Forgotten flowers. And kindnesses

Today

And the reason I cry is the most foolish of all.

Let’s guess...

Because she has just left thirty-three behind and has none of what we, and she, once so reasonably assumed she would have achieved before she was twenty-two?

Because she was the most gifted child imaginable... I almost said, most gifted of all our children because this is indeed true, in the same way that each of our five children is genuinely (and not just because I know some of them read this blog!) the most gifted of all our children, each in his or her own way.

(Serena, deeply and thoughtfully people-intelligent as well as academic-intelligent; Alex, whacky and hilarious, with the focused brilliance only Asperger’s syndrome can give; Ben, organised and multi-talented and capable, and so-musical simply because he decided to be, the funniest of them all; and Rosie? Rose still too young to say what her ultimate genius will be, but even clever Serena described her as one of those sickening girls who can do everything.)

And Bink. The charismatic one. The others would agree. She had all the others had – music, art, sport, maths… oh and her command of language! Her poetry, as a small child; I was convinced she would be a writer – but in addition Bink had an infectious, electrifying spirit. Bink led, everyone followed... dancing, prancing, joyous children of Hamelin, all skipping after Bink... not just siblings but all her schoolmates too. Bink could do everything, yes… but Bink was also set to set the world on fire. Do I cry, then, because she had all the gifts and talents God has at His disposal and everything in between, as well as joy, joy, joy to the skies and back... and all this is come (as yet) to nothing?

Do I cry because she has no home of her own and no career or ambition and no husband or lover or children and not even a single friend her age that I can think of?

No.

Well, not consciously anyway. Perhaps these are too big to cry about.

I cry, when I think of her flowers.

When I remember the flowers I sent her for her birthday.

And all the cards and gifts others sent her too: my father; members of her prayer group...

Priti and I have got to know each other well, since October. I found Priti’s Petals a few days before Bink first went into the North London Priory. I’ll ring you, I arranged with Priti, the moment Bink leaves home, so you can deliver flowers for her room before she arrives. And although she delivered them promptly they weren’t in her room till late in the evening... but then, nor was she, so that’s all right.

Every week, after that. We took it in turns. I draw up a rota of people from her prayer group, to contact Priti and order flowers. So Bink’s room would never be without Priti’s pretty petals. (And because Priti is so clever, and devised arrangements which lasted several weeks, usually her room was bursting with freshness. I have nowhere left to put them! she complained. Then share them with others, Bink; put them in a communal room. Oh yeah, that’s an idea…)

And Priti and I, as women do, as mothers do, became friends through our text messages, and through the beautiful photographs Priti sent me each time, before delivering her flowers... because being a mother herself, she knew I would treasure these in my heart and picture them in Bink’s room.

(She even told me, some time ago, of a therapist who might be able to help more than Bink’s therapists have been. Not that far from us.)

What is your budget for this one? Priti asked me last week.

How can I set a budget for Bink’s birthday? Give her the loveliest bouquet you can. And chocolates. And a cake. And the card signed from all of us, all eight of us...

Her favourite cake flavour? Priti asked.

Ashamed that I didn’t know, I asked Rose. Then Alex, Serena, Shaun. None of us knew. (We don’t eat cake much or often.) All of us thought, perhaps chocolate...?

When Priti sent me the photograph of the cake, my heart leapt. Mischievously. I hadn’t asked her to do this – Bink isn’t allowed to be Bink in there – and there she was, Happy Birthday Bink on her cake!

(Her cake which must surely now be dry. Five days later. And her flowers drooping...)

How much do I owe you, Priti?

Don’t worry, Anne. Wait until Bink has been found. You have enough on your plate.

How much? I asked again on Monday.

So Priti told me how much, and said she hoped Bink liked them.

Bink never saw them, I replied. Paying immediately before Priti could tell me she couldn’t take any money in that case. Bink left just as your flowers arrived.

I can’t take any money, if she never got them!

I’ve paid already, Priti. But thank you.

It feels wrong, Priti insisted. It’s just not right. Taking money for something which was never received. Let me do something. Free flowers next time, or something.

So then I had an idea.

(Given that there ain’t gonna be a next time. Not any more. Not now.)

I didn’t want to do this straight away, in case they deduced she wasn’t coming back. And then wouldn’t have her back.

But now she hasn’t gone back and they won’t have her back anyway.

Collect the flowers and cake again, I asked Priti, and the chocolates. And take them to the vicar, of the church nearby, who has been so very, very, wonderfully kind to her – he still hasn’t met her, but said she could do all the volunteering she liked for them; join the choir; help with the children’s groups; play in the band; be looked after by them all – and take them to his vicarage and give them to his wife. To thank her. For her kind husband.

(Kind husbands have kind wives. That’s how it works.)

We lived in a vicarage ourselves. A vicarage can use all the cake and flowers it can get.

And then, I said, when Bink is home again, you can arrange another bouquet for her and cake and box of chocs, and we will collect them when we collect her luggage.

And she will get it all one day, after all.

I will, said Priti. Thank you.

And Priti’s kindness, in this as in so much else, cheers me every time I want to weep about Bink’s flowers.

She will get her flowers, one day. If she ever comes home, she will.

Thank you, Priti.

Thank you, all of you.

No basket for the basket cases

Today

I can’t stop crying.

Not that this is unusual. There have been months, perhaps years, when I have cried most days.

Bink has not returned to her treatment centre. Perhaps just as well: there was no guarantee they would have her back, and another failure, a rejection, was the last thing she needed.

Perhaps, indeed, that’s why she had to walk out. Ever since she was first there, in December, they kept saying they didn’t have the resources to cope with her. She was kicked out then, for having a panic attack, and it took her and her psychiatrist two months, and numerous exhortations from both him and me that she must never again use the word “suicidal” – not even in the context of “I feel...” – to persuade them to have her back.

(So perhaps the lesson is, don’t go where you aren’t really wanted.)

Since when – despite my spending an hour writing to them that the one thing she needed was security; that what she needed, above all, was to know she was there for the next two months and they wouldn’t suddenly show her the door, for something she couldn’t help – every other day or so one of them wrote to me that she would have to leave... and perhaps it was less damaging to her mental health to jump, rather than be pushed.

So what now?

I had put all my hope – all of it – in this last year’s treatment plan. Why all your eggs in one basket, fool?

Because, fool, there was no other basket.

No baskets available. Not for many years.

What I am hating myself for, most of all, is that several times, over the last few weeks, she has said to me, in tears, “I so want to come home!”

I don’t think Bink has ever said that before.

And – fool that I truly am – I didn’t say, stop right there: we are borrowing Ben’s car now this minute and coming to pick you up.

Because I thought it would be irresponsible. Because I thought, at last, after many, so many years, Bink is getting treatment.

Because I thought, we can’t help her: we can’t get her well. How long have we tried, and not been able to!

But that’s not true, is it? Often and often and at least twice, we have picked up the pieces from someone else making her a lot more ill, and got her quite a lot better.

Just not completely well.

And now she has gone somewhere else, and someone’s else’s mother is looking after her, and she’s not taking my calls.

And all I have left is my tears.

School, structure and security

Early summer 2009

The effect of our move on Bink was fascinating.

To be honest, we were all so happy, so free and energised and in love with our new life that I don’t remember particularly noticing at the time, the effect on her.

As so often, it is on looking back that the pattern seems to shift itself out of the mist.

For the first half of that summer term – while our mortgage broker sweated away so hard to procure a house for us; and our parents came over to have lunch in the nearest pub and look round their new home and discuss how it would all work out; and the vendors gave us coffee in their smart machine yet again and cleared up after Hamlet pooped in their immaculate flower beds and wondered when and possibly whether we would ever exchange – in all those white-gold weeks of early summer, we lived in the school.

In the Chaplaincy, which the head had deemed too small for us and Shaun had said was bigger than the cottage we had just left.

I was slightly surprised, when we first moved in. True, it had high ceilings and generous rooms and given everything we’d just left, was luxurious. But it seemed about the same size as our sweet little cottage in Oxfordshire.

Then... astonishment! Shaun led me up to another floor, as big again, three more bedrooms. What use could we put them to? Ah yes of course, Bink, Rosie and Serena needed them; and the boys if they came home.

Shaun took Hamlet to Bedford Park next door, morning and evening, as we had no garden. And that first morning, another Dane owner screeched her four-by-four round in a U-bend: our first new friends.

I loved living in the school: it was how I was brought up. The wide playing fields stretching to the margins of sight; poplars waving at story-book clouds drifting past sailor’s trousers sky; thwack of willow on wood and youthful shouts of an afternoon. And a loud bell clanging through our flat every forty minutes, marking the day.

The moment we arrived: entertaining again, as we had at the vicarage before we left London. Brunch in the garden beneath our Chaplaincy; Shaun’s new flock, the choir and their families; fish and fresh coriander bought at the newly-discovered market; buttery kedgeree yellow with turmeric and chopped eggs; big urn of tea; Buck’s Fizz.

Lolling sleepily on rugs in the school sun when they’d all gone, staff clearing the tables as they had in my childhood.

While Bink took Rosie into school meals, regular as the bells ringing the lessons. She had settled into a rhythm. And we were so settled ourselves, we scarce even noticed.

Up and dressed each day. Eating regularly. Looking after her little sister.

I believe it was on our very first Sunday, first weekend in Bedford, Shaun and I away somewhere or preoccupied, I can’t now remember.

Bink got Rosie up and dressed, and took her to our new parish church. Bink did. Found it, attended it, took Rosie. Not Shaun or me or even Serena. Not even Ben.

Bink.

A few days later the vicar called with flowers and wine: the modern vicarage squatted opposite our flat and had seen the removal van off-loading our few-weeks’ essentials.

But it was Bink, who introduced us to the church where my mother is buried and my father will be.

Nine years later, it took the eminent Professor Veale, at the Priory, to pronounce that Bink needs structure in her life, such as you find in a boarding school. She should consider something like that for a career.

But of course, the structure only lasted as long as our time living in the Chaplaincy...

The hero

(I am struggling to process where Bink is and what she is doing.

Sometimes it is easier to tell the story of something you’ve processed already…)

April and May 2009

The other thing chips do when they’re down is show your colours.

One of us emerged way ahead in our battle with Shaun’s employing church, a hero in stature beyond us all.

When WW2 broke out my father was twenty one. I’ve often wondered at such courage, in one who seems to me now so young.

He was a conscientious objector.

He also objected to being put in a safe office job in Blighty after his tribunal. So he – and his clergyman father, deeply ashamed of his son’s unpatriotic stance but nonetheless, and to his great credit, backing him up – fought for a rôle for him on the front line, and he joined the Medical Corps.

When orderlies were ordered to bear arms, my father decided he preferred to face a firing squad on earth, than his Maker in heaven if he betrayed his principles… his life only saved by a countermand from the Geneva Conference the next day.

That was courage? No.

What was courage was that on her deathbed my 99-year-old aunt, his much-loved sister, was still claiming my father brought shame on his family.

Courage is going against the crowd.

We are herd animals. Survival in conformity. The one who changes direction, trampled; out alone, starves. Extremely strong instinct, and good reason for it. (Cf. the Milgram Experiment?)

The younger you are, the bigger the crowd, the more astonishing the courage.

When we said goodbye to Oxford we left Ben behind.

Not quite twenty-one.

He was adding music A level to his portfolio, and staying with his tutor till the exam. So he was still in the city for Shaun’s ex-church’s AGM. He asked me if he should go.

Totally up to you, Ben. If you want to hear how they explain the agreement, the payment, your father’s departure, then do. If it would distress or annoy you, no need whatsoever.

Several people rang, late that night, after the meeting.

Stunned.

That church had an electoral roll of hundreds. The large church was packed.

The speeches well prepared. Very slick. Very neat. No mention of compensation or lawyers or liability. Shaun’s breakdown, merely. End of discussion. Let’s move on.

Business shifts itself.

Just a moment, Ben gets to his feet. I don’t think that’s quite how it was.

And he starts to tell a different story...

Big guns step in and say, thank you Ben, most helpful, let’s move on, shall we.

Not quite yet. Ben isn’t finished.

Three times, quietly but firmly, That’s not my father you’re describing. Not quite how it was. Not quite accurate. Three times, till he is eventually silenced.

His rebel ancestors called it the Speech from the Dock. We English can do rebellion too, and his maternal grandfather clearly passed his courage on.

Completely futile, one admiring witness told me afterwards.

But absolutely magnificent.

The hero of our family, Ben is.

Not sure I’ve ever told him quite how proud of him I am. For ever. And a bit.

Telling him now, innit.

Faith? Hope? Or just green shoots in dumb earth...

Sunday

A friend brought me a potted plant the other day. She has recently joined Bink’s prayer group: a bunch of friends I update by email. (We are a select group: you have to select yourself.)

A growing number have only ever heard of Bink. They hope and pray for her, unseen.

I confess, my new friend had picked up that I have been discouraged recently.

Professor Paul Salkovskis once told me OCD is the most contagious of mental illnesses. In truth, I suspect all madness illness is highly infectious. It spreads its smoky invisible tendrils to anyone close enough to love and embrace and be brought down by it.

Thus one’s mood, caring for Bink and loving her, can switch and double back almost as sickeningly as her own.

Depression looms for life.

The sparse occasionally following suddenly seems able to overcome all.

Only to be dashed by deeper despair.

My friend is herself a vicar’s wife. We’d only met once before.

Ben occasionally plays the organ in her husband’s church. Not, he says, because the fee even begins to make the work worth it. But because any vicar running several small country parishes, who respects a musician enough to offer him any mite at all, deserves all the support we can give him. (He would know: he also plays for a big, snazzy church which could afford ten times as much… and can’t see the point.)

Rose played for his midnight communion last Christmas. Exhausted from school, and terrified. He doubled her fee... because (he claimed) it was unsocial hours but really because I told him she is saving up to help in an orthopaedic hospital in Malawi the summer after next, now she has decided to be a doctor. And when you’re fifteen, double an amount which your big brother considers inconsequential can be very consequential indeed. 

(So if you can use a decent harpist for your next event, to help the Malawian trip along, I’m more than happy to act as Rose’s agent.)

So we then got to meet the vicar’s family because they borrowed Shaun’s dippy Great Dane. Why anyone would want Shaun’s dippy Great Dane is a blog all on its own...

So she rang my doorbell the other day, and said, I’ve brought you this.

Oh, is it tulips? Thank you!

I’ve no idea, she said. It’s hidden. And will one day be beautiful.

I planted it straight away, just outside the front door, where I will see it every day.

(I planted bulbs before. In a window box for my parents’ kitchen window, shortly after they’d moved in with us. When I should have been working… but I knew my mother would love them so much.

The following spring she lay in the cold, sodden earth. And the bulbs came up to bless me instead.)

Last night I needed the radio through most of the night. Melvin Bragg. I am steadily working through all eight hundred of In Our Times.

Faith. The assurance of things hoped for. The conviction of things unseen.

Sometimes we have to go on believing in something we can’t see. Not even the green shoots.

Yes, even when it’s really dumb.

Instinct

Today

I have mentioned before that one of the most important things – perhaps, the most important – that I have learnt, having one of my children blighted with so terrible a disease that her own mind (with all the phenomenal and astonishing energy it formally used for creativity) turns in on itself like a cancer and eats itself from within, is to trust my instincts.

If I had listened to my instinct all those nearly twenty years ago, instead of to all the professionals and even friends who were professionals telling us Bink must be hospitalised, it’s possible her illness might have been a passing minor disorder, a quite manageable and even short-lived episode in her autobiography.

If my instinct could have held sway, half as long ago, as I sat sobbing in bed at midnight, when half the family were in the pub with Bink and Gatsby, I excluded – upset not by the personal hurt, but the awareness, a year or two before anyone else – that Gatsby would steal Bink away and do her terrible damage, how many years and much destruction could have been spared us all?

Instinct is why I have no dealings with Robin: why I self-exclude from any meeting about “Robin”’s future. Bink and I are fine with this. I’ve told her it’s a conversation we can have when she is well and happy, if she still wants to change her name, for herself, not because she’s been told by therapists, not because she’s running away from the dear person she is. But at the moment, the very thought of “Robin” sets such a jangling tinnitus in my ears that I can’t find Bink in all the raucous. So I still say no, sorry, not unless you won’t call her “Robin” in front of me.

Because that’s what my instinct tells me. And it’s often been right before. When everyone else has been wrong.

So here’s a thing. I’m listening to my instincts again this morning.

Thursday night, I was a wreck. Friday I woke – if that’s what it is, when you stumble into the vertical from a night of silent yowling – a zombie.

Last night? Zonk. Woke utterly refreshed at six fifteen, to listen to Clare Baldwin in the footsteps of Dorothy Wordsworth.

(And find, hilariously, Shaun still in the kitchen setting his younger brother to rights, not having gone to bed at all. Well, they don’t get together much. And it is Ireland...)

Which is curious. Because on the face of it, yesterday should have been much more worrying than Thursday.

On Thursday evening (I dread reading what I posted, my mind was so scrambled and scribbled) Bink couldn’t speak or move and paramedics were called to check her over. In the white-knuckle ride of Bink’s illness of the last two decades, this is nothing. She was safe, she was attended to, she went to bed.

True, it’s distressing and unpleasant to talk for some minutes to someone you love very much, and hear nothing back but the faintest scrabbling of a mouse in a cupboard. But it’s not huge, it is? It shouldn’t be big, as anxieties go. She was in the care of the professionals: safe, surely?

Then why so worried, mother?

Yesterday, on the other hand, she disappeared completely.

After the upset of Thursday night, I had arranged that I would ring around midday to talk to her. It was one minute past as we pulled in at our destination, to climb the mountain Shaun and his siblings had raced and tumbled on before tea at their Granny’s every long afternoon in every long summer holiday. She was in the bathroom, they would ask her to ring me in ten minutes.

Up. And conscious. Good.

Twenty-five minutes later, Bink not there.

All the way up that mountain: ringing Priti who delivered her flowers, the time she disappeared; Alex, as he knows Bink better than anyone; Serena, unobtainable half way up a Norwegian mountain with her mini-Viking on his first skis; Ben, not answering at work.

Where would Bink go? Is she just in a park? Has she turned up at home?

Telephone conking out. Using Shaun’s. Texting. Racking all thoughts and family ideas. How long can I reassure her therapist enough to prevent police involvement?

Not a conventional way to enjoy the mountain of an Irish childhood.

(In truth, once I’d sent message or text down every alley, I handed Shaun’s telephone back and got on with the view. A mistake, as it turned out. Next time I looked, he had four missed calls from a concerned Serena...)

The one person I almost knew she would be with – her therapist too – had his telephone off, as she did herself. He suffers debilitating ME and often rests.

We came down again through the gathering mists over the dazzling lough, charged my telephone in the prettiest converted-chapel café, and in the car home, enough hours elapsed for her to reach her destination, I rang a schoolfriend’s husband and asked him to nip round the corner from their house and see if he could find anyone in.

He arrived five minutes after she did.

So Bink has escaped her regime for a night or two. And I am left analysing why I was so worried on Thursday night.

And not at all, yesterday.

Given what I’ve discovered, over two decades, about the infallibility of maternal instinct.

On the face of it, there is plenty to be worried about.

Bink has no plans beyond Easter, her due date of discharge.

Given this latest escapade, she may have no plans beyond tomorrow, if the treatment centre won’t have her back.

On Thursday evening, she shut down. Couldn’t speak or move.

Not good.

Yesterday, she was in as much distress and exhaustion.

She has been following the regime as assiduously as strength allows. Good. Very good. But extremely fatiguing. For the first time in years: without medication to dull the pain; getting up every morning with the day; attending meetings, listening to others, discussing, examining, engaging.

Dogged out.

Thursday, her body and speech shut down.

Friday, she walked out into the sunshine and went for the weekend, for her birthday, to the most sensible, wise and loving friend she has.

Admitted, it would have been easier if she’d told someone what she was doing. Less mountain-and-telephone-battery-wasting for the rest of us. More certain of a place to return to tomorrow.

But she couldn’t. She had energy to take a bus and a train and a walk, all the way to her friend’s, which is very exciting indeed.

No more, for permissions and therapists’ meetings and signings of exeat forms... which might well have been refused anyway.

Admitted, too, I was very slightly sad she didn’t stay very slightly longer to see her flowers at their freshest and taste her birthday cake at its moistest and know of all the various cards and presents and birthday surprises either still waiting for her or now flown away.

And most of all, admitted that my mind tells me there is still much to do and to worry about before Bink is safe and well and has a future.

But in the face of her doing something healthy, and independent, and joyful for her birthday...

Well, my maternal instinct seems quite relaxed.

Bink's birthday

Thirty odd years ago:

We were living in Barnet, in North London. Shaun had been two years a curate. Serena was one and a half.

That autumn I was working with a theatre company in York, going home at the weekends. I was filling the place of an actor on maternity leave... not telling them, at my audition, that I was quite a lot more pregnant than she was. Thus, I carried Bink, at seven months’ unborn age, as I flitted about as the fairy on top of the Christmas tree in a children’s show, singing carols and touring and striking and building sets each day as small companies do.

All this seems relevant to Bink, somehow.

Everything about Serena’s pregnancy and infancy was calm and uneventful and as it should be. Serene. (Well, apart from, as she’s reminded me, a bike accident and broken collar bone which had me flat on my back for three weeks.)

Bink’s, wild and whacky.

She always was.

A couple of weeks or so before it was due I asked, idly, What shall we call the baby? Serena being Serena, at nine months of age she had said, “dog” quite clearly, seeing a spaniel on Wimbledon Common.

But, not yet two, she still spoke a lot of scribble.

“Bink?” I echoed her verbal doodle back at her.

It would do. Until we knew the baby’s real name, it would do for girl or boy.

On Wednesday I was due in the West End with Helen, my oldest friend. I can’t remember why I thought the baby might be born that night. I just remember Helen telling me, laughing, not to risk it.

Bink was born as she did everything: fast and furious. Less than two hours, there she was. And already I knew her well enough to know it should have been a leap year. She should have been born two hours into 29th February.

The kind of person she was. Even then. Already.

Over three decades ago.

Soon we called her Lara, for her laughter, long before she was old enough to smile. That’s who she was.

She never thought, we never thought, she would be thirty and no job, no family of her own, no children or husband even.

“Have despatched gift,” emailed Phil, one of the score of friends who pray for her. “Considered a cake with a file baked into the sponge; but was worried the resulting iron oxide might not work with the frosting. .”

The thought of Bink patiently, assiduously, determinedly filing her way out of the life she has been trapped in for far too long will keep me going for a while. Perhaps till Easter, when perhaps she will be home.

I arranged flowers and cake and chocolate, with Priti’s Petals.

Today

We are with Shaun’s family in Ireland to celebrate a double birthday. In his brother’s vicarage.

Yesterday evening, telephone call, Bink unable to move or speak. Ambulance.

I misheard, and became almost hysterical. “Not medication! No medication! Don’t let them medicate her!”

I couldn’t move downstairs again for the party. Just bed. Early evening. Longing for Shaun. No energy to tell him.

He came to bed at last.

I need the radio. Something to listen to.

“I put your laptop on the floor, your side, in case it fell off the bed.” He went on reading.

For three quarters of an hour – listening to the church clock: the quarter, the half, the three quarters – I struggled for strength to reach it, open my eyes.

Slept at last.

Heard the one o’clock. And two. And four, five and seven.

Are you stiff? asked one sister-in-law. You seem confused, said another.

No. Just… no. Thanks.

This day next year.

God grant, with our prayers, that Bink will have health and a job and new friends.

Scars and stigmata

April and May 2009

Experiences change you.

Wildly happy though we now were, we were all different from how we’d been. Serena and I compared notes over the months.

Much more relaxed, in some ways.

Tbh, I suspect we’ve always been more easy-going than many. Shaun’s secretary in Parson’s Green called ours the “free range children”. And when we bought our first ever home that early summer in 2009, several professionals involved were... quite surprised.

The conveyancer said you find out a lot about people when they purchase property. Personalities pushed to extremes. If naturally anxious, you become a wreck; if slightly controlling, tyrannical.

“You and your husband,” she said, processing this, “are very laid back. I mean… very.” Yeah, well, when you’ve had nowhere to live at all, buying your own house becomes a bit of a cherry on the icing thing.

It took our mortgage chappie ten weeks. The vendors were in tears. My parents ringing up, worrying.

When the broker rang one afternoon to say he’d finally got the deal, I said, “Oh, ok. Thank you. I noticed interest rates came down very briefly about a month ago. Did you get it at the lower rate?”

There was a slightly stunned silence. “I thought I’d done pretty well to get you a mortgage at all.”

Yeah. Good. I just thought the lower rate sounded a bit better.

As it happened, for a decade or two some hopeful had emailed me annually to say, when I wanted a mortgage, he was there. I rang him and said he had till Friday. He whistled and said he’d never done that before.

A first for him, then.

Paradoxically, Serena and I also discovered we both had much shorter fuses than before.

Nowadays, when someone messes with me, I don’t wait four and a half years and watch my children homeless before I see red. I just go straight there and save time.

The removal firm ran out of space emptying their vans into our new house. End of the day, love. Gotta go. Have to leave the rest on the pavement.

I got through to the UK head of the firm, pulled him out of his meeting and blistered him to bits for twenty minutes in front of half a dozen open-jawed workers.

On second thoughts, the foreman meekly decided, they would take it all away and store it, free, until we were ready. And then bring it back. Free.

Serena discovered a similar characteristic when a council decided to be jobsworths over children’s donkey rides she had organised for a church fête. Simply, furious. Instantly.

I met the donkey, when we turned up to support.

Over the next year or so I required two different banks, on two different occasions, to reimburse us several thousand pounds apiece. Because I considered they’d behaved unprofessionally. Which annoyed me. In a way it might not have done, once.

And I told them so.

In like manner, if you call my daughter, “Robin”.

I’m going to angry eventually.

Why waste time building up to it?

... of mind?

May 2009 [cont…]

So the third and last payment from the church had arrived.

£500 short.

Having lived fourteen years in a vicarage in a parish technically classed as Inner City, we knew every con in the book.

One we had witnessed a number of times went as follows:

Can I have some quids to bury my granny / reach my dying child in Penzance / fill up the car I’ll bring it back tomorrow without fail here look I’ll leave you this nicked and broken phone as proof that I’ll come back / whatever.

I’m sorry: we never, ever give money. We’ll willingly feed you / ring the embassy / help find you a hostel / whatever.

After a tedious amount of this so-tedious negotiation, the request will suddenly shift ground.

Can I use your toilet / take my shoes off in your porch / have a glass of water / whatever.

The point being that no con man worth his salt will ever willingly go away with nothing. It ain’t professional. He has to save face somehow. Even though this means having to ask for something completely pointless.

Thus it was now.

£500? What was the point of withholding £500? The point was to save face.

Wearily, I rang the church office again. Another oversight. You’ve made a slight mistake: £500 short.

Ah, she said. Yes. That’s because you didn’t leave the cottage clean.

Now, we had spent several hundred pounds on a cleaning firm to go over that cottage for two days when we moved out. Not because we had to. Not because it was in the agreement. But because, all said and done, we wanted to leave on an amicable note. We could afford it. Now.

We even had to ask the cleaners to come before we left rather than after, because when we suggested having the place cleaned at our expense afterwards, when it would be completely empty and much easier to clean, we were told we had to be out by that day, the date was specified in the agreement, and even though there were no plans for the cottage for the foreseeable, that included our cleaners.

So we’d watched them work and knew they’d done a thorough job.

Indeed, when the vicar collected the key, he even said, Gosh it’s very clean!

Besides which, keeping any of the money back, for any reason, had very much not been in the agreement, was a breach of contract and was therefore illegal. They might as well have paid us nothing.

I asked the hapless church secretary what exactly hadn’t been clean?

The oven, she said.

The oven. The cleaners had overlooked the inside of the oven.

I rang Mark Jones: £500 to clean an oven.

Are they planning to get a lawyer to clean this oven? our solicitor asked.

Please will you write a letter demanding the payment of the final £500?

You realise, Mark said, it could cost you a lot more than £500 to recover this £500?

And I suddenly realised I didn’t care.

It was nothing to do with money. Just as it wasn’t, for the church. They didn’t need £500. They needed to win. Even if it was only a tiny, pointless, childish little token win, they needed that glass of water as much as the con man at the door.

And it was nothing to do with money for me, either.

It was because, for the last eight weeks since the agreement had been signed, I had slept. Like a baby. Through the night. (Unlike most babies you and I know, but like the proverbial baby anyway.) Till dawn. Not half way through the dark. For the first time in four and a half years.

And now I wasn’t again.

And that was worth a lot more to me than £500.

If it’s not in our account by five o’clock this afternoon, I told the vicar, you’ll be hearing from our solicitor.

It wasn’t.

The next morning I rang him again and told him a letter was on its way.

It will be there in a moment, he said. Now, please leave me alone. Please, don’t ring me again.

(Ah. So now you know what it’s like? To feel hounded and bullied. Not to sleep at night. To lose your peace of mind?

You’ve experience it overnight: we, for nearly five years.)

The best of it all was, few months later I received a bill for £400. 

I, not Shaun. Even though he was the employee and the legal agreement was with him. (Obviously, you can’t bill a man for not cleaning an oven. It’s not a man’s fault if an oven isn’t clean, is it?)

I wanted to frame that invoice. £400 for not cleaning an oven. In the end I did something much better with it.

I lost it.

Instead of my peace of mind.

What price, peace...

May 2009

As a small child, I met a Holocaust survivor. (And again in adulthood, when Ben took me to an electrifying talk at his school given by Josef Perl.)

I saw in that survivor’s face a look of radiance I will never forget: as if every fresh breeze, every soft sunbeam, every birdsong at dawn or glass of water taken in freedom was gilded with the precious joy of life and freedom.

I found a similar energy when I met John McCarthy, another released from unjust imprisonment. (Even, indeed, some who have deserved their sentences: Jonathan Aitkin; friends Serena met when she did a tv series.)

Our former situation didn’t even begin to compare, of course.

But the joy did!

The dawn sun on our faces. The wood pigeons gurgling from the school poplars. The bright new belonging after more than four years of longing. Shaun like a teenager, with a new challenge.

Bink the most changed of all...

Important though her fortunes are, the heroine of our tale, we will return to Bink in a day or two. Because there was a little more business – highly relevant to a blog about mental illness – knitting up the sleeve unravelled by Shaun’s previous church.

The compensation payments were to be paid in three stages. This was the agreement Mark Jones had drawn up, which had been signed and was now legally enforceable.

(To digress briefly...

Mark had said, if he’d been involved from the beginning, he would have ensured the sum was paid as compensation, rather than loss of earnings. The difference being that compensation doesn’t attract tax or NI contributions, whereas loss of earnings does.

I didn’t set much store by tax, never having earned enough to owe enough to count on the finger of one boot. It didn’t occur to me it would matter.

When we discovered it did, we asked the church if they would do as Mark suggested. Absolutely not. They preferred to pay their own NI bill, rather than spare us a tax bill.

An accountant said there wasn’t much we could do. 

But we had now learnt that you could get through three lawyers before finding a fourth who will fight for you. Why would you believe the first accountant?

Over a year later, the HMRC agreed that it was absurd to pay a clergyman more “loss of earnings” for one day’s unemployment than he could ever earn in a year’s employment. So we got a lovely windfall of all the tax back.

I don’t suppose it occurred to the HMRC to ask the church if it would like its NI contributions back.

There is a lesson there somewhere. About noses and faces and cutting things off things… I think spite even comes into that proverb somewhere.)

So there we were, receiving our payments in decreasing instalments. The lion’s share being the first. A bit sad, that we didn’t quite trust a church to stand by a legally-binding agreement.

Nevertheless and somewhat to our surprise, the first two were paid in full, on time, without demur. 

The third, like the first two, was due on a Saturday.

And not there. 

There is a kind of reassurance in life’s behaving as you’d expected.

So, yet another boring and energy-wasting battle ahead of us: I rang the church office at 9 am the morning after the Bank Holiday Monday, and said there seemed to have been an oversight.

What do you know? By lunchtime it had arrived.

Minus an ominous £500...

Goodbye

April 2009

There was one more thing to do, before leaving the lovely little cottage and lovely little village which had cared for us for three years.

The lovely little church...

How often, over those years, I had dreaded the big farewell from Shaun’s employing church. Invited up to the front, before hundreds. Given a cheque from everyone, for more hundreds. I didn’t want to be there.

In the event, Shaun’s church never said goodbye to us at all. Other than that night, at the Manor House, in a manilla envelope: enough goodbye to put down on a home of our own.

Ironic, that our homelessness would lead to our very first own home.

On Easter Day we went to the tiny church, whose electoral roll we had swelled by half again. Where we had sung in the choir and read the lesson and organised Easter egg hunts for the children. (Where we had even recorded Sunday Worship for Radio 4, when I was asked to preach and free to name my church.)

Towards the end of the service the vicar announced a special goodbye. We looked around.

Someone else asked us up to step up to the front. All seven of us, Shaun down to Rosie. Presented us with a beautiful biscuit-barrel, full; a teacosy; and enough teabags to last a normal family months... or, as they said, us for a few days; and our removal team.

A pink rucksack for Rosie, crayons and a colouring book. For her new school.

And their love. Their kind and supportive and priceless love, for those three years.

“Say something,” I whispered to Shaun.

He shook his head. He couldn’t speak. His eyes were too full.

It felt bad that his employing church didn’t say goodbye. Not fair on all those many decent Christian people, who had been so good to us. Not right.

We would invite them to a tea party at our cottage. For the few who might want to come.

And afterwards, when they’d gone, a party for all our own friends, at the Manor House.

We invited the bishop and his wife to the evening party. A good hundred there; a surprise choir, friends of Ben’s from London, ’specially for me; folk from the village; mates from Oxford.

The bishop stared.

“Are these all members of...” and he named Shaun’s church.

“Almost none,” I said.

“Then… I don’t understand... How do you know them all?”

Well there you are. Senior bishop in the CofE. And he’d never heard of friends and neighbours.

(He was surprised and relieved to hear Shaun had a new post. “So the church didn’t need to give you any money, after all!”

Oh yes, I assured him. It did.

I didn’t add, because we had Mark Jones. And the church… well, didn’t.)

Our last day. Saturday 18th April.

Removal vans all full and gone.

Last packing and cleaning and clearing.

I looked out over the garden. Someone – Ben, Shaun? – had lit a bonfire at the bottom, the last of the rubbish.

Rosie, in dungarees. All alone. Her small profile drifting in the smoke, a garden stick in her hand, prodding the fire.

Not quite six.

Staring into her past in the ashes.

She had spent half her life in that cottage. I had been chafing impatiently all that time. She had been very happy. We had all made very sure she was.

Losing all she knew...

Leave her be. Sad is all right. She will be all right.

(She has long discarded her pink rucksack. Taller than me now, and fifteen.

But if you call for tea you will still get the same teacosy. And biscuit barrel.)

Flitting...

Sunday

Oi, look, I never claimed to be a photographer, right?

Just be thankful I’m not offering you the picture I tried to take of the February half-moon from our bedroom last night. Vibrant orange segment, astonishing between the buildings, shedding no light but on itself, slipping and nudging behind a distant roof as we watched, lights out, from the bed.

If you complain much more about my little robin, I will.

And apologies that Ben’s washing still seems to be up, on a Sunday, again... I’m now wondering whether it’s been up all the time since last Sunday?

Or perhaps it’s Shaun’s washing... but it can’t be because he matches all his socks in pairs on the line. I remember our first au pair, when Serena was still crawling, being so astonished that anyone could be so... I was going to use a biological term inappropriate for a Sunday morning, referring to that so necessary but unattractive part of the anatomy used for waste disposal. But it’s also the sort of situation in which people use the term OCD, isn’t it?

Unless you know Bink, that is.

Shaun took Rose to see her all yesterday. 

“You don’t want to see me?” I checked, yet again.

“Do you mind?” She asked kindly, yet again.

“Well of course I do! I’m longing to see you. But I’d much rather you got better.”

“I’m just not quite ready, yet. Sorry.”

“’S fine.”

Time was, Bink wouldn’t have asked. Time was, she was disappeared, for months on end. Time was, she didn’t even have a roof over her head... and none of us knew.

And after all, I used the time I was left behind, yesterday, to write up the account of someone whose story ended very differently from Bink’s: I’ll send you a link when it’s published.

I can’t afford to be sad about her not wanting to see me quite yet.

They both said she was very quiet all day. Subdued. Even sad. They took her to see her toddling cousins and sit in the unseasonable sun in her aunt’s garden.

To Shaun’s surprise, she showed little interest in the children.

She has promised we will speak today. She needs to make plans about her future. I have lists and pages of options and suggestions and hopes at least that she will like something, catch a spark, have a flicker of enthusiasm in her dear, battered, hurt heart somewhere, for something...

Right. That’s it. I warned you. If you complained about my little robin again.

Shaun thought the moon was sinking. “It shouldn’t be doing that,” he objected. I’ve no idea how he knows this stuff.

But he was wrong, anyway.

“Are you sure? It looks a little higher than it was.”

“You’re right. It’s above the branch now.”

Just a trick of the light, then.

Not sinking at all. Slowly rising.

(Anyway, this is just to prove that I never make empty threats…)

New life

Mid-February to March 2009

Life really can turn on a sixpence. For good or ill.

More often for ill, alas: a child runs into the road; a horse stumbles jumping a gate. Much more likely than the unexpected promotion; the selling of film-rights or silly advance. And they say a Lottery jackpot seldom brings happiness…

How often, over those weeks, I thought of that tenner I threw away on the Lotto, so low I was... and smiled at my folly.

How God must have laughed the more: I was always minded to give you a windfall... but not with a raffle ticket, you nit-wit! (Does God talk like that? Not to Abram maybe – though he could be a pretty spectacular NW, couldn’t he? – but quite possibly to me.)

It’s not how God does miracles. A brilliant lawyer; a conscientious doctor; a lot of work and dedication. After all, haven’t we seen a miracle this last year, with Bink?

And how dramatically our lives had been turned, in those two evenings we’d spent at the Manor House!

As we thought back to that bizarre Monday night, wondering why the church gave us the money anyway – surely they knew enough, now, to guess Shaun might have a new post – we decided his so endearing anti-bartering, arguing himself out of n figures before I could jump in and stop him, had worked in his favour. A higher amount would have been harder to justify.

And of course Pinky and Perky had spent the intervening week lobbying to vote us out: perhaps not so easy to turn round thirty-five independent-minded professionals.

And they didn’t absolutely know Shaun had a new job. Suppose they voted against… and found themselves stuck with us?

Someone who’d been there told us his argument. “For goodness’ sake, let the Atkinses have it! it’s not a huge amount, is it?" (Not to him, maybe…)

“It’s only money.”

As I thought of Mark’s genius in changing our lives so dramatically (by the way, never tangle with your lawyer: apparently an earlier post accused him of split infinities, so he is now offering different paradises as part of his services); and remembered his words, “You aren’t doing anything wrong”; and was tempted yet again to feel guilty at taking money from a church, I considered what money could do.

It was the kind of church always into swanky building projects: some churches are. That money wouldn’t have educated three dozen children in the developing world.

It would have provided an extra loo in the new church hall.

That, or my parents’ last years with us.

I couldn’t really feel guilty, could I?

We put an offer on the only house we’d looked at, the one I’d found on the internet. It reminded me of my childhood home: I needed no more. And had come down in price by a third, on the market for several years.

We had no idea about mortgages. For all we knew, it was twice what we could afford. Or half.

Then the most enjoyable job of all. I wrote to my parents, inviting them to live with us. I showed it to Shaun and he added a PS: how much pleasure it would give us.

So thoughtful. It hadn’t occurred to me.

My parents have always been careful. Independent. Conscientious. Would mull for months. Perhaps give a tentative answer by Christmas.

The next day, Saturday, a blissful lie-in: no more to strive for. Only our move and new life to look forward to.

Tea and books in bed.

Shortly after nine, the post not long arrived, my parents on the telephone: both of them, different extensions.

“Yes,” they both said. “Please.”

They must have been desperate. For so long…

Rather late in the day, I asked everyone. Are you ok with Granny and Grandfather living with us?

Alex was home for Easter. (Having left Cambridge University for lack of disability support, he’d moved to Bristol and was loving it.)

He had no idea what we’d been through. Accusations, threats, terror, midnight reversal.

“All this?” he said. “And I knew nothing?”

“You said you didn’t want to,” I reminded him. “Worry. If you couldn’t help.”

“That’s right,” he said. “I didn’t.”

We had discussed how long it would take Alex to notice, if he came home and we’d all moved out, left for Bedford, not troubled to tell him.

“A few weeks?” Ben hazarded. “He’d bump into Joanna or Mensun in the street eventually, and ask if they’d seen us anywhere.”

“Why do you ask?” Alex said. “Whether they should move in with us? Why does it need asking?”

“Well… we try to act by consensus, don’t we? Old people can become pretty demanding, to look after. It’s your home.”

(When they were much younger, I’d invited Shaun’s father to live with us, in our London vicarage, when he’d been homeless. Very sadly, two years later we’d had to ask him to leave. Alex, aged five, had climbed into his bed at dawn, and when asked why, said, “I wanted a cuddle, Granddad. Before you’re too drunk in the day.”

So we’d learnt that children’s needs must always be put before parents’.)

Now Alexander applied his flawless Aspergic logic.

“Either they won’t need much. In which case they’ll be no trouble. Or they will, in which case they need us.

“So yes. Either way.

“Obviously.”

...gone. Next door.

Mid-February 2009

Joanna’s philosophy of life was beautifully simple.

Good news: champagne.

Bad news: gin.

This humble ideology had kept us going for three years. You’d think, given our lives at the time, on a lot more spirit than fizz. But there was a further refinement to Joanna’s so straightforward thesis:

If there is the tiniest smidgeon of any doubt whatsoever, it’s probably champagne.

There was not much ambiguity that evening.

A juniper night. Having just lost all that compensation, and the possibility of our own home.

However, perhaps because it was after eight o’clock, we broke with custom and hit Mensun’s rather good library of whiskies instead of Joanna’s usual Blue Bombay.

Seeing as Mensun was out.

“It doesn’t matter,” Shaun consoled me.

“It really doesn’t,” Joanna echoed. “Shaun’s got a job to go to. That’s what matters.”

“We’ve got nowhere to live,” I pointed out.

“We’ll find something,” Shaun said.

“It’s not that we want to lose you,” Joanna said. “We’d love to have you next door for ever. But what you’ve always wanted is to move on. Now you can.”

She was emphatic.

“It’s only money.”

“But it isn’t,” I said. “That’s the whole point. It isn’t only money.

“It’s my parents’ last years with us.”

That money represented something much more important than money. Presumably money often does. A loving, godly couple in their early nineties, who had poured out their whole lives caring for others, and were now increasingly unable to care for themselves.

Money could have spelt the difference between misery and happiness, for the gloaming of their days. The end to their increasingly desperate loneliness. The difference between being unable to leave the house even to shop, my mother now so dependent on my father; nothing and no one to look forward to, except church once a week; the simplest of suppers on their own, which my father could barely cook any more; dwindling into the dark, alone...

Or being surrounded by loving young family, as every old person or couple should be.

That was the difference. It wasn’t money. It was people and love and no less than they so richly deserved.

And it was gone.

Joanna poured me another finger of Talisker.

Mensun got in around ten to find his single malt some way below the Plimsol line.

Nearly eleven.

“Just ringing to say we’re coming home, Ben.” He had stayed in the cottage, Rosie asleep upstairs. “Any news?”

“Nope.”

Strange… But not that strange: they hadn’t bothered to tell us after the meeting, nearly four years earlier, which left us homeless. We had waited hour after hour, then; Shaun finally, most reluctantly, ringing the vicar just after eleven, when I absolutely said he had to, to learn that we had no roof over our heads as of tomorrow.

We got up. Just saying our goodbyes, Ben again. “You left yet?”

“Just about to.”

“Don’t. Stay there.”

We settled back down. Five minutes. Ten.

What was he doing? What fresh disaster had overtaken us?

Following my blog as he is, Ben insisted, over supper last night, that I tell his side of the story accurately.

There he was, minding his own business (and his sleeping sister) in that tiny little cottage… one delightful eccentricity of which was that its front door stood directly on the pavement; and on the inside of the door, invisible to the caller, were several steps up into its cramped hallway. So anyone inside the cottage answering the door was automatically two foot taller than the person on the street.

(Given that we lived with Serena’s Great Dane whose head was already four foot off the floor, this could be quite disconcerting when you rang the doorbell for the first time, and found yourself greeted by massive jaws hallooing you through the large letter box, at the height of your average Tyrannosaurus Rex.)

When the doorbell rang at around eleven o’clock that night, Ben opened it to find the person who’d been bullying us relentlessly for quite a long time now, his head just about reaching Ben’s navel.

“Is your father in?”

“No.”

This was not how the script was supposed to go. We should have been there, doing nothing, hour after hour after anxious hour...

“Your mother?”

“She’s out too. Would you like some tea?” Ben added charmingly. He knew, of old, that Pinky was addicted to tea.

“No!” He collected himself, “thank you. You’d better give them this.”

Given the look on his face, Ben judged that we might not want to bump into him in the street. On a dark and lonely night.

Indeed, we never saw him again.

(Though curiously, because his name has the same initials as our son-in-law’s, I’ve lost count of the times my telephone has nearly dialled him by mistake. Someone in the family recently asked why I didn’t delete him… or substitute the name for something rather more rude. Sentimentality, I suppose. And a proper upbringing.)

Ten days earlier Shaun had come in through that kitchen door, having just been offered the job that spelt our so delirious liberation. An age later that evening Ben come down the same old, worn stone steps between our two gardens, through the friendly night, letting himself in through the same ancient and kindly stable door.

Bearing an A4 manilla aloft.

“Got it,” he said.

“Got what?”

“The agreement.”

“What agreement?”

Ben knew nothing of the call just after eight, asking if Shaun had a job already. Nor of my call to Mark Jones immediately afterwards, confirming what I feared. Nor that we had given up all hope hours ago.

He must have thought we’d been imbibing a lot more than whisky.

“The money. They’ve signed.”

Having been brought up in a vicarage, however, Ben did know, all six foot of him, that if a woman bursts into tears and howls and grabs you round the waist and refuses to let go, you just hold her quietly until she’s finished.

“I think,” Joanna said, “we need to open some champagne.”

... going...

Mid-February 2009, Monday morning

I don’t think I slept much, that Sunday night…

Nine o’clock the next morning, Lawyer Number Two. Not in yet. Ring back mid-morning.

Oh, what?

Mid-morning, at last… I read him the email.

Forget it, he said. As soon as they know Shaun has a job, the deal will be off.

But what about all our trauma? The injuries Shaun has sustained? Everything our children have been through?

The church picked this fight with us: it wasn’t our idea.

(Or rather, Pinky and Perky, representing the church. As I’ve said before, most of the people of God in that place would have been appalled at what was being done to us.) Over and over again, I had begged: could we not be collaborative? They would ruin us, this way. They didn’t need to persuade us to leave. Why not simply help Shaun to a new job, as friends and fellow Christians?

Rather than shoving us to the gangplank and making us turn and fight...

Now that we had spent a considerable amount of time researching and detailing our grievances, we knew they were considerable. And legitimate.

Well yes, the lawyer said. If you really want to put your energy into a court case, for years and years to come. You could do that.

But I would let it go, he said.

(Yeah, well you probably have your own house, already.)

What the church is frightened of, is an Employment Tribunal, he said. And if Shaun now has a job to go to, there’s no case to answer.

If you remember, Lawyer Number Two had personal friends in the church.

“What your husband should do, Mrs Atkins, is get a job and take the money. Both.” I could still hear Mark Jones’s words (Lawyer Number Four) clear as the winter wind blowing across the Fens, as Serena and I had walked through Trinity a few weeks earlier.

Would you prefer, I asked Lawyer Number Two, that we take it to a different lawyer?

His relief was audible.

Mark answered immediately.

He had a few hours, to achieve the impossible. After getting up to speed. The meeting was at eight o’clock that evening.

Would he take it on?

“Yes,” he said. “I will.”

Wow.

I sent him the email, received the previous night, adding the new condition: that the agreement would only be binding if Shaun had no job to go to. The challenge was to invalidate that proviso, without alerting them as to why.

As you see. Impossible. No way to do this.

Nevertheless, Mark is an absolute, complete, total, amazing, brilliant... every superlative I can think of (though he does split his infinities – probably a lawyer thing, to confuse the opposition) ... life-changing, wonderful genius.

And friend.

And hero.

Taking on a case like that at eleven on a Monday morning.

But even Mark couldn’t achieve the impossible. Presumably.

I felt sick all day.

That afternoon I was appearing on the Titchmarsh Show again. Second time in a week. Shaking far too much to drive. Too late to ask them to send a car.

Shaun drove me. He couldn’t have done what I was doing. And I couldn’t have driven. Teamwork.

All the journey there and all the journey back, on the telephone to Mark. He spent all afternoon on that letter. Most of it in his own, un-invoiced time... I discovered later.

I had to ask him.

I’d never felt so churned in my life. Head in a vice. Stomach going round a washing machine. And then shrinking in the tumble dryer.

Thus I would feel, if I were robbing a bank.

Pounding, non-stop. Tightened in a winch, and then some.

Thus must Bink feel, every moment of her waking life. And perhaps quite a lot when she’s asleep, too.

“Can I ask you a very important question?”

Mark is a highly principled Christian with impeccable integrity. This much was obvious.

(If slightly less integrity in his grammatical infinitives.)

“Is what we’re doing wrong?” I asked him. Were we being greedy? Should we just let it go?

I’ve never heard anyone so definite in his answer.

“Absolutely not.” Mark was very firm and sure. “Their lawyer’s duty was to get the best deal he could for the church. (Not a very good job done, in my view, but that’s not my business.)

“My duty, to get the best for you.

“You are not doing anything wrong.”

We got back in the late afternoon. Still much to do.

That cottage was so small, you could see right through the ground floor just by glancing in from the street.

Some instinct prompted me to send everyone upstairs. Just as well. When the doorbell rang, most insistently, we were able to ignore it. Without diving under the kitchen table.

Mark had drafted the letter, at last.

“Most disappointed at this extra condition being imposed... Last minute changes... Not the agreement... You have not remembered our conversation correctly... not an accurate record of it.”

Copy it out it by hand, by fountain pen, I told Shaun. (I didn’t quite add that he should flick a few schoolboy blotches on it, to make it look spontaneous.)

Email from Pinky just before seven. Have been trying to contact you for three days. Email, telephone, even calling at the cottage in person. Will assume the deal is off.

No time for that now.

Everything in A4 manila. Contract signed – two ways. Mark wanted the money paid one way, but didn’t want that to snag business so had prepared both in case someone baulked.

Here, Ben! Drive into Oxford. This must reach Pinky by eight. That’s when the meeting starts. In the church. If necessary, interrupt them all, to make sure they have it.

It must be in his hands by eight o’clock.

Then I rang an old friend, due at the meeting. Spoke to his wife. He’d had a prior commitment: it had been too short notice. She promised to bicycle to the church there and then, and make sure the documents had arrived.

Bless you!

Phew. All done.

Just after eight. Pinky’s number ringing mine. Over and over again. I can’t ignore people. No idea why. Weakness of mine.

“Hello?”

Straight in. No pleasantries. “Has Shaun got another job?”

When I was about five, I lied to my mother that I’d cleaned my teeth. She knew immediately – my toothbrush was bone dry, and exactly where I’d left it that morning – and I’ve had a bit of a thing about lying, ever since. Can’t really do it.

Don’t believe in it.

“You’ll have to ask him,” I flustered.

All the time we’d lived in that cottage, we’d complained about the terrible mobile reception. You had to go across the road, to talk.

I love the way God uses our complaints, sometimes, to bless us.

“Hello?” I said. “Hello, hello? I can’t hear you. What did you say? Are you still there?”

I hung up. He tried a few more times, but I didn’t bother any more.

I rang Mark, never expecting him still to be in the office. (Or as he would say, to still be.)

He was.

I told him.

I’m sorry, he said. I tried.

(Gosh. A lawyer. And he really seems to care. Or even, seems to really care.)

They knew Shaun had a job to go to.

It was pretty inevitable, all along. There would not be any deal. Once Pinky had realised his mistake.

“Joanna,” I rang next door, to the Manor House. “Can we come over? We need cheering up.”

Coping

Monday

I don’t know how you cope. Friends often say that.

More often, since reading this blog: We had no idea what you were going through.

How would you have any idea?

Do you know what your next-door-neighbour is going through? Or your best friend?

We don’t wander around with a badge saying, This is what I’m going through. Not least because everyone else is going through worse.

I have a group of fifteen or so friends who pray for Bink. Some of them haven’t even met her. And yet they go on. Faithfully. Week after week and year after year, now, some of them. I update them by email, whenever there is a particular need – including a need to thank God for some new blessing.

(Of which there have been plenty, recently. Mostly – entirely – because she has been getting treatment in the Priory. After sooo long. The improvements have been breathtaking. The fact that she is getting treatment at all, after two decades, near miraculous.)

In that small group of under two score friends, I can immediately think of at least half a dozen going through (or who have been through) far worse. Than we ever have. Ill-health. Bereavement. Abuse. Violence. Life-changing medical error. Inheritance worries. Addiction of a loved one.

At least two mothers in our little group have lost children; one, more than one. Another member has such a severe disability that even reading is now impossible. (She has to listen to emails, and write her own blog by dictating.)

Life is tough.

And we are all in the privileged West. Cross over the seas to Syria. Or Yemen.

So that answers that one.

You didn’t know, because you had your own worries and were going through worse.

As to the first – how do you cope? – there are two answers.

How do you cope with anything? You have to. That’s it. That’s all there is to it.

I used to find it curious, as a child, when grown-ups referred to someone as brave, for something over which there was no choice.

So-and-so is dying of cancer. She is so brave.

Why? Did she choose to die of cancer?

Such-and-such was so courageous, surviving the Holocaust.

To my young definition, brave was a choice.

Scaling a burning building is brave. To save a child. If it’s not your child. 

(If it is your own child, it’s not really. It’s just involuntary. But I probably didn’t know that, then.)

Doing something which is frightening, by your own volition, for a reason. On purpose and purposeful. That is brave.

Anything else is just endurance.

How do I cope? I have to. That’s all there is to it.

But the other answer is that I don’t. I really, really don’t.

It has taken me twenty years to write my fourth novel. The first three took two years apiece. (And, my editor said, should have taken one.)

This is not coping. It just isn’t.

Monday night, after several hours on the telephone talking to Bink’s therapist and Bink herself and our dear friend Jenny, to get her to A&E and more to the point get her fed and encouraged and befriended... after several hours of that, yet again, I could barely walk.

It happens now quite easily. The weariness is cumulative.

I once assumed ageing was what happened to you as the years went by. It isn’t. It’s what happens to you when experiences hit you. One after another after another. Every time you stagger to your feet, wham, another. In the face, over you go. Slightly more quickly than last time. Each time.

Thus, on Monday night, by the time Bink was in the pub with Jenny sounding cheerful at last and fed, I could hardly cross the kitchen. Barely stand. Reached a chair, limping with a massive exaggerated list like a tipsy gorilla, and fell into it.

No physical pain: not at all.

Nothing wrong with my limbs, that I am aware. I could do it if I made myself: of course. Just not much holding any of it together any more. All the glue loosening, as if the doll was left too close to the fire for too long.

Yesterday, all day, trying to write an article which I’d been pushing away since Saturday.  Hardly started. My head tight with giant’s massive hands either side of it, pressing in on it, all day. Unable to think. Put one word in front of another.

Shaun in the British Library enjoying the last day of the Anglo-Saxon exhibition – I should have gone with him: should have remembered; sort of thing we would have done together – and I kept wanting to ring him and say, I can’t do it. I can’t do this any more. I can’t do this loving Bink thing, any more.

By eight-thirty – we eat at civilised times, now Shaun isn’t working: cooking lovely rich stews; beef in red wine; flaked fish in cream – he said, Go and have your bath. By nine, in bed with a book (and a large glass of whisky: the only way to loosen the giant’s relentless grip) wishing Shaun would come but too tired to find him.

So that by three I am awake again. 

Will they kick her out? Will she lose all the gain of the last year, if they discharge her too soon (as has happened twice before)?

Where will she go? Where live? Will she end on the streets again, in a desperate (and unsuccessful) bid for treatment?

Will there be time to set up the volunteering for the church, so kindly offered to her nearby? To have found accommodation?

Before it is too late and she has run out of treatment. Again.

If she has a bad half-day again, like on Monday? Will they wash their hands of her? Will that be it?

Round and round and round.

That is not coping. It really isn’t. Not successfully.

So I find, astonishingly, that it comes as a relief, with all this pressure on my head, to turn back to the events of early 2009.

When there was (surely) so much more pressure on my head.

Where we will resume, tomorrow.

(Bar other incidents...)

More friendship. Again

Yesterday

“Lara isn’t doing too well today.”

(Eh? Lara?? Who is Lara? Lara is Bink’s Christian name. Keep up!

Therapists won’t call her Bink. I won’t call her Robin. So we seem to have ended up with Lara. What professionals call a compromise, I suppose. Not my idea. My idea of compromise is you call a person what her parents call her. But a few years ago Bink decided not to be Bink any more so we all had to get used to calling her Lara, and that’s ok. Better than Robin, anyway. On account of, it’s her name.

Obv, if you’re nuts, the most basic fundamental you need in order to sanify is multiple names and identities. So you know who you are.

One email even resorted to “our patient” to put the matter beyond any confusion whatsoever.

So anyway...)

There I was, having tea with someone who’d come quite a long way to see us. Met him through this blog, in fact. Had seen a great deal of appalling treatment, by the CofE, of its clergy, and having been following my blog had come to curl our hair a bit curlier with some of the horror stories he’d encountered in twelve years of working for a bishop.

So there we were, having a civilised meeting with a guest who had travelled a long way, when my telephone rang.

My fault for answering. In a meeting. Never a good idea…

Lara wasn’t too good, had been in bed all day, and not eaten anything until the afternoon. So they wanted us to nip over (remember the death of my lovely Rover? public transport would have taken us two and a half hours, if we’d set off immediately) and take her into A&E. (Not sure how, without a car...)

This was where I got a tad confused.

Why?

In case she’s dehydrated.

So... um, why not give her a glass of water?

We’ve done that.

And?

We think she may have a urine infection.

(What?! Where did that come from?)

Because she seems a bit confused. (Yeah, well this is Bink we’re talking about. Or, I suppose, Lara. Or Robin. Or possibly Our Patient. Suddenly, confusion doesn’t seem such a psychopathic response.)

Erm... I tried to think of a way of putting this politely. If she were at home, we’d tell her to do a wee test and take it to the GP. Not Casualty. (I mean, it’s not exactly a casualty, is it? In the West. A urine infection. Possible urine infection.)

You don’t, er, think you might be overreacting slightly?

Well, we’re on the spot and we think she needs to be checked over.

Fair enough.

Ben, can we borrow your car? Shaun, are you happy to drive (I’m not insured for Ben’s car)?

No, Shaun said. I’m not, actually. Ben needs his car this evening, and this is ridiculous. If they think she needs A&E they should take her. Straight away.

They haven’t the staff, I explained.

She obviously doesn’t, he said. If she did, they’d call an ambulance.

Yeah, but the last thing we want is for her to get thrown out again, like she did last time, when she had a panic attack. She wants to be there.

They are looking after her, and giving her structure, and getting her up in the morning, and providing her with regular meals, and insisting she goes to meetings, and it is really doing her good, all this.

She is getting better. This is her chance. Of life.

And they’re only being careful, after all.

I’m all for turning annoying things into good things. And a really good thing could come out of this.

“Jenny...” I rang my mother’s friend.

Jenny is amazing. Just a tonic to sit with her for five minutes. More use than a hospital-full of A&Es, that’s for sure. I mean, unless you actually need A&E, that is. If your leg’s hanging off because you’ve been in a motorbike accident, I’m not saying Jenny would sew it back on for you. But if you’re going in just because you didn’t have breakfast till lunchtime and you sound a bit down.

Jenny and her family came to visit my dad a couple of weeks ago, because my father is not long for this world, being 101 and all that. He may yet prove longer for this world than a lot of us, but nonetheless his clock is ticking. And friends gathering.

And I remembered how utterly wonderful Jenny is, and she always remembers how utterly wonderful my mother was (how could you not? well, you might not, if you didn’t know her) and in gratitude to my mother and life and God and His wonderful beautiful world, and because she’s such a lovely person, and given that she lives in that neck of the woods, Jenny had said she would be very happy to visit Bink and cheer her up. Any time.

Only, Bink has been so low recently, she hasn’t wanted to be cheered up by someone she’d never met.

So this was my opportunity. To get them met.

An hour or two later, Jenny and Bink were becoming besties in A&E, and Bink was explaining to me how she’d been doing so well until she got the text from Gatsby last week and everything had fallen apart since, and I was telling her to delete the blasted thing unread, and she was bursting into tears and wishing she could come home.

And an hour or two after that she and Jenny were sitting in a lovely warm pub and Jenny was getting a lovely hot meal inside her, and Bink was sounding as cheered an unconfused as if she’d spent an evening in the company of one of the loveliest people in the world.

Because she had.

And our poor guest was putting his coat on in the hall and saying goodbye... after I’d spent the last four hours on the telephone. Honestly. I might as well have spent it in A&E.

“What an impressive, smashing person,” I said to Shaun, after our guest had left.

“Indeed,” Shaun agreed, “though I’m not sure he felt he had your full attention.”

Sorry, impressive and interesting guest. I lost that a long time ago.

When God decided to give me a mad daughter.

Going...

Mid-February 2009

So near the end of our time there. Still such a long way to go...

Even with Shaun’s new post, we still had nowhere to live. I realised that for all our new-found optimism, the severance agreement was crucial. Without it, job or no job, we had no accommodation.

We’d never had a mortgage before. No idea what we could afford. I went on the internet, found a house. Thought, that will do.

If we got the agreement...

An insane week. Crucial telephone calls over all the minutiæ of the severance package. Interspersed with more work than I usually have in a month. Thought for the Day on Tuesday. Telly in London on Wednesday. An article for the Times by the end of the week. Speaking at the Oxford Union on Thursday.

Normally I’d spend several days mulling such a debate. I would have to write my speech on my napkin during dinner.

“This House believes promiscuity is a virtue not a vice.”

What you have to do, to score in a university debate – specially such a silly one – is tell more jokes than the other side. “I come from a constituency,” said the Anglo-catholic bishop I was teamed with, “where protection during sex means a bus shelter.”

Fortunately, our opponents were elderly feminists, flown over from the States at their own expense. For the kudos of speaking at the Oxford Union. Apparently.

One of them, inaudible.

The other leered, “I hope to get lucky tonight,” at all the fresh-faced twenty-year-olds, cringing around her.

“I don’t,” I said, “hope I get lucky tonight.”

Shaun, handsome in his father’s dinner jacket, was in the front row. (In the chamber where, he told me eighteen months later, he first spotted me from the gallery when we were both Freshers, and watched me all evening...) “I know.”

“Liar,” the bishop whispered as I sat down. “You said you’ve got to write your Times article all night.”

We won by a very long way.

Friday, we flew to Inverness for a weekend with Louis. All the work done. Walks along the breathless estuary. Slumping by the singing fire. Champagne for dinner.

Two months earlier, I had pitched a vicarage housekeeping book. The editor had laughed out loud, reading it to the office. Any other time, I would have secured a deal.

It was crucially urgent. If I didn’t have a contract before a friend’s vicar’s wife’s cookbook hit the shelves next month, my pitch would die in the water.

I just couldn’t. I simply didn’t have time and energy. Not that, and rescuing my family, both. Passionate though I am about my writing, just this once, Shaun’s severance package was more important than a book deal.

I sat by Louis’s fire, knowing I must send the final pitch, if I was to have any hope whatsoever.

Bone-exhausted.

I didn’t.

Sunday night, we returned to Oxfordshire.

Ten years ago, you didn’t get emails on your telephone. Louis didn’t have internet.

We got in, I opened up... and saw our house fly away. Pinky – or Perky: whichever had drawn up the agreement – had realised his mistake.

A supplementary email. This agreement, of course, is only relevant if Shaun has no other job to go to.

That was that, then. Nowhere to live after all.

Or was it? Did a supplementary email count?

I had no idea.

And it was a Sunday night.

(And yesterday, thank you for asking, Bink went to church with Shaun. Was befriended by a lovely young family with children. And introduced herself as Bink.)

Never alone

Sunday

When I was a teenager, I thought life was about studying, making friends, being passionate about a job, having a career... I took Sundays off to go to church and see people and read and maybe take the dog for a walk...

I’m not sure quite what happened.

I was kicking myself yesterday for giving you a cheerful update on a Saturday. Leaving nothing to say in my Sunday post. Other than that Bink had decided not to go to church after all. Otherwise, nothing but a v boring bog-standard day in the life of loving someone mad.

At that moment Ben and Rose walked in from their drive to Rhodes Recovery.

“How was she?”

“All right.”

“No, she wasn’t.”

“No, I suppose she wasn’t really.”

“Didn’t want her violin. I forget to take it out of the car, anyway.”

A bit later, Rose said, “X sent her a text.”

What?!

You’ve haven’t met X yet. We haven’t got to X. You’ve only met all the Robins so far.

Gatsby. Jay Gatsby: X personified.

A text from Jay Gatsby, the Great thereof, would be very bad news indeed.

“I don’t know if I was supposed to tell you. She didn’t tell me not to. Don’t say anything until I’ve rung her. Please.”

Good luck with that, Rose. Bink never answers her telephone.

“If she didn’t tell you not to, Rose, she must have expected you to tell us.”

Come on, Bink: wake up! Rose is a very mature fifteen... but nonetheless a child. You don’t dump that on her. What are the rest of us for? (Thought to be fair, if she’d told Ben, he might just have gone round and punched Gatsby’s great lights out. When he was younger, he might.)

No wonder Bink had been down and low and depressed for half a week, if she’d had a text from that eternal lover and utterly unquenchable great pest, the Gatsby.

She rang, I checked she’d received the books I’d sent her, and advised her to enjoy an evening’s reading.

The four of us – Shaun, Ben, Rose and me – were due to watch a movie together.

Movie-night in our house is not only rare (I’ve never understood: how do you get supper washed up this side of ten-thirty?) but much more challenging and adventurous than in anyone else’s house. On account of Alex’s setting our cinema up, for Rose’s twelfth birthday party.

The understatement of the year was when Serena asked – our wifi was rerouting via Calcutta and all our calls to my father, upstairs; who can’t hear anything over the telephone anyway because for some reason he removes his hearing-aid to take calls, and is yet to understand how the internet is an improvement on carrier pigeon – “Do we think Alex over-engineers, sometimes?”

We don’t have a telly any more.

Alex’s system made tv obsolete. (Rather in the way that videos did: once you’d recorded your programme, you didn’t need to waste time watching it. And once you’ve tried to follow a plot via Alex’s system, you’re cured of movie-watching for the next eighteen months...)

A wide screen descends from the ceiling at the press of a button. The projector whirrs into life. You negotiate with the sound system, to see if it’s talking to any of the other systems today. Then you choose from about eight remote controls. This is such fun it can easily take half an hour.

I don’t even know how you begin to find a film or programme.

The moment of greatest excitement comes when you’ve got into the action, the hero is about to be garrotted with a cheese wire by the evil Moriarty and you’re longing to know how he escapes... and the picture cuts out. You can can still hear the blood curdling yells so you could continue like this, filling in the blanks yourself, but decide to take a tea-break and let the projector calm down... and when you come back you find the hero is in bed with the girl and you have no idea how he got there. But never mind, because they’re now surrounded by snapping crocodiles... and this time the sound cuts out. So you never learn how he talks his way out of that one. You just see the crocs shrugging and circling off.

It’s much better exercise for the little grey cells than watching a film normally. A cinematic jigsaw-cum-cryptic-puzzle.

Last night’s plot was further complicated by a continuous volley of texts from Serena, started while I was snatching a quick pre-movie bath. (Alex has set up our laptops so we can text whilst also on our telephones.)

“I’m on the phone to her now. In a bit of a state. Do you know about the text she received?”

“rose told me”

“Can anyone visit her tomorrow?”

“hang on im getting a lot of water in my laptop ive set up a visit with a lovely friend of grannys but shes nervous because shes never met her”

This correspondence, trying to sort out a sobbing Bink between us and make sure she would have company today, took up most of our respective evenings.

Poor Serena... “I’ve done a lot of hard manual (and some mental) labour today, and then had 2 of Alex’s dry martinis.”

That would knock anyone out. One, would. Let alone planting an entire hedge.

Eventually I simply told Bink that Shaun would pick her up and take her to church today. Then told Shaun. Then told Ben we needed his car. Please. And is that woman the spy and why is she shooting the fat one and who’s the baddie I don’t know what Jude Law looks like.

And finally, at ten o’clock, had to procure permission from Rhodes Recovery for Bink to go to church.

Message back from the manager. This time yes but could you give us more notice next time?

Yeah, course. Silly of us not to think of that, really. Serena and I just did all this for fun. Comforting a hysterical Bink instead of something boring like watching our respective films.

I was able to catch the last fifteen minutes. Serena wasn’t so lucky: Christian had given up and gone to bed. And Alex and the au pair resorted to Dr Who, which even after a couple of his martinis would be pretty dire.

This morning: printed off numerous maps of Rhodes and church; also of singing weekend info for Bink to see if she would like to join the community which runs these, after Rhodes. Just getting organised for departure when my father’s care provider rang. No care today. Sorry. Everyone sick.

No one to get him up, on the loo, washed, dressed, breakfasted, lunched, looed, teaed, suppered, looed again and bed.

“I can’t do that,” I said. “I just can’t. We have a daughter in hospital. I’m not a trained carer. I’m not strong enough to lift him. And we have people coming for dinner. And a daughter in hospital did I say that? This is why he pays triple… oh, never mind.”

Next two hours spent ringing round for another care provider. Interspersed with ringing Rhodes to ask someone to wake Bink. And sending a text to a friend who used to attend the church to ask if someone could welcome Bink and be friendly. And ringing another carer. And another. And telling my father he wouldn’t be got up until eleven.

Know what I did for relaxation, after I’d got the world organised?

I cleaned wax out of the carpet. From where the Christmas tree candles had dripped on it.

In 2017.

That was my relaxation. This is what I now do for fun. Because it’s easier than the rest of life.

I haven’t had breakfast yet. But I have now organised dinner.

All I have left to do (apart from prepare veg, find a picture for this blog, get Rose’s brunch and write 2,200 words for the Daily Mail about the utter tragedy of someone who didn’t end up as fortunate as Bink) is get hold of Shaun, to find out whether Bink wants my mother’s friend to visit this afternoon.

Time was, when Sundays were for going to church. Seeing friends. Reading a bit. Relaxing.

Plus, you never hung washing out on a Sunday. Once.

This is Ben’s washing. Hanging on a Sunday. Times have changed. (And I don’t have time to sit waiting for my little robin to allow me to photograph him on the bird table. Just as I didn’t have time to write a short post, today.)

Though to be fair, I think he put it up there on Wednesday.

So that’s all right then.

And just now, I got a text from my dear friend Mags to say she’d alerted four friends in the church to be friendly to Bink, and “YOU ARE NOT ALONE xx”

Know what?

It made me cry...

(But only for a second because I didn’t have time for more.)

Naah it's RUBBISH

Yesterday.

(To Ben last night:)

HELLO?? WHAT?

NO, I’M IN A MENTAL HOSPITAL. A MENTAL HOSPITAL!

NAAH. IT’S RUBBISH!!!

I’m not sure why I should feel so encouraged.

She is depressed. Lonely. Worried.

Crashed midweek. Still low now.

And yet I am.

One thing I have learnt, almost above anything else in this rum business of having a mad daughter, is to trust my instincts. (Which is why I’m being such a bore about her name. My senses are SCREAMING!)

And my instincts are currently telling me to be happy about Bink. Even though she is – at the moment – not at all happy herself.

So let’s examine:

1. She is in treatment. Some of the best treatment in the world, presumably. If the renowned Priory can’t get her well, who can?

2. She is off meds. Finding it hard, with no painkillers in that turmoil of her tormented brain, but off them anyway.

3. And persevering. Admitted, she doesn’t have much alternative. She has a shrink too sensible to put her back on the dulling anæsthetics. And nowhere to live other than the four walls of her cell. But she is keeping going. There are plenty of ways she could have run away or sabotaged treatment if she wasn’t in it for the finish.

4. Talking to me. True, not wanting to see me, at the moment. But that’s ok. I don’t hear any antagonism when she tells me this.

5. Wanting to see her siblings. And Shaun. And turning to me for help. Which is what I’m for, apparently. (Sigh.)

Much, indeed, to be grateful for. Ben and Rose are seeing her this afternoon.

And tomorrow, if the plan holds, Shaun is picking her up to take her to church nearby. To make new friends.

Mid-February 2009

Your feedback, kind reader, is that – confusing though the knitting pattern can be at times – you are interested in all the different yarns of our story. Not least because all of them lead back to Bink, in the end.

So there we were, that Monday evening in mid-February 2009, laughing ourselves witless because Shaun had just lost us a small fortune. But, come on: only part of the fortune at stake.

Not yet in the bag.

Pinky and Perky had to go back from the Brussels of our little cottage and get the deal past the parliament of the Parochial Church Council. Desperate though they were to sign and seal and be shot of us, there is a legal requirement that a PCC must have a week’s notice before an extraordinary meeting. (Remarkable that anyone knew the law, without Shaun active on the staff – he had twice been asked to take an illegal wedding during his time in that church – but apparently somebody did.)

So, a week to wait. And keep schtum about Shaun’s new post.

The next day, for reasons lost in the mists, we were in Cambridge. Visiting my parents.

Now that our worry had been alleviated, I could notice theirs scoured on their dear kind faces like cats’ scratches. 

My father, bringing in the tea, bent down with care for us. My mother’s quiet, benign dementia lapping at the edges of her brilliant brain: her soul saying nothing, but bleeding anxiety for us. Where would we live? What would become of us?

How could we not tell them?

Suppose one of them died over the next few days, and they never learnt that Shaun had a new job at last?

Would I ever forgive myself?

But we had agreed. No one. Not a soul. 

And our pact was for my parents more than anyone; far more than for any of us. We would survive: we knew that, now.

We had offered, twenty years earlier, to care for my parents in old age. A promise which, for the last four years, we had not been able to keep.