The Family Retreat, page 8
When the baby is finished, she shifts him up in her arms, his head resting on her shoulder. She picks at her now cold plate of food. The man has pushed his plate away, wiped a sleeve across his face and is tapping at his phone and chuckling. The woman jabs at the food with her fork. The baby wriggles in her arm.
He chuckles again. I imagine he’s watching YouTube videos – funny clips of dogs falling off planks or hilarious goalkeeper errors. Either way, it keeps him amused. It’s only when the other baby in the buggy starts to fuss that he glances up. ‘Just a sec,’ he says, tapping into his phone. More laughter. Then eventually, he reaches across to take the baby she has fed, as she leans down to pick up the other.
He is slow to notice, even slower to help. She doesn’t ask.
And I feel a rush of irritation for them both. But mostly, I realise, for her.
On our way back, we stop at the supermarket and the kids choose comics and Kinder Eggs from the toy machine. As we get in the car, there’s a plane overhead.
‘Is that Daddy?’ Ruby asks.
‘Yep, there he goes,’ I say. ‘Whooosh,’ and I fly my hand through the air.
*
Back at the cottage, Philip, Penny’s father, is at the picnic table reading the paper. He has earphones in and doesn’t hear us come back. He looks startled when the kids clamber up onto the table. And it’s clear he feels trapped by our arrival, that had he seen us coming, he’d have discreetly slipped back inside through the door that opens onto his small patch of lawn. I’ve seen him do it several times already, a flash of movement when we’ve come out into the garden, scurrying off before he gets embroiled in conversation. It’s clear he’s avoiding us. Or more likely avoiding the noise and exuberance of the children.
‘Sorry,’ I say to him, then try to usher the kids away. ‘Philip’s reading. Let him have some peace and quiet.’
Ruby makes a pouty face. ‘But we have biscuits,’ she says, pushing the plastic plate towards him. She has arranged the fingers of shortbread in a circle, like petals on a flower.
‘How lovely,’ he says, and he stays seated, clearly not wanting to offend her, and after further encouragement from Ruby, he helps himself to one.
He has a cup on the table and I point to the pot I’ve brought out on a tray, and this too he accepts. We’ve exchanged greetings over the fence, but this is the first time I’ve seen him properly. He has a solid handsome face. White hair cropped short, with a neat salt and pepper beard. He’s wearing a soft wool navy jumper and jeans. He looks perhaps in his late sixties, but has a kind of distinguished youthful air about him.
We chat about the weather. The coastal walks. Rob’s departure. Chit-chat as I pour the tea. He tells me he’s staying with Penny for a month or so. ‘She’s recently got divorced. Said she wanted the company. But really,’ he smiles, ‘I think she wanted to keep an eye on me.’
When I ask about the book, he looks momentarily surprised, and blinks back at me, pushing his glasses up onto the bridge of his nose.
He goes on to explain how he took six months’ study leave, that it was his first proper break in forty years. ‘I wrote about thirty thousand words,’ he says, then he sips his tea. ‘But now I’m not sure if I want to write it after all.’
The children have eaten the petals of biscuits one by one and are now on the grass arguing over the toys they got from the machine.
He smiles at me. ‘If I was a priest, I might say I was having a crisis of faith.’
His openness is disarming. Perhaps it’s because I’ve been spending so much time with Helen. I’m taken aback, and for a moment, I’m not sure what to say.
‘I’m a psychiatrist,’ he says, helping me out, ‘and a psychotherapist. I work in addiction. Mainly drugs and alcohol.’
‘NHS?’
He nods. Then after a pause, ‘Joyce tells me you’re a GP.’ ‘That’s right,’ I say, ‘I’m on a sabbatical,’ and the word feels lumpen in my mouth.
He looks away across the fields. ‘It’s a very difficult time to work in the NHS,’ he says slowly. ‘The National Health Service – the health bit sometimes feels the least of it. It’s all the other stuff that drags people down.’
He turns back to me. ‘Did you work in London?’ he asks, and when I tell him Tower Hamlets, he smiles, ‘Well, I’m sure you know what I mean.’
At first, I think he’s alluding to the systems and red tape and the bureaucracy of work in the public sector, but he shakes his head. ‘Oh no,’ he says, ‘I steered clear of all that. Never went into management. Just ran a specialist clinical team in South London.’
He goes on to say he had this desire to consolidate his work, to write about the case studies, the forty years of clinical practice. ‘But the more I wrote, the more I concluded the circumstances of some people’s lives are hard,’ he says, ‘right from the beginning. I felt overwhelmed . . .’ his voice drifts off.
Fleetingly, I think of Mrs Chandra. The Robsons. Their damp squalid living conditions. The neglected estate.
I look back at his open face, his warm kind eyes, and I see he looks genuinely anguished. He tells me it wasn’t a new revelation, one he’s felt many times over the years, ‘but there was something about the process of sifting through my work, selecting the cases I wanted to write about. I was struck by the power of that choice. It left me feeling very uncomfortable,’ he says. ‘There I was, in my nice middle-class life, writing a book about my patients’ very difficult lives –’ he pauses, ‘– I don’t know. I felt a sense of guilt in the power and privilege I had. Or in the omnipotent belief that we can turn the tide, like it’s an easy thing to do.’
I think of Keith. His angry words in my room. You hold all the power. We’re just the little people.
‘I’m sorry,’ he smiles, ‘my daughter thinks all the writing is making me far too introspective – perhaps she’s right.’
He is silent for a moment, as if gathering his thoughts.
‘But surely therapy helps?’ I say. ‘To understand what’s happened? To make change? And anyway, addiction doesn’t discriminate.’
‘True,’ he nods, ‘but the hardest bit is always sustaining the change. That’s so much trickier when you’re poor. When you have no money. No resources.’
He talks about the other important things in someone’s recovery. ‘A nice place to live. Money to buy decent clothes,’ he shrugs, ‘a sense of self-worth, status and independence. I mean, some of the halfway houses that I’ve visited across the country – simply indescribable. Not a great advert for the “life without drugs” is better message,’ he laughs.
He reaches into his pocket and pulls out a white square of a handkerchief and flaps it open like a flag. He carefully takes off his glasses with the other hand.
‘Sometimes it’s just the roll of a dice, isn’t it?’ he says, as he cleans his glasses. ‘Right from the beginning.’
‘Yes,’ I agree, ‘it is.’
‘I mean, human decency,’ he smiles, ‘it’s not rocket science, is it?’
He places the clean glasses back on his nose.
I take in his earnest face. How he talks with such compassion about his work and his patients. I want to say something about the kindness I can feel, about all the people he must have helped. I want to say something about hope. But I, too, feel defeated.
He tells me he was left with some questions he struggled to answer. ‘I felt in touch with the pointlessness of what I do.’ He holds his hands out. ‘My loss of faith laid bare,’ and then he clears his throat. ‘Speaking of which,’ he says, slightly reeling back at his self-revelation, ‘my apologies. I hadn’t intended to be so confessional.’
I shake my head. ‘It’s interesting.’
He smiles. ‘It makes a welcome change from having to talk enthusiastically with my daughter about a book I’m not even sure I want to finish.’
There’s a moment of silence.
‘Maybe you need to write a different sort of book,’ I venture, ‘about what you’ve been talking about. The guilt. The hopelessness. I’m sure it will resonate with other clinicians.’
He considers this briefly, looking back at me.
‘Anyway,’ he says, leaning forwards to pat his hand on the table in front of me, ‘your turn. Tell me about your GP sabbatical.’
It’s a relief, in that moment, to see Penny’s car turn into the gravel track. He looks over in her direction and lifts his hand to wave. Then, turning back to me, he says, ‘To be continued, another time.’ Then he eases himself up from the picnic table and dips his head towards me. ‘Thank you,’ he says with real sincerity, ‘for listening. And for the tea,’ and then he makes a point of walking over to Ruby and thanking her for the shortbread, ‘and its magnificent presentation.’
She beams back at him.
And then he is gone, slipping back into the cottage.
*
When I tell Joyce the change of plan for that evening, she’s delighted to have the kids; she says she’ll take them to see the new piglets. ‘We’ll have a lovely time,’ she says. ‘Kirsty’s room’s at the top of the stairs, second on the right.’
I am a little early. I set up my computer, and I look around the teenage room. A map of the world. Her route drawn out in a thick red line on the poster. I think about Thailand where I once went travelling. The crystal-clear water. The white sand. I scan her shelves; books, jewellery, posters of bands and celebrities I don’t recognise.
When we link up, it’s weird at first, just to see Veronica’s head and shoulders, not to be sitting on the soft oatmeal sofa. But I quickly adjust and I’m surprised to find myself talking about my father. I talk about his strange mini-break. His speedy return home. The mystery of it all. ‘So odd,’ I say, ‘so unlike him.’ I tell her he’s reserved. Quiet. Repressed. ‘But lately he’s been different. More outgoing.’
I tell her all about his depression. His heavy weighty moods when I was a child. I didn’t plan on talking about any of this. In fact, as I was climbing the stairs to Kirsty’s room, my mind was blank. I had no idea – or even desire – to talk that day. But silence would have been intolerable. Especially on a Zoom call.
‘We’d have to be really quiet,’ I tell her, ‘me and Gemma. Mum told us he was working. She’d tell us to keep the noise down, “play quietly,” she’d say, a finger on her lips.
‘But I knew it wasn’t work. I didn’t know what it was, but I knew it was the opposite of activity. I’d peer at him through the crack of his study door. He’d be sitting neatly in his chair, hands folded in his lap, staring into space.
‘I’d come back hours later, and check up on him. Creeping along the corridor. And his shape. His hands. The direction of his gaze. All unchanged.’
‘What did you make of it at the time?’ Veronica wants to know.
I shake my head. ‘I don’t know. I just felt the weight of it. Something I didn’t understand.’
She thinks about this for a moment. ‘I can feel the heaviness of it as you talk,’ she says, ‘it feels suffocating. Silencing.’ She wants to know if we talked about it. ‘Your mother and you girls?’
‘Not that I can remember. I just had a sense of us accommodating him. This giant elephant of a mood. It was something to co-exist with. We tiptoed around him. We were quiet, inconspicuous. We got smaller. It was as if the black mood had fallen from the sky. There was no sense that he had any control over it.’ I pause for a moment. ‘There was a kind of passivity about it. Like it was a giant hand pressing down on him.’
She asks when I first noticed it. ‘Was it before your sister got ill?’
I’d mentioned a little about Gemma in passing, and several times Veronica has returned to it. And I’m aware that, every time, I feel a resistance. A pull away.
I think about this for a moment. Casting my mind back over those blurry two years. ‘Afterwards, I think,’ and then I nod, remembering that when Gemma went into hospital, Dad rarely came. ‘It was mainly me and Mum,’ I say, ‘he must have been at home. Sitting in his chair.’
She nods.
‘But you know,’ I say, ‘it’s so strange that his mood, something so passive and inactive, could wield such power.’
It’s towards the end of the session that she talks about the different theories of depression. ‘There are many,’ she says, doing that twirl of her hand. ‘But there is one I have found to be helpful. And one that may explain the weight, the force. One theory understands depression as anger turned inwards.’
There’s a pause. I think about this.
‘It may explain why it emanates such power. Such fear,’ she says, ‘and can feel so immobilising. And your mother? What did she do? How was she with him?’
‘She fussed about. Mollified, accommodated. Appeased. Perhaps it’s how I learnt to do the same,’ and I know, as soon as I say this, she will ask me to elaborate and so I find myself filling the space in order to block the question. ‘But you know, I believe my mother was angry too. I think she felt a kind of concealed vitriol for his weakness. And when he got better, it came out. Like well-aimed poisoned darts.’
And at the end of the session, she comes back to my sister.
‘A child that doesn’t eat. A child that refuses the most basic of human functioning, the withholding of nourishment needed to survive. This must evoke a deep sadness. But also,’ she considers, ‘a kind of rage. And I find my thoughts returning to this, and how little we have talked about it here.’
*
Joyce is picking me some beans from her vegetable patch when we hear a shriek. Sam comes hurtling out of the kitchen.
‘There’s a gun,’ he sobs, ‘in the kitchen,’ and he runs at me, flinging himself into my arms.
Startled, I look up at Joyce.
She crouches down next to him. ‘The one up on the wall?’
He nods, his eyes wide and fearful. He’s trying very hard not to cry.
‘Is it for the bad people? Are there bad people here?’ he gulps. ‘Dad said there can be bad people everywhere. But not here?’ He looks stricken. ‘By the seaside—’
His body shudders. I realise he’s referring to the ‘stranger danger’ chat we’d all had a few months back, which was prompted by Sam’s fervent belief that ‘bad people’ only lived in big cities.
Joyce sits down on the grass and pats the space next to her. Still clinging onto my hand, he drops down by her side.
‘So,’ she says, ‘because you’re a big man, I’m going to tell you the truth. It would be a lie for me to tell you that you can’t find bad people at the seaside. Your dad is right, there are bad people everywhere. But, and this is a very big but – there are very few bad people. A tiny amount,’ and she puts her hands up, her thumb and forefinger a minuscule space apart. ‘There are many more good people than bad people – it’s like the good ones squash out all the bad ones with their loveliness and kindness.’
He seems to like this. I feel the grip of his hand relax in mine.
‘The next thing to tell you is that gun on the wall is not for people.’
He blinks back at her.
‘It’s to scare off pests who might kill or harm our animals. All farmers have to have a gun. That’s a rifle, and Pete sometimes uses it when the foxes come to worry the lambs. He fires it in the air to scare them away—’
‘What would a fox do to the lambs?’
‘Well – it might really hurt them – and the lambs are very small. They need to be protected, until they get bigger.’
He thinks about this for a minute. ‘So, the gun can save the lambs?’
‘Exactly.’
‘By the noise?’
‘Exactly. And you see where it was – high up, in that special case?’
He nods.
‘It’s up there, out of reach, because it’s just for Pete to use. No one else. OK?’
‘OK.’
EIGHT
Seeing Keith’s name at the top of my list on that Thursday morning landed like a heavy stone. I was exhausted. Ruby had woken with a nightmare and when she’d eventually fallen asleep in my bed, I’d lain awake for the duration, willing myself to go back to sleep, and ruminating about how dreadful I’d feel if I didn’t. Rob was away again, and having to do all the nursery pick-ups and drop-offs was eating into my non-patient time. Admin was piling up, including the stack of out-patient letters I had yet to review before they were uploaded onto patient files. So, that day, before I pressed the buzzer to reception, I closed my eyes, bracing myself for the sensory overload of what was to come; the jaunty energy, the jokey banter and the barrage of irrelevant detail.
But when Keith knocked on the door, he was slow to come in, and when he did, his movements were muted, in sharp contrast to his usual Tigger-like entry. He was muttering about the appointment system. ‘What do you have to do these days,’ he asked, ‘sell your soul to the devil?’
I said I was sorry if he had to wait. ‘It’s been exceptionally busy.’
He rolled his eyes. ‘We’re all busy,’ he said, as he sat down in the chair by my desk.
He was wearing a grey hoodie, shorts and a black baseball cap. He explained he’d come straight from the gym. ‘Go every morning before work. Nina thinks I’m nuts. But you’ve got to look after yourself, don’t you? Keep everything in good working order, eh?’ and he clapped his hands together. His upbeat stance seemed strained. A little tried for.
‘What can I do for you today?’
He said he’d had a ‘funny turn’ and told me about the dizziness and the breathing difficulty, ‘like I couldn’t get enough air into my lungs.’
He told me he was at Power Gym in Bethnal Green, how he was training for a marathon.
‘Can you describe what happened?’ I said with a tight smile.
‘Suddenly woozy and lightheaded,’ he said. ‘But then an odd feeling. Like an out-of-body experience, as if I was floating somewhere up above, watching myself,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘And my heart was going like the clappers. And I was really hot. Pouring with sweat, hadn’t even started my workout,’ he laughed, and went on to give me details about his cross-training programme. ‘It was day two, so it was squats and bench presses. A hundred of each—’
