Sorrow and Bliss(16)
I started a diary on my twenty-first birthday. I thought I was writing, generally, about my life. I still have it; it reads like the diary you are told to keep by your psychiatrist, to record when you are depressed or coming out of a depression or anticipating the onset of one. Which was always. It was the only thing I ever wrote about. But the intervals in between were long enough that I thought of each episode as discrete, with its own particular, circumstantial cause, even if most of the time I struggled to identify it.
Afterwards, I did not think it would happen again. When it did, I went to a different doctor and collected diagnoses like I was trying for the whole set. Pills became pill combinations, devised by specialists. They talked about tweaking and adjusting dials; the phrase ‘trial and error’ was very popular. Watching me dispense such a quantity of pills and capsules into a bowl once, Ingrid, who was with me in the kitchen, making breakfast, said, ‘That looks very filling,’ and asked me if I wanted milk on them.
The mixtures scared me. I hated the boxes in the bathroom cabinet and the bent, half-used blister sheets and scraps of foil in the sink, the insoluble feeling of the capsules in my throat. But I took everything I was given. I stopped if they made me feel worse or because they had made me feel better. Mostly they made me feel the same.
That is why eventually I stopped taking anything and why I stopped seeing so many doctors, and then none for a long time, and why eventually everyone – my parents, Ingrid and later Patrick – came to concur with my self-diagnosis of being difficult and too sensitive, why nobody thought to wonder if those episodes were separate beads on one long string.
6
THE FIRST TIME I got married was to a man called Jonathan Strong. He was an art broker with a focus on pastoral art and sourcing it for oligarchs. I was twenty-five and still Vogue weight when I met him, at a summer party put on by the publisher of World of Interiors who was in his sixties, white-haired and, in wardrobe terms, partial to velvet. His first name was Peregrine and, people in the office said, his surname had been set as a keyboard shortcut on all the computers at Tatler because it appeared so often in the social pages. As soon as he found out that my mother was the sculptor Celia Barry, he invited me to lunch because although, he said, he was unmoved by my mother’s work, except on the occasions he was actively repelled by it, he cared for artists and art and beauty and madness and he assumed I would be interesting on all four subjects.
I expended what material I had before Peregrine had finished his oysters but he asked me to lunch again the following week, and every week from then on because he claimed to be captivated by my childhood, the stories I told about it – the parties, my father’s artistic and domestic travail, the unfinished opus, the Umbrian Sunrise and foil mille-feuille. Most of all, he was thrilled by my brushes with insanity. He said he did not trust anyone who hadn’t had a nervous breakdown – at least one – and was sorry his own was thirty years ago and, unimaginatively, following a divorce.
I told him about my father’s alphabet game. Peregrine wanted to try his hand at it straight away. It became our habit after that to write them once he had ordered for us, on cards supplied from his breast pocket.
The day I produced – I do not remember all of it – one that began with A Bronze-Cast Degas Excites Feeling – Peregrine told me I’d come to feel like the daughter he had never had, even though he had two. But, as he went on to explain, instead of becoming artists as he’d hoped, at university they’d both come out accountants. He said ‘to the heartbreak of their father’. Even now, years later, he found it difficult to accept their chosen lifestyles, which involved much hoovering of semi-detached houses in unbeautiful parts of Surrey and buying things from supermarkets, having husbands and so forth. Peregrine’s lifestyle was sharing a Chelsea mews with an older gentleman called Jeremy who did all their shopping at Fortnums.
At the end of his talk, I asked Peregrine to read what he had written. He said, ‘Far from my best but as you wish. All Bernard Can Digest Easily, French Gammon. His Intestinal Juices –’ and then he was cut off by the arrival of our oysters.
*
Ingrid’s eldest son went through a period of writing pretend menus. She texted me pictures of them. On one he had written,
1. red Winh 20
2. wite winhs 20
3. mixcher of all the wihns, 10.
In the message, Ingrid said she had ordered a large number three, because it’s basic home economics.
*
It was Peregrine who pointed Jonathan out at the summer party and, as he said a year later while begging my forgiveness for it, ‘unwittingly choreographed your devastating pas de deux’.
Jonathan was standing in the middle of the room talking to three blonde women dressed in iterations of the same outfit. Peregrine said they were all in trouble, at risk of being seduced or sold a horrible landscape, and apologised for having to leave me alone because he had to go and say hello to someone tedious.
I passed Jonathan on my way to the terrace and sensed him turn and watch me to the door. When I came back inside and returned to where I’d been standing with Peregrine, Jonathan stepped away from his group. I committed to hating him while he was cutting his swathe towards me because his hair looked wet even though it wasn’t and, passing a waiter, he lifted two glasses of champagne off his tray without acknowledging him. He put one in my hand and, as he did so, the sleeve of his dinner jacket shifted to reveal a wristwatch the size of a wall clock.