Just as I reached the end of Rodborough Avenue, where Jeanne lives, I saw none other than Hannah Harrington reversing out of Jeanne’s parking spot. She was concentrating on not hitting a neighbour’s car, so she didn’t notice me, but I got a good look at her. She looked not dissimilar to the last time I saw her: tear-stained, tired, lost.
Of course, I wondered immediately why Hannah was seeing Jeanne, and before I knew it the old fear engine had fired up again. What if it was one of Sarah’s parents who died? Sarah would be distraught. She told me in those letters how guilty she’d felt, all these years, insisting on living thousands of miles away. I decided it was my duty to help her.
‘I want to call Sarah Harrington,’ I announced to Jeanne on arrival. ‘Can I do that here, with you? ’
‘Come and sit down,’ she said calmly. Oh brilliant , I imagined her thinking. Here we go.
Within a few minutes I had calmed down and accepted that I had no business calling Sarah Harrington, but it did inevitably lead to a conversation about her. Jeanne asked again if I felt that blocking all thoughts of Sarah was helping me let her go.
‘Yes,’ I said stubbornly. Then: ‘Maybe.’ Then: ‘No.’
We talked about the process of letting go. I told her I was fed up with being so bad at it, but that I didn’t know what else to do. ‘I just want to be happy,’ I muttered. ‘I want to be free.’
Jeanne laughed when I complained that there was not a manual for stopping loving someone. I admitted that that was actually Alan’s joke, and then she threw me a neutral look and said, ‘While we’re talking about setting ourselves free, Eddie, I wonder how you feel about that in relation to your mother? How do you feel when you imagine freedom from your duties to her?’
I was so shocked I had to ask her to repeat herself.
‘How does the idea of lessening some of that burden feel?’ Her tone was friendly. ‘That’s how you described it last week. Let me see . . .’ She peered at her notes. ‘A “nightmarish burden”, you said.’
My face blew warm. I pulled at a loose thread on her sofa, unable to look her in the eye. How dare she bring that up?
‘Eddie, I want to remind you that there is no shame – none at all – in finding it hard. Family carers might feel great love and loyalty towards their relative, but they also experience resentment, despair, loneliness and a whole range of other emotions about which they would not want the patient to know. Sometimes they reach a point where they need to take a break. Or even completely rethink the care arrangement. ’
I stared at the floor. Back right off! I wanted to shout. This is my mother you’re talking about! Only nothing came out of my mouth.
‘What are you thinking?’ Jeanne asked.
I don’t get angry very often – I’ve had to learn not to, for Mum’s sake – but suddenly I was furious. Far too angry to appreciate what she was trying to do for me. To be grateful that she had waited weeks before bringing it up. I wanted to pick up the vase of peachy snapdragons on her mantelpiece and throw it at the wall.
‘You have no idea,’ I said, to a counsellor of thirty-seven years’ experience.
If Jeanne was shocked, she didn’t let it show.
‘How dare you?’ I went on, voice rising. ‘How dare you suggest I just run off and abandon her? My mother tried to kill herself four times! Her kitchen looks like a fucking hospital dispensary! She’s the most vulnerable person I know, Jeanne, and she’s my mother . Do you have a mother? Do you care about her?’
It took nearly half an hour for me to apologize and calm down. Jeanne asked kind and respectful questions, and I responded with curt monosyllables, but she kept going. Nudging me, with those clever bloody questions, closer and closer towards an acknowledgement that I was dangerously near to breaking point with Mum. With life. Nudging me towards a grudging acceptance that it might be my own grief that had stopped me admitting this.
Jeanne seemed convinced that Derek could help find a solution. ‘It’s his job,’ she kept saying. ‘He’s a community psychiatric nurse, Eddie: he’s there for both of you.’
And I kept replying that there was no way I could hand my mother over to Derek. However wonderful he was. ‘I’m the only person she wants to call when she needs help,’ I said. ‘There’s nobody else she’d trust.’
‘You don’t know that for certain.’
‘But I do! If I told her she couldn’t call me – even if I said she couldn’t call me as often – she’d either take no notice and carry on as before, or she’d become dangerously ill. You know her history. You know I’m not just being pessimistic.’
By the time our hour was up, we had made no real progress, but I had promised I’d continue next week without any tantrums.
Jeanne laughed. She said I was doing really well.
I reach the top of the hill, finally, arriving underneath the beech tree I’ve come to check. (It’s metres from the mystery welly.) Back in June, when I was tramping the countryside, thinking angry and confused thoughts about Sarah, I noticed it was suffering dieback – only it’s looking much worse now. I’m guessing some sort of beetle, as there’s no obvious pathogen in the bark, but it’s definitely a goner. I rest a hand on the trunk, saddened to imagine this magnificent beast felled by a snarling chainsaw.
‘Sorry,’ I tell it, because it feels wrong to say nothing. ‘And thank you. For the oxygen. And everything.’
I check the surrounding trees (the welly is still there) and then walk back down the hill, hands in pockets. My brain keeps trying to slide me back in the direction of Sarah, and her sister’s visit to a grief counsellor, but I resist. I make myself think about the tree instead. The tree is a problem I know how to solve. I’ll call Gloucestershire Wildlife Trust tomorrow, see if they’d like some help bringing it down.
By the time I get back to my barn, I’m feeling quite normal again.
Then I step inside and find my mother standing by my drawer of purple letters. My secret drawer of purple letters, which nobody on earth other than Jeanne knows about. And I realize that Mum is reading – she is reading quite calmly – one of my letters to Alex. She holds it in one hand, an ugly expression on her face.
I have to take a moment to be certain this is really happening. To be certain that my mother – my dear mother – is committing a breach of privacy on this level. But at that moment Mum turns the letter over, so she can read the back of the page, and I know there’s no doubt.
Disbelief melds slowly into fury.
‘Mum?’ I say. My hand is clamped to the doorframe like a bench vice.
In one movement she slides the letter behind her and turns to me.
I reread in my head the text message I sent her before going out: I’m going for a walk. Just to warn you, I’ll be leaving my phone, for a bit of peace. But I’ll be back in a couple of hours.
I always deliberately overestimate the time it’ll take me to do something. She panics otherwise.
‘Hi, darling!’ It’s that voice again, the one she does when she’s pushed me too far. Only today it’s even higher. ‘You were very quick.’
‘What are you doing?’
‘I . . .’
There is a thick, panicked silence as she weighs up her options. Everything is still. Even the trees outside seem to have paused, as if waiting for confirmation of treachery. But she can’t do it. She can’t tell me the truth. ‘I could hear something,’ she says, and her voice is so full of inflection she could be on children’s television. ‘It sounded like a mouse. Have you had trouble with mice recently, Eddie? It was near here. I’ve just been poking around . . . I’ve opened a few drawers. I hope you don’t mind . . .’
She continues in this vein until I shout— No, I actually bellow, ‘HOW LONG HAVE YOU BEEN READING MY LETTERS?’
There is a bottom-of-the-sea silence.
‘I did find some letters, just a second before you arrived,’ she says eventually. ‘I haven’t read them, though. I took a look at one and thought, Oh, this has nothing to do with me , so I was just putting it back when—’