Authors: Susan Howatch
“I could say the same thing to you—imagine inflating a run-of-the-mill breakdown in communication into a fullscale marital mess worthy of counselling from Relate! Now darling, let’s just talk about this calmly and sensibly for a moment. First of all I want you to know that I accept my share of responsibility for this very painful situation and that I intend to work very hard to redeem my mistakes. It’s entirely my fault that I didn’t realise much earlier how unhappy you were—I’m afraid I’ve been using up so much energy in my work that I’ve been incapable of ESP when I’ve come home to relax! However, ESP or no ESP, I promise you I’ll be a great deal more sensitive in the future.”
“Thank you, but—”
“Now, the second thing I want to say is that I do understand why you’re going through a crisis at the moment. With the business sold and the boys growing up fast you must be very conscious of an emptiness at the centre of your life, but I assure you that the way forward is not, as you seem to think, to smash up your life and destroy your closest relationship. The way forward is to transform your—our—present life so that our relationship is healed, renewed and transformed.”
This struck me as being psycho-babble—or rather, psycho-spiritual-babble, something which I knew I ought to ignore in order to focus on the central truth that the marriage was finished. Yet at the same time I was severely tempted to argue with him. I’d suffered too much from that awful ministry of healing which had consumed my husband
and deprived me of a normal married life, and no one was now going to try to heal
me
with psycho-spiritual-babble in the expectation that I would make no attempt to talk back! As the white-hot anger, long suppressed, swept through me I managed to say crisply in the calmest of voices: “Don’t play the guru with me, Nicky, and don’t hand me any wonder cure which isn’t firmly rooted in reality! You’re just twisting the dogma to suit your purpose, but two can play at that game and now I intend to twist it back!”
“What do you mean?”
“You’ve often spoken in the past about self-realisation—about people growing and developing into the unique selves which God has designed them to be. You believe, don’t you, that we have a duty to realise ourselves as far as possible because the more we become most truly ourselves the better we can serve God by doing what he wants us to do—by doing what he’s designed us to do—and so chiming with his overall creative purpose. I’ve got that right, haven’t I? Isn’t that what you believe?”
“Yes, but—”
“Well, I want to go on realising myself. I’ve come a long way in the past few years, but I don’t want to stop now and I don’t want to go back. I want to go on becoming the person God means me to be, and the life God means me to lead has nothing to do with being married to you.”
“That’s not just twisting dogma, that’s perverting the truth! What you’ve outlined is the ‘me-generation’ philosophy—it’s individualism running wild because what you’re really saying is: ‘I’m the only one who counts and everyone else can go to the wall!’ You don’t want to serve God by taking your place in a unique network of human relationships—you just want to serve yourself by going your own way regardless of those who love you!”
“No, it’s not like that—you’re twisting everything again—”
“I’m twisting nothing! I’m telling you the truth, I’m speaking out for Christianity against self-centred individualism, and I’m saying that you
can’t realise yourself at the expense of others!
”
“My God, that’s rich!” I exploded as anger finally elbowed my fear aside. “You’ve been realising yourself at my expense ever since we married! And throughout most of our marriage you’ve certainly been realising yourself at the expense of our sons! Well, I can’t take your self-realisation any more, Nicky—I can’t take it, and neither you nor anyone else is going to make me!” And yet again I rushed from the room.
VII
He came
after me as I stood trembling at the kitchen sink, but when I told him to keep his distance he remained by the door. I concentrated on taking deep breaths to fight off the nausea, and eventually, when I remained silent, he said in a level, reasonable voice: “Although I would deny the truth of that accusation, I do concede that in trying to care for you to the best of my ability I’ve nevertheless managed to get a lot wrong. Well, I’m very sorry and now I want to redeem my mistakes by putting everything right.”
“Of course you’re going to say that,” I said, clutching the edge of the sink so hard my fingers ached. “That’s the Christian game, isn’t it? You confess, you repent, you’re forgiven, and then everything’s a glorious resurrection, but I’m sorry, I’m not playing that game any more and I don’t want this marriage to be resurrected. I want—I need—”
He suddenly let his anger show. “Oh, ‘I’—‘I’—‘I’! Rosalind, have you any idea how fantastically egotistical you sound? Unless you draw the line now your self-centredness is going to make a lot of people—including yourself—very miserable!”
“Don’t you bloody preach to me!” I cried, but I was rattled. Violent anger certainly demolishes me but I’m also no good at coping with scenes when non-violent anger is on open display. I have to have the anger muzzled and veiled. That’s what I’ve always been used to and that’s what I can handle competently. Naked anger knocks me off balance.
“I’ll damn well do as I choose!” shouted Nicky, careful to sound angrier than ever. Of course he knew exactly how disconcerting this was for me. “Why shouldn’t I preach to you? Good preaching means telling a few home truths about reality, and a few home truths about reality are obviously just what you need to hear!”
“Don’t shout at me, don’t shout—”
“Shut up! Now just you listen to me! You accused me of realising myself at the expense of our sons, but what do you think you’ll be doing if you smash up our marriage? In fact how can you even think of doing this to the boys?”
“But they’d be all right! They’d go on living with me at Butterfold and the disruption would be minimal—”
“Rosalind, I don’t know what corner of cloud-cuckoo-land you’re inhabiting, but I suggest you come back to earth right now and stop
messing around with this very dangerous fantasy. You have two adolescent sons, one very disturbed, the other shaping up to go the same way, and yet you casually propose to sever them from any masculine influence in the home! Okay, I know I’m not the world’s most perfect parent, but even though I haven’t been around as much as I should have been, those boys know I care about them, they know I’m utterly committed to their welfare, and no matter how much they whine at some of my decisions, they know I’m
never
going to realise myself at their expense, wash my hands of them and walk out. So if you think I’m going to sit back and let you deprive Benedict and Antony of the love and security I represent—”
Guilt instantly exacerbated my burgeoning panic. “But you’d have visiting rights! I’d never, never do anything which would harm Benedict and Antony—”
“Then why are you talking of smashing up the marriage? Can’t you see that if you do that you’ll smash up the boys?”
“Oh, but—”
“I think it’s time you took a long, hard look at yourself, Rosalind, I really do. You’ve been ready enough to criticise me, but I think if you turn the spotlight on your own behavior, honesty will force you to admit you’re not entirely without blame yourself! For instance, you’ve convinced yourself that I was the one who wasn’t able to cope with family life at St. Benet’s, but in fact the non-coper was you, wasn’t it? You couldn’t face life in London without at least an acre of garden to nurture! And talking of nurturing, what about your shortcomings as a mother? If you hadn’t spoilt Benedict so rotten, Antony wouldn’t have felt compelled to imitate him to gain your attention! You never had a clue how to deal with them sensibly—in fact if you hadn’t secretly been more interested in bringing up flowers than bringing up children, those boys wouldn’t be the rowdy yobs they are at the moment and my job as a father trying to repair the damage you’ve caused would be one hell of a lot less tedious and painful!”
I had no strength left to fight. He’d drained it all out of me, drop by drop, with vilely skilled precision. I felt trumped, tricked, trashed and trounced.
Breaking away again I burst into tears and ran sobbing back to the living-room.
VIII
I fought
for self-control and lost. I felt as if I were drowning in a rising tide of guilt and grief, and now all I wanted was to escape to some private haven where I could abandon myself to despair, but no escape was possible because Nicky was on the brink of shoring up his victory. Slumping down beside me on the sofa as I wept, he gathered me into his arms and I no longer had the strength to push him away.
That was the moment when I knew my brief, brave sprint for freedom was over. I was to be comforted, counselled, remodelled, “fixed.” In the end I would be just another name on Nicky’s long list of successfully treated clients, just another testament to his powers as a healer. And that would be a happy ending, wouldn’t it? Obviously I’d spent years being a selfish wife, refusing to share his ministry, and a rotten mother, capable only of producing rowdy yobs. If anyone needed “fixing” I did.
The awful thing was that I knew these desolate thoughts were a gross travesty of the truth, but I found myself powerless to repudiate them. All decent mothers suffer agonies of guilt if their children become troublesome, and I’d often worried myself sick by wondering how far I was to blame for the boys’ problems. By zeroing in on my guilt and magnifying it, Nicky had converted my shortcomings into a burden which I couldn’t, in my present shattered state, throw off. The result was that I could only think: yes, I must abandon any idea of divorce or else the boys will be destroyed and I’ll wind up being the worst mother in the world.
I thought of Mummy talking of soldiering on and keeping a stiff upper lip. I thought of Daddy playing the game and not letting the side down as he endured silently behind his newspaper. How could I even think of desecrating their memory by chucking in the towel and doing a runner? A deserting wife was beyond the pale. A deserting wife could only be condemned. A deserting wife had lost control.
My whole body seemed to throb with shame as my upbringing finally reclaimed me. I couldn’t withstand it. My defences had been destroyed and my will had been broken. All I could do now was to lie like a lump in Nicky’s arms and listen, wet-eyed and passive, as he talked in the gentlest and most soothing of voices.
“Now darling, don’t despair,” he was saying. “We’re going to get
over this. The thing to do is to take one step at a time, and the first step is to end this split-level way of being married—we must be together during the week as well as at weekends, and what I suggest is that we begin by living together at the Rectory until the boys come home for the holidays. We’ll have to spend the holidays in accordance with the old regime because we certainly don’t have time for radical reorganisation before mid-December, but if you now come back with me to London you could make a start on planning how to adapt the Rectory for family life.”
He paused, waiting for a comment, but when none came he continued with increasing confidence: “During the holidays we can involve the boys in our new plans—the change should be presented to them as exciting, a move which will give them a lot of interesting opportunities. Then when they return to school in the new year you can go ahead with renovating the Rectory, making plans for the garden and so on … Okay, I know the garden’s a wilderness at the moment and I know how inferior it must seem to the garden at Butterfold, but it’s got great potential, and there are two unused rooms next to Alice’s flat—they could be thrown into one to make a garden room for your plants. The boys, of course, will need their games-room but that’s all right, we can divide the curate’s flat; there’s no need for Stacy to have so much space. Yes, I can see the house taking shape … and we’ll be together at last, just as we should be. It’s the split-level living that’s undermined us but once we put a stop to that we’ll be on our way to a much better relationship.” Kissing my cheek lightly he gave me a reassuring squeeze.
I managed to whisper: “And Butterfold?”
“We’ll keep the farmhouse as a second home,” he said at once. “I know how much it means to you, and besides, we’ll still want to escape to the country sometimes, particularly during the summer.”
“I suppose … I suppose there’s no question of you leaving St. Benet’s in the immediate future?”
“None. It’s going from strength to strength. Incidentally, I don’t know if you’ve had any ideas yet about what you want to do next, but there’s plenty of opportunities for voluntary work at the Healing Centre, and—”
“Yes.”
“—and I’m sure we could use your special gifts in some creative way. On the other hand,” he added rapidly as he failed to detect any sign of an enthusiastic response, “if you wanted to return to domesticity—” He broke off.
I waited before it suddenly dawned on me that he was having trouble phrasing his next suggestion. Memories of a very awkward subject surfaced, triggered by the concept of domesticity, and at once I tried to turn the conversation elsewhere. “I shall enjoy taming the garden,” I said feverishly. “Would I need to get permission from the Archdeacon if I wanted to build a conservatory?”
But Nicky’s thoughts were far from conservatories and he refused to be diverted. “Look,” he said urgently, “I know you’ve always been cool in the past when we’ve discussed the possibility of having another child, but I see clearly now why you were against the idea. You thought, didn’t you, that I wouldn’t be around enough to give you the necessary support, but if we now eliminate the split-level life—if our marriage moves into a new phase—if you were to fancy a return to domesticity—”
“No, Nicky. I’m sorry, but no.”
“Well, I realise we’re both a bit old for that sort of thing, but women often have babies when they’re over forty these days, it’s not unusual—”
“It’s not unusual but in my case it’s impossible,” I said flatly, so unnerved by this time that I could do nothing but blurt out the truth. “I had myself sterilised four years ago when I went into hospital for that D and C, and there’s no way I’m going to try to reverse the operation.”