*

  I started Tuesday evening classes in Italian. I spoke a little already, so my lack of progress would not be noticeable. I assumed that Jane Kitchener did not know that Harry rented a one-room flat at the top of the Banbury Road, within earshot of the ring road. When I asked him how long he’d had it, he laughed. I didn’t ask again. On his urging, tough though it was, I attended the first two classes, and after those, managed one every four or five weeks. The community centre in Summertown was a fifteen-minute walk to Harry’s place further north. After the lesson, some of my classmates would head for dinner at a Chinese restaurant close by. ‘We’ would attempt to speak only Italian. I went once. Those meals and the lessons I did not attend were sufficient cover. Occasionally, when Percy was away for a conference or driving to Newcastle or Edinburgh to deliver a violin, Harry and I marked up a whole night together. I encouraged Percy to get his band together again, for they sometimes played in pubs outside town. He shouldn’t let marriage stand in the way of doing the things he loved, I would selflessly insist. Around the same time, I persuaded Harry to invest in a mobile phone. The TMI was what he called his, the Tool of Marital Infidelity. What I loved about our evenings included not only the sex, the secrecy, the obscure hide-away and the suppers Harry and I cooked there. They also included books.

  I felt, though I could never say, that I had made a sacrifice in marrying a man who had no taste for reading, who would rather fix the plumbing than talk about literature, even though he liked it when I read short poems to him. By an unspoken accord, we used to talk about everything that existed that was not gluing violins together and not books. But a world minus the glued violin is larger than a world without books. It would have challenged Percy’s generous nature to think that I had lost more mental freedom in our marriage than he had. But of course I had. A significant portion of all possible worlds, real or imagined, is touched on or explored in the earth’s total accumulation of books. Violins, completed or not, refer mostly to themselves. This seemed too obvious to state. We were delighted to acknowledge what we each had gained, but Percy and I never discussed what I had lost. In him I had a partner and a playmate, but I also wanted a thought-mate. I never found such a person in college. By convention, high table was devoted to small talk. The American critic Edmund Wilson’s journal reveals how disappointed he was by college dinners at high table, where serious discussion was politely avoided. He was visiting England in the 1950s. After Cambridge and Oxford, he was intellectually liberated to be staying in London with the writers Karl and Jane Miller.

  Like Wilson, I needed liberation and thought I was owed someone like Harry. I needed our rambling, sometimes hilarious post-coital cocktails of literary argument, celebration and gossip. His cleverness made me clever. It was rare, but it pleased me when I knew a poem, a book or an author new to him. Tuesdays, late evenings, walking slowly south along the Banbury Road, watching out for a Headington bus, I fairly vibrated with well-being. Easy then, to convince myself that by becoming whole, I was doing our marriage a favour. I could honour and adore my husband with even greater abandon. In the hailstorm of lies I told Percy, I persuaded myself I was virtuous. Truly, I was clever.

  But not as clever as the vengeful gods as they perfected my shackles and looked for an opportunity to slip them round my ankles. There are dire developments in life whose earliest signs can be known only in retrospect. Then we might say, I wish I had known! But in my case, it would have made no difference. It began, according to me but not the doctors, at breakfast on a Saturday morning in the early summer of 1999. We were drinking coffee in the back garden. Percy raised a subject that we had been through a few times before. He approached it delicately, with no pressure, he said, but he wanted to be clear. It was the large matter of whether we would have a child. He would love to be a father, he said, but he would respect my decision. Previously, I’d said that I was too old at thirty-nine. I was concerned for my career and the books I wanted to write. I did not add that a baby, in its ruthless way, would demand an end to my Tuesday trysts.

  None of this was on my mind that sunny morning. I had decided it was time to tell my husband a shameful secret that only my sister Rachel knew, along with a few people I hadn’t heard from in many years. I’ve kept journals at different times and I have never been able to set down this story until now. The boy left at the station was also forbidden. Nightmares of abandonment have pursued me. I could not confess to my journal, but I could tell Percy. I see him now, his folded arms resting on the garden table, forgiveness already in his look. Whatever he was about to hear, he would embrace it, understand it and love me.

  When a young person leaves home after an oppressive upbringing (parents, religion, poverty, in any combination) there might follow a period of destructive rebellion. It can be brief, before the passing years impose some order, or it can last a lifetime. Every case is different, and mine was curious. I worked hard at school, got the scholarship, escaped from home, but remained a diligent student with only the occasional lost weekend, calmed down before finals and came away with a good degree. I moved into a shared house in Clerkenwell with three women medical students and found a job in an estate agent’s office. The work was dull, but I typed fast and I was valued and soon I was promoted and on a commission. These were the early Thatcher years, and there was crazy greed in the air and a house-price boom. My hours were not strict. My housemates were wild drinkers and everywhere there were pink and blue Ecstasy tablets for the asking. My degree seemed like permission, a ticket to do whatever I liked, and for reasons I have tried to explain, I had a string of awful boyfriends. This, not my student years, was my time of breakout. Then, breakdown.

  Within six months I was pregnant. The father walked away. If my parents had known, they would have urged me to have an abortion. Sensible, given my circumstances. But coming from them, it would have sounded to me like more of the dead-hand oppression I was in flight from. In the shared house there was a tiny unused room next to mine and with Rachel’s help I cleared it out, decorated it and made a nursery. The housemates were helpful too. My sister was living a sensible life, training to be an executive in an Arab Gulf airline. She lent me money. The baby was born in mid-December at St Bart’s Hospital, a beautiful little girl I named Diana after the huntress. She had a blazing blue-eyed gaze and curly wisps of blonde hair. Everybody adored her and my medical friends fought over the chance to look after her. For six months I stayed at home and was happy. The Clerkenwell house became the centre for gatherings, or parties, weekdays and weekends. I went out a few evenings while one of my housemates babysat. One night I took Ecstasy. I was slipping back into my old routine.

  That same week there was a bigger than usual party in the house. About thirty people. I brought Diana down around nine and all the women and some of the men cooed over her. Around midnight I looked in on her and she was fine. I was going back to work in two days and taking Diana with me in her pushchair. I don’t remember how the rest unfolded. I suppose the celebratory atmosphere was part of what drove me to become dreadfully drunk. The music was still loud around two thirty when I went to bed. I hardly dare write this down. I forgot about Diana. I did not go into her room. The fact of her existence did not penetrate my disgusting state. I abandoned her. I sat on the edge of my bed unlacing my shoes and the next time I was conscious it was ten in the morning and I was still fully dressed. Hungover, I stumbled into her room. She was lying on her belly in her cot, face down in a puddle of vomit.

  At the inquest, the coroner was deeply sympathetic about my loss and took pains not to mention my drunkenness. Sitting in court, I felt my shame even more intensely. Rachel told me that it was helpful the press did not cover the hearing, but I was beyond thoughts of help. Silence fell like fog and smothered my existence. I became deaf. Or rather, when people spoke to me, I heard their words, but I didn’t hear their meaning. I didn’t move, I didn’t eat or speak. Rachel went to the funeral in my place. The only time I left the house was when I went with her and the medical students to an obscure corner of Spa Fields. We intended to dig a hole with a garden trowel to bury the pale blue teddy that Diana always cuddled at bedtimes. It was a hopeless occasion – heavy rain, a cold June wind blowing and the ground too stony to dig. The idea had been to read some poems aloud, but we couldn’t stand it. I collapsed in grief and at my insistence we brought the teddy back with us. I never saw or heard again from my medical friends. The next morning my sister took me home to our parents.

  She insisted that they had to be told. I sensed their reproach in every kind word. To be treated as the focus of their attention was an unfamiliar experience. I regressed to a sour teenager and hated them for all their care, but they kept at it. Eighteen months later, I applied to my university to do postgraduate work and I was accepted for a DPhil. My oppressive parents raided their savings for my upkeep. I took it as my due and I never properly thanked them. In another age, I might have taken myself off to a silent nunnery. Oxford would have to do. All my undergraduate friends had left, and I was glad. I made no new friends and lived alone while I researched and wrote about the poetry and sad life of brilliant John Clare. I knew I did not deserve to have another child.

  This, in shortened form, was what I told Percy that beautiful early-summer morning in our Headington garden. When I had finished he was silent for a while, for which I was grateful. The memories of two decades ago had brought me to a tearful state. Percy waited, and at last he spoke through a long sigh. ‘It’s a terrible terrible story. You were young and crazy. You made the worst possible mistake. But you can’t go on punishing yourself for the rest of your life. Having a baby could be wonderful for us both. And redemption. But if you don’t want one, for all your other reasons, well, I’m with you, whatever you decide.’

  With that he got up and embraced me and kissed the top of my head, then walked the few yards to his homemade workshop. I sat in a daze. His response was what I had hoped for, and I don’t think I ever loved him more. Perhaps it was time to think differently about having a child. I thought again about that tiny boy at the end of the platform and the mother who abandoned him. By denying a life, I could be a version of her. Time to choose. I went to the bottom of the garden, through the gate to the lane that ran along the backs of the houses and led into an enormous dreary field. I walked for an hour, then doubled back, making a route between the lane’s huge puddles that never seemed to dry out. By the time I reached our garden I had made my decision. I was not going to break in on Percy’s work with such momentous news. I would wait until he came into the house for lunch and meanwhile look at some lecture notes. But it was hard to concentrate. Flashes of deep excitement and a sensation of floating scattered my thoughts. Telling my secret had lifted something dark or had shrunk it and turned it into a seed of hope. Diana, in another form.

  Percy worked a half-day on Saturdays. He came into the house, as usual, just before one o’clock. I assumed his work had gone well. He looked cheerful as he stopped in front of the table where I was trying to read and asked if I wanted a sandwich. Cheese, tomato, lettuce and pickle.

  I nodded.

  ‘Coming up!’

  I said, ‘After our conversation, I went for a stroll.’

  ‘Yes?’ He had moved away and was going towards the kitchen counter.

  My heart had picked up speed, the way it does when I’m about to give someone close a present I know they will love. I couldn’t stop smiling. ‘I think you’re right.’

  ‘Yes?’ He said this with his back to me.

  ‘About self-punishment.’

  He was placing a fresh loaf on the bread board and taking a bread knife out of a drawer. He said quietly, ‘Um …’

  ‘And redemption.’

  Now he turned and came back towards me, the knife still in his hand. ‘Sorry darling. I’m lost.’ He said it warmly, as if indulging a child.

  I stared at him. He sometimes went adrift in the intricacies of violin construction. I kept the irritation out of my voice. The beauty and importance of the moment was too precious to spoil. ‘I’m talking about our conversation this morning, when I told you—’

  ‘But Vivien—’

  ‘—the whole story. And I’ve decided, Percy. I would love us to—’

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

  We stared at each other. He sat down opposite me and rested the knife on the table. I was scanning his features for some hint of an inappropriate joke. All I saw was bafflement.

  Finally, I said, ‘You don’t remember our conversation?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘In the garden.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Percy. This morning.’

  He was shaking his head, and I was beginning to feel frightened. ‘What have you been doing this morning?’

  ‘I went … I went …’ He looked around the room in search of an answer.

  ‘Did you mow the lawn, go to the shops? Did you read a newspaper?’

  He put his face in his hands. ‘I’m trying to think. Don’t keep asking me.’

  But he could think of nothing. I waited, then I patted his hand and went to the phone. I had a colleague at college, not a doctor, but a professor of neuroscience who long ago had accumulated clinical experience in psychiatry. There was a chance I would find him at home. His wife answered and went to fetch him. He was on his way to tennis, he said, but he had a couple of minutes. I was conscious of Percy watching me closely as I described what had happened.

  He was reassuring. It sounded like a TGA, a transient global amnesia. It might last a few hours, during which Percy would not be able to lay down new memories. Not that uncommon. Weird to experience, unsettling to witness, then it lifts. No consequences, no treatment necessary.

  ‘But he should have a scan. I’ll phone a friend at the John Radcliffe on Monday. Meanwhile relax! He’ll be fine.’

  When I turned back to Percy and started to tell him what my friend had said, he spoke over me in the same cheery tone. ‘I thought of making myself a sandwich. Cheese, tomato, lettuce and pickle. Want one?’

  ‘All right.’

  ‘Coming up.’

  But after a moment he wandered to the other end of the room and moodily stared through the French windows at the garden. Then he roused himself and told me again in the same eerily cheerful voice that he was going to make a sandwich, listed the ingredients and asked if I wanted one too.

  When I said I did, he called out, ‘Coming up!’

  He made no sandwiches that afternoon. I made them. When I gave Percy his, he took the plate with a grunt of surprise. We ate in silence. Afterwards, he went to the shed and later, when he returned to the house, the lotus-eating spell was over. He had found his current project on the workbench. Everything he had intended to do had been done to his own high standards, but he had no memory of doing it. Or of anything else. ‘There’s a hole in my life,’ he kept saying in wonder.

  Two months later we were at a consultation to be told the results of Percy’s scans. The neurologist pointed with his pencil at a screen where smears of grey and black converged. They meant nothing to us, but the drift was clear. My college friend had been right and there appeared to be no neural damage that could have caused the amnesia, and no visible consequences. We were about to thank the doctor and leave when he raised a hand to delay us. He brought up another scan, hardly different from the one we had been looking at. Again, he tapped the screen with his pencil. There was some enlargement here of the ventricles, he told us, and a possible degree of shrinking in one area of the hippocampus. Nothing to worry about now, but another scan in six months would be advisable, and some cognitive tests beforehand. Percy and I were keen to get away from the cramped office and its general air of unhealthy interest in mental dysfunction. The shelves around us were filled with books whose spines declared 10,000 ways a brain could go wrong. We stood, said our thanks and agreed to make a date with the secretary.

  My elated optimism never returned, and the question of a baby was dropped. Not even that, for we never got that far. I could not bear to tell Percy the story of Diana again. The luminous idea of having a child had been dimmed by a moment of frightening mental failure. It was difficult to admit it, but the episode challenged my faith in Percy’s strength, his reliability and competence. He was my rock and now a crack had appeared. It could not be wise to make myself vulnerable by having a baby if Percy was to be vulnerable too. The conventional medical view was that transient global amnesia was without consequences. I could not believe this, especially now that a doctor wanted Percy to be scanned again. I explained this to Harry one evening. He listened patiently. He agreed that I was right to be concerned for Percy’s mental health.

  For some reason Percy missed his appointment for the scan and cognitive tests and had to wait a further three months. The diagnosis when it finally came was no surprise. A box-ticking cognitive test backed it up. Our neurologist insisted that what I called the lotus episode was coincidental and had nothing to do with his Alzheimer’s. I did not believe him. But it hardly mattered. By then, the long decline had already begun. Percy’s forgetfulness was its most obvious feature, until irritability and then anger crept in. It was all bad and it was all slow, and my own brain’s protective amnesia eased me from one stage to the next.

  During the year after the second scan, Percy remained fully aware of what was happening to him and knew that there was no way out. Or that there was only one exit and he could either take it now or let the disease take it for him later. He was depressed, as anyone would be. He told me that our lives together were ruined, that our future had been snatched from us. I would remind him of the marvellous hike we had planned for the next day and the friends who would be visiting, of the plain fact of our love and how we would stay close and live for the present. But he was right. The future looked appalling. We had a few fake rational conversations about suicide – the timing, the method, the need to protect me from suspicion of murder. I say fake because I knew that I would never help him, and he would never do it. I had been told that there would come a time when he would unknowingly cross an invisible frontier and no longer have what they called insight into his condition. Suicide would be forgotten.