All at Sea, page 17
Had I become Tony’s second wife, this oversight would not have mattered; a wedding would have nullified the will. And Tony had wanted us to marry. I was the one who always said no. A piece of paper to prove we loved each other felt unimportant to me, and so by any logical cost–benefit analysis could only constitute an unnecessary risk. This was no reflection on my faith in our future, for I could not see us splitting up. But having endured the misery of divorce once, and watched my life and finances wind up in the hands of lawyers, the only way to guarantee it couldn’t happen again would be not to remarry.
So indifferent was I to the legal status of our relationship, it mattered nothing to me that Tony was still technically married to his wife. He had been trying to divorce her ever since they split up, but was unwilling to pay a lawyer several thousand pounds to do something he felt confident of being quite capable of himself. ‘I mean, how hard can it be?’ As the years passed, the folder in his filing cabinet marked ‘Divorce’ grew fatter and fatter. Tony couldn’t understand it. Time and again he would fill out all the forms, present the paperwork to the appointed court as instructed, and wait patiently for news to arrive in the post that he was divorced. Instead, the forms kept coming back. The reason for their rejection was never explained, and it took him years to get to the bottom of the problem.
His wedding had taken place in Las Vegas. Being dyslexic, his spelling was atrocious, and Tony had been writing ‘Los Vagas’. A quick proofread by me would have been enough to rectify the error, but as with his will I mistook Tony’s divorce for no concern of mine, and this misapprehension leaves me no more legally entitled than the milkman to adjudicate over his affairs. It was probably a piece of luck he died abroad, for had we been in the UK I’m not sure I would have had sufficient authority to proceed as far as appointing an undertaker.
The implications of this bureaucratic non-status are bewildering and infinite. When the insurance for our family car expires, I cannot renew it. The car was paid for by me, but registered in Tony’s name, so must sit outside the house gathering rust and mould. My travel insurance policy, whose premiums I pay, covered my whole family on holiday, and the company agrees at once to release the death benefit – only, not to me. The money must go to the executor of Tony’s will, they inform me; it’s the law. Credit-card companies start phoning the house when repayments are missed, and at first they ask for Mr Anthony Wilkinson. When I tell them he has died they politely hang up. But they keep calling back every day, and evidently assume I am lying, because soon the calls come late in the evening, and open with an artfully matey, ‘Hiyah, can I speak to Tony?’ I have no authority to instruct lawyers to make them stop.
Nothing of Tony’s belongs to me. Our two London rental flats, which represented our pension and could now save us from insolvency, were in his name alone. I do not even own his clothes or photographs. By the grace of God, Tubslake is in my name – but in our newly reduced circumstances we are almost certainly going to lose it.
Our family lawyer tells me I must contest the will. He says I have no choice. I am legally obliged, he says, because when Jake and Joe turn eighteen they can sue me for failing to protect their interests. That’s not going to happen, I protest. ‘How do you know?’ friends point out. ‘You didn’t think Tony was going to drown on holiday. But he did.’ So once again my life and my finances are in the hands of lawyers.
The prospect of the legal challenge makes me ill, so my brother Ben volunteers to take charge and I sign over all responsibility to him. I want nothing to do with it. But I become a probate bore to anyone who will listen, and quickly discover that at least half my friends have not made a will either. They are horrified and shaken to learn of my predicament, but such is the peculiar power of psychological resistance to the matter, I would be surprised if any has since gone to a lawyer and made a will.
It would be of little use to them if they did. When Jake and Joe were born I had made mine, and congratulated myself for doing the sensible, responsible thing. What a smug idiot I have been. Doing the responsible thing is all very well, but in this case will by definition only serve a purpose after you are dead. So what use is it to me? One’s own will is not the one anyone with sense should concern themselves with. I should have frogmarched Tony back to the local solicitor in March and paid the fee myself. I am humiliated by my own stupidity.
My feelings towards Tony’s culpability are more complicated. It is hard not to feel angry with him for landing us in this mess, but I don’t want to be polluted by blame. And what was his carelessness, compared with mine? A couple trusts each other with their lives, and I let him die. Had he not lived so dangerously for decades this might be easier to forgive, but for him to survive so much jeopardy only to die on my watch feels like a damning indictment, and the compulsion to apologise consumes me. Every time we visit his grave I find myself sobbing helplessly, ‘I’m so sorry, Tony. I’m so sorry.’
In my mind our entire relationship is undergoing a radical reappraisal. I spent so many years fixating on the quality of our romance – did he meet my emotional needs, was I fulfilled, were we right for each other? – under the misapprehension that perfectionism is a relevant romantic ideal. I think I would have expected the relationship’s imperfections to have some bearing on my sense of loss, as though grief might be analogous to losing a handbag. If the bag was a cheap old thing from Primark, you would mind less than if you lost the perfect Mulberry – and the same should presumably, I would have imagined, apply to the loss of a relationship. You could always console yourself by recalling the elements you never liked.
But our shortcomings turn out to have been immaterial. There is no comfort in the memory of the ways in which we didn’t work, because it wasn’t the details of our partnership that mattered, but the fact of it. We had given our lives to one another, and ceased long ago to be separate individuals. We were a joint enterprise. There are plenty of things about my body with which I am not entirely happy, but no amount of minor imperfections would mitigate the horror of being sliced in two. Without Tony I am limping and bleeding, because half of me is missing.
This is not my first experience of being single. When the label last applied to me, however, it was immaterial, for in one’s early twenties everyone is essentially single, whether in a relationship or not. Only now do I understand that loneliness is not an absence of company, but of meaning. The daily details of my existence still matter enormously to Jake and Joe, but there is no longer an adult alive for whom they hold any material significance, and the sense that I have ceased to matter is more devastating than I like to admit. If I do not belong to anyone, I do not belong anywhere.
The four people with whom I shared most of my life are all gone, and they have taken my history with them. My mother died when I was nine, and my oldest friend has been ill for some years with an incurable and degenerative neurological disease which is stealing her mind and our shared memories. My ex-husband and I still see each other from time to time, and the tenderness between us remains precious, but divorce leaves an inevitable distance that will always be unbridgeable. And now Tony is dead. Unable to locate myself in any shared narrative, it is as if I no longer exist.
Now that I am no longer building a life with someone, every day has become a transitory series of discrete experiences, for with no joint archive in which to be filed as memories they are simply discarded every night. Nothing is cumulative; I have lost my past. There is no future either, because I do not dare look further ahead than the next fortnight. I exist only in the moment – but not in a good way, not in the way therapists encourage. It feels like wearing a baseball cap pulled down very low, restricting vision to a semicircle 6 inches in front of my feet.
The surprising thing about being single and lonely is the frenzy of socialising it requires. I have never had less desire for company, nor seen more of my friends; weekends have not been this hectic since I was an undergraduate. One day I happen upon an elegant explanation for this paradox, in an interview with Judith Kerr. ‘The problem with being widowed is not that there’s nobody to do things with,’ the children’s author observed. ‘It’s that there’s nobody to do nothing with. You have to make some plan for the day, otherwise there’s this shapeless emptiness.’ A weekend can no longer be left to its own devices to evolve lazily, but must be exhaustively scheduled with a full programme of children’s activities, and populated by an extended cast of extras. I live in terror of last-minute cancellations, so in addition must always be careful to line up a weekly Plan B of understudies. It is a full-time job. We need a social secretary.
Jake and Joe are remorselessly drilled in the etiquette of being a good host or good guest, for we are always either visiting or receiving; they can never simply be. It is a lot to ask of a three- and five-year-old, and I worry about expecting too much (‘Share your toys! Did you put the loo seat down? Don’t forget to say thankyouforhavingus’), but worry more about the alternative to this social merry-go-round. Left alone with them, I am afraid I can never be enough.
These weekends cannot be much fun for our friends, for I am poor company. There is a reason why I interview people for a living – I prefer to be the one asking the questions – and the new solipsism of grief embarrasses me. The trouble with sadness is that it seldom produces anything new to say, and if I tire of hearing myself enumerate yet again the monotony of my miseries, it is safe to assume I must be boring them too. What friends feel able to talk about to me is equally problematic.
They are understandably reluctant to tell me about their own troubles. When one or two forget and begin to recount a recent drama, they quickly check themselves – ‘God, I’m so sorry, how could I be complaining about anything to you?’ – but good news must be censored too, because no one feels comfortable telling me about anything wonderful in their life. Nor do they know what to ask. No one else has been widowed at forty-three, so they feel out of their depth, unequal to my situation, and their apprehension evokes echoes of my childhood. Nobody I knew was motherless at nine, and once again no one knows what to say. Afraid of asking the wrong thing, most tend to opt for the one question I am always at a loss to answer: ‘How are you?’
This problem only intensifies the further I stray from the safety of low-key kitchen-table conversation. I go to a friend’s garden party in Hampstead, where all of the guests know about Tony’s death. The party is full of clever and fascinating people, and yet almost every exchange I attempt quickly reaches the same conversational impasse. Few guests risk straying beyond the safety of small talk, and those that do soon get stuck in the no-man’s-land of a harmless-looking subject that bores both of us to death, but from which we daren’t escape. I go home having learnt more about pilates and Brazilian theatre than I ever wished to know, and resolve not to go to any more parties until I am no longer a social liability.
The most successful conversations are ones in which I count my blessings. I discover this quite by accident, when one of my more Pollyannaish friends comes to stay. Telling the truth about how I am feeling is, I soon see, a mistake; her expression grows increasingly aghast, and panic gathers in her eyes. ‘But of course,’ I divert hastily, ‘it could be worse. Jake could have drowned too.’ Her panic fades a fraction, so I keep going. ‘And we were so lucky to have so many friends in Treasure Beach to help us.’ I can see this is definitely working. ‘It was amazing that my brothers and Jenni and Danielle could all fly out.’ What else? ‘Um, and Tony would be so proud of how the boys are coping. Yes, and what would we have done without all the support from my family? When I think about it, this whole situation could be so much worse. We’re really very lucky.’
Why hadn’t I thought of this before? She relaxes into a beaming smile of approval, and I bask in its warmth. Already I can picture her reporting this conversation to others – ‘Isn’t she brave?’ – and anticipate their awed admiration. The next time I try it out, it works a treat again. I learn to reel off my blessings by rote, and it never fails to impress.
The script is not a total work of fiction. One legacy of Tony’s death that does feel like a genuine blessing is a new appreciation of the primitive power of family. Growing up in the Eighties, I must have confused the value of family with Thatcher’s ‘family values’, for I was suspicious of people who banged on about how much they loved their family. In my head the word was always pronounced in the estuary vowels of a Sun editorial – ‘faaah-mly’ – and Mothering Sunday and Father’s Day were boycotted with contempt. ‘Commercial claptrap,’ I would scoff snootily. In the Nineties most of my friends were gay, and often estranged from their parents. It was the era of Friends and Sex and the City, and as we pranced about in Manchester nightclubs dancing to ‘We Are Family’ I fully subscribed to the fashionable new orthodoxy. Having a family didn’t have to mean being lumbered with actual relatives; we were perfectly at liberty to invent our own.
If I try now to imagine these months without my family, the nonchalance with which I used to take it for granted staggers me. All the other blessings I trot out when required are neither untrue nor insignificant, either – but the device still feels fundamentally fraudulent. It is gratifying to see how it makes everyone feel better, but the idea that I feel truly fortunate is farcical, and demonstrably a lie.
The least successful conversations are those that start with someone saying: ‘What you should do …’ or ‘Why don’t you …?’ How the sentence ends doesn’t matter. It could be the most brilliant idea anyone has ever come up with, but the more inspired the less welcome it is. There is already so much to do. As I have neither the strength to manage half of it, nor much faith in there being any point anyway, well-intended suggestions can only compound my sense of inadequacy. ‘You’re so strong, you can cope,’ is similarly counterproductive. I have never felt weaker in my life, so to hear that this is yet another expectation I am failing to meet only makes me feel worse. Everyone is doing their best to be helpful, and in their shoes I would be the same, but solution-based thinking is so incomprehensible to my current state of mind that they might as well be talking in Chinese.
Another thing everyone says is, ‘You won’t feel like this for ever.’ The pain is going to ease, they assure me; in time I will start to feel better. This is half true. What actually happens, I gradually see, is that the pain becomes normal. I get used to it. It doesn’t get better; it just becomes familiar. And familiarity is an extraordinarily powerful thing.
In the early days it is sobering to discover how little my capacity for motivation differs from Jake and Joe’s. In order to navigate small boys through their day, a system of modest incentives must be deployed, for without rewards to sustain them through the tedium of tidying up toys, eating vegetables, brushing their teeth, the domestic routine quickly breaks down. Any parent can tell you that most upsets in a three-year-old’s world can be soothed by a teaspoon of honey. I had no idea until now that the same would be true at forty-three. I used to think myself blessed with an unusually stoical work ethic, but like most of my old self-image this proves to have been wide of the mark. In order to keep going, I require teaspoons of honey too.
They used to take the form of watching telly with Tony before bed, or an affectionate text, a private smile, or the jerk chicken he used to cook. Now that there is no longer any honey – and even if there were, I doubt I could taste it – my motivation quickly runs down. Every tiny banal act of daily life becomes a monumental effort. Without the possibility of a moment’s pleasure, I find I don’t really want to do anything at all.
But as the months pass, I learn to live without it. To my surprise, pleasure does not have to be the point of life – nor even a significant component. My friend Jenni tells me about a new book whose central thesis states that happiness requires a balance of purpose and pleasure, and this sounds about right to me. But it is perfectly possible, I am discovering, to survive on purpose alone.
There is just one snag. My old friends in London will put up with a puritanical drag, but the same can hardly be expected of anyone I have only just met. To build a viable life we need a social network closer to home, and Tony and I had barely begun to make a start on one when he died. It had centred chiefly on the boys’ nursery, and the kindness of everyone there is astonishing and humbling; the owner cleans our house, mums leave lasagnes on the doorstep, dads invite the boys on expeditions to the forest. A man from the local pub offers to cut the grass; the bar staff want to babysit. I am ashamed to admit that the debt of gratitude can sometimes feel onerous. Having had so little time to bank good will before Tony died, I am running up an overdraft that must surely soon reach its limit. I will need to make myself more appealing to the small circle we already have, and it needs to grow wider. I haven’t consciously tried to make new friends since Freshers’ Week, and suspect it will require me to appear fun.
How should a newly widowed woman go about this? I decide it will be easiest if I simply don’t tell anyone I meet about Tony. This is partly because I don’t know how to. How would one introduce his death into casual conversation; how should it be phrased? Mainly, though, it is because I cannot bear to present myself as an object of pity before phone numbers have even been exchanged, and the instant imbalance the disclosure would create must compromise any prospect of a normal friendship evolving. It also introduces another problem which I am finding oppressive and do not know how to solve. The sympathy of people I barely know confers an obligation in return to be worthy and deserving of their kindness. No one wants to feel sorry for someone who turns out to disappoint their expectations of widowhood, and by simply being myself I am afraid I may inadvertently incur resentment, which I feel too vulnerable to risk. The situation therefore requires me to appear virtuous and unobjectionable at all times, which is exhausting and, I suspect, makes me drearily bland. The only wise course of action when meeting new people must therefore be to keep quiet about Tony.
