Lessons in Heartbreak (39 page)

Lily felt shocked. She’d often questioned the concept of war. Mopping up blood and comforting patients who’d woken to find themselves facing life as an amputee, had that effect. But she’d kept her doubts to herself. To question would be disloyal, as if she was undermining the war effort.

‘If God is running the whole world, then I don’t like the way He’s doing it,’ he said grimly. ‘This war isn’t solving anything. If the Allies had done the right thing about Hitler a long time ago, we wouldn’t be here now. We behave like sheep, Lily. Somebody else will work it out, somebody like God or the Government. If you cede power to somebody else all the time, then you get what you deserve.’

‘I still believe in God,’ she said.

‘But why does there only have to be your precise God? Why can’t somebody else’s God be enough? It’s fear, you see: I don’t like religions that rule by fear. Believe us or else you’ll burn in hell. That’s not a loving religion. We’re all living in fear right now and I can’t believe that it’s the right way to live. I should
add that I’m not saying that to get my hand on your leg, Lily,’ he said gently.

Lily smiled, grateful that his anger had dissipated. ‘You got rather further than my leg,’ she said.

‘Did I? Hmm, I might have to try that again.’

He began caressing her again and Lily felt her blood stir. They didn’t have much time.

Diana and Maisie would be home soon.

‘I’ll be gone before they come, I promise,’ he said and then quieted her with a kiss.

Lily lay under him, revelling in the feel of his body on hers, and wished she could quiet her racing mind as easily as he’d quieted her talking. This was wrong, so wrong, screamed her head, but still, she couldn’t stop. There was no going back now.

He left at twelve, heading off in black streets with only a torch to find his way. Lily didn’t ask if she would see him again: she knew she would.

She climbed the stairs and got into a bed still warm from the imprint of his body, hugging the sheets where he’d lain close to her. She felt exhausted and sated, but sleep wouldn’t come. All she could think about was what she’d done.

She’d betrayed her upbringing, her religion, by being with Jamie. She didn’t have to tell anyone to be cast out from the Church; the Almighty already knew.

She thought of the picture of the Sacred Heart of Jesus that decorated every Catholic home in Ireland. A red lamp was always lit under the Sacred Heart and beside it would be a beautiful box-frame with Pope Pius XII’s picture, and the papal seal underneath.

She could see her mother blessing herself each time she passed it, and the guilt overcame her.

But one question remained in her mind: if their love was such a powerful lightning strike and made her feel
whole like nothing ever had before, then how could it be so wrong?

She’d never really questioned her religion before, even after all she’d seen at the hospital. Questioning was the enemy of faith. But were the old instincts so wrong, the powerful instincts that drove her as a woman?

A strong voice from a little old lady came into her mind.

‘Trust that,’ said the voice, laying a small hand, clawed from the ravages of arthritis, on her breast bone just over the heart. ‘The heart never lies, mo chroi.’
Mo chroi
, Gaelic for my heart. Like saying ‘my love’.

Granny Sive, Dad’s mother. Lily hadn’t thought of her in years. She was dead, God rest her, had died when Lily was only nine or ten. And even though Lily had been a child, she’d known that her grandmother’s death was like the end of an era of some sort. The passing of history, her dad had said.

Indeed, Granny Sive – Lily had lisped the name when she was a small child, could barely say it: Sii and then Va, all rolled together into one syllable – had been the last of what her father called ‘the old people’, and he wasn’t talking about age.

Granny Sive had gone to church and was on nodding acquaintance with the priest, but her Christianity sat side by side with the old mother earth religion of the Celtic peoples.

She could tell the time without heed to the kitchen clock, she knew what way the weather was going to turn from looking at the way the birds were flying back to their nests, and she studied the phases of the moon carefully.

Granny Sive told Lily tales of the warrior goddess Brigid, who had powers to heal the sick. For the old people, Granny Sive explained, lighting candles to honour Brigid on the first of February was as important as Easter to the priest. Imbolg, the Celtic festival around Brigid’s day, heralded the birth of spring, the lambing season and the prospect of warmth.
Mountain ash and whitethorn grew outside her house: magic trees, she told Lily.

And she told stories of the mother of all the Irish goddesses, Danu or Dana. Lily’s middle name was Dana. Mam had favoured Lily, the name of one of Lady Irene’s sisters, but Granny Sive had pushed for Dana. In the end, they’d compromised. She became Lily Dana Kennedy.

What would Granny Sive have made of Jamie? Would she have invoked the crucifix and eternal damnation? Or would she have pressed her old hand to Lily’s heart and said, ‘Trust that’?

Lily wished she was more like Granny Sive.

The hospital psych ward in Tamarin was tiny and consisted of a small four-bed section in the middle, with a further four rooms leading off from the communal area. Overlooking the sea was a television room, a ‘quiet room’, the nurses’ station, and a consulting room.

Anneliese had been there for five days and she was fed up with asking the chief psychiatrist, Dr Eli, if she could go home. Once again he was dragging his heels.

‘I’m fine,’ she said. ‘It was an error of judgement brought on by numbing myself with tranquillisers,’ she added as they sat in the small consulting room and Dr Eli gave her his grave but friendly look.

‘Trying to drown yourself is quite a statement,’ he said, in a voice so calm and measured that Anneliese would have hit him over the head with something, if only there had been a single blunt object in the room that wasn’t nailed down. Clearly people had tried this before. In the psych ward, the knives and the chairs were plastic. There was nowhere to vent any anger.

‘Lapse of judgement,’ she insisted. ‘I can’t believe I did it. I’m not mad, right. Plus, if I wasn’t mad before I came here, I’m
going mad now. I hate,
hate
being in rooms where I can’t get out, and there’s nothing to do and nobody to talk to. It’s like being stuck on a reality TV show without the cameras or the choice about food. Let me go home.’

‘You know you’re only in the locked ward because we’ve no beds anywhere else in the hospital,’ Dr Eli said. ‘I’d like to keep you in for a few more days to make sure you’re doing as well as you say you are.’

‘I am well,’ Anneliese groaned. ‘You can’t fake it – I tried and, believe me, I now know the difference between not being well and being well. I want to go home, breathe fresh air and feel healthy again.’

She wanted to leave because the atmosphere of sadness that permeated the ward was hard to live with. Compared to the teenage boy locked in his own head from drug addiction, and the young woman with empty eyes and bandaged wrists from trying to cut them, Anneliese knew she was basically well. Her being here was a stupid mistake. With those kids, it was much, much more and she knew she couldn’t heal until she was away from the ward.

‘Plus,’ she added, ‘I never want to see a tranquilliser again in my life. I don’t want to be out of my mind. I’ve decided I like being in it. Numbing my brain was the problem. I numbed too bloody much and stopped thinking straight.’

‘How does it feel, talking about this, about why you did it?’ he asked.

Anneliese had regretted her walk into the sea many, many times. Trying to explain her actions to Beth was the worst, but telling Dr Eli came a close second. The man was a bloody monolith of calm, nothing upset him, and he asked the same questions again and again, as if the repetition would make her give in and supply the real answer.

Except Anneliese had given the real answer already:
I don’t really know why I kept walking into the sea, it’s sort of hazy in
my mind. I wasn’t thinking properly, but I know I don’t want to do it again. I made a mistake, really, a mistake.

‘Oh, Dr Eli,’ she said wearily, ‘what is the correct answer to that question? What’s the answer you want to hear? That I’ve got Dalí-esque shapes in my head bleeding their life out on to the floor? That giant cockroaches are under my T-shirt? You know what was wrong with me? Life.

‘My life sucked. I haven’t lost my marbles, I didn’t have a hallucinogenic dream where Noddy French-kissed me or where I turned into a horse and wanted to trample my mother and marry my father. I don’t want to be a paper on Freudian analysis for the middle-aged woman. My problem is simple: I reached rock bottom, tried to numb my head, and ended up in a happy blur that saw me walk down the beach and keep walking.’

There was a pause before the doctor slid seamlessly into the space with a question: ‘How does it feel to say that?’

A roar of laughter bubbled up inside Anneliese and escaped. The noise shocked her for a second because it was so long since she’d laughed.
How does it feel to say that?
You couldn’t make it up, she decided. She felt as if she was trapped in an episode of
Frasier
crossed with
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.

‘Do you ever watch
Frasier
, Dr Eli?’ she asked. ‘You know, the sit-com with the psychiatrist who has a radio talk show in Seattle.’

‘Not really –’ muttered the doctor. ‘I don’t watch much television.’

‘It’s very funny,’ Anneliese said. ‘You should watch it. You’d love it, although you’ve got to be able to laugh at yourself to enjoy it, and that’s not always easy –’

‘Back to you –’

‘No, not back to me,’ Anneliese interrupted. ‘Not trying to be rude, here, Dr Eli, but I’d like to go home and stop this. Can you discharge me?’

‘One more day?’ he said.

Anneliese thought it would be easier for Beth if she was discharged properly instead of her just charging out by herself, saying she was fine. Legally, Anneliese knew she didn’t have to stay, but she felt guilty for stressing her pregnant daughter out, and playing by the rules seemed a good solution.

‘One more day,’ she agreed. ‘Now,
I Love Lucy
is on – you need satellite television in here, Dr Eli. Paramount Comedy would help a lot of us get better much faster.’

‘You think so?’ he asked.

She nodded. ‘Sit-com therapy should be a recognised form of analysis, part cognitive behavioural, part laughing-at-yourself. And I’m smiling just thinking about it, so isn’t that progress?’

After Dr Eli had gone, Anneliese wandered into the television room and sat in one of the windows, looking out at the sea. The windows had bars on the outside. To keep the crazy people in or keep the rest of the world out – Anneliese didn’t know which. Strangely, she was used to the bars now. Those first twenty-four hours, when she’d lain numbly in her bed, she’d hated them and all they represented. Her downfall.

It had been instantaneous: one moment, she’d been standing on the beach, still being Anneliese, mother of Beth, sort of wife to Edward, stalwart of the Lifeboat Shop. And a fraction of a moment later, she was the woman who’d tried to drown herself in the deceptive currents of the bay. Just a flicker of doubt and her whole life had changed.

Edward had come to the hospital after she’d been brought in and she hadn’t cared about him seeing her.

‘Go away!’ she’d cried hoarsely at him, clad in a hospital gown because her sea-sodden clothes had been removed. ‘Go away.’

He’d gone and even though Anneliese knew he was devastated by what had happened, she didn’t care about his hurt. Let him hurt. Let him feel what it was like.

Beth was different.

‘Your daughter’s coming to see you, Anneliese, isn’t that nice?’ said one of the nurses, the tall one with the dark hair, the next morning. That was when the shame coursed through her. Her darling pregnant daughter was driving to see her and had presumably been phoned the night before with the sort of news nobody ever wanted to hear. Anneliese pictured the confusion and hurt on Beth’s face; she could imagine her leaning against the wall to rest her back, hand on the mound of her baby, asking: ‘No, it can’t be true?’

She’d
done that. Her. The woman who’d spent her life taking care of Beth had spectacularly abandoned taking care of her. Beth could have gone into early labour with shock, anything, and it would have been her fault.

For the first time since she’d been admitted to Tamarin Hospital the day before, Anneliese emerged from her locked-in state and began to cry. She’d thought she could simply disappear off the planet and nobody would care. But she’d been wrong.

Beth hadn’t arrived until nearly lunchtime. From her bed where she was propped up against the pillows because she felt so bone-numbingly weary, Anneliese could see Marcus and Beth enter the ward. Even the strain on her face couldn’t diminish the glow of imminent motherhood. Beth’s skin really was blooming and her hair fell lustrously around her shoulders. She looked like an advert in a pregnancy magazine. Except that pregnancy magazines never featured pictures taken inside psychiatric wards.

Anneliese gulped and the gulp turned into a sob.

‘Mum!’ Stopping only to gesture to Marcus to stay back, Beth rushed to her mother and hugged her. ‘I was so worried, Mum. I couldn’t believe –’

‘– I know: that I’d done something so stupid. I’m sorry, so sorry,’ Anneliese sobbed.

‘Mum, how could you think of doing that? How could you?’

Anneliese hugged her daughter and the promise of her first grandchild and felt the raw heat of the shame again. Look what she’d
done.

Anneliese knew there was only one way to fix it and she took a huge step back into her old life: ‘It was a mistake, my love, I wasn’t thinking straight. I’m so sorry, I can’t tell you how sorry I am. I’d taken too many anti-anxiety tablets and I did something I’ll always regret. It was a stupid mistake, please believe me.’

‘Oh, Mum.’

Anneliese could feel some of the tension leave Beth’s body and she knew she’d done the right thing.

‘I was so worried, you’ve no idea. Dad phoned and I couldn’t take it in at first. I mean – you would never –’

‘I’m sorry,’ said Anneliese softly, ‘so sorry.’ She wanted more than anything to tell Beth the truth about how she felt, but she couldn’t. Not now, with Beth pregnant. Probably not ever. A long time ago, she’d made the decision not to raise her daughter to stand in the front lines.

She’d tell Beth what she needed to hear and pray that telling Beth it had all been a mistake would take away the red raw shame inside her for having hurt her daughter. So, she wasn’t being honest. But she might die of pain if she told the truth. And now, with Beth holding her, Anneliese realised that she didn’t want to die after all.

‘It’s going to be all right,’ Anneliese soothed, and was astonished to realise that it
was
going to be all right. At that precise moment, when she should be feeling worse than she ever had, she felt a strange surge of relief because she’d been through the absolute worst and had come out the far side, still breathing, still
there.
Despite the fear, she’d got through it. She could get through anything. That thought brought her a ray of sheer peace.

It was like jumping into the abyss and, instead of falling endlessly, she’d hit a trampoline – or bouncelina, as Beth called them when she was little – and she’d been bounced back.

We don’t want you
–
so you’d better bloody well get on with it
, the other world had said irritably.

‘It’s going to be all right,’ she repeated, and this time, she meant it.

‘Why didn’t you phone me and tell me how you were feeling?’ Beth went on. ‘Mum, I’m here for you, you know that.’

‘I’m sorry,’ Anneliese repeated, hugging her.

Eventually, Marcus had come over to sit on the bed, and they’d skirted round why his mother-in-law was in the psychiatric ward. Dear Marcus, he was a good man.

She’d told him as much when he and Beth left.

‘Take care of her,’ she’d whispered to him. ‘I’m sorry for all of this, Marcus. It’s going to be OK, though. I’m not planning on trying it again.’

Marcus nodded and she could see a telltale gleam of wet in his eyes.

Beth had come back the following day, and Anneliese had summoned up the energy to look sprightly and tell her daughter to go home, that she’d be fine.

‘Are you sure?’ Beth asked.

Anneliese, inhabiting the in-control-mother zone, nodded. “Course I am,’ she said firmly. ‘You go home and work on this baby. I’m going to be fine. I’ll be out in a few days and I’m looking forward to going home, and putting all this behind me.’

She managed to say it with brio, as if what had happened was a little glitch instead of a suicide attempt.

‘Well…’ Beth faltered.

‘Darling,’ Anneliese used the voice she’d used when Beth was at primary school and didn’t want to get out of bed on cold winter mornings, ‘I’ll be fine.’

‘OK, Mum,’ said Beth, accepting it.

Anneliese felt relief that she’d convinced Beth she was fine, even though she wasn’t. But mingled with the relief
was a certain sadness that her daughter had believed her so readily.

Anneliese had never known her mother’s secrets, any more than she’d known dear Lily’s secrets. But she’d somehow thought that she and Beth would share each other’s lives. But they didn’t. The fierce bond between mother and child didn’t include that. Perhaps the bond would be weakened if it did.

Mothers were meant to mother, not spill their souls.

Beth didn’t need to know that Anneliese now bore two scars that would never heal. The first was how much she’d hurt Beth by trying to kill herself. The second was that she’d reached that place where death seemed the best option. It was like a spot on a mythical road-trip, somewhere that altered a person so much that, once they’d visited, they were never quite the same again.

When Beth had gone, Anneliese let the in-control feeling flood away. She could summon up the mother persona if required, but to get out of this place, she needed to let go of the old Anneliese.

‘Anneliese.’

She looked up from the window seat in the television room. It was her favourite nurse, the tall dark-haired one.

‘Hello, Michelle,’ she said.

‘You’ve a visitor, Anneliese,’ said Michelle.

‘Who?’

‘Me, the man who pulled you out.’

She’d thought the big figure behind Michelle was another patient, but it wasn’t. It was the marine ecology guy. Mac, the man she’d tried to avoid on the beach, the man who had pulled her out of the sea.

‘I’ll leave you to it,’ said Michelle, walking off.

Anneliese stared at Mac and embarrassment flooded through her. He’d been there that day: it was like him seeing her naked.

‘How did you get in?’ she demanded. She was all out of politeness.

‘I was visiting someone and I thought I’d come over and say hi. I wanted to see how you were. I was the one who pulled you out, after all.’

‘I didn’t ask to be pulled out,’ said Anneliese irritably. It wasn’t entirely true, because she had wanted to be pulled out. He’d saved her life.