Where did we go wrong? She’ll stomp into the kitchen, Meriel, stub out her roll-up cigarette in a saucer though there’s always an ashtray provided. She’ll look in the fridge, slam shut its door with a snort of disapproval no matter how much it holds; she’ll push back my cooking things and sit herself on the table and swing her skinny legs weighed down with those horrible great boots. Even before she’s said a word, Meriel brings menace into the house. She shatters our peace. In truth, we’re afraid of her.
What should we have done differently?
We’ve tossed the question between us so many times that it’s become stale. We can find no solutions and we can’t go on asking ourselves, says Douglas, quite rightly. We can’t go on torturing ourselves, condemning ourselves, battering ourselves with guilt, exhausting ourselves with questions that have no answer. Our firm intention is just to accept, to question no more. But the haunting remains, the wondering. The constant regret.
Sometimes, when we slip into theories without meaning to, I suggest to Douglas it’s because we’re so dull. A dull, once happy couple. Reluctantly, he agrees. He doesn’t like to think we’re dull. To him – to me, we’re not. Until all this, we have had and appreciated our small pleasures in life: security, just enough money, solid house with a nice bit of garden for the roses that are Douglas’s hobby, holiday abroad most years, quietly in the same hotel near the Pyrenees where we can walk and gather wild flowers.
By others’ standards, our ambitions have been minor ones and we feel no smugness in having achieved them to some extent – Doug a partner in the firm of solicitors after only twenty years. He specialises in divorce and never ceases to be amazed by other people’s unhappy marriages. Over the years he’s come back with stories of cruelty and violence and calculated unkindness you’d scarcely believe. But he enjoys the job. He’s good at it, plainly. Also, his golf has improved as well as his roses – I doubt you’d see a better show of them anywhere in Berkshire.
As for me: well, all I’ve ever wanted was a quiet life, running the house efficiently, cooking for the family, enjoying the Bridge Club once a week. When Meriel went to weekly boarding school, I admit I did indulge in a few evening classes in pottery, History of Art and botany – things I’d had no chance to study at school and had always hankered after. But whenever Meriel was at home I’d put them to one side. I’d make sure my reading was finished by the time she was back so that I could listen to all her news over a slice of Victoria sponge, drive her over to her friend Lily – whatever she wanted. In all fairness, I don’t think she could ever accuse me of neglect, though I suppose, yes, our life to her might seem unexciting. Dead, she called it, in one of her rages.
I had three miscarriages before Meriel. The nine months of pregnancy with her I found hard to believe – hard to believe she wasn’t one more life snuffed out before it had a chance. We had always wanted two children, but once Meriel was born, a perfect baby, we decided not to try our luck again. We felt it wouldn’t be possible to love another child so much, and all desire to put the matter to the test dissolved. Meriel was enough for us.
‘But we must be sure not to suffocate her with love,’ I remember Doug saying. We tried very hard to be sensible parents – balanced, understanding but not spoiling, disciplining but not regimenting. We tried to inculcate in her from an early age a curiosity and love of simple things . . .
She’ll barge into the house, drinking beer straight from the can and when she’s finished it she’ll crumple the can up in one hand as if it was so much tissue paper. She has big, manly hands, sinews tough as chains under the hard skin, flat fingers that pry over our things with distaste. Recently she’s had her hair shaved round the back and a new earring at the top of her ear. Some years ago, she dyed her hair pink and had it standing up in points, like a clown. I managed not to say anything, and over this new shaved look I’m doing my best not to make any comment. But, I mean: Meriel’s twenty-three now. She’s no teenager. She’s grown up.
By the age of five she knew the names of dozens of wild flowers and was an endearing, rewarding child. Not pretty, exactly: nose a little too prominent, like her father’s – eyes a shade too close together, perhaps, but the bright blue that comes from my mother’s side of the family. Everyone said she had lovely hair, and she was always turned out neatly – hand-smocked dresses and well-polished shoes. She was a bright little thing: happy, gregarious, loving. She would fling her arms around Doug’s neck and ask him for an icecream or a story, knowing he would be unlikely to refuse her. From an early age, she would dedicate all her artwork to me, bright pictures of birds, and flowers bigger than the flat houses, I love you Mum written in the corner. One of her teachers assured us her draftsmanship was exceptional and she might well be an artist. I was inclined to agree.
At the age of nine, I think it was, Meriel began to show the first small signs of revolt. It was then we noticed that order, so much the norm in our house, seemed to frustrate her. No matter how much I tidied up her room, or persuaded her to do so, it was only a matter of hours before neatness had given way to havoc. She seemed to get a charge from flinging things off shelves on to the floor, rummaging through the neat piles of clothes in her drawers until they looked like a jumble sale, pulling her mattress on to the floor where, she said, she preferred to sleep. Her untidy ways weren’t confined to her own room, either. In the kitchen, she spilt things so often it seemed clear it was on purpose. She threw her clothes all over the place, rumpled the cushions, left books and papers on the floor. I think we both felt she was deliberately trying to annoy us, and took some pleasure in our discomfort and unease. Douglas and I hate things out of place: a sense of meticulous order has always been the staff we lean on.
By the time she was twelve, Meriel had given up at school. She was in constant trouble with her teachers and, apparently, no longer interested in any subject, even art. No more paintings for me. Her father could no longer persuade her to read a book, any book. Her short attention span could accommodate no more than a teenage or music magazine. She spent most of her pocket money on these publications, then flung them down wherever she happened to be.
‘Do pick up your magazine, Meriel.’
‘Cool it, Mum.’
‘Do as your mother says, Meriel.’
‘For Christ’s sake, stop nagging.’
‘Don’t adopt that tone with your mother, Meriel, or I shall stop your pocket money.’
‘Go ahead and stop it. See if I care.’
‘Meriel! Don’t be so rude to your father.’
‘Oh, piss off, both of you.’
Such language, at twelve. There were variations on this ritual exchange, then Meriel would clump out of the room, stomping the pages of the offending magazines to a mush on the floor in her utter scorn.
In the end, I would always be the one to clear them away.
It was about this time – just before Christmas, I remember – that Meriel chose to rebel against her name.
‘What on earth was up with you, giving me such a daft middle-class name? You can imagine how that goes down at school.’ Surely not too badly, I thought. The school was full of Virginias and Camillas and Emilys, a nice bunch of middle-class girls. ‘You can’t blame them for sneering,’ she added, sloshing her tea aggressively over the side of her mug – a hideous mug, incidentally, orange decorated with black lettering:*** k You, mate. When it was on the shelf, I always hid it behind another mug, turning the lettering away. Time and again I would find it placed back right in the front, its message staring my visitors in the face. It was one of our unspoken battles. Sometimes the mug so enraged me that I vowed I would throw it out, or break it on purpose. But I never went quite that far for fear of Meriel’s revenge taking some even more drastic turn . . .
Douglas was concentrating on his Daily Telegraph, in one of his best-to-ignore-her moods.
‘So anyway, from now on I’m not Meriel, I’m Mog.’
‘Meg?’ asked Doug, despite himself.
‘Not Meg, no thanks. Mog.’
‘Mog? But Meriel’s a lovely name,’ I ventured. We had agreed on it within moments of her birth. The small scrunched-up pink face looked like a Meriel, I remember saying to Douglas.
‘Mog it is. I’m telling you – anyone who doesn’t call me Mog won’t get an answer. Meriel is dead.’ She banged down her fist so hard that the Formica table skittered on its thin legs.
‘We’ll see about that,’ said her father, in his most authoritative voice, which sometimes had effect.
‘We will,’ I agreed. ‘Meriel. Mog, indeed!’
She won in the end, of course. Weeks went by when she responded to any question with persistent silence if we called her Meriel. Mog, eventually we said, in desperation. We were rewarded with a pleased smile. The triumph of a victory made her more agreeable for a while. And naturally we only called her Mog when we had to. If sometimes we slipped up and said Meriel by mistake, we were regaled with the old fury and rudeness. Our daughter hadn’t an ounce of forgiveness in her.
We were prepared for a difficult time during Meriel’s teens – that was to be expected. But we never imagined she would push our tolerance quite so far: pierced nose, shaven head, a tattoo on her shoulder – all done without our permission. As for her clothes – in a word, revolting. Why did she always want to make the worst of herself? That’s what we couldn’t understand. Our pretty daughter, at fifteen, was replaced by a brutish, alien creature we scarcely recognised. Drugs were our greatest fear, of course. They seemed the obvious next step. She was in with a bad lot. But when we ventured to have a conversation about the dangers – well, she just laughed, full of scorn. She’d never been into drugs, she said. Demos were more her thing.
Indeed, this seemed to be the case, as we discovered to our horror. Most weekends she’d go off with some renta-crowd – anti-students’ cuts, anti-blood sports – it didn’t seem to matter what it was, if there was a chance of joining a rowdy mob and throwing bricks at the police, Meriel would be there. You’ll get arrested, we said. Who cares? she said. You must pay for what you believe in. We despaired. But there was nothing we could do.
Then came the day she walked in with a nasty cut above her eye. Didn’t say a word. Dashed up to her room before I could offer to bathe it for her. Shut herself in her room. She wouldn’t come down for supper, though she did ask for aspirin. When I asked if I could help, I was told to mind my own business.
After that, as far as we could tell, she went to no more demonstrations. But we noticed other changes. She began to grow her hair back. The fridge was no longer full of cans of beer. She seemed to go out less with her friends. She was working, she said, in her room: and we believed her. So in some ways she became a little easier, though her aggressive feminism and vegetarianism seemed more deeply entrenched than ever. As for her political correctness! We could hardly open our mouths without making some faux pas in her eyes. When Douglas complained that an Indian plumber had done a useless job, she threatened to report him for racism. When I said something about the Chairman of the WI, I was blasted with a ten-minute lecture on the necessity of addressing such a figure as a Chairperson, even though the grey-haired old lady I had referred to had been happy as Chairman for the last twenty years. As for the food problem: while I tried my best to cook her things with vegetables and pulses, she sneered at us for our love of the Sunday joint which she, too, once used to enjoy, and our mid-week cottage pie. She managed to make us feel very uncomfortable at meals: always on about the cruelty of killing animals, the dangers of animal fat, and so on. Sometimes I could see Douglas was near to exploding, so goaded by her thoughts. But he managed to keep control, not to shout. It was hard for him just to let her have her say, unchallenged: but easier than the screaming row that would ensue if he tried to reason with her. Reasoning was the least of Meriel’s abilities.
She did surprisingly well in her exams – no cause for celebration, she said when I baked her a cake she refused to eat because there was ‘dangerous’ colouring in the icing. Nothing very fancy about getting a few good marks, she said. Just meant it made her way into university that much easier.
Psychology was her subject. Psychology! Douglas raised his eyebrows, signalling only a fraction of the pain he felt. Couldn’t she have chosen something better than a trendy, soft-option subject, he asked? With her brains – and he was proud of her brains – history: why not history? She’d done so well in that. Foolish man! He should have learned by then to keep his opinions to himself. Meriel went berserk, screaming at him, banging doors. ‘What do you know about what motivates me? When have you ever cared about me as a person, not just as your daughter?’ Then she slammed out of the house, leaving those cliché questions of modern jargon heavy between us, saying she was going to her friend for the night. (Boy or girl? We did not know). Douglas did not bring up the subject of psychology again.
Once Meriel had gone to university, the house became very quiet. Easier. We were aware of the luxury of peace, of no fear of tantrums or accusations. Surprisingly, she wrote to us several times – ordinary, newsy letters, telling us how she was doing, how she was enjoying university life. She had found a lot of people there who thought like her, she said. Like-minded, was the way she put it. (God forbid, said Douglas.) Once or twice, she even rang us – non-commital, but quite friendly. Then, her third term, we discovered Douglas had cancer.
For some time, he had been complaining about a painful shoulder. He thought it was rheumatism, or arthritis, perhaps. But as it did not improve over the weeks, he agreed to go to the doctor. He was X-rayed. A tumour was found. There were tests. Malignant, it was. A course of immediate chemotherapy was prescribed. I wrote to Meriel, breaking the news as gently as I could.
Twelve hours after receiving my letter she was home. Douglas and I were sitting by the fire with our hot drinks before going to bed, trying to make decisions calmly, in the way that people strive to in a crisis – what would happen about the business, and so on . . . Anyhow, Meriel comes barging in, giving us the fright of our lives. She’s red-eyed, shouting, hysterical. Then she’s all over her father, hugging him, crying. He has to push her away because, inadvertently, she hurts his shoulder. Then she sits on the floor, hugging her knees (which are poking out of torn jeans) and begins to spew out all this stuff against conventional medicine. The reason she has rushed home so fast, she says, is because she had to stop us deciding in favour of the treatment. Chemotherapy was crap, she said. Had we considered the side effects? Did we know how rarely it was successful? Conventional medicine was for the most part crap. The only way to certain recovery was alternative.
There was a long silence. Meriel was staring at her father’s doubting face. She shuffled over to him, put an arm around his neck, more gently this time, leant her cheeks against his, just as she used to when she was a small child.
‘Believe me, Dad,’ she said. ‘I’ve been studying all this sort of thing. It’s all to do with positive attitude, freeing the body and soul from all the aggro that’s been storing up so many years. Why do you think you’ve got cancer? Stress, that’s why. You’re stressed out, Dad.’ She glanced at me.
I could see Douglas inwardly wincing at all those jargon words he hates so much, but at the same time he was touched by Meriel’s unusual concern. This strange turn of events caught him off-balance. It was a moment, I could see him thinking, which he had to play carefully. If he said the wrong word, off she would stomp again, offended by the spurning of her advice and concern. If he agreed . . . what would we say to our doctor?
‘For a start, you’ve got to get all the anger out of you,’ Meriel went on after a while. ‘It’s got to be released.’
‘But I’m not angry,’ Douglas said.
‘That’s what you think. Listen, I know about these things, Dad. Honest, I’m a member of the Healing Society. I’m a Healer. I admit I haven’t much experience, hands on, like. But I understand the principles. I believe in it one hundred per cent. When Mum wrote to me with the news, I couldn’t help thinking here was a God-given chance to do something worthwhile at last. Make up for my – er, in the past.’
She put her hand on her father’s knee, something she hadn’t done for more years than I could remember. She looked very young, a child. Douglas seemed to be thinking the same thing. There was a brightness in his eye. He was close to tears.
‘You’re a good girl,’ he said at last. ‘I appreciate your concern. I’m not out of sympathy with all the alternative medicine bit myself, as a matter of fact. I’ve read quite a bit about it – I’ve been reading everything I can about ruddy cancer in the last few weeks, as you can imagine. But the fact is, this business—’ he freed his hand from Meriel’s, briefly touched his shoulder—‘could gather speed. I can’t afford to hang about. I’d be a fool not to take the experts’ advice, start the treatment. We’re in very good hands, you know.’
Meriel moved a few feet away from her father. She looked at him with the hard eyes we were used to when she was not immediately able to get her way.
‘Do this forme, Dad,’ she said. ‘Give me a chance. Just a few weeks. It’s all a matter of diet, massage, positive thinking. Attitude is everything. Like: there are only another two weeks of term. I won’t go back. I’ll stay here, organising a programme for you. Starting tomorrow. I’ll prepare your food, prepare your soul, Dad. Honest. In fact, not tomorrow – now. No time like the . . . We’ll start with a massage, relax you, build up your confidence. . .’
Douglas’s eyes moved about, alarmed. Again, he touched his shoulder.
‘I’d rather not, a massage,’ he said.
‘I won’t hurt you, stupid. It’ll just be temples and toes. You’ve no idea how much good work on the toes can do.’ She gave a confident smile. ‘I’ll explain it as I go. Now, you lie on the floor, Dad, nice and comfortable, cushion under your head. I’ll just get my oils. Let’s give it a go. All right?’
Douglas nodded, very weary.
‘Very well,’ he said.
Half an hour later, I could scarcely believe my own eyes. There was Douglas stretched out on our fluffy carpet, eyes shut, socks off. Meriel, kneeling beside him, was kneading at the furrows on his poor dear brow with her big flat thumbs. She would work them right up into his temples, where once the hair was thick and handsome, and was now so thin. There was an overpowering, claustrophobic smell of lavender oil in the room – a smell, I was later to learn, you can never quite extinguish from a room. A smell I came to associate with the terrible weeks of Meriel’s ‘cure’. Nothing like the summer smell of lavender bushes, or dried lavender in a muslin bag. In its concentrated form, it is menacing, sickening. I could see Douglas’s nostrils twitch, affronted. But he said nothing. He kept his eyes shut, allowing his head to roll with her hands as she kept up a perpetual stream of theories. ‘Trouble with you, Dad, is you’re suffering from a crisis of identities.’
‘I don’t think your father is doing any such thing,’ I heard myself saying.
‘You don’t know anything, Mum. That’s been one of Dad’s problems.’
She moved down to his feet. Watching her at work on them was even more upsetting. The private nature of feet came home to me: no wonder people don’t want them exposed. They are not the most attractive part of anyone’s body. Douglas’s were long and thin, sinewy. The white ridges of bone that stuck up put me in mind of a plucked chicken’s wings. As for the nails, well, even the most loving wife would have to admit they were not a pretty sight. Wide, flat, lobster-coloured nails, Douglas had, each one topped with an arc of dense yellow that curved cruelly into the hard flesh of the toes. Sometimes they caused him pain and he would have to go to the chiropodist, who said he had a problem. All this I was familiar with – part of my husband, for better, for worse – a huge blessing he wasn’t one of those men who liked to wear open sandals. But it didn’t seem right to me, a daughter on familiar terms with her father’s feet. There she was, pulling at each toe, prying into the secret places between them, all the time droning on about how each toe sent signals up to wherever. Sounded like a lot of stuff and nonsense to me, but I knew I had to go along with Douglas, do whatever he wanted.
When at last she had finished, Douglas sat up very fast, giving the sudden appearance of a fit man. But he looked dizzied, confused. Meriel sat back on her heels, very pleased with herself. She stretched out her hand, held it a few inches from her father’s chest.
‘There: I can, like, feel the energy coming off you already, Dad,’ she said. ‘The anger – can’t you feel? It’s beginning to make its way out.’
Douglas gave her the faintest smile, patted her on the head. He looked so . . . what was it he looked? I couldn’t put a name to it for a moment. Then I suddenly knew what it was: undignified. That was it. For the first time I could ever remember, my husband’s dignity had been ripped from him. He sat hunched on the floor, oily bare feet ashamed in the fluffy pile of the carpet. His thin hair darkened by the lavender oil, and all askew.
‘Go on, tell me you don’t feel a difference.’
Meriel gently stroked his feet with a possessive intimacy that gave me the creeps.
‘Can’t say I feel any benefit yet,’ he said carefully, ‘but then it’s early days.’ He gave Meriel another smile. She put her arms around his neck. ‘Oh my dear, dear girl,’ he said, with a kind of exhausted relief, as if this physical contact with his daughter was something he had been hoping for for a very long time.
Upstairs, Douglas had a bath and washed his hair. But nothing would get rid of the smell of the lavender. It came off his skin like some terrible incense, increasing the discomfort of our argument – whether we should agree with Meriel’s well-meaning but useless theories – that went on till dawn began to light the familiar things of our room, and the day threatened.
But having lost my argument, I did my best when it came to a show of solidarity. I wore my new red coat, and the gloves Douglas had given me at Christmas, for our visit to the specialist. Douglas put his thoughts to the man with all the articulacy he was capable of when addressing a difficult client. You’d think he’d been an advocate of alternative medicine for years, the way he described the reasons for his decision. He was determined to give it a try, he said. A man had to have faith in his daughter. The specialist listened politely, a sceptical frown on his brow. Then suddenly he shrugged his shoulders, almost as if he thought there was no point wasting precious time on one so obdurate as Douglas, and suggested a compromise. Why not go along with Meriel’s ideas, he said – after all (and here he allowed himself a small chuckle) they could not do much positive harm. Why not start the course of treatment right away as well? There was a small silence while Douglas considered this reasonable proposal. The specialist looked at his watch.
‘In cases like yours, there’s no time to be lost,’ he said.
With this piece of news, Douglas made up his mind instantly.
‘No,’ he said. Til give my daughter a chance first. Just for a few weeks.’
‘Very well,’ said the specialist, and saw us out into the stuffy corridor. I felt as if our lifeline had been snapped. But I kept my fears to myself, and drove Douglas to his office. He was to start arrangements for his deputy to be in charge. Although he intended still to work some days a week, already it was apparent he was not up to a full week in the office. Fatigue hit him every day after lunch. This afternoon, however, he seemed to be full of beans. I secretly wondered, only for a moment, whether there might be something in Meriel’s gobbledy-gook after all – some magic, some transference of will. I don’t know. I do believe miracles can happen. Though nothing could convince me Meriel could be the perpetrator of the sort of miracle we needed.
I got home late that afternoon, having been shopping at Sainsbury’s. I got home to find that Meriel had already been on a spending spree of her own. The kitchen table was entirely covered with fruit, vegetables, and several blue glass bottles of essential oils and many packets of vitamins. In an expensive-looking new liquidiser she was making raw carrot juice – I refrained from asking, but imagine Douglas must have lent her his credit card, or given her cash. A pile of chopped liver with a nasty bluish-purple shine lay on a board. On top of the fridge, propped up in the rude mug, a joss stick was burning. Its sickly smoke curled down over us. The blinds at the kitchen window were half-drawn. Meriel’s portable CD player was on the draining board, Indian music mewing forth.
‘What’s all this?’ I asked, lowering my own bags of provisions to the floor.
‘Day one of Dad’s diet. Starting with supper. Don’t put on that face, Mum. Give me some credit.’
Did I put on that face again at supper? I hoped not. But as I watched Douglas struggle with a plateful of raw liver mixed with grated carrot, I could not be sure. Later, Meriel insisted on more pulling of his toes, though she did agree to a scentless oil. I could not bring myself to watch this revolting performance again. I went up early to bed and wept into the pillow.
‘Please see some sense, Douglas, and stop all this nonsense. There’s no time to lose,’ I said, when at last, exhausted, he joined me.
He made an effort to be consoling. He promised me that if Meriel’s methods did not result in definite improvements quite soon, he would return to the specialist.
‘Don’t you see,’ he said, ‘that she’s come to make amends. If we reject her now, we’ll lose her for good. As it is, she’s back to loving us, wanting us, needing to do something very important for us. It would be madness to reject her. She’d be gone for good. We must give her a chance, whatever the cost.’
What could I do but nod, agree? Whatever feelings a wife may have, she must not add to her ill husband’s problems.
In the middle of the night, I heard Douglas get up and go to the bathroom. He was there a long time, terribly sick. I pretended to be asleep. The days go by slowly. Fraught. She’ll stomp into the kitchen, Meriel, with bags of fruits and vegetables, pulses and grains and vitamins. There hasn’t been any meat in the house – apart from the raw liver – since she came back. Not a thing I fancy, and I can’t very well bake a batch of scones just for myself. Never a ‘Anything you’d like, Mum?’ What’s more, she’s taken over. She’s in charge of what goes on in the kitchen. All I’m left with is the clearing up. Still, I suppose I can’t complain. She’s here, she’s all over her father, paying him more attention than she has done for years. Almost an obsessive attention, I might add, as if it’s important to her to make her point, to prove her alternative methods are right, superior.
She comes down late – never an early riser. So I do the breakfast, eating half a grapefruit to keep Douglas company, though I can’t take the carrot juice. Douglas says its not bad, once you’re used to it. He’s been a hero, forcing himself to get used to Meriel’s diet, I’ll say that. Nowadays he only goes to the office twice a week – Meriel packs him a salad and fresh orange juice the night before – and comes back looking ashy in the evenings. But quite cheerful. ‘Don’t you think Dad’s looking better, Mum?’ Meriel keeps asking. I can see in his eyes Douglas is hoping for an encouraging answer. So, yes, I say, I believe he is. That’s not the truth, of course. I keep the truth from both of them. My private opinion is that he’s a bad colour – yellowy skin, a jaundiced colour. Also, he’s lost a lot of weight very quickly. Half a stone in a couple of weeks, I’d guess. But that’s not surprising, considering the rabbit food Meriel insists he eat. And when he’s in her presence, I’m bound to admit he puts on a show of good spirits, swears he’s feeling better. That pleases her. She kisses the top of his head and pats him with her big hands. I hate her at those moments. I believe I really hate her.
Evenings, there’s a routine. After supper, she and Douglas go next door for another massage session. I really can’t abide to watch. They’re back on the lavender oil, now: as far as I’m concerned, the sitting room has become uninhabitable. It stinks. So, after supper, I sit in the kitchen with biscuits and tea – Meriel’s vegetarian concoctions aren’t exactly filling, and of course I won’t touch the raw liver – watching the telly. Every night Meriel tells me, at the end of the session, they’re getting somewhere. An inner peace is replacing the old stress, she says. I look at Douglas, but he won’t meet my eye.
One night it’s one-thirty and they’re still in there. I know Douglas needs to go to bed, it’s his office day tomorrow. So I tap on the door, poke my head round. Well, it’s really spooky. There’s dreadful Indian whining music, the smell of joss sticks curdling with the stench of lavender oil. Douglas is laid out on the fluffy carpet, bare yellow feet poking out of the end of his trousers, hands of paler yellow spread out on his thighs, eyes shut. The flesh of his face, was my immediate thought, did not seem to belong to the same man. It was a terrible colour, a sort of thin grey, like the flesh of a snail.
Meriel, kneeling behind him, looks up. Her fingers are twirling about in the air above his chest, as if she is kneading invisible pastry.
‘What do you want?’ The usual aggression.
‘I think it’s time for your father to come up to bed.’
Meriel went on with her twirling, as if I had not spoken.
‘Here, look at this, Mum,’ she said at last. ‘You can see what’s happening, can’t you? The core of his anger. You can see it coming out. It’s like smoke, isn’t it? It’s tangible. You can feel it.’ She pinched her finger and thumb together as if she was pinching snuff. It struck me she was completely mad. ‘Once Dad’s free of all this, he’ll be well on his way to recovery. Cancer’s, like, one hundred per cent caused by stress, anger, rotten feelings that fester into a kind of garbage inside you.’ Her chant was familiar by now.
‘Not one hundred per cent,’ I ventured.
‘Listen, I’ve studied all this. I know what I’m talking about.’
A matter of opinion, my girl, I said to myself. You’ve only been an undergraduate for under two terms, and you’re meant to be studying psychology.
But there again, perhaps all this sort of talk is psychology . . .?
Douglas opened his eyes and struggled to get up. He looked very tired, but managed a smile. Both Meriel and I put out a hand to help him up. He had taken off his jacket. I noticed that beneath his shirt his shoulder bones stuck out like wings.
‘Thank you, love,’ he said to Meriel and I felt myself stung by a terrible feeling. The pain in my chest, the jealousy, was tangible. Then, perhaps aware of my feelings, he put his arm around my shoulders, thank God, and leant on me all the way upstairs.
Meriel went back to university at last. Never have I been so relieved. I opened the sitting-room windows wide to try to banish the smell of lavender oil, then set about clearing up my kitchen. She’d left instructions everywhere – pinned to the walls, stuck to the fridge: lists of ingredients I was to buy, how to make a lemon dressing, the importance of carrot juice at all times . . . I don’t know. It wearied my head, trying to follow it all. I knew I’d never manage: my heart wasn’t in it. In my opinion, what Douglas needed was some nourishing food, something to keep his strength up. I felt like ripping all the bossy little instructions down, throwing them away. Then I thought, better not. Not till I see what Douglas feels. He may want to keep the whole ludicrous routine going. Keep on giving it a chance. Besides, Meriel had left with so many threats. ‘If you don’t continue the cure scrupulously,’ she had said, ‘it will be your fault if Dad declines. As you can see, he’s much better since I’ve been working on him. He’s a different man. Can’t wait to get back and tell the Healers about my success.’
I made a small batch of scones that day, put two or three on a plate for tea. When Douglas came home – he comes back much earlier now from his two days at the office – he took one, ate it slowly, relishing every bite.
‘Guilty?’ I asked with what I hoped was a mischievous smile.
‘Just very hungry,’ he said.
‘What if I made you a steak and kidney pie for supper?’
‘I’d eat it,’ he said. Well, we hadn’t had such a happy evening for weeks.
Douglas made some effort to return to carrot juice and so on for a couple of days, but we both agreed it was time for the experiment to come to an end. It was quite obvious there was no improvement in his condition: in fact, the truth was, as he admitted within a week of Meriel’s departure, he felt bloody awful. No energy, much worse pain in his shoulder.
‘But no need to worry,’ he said. ‘Mr Belton was so optimistic, remember? Said I’d probably got a few years, and quite a high chance of full recovery.’
‘But you wouldn’t start the treatment when he suggested it.’
‘Won’t have made much difference, six or seven weeks. All the same, I’d like to go back and see him.’ I could tell, by that, he was worried. We were sitting on the sofa. It was an overcast afternoon. He’d laid one of his thin hands on my knee. It quivered.
‘Why, Douglas?’ I asked. ‘I’ll never understand why you agreed to go along with Meriel’s daft theories.’
‘Surely you should understand,’ he said, so gently. ‘I had to win her back. We had to win her back. There’ve been so many years of alienation. I thought this might be the last chance. I thought it couldn’t hurt. Might even be something in it.’
‘You mean, you didn’t believe in it all, although you kept telling her you did?’
Douglas shrugged.
‘I couldn’t disappoint her, could I? Here she was, with something she really believed in. I haven’t seen her so enthusiastic, so involved in something, since she was quite a small child. Besides, I think she was trying to say sorry. Trying to make up for all the difficult years. I wouldn’t have had the heart to reject that. You wouldn’t, either.’
‘She didn’t like me any better, I noted.’
‘One thing at a time. She’s not capable of taking on several things at once, remember. She’ll come round to you.’ This was no time to argue.
‘So what do we do about telling her, Doug? About giving up her plan?’
He thought about it for a long time, in silence.
‘We don’t tell her,’ he said at last.
The following week we returned to Mr Belton, the specialist. He interviewed Douglas at length. It was hard to read his thoughts, but I fancied he looked concerned. Douglas, he said, had lost a stone.
‘I thought it was worth giving it a go,’ Douglas said.
‘It was up to you,’ Mr Belton said – not unfriendly, exactly. More, a little impatient. He made an appointment for more tests, X-rays. A few days later, Douglas left his office for good. Meriel rang up most evenings.
‘How’s the routine going?’ she kept asking. ‘Carrot juice three times a day? You must be getting used to chopping up the raw liver by now, Mum.’ We lied to her. We lied and lied, bright voices. She was full of smug pleasure, of course. The story about her father responding so well had been received with much interest, she said. These conversations were very trying. Each time Douglas put down the telephone he looked like a slain man.
‘I’d give the world not to be doing this,’ he said.
‘Let’s hope it’s not one more of our mistakes,’ I said. ‘Dear God, where did we go wrong?’ The question slipped out before I could stop it.
‘We’ll never know,’ said Douglas. Mr Belton summoned us to tell us about the results of the tests. This time, there’s no denying he looked grave. One glance at his face and I knew what the news was going to be.
‘The one thing that’s certain about this disease,’ he said, rubbing his healthy brown hands together, ‘is its unpredictability. Sometimes, when all the signs have given little hope, it suddenly becomes almost dormant. Other times, you’re pretty sure the patient has months, if not a few years, left, and the tumours multiply with a devastating speed.’ He paused. ‘I wish you hadn’t postponed the treatment,’ he said. ‘But we’ll see what you can do.’
He described it all to us in great and kindly detail, but his words were far away, blowing down through a thin tube in my ears that made an echo. On the way out, Douglas took my arm. I felt its terrible thinness. I felt the sinews tremble, but he was being so cheerful.
‘Don’t worry,’ he said, ‘I’m going to lick this thing. I’m a fit man, and whatever Meriel might think, not an angry one.’
We laughed, standing there in the car park, the cars a paintbox of colours flowing into one another. It was the last time I can remember we laughed, and Douglas asked me to drive.
It all gathered such speed after that, there was scarcely a moment to get back to this journal. Besides, I couldn’t. I couldn’t bring myself to describe the horror of Doug’s fast decline: the small spasms of hope always quickly dashed by despair. I looked after him myself for as long as I could, then a nurse came in to give me some relief. His hair fell out. I became fascinated by a small pulse in his temple, beating away, roped in by a swollen blue vein, fat as a worm. Had they always been there, pulse and vein, beneath his hair, all the years of our marriage? It was the sort of thing I began to concentrate on, trying to deflect my thoughts from the reality of the situation. Douglas was dreadfully sick, and new pains began. Terrible stomach pains. It was time for all possible help, things beyond me. He agreed to go into the local hospice, a sunny place with windows on to a nice garden.
The time had come, too, to tell Meriel. I dreaded the call so much. In fact, I gave way to cowardice and wrote to her. I said the switch to conventional medicine had been a mutual decision. It was what Douglas wanted, what we thought would be best. I put it all as gently as I could.
Her first response was at midnight, waking me from a light sleep. A great spewing forth of abuse, anger, tears – all just as I had expected, only worse. Vitriolic. Accusing me of breaking her trust, betraying her. What sort of a mother am I, she asks. What sort of a wife? Giving up her way – so successful in just a few weeks, as we had all witnessed – and subjecting Doug to chemotherapy was tantamount to sticking a knife through his heart. When I tried to remonstrate, ask her to listen to reason, she just slammed down the telephone.
She kept on ringing. Whenever I came back from visiting Douglas – and I couldn’t worry him with all this, of course – she was on the telephone with her horrible accusations.
This morning was the worst of all. So vicious I can only hope it was the last time she’ll ring.
She accused me of killing her father.
‘If we hadn’t wasted weeks on your stupid methods, your father might not be lying there dying right now,’ I shouted back. I was suddenly angrier than I’d ever been in my life, with anyone.
‘You bitch,’ she screamed. ‘Bitch, bitch, bitch.’ She disowned me as a mother, she said. I wouldn’t see her again, not even at the funeral.
It’s late at night now, but I’ve calmed down a bit. I try to put Meriel from my mind, concentrate only on Douglas. He was very tired this evening, weak. But cheerful as always, holding my hand. He doesn’t ask about Meriel any more. He hasn’t the strength to hear about disputes. He knows there’s only a short time left.
Well, I’m not going to write my journal again after tonight. It’s been cathartic in some ways, but nothing can help any more. Besides, I want to spend every moment from now on at Douglas’s bedside. Often, sitting there, so quiet, I long to ask him one last time, where did we go wrong? But the time’s past. Such a question would be an unfair burden in his pitiful state. Besides, the closeness of death rarely enlightens. Like me, he can have no answers.