A very expensive joke

Monday, mid-February 2009

It was before ten o’clock the next morning (after we sent our letter and appendix – refuting all the allegations against Shaun, and countering with several pages of our own – to all the Parochial Parish Council, bishop, vicar, Uncle Tom Cobley and virtually everyone we could think of bar the Daily Mail) when Pinky and Perky, the two cheerleaders, asked if we could meet up.

A bite, by Jove!

What a surprise…

They suggested two o’clock so I said not before three. For absolutely no reason whatsoever. Except, I could.

I then rang Lawyer Number Two. Could he get to Oxford by three, to negotiate please? Long before he said he’d never get there in time I realised that he was the last person we wanted in the room.

He’d never been in such a situation, had no idea how to read it, couldn’t even begin to guess what sort of sum to suggest.

I, however, had often been in such a situation, albeit in a mini-mini-micro kind of way...

Will you do this radio programme for a fiver?

How about twenty-five? And a puncture allowance because I’ll be biking to the studio.

Ten is the most we ever pay. But we’ll send a car for you.

Twenty. And bike mileage.

I really don’t know... I’ll have to refer it up. We never pay that much, usually.

I’ve been a freelance all my working life. I sacked a top agent, when I realised I was negotiating higher fees myself while the office was shut down over Christmas.

(It’s not even the money, per se. It’s the fact that they pay Jonathan Ross and Russell Brand three mill to abuse Andrew Sachs, and then can’t afford to pay the rest of us...)

“Right,” I instructed Shaun. “There may come a point when I have to leave the room. I am absolutely definitely never ever ever signing any confidentiality agreement whatsoever,” (otherwise I wouldn’t be writing this, would I?) “so there may be details I don’t want to know.

“But as soon as we get onto money,” I said, “keep your mouth shut! I’ve been negotiating fees since ever, ok?”

“Ok,” he said.

Apart from anything, Shaun would give his shirt away if the rest of us let him. He’s given his best coat to a tramp, more than once. (Not the same tramp.) Which, ok, is quite a pleasant characteristic in a clergyman... under usual circs.

“So don’t say a word, when it comes to money. Got that? Oh, and no tea, coffee, any of that palaver. This is business.”

“Right.”

Just before three. Dring.

I showed them into the little sitting-room.

Tiny though the cottage was, it was divided by its staircase, so the sitting-room was one end and kitchen and other gubbins, the other.

We waited.

Shaun must know they were here. Every room was a few seconds’ reach from the doorbell.

And waited.

Good, I thought. Not like Shaun at all. Keeping them waiting...

Rosie hovered in the doorway. Eventually, “Can you tell Daddy they’re here?”

Seventeen minutes past, Shaun showed up.

Right, I said. This clause here. Confidentiality. Rest of the family can’t sign that.

Ok, they said.

Eh? I thought. That was a bit too easy.

And this clause here, about the cottage. Not appropriate for a clergyman.

No, they said.

Coo, I thought.

And we can’t possibly move out next week. How about... (I mused into the middle distance)... 18th April? (We had just, that morning, succeeded in bringing forward Shaun’s new job by a term... to 20th April. We could slum it for a day in between.)

Fair enough, they said.

Blimey.

So it’s just down to the horsetrading, I said.

Indeed, they said. And laughed a little nervously.

Well now, I said, and took a long breath. We’ve been advised that it would be absolutely and completely absurd even to consider anything under n figures, I said.

And waited for the bark of hollow laughter and the suggestion that we get real.

It never came.

I see, said one.

Which end of n figures would that be? said the other.

Holy s***. 

They must be absolutely terrified.

(Our letter and its appendix was quite good, then…?)

It was at this point that I completely lost my nerve. We’d never owned n figures. We’d never even imagined n figures. I didn’t know what n figures looked like. I’d only said that as a joke. Like, you know, when you’re in the bazaar in Istanbul and you say you’ll buy a priceless handmade silk rug for two and six. And then realise you’ve just starved a family of ten for a year.

If I’d spent a few seconds anticipating n figures for real, my answer would have been very different. I didn’t have time to think, I was so shocked.

The lower end, I said. Of course.

Right, they said. And breathed out.

And that would have been that. n figures. Crikey. Beyond our wildest dreams.

Except muggins on the sofa, my husband, saw fit at this moment to shove his oar in.

After all, we’ll need moving costs, he said.

(Eh? Keep quiet, Shaun. We’re done now.)

And rent.

(No we won’t. Only one day’s rent!)

And something to live off...

(You’ll be on a salary, you twerp.)

And... you see, we wouldn’t be able to stay with friends for more than a few weeks...

The figure was rapidly plummeting from n figures to n-1 figures before my eyes. I jumped in quickly, shut him up and closed the deal. The last thirty seconds had just lost us a very great deal of money.

“What on earth were you doing?” I said after we showed them out. “They were just about to give us n figures, till you chipped in. I told you not to say a word when it came to the bartering.”

Bear in mind, reader dear, that my darling husband was still recovering from a very debilitating breakdown.

“Oh, is that what you said? I couldn’t for the life of me remember. Only that it was very important. That’s why I waited so long in the kitchen, hoping you’d come and get me so I could ask you.”

What am I married to?

Why not tell Rose to fetch me? Why not pop your noddle round the door and ask if I could come out for a private word?

Because my darling husband, for all his brilliance, never thinks of the simplest things.

I can’t ring my mother: I don’t know her number. So ring your sister, you muppet, and ask her!

Never thinks of it.

You’re three hours later than you said.

Yes, sorry. Didn’t have my ’phone.

So... why not borrow one? Like the barman’s, for instance?

Oh! (Astonished.) I didn’t think of that.

(Even though I’ve been suggesting it for several decades.)

We laughed for the rest of the afternoon. And again that night. And all the following week.

What a twit! And yet so clever… when it comes to Kierkegaard.

It still makes me laugh, now.

A very, very expensive joke.

Worth every penny.

Still is...

High days and holy days and days of love and tea.

St Valentine’s Day

When Serena was about seven, she gave me a St Valentine’s gift.

She was ahead of me, there. It was the first time I’d ever heard of a Valentine token being given for love, pure and simple. Not necessarily from a sweetheart of the opposite sex.

What CS Lewis called φιλία (friendship) or στοργή (family love) not ἔρως (being in love).

It was a tiny little aluminium bucket, which she had filled with sweets and garden flowers. And it had a little cardboard label tied to it with string, with a message of love pencilled on it. Something like, “To Mummy. Happy Valentine.”

I have it still. Sadly not the label. (Nor the flowers or sweeties. Don’t be silly: Serena will soon be getting a little bucket and flowers from the garden all of her own, on Mothering Sunday.)

I use it every day, in fact.

I am tea-addict.

We will probably be giving up booze for Lent. I once gave up caffeine (though this made me quite ill). Tea? Never!

Believe it or not, Shaun and I are sad enough to have his and hers kettle-and-teapots either side of the bed. In theory Shaun gets up and makes tea for both of us, so he has the two-person teapot his side (tin, so it doesn’t need heating). Often, however, I wake at 6 o’clock and really can’t wait a couple of hours before getting my brain in gear, so I fill a preliminary one-person pot (also tin, ditto), to get me started. 

Then, you know, write a blog post for you for several hours, or similar.

(As it happens, tea in bed was probably the single thing I missed most during our homeless period. Life has hit the buffers, when you don’t have enough stability to organise a kettle and teapot by the bed. Or staff.)

Then the day gets started.

Assam for breakfast: Shaun’s favourite.

(Ben thinks I’m a snob, because I consider Earl Grey in the morning chavvy. Back me up on this, readers! It is, isn’t it? That, and having to buy your own DJ instead of inheriting your grandfather’s.)

That breakfast pot can easily stretch into the afternoon.

(In the middle of all this civilisation is my mid-morning token nod to the barbarians of the EU: coffee... with cream because I dislike coffee so much. Often taken long after what should be lunchtime. Because I’ve been working so hard yeah right.)

For teatime itself, something creative: winter berry tea; or chocolate and orange tea; or even pistachio and marzipan tea. Concoctions Shaun considers revolting. Occasionally I sink to cream of Earl Grey, as long as it’s in the afternoon... though even C of EG is overrated, frankly.

Or perhaps Darjeeling if I’m feeling conventional. Spring tea, if the weather keeps warming. I suppose, St Valentine’s tea if I’d thought to order it in time and there is such a thing.

(These are all proper black teas, with full-cream milk. No girly muck. You know, stuff with rosehips or ginger or rubbish like that in it. In a teabag, with a string. Ugh.)

So I use Serena’s little bucket all day long. Until the sun is over the yard-arm. (Out of Lent, I hurry to reassure you.)

The tealeaves steep in a metal mesh bucket for the statutory number of minutes, and then I lift the mesh out of the pot and put it in Serena’s bucket, to drip. It fits, exactly.

Thus, every day, for most of the day, I have a delicious ritual which reminds me of my eldest daughter. And how much I love her. And I hope, she loves me... or did when she was seven, anyway.

And the reason I mention this today, St Valentine’s Day, the day for little gifts and symbols of love, is because I’ve been thinking a lot recently about the love between mother and daughter.

(Apologies to those of you who aren’t either. I expect blokes have something equally bondy. Shouting at the television. Imbibing a drink so vile we call it after a taste we normally avoid at all costs. That sort of thing.)

I miss my own mother every single day.

I miss asking her advice. I miss sharing things with her. I miss her comfort and acceptance of me, just as I am.

In a similar sort of way, I love asking Serena’s advice, and sharing things with her. Curiously, talking to my daughters – Rose, too – reminds me of my mother. Makes up for her.

And this love and acceptance is something I am now beginning to enjoy so very much with Bink.

You know what a wailing witch I’ve become about this renaming thing: Bink being “Robin”. I’ve wondered how I’d explain my strength of feeling to a therapist if any of them asked me. (They have far too much sense, of course. Of self-preservation.)

Every time, my explanation comes back to giving birth. If you haven’t done it, you just don’t get it. (Sorry, blokes. I’m sure war is the same.)

Latest development is that Shaun and I have been invited to a therapists’ meeting. Bottom line: if they can’t assure me they won’t call Bink “Robin” in my hearing (which I’m not at all expecting them to do: either call her this, or assure me in advance they won’t) I can’t do it.

Period, as the Americans say. (Nothing to do with being wimmin this time.)

And the delicious thing is, even though Bink is the one telling them to call her Robin, she totally rocks with this. Respects it. Accepts me as the tempestuous termagant I’m being.

So there’s a little bit of στοργή I’m really revelling in, today.

For St Valentine’s Day.

Deadline

Saturday, mid-February 2009

It was about seven thirty the next morning when I remembered.

Mark Jones.

Lawyer Number Four.

(Perhaps I should explain that the church, too, had insisted we consult a lawyer. Even offered to pay. I later thought perhaps this is a legal requirement, if you sack someone? Only thing was, their budget was just enough to pay for the kind of lawyer who would tell us to sign anything, at first skim-reading. Presumably a cheap lawyer can be as dangerous as a cheap personal trainer. Or, worse, hairdresser. You end up in more of a mess than doing it yourself in the bathroom mirror.

Anyway, we had done as instructed. No point paying for all that cleverness if you don’t listen to it, is there?)

Mark’s words had lodged, like tiny shining seeds, glistening in my memory.

Something is missing from this settlement offer. I wouldn’t have drawn it up like this.

“What your husband should do, Mrs Atkins,” I could still hear his clear, courteous words as I walked up The Avenue in Trinity, “is get a job, and take the money. Both.”

“Shaun,” I kicked him awake. “He mustn’t announce it.”

He rolled over in the other direction. Joanna had insisted on quite a lot of champagne...

“Oi. This is important.”

“Nhhnnm.”

“The Head Master. He mustn’t announce your appointment. Not until we’ve taken legal advice.”

“I can’t tell him that!”

“I can. Give me his number.”

It wasn’t quite eight o’clock. The Head was still at home.

“Would you mind,” I asked, “please, not telling anyone about Shaun’s appointment? Yet.”

I explained briefly.

“I don’t mind. But I told the bishop last night.”

“Could you tell him not to, as well?”

“Yes.”

He sounded, if anything, amused.

Of course.

He knew what we’d been through, because I’d nearly pulled out of going to speak at his church six months earlier, when Shaun had a breakdown.

Not a soul. No exceptions whatsoever. Not even Alex, away at university.

Not even my parents.

I hate secrets.

(That Saturday afternoon an old friend, an elderly clergyman, came to pray with us and support us: Shaun with no job to go to, and all. It felt bad, not telling him. Very bad indeed. When we eventually did, over a week later, asking him not to breathe a word to anyone, he instantly announced it to an entire conference of fifty clergy. Must be the long years of confidentiality training in the confessional, I suppose. Leakier than a popped paper bag in the bath.)

Shaun’s response to the settlement offer was due in by tomorrow, Sunday. The four-week deadline. 

We had written the letter and appendix. Refuting everything, accepting nothing.

It now just needed a final paragraph. The merest hint that he might be open to negotiation, perhaps…

I had made it very clear, in person, a number of times, that we could never afford a settlement without Shaun’s having another post to go to. We never could accept one. We needed a roof over our children’s heads.

If anyone had believed me, they would now know he had a job offer.

I also knew they wouldn’t.

Some churches are like that.

I’m a woman.

We had the weekend to read and reread and check.

Unfortunately, we didn’t have Mark Jones’s out-of-hours number. So, Sunday evening, we ran our week’s work past Lawyer Number Two. He couldn’t see any spelling mistakes.

The two cheerleaders would expected a discreet response, just to them. Shaun wouldn’t want the entire church knowing he’d been accused of Gross Misconduct, surely?

I thought it would be fun to deliver, by hand, hard copy to everyone on the church Parochial Church Council, as well as to the bishop. But there were nearly forty of them. An amusing gesture, but it would take us all night.

Email to everyone would have to do.

Shortly before midnight we sat round the table. (All Atkinses except Rose, in bed; and Alex, at university – I’d asked him if he wanted to be kept informed, but he said no: it would worry him.)

Agreeing that we were ready.

We pressed send...

More friendship

Friday, mid February 2009.

The bishop had forgotten I was coming. But he put the kettle on and asked after Shaun’s job application, the reason he wasn’t there.

I hadn’t taken a lawyer, no. But I had taken a lawyer’s advice.

Three-bedroom flat for the Chaplaincy, I said. Besides, all the other applicants were teachers of long experience.

* * * * *

The most stimulating day Shaun had enjoyed in ages.

Lunch with the boys. Voluble response to his lesson. No time to draw breath. Meeting. Interview. Teaching. Talking.

Buzzing, he was.

We were due to spend the evening with our dear friends next door, at the Manor House, five of us. As we were leaving, the telephone rang. Head Master.

“Shaun’s had the best day in years,” I said. “Really enjoyed it.”

“Good,” he said.

I gave Shaun the telephone.

After a few minutes we gestured that we would see him next door.

He was a long time. Half an hour. More. It didn’t matter. We sat in their kitchen, chatting, easy, at home.

I wasn’t bothered about the Chaplaincy post, had no desire to live in Bedford, Shaun didn’t want to be a teacher. It was only important because it was the first job he’d been considered for, given a chance at. It was a run-in.

I wanted to go home now, to Cambridge.

There are some evenings, moments, landmarks you will never forget. Till the end of life.

Shaun’s coming in from the cold. Down the stone steps, which linked our two gardens in secret, through the hole in the wall, in the dark.

Changed into jeans.

“I was everybody’s first choice. Governors, Director of Music, Head. Most of all, the boys.”

I can’t remember the yelps of delight or screams of astonishment from the others.

All I remember is holding on to Shaun, round his middle – I on a kitchen bar stool, he standing – holding and holding and grasping so tight it must surely hurt, rock he was, solid, sobbing over and over again.

“We won’t be homeless. We won’t be homeless. We won’t ever be homeless again.”

Relief crashing over my head as the gasping North Sea. Sucked under the tide and thrown up on the sand and gulping for breath.

The moment life changes. Turned on a sixpence.

We will not – my children will not – be homeless again. Not ever.

The champagne fired at the ceiling and gurgled into the glasses. Joanna smiling calmly and pouring. Mensun bemused as always and quietly thrilled.

The happiest moment of our lives, and they gave it to us in their kitchen, filling glasses, chinking, no need to say anything but just watch another family being happy. We hugged each other and them and cried again and drank again.

We would never be homeless again. My children will not be homeless.

Where will we live? someone must have eventually asked him.

“First thing the head said: the Chaplaincy is too small for us. Which it is. I said, it’s twice the size of our current cottage. Which it is, too. He suggested a housing allowance.”

Shaun had made a mistake, I was sure. He’d written numbers on the back of an envelope. A teacher’s salary. Twice what he’d ever been paid as a clergyman.

I kept repeating, over and over. “It can’t be!”

“John gave me the figures.”

Don’t accept it yet, I said. Not without mulling it over. That’s what went wrong with the Oxford job: too good to be true.

“Too late,” Shaun said. “I have.”

Shaun never goes back on his word. That’s what went wrong with the Oxford job, too. He simply couldn’t believe another clergyman could.

(Except to me, obv. “Yes, I’ll mend it: you’ll only mess it up.” Ten years later: “I didn’t say when.”)

Oh, what an evening that was... So happy, so wondrously, exuberantly celebratory.

So full of champagne.

Some time later, I can’t remember why, I had cause to go into the Manor House when there was nobody there. I was feeding the parrot, or something. I stood in the empty, tidy kitchen and recalled that night, and another equally memorable evening with them ten days later.

Such friendship is not in every lifetime.

It was worth four years of hell, to know – and love – you guys.

And togetherness

February 2009

Overnight we became a cottage industry.

Shaun said he’d seen a series of photographs, years ago, taken in the womb. So powerful they could be a lesson on abortion in themselves. If only he could find them...

Once he had, of course, had no idea how to display them.

So Serena stayed up all night, copying them onto her computer then burning them on to a CD. If the school didn’t have the technology to project these, I thought, the job is scuppered.

Ben went into Oxford for aftershave, deodorant, pampering items for his overnight stay with friends nearby.

I packed his case, just as I had for Alex when he had interviews at Cambridge. Linen shirt. Starched linen clerical collar. Fine wool suit, re-tailored. I’d got all these ready long before. For the time when, one day, he would be shortlisted.

Repacked. And packed again. Cufflinks. Wristwatch. The fountain pen that goes in the breast pocket.

He didn’t need any of this stuff, of course. But I had to do something.

It still wasn’t enough.

I promise you, I’ve never done this before or since. Never likely to do it again. I went out in the dark with a bucket of soapy water and sponge, and I washed the car... My lovely car, which our friend Jane had given me.

Cut me some slack. His first interview in four years.

It wasn’t even a job he wanted. The Chaplaincy accommodation was a three bedroom flat so we knew it was hopeless.

But we also all knew, without a word between us, that we had to show him how much we loved him. And looked to him to provide for us.

He left, much later than intended, on Thursday night.

To conduct, the next day, his first lesson in thirty years.

Yesterday.

I am so enjoying the Bink I am talking to now. I can’t remember when she was last so funny. Or energised... Or just... normal sounding.

And now I come to relay the conversation, I realise it won’t sound funny at all...

“I’ve gotta go.”

“Ok, Bink. What are you off to? Lunch? Something fun?”

“AA meeting.”

“AA?! Why are you going to an AA meeting?”

“I have one every day.”

“What on earth for?”

“How can you not know? You’re writing a blog about my treatment, and you don’t realise I have daily AA meetings! For the last few months...”

“Maybe because you’ve never told me?”

“Ah. Ok. Fair enough.”

“But you’re not an addict, surely? I mean, you’re just nuts.”

“So why did you put my into an addiction programme?”

“Because there wasn’t anything else! And you had to come off the Lorazepam, anyway.”

“Yeah.”

“How long do you have to do this for?”

“Life. Otherwise I’ll relapse. Apparently.”

Relapse... into what? Bink isn’t really an alcoholic, is she? Just completely off her tiddley little toddle.

I contemplate never being able to go to the pub with her again. Or open the bubbly to celebrate her being sane at last.

Maybe I should go to AA meetings...

“Is it helpful?”

“Mmm. Dunno. Not yet.”

“Well, you’d better go then. Don’t be late.”

“Yup.”

“Love you.”

“Bye.”

Perhaps, as with anything funny, you really had to be there...

PS Given that our exchange on the page doesn’t really convey how lighthearted it made me feel, I thought I’d add an anecdote on the same topic.

You’ve probably picked up by now, Shaun was the P of Parson’s Green. We had a proper Victorian vicarage, next to the church, which in turn was next to the church hall. Opposite the White Horse aka Sloaney Pony, where we were very good friends with the landlord.

The church hall, in common with most church halls, earned itself a little harmless pocket money hiring itself out for meetings.

We got to know all the schedules: Bendy Wendy’s ballet on Tuesday afternoons; PC Jamie’s women’s self-defence on Wednesdays. Not just because we were part of a lot of them, but because punters were always getting lost and ringing the vicarage bell by mistake. Thinking we looked like the church hall.

One Monday, one thirty, stranger at the door, looking for AA.

Often happened.

I directed him to the church hall. But I also happened know he was half an hour early, as AA didn’t start till two.

“Never mind,” I said. “Over the road, on the corner there, is the White Horse: the beers are supposed to be very… oops. Sorry.”

Starting to fly.

Sunday

I have one very awesome daughter.

Actually, I have three very awesome daughters. And two pretty darned awesome sons.

I just happen to be concentrating on the middle daughter at the moment, because this blog is primarily about her.

Bink transferred back to Rhodes Recovery again on Wednesday. She rang me that evening.

“All the time I’ve been in the Priory,” – she means since she was sent back there in mid-December, having had a melt-down at Rhodes which terrified all the staff – “I’ve been trying so hard to be cheerful, and just been utterly miserable. Now it’s the opposite.”

“You’re trying to be miserable?”

“I feel fine. I have no idea why.”

“Brilliant, Bink! Well done. So you’ve learnt maybe you just need to persevere through the bad times?”

“They shouldn’t have sent me back to the Priory. It was a mistake. They should have helped me work through it here.”

“It won’t have done you any harm, Bink. It doesn’t matter that you didn’t enjoy it. It’s all helpful consolidation of what you learnt the first time around.”

“S’pose. But now I’ve got a grotty room. It doesn’t even face the garden.”

“Doesn’t matter. You’re not there for ever. Are there any garden rooms available?”

“Loads.”

“So negotiate a better one. That will be good for you, too.”

“’K.”

She also negotiated leave of absence yesterday, to join Alex at a boardgames party with some Cambridge friends, having first been told she couldn’t go. Me, I’d rather have my toenails extracted with a blunt teaspoon than attend a boardgames party of Alex’s geeky goofs. But then I’m not banged up in a loony bin, with only an outside wall to look at.

I was really proud of her.

Even more impressive, she had a volcanic panic attack when she was supposed to be going back, and managed:

1. To ring me, to get the number for Rhodes Recovery.

2. To ring Rhodes and tell them she was having a panic attack. Without inducing one in them.

3. To get in an über to get back in time for curfew. After, ok, missing the first über Alex called for her, because she was in too much panic to go downstairs without him. But he called another and she got in that, and last time I spoke to her, was on track to be early back.

Wow, fab, and well done Bink!

She was also extremely wise in something she said to me the other night. As she so often can be.

I know we’re all sick to death of the Robin-name-thing... but I told her how it made me feel every time I thought of it.

Sick to death, in fact.

The idea of all those therapists calling her Robin makes my blood seethe. It’s the memories, I said. Of what you put us through. When you were off being Robin.

“I think maybe,” she said, “we need to talk about that, more than what I’m called.”

“I think maybe you’re right,” I agreed.

“In the meantime, I’ll make sure I’m not called Robin by anyone you might come across,” she promised.

“You’re a star, Bink. Thank you.”

And the picture?

I came across this some weeks ago, looking for a picture of something else. It made me think of Bink. Hugely. I’ve kept it ever since, to post when it seemed right.

(When she was little, she made numerous beautiful copies of Arthur Rackham færies, beautifully executed. I would have framed them, they were that lovely… but she did them on rough paper, on the back of maths calculations and shopping lists, many of which still showed through.)

I’ve no idea who the little boy is. Perhaps some little boy not yet born?

(He looks remarkably like Bink’s nephew, in fact… but then all babies look the same to me. Ben, Serena… show me a photograph of any of them and I can’t tell them apart.)

Fly Bink (and little boy).

Fly!

Teamwork

February 2009

The most important writing I had ever done.

Shaun had been given four weeks to respond to the church’s severance proposal. They had upped the money, but we still couldn’t possibly afford it. Rent and removal costs would gobble it up in weeks. And then we’d have nothing. Nowhere to live, nothing to live off. No prospects, no future, no nothing.

you take my life
When you doe take the meanes whereby I liue.

Without a post to go to – and therefore house to live in, and stipend to live off – Shaun couldn’t possibly relinquish the post-for-life for which he’d left his living in London.

I had told the ringleader this. We could never afford to accept.

The meanest intelligence could have worked it out. That is, unless you’d never experienced not owning your own house and having plenty of money to fall back on. 

And had no imagination.

This was a middle-class church.

Half way through the four weeks was when Shaun received his letter of accusation.

Even the bishop let slip how stupid it was. Such a careful – if idiotic – scheme designed to move us on.

Now completely blasted out of the water by a couple of people losing their nerve, firing off shots at random and trying to frighten us into accepting.

“Very silly. Very silly indeed,” had been the episcopal verdict.

We would respond to both at once.

I chose the main letter.

The church had demanded the duel and chosen the weapon. Accusation. They wanted a fight by accusation, we would have to do the same. If we were to survive.

For over four years we had not protested. Not even when they made us homeless. Shaun had done the job to the best of his always impressive ability. I had licked my family’s wounds and looked for a way out. We had over four years of unexpressed complaints.

There was no shortage of material.

Shaun took the appendix, answering the allegations. Point by point, accusation by accusation, evidence for evidence. Every assertion, refuted meticulously. Shooting down the sorry scarecrows which had looked so large and real and frightening at first sight.

As I’d told him, as soon as you went boldly up to them and poked them, you could see they were nothing but straw.

All lies and misrepresentations.

The children pitched in. Phrasing, editing, researching, rephrasing.

The writer’s first discipline is to write what’s in front of you. See the truth. Then tell it.

I had witnessed it. I must write it.

I chose my text: the church’s own employment handbook. How it had failed its own criteria.

Page after page. Detail after detail. The discrepancy between promise and outcome. The contradiction between the church’s principles and its behaviour. No aspect left unchecked. Acts of Parliament going back decades. Synodical Government Measures.

Barely a few hours’ sleep each night. Thinking, writing, fact-finding, editing. Keeping myself awake with willpower and determination.

And the knowledge that, if ever I had to fight for my family, it was now.

John McCarthy, in Some Other Rainbow, wrote that an early attempt to escape his captors failed because his bowels played up. I found this astonishing. When you have to do it, your body gets behind you.

A lawyer friend once said to me, include all. Put in everything.

My letter was soon ten pages.

Shaun’s too.

Monday, I had to write Thought for the Day.

Tuesday, to London for the Titchmarsh Show. I worked on that letter in every spare moment, in the dressing room.

Wednesday, I took a call from Bedford School.

Shaun’s application had been held up in the snow.

It had missed the deadline by a week.

But it had been franked on the correct day – so we hadn’t missed the post-van, then? – and they would honour it. 

Would he come for interview on Friday? He would be taking a lesson. First time shortlisted in over three years.

“I can’t teach,” he pointed out.

“You’ve got till Friday to learn.”

Dogs and lawyers

February 2009

We liked Lawyer Number Three. No surprises there. Brian had found her.

I spent two days sending her pages of notes. Then cursed my thoroughness and attention to detail.

“This name here,” she said. Tiny bit-player in the corner: church treasurer or some-such. Needn’t have mentioned him at all. “I’ve acted for his firm.”

Conflict of interest. End of relationship. Deep disappointment.

She recommended two other firms, both Christian. Croydon or Birmingham. Croydon sounded closer.

Lawyer Number Four.

Mark Jones.

He told me to email everything over.

He rang a day or two later – when I was walking through The Avenue of Trinity College (the correct Trinity, obviously) presumably with Serena as she is a member – addressing me most courteously, as Mrs Atkins.

Coo. V professional. Sadly didn’t make me any richer though.

Mark explained his fees. Including telephone conversations.

I felt hot all over, and slightly sick. There was nowhere to sit down. Did this mean we already owed him squillions?

I didn’t dare ask.

How brief could I make the conversation?

(Bloke rings lawyer. Asks fee.

“Five-hundred-pounds-for-three-questions.”

“Isn’t that rather a lot?”

“Yes-what’s-your-last-question?”)

Mark had scanned the proposed settlement. “There’s something missing,” he observed.

“Oh?” I said. Slightly more attentive now. Like a dog, my eyes watching a stick. Was that all it was? Or was it a bone...?

“I would never have drawn up a settlement like this,” he continued.

“Why?” I said. “What’s wrong?”

“They’ve left something out.” I could hear his brain whirring impressively, down the line. “A settlement like this should always be conditional,” he explained. “They’ve forgotten to specify that the money will only be forthcoming if your husband hasn’t got another job.”

Only a stick, then.

Shaun hadn’t got another job. What difference did it make?

“What you should do,” he said, “is this. Your husband should get a new job. And accept the money. Both.”

Yeah right.

And nip to the moon in the meantime.

A day or two later, Lawyer Two rang back. Reluctant. He knew members of the church.

Knowing what I know now, it seems extraordinary that he considered it at all. Surely, with not just clients but friends on the other side, there was far more conflict than for Lawyer Three?

But as he heard the way Shaun had been treated, his blood stirred.

“I’ll do it,” he said. He was Louis’s contact. It seemed to make sense.

“Thank you,” I said.

Know what? I’ve just remembered…

(That you get what you pay for? It’s ok thanks: I knew that already. That money spent on a really decent lawyer can return you an hundredfold? That I was soon to learn, too.)

Lawyer Two’s name was Robin.

* * * * *

I’d never thought Serena’s dog would earn his keep. That next weekend, he did. For life.

Serena’s – like Shaun’s, his successor – was a harlequin Great Dane. Handsome, enormous and almost completely pointless. Until that weekend.

And since our, and his, trauma of homelessness, very slightly unreliable.

Shameful to relate, given that this was a church, I knew it had become a bloke-thing. In truth, had been ever since I hadn’t done as I was told.

Watch me demean you. Mine is bigger than yours.

I can even make your children homeless.

We had been invited to Neil and Christine Hamilton’s honey-stone gorgeous manor for the weekend. (We had met at the Mail on Sunday Christmas party some weeks earlier and, hearing our story, Christine had been kindness itself: sending flowers and pink champagne and chocolates, just to cheer us.)

Meanwhile, the church-member who had taken our humiliation upon his shoulders told us that he and another needed to take an inventory of our cottage. They would visit on Friday, late afternoon. I replied with polite regret: we might have left already. How about Monday?

“No matter,” he said. “We have the key.”

Now, clergy accommodation is not tenancy. You don’t get much dosh, as a vicar, but you are still accorded some respect. Although clergy never own their homes, they are deemed as if they do.

He was a lawyer himself. He had no legal right to let himself into Shaun’s tied accommodation, without his permission.

No matter, as he said. It nicely served to illustrate that we had nothing. They were in control. That I should have done as I was told first time around, and would certainly have to now.

“Entirely up to you,” I emailed back cheerfully, “but Hamlet will be here. We can’t answer for his response, with strange men” (they’d both met him, but I liked the tag) “letting themselves in, and us not here to approve you.”

Great Danes are soft as cuddly toys.

Just as well. With half a mind (rather more than they usually engage) they could take your throat out in seconds. Several of you at once.

They are the size of lions.

“We’ll see you on Monday,” he emailed back.

Dignity, delivered by dog.

We set off in more deep snow.

More deeply though, I regretted not taking Hamlet with us. He would have loved Christine’s lovely home and lovelier gardens.

All in the snow and all.

Through the snow

February 2009

We wanted to move to Cambridge, to care for my parents. And be there for our children. And because we both love the city...

All C of E posts, we now knew, were barred to Shaun… and had been for three years. Because the Archdeacon of Cambridge didn’t like me.

So Shaun asked an old friend, a school chaplain, if he’d write him a reference for a Cambridge school.

“Bedford School’s looking,” the friend said. “Apply for that.”

“Why?”

“So I don’t have to.”

“You realise I know next to nothing about teaching?”

Unlike most of the others, some demanding thirty-page forms, Bedford School required a CV and two referees.

Five minutes.

Must be run by someone sensible.

The application was due the next day.

That evening we were having dinner with the Mawhinneys, near Peterborough. Brian and Betty were old friends from Shaun’s first curacy, three decades earlier. Ever since, Brian had maintained – and still does – that Shaun is the best preacher he’s ever heard.

He’d long agreed to act as referee.

So we needed to tell them the worst. If Brian was going to recommend him, he should know what Shaun had been accused of.

The snow smothered the ground and swirled the air.

I dashed out into it, to a pillar box in a village on the way. Last collection 6pm. It was dead on six o’clock. No sign of the post van anywhere.

Perhaps we’d missed it? No time to find another. We’d be late if we dithered.

I shoved the application into its gaping black mouth.

Dear Betty had gone to much trouble. How good it is, to be among old friends! When the chips are down. You know who stands by you, then.

How are you? How are the children? How’s it all going?

We had to spit it out sooner or later.

Breakdown. Gross Misconduct. Not looking good.

A neon light, Shaun said, blazed into life behind Brian’s eyes. The constituency MP in him fired and crackled. Much more interesting than children and how are you. His leonine, fierce intelligence roared to 60 mph from a standstill.

“Get a lawyer.”

“Of course,” we said. “But how?”

“And don’t ever go and see your bishop again without one.”

“But Brian,” I said, “we’re due to see him at eight o’clock tomorrow morning.”

“Cancel. You’ve got to make him sit up and take notice. You never walk into his house again without a lawyer in tow.”

When you’ve been Cabinet Minister and Chairman of the Tories, senior bishop in the Ho of Lords is small fry squirming in the shallows.

It was already gone ten at night and Brian was on the telephone. Animated, insistent.

Twenty minutes later he had a lawyer for us. And had briefed her.

Lawyer Number Three.

We drove home late, in much deeper snow, Brian’s fighting spirit warming our cheeks to a chubby glow.

Before eight the next morning I left a voicemail, cancelling our meeting. Within minutes the bishop rang back.

Sitting up and taking notice.

Chance and Chancery

Mid-January 2009

“Sign.”

“I’m sorry?”

“Your husband must sign.”

“Sign what?”

“Anything. Whatever they’re offering. He hasn’t got a leg to stand on.”

So that’s what happens when you consult a lawyer.

I had sent him the letter, accusing Shaun of everything: robbing the Bank of England, being rude to his mother, pulling wings off flies.

This was his educated legal response.

It was like sitting in class... and realising the teacher has completely misunderstood the Second Law of Thermodynamics and thinks gravity works upwards. (Ok, that may not be the 2nd L of TD, but you get the gist. Don’t quibble.) 

Fat lot of use you are.

He’d obviously only read the letter once. I could have told him to read it four times because it gets clearer it’s a scam after the third, but I reasoned that if I had to tell my lawyer how to suck eggs it was probably going to be quite a messy relationship.

Lawyer Number One. Neighbour of our cousins.

It was Louis who came up with Lawyer Number Two. A contact via church.

Friends in Shaun’s employing church, also clergy, were going through a pretty rough ride at the same time as us, employed (or rather not, any more) at the theological college Wycliffe Hall. They had come across Lawyer Number Two during their own dispute, and were pretty unimpressed.

Presumably he was no good either.

How many lawyers can it take to change a light bulb? Several to mess it up, and one to sue all the rest...

At the beginning of February I received the call I’d been dreading since my column hadn’t run, for a week, before Christmas.

Recession. Can’t afford. Month’s notice.

Yeah right. You wrote a dud column, you dumbo: looking after everyone. One clinker in four years. But enough.

For the first time in all the time I’d known him, I considered hiding something from Shaun. He still wasn’t well. His confidence some depth below the floor. Now I had no income either. My weekly column had been bringing in more than Shaun’s stipend.

Staring destitution in the face wouldn’t help him get a job, would it?

So I waited for the post, which we’d been pinning all our hopes on for Shaun for half a year, to come and go. Which of course it did. Same Archdeacon of Cambridge.

By now we knew to expect nothing.

In the light of everything we were teetering on the brink of, my loss of income hardly seemed to register. I told him.

He barely shrugged.

It was then that I did the most irrational thing I’ve done in my life. Whilst knowing how irrational it was.

I don’t think I’ve ever ’fessed up to this to anyone before.

Presumably this is what sells more Lottery tickets than anything. Not idiotic hope. Not, as my brother says, statistical stupidity.

Simply despair.

I just couldn’t think what else to do.

Serena once told me that if you are going to waste money on the Lottery you can increase your infinitesimal chance by some infinitesimal amount by buying them all at once. A hundred (strictly a hundred and four, obv) Lotto tickets in one weekend offer slightly better odds than two a week for a year.

I’m not very interested in statistics and I can’t remember why.

I wasn’t going to waste £100. That would be seriously dumb. If God wanted to save us through the National Lottery he could do it on a tenner just as easily.

So I shoved £10 in some fund or other which would notify me if I won. I knew I’d never get around to working out how to check my numbers. Out of this, I bought eight tickets.

I never expected to hear anything. I wouldn’t have been able to explain myself to my father if I had. He stopped voting Tory the day John Major brought it in and considers gambling economic prostitution.

I never did buy the last two tickets. Presumably I still have £2 on account.

Two months later, I thought of that wild gambling bid over and over again.

God does have a sense of humour.

Acceptance

4th February 2019

My dearest Bink

I’ve started a letter to you several times over the last few weeks, but have so much to say that other people’s demands have taken over, each time, long before I finished.

And now, again, I’ve thought a great deal about all you said last night, as well as on previous occasions, and again there are so many issues I’d like to talk to you about that I’ve decided to pick just one. Maybe I’ll write you another letter about the next one... and so on.

The first thing I want to say is, Sorry.

There seems to be an aspect of my approach to life – because I don’t accept things that aren’t what I consider the best they could be – which is unhelpful to you. Because it means I don’t accept your being ill. And that makes you feel I don’t accept you. So the first thing I want to do is apologise, if this has been hurtful for you. Please forgive me. If you can.

Of course, I immediately wondered whether I could change. But I’m not sure I would want to even if I could, so instead let me try to explain my attitude. It’s not unique to you, specifically: you know this. I have the same approach to everyone and everything.

My Philosophy.

Basically, my interpretation of the first three chapters of Genesis is that God created us good and well and to live for ever, and this is our natural state. Anything less is not how He made us to be. And therefore not our natural, true, real selves.

Consider the pronouncement that, as a result of the Fall, man will rule over woman. (Or that there will be pain in childbirth, or work will be tough and frustrating, or any aspect you like.) There have been plenty of (male!) theologians who have argued that God is decreeing this superiority of men over women, rather than simply describing it. (And plenty of women I know who have gone along with this.) This is how we’re supposed to be: men ruling the world.

I don’t accept this: not at all. Everywhere around me I see men (still, even now) having the upper hand: the privileges; the advantages; that so-fruitful freedom to focus, undistracted by cares and multitasking. The effect of superior strength in a fallen world. I see this bias as something to challenge and overcome, because it is not the original, egalitarian and co-operative way we were created to be.

Similarly, this is my attitude to your illness, just as it would be to my own.

I’m really sorry if, in some ways, it’s unhelpful... but I’ll come on to that.

My Approach.

So I fight things which aren’t as I’d like them to be, or believe to be the best they should or could be.

Take our time in Oxfordshire. The church (eventually) housed us in a cottage far too small for us and miles from anywhere.

I was well aware at the time that many people would have put up with this. Many godly vicars’ wives would have seen this as God’s provision and embraced it, to support their husbands. I was realised such an approach almost certainly would have led to an easier, and happier in the short term, life for everybody. (Possibly even for her, if she were genuinely reconciled to it.)

I can’t and don’t do this: put up with second best. All the time we were living in that pretty little village in that pretty little cottage, I was chafing and struggling and wanting something better. So I was living with a deep dissatisfaction, rumbling under all the joy and friendship and happiness we managed to scrape together there, all the time... until eventually I changed our future.

Or take my inability to write a novel for twenty years. There was part of me, for all those years, utterly miserable at my failure. I often wondered whether I should just give up being a novelist and content myself with cooking or something... Wouldn’t that be easier? But I knew I would always be disappointed in myself if I did.

And now, because I wouldn’t and couldn’t give up, I have another novel on my bookshelves.

My Effect.

I can quite see that this may not be comfortable to live with. And I’m very sorry if it makes you feel rejected. Really, very sorry indeed.

On the other hand... 

Many people have said, one way or another, that no one else would have got you to where you are now. Other parents, mothers even, might have felt obliged to accept things as they were, because getting anything better for you – any help at all – was so completely and utterly impossible.

I couldn’t tolerate this: the idea of your being ill for the rest of your life – or even the prime of your life (do you remember that lovely, ineffectual Irish shrink who said these things often resolve themselves in midlife?) – so I strove and strove and strove until I found a better way for you: a programme of treatment. 

Simon Scantlebury likes to quote my “Impossibles” as he calls them. Impossible things he says I have achieved, which he shows to his clients. He had a list of twenty-one at the last count: things I had been told I couldn’t do, or Shaun couldn’t do, or no one could do. That other people considered impossible.

The impossible I am most proud of is getting you into the Priory. That seems the most impossible, to me. I scarcely even believed it possible myself. I just had to try. Because it was even more impossible to give up and accept the idea of your being ill for the rest of your life.

I’m nearly at the end of the page and that’s enough for one letter. Please believe that I accept you. I love you and always will: ill or well. I just don’t accept your illness as being the true and real and best you for you to be. Hope this makes sense.

Love you, always,

Axxx

Hope

Yesterday

At last, I spoke to Bink. First time in ages, it feels. Her voice like honey on a sore throat.

She is low, though.

Caring about nothing, wanting nothing, seeing hope in nothing.

Just existing.

“Are you upset about your friend Tom?”

“Not for him. He’s better off.”

“Nobody is better off dead, Bink.”

(And then I remember what my father’s carer said yesterday. The sooner he can go, the better.

Really? No!

Yesterday, two of his pupils from forty years ago, twins, came to lunch. Brought communion – one of them a naval padre – and the BCP.

And company and laughter and anecdotes and very good wine. Not that my father can taste very good wine. Not at 101. Truth is, he could never taste good wine.

But we can...

And tonight he and I went over, again, Dido’s chilling curse on Æneas towards the end of Book IV. I’d forgotten less than I’d feared, in the fortnight he’s been in hospital. And tomorrow my brother comes and on Wednesday my sister... He’s not ready yet; not quite yet.)

Is anyone better off dead?

“Better than where he was.”

“What was wrong?”

“Depression.”

“He could have got well, Bink.”

“I don’t see how.”

“There was the possibility of it. He can’t get well now, can he?”

“He has, now.”

Hmm. 

We considered reasons.

“Because I’m not on Lorazepam any more? Professor Veale says this is just my natural state, without drugs.”

Well that’s great, that is.

“Don’t you think you’re any better? At all?”

“Maybe I am. My OCD is a lot better.”

“That’s fantastic, Bink! Really exciting.” So… “What would you like to do with your life?”

“Nothing.”

“What would you enjoy?”

“Dunno.”

“Isn’t there anything you want?”

“Not really.”

I tried my mother’s old trick.

“If you could do anything in the world, no restrictions, anything at all?”

“To go back in time and my life not fall apart.”

Ok... Even I agree that’s unlikely.

Going back in time is challenging. Alex could perhaps manage it – when he was thirteen he explained time-travel to me in great detail, and it really did sound possible… in the future if not yet – and given that time often seems to stand still for Alex anyway, perhaps he might reverse it one day.

“Suppose your life hadn’t fallen apart. What would you have now?”

“Babies.”

“Is that what you’d like most of all?”

“Yes.”

“So, Bink, there is something you want! That the most positive thing you’ve said in the last half hour. You want babies. Come up with a plan. Work out how to meet interesting people. Find work that will introduce you...”

My cousin Fleur has said it to me over and over again, in the last ten years or so. 

Where there’s life there’s hope. Jewish saying, apparently.

For Tom, no hope left.

For Bink, all the hope in the world.

Babies.

Hold onto that, Bink. It may not be a fashionable ambition. It wouldn’t be mine. But lots of people have wanted babies. My mother: maths scholar; life-changing teacher. What gave her most satisfaction?

Family.

Mary. Queen of England. First ever female reigning monarch. Paved the way for Elizabeth, Victoria, Elizabeth. What did she want?

Babies.

Lots of lovely chubby babies.

Care and caution

Sunday

Those of you who have been with us a while will know the Sunday rules:

1. Current news.

2. Good news.

3. Bink’s news.

(And that it’s not always possible to have all three.)

We have got good, current, Bink news today. Very good.

But not exclusively so…

The plan was always that Bink would go from the North London Priory on to the new Rhodes Recovery for secondary care.

She did.

Unfortunately, after her first week in which she was extremely enthusiastic about her new environment, she had a weekend with not enough structure or company and her mood dipped.

When Bink’s mood dips it can be quite frightening. The first few times. Even for professionals.

She can scream non-stop for several hours, audible half a street away. That’s just for starters. She can curl into a ball under a table and not speak or move at all, except perhaps rocking slightly, also for an impressively long time. She can set fire to things or barricade things or go completely rigid or mute or smash a whole pile of twenty plates, one by one, slowly, at three in the morning.

Not at our house, this latter, because it’s very much against the rules. Destroying things. But if you haven’t thought to put the rules in place.

Serena is used to it. And yet the last time Serena came home and Bink had that kind of mood swing, she went back to her own house exhausted for half a week, just listening to it. And trying to protect her baby from the emotional fall-out of hearing it.

Bink hadn’t been specifically warned not to express herself quite so freely in Rhodes Recovery. And when she hit a low after that first weekend she also happened to use the word, “suicidal”.

She is adamant that she didn’t say she was suicidal, merely that she felt suicidal, but it triggered an immediate response and she was sent straight back to the North London Priory the very same day, on the grounds that Rhodes hasn’t got the resources to care for patients who are at risk.

(Well, neither have we. But God never gave her family an Acute Referral option.)

At this point one could have a debate about mental health professionals knowing the difference between suicidal feelings and suicidal intentions. 

On the other hand, I don’t suppose it’s done Bink any harm at all to learn that expressing her panic and stress in certain ways spreads a lot of panic and stress to others around her without necessarily reducing the panic and stress she herself is feeling.

(I wish I’d thought to communicate that to her myself, years ago, as emphatically as Rhodes Recovery has. But see above, re Domestic Backstops, lack of.)

It has taken her since well before Christmas until now to persuade them that, however alarming she might have sounded, this was just her way of telling them she wasn’t feeling great and it didn’t mean she was at risk at all.

So the very good news, today, now, as of two days ago, is that Rhodes Recovery has at last agreed to give her another chance.

On condition that she doesn’t curl into a ball, scream the place down, or – specifically – bandy the word suicidal around the place.

They haven’t put it quite like that, I don’t suppose. But that’s what it amounts to.

“If you are suicidal,” I explained to her as clearly as I knew how, “then yes, you must say so. Scream so. Pull out all all the loudest Principal stops, so. Ambulances will come hallooing and swerving and bash down anything in the way, there will be a huge noise and fuss and flashing of blue wailing banshees and you will be slung out of Rhodes for ever. But you will be alive. So please do this, if you really are suicidal, Bink.

“However, if you are merely trying to convey how distressed you are, please simply express yourself, specifically and clearly. Such as, ‘I’m feeling very distressed’.”

I believe she’ll stay.

Bink has never lacked grey matter. Or motivation.

She just needed to know the rules.

That is the good news.

The bad – and very sad – news is that I can totally see it from their point of view. Having just heard other news too, two days ago.

Serena rang Bink and she told her.

I only know what Serena told me.

Bink was admitted to hospital (doesn’t matter where or when: she has been hospitalised a number of times) with someone I’ll call Tom.

Serena met Tom. He was: “a very sweet grown man,” (I had confused him with a teenager of the same name) “who was outside talking to her in the garden when we visited, so lonely he then ‘happened’ to bump into us when we were in the playground and café with Bink.”

Bink talked about him a lot. To Serena. (Not to me.) 

She was worried. Said he shouldn’t be discharged. Would be at risk.

“Bink,” Serena assured her, “you can surely leave this to the professionals. They’ll know if he isn’t safe. It’s not your responsibility.”

He shouldn’t be discharged, Bink said.

He shouldn’t.

He was.

I’ve often thought Bink quite exceptionally perceptive. When she’s not completely nuts, that is. (Quite often, when she is.) She also cares. A lot.

Perhaps she cares too much…? Perhaps that’s partly what makes her nuts…

The brutal and economic truth is that, because Tom was discharged, no one will be held responsible. I’m not saying I want anyone to be held responsible. Legally. I doubt it helps anyone.

When Bink had to leave Rhodes before, Serena sounded pretty upset. Suppose she kills herself in a few months’ time, because she didn’t have the secondary care? (She won’t, because Bink doesn’t go around killing herself. But if she were genuinely at risk…?) Would that make it all right, because she’s not their responsibility?

Tom’s tragedy may presumably have happened precisely because he was discharged.

The irony being that what clears such a decision legally, may be exactly what implicates it morally.

Friendship

Mid-January 2009

[Spot the date, above. So you don’t get as confused as I am, most of the time. With all these spaghetti threads of story waving their drunken Hydra tendrils, constituting my life.

For instance yesterday… spending four and a half hours the moment I came out of a meeting: asking my father’s care provider why she hadn’t told me on Thursday that she couldn’t get care in place for him to come home from hospital, so Shaun and I rushed all the way back from Norfolk to welcome him only to find his room empty; sending texts to all the carers I could think of asking if they were available; finally getting care in place for the weekend… and then discovering the provider had pulled it because she doesn’t like the client making the arrangements; ringing another provider at five o’clock yesterday afternoon asking if they could produce 24-hour-care out of a hat till Monday; ringing the ward half a dozen times to say don’t cancel the ambulance… so my father could come home, where we’ve promised him he can die. Not that I think he will, now he’s home. Not immediately.

Settling him by his fire and Shaun’s pouring him far too strong a whisky and just being glad he’s here. Welcome home, Daddy. Can we resume our Virgil tomorrow? We’re nearly at the end of Ænead IV: please don’t leave us before Dido does.

(And now, of course, determined to sack the care provider since I’m the one that has all this hassle every time… but this will mean sacking all the familiar faces around a dying man.)

Next time you read about bed-blockers, this is what it takes. And about £800 of my father’s money, to free up his hospital bed for the weekend and have him home… Not willing to waste a penny of the NHS, am I, given the nothing there isn’t for Bink?

We resume the story we left off a week ago, after Shaun received his letter of accusation. You remember: he was guilty of Gross Misconduct. Four pages of it.]

So I went upstairs, with my telephone, into that bathroom piled high with cardboard boxes full of books and other possessions as the whole cottage was, and locked the door.

I’ve no idea why. I suppose I didn’t want Shaun to hear me. And worry any more.

You may have read my earlier post, The Sun King, about our dear, wonderful and generous friend Louis. And his gorgeous pad in Scotland which became my home for three lonely and beautiful months, when we had nowhere to live.

Louis and I were at Oxford together. Then we lost touch, and reunited some years later when he came and helped lead the Christian CYFA Venture Holidays Shaun and I used to run together.

The first time he bailed us out – he often has since – was after a house-group he came to in our sitting-room during Shaun’s second curacy. House-groups are smaller groups within a church, which get together in someone’s home for bible study, prayer and being nice to each other. After you’ve poured over a passage of Scripture and asked rather-too-obvious questions, you usually share prayer needs; and earlier that day I’d bonked our car against someone else’s bumper on the school run and was terrified we might be stung for £20 or so. (It was presumably another Christian driver, since our children were at a Christian nursery school… actually thanks to Louis, now I think about it, as he’d told us about it. Sadly, sometimes – not usually, in my experience; but occasionally – Christians care about their cars as much as the next man. Fair enough.)

In those days, living on a curate’s income or more accurately lack of as we were, £20 was enough to reduce me to a helpless sobbing jelly before lunch: as when the washing machine broke down (which it often did as we had a second-hand one and washed several bottom’s worth of nappies every week) and a friend fixed it for us… but the engineer can’t be cancelled now love ’e’s on ’is way so you’ll still have to pay the call-out when he turns up. Waaah-waaah. For several hours.

So please, I said, could we pray that the other driver couldn’t be bothered, as we hadn’t got £20?

Louis had a quiet word with me afterwards, and told me to send him the bill. The worry fell off me like Pilgrim’s burden.

Louis is Ben’s godfather, and adored by all of us. He is a very, very special friend, and the rest of our lot are pretty fed up with Ben, for bagging him at the font.

(I can say all this freely, because the chance of Louis’s reading my blog is nil. I was once reduced to mentioning him in the acknowledgements to one of my novels, in the hope that it would shame him into reading it. It didn’t. Hello, Louis?? Anybody out there? Helloooo?! I’m about to smash your grandfather Louis’s priceless set of Louis XIV crystal champagne glasses! See? Silence.)

So I locked the door, and dialled his number, and got his voicemail as I’d expected to. It was eleven o’clock in the morning, when Louis is presumably a tad distracted, running the London Stock Exchange.

I knew he wouldn’t be there, answering what he calls his cellphone, but I couldn’t think what else to do. I don’t usually leave a message for busy people.

“Hi Louis. We’re in deepest shit. Um. That’s it really.”

I don’t think I even say goodbye, before hanging up.

It was nearly twelve hours before he returned the call. Gone ten thirty. Ready for bed.

At that time you could still have two people on different handsets on the same line, so I listened in upstairs while Shaun spoke to Louis downstairs. Mind you, the cottage was so small I probably could have heard most of the conversation anyway.

The first thing he said, I could have predicted.

“Get a lawyer.”

Obvious. When you live on a clergy stipend, you don’t always think of the obvious.

It was the last thing, however, that was and remains so precious.

He and Shaun had been talking for about fifteen or twenty minutes, and suddenly Louis sounded almost vulnerable. Perhaps I imagined it, but there seemed a tremor of doubt in his voice. Almost as if he were asking us for reassurance.

“We’ll get through this, Shaun. Won’t we?”

We.

Not you. We.

“Yes,” I suppose Shaun said. “We will.”

That is friendship. That’s why Louis is so special.

Names

This week

“I like the name Robin.”

Thing is, when I talk to Bink these days, she sounds almost completely sane. Which is, actually, very good news indeed. Because if she sounds sane, she probably is... in that moment, anyway.

And then I remember her utter misery on the morning of Christmas Day: nothing in her life to live for; longing only for the darkness of death; not having that to fall back on so staying under the duvet for as much of life as possible, the closest to such oblivion she can find.

And then I think, perhaps all Bink can do is the same as all the rest of us can do: plough on, with discipline and perseverance and as many cups of tea as it takes, to shift the balance from desperate to joyous moments – with all the bearable moments filling the sandwich in-between – so the latter outweigh the former just enough for there to be sunshine and birdsong to get up for.

I thought of another possible significance, when I was writing to the therapist about it.

At exactly the age Bink got ill, she very much wanted to be a boy. I did too, as it happens. (No, not when Bink was that age: don’t be silly…)

I was brought up in a school which educated one of the best-known choirs in the world. My friends, golden heroes of romance and privilege, blonde heads tall above me. thwacking sixes over the boundary in the sun, many of them going on to become world-class musicians.

Unthought of that girls could be so revered. Not even allowed to wield the willow, let alone sing.

It’s not rocket science, is it?

Bink, too, fought for recognition in a school still favouring the males: the only girl in the cricket and football teams.

We have agreed, she and I, that we both would have opted for transition if it had been available, we were that serious about it. And have thanked God that it wasn’t.

One of the corrections Bink made when proof-reading my book was to the spelling of a minor policewomen. “Always spelt with a ‘y’ for a women,” she said. “Well, except by me.”

“I’ve always like the name Robin. I thought at the time, What a shame that he” (her abusive therapist) “spoilt it.”

Never actually said so at the time, though, did you Bink? Never wanted to be called Robin, as far as I know, until several Robins had done you quite a lot of damage and you were very seriously ill.

Of course Robin is a lovely name.

I know several Robins, and like them all.

I have a cousin Robin, who came with his wife (my blood cousin) to visit my father the other day – as the world and his wife have been doing since I rather rashly told several hundred family members and ex-pupils that they might not have long to say goodbye – which reminded me that this particular Robin is one of my favourite people.

Since Christmas I’ve discovered another cousin Robin, living in Germany, who – without having met me (or even spoken or written to me: his wife reads this blog, and made contact) – has just bought me a book. Can’t get much better than that, for a writer, can you? Yes, indeed you can. The book is secretly hollowed out, which is pretty darn cool.

And inside the hollow are two bottles of whisky! And the book is called Writer’s Tears.

It totally wouldn’t be possible to like any Robin more than that, would it?

(I even received a lovely email a couple of days ago from a vicar I know called Robin, who had liked my most recent Thought for the Day.)

I’ve mentioned the robin that visits our bird-table. A few years ago the Today Programme discovered the robin is the nation’s favourite bird. (Cutting edge investigative journalism for you. They’ll be covering war zones next.)

Everyone likes robins.

The fact that I’ve illustrated the loveliness of the name by telling you of several Robins I’m fond of proves the point though, doesn’t it?

Nicola is a thin name. I pretend that this is because of the i and c sound, but it isn’t really: it’s because Nicola was tall and boney and came top of every exam we ever sat. (I bumped into her when speaking at a Christian conference decades afterwards, and she admitted with breezy honesty that it was the last time she ever came top of anything. Peaked in the fourth form. There’s a lesson in there somewhere about not taking your French vocab and capital cities too much to heart.)

Bettina is a short stubby name with curly red-blonde hair. Who picks her nose and wipes it under the bed. (I thought it disgusting aged six, but she assured me that no one would ever know.)

You can play this game at home.

Peter: son of our cleaner, who nicked everything. Crispin: tall, dark and utterly drop-dead gorgeous; chic and trailblazing to the last, he introduced us all to muesli and was my first friend to die of AIDS.

It’s how names work.

Anyways, as I say, Bink was sounding on pretty good form.

“What do you want to be called?”

“I really don’t care. I wished, immediately afterwards, I’d asked to be called Majesty.”

“I could do Majesty. Majesty would be fun. Is it too late to change?”

“Dunno.”

“Can’t do this, though. Sorry, Bink.”

“You mean, you can’t call me Robin?”

“No. I mean, I can’t engage with anyone who does.”

“Ok.”

We all have our lines in the sand.

Bink’s therapist wouldn’t let her take bread-and-butter into the session. It was gone four in the afternoon and she hadn’t yet had breakfast, so I pinched some from the canteen. We had to start a couple of minutes late.

That’s ok: I respect that. No food in the classroom.

I have mine, too. I don’t do meetings in which Bink is going to be Robined all over the place. (Haven’t been invited to any since this business started, but just flagging up.)

My bread-and-butter in the sand. Reminiscent of all the picnics my parents ever organised. Not pleasant even then.

Which in turn means I’m very much hoping and praying she really doesn’t mind. Because if she comes out of the Priory full of beans and exuberance, as of course we hope she will; and starts making friends like a normal person, as has been my prayer (and that of many others) for many years; and invites all her mates home, as we love our children to do... 

And they’re Robining her over breakfast…

Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.

I suspect you’re as sick of names as I am now, so tomorrow we will revert to Shaun’s life-stopping letter in the snows of 2009. There is lovely snow now, all over our garden and the roofs.

I wonder whether that will bring my little robin back?

Apeshit

Last week.

So I wended in the general direction of what is known in the trade as apeshit.

Not at first, of course. I was properly brought up. I don’t go around threatening to put arsenic in my daughter’s therapists’ tea just because they do something perfectly therapisty like… arrgghhhhh!

Deep breath.

At first I replied, very calmly, That’s bad news. I don’t suppose she told you the associations?

Then (having no response) I sent a much longer email spelling out the associations.

Then I did nothing for a couple of days (except worry myself sick, obviously; and ring Serena a lot, probably) and then I rang Bink because it was Sunday and she has Sunday afternoons off in Therapyland, and we had a lovely long conversation about this and that and how are you and whatnot, at the end of which I said, casual-like, I hear you’re calling yourself Robin again?

And she said, They said I couldn’t be Bink any more.

What?

“A bunch of therapists got together and decided I couldn’t be Bink, and I’d have to call myself something else.”

So I went from sick with anxiety to hugely, hugely, HUGELY relieved – I mean, come on: I’d much rather have mad therapists than a mad daughter, wouldn’t you? Therapists are supposed to be nuts –and really only mildly p***** off because after all, I was soooo relieved that she hadn’t come up with this whacky, crazed idea all on her own.

And sent another email expressing my concern about a policy of getting already loony patients to screw with their surely loony enough identity, and then slept on it and sent another email saying, Maybe I did you an injustice and Bink was fibbing?

She does do that, sometimes, when she’s painted herself into a corner. And no of course it doesn’t help, but one of the things about extreme anxiety is that you sometimes do something which is pretty dumb in the long run but gets you out of an immediate anxiety-inducing hole. Or corner. Or indeed yet another nail-across-a-blackboard mixed metaphor.

And then I thought, If I were a therapist, I hope I’d be perceptive enough to notice that this mother here might be a teensy weensy bit exercised about this whole Robin thing, what with all these emails flying my way like Red Indians’ arrows at the Lone Ranger, and all. Oop, sorry: Native American arrows, given that we’re in therapyspeak. Not sure what the PC is for the Lone Ranger, but presumably something like, Solitary Person Riding Around a Bit to the Sound of Rossini.

And if I were a therapist, I hope I’d be compassionate enough to pick up the telephone and be nice to her about it. Especially as she has asked me to get to the bottom of this.

After all it must be quite tough enough already, being mother to a lunatic.

If I were a therapist, that is. Given that being a therapist is presumably about a) spotting stuff like that and b) solving it.

Two days (five days after the original email) later the therapist finally rang. About something else, I think.

And then I went apeshit.

For a full fifteen minutes, I’d say.

Do you not think Bink has enough freakiness in her life, without being called by the name of her abuser? Of course it’s freaky! Have you renamed yourself? No, neither have I. I didn’t choose the name I go by, and probably wouldn’t have, actually, given the choice. (Quite a boring name, Anne.) I just go with it. Because my parents chose it for me. Like ninety-nine point nine nine per cent of the rest of us, named by our parents and sticking with it.

To get rid of negative associations?!

Bink has been Bink since before she was born, affectionately so-called by her sister Serena. (And has three baptismal names to choose from if she really doesn’t want to be Bink any more.) Bink is associated with all her life, the well and the ill, the happy childhood and the impressive degree and being bridesmaid to Serena, as well as the tormented adolescence. Whereas Robin? Robin! Robin?! Robin only has negative associations.

And so on and so forth, pacing up and down, getting angrier and shakier by the minute.

Until I got off the telephone so angry and shaky I didn’t know where to put myself. So I rang Serena and dumped it all on her.

And then deteriorated steadily throughout the evening till I could barely speak or shuffle.

And then at the beginning of this week a more senior therapist rang, and I could see why Bink tells me this therapist is “very smart”... but as I don’t have said therapist’s permission I can’t tell you much more about the conversation except that I ended up considerably mollified, and pleased to have been contacted.

Though actually, being brutally objective about it now, afterwards, I don’t really see why I have reason to be any less worried, given that Bink is still going under the name of Robin.

“I don’t really care,” she said. “I’m just fed up with keeping everybody happy. The therapists. My family.”

Yeah, well.

Maybe get yourself happy first, Bink. Or Robin, if that’s really who you want to be... but if so you’ll have to count me out. Soz. Been there, done that, haven’t got the painkillers though because they don’t make ’em for losing your daughter.

[And thank you, readers, truly, really, deeply, for all your kind and encouraging comments.

Helen, your question is the easiest to answer. My publisher is working on the reprint of On Our Own, and earlier this week I was sent a sample mock-up.

I will ask him now, how long it will take to produce.]

The last Robin

[Serena has been telling me for so long to fast-forward to this part of the story.

How can readers understand coming up into sunny grasslands, if they haven’t been through the valley of shadows with us?

This is what she says to me.

And now I’m here, I don’t know where to start… or how to tell it in less than the years it took to live through.

I had pre-scheduled a different post for today, going back to the story of ten years ago, before writing my Thought for the Day script yesterday, but now think this may not be what you want, quite yet.

So I’m going to have breakfast and think about it. And post late, today…]

Several years, c. 2013-6

In all true færie tales, the last is the most significant.

Grendel’s mother more fearsome than Grendel. The stepmother negligent, but the witch downright murderous. The tenth plague of Egypt more devastating than all the others put together.

The last Robin... bound to be more disturbing than all the rest.

The thing about pain, mercifully, is that you can’t remember it. Else the human race would die out long since. Every new birth striking a seasoned mother with the force of incredulity. It can’t have been such agony last time. I remember pain... but pain like this will surely kill me.

And thus it is that I can’t really remember how anything could have hurt that much.

I remember details... just as I remember the midwife asking for music when I was in labour with Serena. To remember what it actually felt like, would be to feel the pain all over again.

I can remember being without sleep all night long, Bink missing. Rose, aged ten, pulled from her dormitory at three in the morning, because Serena thought she might have had some message though the rest of us hadn’t, and the police said we must try everything. The poor child falling asleep again just before dawn... and dreaming she was the one to find Bink’s body swirling in the dark woods and darker water.

I remember delaying a business flight by half a week to the US, where I was to interview Desmond Tutu’s daughter; missing my one and only chance to visit Washington DC for my next novel. And every time I turned my face from the work I was there for, wanting to sob and weep my life away.

I remember not knowing where she might be spending Christmas. Wondering, for weeks and months, whether she lay in a ditch. Unknown, unrecognised, untraced. 

I remember being at a pre-Christmas party, apologising, appalled, to someone I barely knew for the tears streaming down my face. Bicycling home behind Shaun, my balance so gone that I wobbled and fell into the gutter and just wanted to lie there and howl.

Occasionally, once every many-months perhaps, receiving a telephone call... my sick heart soaring to hear her. Dropping everything to listen and talk, for an hour or so, savouring each moment because it was my dear, close-loved Bink.

Her lurching back into our lives for a day or two... but as with the end of war and announcement of peace, you discover you have lost so much that the death and destruction you are left with hurts as much as the fighting ever did.

The praying, the crying, the begging for it to end. For years, this must have gone on, one way or another.

I said it was my dear, close Bink. And surely she was.

And she wasn’t.

She asked us to meet her in Staines one Sunday evening. We abandoned everything and drove for an hour and more, and found a wisteria wrapped around the pub, pregnant with early summer scent. No Bink anywhere to be seen. We asked the barman.

No, he said. No one called Bink.

We described her.

“Oh,” he said. “You mean Robin. We all know Robin! She’s in the garden.”

We visited her in a friend’s house. “Hello Robin,” said one of the lodgers.

“Robin!” Her friend called upstairs to her: the one who had hidden her from us, and didn’t tell us when she was in hospital.

Robin. All the bad people in my life. Now me.

[This from Bink’s therapist to me.]  Fri, 18 Jan 09.33 (12 days ago)

“To keep you updated Bink has chosen to be called Robin and so we are now referring to her by this name.”

Robins Two and Three

Summer 2000 and January 2012.

You already know about Robin number Two, if you have been with this blog for a while. (A couple of very helpful readers have scrolled back and reminded me. See for instance 21st and 22nd August, and 21st September)

For those who have joined us since (or missed these posts):

In the autumn of 2000, Bink, aged 15, was diagnosed by a friend as having OCD. If she had been given immediate and appropriate treatment – as she surely would if it had been a physical illness – the lives of all of us might have been very different indeed... but that’s a separate matter.

By the following summer she had still received absolutely nothing from the NHS. Because, for the first time in my working life, I had an income greater than my expenses, I was able to pay for private therapy.

On the recommendation of a friend, Bink had ten weeks with a snazzy psychotherapist with a snazzy practice in Sloane Square, called Robin. Robin showered her with extremely inappropriate physical and verbal assurances of his extremely inappropriate affection, her already susceptible soul becoming more screwed by the session... until she took a cry-for-treatment overdose which poleaxed Robin into such panic that he persuaded her into a hell-hole of a psychiatric ward from which she was never going to walk out whole.

After she escaped – extremely damaged, three months later, her life changed for ever – and rather reasonably sat on Robin’s snazzy doorstep demanding some kind of explanation, he attempted to get her sectioned. Since this would have been many times more damaging than the already devastating effect of her so-called voluntary incarceration, it is difficult to see this as anything other than Robin’s cowardly attempt to save his own now unsurprisingly s***scared skin.

Still today, Bink blames Robin’s behaviour for much of her ongoing illness.

This was Robin Two.

The middle and by far the most destructive of the first three Robins in Bink’s life.

Robin Three was responsible for Bink’s academic welfare at Cambridge. I rather liked him, actually. (Just as I have much reason to be fond of Robin One.)

At the time when she asked me, “Why are all the bad people in my life called Robin?” it must however be acknowledged that he was not presenting as a particularly benign power.

Bink had not been well during her undergraduate career. Neither time.

At the end of her first year, two of Bink’s essays came top of her entire Classics year in the university and she missed a First by a quarter of a mark. (Given that she’d barely scraped any work together all year and had small Latin and less Greek, she is convinced they shaved off that quarter mark – who ever heard of a quarter of a mark? – artificially, in order to spare a top degree being awarded to such a shockingly ignorant candidate.)

Despite her formidable potential however, given the state of her health she can’t have been an easy pupil.

Over the Christmas and New Year of 2011 and ’12 (at the end of her fourth term and beginning of her fifth) she was suffering from particularly acute symptoms. As this was at exactly the same stage of her academic career as she had dropped out, with illness, before, I imagine she faced quite a daunting psychological barrier.

Sensibly, she told her college she wasn’t sure whether she was well enough to press on.

What she had intended as a tentative question about continuing, Robin accepted as a definite resignation, with arguably indecent enthusiasm.

She had to be out of her room by Sunday. Or be kicked out. (That’s what she understood, anyway.)

So that was Robin Three.

Not necessarily a negative influence in Bink’s life, overall. But that morning, as she anticipated her imminent eviction and commented on the Christian name these three people in her life so coincidentally had in common, this third Robin was indeed perceived as a problem to be prevailed over.

All the “bad” people. All Robins.

Alas, there was one more Robin. From my point of view far more devastating and destructive than all the Robins so far.

I can only assume, therefore – since a mother can’t help but feel her child’s pain – in some ways experienced as such by Bink herself.

It was this last Robin whose very memory made me crumble into a shuffling wreck last week. The Robin I never want to see again.

The Robin I very much hope is not now re-entering our lives for long.

Robin One

January 2012

“Why,” Bink asked me, “are all the bad people in my life called Robin?”

We were walking round the courtyard of her Cambridge college. Her second one.

There is so much of the story to fill in, to explain to you about Robin...

[I am so cheered by your comments in response to yesterday’s blog. Thank you!

I will continue to tell the story of ten years ago, as well as today’s story, if you can keep all these different coloured yarns knitting our story in your head. Since there are readers remembering the Robin of last September – which even I hadn’t remembered – you obviously can...]

I suppose I must have asked her to elucidate. It was early January, 2012. Mid-morning. Cold, and bright and clear.

And exactly the time of year she had crashed out of Cambridge a few years earlier, in 2008.

Much had happened in our lives since. A move to another town and home and life.

Bink struggling on. Longing to return to Cambridge. Discovering her college didn’t consider her well enough to return.

Serena and I calling an ambulance (probably one of many) early one morning or late one night, I don’t remember. Perhaps both. Bink locked in the bathroom. We sensing her blood in the air, seeping under the door with her pain and panic: razors, wrists, white limbs with savage threads of weeping red.

Angry at us calling the ambulance.

Disappearing again, running away through the streets. Scooped up into hospital when they found her. None of it for long: two or three days. None of it helping.

My father, astonished, horrified, at what we lived with all the time. 

My dear mother’s birthday, the day he took her under his wing.

The fight continuing, to return to Cambridge. Trying a harder way. Every way.

I would love to tell you how we stumbled through much of this but I must fast-forward to explain to you about Robin. We can return to the details on a happier, sunnier day, if you are still walking with me when the dawn rises on Bink’s life...

“All the bad people in my life called Robin...”

Robin One. A sexual assault. An unwanted kiss in early adolescence.

The first sounds so shocking: the second so commonplace. And yet they can be one and the same. I know.

I was eleven. My father a head master, my mother a teacher; every August, teachers’ holidays. (I’ve said already, I disliked those holidays, being away from home. Perhaps this is why?)

The previous year we had been abroad for the first time, the first holiday not in my grandparents’ seaside house in Norfolk, camping in streaming rain and flimsy, leaky, hip-high tents in a flooded French campsite.

So this year, my parents had bought a caravan and we had driven to Spain. Staying for two weeks in a campsite on the beach.

The best part of which, for me – perhaps the only good part – was the horse. Every day, around the campsite with his cart to collect the rubbish. 

That horse and I were instant friends. I took his likeness, with my sketch pad and pencil: trotting, standing still, being harnessed. I rode in the cart. I got up early to be with him when he was taken out of his stable and tacked up.

I was blonde and eleven. The dustman was Spanish and adult. It was eight in the morning and no one else around. He took me into the doorway of that stable and kissed me. Twice.

I can still see his eyes, close up, terrifying, blurry in the blinding morning sun. Lip on lip – that was all – shocking in the scorching Spanish sun.

I never went to see that horse again.

I sat in my parents’ caravan, in someone else’s caravan when we went to visit, appalled at the closeness of my father and brother; deeply uncomfortable in their proximity in such a trapped space; myself exposed and changed for ever. Sensing, in those two innocent and unknowing men in my loving family, an overwhelming threat.

I never told anyone: not for years.

The blur of his eyes in the sun haunted me for years, too. Till late teens or early twenties.

Since then I have always churned, squirmed at, shrunk slightly from, men of Latinate colouring. Could never have loved a man with raven hair and deep brown eyes and olive skin. Too intimidating.

I never thought of it as “sexual assault”. I never complained of trauma. I believe I eventually told a friend, many years later, of the intrusive picture I still carried with me. The eyes swimming in the sun.

That was Bink’s Robin One. An unwanted kiss. (For all I know, more: she never told me.)

Two adolescents: one unwilling.

Robin

Today

Serena says why do I write about events ten years ago – the story of our family: not primarily the story of Bink Bonkers – when there is so much to tell about Bink’s illness here, today, now, right now, today.

Why? Because I am not used to blogging and there is part of me which believes one must reflect and think carefully before going public with something so personal and intimate and painful and… so, potentially… well: the story could go either way, couldn’t it? I try to be cheerful but it could end up a terrible car-crash of a story: this, Bink’s latest episode of treatment.

Surely I should make notes now and tell later?

That’s how I’ve always done it. That is the civilised, well-brought-up way to tell a tale. When you know the ending.

Isn’t it?

No, Serena says. Tell now. It is a blog. Let your readers experience it with you, now. As it is happening, in real time.

You don’t know the end, she says. Unlike what happened ten years ago, you don’t know whether it will end up a tragedy or a comedy. That’s how it should be for your readers, too.

And this is a story about Bink. Bink and her illness. Not all of us.

Which leaves me with a dilemma as to what to write for you in tomorrow’s and this week’s posts.

I am somewhat obliged to continue the story of a decade ago, because I’ve started and it wouldn’t be fair not to finish. I’ve told you about the letter Shaun received, accusing him of such things…

What do you do, with a trumped-up four-page accusation of Gross Misconduct staring you in the face, along with the ruin of all your family? Including, but not only, Bink.

Nevertheless, Sundays’ posts have always been about today. Now.

This is what it is like, today.

I can’t walk properly. I shuffle, like someone nearly twice my age. As described in my diary of ten years ago, trapped in that little cottage. But much worse, sometimes, now. And more frequently. Or so it seems, today.

I limp very heavily on one leg, though there is no physical pain. And nothing wrong with my leg. Either of them. I have no idea even which leg it’s supposed to be. My impression is that it’s always the same limp, the same leg, but since it’s psychosomatic – since there is nothing physically wrong with me – why should it be?

My father’s carer last week asked me, Is it arthritis? Arthritis?!

No – though thank you for asking – of course it isn’t arthritis! It’s depression, I told her.

Though it isn’t that either. This isn’t depression. I don’t use the word depression, any more. Like stress. That is another catch-all meaninglessness. I’ve heard both used too much, over the last twenty years, for either to mean anything any more.

There is heartbreak. There are all sorts of things. There is just being completely and utterly and almost totally crushed by life. Not depression.

But I use the word now, for my father’s carer, because right here in the moment I can’t think how else to describe it in everyday language, without a long explanation. “Depression” is easier. It does the job.

We had colleagues of Shaun’s here for dinner. A few nights ago. It was all a few nights ago, now. I made myself all write this at the time, because Serena told me to.

And my sister’s family. They came to visit my father. He is probably dying. It was right and good that they came.

And I could barely speak. I was hostess to twelve people and could hardly talk. Hardly shuffle back into the room with the pot of coffee. In my pyjamas because I could no longer face the world clothed.

I ache all over though there is nothing wrong with my body. There is no actual physical pain. And yet I ache all over.

Even my sister says she is worried about me. Nobody is ever worried about me. I am the one member of the family who is never ill. I am the one who keeps everyone else going.

Have you seen a doctor, she says. I don’t even have the strength to laugh. I don’t have the energy to tell her there is nothing wrong with me. Let alone what a doctor might do to me. With their blasted pills.

Nothing, except what is happening to Bink.

Robin is back. That’s all that is the matter with me.

Robin is back.

You don’t even know who Robin is because I haven’t yet got to that part of the story. And I don’t have the wherewithal to tell you. At the moment.

But Serena says I must take you with me on today’s story. Here. Now.

And today’s story is that Robin is back.

And that is why I can’t walk.

(This is the picture I wanted to share for today’s post, but so far have been unable to trace who owns it. If anyone recognises it and can tell me so I can ask permission to use it – or take it down if the photographer would prefer – I would be most grateful. Robin Fighting. I’m not a good enough photographer to take a picture like this. Or any, of a robin, though one visits my bird table. I’m not a photographer at all. All I can do is tell you that this is what happened in our lives.

This is Robin.)