“Have you talked to your mother about that?”
Gaby laughed at the preposterousness of the suggestion. “You don’t know my mother. I’m afraid that kind of detail doesn’t get talked about in the Martin household.”
“Oh. So are you really worried about your ability to have healthy children?”
“No, not really. Well, it’s another worry to add to the list, you know, when my head’s full of worries, but not really a problem.”
With a visible effort, the girl pulled herself together. “No. As I say, no worries about marrying Steve. No worries about the arrangements either, really. I know we’ve left it late, and I’m sure there’ll be various panics and crises along the way, but equally I know we’ll be able to cope with them. Steve and I are both organizers by nature and profession. No, all that’ll be fine. It’s just…”
“What?”
“It’s the thought of the wedding bringing back to life things that should have been long forgotten.”
“Things to do with your parents’ wedding?”
“Not really. Well, things that happened round that time, I suppose, but – No, I shouldn’t be talking like this. It’s disloyal.”
“You can’t be disloyal in the abstract, Gaby.”
“What do you mean?”
“By definition, don’t you have to be being disloyal to someone?”
“Yes.” The girl didn’t answer the question directly, but her next words were still revelatory. “The fact is, my parents are fine. Well, as fine as they’re ever going to be. I don’t mean they’re happy. I think they both find life too difficult and challenging ever to be actually happy, but they’re content. They’ve got a small, circumscribed life which they can cope with. I don’t want that put at risk.”
“And why should your wedding do that?”
“Well, it’s a public thing. A lot of people will find out about it.”
“And are there people – or a person – who you don’t want to find out about it?” Gaby didn’t answer. “An ex-boyfriend? An ex-fiancé?”
But no. Jude had lost her. “That feels so good, down in my back,” said Gaby determinedly. “Amazingly warm. Is it the oil that does that?”
“No, not the oil.”
“Well, whatever you’re doing, it really seems to be working.”
“Good.”
“I feel I could leap up and play a game of squash.”
“I wouldn’t advise you to do that straightaway. I’ll give you some exercises to do, to keep you loose.”
“So do you think this’ll cure it? The pain won’t Come back?”
“The pain won’t come back when you’ve got rid of what’s causing the pain.”
“But you said there wasn’t any injury, nothing actually physical causing it.”
“Right,” Jude agreed. “That’s what I said.”
Six
Gita pushed the remains of the Crown and Anchor’s fisherman’s pie around her plate. She hadn’t eaten much. For the first time since Jude had collected her from the clinic, she seemed actually depressed. Maybe the effects of the medication had decreased as her body got used to it. Maybe for the first time she was facing the reality of what she had done, the division made in her life by the suicide attempt, and the fact that she now had to face the continuity she had tried to escape.
“I must try and get some work,” she said, not for the first time.
“Don’t worry. You’re not on the breadline yet.”
“No. But it’s not just the money. For someone like me – any freelance probably – the work’s more than what you get paid. It’s a kind of self-validation.”
“I know.”
“For me working means I’m functioning. It’s all to do with the way I look at life. I can survive anything if I think there might be an article to be written at the end of it.”
“So are you going to…?”
Jude didn’t need to finish the sentence. Gita replied firmly that she intended never to write anything about her suicide attempt. “I can’t stand that – journalists who only write about themselves. Television personalities who have heart attacks and then write books about heart attacks. Germaine Greer even wrote a book about her own menopause, for God’s sake. I write about other people. My attitude to them is obviously coloured by my own experiences and my own judgement, but I am not the subject of my writing, and never will be.” She looked gloomily across the bar of the Crown and Anchor. “But I’ve got to get something going soon. If I can re-establish myself professionally, then maybe I can start to pick up the pieces of my private life.”
“You haven’t heard from…?”
“No. Don’t expect to. Hope I never do.”
“But he did hear about your…?” Uncharacteristically, Jude skirted round the words. “What happened to you?”
“I’m sure he did. We have enough mutual friends. He must’ve done. Which I think is the thing that makes me angriest about the whole business.”
“Oh?”
“The satisfaction that he would get from that.”
“Surely not?”
“You don’t know him.”
“I’ve met him.”
“That’s not what I said, Jude. You don’t know him like I do. The idea that his walking out on a womanwould have driven her to suicide he’d regard as an alternative notch on his bedpost.”
“Oh dear.”
“And I bet even now he’s using it as a come-on in his chat-up routine – saying how sorry he is that the woman he lived with for years had such problems, how he tried to be supportive to her, but what can you do in the face of mental illness? And how he’s been terribly wounded by the experience, but he’s daring tentatively to start thinking about relationships again.” Gita took a savage sip of wine; its taste seemed no more attractive than the words in her mouth. “The bastard!”
“On the other hand,” said Jude quietly, “it wasn’t him who you turned your anger against, was it?”
Gita shook her head. “No. His behaviour just made me reflect on myself. If I could let someone treat me like that, what did that make me? And I thought of everything else that had gone wrong in my life: all the other men; the fact that I haven’t got any children whose lives I could mess up; the fact that any looks I might have had are long gone. Oh, the same endless spiral.”
“A friend of mine, Gita, once described depression as ‘constipation of the mind’, the way your thoughts get stuck and stale, and make you feel heavy and lethargic and incapable of anything.”
“Hm…”
“And he also reckoned anti-depressants acted like laxatives: freed up the flow, allowed your ideas to move again.”
“What a quaint taste in metaphors your friend had.”
“Yes.”
Gita sighed. “At my lowest – I’m not at my lowest now – but at my lowest, the whole world seems to be a reproach to my own inadequacy. Everything I see anyone else doing I think ‘I can’t do that’. It gets quite funny sometimes – well, it would be funny if it weren’t me in the middle of it all. I open a door, and I think, ‘I couldn’t make a door. What use am I if I can’t even make a door?’” She chuckled wryly. “Sorry. That’s just how I sometimes feel.”
“Not all the time, though.”
“But when I’m down there, it feels as though it’s going to go on for ever. That’s what’s so cruel. When you’re depressed, you can’t imagine there will ever be a time when you’re not depressed.”
“And when you’re high?”
“Same story. You think you’ll never be depressed again. You think you’ll spend the rest of your life glorying in how wonderful you are, loving yourself.”