The Only Story(45)

Mostly, you can only deal with the day-to-day crises. Occasionally, you look to the future, and find one outcome which has a terrifying logic. It goes like this. She doesn’t drink all the time. Not every day. She can go a day or two without the comfort of a bottle. But her memory, as a result of the drink, is getting poorer. So the logic runs: if she carries on destroying her memory at the present rate, maybe she will reach the stage when she has actually forgotten she is an alcoholic! Might that happen? It would be one way to cure her. But you also think: you might as well simply blast her with ECT and be done with it.

Here is one of the problems. You don’t, at bottom, think of alcoholism as a physical disease. You might have heard that it is, but you aren’t really convinced. You can’t help thinking of it as many people – some of whom you might not want to be associated with – have thought about it for centuries: as a moral disease. And one of the reasons you do so is because she does too. When she is at her most lucid, her most rational, her most gentle, and as much tormented by what is happening to her as you are, she tells you – as she always has – that she hates the fact that she is a drinker, and feels deep shame and guilt about it: so you must leave her, because she is ‘no good’. She has a moral disease, which is why hospitals and doctors cannot cure her. They cannot fix a flawed personality from a played-out generation. She urges you again to leave her.

But you cannot leave Susan. How could you bear to withdraw your love from her? If you didn’t love her, who would? And maybe it is worse than this. It is not just that you love her, but that you are addicted to her. How ironic would that be?

An image comes into your head one day, an image of your relationship to one another. You are at an upstairs window of the house on Henry Road. She has somehow climbed out, and you are hanging on to her. By the wrists, of course. And her weight makes it impossible for you to pull her back inside. It is all you can do to stop yourself being pulled out with her, by her. At one point she opens her mouth to scream, but no sound emerges. Instead, her dental plate comes loose; you hear it hit the ground with a plasticky clatter. You are stuck there, the two of you, locked together, and will remain so until your strength gives out, and she falls.

It is only a metaphor – or the worst of dreams; yet there are metaphors which sit more powerfully in the brain than remembered events.

Another image, based on a remembered event, comes into your mind. You are back at the Village, the two of you, in the flush of love, quietly but entirely intent on one another. She is wearing a print dress and, knowing that you are watching her – because you are always watching her – she goes over to the chintzy sofa, plumps herself down, and says,

‘Look, Casey Paul, I’m disappearing! I’m doing my disappearing act!’

And, for a moment, as you look, you can see only her face and the stockinged part of her legs.

Now she is doing another disappearing act. Her body is still there, but what lies inside – her mind, her memory, her heart – is slipping away. Her memory is obscured by darkness and untruth, and persuades itself towards coherence only by fabulation. Her mind oscillates between stunned inertia and hysterical volatility. But it is the disappearing act which her heart is doing, oh, that is the hardest part to bear. It is as if, in her thrashing about, she has stirred up the mud that lies at the bottom of us all. And what is now coming to the surface is unfocused anger, and fear, and frustration, and harshness, and selfishness and mistrust. When she tells you solemnly that in her considered opinion your behaviour towards her has been not just beastly but actively criminal, she really thinks it is true. And all the sweetness of her nature, the laughingness and trustingness central to the woman you fell in love with can no longer be seen.

You used to say – when putting off friends who wanted to visit – ‘Oh, she’s having a bad day. She’s not herself.’ And when they saw her drunk, you’d say, ‘But she’s still the same underneath. She’s still the same underneath.’ How many times did you tell this to others, when the person you were actually addressing was yourself?

And then comes the day when you no longer believe such words. You no longer believe that she is still the same underneath. You believe that being ‘not herself’ is her new self. You fear that she is, finally and utterly, doing her disappearing act.

But you make one final effort, and she does too. You get her admitted to hospital. Not the National Temperance, as you had hoped, but a general, all-female ward. You sit her down on a bench while they are admitting her, and explain gently, once more, how it has come to this, and what they will do for her, and how it will help.

‘I’ll give it my very best shot, Casey Paul,’ she says sweetly. You kiss her on the temple, and promise to visit her every day. Which you do.

At first they put her to sleep for three days, hoping to peaceably flush the alcohol out of her system, while also calming her disturbed brain. You sit by her lightly sleeping form and think that this time, surely, it will work. This time, she is under proper medical supervision, the problem has been stated clearly – even she isn’t ducking it – and at last Something Will Be Done. You look at her calm face and think of the best years of your time together, and imagine that everything you had back then will now return.

On the fourth day she is still asleep when you go in. You ask to see a doctor and some twenty-year-old houseman with a clipboard presents himself. You ask why she is still sedated.