband restrains the ten or so wisps of white hair that sprawl from his crown. He stands looking round for a moment, as if perhaps expecting applause for having recognized his own name, then follows the consultant into his office.
You are not prepared for what happens next. You hear the psychiatrist’s voice, quite clearly, say,
‘And how are we today, Mr Ellis?’
You look at the closed door. You see that there is a three-inch gap between the foot of it and the floor. You guess that the consultant must be facing the door. You do not hear a reply from the deaf old fool, but perhaps there hasn’t been one, because next, loud enough to rouse the other nodding nutters, come the words,
‘SO HOW’S THE DEPRESSION, MR ELLIS?’
You are not sure if Susan has been paying attention. For yourself, you think this is unlikely to work.
There is her shame, which is ever present. And then there is your shame, which sometimes presents itself as pride, sometimes as a kind of noble realism; but also, mostly, as what it is – just shame.
You come back one evening to find her pie-eyed in a chair, the water glass by her side still containing a good inch or so of non-water. You decide to behave as if all this is completely normal – indeed, what domestic life is all about. You go into the kitchen and start looking around for something to turn into something. You find some eggs: you ask if she would like an omelette.
‘It’s easy for you,’ she answers belligerently.
‘What’s easy for me?’
‘That’s a clever lawyer’s answer,’ she replies, taking a swig right in front of you, which she rarely does. You are about to go back to cracking eggs, when she adds,
‘Gerald died today.’
‘Which Gerald?’ You can’t immediately think of a Gerald among your mutual friends.
‘Which Gerald indeed? Mr Clever. My Gerald. My Gerald that I told you about. The one I was engaged to. This was the day he died.’
You feel terrible. Not because you have forgotten the date – she has never told you it before – but because, unlike you, she has her dead to remember. Her fiancé, the brother who disappeared out over the Atlantic, Gordon’s father – whose name you no longer remember – who had been soft on her. You have no such figures in your life, no griefs, no holes, no losses. So you don’t know what it’s like. Everyone should remember their dead, you believe, and everyone else should respect this need and desire. You are in fact rather envious, and wish you had a few dead of your own.
Later, you become more suspicious. She has never mentioned the day of Gerald’s death before. And there is no way for you to check. Just as, in happier days, there was no way for you to check when she told you how many times the two of you had made love. Perhaps, when she heard your key turn in the lock, and she was unable to get up and also unwilling to hide the glass at her elbow, she decided – no, this is perhaps too deliberate a verb to describe her mental processes that evening – she ‘realized’, yes, she suddenly realized that it was the day of Gerald’s death. Though it could equally have been Alec’s, or that of Gordon’s father. Who could tell? Who knew? And who, in the end, cared?
I said I never kept a diary. This isn’t strictly true. There was a point, in my isolation and turmoil, when I thought writing things down might help. I used a hardback notebook, black ink, one side of the paper. I tried to be objective. There was no point, I thought, in merely venting my feelings of hurt and betrayal. I remember that the first line I wrote down was:
All alcoholics are liars.
This was, obviously, not based on a huge sample or broad research. But I believed it at the time, and now, decades later, with more field experience, I believe it to be an essential truth about the condition. I went on:
All lovers are truth-tellers.
Again, the sample was small, consisting mainly of myself. It seemed to me evident that love and truth were connected; indeed, as I may have said, that to live in love is to live in truth.
And then the conclusion to this quasi-syllogism:
Therefore, the alcoholic is the opposite of the lover.
This seemed not just logical, but also consistent with my observations.
Nowadays, a lifetime later, the second of these propositions seems the weakest. I have seen too many examples of lovers who, far from living in truth, dwelt in some fantasy land where self-delusion and self-aggrandizement reigned, with reality nowhere to be found.
Yet, even while I was compiling my notebook, searching to be objective, the subjective kept undermining me. For instance, I realized, looking back at our time in the Village, that whereas I thought of myself as both lover and truth-teller, the truths I had told were only to myself and Susan. I told lies to my parents, to Susan’s family, to my own close friends; I even dissembled at the tennis club. I protected the zone of truth with a rampart of lies. Just as she was now lying to me all the time about her drinking. As well as lying to herself. And yet she would still affirm that she loved me.
So I began to suspect that I was wrong in considering alcoholism as the opposite of love. Perhaps they were much closer than I imagined. Alcoholism is certainly just as obsessive – as absolutist – as love; and maybe to the drinker the hit of booze is as powerful as the hit of sex is to the lover. So could the alcoholic be merely a lover who has shifted the object and focus of his or her – no, her – love?
My observations and reflections had filled a few dozen pages when I came home one evening to find Susan in a state I knew all too welclass="underline" red-faced, semi-coherent, quick to take offence, yet at the same time genteelly pretending that all was for the best in this best possible of worlds. I went to my room and discovered that my desk had been inexpertly rifled. I had, even then, a habit of orderliness, and knew what lived where. Since the desk contained my Notes on Alcoholism, I assumed, wearily, that she had probably read them. Still, I thought, perhaps in the long run the shock might have a useful effect on her. In the short run, evidently not.
The next time I went to my notebook to make an addition, I saw that Susan had done more than just read it. She had left an annotation beneath my last entry, using the same black ink from the same pen. In an unsteady hand, she had written:
With your inky pen to make you hate me.
I didn’t accuse her of rifling my desk, reading my notebook, writing in it. I could imagine her saying, in a tone of polite protest, ‘No, I don’t think so.’ I was weary of constant confrontation. But then, I was equally weary of a constant pretence that all was well, a constant evasion of the truth. I also realized that it would be impossible for me to write anything down in the future without picturing her at my desk studying my latest denunciations. This would be intolerable for both of us: the annotation of pain on my part, the dim yet irate acknowledgement of pain caused on her part. So I threw away the notebook.