One Monday after Clouds my literary agent came to see me and suggested that I write about the experience of detoxification. The people at Clouds had said the same. This book is not it. I would like to address a book that might be of use to an addict who is not sure whether they are one, and I’m fairly sure this book will be, if useful, useful in a more diffuse psychological way.
I will tell quickly, because I am so ashamed, the fact that after my agent had gone I saw the migrainous aura in the air that tells me that I am going to have a drink. For the next two weeks I drank to die, to the despair of all who had invested love, patience and trust, not to say a large sum of money, in my sobriety. Entirely drunk and responding, no doubt, to what had been there all along, I ran from my isolated house at the end of the cul-de-sac to Fram’s house that had been our marital home. Perhaps that is not true, perhaps Fram came and collected me. At any rate, after as many as five years without seeing each other in other than strainedly civil circumstances, we were together again. And there was Claudia. For, I think, two days, they nursed me. I stole two bottles of wine because I was having DTs. In front of Claudia, who is dry, witty, confident and intelligent, I was everything I had I thought managed not to be: maudlin, sentimental, snobbish, bitchy, envious of her solid yet elegantly raffish background, the lot. She took it all. Claudia is one of nine siblings from two marriages. I am one of one sibling from one marriage, really.
After that last bender, once more, and without complaint, the Farleigh household rallied around the woman who had never been its head. I was nursed for perhaps ten days in ‘my’ bedroom at Farleigh. Every day the sway of the trees made me a little less sick. Every day I could more easily fight off the racing thoughts of the urgent necessity of suicide. I could even see, in person at the bottom of my bed, my older two children, who were, if you can believe it, offering to drive me to meetings. The last drink I had in my life I could not finish. It was a can of Special Brew, taken from the refrigerator in my first husband’s morning room. I poured the rest away, squashed the can and wrapped it up. Later when I was returned to Oxford and having my second try at a sober life that has, so far, while undermined from many angles, not cracked, I threw the can away.
What seems to have happened is this, and Fram will correct me if I am wrong. When I left our marriage, Fram said his mother was ‘on the verge of beginning to be able to contemplate thinking of coming around to me’; Minoo insisted that she loved me. After I left, I received a letter from my mother-in-law begging me to reconsider and saying that she was sorry. I was very touched by this letter and have hidden it somewhere so deep that I can’t find it. I know now that Fram dictated it, but my late mother-in-law was willing to write it.
In a way, my departure was all my mother-in-law’s fears and dreams come true. She had her son back and she had her proof that I was as delinquent as the culture that I represented. She cannot but have been agonised by the pain in which she saw her son, but she also knew that he blamed her in part for the catastrophe, and that blinded her with fury. It was Avi and Minoo and, later, Claudia who got Fram through.
During the years in which I had imagined Fram all-powerful, plotting, arranging for my book to get bad reviews, talking the brilliant streak of malice that he can, and always, always outflanking anyone in argument, Minoo had made mention of Daddy’s ‘horizontality’. They had taken holidays together in Greece, in Sansepolcro, in Menton, and ‘Daddy has gardened and we did a lot of Gibbon/Plato/Donne together.’ Minoo would not be used as an informant and nor did I ever approach him with the intention of so using him. It was Claudia who told me later that Fram had, during these years that I was drunk, a nervous collapse.
At once all feuding and all stiffly held positions melted for me and I was struck at heart that this person with whom my mind was most involved had been dealing with such pain over such time. I bought a quantity of books on bipolarity and read them properly. I wanted to know everything that retrospectively might mend him.
My mother-in-law’s father, who looked very like Fram, died young driving home one evening on a road he knew very well. Mehroo’s mother, Ratu, remarried quite soon. She was the first woman in India to get a pilot’s licence. Home movies show her beauty but also shyness veiled to some degree by the fashions of the time — a cocktail or cigarette holder never too far away — and a Leonardo smile. Mehroo found it difficult to come to terms with her mother’s remarriage, and though they remained close, there was a touchiness between them. After her mother died, Mehroo cried every morning for several years. When Eddie died she berated herself for having done so and her own widowhood was almost impenetrably sad. When Fram returned from weekends spent with his mother, it was often as though he needed draining of the gloom he had ingested. In fact his patient, tranquil sister, who lived with Mehroo and increasingly looked after her, protected him far more than he cared to admit.
When Fram introduced Claudia into his life, which was long after I left him, Mehroo said that ‘even that one’ (me) would be better than ‘this one’. It is possible that she saw that Claudia (who hates me to say this, remarking that it makes her sound like a breakfast cereal) was authentic in ways where I, who had trained myself, in order, as I thought, to please my mother-in-law, seemed not to be.
The language of disgust came easily to my mother-in-law. It was the dark side of her noticing eye and impulse to order her surroundings to make them fresh, light and airy. It is a language perhaps available to women who have not allowed their sons to grow up. Fram was much more her construct than his father’s. Perhaps I am still in a swoon of honeymoon with my sons, or perhaps I am smug, but I don’t see why their loving other women should spell infidelity to me; I think it might even mean that they must like me, or some category to which I belong, that of being female.
It was Claudia who saw that Fram must choose between her and his mother and enabled him to make the necessary transition without any unnatural break. Throughout all this, Avi nursed her brother, took no sides, exhibited perfect tolerance and when the time came, with Fram, nursed their mother in her swift last illness right up till the end, which Minoo and I missed by a few hours. In her last weeks, she was allowed to remain at home, consumed by cancer and read to by her children. I sent her a short letter saying that I was sorry that she was ill, that I had loved her and that I was very sorry that I had hurt her.
Fram chose life. Claudia is life in the many. With her came Toby Buxton, father of her twins, and tutelary spirit of the household. I was lucky enough, and this is not invariable, to love their twins Xavier Buxton and Yvo FitzHerbert, on sight. They are dissimilar twins yet their sense of a shared life saturates their relationship. Tall strawberry roan Yvo has cornered climate-camp and chess, and blue-eyed auburn Xavier is that rare thing, a born classicist. By lucky chance, though his school offered no Greek, he attached himself to a retired don, Margaret Howatson, from whose private lessons he would return with shining, sharpened eyes. Curiously, through their father, Yvo and Xavier have, like my son Minoo, a brother seven years older, also named Olly and with a poll of red hair.
When first I heard of these domestic arrangements, my reaction was envious, I suspect, and petit bourgeois, I know. The truth is that it works very well. Toby does the cooking and lives in the coach-house. Fram does the gardening and emanates power from his elegant drawing room. Claudia does far more than she pretends to and emanates an equal power that contains Fram’s own and protects him from it, from her large, wood-stoved study. Bysshe, the standard poodle, a redhead himself, has the best manners of any dog I know. Segolène the cat seldom settles save to scratch or to burrow into her fleecy manger next to Claudia’s computer.