They do not threaten to section her – that little Hitler is off practising his black arts on other, less disruptive patients. But they tell you that they cannot treat her further, that the rest may have done her some good, that this is not the appropriate place for her and they need to free up the bed. You see their point of view entirely, but ask yourself: Then what is the appropriate place for her? Which stands in for a wider question: What is her place in the world?
As the two of you leave, the woman in the next bed pointedly ignores you both.
It has taken some years for you to realize how much, beneath her laughing irreverence, there lies panic and pandemonium. Which is why she needs you there, fixed and steadfast. You have assumed this role willingly, lovingly. It makes you feel grown-up to be a guarantor. It has meant, of course, that for most of your twenties you were obliged to forgo what others of your generation routinely enjoyed: the mad fucking around, the hippie travelling, the drugs, the going off the rails, even the stonking idleness. You were also obliged to forgo the drinking; but then, you were hardly living with a good advertisement for the stuff. You didn’t hold any of this against her (except perhaps the lack of drinking); nor did you treat it as some unfair burden you were assuming. It was just the given of your relationship. And it has made you age, or mature, if not by the route normally taken.
But as things begin to fray between you, and all your attempts to rescue her fail, you acknowledge something you haven’t exactly been hiding from, just didn’t have time to notice: that the particular dynamic of your relationship is triggering your own version of panic and pandemonium. While you probably strike your friends at law college as affable and sane, if a little withheld, what roils beneath your own surface is a mixture of groundless optimism and searing anxiety. Your inner moods ebb and flow in response to hers: except that her cheerfulness, even when misplaced, strikes you as authentic, your own as conditional. How long will this present little stretch of happiness last, you are continually asking yourself. A month, a week, another twenty minutes? You can’t, of course, tell, because it doesn’t depend on you. And however calming your presence is on her, the trick doesn’t work the other way round.
You never think of her as a child, not even in her most selfish delinquencies. But when you watch an anxious parent tracking its offspring – the alarm at each bandy-legged footstep, the fear of each ‘trippy’ moment, the wider fear of the child simply wandering off and getting lost – you know that you have been there yourself. Not to mention the child’s sudden switches of mood, from blissful exaltation and absolute trust to rage and tears and a sense of abandonment. This too is familiar. Except that this wild, shifting weather of the soul is now passing through the brain and body of a mature woman.
It is this, finally, which breaks you, and tells you to move out. Not far, just a dozen streets, into a cheap one-room flat. She urges you to go, for reasons good and bad: because she senses that she must let you go a little if she is to keep you; and because she wants you out of the house so that she can drink whenever the mood takes her. But in fact, little changes: you are still living just as closely. She doesn’t want you to remove a single book from your study, or any knick-knack you have bought together, or any clothes from your wardrobe: such actions will throw her into a fit of grieving. Sometimes you sneak back into the house to remove a book, shuffling others along the shelf to cover the theft; occasionally, you stuff in a couple of cheap paperbacks from Oxfam to disguise the betrayal.
And so you live an oscillating life. You continue to have breakfast with her, and also supper – which you mostly cook; you go on expeditions together; and you get reports from Eric on her drinking. Eric, being merely fond and concerned, rather than in love with her, is a more reliable witness than you ever were yourself. Susan continues to do your laundry, and some of your best shirts come back lovingly scorched. Drunken ironing: that is one of the lesser, but still painful, things life has surprised you with.
Then, almost without your noticing it, what is close to the final stage kicks in. You may still desperately want to save her, but at some level of instinct or pride or self-protection, her devotion to drink now strikes you more sharply, and more personally: as a rejection of you, of your help, of your love. And since few can bear to have their love rejected, resentment builds, then curdles into aggression, and you find yourself saying – not aloud, of course, because you find it hard to be overtly cruel, especially to her – ‘Go on, then, destroy yourself, if that’s what you want.’ And you are shocked to discover yourself thinking this.
But what you don’t realize – not now, in the heat and dark of it all, only much later – is that, even without hearing you, she will agree. Because what she is leaving unspoken is this reply: ‘Yes, that’s exactly what I want. And I am going to destroy myself, because I am a worthless person. So stop bothering me with your well-intentioned meddling. Just let me get on with the job.’
You are working for a South London practice which specializes in legal aid. You enjoy the range of cases you handle; you enjoy the fact that in the majority of them you can solve things. You can get people the justice they deserve, and thereby make them happy. You are aware of the paradox of this. Also, of another, longer-term paradox: that in order to support Susan, you need to work, and the more you work, the more you are away from her, and the less able to support her.
You have also, as Susan predicted, found yourself a girlfriend. And not one who will run off at the first phone call. Anna is, perhaps inevitably, also a lawyer. You have told her some of Susan’s history. You have not tried to get away with merely saying she is ‘eccentric’. You introduce the two of them, and they seem to get on. Susan says nothing to embarrass you, Anna is brightly practical. She doesn’t think Susan looks after her diet well enough, so once a week takes round a loaf of proper bread, a bag of tomatoes, a pound of French butter. Sometimes the door remains unanswered, so she leaves her offering on the step.
You are home one evening when the phone goes. It is one of the lodgers.
‘I think you’d better come round. We’ve had the police. With guns.’
You repeat the words to Anna, then run for your car. In Henry Road there is an ambulance outside the house, its blue light revolving, its doors open. You park, walk across, and there she is, in a wheelchair facing out towards the street, with a broad bandage around her forehead which has pushed her hair up into a Struwwelpeter shock. Her expression, as often when a sudden crisis has worked itself out, is one of slightly amused calm. She surveys the street, the ambulance men fixing the wheelchair in place, and your own arrival, as if from a throne. The blue light revolves against the steadier sodium orange. It is real and unreal at the same time; filmic, phantasmagoric.
Then the chair slowly rises on its hoist, and as the ambulance doors are about to be closed, she lifts her hand in a pontifical blessing. You ask the ambulance men where they are taking her and follow in your car. When you get to the A&E department, they are already taking preliminary details.
‘I’m her next of kin,’ you say.
‘Son?’ they ask. You nearly agree, for speed, but they might query the difference of surname. So, once again, you are her nephew.
‘He’s not really my nephew,’ she says. ‘I could tell you a thing or two about this young man.’
You look at the doctor, lying to him with a slight frown and a tiny movement of the head. You collude in the notion that Susan is temporarily off among the nutters.
‘Ask him about the tennis club,’ she says.