Heartbreaker (59 page)

But we start praying for all my family, even the snotty or weird members, and at that point I tell Lewis I’d like to pray for my father, I’d like to say how grateful I am to him for teaching me to sail and how precious the memory is of that day we sailed past the Needles. And after these prayers I think I might be able to talk at last about what Hugo’s death did to my parents, but although I tell Lewis I want to try, the words still refuse to come.

So Lewis diverts me again by playing Scheherazade, and at last he goes further back than his teenage days at the monastery. He tells me his childhood was spent with an uncle and aunt at their Sussex mansion because his widowed mother was too busy having affairs to care for him. He says he loved her anyway but hated the uncle and aunt, so he got himself expelled from school in the hope that he could go and live in Paris with his mother and her current lover.

“Naturally they were horrified,” says Lewis dryly, “and in fact after that no one wanted to give me a home, but at least Great-Uncle Cuthbert believed that my salvation was his moral duty. However, he was a tough old man and overt affection wasn’t his strong suit. Life was hardly a bed of roses,” Lewis adds, finally revealing the dark side of the monastic soap opera, and of course I can identify with the pain of not being wanted.

I know I can tell him everything now.

He’ll understand.

I start by saying how after Hugo died my father withdrew from me to immerse himself in his work and my mother sank fathoms deep in depression and neither had anything to say either to me or to each other.

“But there was nothing particularly new about any of that,” I say casually, as if the memories are really not too bad once you get used to them. “Dad was always immersing himself in his work and Mum had had depressions before and neither of them had had much to say to each other for years. It was just that Hugo’s death magnified all this crap to an unbearable degree.”

“You’re saying they couldn’t cope with the loss.”

“Right . . . They’d had so much invested in him.”

“The Harley Street dream?”

“Yes, you see, Mum would have liked Dad to have been a Harley Street specialist because that would have put her on a level with Aunt Marigold in St. George’s Hill. So Hugo being a Harley Street specialist would have been the next best thing.”

“And your father wanted this for Hugo too.”

“To be fair to Dad, I have to say he wouldn’t have minded if Hugo had just wound up a GP, but he definitely wanted him to be a doctor. Dad himself had followed in his father’s footsteps—in fact in Dad’s world, the world he grew up in, elder sons followed in their father’s footsteps, no question, and if the elder son died the next son would step up to fill his shoes. That was why it was so awful when—”

“—you couldn’t fill them. I understand . . . So Hugo was sustaining your father’s world-view and compensating your mother for the fact that your father hadn’t lived up to her expectations.”

“Hugo compensated Mum in other ways as well. He was everything Dad wasn’t—outgoing, gregarious, open, straightforward . . . Dad was always working or feeling tired or going sailing or shutting himself up in his study.”

“Not the easiest of husbands, perhaps—and this wasn’t the happiest of marriages, was it, even though everyone thought it was such a success.”

“True, but Hugo made everything okay,” I say. “He kept the marriage stitched together.”

“But there must have been other crucial stitches, surely, or your parents would have separated after he died. Was it you, do you think, who then kept the marriage from disintegrating?”

“Oh no,” I say at once. “No, it wasn’t me. Couldn’t have been.”

“Why not?”

I give a little shrug, fidget with my watchstrap.

“You mentioned your mother was prone to depression,” says Lewis, moving on—or is he only moving sideways? “Was this clinical depression treated by a doctor?”

“Suppose so. She got pills. Dad said she was fine.”

“And when was this?”

“After I joined Hugo at boarding school and she was left on her own at home. But Granny the Gossip—Mum’s mum—told us Mum wasn’t nearly as bad as she was the previous time.”

“What happened the previous time?”

“Post-partum blues. Suicide attempt. Granny shouldn’t have let that slip out, naughty old girl.”

“The post-partum blues were after you were born?”

My throat starts to tighten. “Yep.”

Lewis waits. I wait. Eventually Gavin Blake Debonair Survivor cruises in and says languidly: “Mum didn’t want another baby.”

“Is that what your grandmother said?”

“No, no, no!” I sound shocked. “Granny would never have said anything like that.”

“Then who did?”

I think of all the millions of women in the world and wish I could pick one at random and lie about her. But of course I can’t. No more lies. I have to tell the truth, and the truth here is that the woman was none other than—

“Mum,” I say casually to Lewis, and smother a fake yawn as I glance away.

“Ah,” says Lewis, keeping the world turning.

“Yeah.” I try to stop fidgeting with my watchstrap before I break it. “Mum told me after I was chucked out of medical school,” I say nonchalantly. “It was when I could no longer cope with trying to be Hugo. She lost her temper and shouted: ‘You’re hopeless, you’ll never get anywhere, never achieve anything, I wish I’d never had you, I wish I’d had that abortion I wanted,’ and then she burst into tears and started screaming she wanted to kill herself, and Dad came out of his study to see what all the fuss was about and he said: ‘For God’s sake, what is it now? Shut up, the bloody pair of you!’ he said, and after my mother ran off sobbing I tried to explain to him she was disappointed I hadn’t made the grade as Hugo would have done but he just said: ‘Well, how do you think
I
feel? It’s a tragedy you haven’t the brains to be a doctor,’ and that was when I knew both of them were wishing I was dead and Hugo was alive. I left home that same day.”

“I’m not surprised.”

Gavin Blake Debonair Survivor begins to fragment. “I suppose you’ll want to excuse Mum by saying she was just suffering from another bout of her clinical depression,” I say defiantly, unable to fake nonchalance a second longer, “but I say fuck her clinical depressions, fuck them, she treated me as if I barely existed after Hugo died—and even before that it was all Hugo, Hugo, Hugo, she didn’t give a shit for me ever, she just pretended she did. Elizabeth was the one who gave a shit,” I say violently as the emotion swamps me, but then I have to squeeze my eyes tight shut to ward off the pain. Elizabeth the mummy-substitute and
femme fatale
— my grand illusion. Elizabeth hadn’t given a shit either. Elizabeth had wanted me dead.

Just like my mother.

“Oh God,” I say, “oh God—”

“Okay, we’ll stop there.”

“No!”
I shout, making him jump. I tell myself I’m not going to be weak and wet and wimpish, I’m not, I’m so fucking tired of being such a fucking mess. Peeling my fingers from my face I say strongly: “My mother was a stupid bitch. She spoilt Hugo rotten, she slobbered over him endlessly, but at the end when he was dying she was no bloody use at all. He wanted to talk about death but she refused to listen, she always insisted he’d get well, she failed him totally—”

“And your father?”

“In denial! Worse than Mum! Do you hear that, Lewis? This man was a doctor, for God’s sake, a
doctor,
and he couldn’t cope with someone who was dying! He failed Hugo as well. That’s why I had to step in. I was fifteen years old and yet I had to bear the whole back-breaking burden.
I
was the one who had to talk to Hugo about death,
I
was the one who had to make that terrible promise to ensure he died in peace,
I
was the one who let him into my head and wrecked my life—
I su fered far more than
they did!
And I tried so hard to make it up to them for being alive when he was dead, so
hard
I tried—”

“It was hell, wasn’t it? No wonder you’re angry—”

“
Angry?
Fucking hell, that word doesn’t even begin to describe how I feel!” I yell, and then suddenly I’m sobbing. Fucking hell again. But I’m not stopping now. Can’t. My heart’s banging, my eyes are streaming, my breath’s coming in shudders, but somehow I’m still talking, still spewing out these godawful shitty truths—only this time they’re worse than shitty, they’re so dreadful they’re sort of cosmic, like Medea killing her children or Oedipus killing his father, they’re the kind of truths that make you want to die when you’re speaking them, but at the same time you know you’re speaking them to survive.

“I hated them all,” I say in between gasps as the tears burn my face. “I hated Mum and Dad for leaving me to cope alone and making me feel so guilty that I was alive. I hated Hugo for dying and then for taking over my life. And worst of all I hated myself for not being able to become Hugo, for letting down not just my brother but the parents I loved—and I did love them, I loved them all the time I was hating them, I loved Mum and Dad, I loved Hugo, and the more Mum and Dad grieved for him and ignored me the more I wanted their love and despised myself for not being good enough to get it. It made me feel so worthless, such a failure, so absolutely undeserving of any love at all—” I break off, too awash to go on.

Lewis wants to touch me but he knows he can’t. He wants to put his arm around my shoulders and comfort me, but he knows he has to keep his distance. I can feel all this compassion but I’m blocked off from it behind the glass walls that my sickness has built to separate me from normality. But he takes off his pectoral cross and he slides it to the middle of the table.

When he withdraws his hand I pick up the cross and wrap my fingers around the Bloke-image. Can’t see it. Too many tears. But I stop sobbing and shuddering. I feel as if I’ve been trampled into the mud by a herd of elephants, but at least I’m quiet and still.

Lewis says: “You were very courageous, offering Hugo hope no matter what the cost to yourself, and as I made clear earlier, it certainly wasn’t your fault that your way of helping him could never have worked out. Nor was it your fault, let me now add, that your parents were so overwhelmed by the tragedy that they couldn’t love you as you deserved.”

I want to break down all over again but I don’t. I keep myself together somehow, and after a long pause I manage to whisper: “But if it’s not my fault . . . are Mum and Dad to blame for everything that went wrong?”

Lewis’s voice stays firm. “Obviously they made some very big mistakes, but before we unload our blame we need to ask ourselves if we know the whole story. For instance, were there any mitigating factors? I always wish,” he adds, “that I’d had the chance to ask my mother if there were any mitigating circumstances which explained why
she
rejected me when I was young.”

I digest this. More seconds slip by but finally I say: “Can I just shovel all the blame on God for allowing this to happen?”

“You’ve certainly got cause to complain to him, but make sure you listen afterwards for his answer. Every mess has to be redeemed and put right—that’s just as much a part of the creative process as the waste and mess. So in his answer you’ll see the path to redemption, and then you can work out how you can best give him a helping hand.”

I bin the idea of skiving off or collapsing in a useless heap. Obviously my first task in giving God a helping hand has to be to keep on keeping on, clearing the roadblocks from my mind no matter how painful that process is.

So where have I got to? The area around Hugo’s now been fully excavated. He’s ready. I’m ready. No more delays.

Taking a deep breath I say: “I think it’s time for Hugo to go home.” The anniversary of Hugo’s death falls this month, and I tell Lewis on his next visit that I want to lay flowers on the grave and say goodbye.

Lewis asks how I feel about leaving the house, but I’m confident I can do it. “I’ve got a mission,” I tell him. “I really want to get to that grave.” But I don’t explain just why the visit to the grave’s so vital.

I’m very aware of Hugo at the moment. He’s now calm, silent, waiting, no longer hanging around my neck like a lead weight but lying peacefully on my chest like a heavy gold medallion—something valuable but not something you want to lug around twenty-four hours a day. How light I’ll feel when he’s gone! But he may not want to let go. We’ve been sharing a body for so long that we’re like Siamese twins.

I feel clearer now about the tragedy. I’m seeing us all as victims who got mown down in one of God’s messier creative splurges and mangled by the splurge’s dark vile bits, the bits which haven’t yet come right. But I know now that God’s not just out there lolling idly in front of his canvas. He’s in a muck sweat, painting away to save the picture, and although my family was blasted apart by the thwack of the creative process, the creator himself can’t rest until he’s brought us back into the right pattern.

Mum, Dad, Hugo and I are all waiting to be reintegrated in the design—we’re all waiting to come home to our allotted places—and as I realise this, I find the other members of my family are crowding into my head as if hoping for a big reunion. Grandfather, Grandad and Other Granny all died before I left home, but death doesn’t matter in this context, the important thing is that they’re alive in my head—in psychic reality, as Lewis puts it—and right now they’re busy milling around with all my memories of the living. God, whatever happened to arch-bitch Aunt Pansy in Los Angeles and rich-bitch Aunt Marigold in St. George’s Hill? What happened to snotty cousins Arabella, Charlotte and Jeremy in England and weird cousins Rick, Mary-Elizabeth and Ham (short for Hamilton) in America? All those lost people . . . But they helped create the pattern of my childhood, the pattern which now has to be retrieved so that my old life can be integrated at last with the new.

Yes, it’s going to be okay this time, Hugo, I promise . . . It’s as if we’re in one of those old-world dances where you have to go through a whole chain of set moves before you finally come home down the finishing strait. Our dance was ripped up in our youth because an earthquake struck the ballroom, but I’ve cleared away the fallen debris, the band’s come back and now we can return to the floor to pick up the dance where we left off—we’re going back to the point where we danced the wrong steps because we were too young to know the right ones. It wasn’t our fault we danced the wrong steps, Hugo, and in this scenario it wasn’t your fault either, Mum and Dad. And although the four of us wound up wasted we don’t have to stay that way, we’re being given a second chance, we’re being led back to the ballroom floor. What makes me so certain? Well, I’ll tell you. It’s because we’re being led back by The Bloke himself—yes, we are, Hugo, yes, we are! He wants us back and he’ll go to any lengths to get us there because he’s the
Healer,
he’s the
Leader,
he’s
LORD OF THE DANCE,
and this time we’re
all
coming home . . .