The Psychopath: A True Story(60)
To which I simply replied, ‘I thought you had called this to an end?’
He replied, ‘Sorry.’
So I answered, ‘For calling it to an end, or for texting this morning?’
He then just got belligerent, so I blocked him.
I am and have been quite happy on my own. I have occasionally wondered what it would be like to have a partner, and I would have loved my children to have a good father figure. There are some truly wonderful men out there, men who are supportive and loving, who do their share around the house, help shoulder the financial burden, and provide their partners with love. I just never met mine. I try not to dwell on why the man I believed was my ‘soulmate’ turned out to be a psychopath because it will not help anything. I still have dark days when I feel that the only (adult) person who truly loved me was my mother. However, most of the time I am positive and when I look at the practicalities of the situation I don’t think I would like to share a bed with anyone again, nor have to wash another person’s socks. So unless someone truly wonderful were to come along, I don’t think I really want another relationship. I don’t have time for ‘settling’ for someone just because they are there.
Over the years I have done something that I couldn’t initially explain. I had a desire to speak to old boyfriends, to find out if any of the relationships I had had were real and whether I had indeed been loved at all. Not surprisingly, the people I contacted were surprised and confused to hear from me and were usually rather dismissive. I must admit that it must have been a bit strange my calling them out of the blue. Then one day my sister mentioned that she had bumped into one of my first boyfriends from when I was nineteen years old. He had not only been a boyfriend but a mutual first love, and although the initial relationship had only lasted about a year we had remained friends for more than a decade after, before life got in the way and we drifted apart.
I called him out of the blue and his reaction blew me away. He was happy to hear from me and devastated to hear what had happened. He called me back the next day, angry and needing to talk about it, saying ‘how dare’ anyone treat his Mary like that. I was so touched. I had always loved him and it made me feel like I had something to hold on to.
It meant everything to me that at least one of my relationships had been real, at least one man had loved me enough to still care years later. We rekindled our friendship although we rarely see each other. He has a partner and a child now so there is no romance, but it helps me to know that there could have been.
LIFE MOVES ON
At the end of my relationship with Will Jordan I had to deal with the worst experience of my life, losing my mother. In some ways this pushed me rudely into full adulthood at the ripe age of forty-one. My father, although a decent man, was a very old-fashioned gentleman. He earned the money to support the family and did all the ‘dad’ stuff like DIY around the house, looking after the garden and the like, but was never very involved with us as children. He was there but did his own thing. However, he was an infinitely better father than Will Jordan was to my children. One of my favourite memories of my dad as a child was him getting a dark green MG two-seater sports car, when I was maybe four or five years old, and him letting me sit on his lap and steer whilst he took the controls – something that would be totally illegal today. I suppose it is such a special memory for me because it was exciting and different, but also because I was getting my father’s undivided attention. A rare occasion indeed for the youngest of his four children.
When my mother died, my father did his best to step up and be a good parent to us all. Although we were already well into adulthood it was really the first time that I got to know him as a person rather than a shadowy father figure. When he was eighty-five his conversation started to get a bit circular, so I started to work with him to write down his own life story which was fascinating. Born in 1925, he had seen so much change in the world. He could remember being aged ten and going down George Street in Edinburgh in his grandfather Fred’s horse and carriage, with the dogs running along between the back wheels. A policeman (there were no traffic lights in Edinburgh at that time) held up his hand to tell Fred to stop and Fred just waved back as if the policeman was being friendly. My father was impressed that Fred had got away with it! Dad’s school was bombed during the Second World War, killing the headmaster, and when he was old enough he left for officer training in the Navy. At the end of his training he was deployed to his ship and the moment he arrived was told to stow his stuff because they were off! When he asked where they were going, he was told, ‘It’s D-Day!’ His ship was laying down smoke in the English Channel to mask the movement of the troop ships, so they had to go back and forth the whole time whilst being shelled.
Dad was given a cine-camera and asked to film the action. At the time he thought it was a very important job, but later when he asked who he should give the film to and was told to keep it, he realised that the camera had just ensured that he kept out of the way. It did, however, give him an interest, and after the war (and a degree in maths from Cambridge, as well as a brief stint in publishing and teaching) he entered the new emerging industry of television in 1950. After that he rode the rising tide of television until he retired at fifty-five and then did some freelance video production work.
It was interesting having a father in television. He and my mother had fascinating friends, often people who were quite famous. Whenever we went to see a play, my father would suggest that we go backstage and say hello to the cast, something I thought was quite normal but apparently not! The cast always seemed to be delighted to see us, especially when Dad mentioned he was a TV producer.