“I said I would come,” I said, smiling at her and trying to lighten the atmosphere. “And here I am, my darling.”
“What have you done to your eye?” she demanded.
“Silly, really,” I said. “I caught it on the corner of the kitchen cupboard, you know, the one by the fridge.” We had both done it before, often, though neither of us had actually cut ourselves in the process.
“Were you drunk?” she asked.
“No,” I said, “I was not. I was making tea. To be precise, I was getting the milk out.”
I leaned down to give her a kiss, and she made a point of smelling my breath. Finding no trace of the demon drink, she relaxed somewhat and even smiled at me.
“You should be more careful,” she said.
“I’ll try,” I replied, smiling back at her.
“Have you had a good day?” she asked.
“Yes,” I said. “Particularly good. All six favorites lost, and we recouped the entire amount of yesterday’s losses and then some.” I decided against mentioning anything about my visit from a detective chief inspector of police or the discovery that my father had murdered my mother.
“Good,” she said, sounding genuinely pleased.
We sat together in armchairs in front of the television in what might have been a normal domestic situation if not for the multiadjustable hospital bed in the corner of the room and the white-smock-uniformed male nurse who brought us in a tray of coffee, together with Sophie’s medication.
“Good evening, Mr. Talbot,” the nurse said to me. “Glad you could make it tonight.” He smiled. “Your wife was so disappointed yesterday, as were we all.”
He gave the impression that I was being officially told off, which I probably was. Sophie’s treatment relied heavily on having a steady routine with no surprises.
“Good evening, Jason,” I said to the nurse, smiling back and resisting the temptation to make excuses. Now was neither the time nor the place.
“My, what have you done to yourself?” he said, looking at my face.
“Head-butted our kitchen cabinet,” I said.
Jason raised his eyebrows in a questioning Oh yes, pull the other one fashion.
“We do it all the time,” said Sophie, coming to my aid. “We ought to get that cupboard moved.”
Jason relaxed and seemed satisfied that my black eye was accidental.
“The guest suite is available if you want to stay,” he said with a smile, his admonishment for yesterday’s absence clearly over.
“Thank you,” I said, “but I can’t. I need to go home and change.” I also decided against explaining that I had worn exactly the same clothes for two days running and why. “But I can stay for a while longer.”
Sophie and I watched the television news together before I departed into the night and the road to Kenilworth, and home.
Our house was a 1950s-built, three-bedroom semidetached in what was still called Station Road, although the railway station to which it referred had closed down in the 1960s. The previous owners had transformed the postage-stamp-sized front garden into an off-road parking space, and I gratefully pulled my Volvo into it at ten minutes to midnight.
As usual, the house was cold and lonely. Even on a midsummer’s day it rarely could be described as warm or cozy. It was as if, somehow, the very bricks and mortar were aware of the daily sadness and despair experienced by the occupants within.
Sophie and I had moved here from a rented one-bedroom over-shop flat soon after our wedding. Her parents hadn’t approved of the union. They were God-fearing Methodists who believed that bookmakers were agents of the Devil. So it felt as if we were both orphans, but we didn’t care. We were in love and we only needed each other.
The house in Station Road was the first home we had owned and we knew it would be a struggle. The mortgage company loan had been to their utmost limit, and, at first, Sophie had worked in the evenings behind the bar at the local pub in order to help meet the repayments. I had toiled six days a week on the Midlands racetracks, and, quite quickly, we were able to pay down the mortgage to a more manageable level where we could spend more time together at home.
I had always wanted children, and I soon made mental plans to turn the smallest bedroom into a nursery. Perhaps it was the pain of having endured a largely abandoned and unhappy childhood that had made me so keen to nurture the next generation. Not that my grandparents hadn’t been loving and caring. They had. But they had also been somewhat distant and secretive. Now I knew why.
“How could God have taken Mummy and Daddy to heaven?” I had constantly asked my grandmother, who, of course, had no answer to give me. Now I discovered that it had been my father, not God, who had been responsible for my mother’s death, and he, far from going to heaven, had gone to Australia. The car crash story had been as convenient as it was untrue.
In spite of her longing for a child, Sophie’s illness had soon put our family plans on hold.
All had seemed fine until, one night, I woke to find her side of our bed empty. It was half past three in the morning, and I could hear her somewhere downstairs, singing loudly, so I went to investigate.
She was in the kitchen and had clearly been there for quite a while. Every shelf and cupboard had been emptied, their contents stacked both on the kitchen table and on the floor, and she had been cleaning.
She had seen me come into the room but had carried on singing even louder than before. She simply couldn’t stop. And so it had gone on all night and into the following day. I couldn’t reason with her. Eventually, in desperation and fear, I had called the doctor.
This manic state had lasted for nearly a week, with her spending much of the time in bed asleep and heavily sedated. When awake, she had hardly stopped talking or singing, and she was greatly irritated when interrupted.
And then, almost as quickly, she had dived into a deep depression, refusing to eat and blaming herself for all the ills of the world. It was irrational and obsessive behavior, but she believed it absolutely. Sedatives were exchanged for antidepressants, and for a while we didn’t seem to know whether she was going up or down.
Mental illness can be very frightening, and I was utterly terrified. Physical disease usually manifests itself with visible symptoms-a rash, a fever or a swelling. And there is nearly always some pain or discomfort to which the patient can point and describe.
However, a sickness of the mind, and its function, has no such easy-to-understand physical indicators. Sufferers appear just as they did before the disorder hit, and often, as in Sophie’s case, have no comprehension that they are ill. To them, their behavior appears quite normal and logical. It is everyone else who’s mad for even suggesting they need psychiatric help in the first place.
The plans for a family that I had initially placed on hold had, by now, been well and truly switched off. The little bedroom, which had long ago become my office and storeroom, would, it seemed, never contain a cot and teddy bears, at least not while Sophie and I owned the house.
It was not just that Sophie was too often ill to look after a child, it was also the risk that a pregnancy would cause an upset to her hormones that could tip her over entirely into a void from which she would never recover. Postnatal depression can severely debilitate even the sanest of mothers, so what might it do to Sophie? And even though a professor of psychiatry had told us it wasn’t likely, there was some evidence to suggest that manic depression could be a hereditary condition. I was wary of creating a manic-depressive child. For ten years I had witnessed the destruction from within of a bubbly, lively and fun-loving young woman. I didn’t relish the thought of the same thing happening to my children.
I supposed I still loved Sophie, although after five months of medically enforced separation I was sometimes unsure. It was true that, during those months, there had occasionally been some good moments, but they had been rare, and mostly we existed in limbo, our lives on pause, waiting for someone to push the PLAY button if things improved.
We had definitely been dealt a bum hand in life. Sophie’s parents, typically and loudly, had blamed me for their daughter’s illness, while I silently blamed them back for rejecting her over her choice of husband. The doctors wouldn’t say for sure if that had been a factor in her illness, but it certainly hadn’t helped.
Alice, Sophie’s younger sister, constantly said I was a saint to stick by her all these years. But what else could I
