Dark then, I went up Pembridge Road to Ladbroke Grove, then onto Westbourne Terrace. The organic supermarket where Nicholas and I worked had become a clinic offering laser hair removal and cosmetic injectables. The shops and bar on either side of it were still open but I was too wet to go inside. I just stood there for a minute, hearing my cousin. ‘Ideally, Martha, you want to figure out the reason why you keep burning your own house down.’ I turned and walked back down Pembridge Road to the station, letting myself get trapped behind slow-walking tourists because I still didn’t want to go home.
*
On the train back to Oxford, I called Goldhawk Road, expecting to hear my father’s voice. I had already tried to call Ingrid at Paddington to tell her about the appointment. Her autoreply said I Can’t Talk At The Moment. Now, exhausted, I just wanted to listen to my father talk about something uninteresting, knowing he would continue for some time as long as I said really at intervals.
My mother answered and said immediately, ‘He’s gone to the library. Ring back later.’
As a source of solace, I had always considered my mother many rungs below last resort. It is funny to me now, the line that spoke itself to me just then: Oh well. Port in a storm.
I said, ‘You and I could chat.’
My mother exaggerated her shock. ‘Could we? Alright. What have you been up to? That’s how these conversations are supposed to begin, isn’t it?’
I said, ‘I’m on the way back from London. I just saw a psychiatrist.’
‘Why?’
I told her I wasn’t sure.
It is funny, now, because she was the storm. Just about to break over my head.
‘Well I hope you didn’t believe a word he said. I’ve never known a psychiatrist who wasn’t full of shit. They want us all to be mad. It’s very much in their interest.’
She knew. My grip on the phone was so instantly rigid, it sent a little shock up my arm.
My mother said, ‘Are you still there?’
‘Do you remember that time when I was eighteen –’ saliva was flooding my mouth in the way that precedes vomiting ‘– you took me to a doctor who said I had ——？’ My right thigh started shaking. I tried to stop it with my hand.
‘I do not.’
‘He was Scottish. You knocked over his coat stand on the way out on purpose and refused to pay. His receptionist chased us to the car.’
My mother said, ‘What about it if I do remember?’
‘Why did you get so angry?’
There was a silence and I checked my screen to see if she had hung up. But the timer was ticking on and I put the phone back to my ear.
Finally she said, ‘Because he was trying to put some awful label on you.’
‘He was right though. Wasn’t he?’
‘How do you know.’ It wasn’t a question. She said it like a child in a sibling argument. How do you know.
I told her it didn’t matter. ‘You knew he was right. You have known the whole time and you didn’t say anything. Why would you do that to me?’
Both of my legs were trembling then.
‘I didn’t do anything to you. I told you, I didn’t want you to have to go through your life with that terrible label attached to you. If anything, I did it for you.’
‘But the thing about labels is, they’re very useful when they’re right because,’ I carried on through her attempt at interruption, ‘because then you don’t give yourself wrong ones, like difficult or insane, or psychotic or a bad wife.’ That was when I started crying for the first time since Robert’s office. I put my head down so my hair fell and hid my face but my voice was getting louder and louder. ‘My whole adult life I’ve been trying to work out what is wrong with me. Why didn’t you tell me? I don’t believe you it was about labels. I don’t believe you.’ A man across the aisle got up and ushered his son and daughter to seats further away. ‘You were perfectly happy for it to be other things. You let me think it was depression and everything else doctors told me. Why not this? Why didn’t you –’
She cut in then. ‘I didn’t want it to be true. ——’s a hateful disease. Our family has been ravaged by it. My family and your father’s. I’ve seen what it does, believe me, and I couldn’t bear the idea of it being you as well. I couldn’t. If that makes me a bad mother –’
‘Who?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Who in our family?’