Millicent found the doll in the bin under the kitchen sink, the arms and legs torn from their sockets. We sat on the sofa in the living room before Max was awake, holding each other, trying to understand what was happening to our son.
What do we do?
I read all that I could about small children and grief. Cry with them, said the books. Don’t hide your own feelings, said the magazines. They need to know it’s
OK
to grieve, said the parenting sites. Have a funeral, they said. Bury a doll, they said. Yeah, we said, what a bunch of freaks.
One night, after Max had cried for six solid hours, I cried experimentally in front of him. The result was immediate, catastrophic.
Max’s distress intensified. He clung to me as if I too might disappear. I tried to talk to him about why he was crying, about how that was
OK
, but he became hysterical, pushing me away, kicking and punching the mattress, screaming, ‘No, no, no, no!’ Then he banged his head so hard against the top rail of the bed that his nose bled for two hours. I took him to Casualty, terrified by the bruise radiating out from his left temple.
The nursery asked us to keep Max at home for a week. I called in sick.
Millicent avoided the house. She took to working as much as possible, leaving early and returning late. At home she would slink around, keeping out of the way of the boy who seemed to hate her and fear her in equal measure.
We would meet almost by chance, she and I, if I crept downstairs when Max had cried himself into catatonia: to make tea; to have a smoke; to take a telephone call. Once I stole into our bed and lay down beside Millicent for a few small minutes, only to be summoned back by my son’s screams of rage from the next room.
This was unliveable. Millicent was losing weight, undone by her own grief, and by guilt at what grief was doing to her little boy.
And so Millicent’s absences began. ‘Out,’ she would say, when I asked her where she’d been. ‘I’ve been out. Thinking.’ Out to cafés and libraries in the daytime, bars in the evening, parks at the dead of night.
‘This is London,’ I would say. ‘Don’t go to parks.’
‘It’s super-safe here,’ she would say. ‘No guns.’
Our son lies in his bedroom in our mean little house, his eyes screwed shut, alone at the dark of night.
The rain sculpts Millicent’s clothes tight to her body, like cloth on to plaster of Paris. She sits on a bench at the dark of night, huddled against the cold, alone amongst the blue-black shadows of the park.
Go home.
Do people ring Child Protection Services about parents like us? Or do they leave us alone because we look as if we know what we’re doing, because we feed our son, and clothe him, and send him to school?
Four hundred miles north I pace my parents’ flat. Alone at the dark of night.
Millicent is more upset about the dead neighbour than she is prepared to admit. Her absence tells me that.
I paced the flat until five, then made tea and woke my mother. Her eyes wandered around the room, then fixed on me.
‘Alexander, you’ve not slept.’
‘No, Mum.’
I sat on the bed. She ruffled my hair.
‘What is it, Laddie?’
I was seven again. We were alone together, the whole day in front of us. Edinburgh Zoo, then Tantallon beach in her racy Triumph Dolomite, front seat, top down. Ice cream in Musselburgh on the way home. Vanilla or strawberry?
Both if you’re good, Alexander.
Both if you’re good.
I put my arm across her back.
‘How was your night, Mum?’
‘As expected. Alexander, son, what is it?’
‘Mum, I’m so sorry. I have to go home.’
‘What’s wrong?’
‘Nothing,’ I said. Everything, I thought. Max, Millicent, Dad. Me. The police.
Everything’s wrong, Mum.
My mother looked at me, sceptical. Tell her the truth, I thought.
Tell her something like the truth.
‘It’s Millicent, Mum. She needs me at home. I’m so very sorry.’
‘Aye,’ she said softly.
‘I’ll come back, Mum. I’m really sorry, but I have to go.’
‘Aye,’ she said again. ‘Aye.’
‘I can try and make the arrangements.’
‘No, son. No, he’d want me to do that. I’ve his instructions in a letter. But you will come, will you not?’
‘Yes, all of us.’
She made me chicken sandwiches, wanted to drive me to the station. While I stood by the front door, anxious to leave, she fetched a large red carrier bag from the spare bedroom. ‘For Max,’ she said. ‘In case you can’t make it back.’
‘Mum,’ I said, ‘we’ll be there. Of course we’ll be there. I have to go.’
I made the five forty train with three minutes to spare.
The train came into King’s Cross on time, and I was at home by ten past ten. There was Millicent at the kitchen table, looking for all the world as if nothing was wrong between us. Expensive underwear, an old white cotton shirt of mine. She smiled and got up to greet me, hands on my shoulders, flexing up to me, barefoot and tiny. I kissed the top of her head, then stepped away from her.
‘Hey, honey,’ she said. ‘I’m so very sorry for your loss.’ The right words, the right note of concern in her voice.
‘Max told you.’
‘How’s your mother?’
‘Not good,’ I said. ‘Where is he?’
‘Max went to school. Alex, are you OK?’
‘Fine. I’m fine. I
told
him to wait for me.’
‘You were worried about him. There’s nothing wrong with that. You’re a good father, Alex.’ She sat down in her chair.
Was she leaving a gap, creating a silence that I would feel compelled to fill?
You’re a good mother, Millicent.
Was that what she was waiting to hear? Part of me wanted to say it so that she could contradict me.
No, Alex, I left Max alone and I feel bad. I’m a horrible, horrible mother.
Millicent sat down at the table again. I sat down on the floor, my head level with the counter top.
‘So,’ I said. Millicent’s technique. That single word.
You fill the gap now, Millicent.
‘Oh, Alex,’ she said. ‘There’s so much I can’t tell you about my life right now.’ Then she began to cry.
I watched her for a while. The anger lifted from me. It was easy to forget how vulnerable she was. I got up, tried to pull her to her feet so I could hug her to me, but she sat, balled defensively into her chair. I crouched down and held her to me. Her shoulders kept me stiffly at bay. Then her body relented and she collapsed into me.
‘I’m not sleeping, Alex,’ she said after some time. ‘I know I never should have gone out and left Max, but I just can’t seem to sleep, and you weren’t here, and I was feeling stupid and ashamed about what I did, because what I did was so stupid and so shameful. So I went for a walk. I kind of destroyed my dress, and my shoes. Even my underwear.’
By the back door was a pair of black leather wedges. The heels were covered in a grey-black mud, the leather sides dulled down to a feathered salt-stained grey.
‘I don’t think I can save them, can I?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said.
‘I already threw my dress in the trash. And my underwear and bra. This is the second time someone I know killed themselves, Alex,’ she said. ‘In truth I’m struggling a little …’
She wiped her eyes on her shirt sleeve, and rested her cheek on my shoulder. I held her to me, rocked her gently back and forth on her chair.
‘It scares me, you know, Alex. It’s like, it says other people’s pain is unbearable, and there’s nothing you can do about it because you can’t reach it. Like what if I’m wrong and they’re right, and every word I write is ultimately pointless because you can’t bridge that gap?’
Don’t unravel, I thought. There isn’t room for either of us to unravel.
‘I found some stuff.’ The timbre of her voice was so even, so without inflection, so studiedly calm.
She pushed me away. I sat down in the chair beside hers. She pulled away from me a little, watching my reaction.
‘What stuff did you find?’
‘Some letters.’
Not Caroline’s letters. She didn’t say Caroline’s letters. She won’t find Caroline’s letters.
‘In my sock drawer?’ I said, as calmly as I could.
She nodded. ‘I guess maybe you meant for me not to see them. I may have overreacted a little.’
‘You overreacted?’
‘I know you’re not that guy.’
‘No,’ I said. ‘I’m not. Not any more.’
‘Then question,’ she said. ‘Why keep them?’
Because somewhere, almost out of sight now, is a darkly remembered landscape. In that landscape there is no tiny house in Finsbury Park, and no Max, and no Millicent.
‘I don’t know,’ I said.
‘Kind of funny how often the term
lack of commitment
comes up.’ She gave a little laugh.
‘I’m sorry, Millicent,’ I said.
‘It’s OK, Alex, you get to have a past. I guess I was scared maybe you were feeling nostalgic for something I can’t give you. Like maybe we’re unreachable to each other, or something.’
‘I was unhappy then,’ I said.
‘And you’re not now?’
‘Not since I met you.’
She opened her eyes very wide. Blinked hard.
‘Right,’ she said. ‘Because life with me is just
so great
.’
‘You know what I mean, Millicent.’
Don’t unravel.
When we lost Sarah, Millicent had kept herself together for as long as it took to get Max back on his feet. Then she lost her job on the additives magazine.
‘But I thought you’d been working crazy hours.’
‘Yes. I guess I did let you think that.’
She had barely been turning up at all. She had been sitting in parks, cafés, museums and restaurants – anywhere to avoid sitting at her desk and working. There she sat for hours on end, quietly grieving, while I knew nothing of her pain.
She had been protecting me, and protecting Max, while she took the full force of the blow. She had shielded me from the horror of that birth that wasn’t a birth. That tiny stiff body in the delivery room. That ward with the real living babies and the
want-some-more-gas-and-air
fathers. I was insulting her by believing I understood it.
I had assumed my grief matched hers, that I had the measure of her pain. I saw now that Millicent’s suffering was of a different order. Gulfs, chasms, continents, voids – those are the tropes that divided her from me. I watched her suffering as though through fog: I was desperate to help; I was unable to reach her.
Millicent had begun to unravel then. If it was a breakdown, it was very controlled. She was functional when Max was around: she played with him and bathed with him, read to him and sang to him. I could feel the sadness in her then, but also the love.
But with Max asleep, or at nursery, she would lie for hours on the sofa, in our bed, in the bath, saying nothing, doing nothing.
She refused to see a doctor.
‘You’re depressed,’ I said.
‘I know,’ she said. ‘But please let me do this my way. I don’t want it to be a
thing
.’
‘It is a thing, whether you want it to be or not.’
‘OK. But please, no doctor.’
And I can see now what I couldn’t see then: that the seeds of her supercompetency had already been sown; that she planned the structure of her unravelment. She knew that suppressing the pain would extract a high price, that there would be a reckoning, and she planned for that reckoning.
She waited until she was sure that Max was secure. She waited until I had a break in my contract. She made sure that we were all right. As far as we could be. She even arranged extra childcare for Max.
She told me that her pain was hers to deal with, and hers alone; that I could not understand it; that I must not try. She asked me only to look after her, to wash her and to feed her, and to see to it that she did not do something stupid. Most of all she wanted me to make sure that Max was all right.
‘What do you mean, do something stupid?’ I said, but she never told me.
‘Just make sure that Max is all right.’
Then and only then did she let herself fall; she trusted that I would catch her, and I did.
I woke to find Max standing in our bedroom again. He had been watching us for some time, I guessed. He seemed happy to accept that we were in bed in the late afternoon, that I wasn’t at work and that Millicent wasn’t at her desk. I wondered if that made us bad parents or good parents.
‘OK.’ He stayed where he was, all nervous expectancy. ‘I’m ready.’
‘What for, Max?’
‘The psychiatrist.’
‘The psychiatrist?’
‘The psychiatrist.’
‘What psychiatrist?’
‘The one you think I have to go and see. Mum said it’s today.’
‘Is it?’
‘You forgot, Dad.’
‘I didn’t forget. Your mum’s been very tired. I’m sure she meant to tell me, but she didn’t.’
‘Mum doesn’t forget things. You forgot.’
Normally of course that would be true, but Millicent was at the end of her strength. I tried to slide her off me without waking her, but she stirred, blinked twice, and sat up.
‘Hey, Max.’
‘Hi, Mum. Want me to make you some coffee?’
‘I’ll make some, Max,’ I said, and got out of bed. ‘While Mum gets ready.’
‘For what?’ asked Millicent.
‘The psychiatrist,’ said Max.
‘I forgot. I’m sorry, Max.’
Max looked pained, but sat down on the bed beside her.
‘You know it’s not a real psychiatrist, Max,’ said Millicent.
‘How come?’
‘Psychiatrists are doctors. This one’s not a doctor.’
Max considered this.
‘She’s a psycho
therapist
. Lots of people go to therapists.’
‘No they don’t.’ But he leaned in towards Millicent, who put an arm around his neck, drawing him gently to her. I pulled on a pair of trousers.
‘Aren’t you going to put pants on, Scottish Dad?’
‘What’s Scottish about not wearing pants, Max?’
Millicent and Max exchanged a look. ‘The kilt thing, right, Max?’ said Millicent.
Max nodded.
‘What’s worn under the kilt?’ said Millicent.