Kidnap

Winter, 2013 - 2014

We had no idea where Bee spent Christmas, that winter after Serena’s lovely wedding.

If indeed she did. If she still breathed and lived.

Having lived in a recognisably working vicarage for fourteen years, in what was technically inner-city, we had met plenty of homeless. I knew about the life-expectancy of rough sleepers.

Three years is supposed to be good-going. 

Bee had been a target for sexual abuse even living in the privileged confines of Cambridge University. She is so small… so vulnerable…

It was years before we learnt where she did.

With a lovely family, whose son had taught her Classics when we were living in Oxford. (I had once imagined Bee herself might have such a boyfriend: academic, musical, Christian. They’d never have had any money... but how much happiness, music and children she might have shared with such a friend!)

Then she went on to sleep rough. For a month? Was it two? In the bitterest teeth of winter. In a desperate bid for treatment.

Which led to none.

Of course.

Look on the streets. At those huddled there, hungry and cold. Does anyone care? Most of them are in need of treatment.

Eventually admitted herself to a psychiatric hospital... Which proved worse than living on the streets.

Herded like animals. Made to wait humiliating, dehumanising hours for a few-minutes’ conversation with a nurse. Like blacks in the time of apartheid. Non-persons.

They are loonies. Why would you treat them like human beings?

More terrible than anything she’d been in before, which even I found hard to credit.

But we knew nothing of this. Would it have been more bearable if we had?

We did hear – either late 2013 or early 2014 – from the Chorister School, where ten-year-old Rosie was boarding two hundred miles away, that she’d had a lovely weekend with them.

Sorry?

With whom?

Bee and Gatsby. Came to take Rosie out for the weekend. Surely you knew, Mrs Atkins? It was the boys’ choir on duty that weekend, so she was allowed out for the weekend.

Oh my word.

Some parents, I know, would have exploded their anger and grief and terror at the school itself.

(You did what? Without our express permission? How dare you?! Calling my lawyer…)

I know plenty of parents who would. Totally unfair as well as pointless. Long before Rose started at the school, Bee had asked if she could take her up there to settle her in. At the beginning of her first term. She seemed well when she asked.

Bee can’t accept “broken” promises. The situation might now be different beyond recognition, but how could that be explained? So we had let her and Gatsby take Rose there the previous September: my harp and all her luggage in Gatsby’s car, several days staying in the North of England, introducing her to the school.

How could the staff know how much had changed? If we had trusted Gatsby then...

(We didn’t know until years later what Gatsby had done that previous summer. We had several meetings with the police when we did. I wondered what the impact might have been on the care of his own daughter, if we’d known sooner.)

Well, the school must be told now.

Never, I said. Never again. Ever, ever, ever. Gatsby is never to be allowed to see Rose again. 

Ever.

Nor is she to be allowed out, with anyone, without very explicit permission from us.

And if anyone rings on the school call-box, we are to informed immediately.

Poor Rose. Singled out so often by her sister’s illness.

It was a truly wonderful school and I’m sure they did this very discreetly and compassionately... but dearest Rose must have been the only child whose telephone calls had to be screened.

And of course, you can imagine, to wretched Bee’s troubled mind, how this must sound.

Such evil parents. Keeping two loving sisters apart.

Taking out their revenge on a child and using her as a pawn in their anger.

Lilac time

Sunday

Serena was born at lilac time.

Now that the lilacs are in bloom

She has a bowl of lilacs in her room

And twists one in her fingers while she talks.

Ever since I was a teenager I have delighted in bowls of lilacs. All because of TS Eliot. Planted lilacs in many places where we have lived.

Looked out of the window at them waving congratulations the morning we woke to find a miraculous, serene, golden little dayspring baby in a wicker cot by our bed all along with the sunshine.

Where did that come from?

In our next house, the wing of the eighteenth century vicarage where Shaun was curate, I took cuttings and put them in all the flowerbeds, and they thrived, miraculously, like little Serena of the fairest white-gold-dust bubble-down hair. The park opposite, where I took our small children often – and where someone in a mac flashed at us when I had little Bink and Alex with me and the poor man! for once the police were there in under a minute and caught him, poor wretch what harm was he doing, really? – was full of multi-coloured lilacs – mauve and pink and white and soft blue and dark, dark purple – until one year some municipal saboteur took them out for bedding plants.

How I mourned those beautiful lilacs!

I planted this one, the variegated purple, in our new garden for Serena… along with several more.

“Ah, my friend, you do not know, you do not know 

What life is, you who hold it in your hands”; 

(Slowly twisting the lilac stalks) 

And this is the time of year when our house starts to fill with young people.

We let it out on Airbnb, this lovely home which we bought with the so-inadequate compensation from the church in Oxford which treated Shaun so badly, now that he has no work for us to live off, and from lilac time onwards they come flooding in, the happy laughing crowds, every weekend. Hen parties and stag parties and mixed “sten” parties, engagement parties and celebration-of-anything parties. Lawyers and doctors and vets and film-makers and young people from the City.

This weekend, a joint thirtieth-birthday-party. We get quite a few of those, too. It’s my girlfriend’s, my boyfriend’s, and I want to arrange a surprise for him, for her. Sixteen of us, twenty of us, for the weekend. We’re very respectful, all professionals. Is that all right?

They brought a couple of tents, these ones.

“You let it flow from you, you let it flow, 

And youth is cruel, and has no remorse 

And smiles at situations which it cannot see.”

This weekend’s couple, just back from honeymoon, both had their birthday yesterday, same day, thirty and thirty-one both, and their one-year-wedding-anniversary today (working too hard, when they got married, to honeymoon a year ago) with twenty and more and twenty-two of their delightful, young, cosmopolitan and successful friends.

She, as a surprise for him.

(What on earth are we doing, he said when he arrived at the doorstep, going to someone’s house? Not the first to have said this, on being given our home as a surprise.)

One of the group arrived early and sat not-working at the kitchen table at teatime yesterday, trying to concentrate with Horatio in her face. She loved him: they all do. She is just changing Chambers and has much to do before back to London on Tuesday. The lawyers often bring work and need the WiFi code.

When we got in late last night they were dancing on the table and Horatio was barking that it was dangerous and they fêted us and introduced us and poured me a vile-coloured and surprisingly refreshing Prosecco with Aperol.

And asked my age and said gosh my mum’s younger than that and you look fantastic.

I smile, of course, 

And go on drinking tea. 

Thirty. By the time Bink was thirty she should have been doing all this.

She is with her very kind friend, who – bless him – sent me the briefest of texts yesterday morning, to say she had been through a bad patch but seems to be recovering, and he is encouraging her to talk to us again.

Every time it happens I think: I mustn’t forget this. How much it hurts. How angry-making it is. How unbearably horrible to everyone. I must tell her. Why would Bink want to treat us all so vilely?

And every time there is the slightest hint of the possibility of her talking to me again it all melts away again in sorrow and tears for her and I only want to help her, to love her, to want her well.

So I never tell her how much it hurts us, after all.

“Yet with these April sunsets, that somehow recall 

My buried life, and Paris in the Spring, 

I feel immeasurably at peace, and find the world 

To be wonderful and youthful, after all.” 

Is it?

I was in Paris in the Spring before I went up to Oxford. Bink was never well enough.

I must stop writing, go into the garden and mark out the tennis court on the lawn. Round the tents. First time this summer. Forgot to ask our gardener last week, and they all brought racquets.

I sang in a concert last night, in the beautiful mediæval Moot Hall in the countryskirts of Bedford. My favourite concert of the choir I sing in: Elizabethan madrigals mostly, which is all I really understand, musically; our English late-flowering Renaissance. (I can’t do the modern, German stuff. I read the notes, but I never really get it.)

Kept thinking of Bink. Thank goodness not weeping uncontrollably, as I have been through so many concerts in the last few years.

But wanting to, in a way. The pity of it.

Kept thinking of her. Kept thinking of my poor, dear Bink.

Our penultimate song, set by one of the basses as a cappella close harmony. If only I could do this for you, Bink. If only I could.

Not nearly as sad as the last one. The soprano who sings next to me, the voice of an angel, heartbreakingly lovely, said she wants this at her funeral. You can’t, I said. We sang at your wedding eighteen months ago: far too happy and long a life ahead of you.

(Not your funeral to choose, she said. Not really yours either, I pointed out, since you won’t be around to insist.)

Bink almost could though.

Bink could almost, legitimately, have us sing this at her funeral.

Why?

Thursday

On balance, it was just as well I rang the police.

Breakfast time, Facebook message from a friend, Bink is here. Sleeping. Safe.

Odd thing: I had said to her hostess the previous evening that his was the only place where she could end up. I couldn’t think of anyone else she still knows.

Why didn’t I contact him? I’ve no idea. Too tired and confused, presumably.

She had told him, after staying with him for twenty-four hours, the police seem to be trying to contact me.

(So she can receive calls and texts... If not from me.)

Obviously the same bright blue spark who had rung me after midnight. Sent her a bunch of messages from a withheld number, with no number to ring back on.

So her friend made her ring 111, to tell them she was safe. And then in the morning he sent me a message, so we’d know too.

You can ring me any time, he wrote.

Thank you, I replied. Thank you thank you thank you thank you.

I’ll ring you.

Thank you.

She had turned up on Tuesday, cheerful and happy as if paying a social visit.

How long are you staying, Bink?

Probably take you three years to get rid of me. Ha ha.

No, Bink. You can stay a couple of nights.

She does this, every two or three years, he tells me. Just send me a text if she’s missing. Save you ringing the police.

Why?

Why why why why why?

She had the perfect set-up.

Kind people to live with.

Unconditional acceptance.

In Cambridge which she loves.

No demands on her.

Perhaps that’s why, Serena said.

Perhaps...

I’ve done anger before. (So rude to the hostess who is giving up so much for her. Just walk out: no word. So wasteful and unkind to us. To everyone.)

Doesn’t get you anywhere, anger. Except that it’s a lot more bearable than grief. Similar squandering of energy, though.

Serena is angry.

I honestly have no idea how much she can help it, I argue.

I heard snippets of her conversation with Alex, Serena says. Most of it seemed to be, Do you think the police can find me? How can I ensure they can’t?

(So that’s why she rang him. Wanting to know if technology could trace her.)

You don’t do that, Serena says, if you just need a bit of time to yourself. 

No, I agree. You tell your hosts, I need a bit of solitude. I’m going away for a few days. No need to worry about me.

You only do that if you want to cause disruption. She’s doing it to get attention, Serena says.

But she can have all the attention she wants!

No she can’t. You’ve only been talking to me for two minutes and already you’ve had to break off to take a call from Grandfather, upstairs.

At which point Serena breaks off for far longer, to respond to her toddler and instruct her au pair.

What is she running from? What does she want?

Even Bink doesn’t have any answers.

And God isn’t telling.

I want to shake her.

No, I don’t. I want to go and see her. Take her out for tea.

Say, Bink, wake up!

You mourn the loss of the past. But you’re throwing the present away. And with it, the future.

Will she see me? Will she just run further, if I try?

Given the text she sent me today, I doubt if she’ll have anything to do with me for a while. We’ve been here often before, too. Seems to come completely out of nowhere.

Will I ever be able to say, this is Bink’s life to throw away? Can a mother, ever?

Will I ever be able to give up?

Round and round again…

Yesterday morning.

Stumbling again when I get up, as if drunk or very old. Tripping over on my way to the bathroom.

The room tips, when Bink’s kind hostess tells me on Wednesday evening. As if the ship is suddenly keeling in the water.

Not again. Please God not again.

Another evening gone. Lifetime gone. Another episode. Yet again.

So tired of it all.

Supper abandoned. I had thawed two wine red steaks for us.

Shaun brings me a cocktail instead. He has been in and out of the room for some ten minutes, and has of course picked up the gist.

Go and run your bath, he says after I hang up.

It is too tired in the evening to do anything now.

Do you want anything?

Roasted cashew nuts.

Do you want me to go and buy some?

Yes please. I lay my head on his arm, briefly. The comfort of skin on skin.

Go up to my father. He prays and asks for her often. Two hours before, had asked for news of her: calls her Lara because a few years ago she didn’t want to be Bink any more.

Missing, I say. His carer listens too, kindly.

Will you ring the police?

What for?

I think you should. And your lovely clergyman friend in Cambridge. It’s a big church he is part of.

Have your bath, Shaun says.

He has put a second cocktail and the cashew nuts in the bedroom, lit a candle and turned the radio on for me.

Half an hour listening to awful music on the Peterborough police line.

Last time I tried to ring the police on the non-emergency number to report dangerous driving, I gave up after fifty minutes, when we arrived at Serena’s house, and never bothered again. Then realised I should have rung 999 because it was a crime in the process.

So I give up and ring 999.

Can’t help. We’re Bedfordshire. That’s Cambridgeshire.

I can’t get through to Cambridgeshire.

I’ll get them to ring you back.

I dread them waking me. When this has happened to you this often, the one thing you need is sleep.

Ten twenty two they ring back. I give them details.

Vulnerable. Very ill. Missing.

They don’t take a description.

Half past midnight. Telephone. 

I stumble through sleep and hand it to Shaun.

It’s for you.

Police. To say absolutely nothing, as far as I can understand.

Don’t you want description?

Consultation the other end.

I’ll find out and ring you back in five minutes.

Most unusually, I fall straight back asleep.

Again. Telephone.

Police say nothing again.

Don’t you want description.

No. We’re not concerned.

Why not?

We’ve done everything we need to.

Yes, but why aren’t you concerned.

Consultation again.

Can’t say. Data protection.

What do you mean, data protection? We were the ones to tell you. What data can you be protecting? We’ve given you all her data.

Consultation.

She’s safe.

You mean you’ve spoken to her?

Can’t tell you. Data protection. But she’s safe.

Have you spoken to her?

Data protection, sorry. She’s safe.

Bollocks, Shaun says when I hang up. Data protection means protecting someone’s data.

Well, I’m not going to challenge them because ringing back would take three weeks.

And now, of course, I really can’t sleep. Not for hours.

On the radio the next morning, Today Programme, mention of inexperienced police officers handling calls.

She rang Alex. Is indoors. Safe. And not at Gatsby’s.

Her hostess – who knows Gatsby – says he wouldn’t have her back. More likely to call the police.

Yeah right.

He has moved on, she says. Has a new relationship.

I am very relieved.

And perversely – stupidly – a bit angry. He has had the luxury of moving on. After what he did to her. Nevertheless, moved on is a lot safer than still obsessed.

So a lot more relieved than angry.

Missing

Today

Bink has gone missing again.

I did have a post pre-scheduled for today, but it seems stupid to write about the past when the present is like this.

Ax

Empty Christmases

Friday, November 2013.

Those who have read my latest novel may recognise the ample three hours in Heathrow to catch a flight for Baltimore... and still very nearly missing the flight.

My mind was in pieces. I didn’t know where I was or what I was doing.

Until I saw the light flashing for the last boarding.

I seemed to run for half an hour to find the gate. Fell in the seat in a palpitating panic. And wept and wept. For most of the journey.

I can’t remember whether the stewardess actually asked whether I was all right, or I simply longed for her to.

I do remember standing in a long queue on arrival, recognising a Cambridge chaplain also attending the conference, talking to him and simply wanting to cry. Wanting him to know, so I could.

The organisers – two women I’d rung about delaying my arrival: a daughter’s near-suicide works, as a reason – were meeting me, would look after me and be kind, I knew... but the queue seemed interminable.

I did the job. Cameras, microphones, big audience.

One does, doesn’t one? Perform.

I spent several days in Baltimore amongst lovely Christian people. Presumably mostly only crying alone in my hotel room. The Templetons were kindness itself, showing me round Baltimore and loading me down with presents for Rosie. Jack Templeman reminded me of my so-generous grandfather, when I was her age; suggested these be Hanukkah presents for her so she could understand a little of the origins of her own faith.

So when I got home I bought a hanukkiah, a menorah, for the Chorister School where Rose would be singing until Christmas Day; asked my cousin Fleur the correct way to celebrate and the correct order for lighting the candles each day; passed it all on to the House Mother so the choristers could mark Hanukkah together and share the Templetons’ presents.

(When we’d been living in Oxfordshire, Bink had spent weeks making a large Advent calendar for Rosie, organising someone in the village to sew it for her, hanging it on the wall and filling each pocket with a different present for each day. I think it was the following Advent, 2014, that this inspired Serena and me to reuse the same lovely cloth calendar for the Chorister School: there happened to be one chorister for each day in Advent, so Rose helped us choose a present suitable for each child... though of course, we couldn’t resist giving Rosie herself Christmas Eve!)

The Christmases have all been swept up together into a fractured shattering of pain.

Was that the year when I went to the party of a colleague of Shaun’s, someone I barely knew asked how I was and I simply burst into tears?

Upon which, of course, you have to spend the next twenty minutes apologising and explaining that your daughter is ill while he has to say it’s fine and that he quite understands.

How often have I done this, over the years?

I have noticed how similar grief is to intoxication. How it incapacitates in the same way.

It was so when Shaun accepted the post in Oxford with no housing, and we were due to leave our London vicarage in the New Year. I hid in the loo for half the night at the Today Programme Christmas party, throwing up into the bowl and not daring show my face in case it appeared on the Daily Mail the next morning as Thought contributor being blind drunk. 

I knew I wasn’t, but I also knew that’s exactly how I’d appear.

Sick with worry looking just like sick with wine.

I asked Shaun if we could leave the party, and bicycling home fell into the gutter and lay staring at the stars. 

He turned round to help me up.

Bit too much to drink, dearest?

Not nearly enough.

Not enough to dull the pain. Of missing her.

Not even knowing where she is.

Not knowing... I didn’t even know if she was alive.

Jay would hardly tell us, would he? Might not know.

Could be months.

Earlier this year the hostess told me she reads this blog every day and had no idea what we were going through.

How is that possible? I burst into tears at your Christmas party!

But of course it is.

Reply

Thursday, November 2013.

Took me several hours, that email.

Not sure why I bothered.

Dear Anne,

I have not read your message in full.  It's all too much for me at present.

I do not know where Bink is staying. I have spoken with her and I believe she is safe. She has not yet made a decision about where to be. She decided not to come to my house for the time being, because she was too anxious about you “interfering” by trying to find out where she was going.

Yesterday I spoke at length to Bink about going to [your address]. I told her that [there] she could be sure of constant company and loving care: more so than anywhere else. She reacted very strongly against the prospect, even when I offered to take her there and, if she wanted, to be with her there. Today I tried again, with a similar result.

[I have mentioned before Jay’s Iagoisms, effecting the opposite of the words’ face value.]

The simple thought of you knowing her location makes her obsess about finding somewhere else to go. She spoke again and again about refusing local mental health care services, solely because you were there at the hospital yesterday when they were mentioned and might try to use them to find out things about her. She has said that she will not use any health service which cannot guarantee her confidentiality. The local team contacted her today but she was unable to arrange anything because of her anxiety about this.

She was very upset at the fact that you all turned up at the hospital. I explained to her several times that this is inevitable when she puts herself in harm's way, in a life-and-death situation: that such a situation over-rides her autonomy.

Surely [your address] can only be a good place for Bink if she can decide, for herself, that it is a good place, or at least an acceptable place. Taking her there against her will would be abduction. Keeping her there against her will would be false imprisonment. I'm serious about this: these would be crimes and I won't be a part of either one.

...

This is *very* upsetting for me. Please, please, don't pursue me any further. I'm acutely aware of the potential conflict between my responsibilities, and don't need reminding of it.

J.x

Good grief.

This was someone with a First from Cambridge.

Dear Jay

Thank you for replying. I am very sorry indeed that you are so upset and worn out, and not at all surprised. It must be wearing enough caring for [your daughter] alone.

We wouldn't dream of asking you to be party to a crime, nor of taking Bink somewhere against her will or holding her there. I have no idea how anyone would do such a thing let alone why. So please rest assured that this was never in anyone's mind, nor could it be. The very idea is absurd.

...

Finally, a brief explanation. I was very unsure whether to change my plans yesterday: I very much did not want to (and I hope it will not have compromised the best paid work I've been offered for far too long, which is a great honour and which has involved others putting their necks on the line for me). So I trusted myself to Shaun’s and Serena’s judgement, both of whom were very sure that, since Bink had behaved in a way to guarantee maximum attention, this was what she needed and wanted, however unpleasantly she had asked for it. She may say now she was upset that we turned up, but that wasn’t what her text to me at the time said; she didn’t have to see us and she didn’t have to allow any of us into the room. No doubt [under Jay’s influence, of course] she has persuaded herself she didn’t want us there. I'm not sure she has persuaded anyone else.

Look after yourself Jay. ... Above all you are responsible to your children, and to yourself for them.

Friday. 

Serena to me:

I'm afraid I responded to jay’s idiotic e-mail a little more brusquely than you did...

Me to Serena:

It was a bit, wasn't it? Shaun found it very defensive indeed and thinks it’s just sinking in that his role has not been entirely helpful. I think he put it more strongly than that!

Had a dream... I had arranged to go and see Bink, though I think I hadn’t arranged this with her. I turned up, and saw her walking along with Jay... She was very, very definitely still living with him. She wasn't expecting or wanting me but she was civil about it and we all got in the car together.

The main point of the dream was that she was still at Jay's. I don’t think he would lie to us so emphatically, but he is very much in her thrall.

Serena to me:

Well, I told him if he seriously believed abduction and imprisonment were on the cards, Bink was obviously making him as deluded as she is. I only phrased it marginally more civilly than that.

Email to Gatsby

Wednesday morning to Thursday, November (my mistake: not October) 2013.

We dithered in the carpark.

Please could we take Serena and Christian home?

Good idea.

Wait. Diversion via Kennington would be slower than tube.

Bad idea.

Too tired to function, all of us.

Dropped them off at a station somewhere.

Went home. Fell into bed.

Should have been in Washington DC by now.

Thursday 21st November, 2013 10:47

[Bending over into somersaults to be tactful and kind and keep him on board whilst trying to explain what was at stake.]

Dear Jay

Thank you for your friendship towards Bink and all you do for her.

It was very good of you indeed to be there for her in the hospital. You looked drained and utterly exhausted, and we are inevitably concerned for you. We have experienced all this before with Bink, many times, long before she knew you: yesterday morning was a re-run of the morning of 10th December, 1997. We owe it to you to spell out that it can (and probably will) get very much worse, and that an open and indefinite invitation to Bink to make her home with you, unconditionally, would currently mean being available around the clock to ensure her safety and oversee her medical care. This would inevitably compromise your care of your own daughter and is not right or appropriate.

Jay, we all realise you realise what I am about to write. I want to spelt it out partly to liberate you: Bink needs to be at home.

1. She needs daily medical care. Michelle [the psychiatric nurse] indicated that home is a better place to set this up.

2. She currently needs someone in the house with her continuously: there are several people here to share being available for her. Someone may need to sacrifice earning a living to be her carer.

3. Your first responsibility is to your own daughter (and son). You cannot and must not put Bink before your own children. It is not helpful for your daughter to witness a dangerous suicide threat being used as a means of getting help. (This is not a criticism of Bink: she didn’t know how else to ask. Your daughter needs to learn from safer models.)

4. She has issues with us which are “freezing” her. Living at a distance, she can postpone these indefinitely. It has taken a close friend of mine into his sixties to resolve similar issues (if indeed he ever has) and they have wrecked his happiness and his relationships. If Bink takes twenty years, she will lose having a family of her own.

5. If Bink kills herself, it will be a tragic loss of a very dear friend to you. To us her family, it will redefine who we are. We must take responsibility for it.

I suspect we are all in agreement about most of this.

The challenge, of course, is getting her here. You have made a promise that your home is always available to her; and you believe she must make this choice herself. You may have better solutions. My suggestions are:

1. Circumstances change promises. She is currently at risk and you are not in a position to ensure her safety: no one person has the resources to do this, and you certainly have not as she demonstrated by accusing you of not meeting her needs. You have a daughter who is vulnerable at the moment, whose needs eclipse Bink’s. Moreover Bink is asking for, and needs, more than your promise. You promised a corner of your house: you did not promise full-time care [little did I know that in fact he had] nor to compromise your daughter’s welfare [that too, in effect: he had told his own children that Bink was now a member of their family] nor presumably to meet demands that are beyond you [and again… as was to become amply demonstrated].

2. By closing off a less-good option, you make the safer choice more possible for her. (Yes, she could choose something worse. If she does she will know what she is doing. The responsibility to remove an option that is not the best does not include eliminating all those that are worse.)

I am including the family (except Rosie: she has had enough) in this email because I am (I believe) representing the family's views rather than my own. I am including [another mutual friend] because Bink wanted [this friend] involved in the decision as to where she should live.

We are very, very grateful to you both. You are both extraordinary friends, and Bink is very fortunate indeed to have you.

On a different subject, Ben feels strongly that Bink would be better protected if you would renegotiate – or rather, not negotiate at all, but tell her – what confidentiality means, and that you will always tell her parents when she is at risk, or in hospital, or missing. (It would have been helpful, for instance, to know she had been in Fulbourn Hospital last week.) She told Ben yesterday that she wanted to “tell [her siblings] stuff,” but thought it might, “get passed on”. Ben assured her that she could speak to him in confidence, but explained that confidence is never absolute and he may occasionally have to pass things on if there are issues of safety – as anyone responsible would do. Bink seemed to accept this clear rule without difficulty. It could be helpful for you to ask Ben why he believes this so passionately, and has for some time.

In the small hours of yesterday morning Rosie dreamt of Bink's body floating in a dark river. We are all working together to avert that future.

Thank you again.

A

xxxxx

Play Lady K

Sunday

Sundays are days for the positive and the present.

As I can’t currently think of anything in Bink’s story that is both positive and present (she rang on Friday – good in itself – but when I asked how are you she said, not good but I didn’t ring to talk about that) I am going to tell you about something positive and present in my own life.

Which I heard about in Lent so I couldn’t open the bubbly there and then...

During my aching, arid, twenty-year writing drought I frequently begged my cousin Fleur, who teaches creative writing, to mentor me.

Please, Fleur, I said. I need help. I am desperately stuck.

You’re a published, professional writer. I teach amateurs who want to enjoy themselves. I can’t teach you anything.

This went on for years, until Fleur relinquished her university teaching post. I asked her again, and at last she capitulated. Wouldn’t let me pay her which was what I wanted. But she agreed to set me exercises which was what I needed.

As with a daily blog – as I hinted in reply to Daisy’s comment yesterday – almost more important than the quality of what you do, when you get in a rut, is simply that you do. So I churned the words out. Day after day.

Sometimes must have been about Bink.

It was with some surprise therefore, some weeks in, that I read Fleur’s comment. In my writing classes, she said, my students vie with each other who can be the first to make me cry. Today you achieved that accolade.

Really?? It wasn’t a particularly emotional piece.

Are you sure?

It was: The best evening of my life, or somesuch.

I had described the premier of my imaginary first play. Not the West End or Broadway or anything seriously ambitious. No Olivier or Tony award. Just seaside rep. North Norfolk. Where we all, as a family – including Fleur and her actor-now-barrister husband, my cousin – go on holiday every summer. Where I cut my teeth on weekly rep as an actor myself.

I simply wrote about the champers we shared after the first night of my first play.

After decades of telling me that it didn’t matter that I couldn’t write because I was caring for my children which is so much more important, suddenly Fleur saw.

It isn’t more important to me.

What I wanted was to write.

That is what God put me on this earth for.

I know this: He seems to forget sometimes.

And this realisation, understanding what I felt in being unable to do what I was created to do, brought tears to Fleur’s eyes. More than any account of Bink’s sufferings. Or Alex’s. Or any of ours.

Well, I realised: I’d better write that seaside play. In that case.

The Christmas before last, I was introduced to someone who runs a competition for new drama. I’ll have to apply, I thought. Can’t meet this year’s New Year deadline, because it’s only a few weeks off.

Long story short, year and a bit later, you’ve been travelling with me for a lot of that year, I hadn’t had time. New Year’s Eve deadline again. There I was, thirty-first of December, frantically scribbling my play in my father’s kitchen upstairs because we’d let our house out for the celebrations.

So while everyone else was out drinking in the NY (or in drinking it very noisily in our house downstairs) I was emailing the organisers of the competition saying my entry will be with you, soon, by midnight.

Promise.

(So I might as well have written in the previous year, when I had fortnight over Christmas? That’s not quite how it works: I’d had a year of thinking about it at 3 am by now.)

It was selected.

It is showing.

PLEASE COME!

I can’t imagine anything more enjoyable than meeting the readers of my first blog in the audience of my first play.

Sharing champers after the first night.

Because, you see, unlike Fleur, I am not a dedicated mother or wonderful selfless person or meaningful and spiritual human being, satisfied spending my life for others and pouring myself out on one mad daughter.

I’m just a writer.

Wanting to write...

Sleepless in Staines

October 2013, Wednesday

A dismal day. One of the worst of our lives.

The only one of us properly awake was Ben, who sleeps through anything. The rest hadn’t slept since Monday night.

We sat in a row, on plastic chairs, being polite to Gatsby whilst wishing him far away. Bink was out of sight, being assessed in a room somewhere.

I asked after his troubled daughter. Thinking, why aren’t you with her. Knowing the answer full well.

Eventually we were called to go in and see her.

Gatsby got up too.

Why didn’t we say, excuse me but no? We are her first of kin. We would prefer to see her alone.

English manners. How long it takes us, as children, to learn them: how much longer, to unlearn again when we need to.

The interview was blistering.

Bink. Two nurses. Shaun and me. And Gatsby.

They asked about Bink’s situation.

Gatsby jumped in. She’s just graduated from Cambridge.

Her medical history?

Gatsby answered this too.

Her whereabouts?

Gatsby again.

And so it went on.

I chipped in occasionally, when I could be quick enough.

Shaun listened, as he does.

Listening, to be honest, being the hardest part. The only comfort having Gatsby in the room was that some of Bink’s invective spilled in his direction too.

I’ve never witnessed such hatred. Not even when she was in the Florence Nightingale Unit, aged sixteen.

What was it you wanted to say to your parents? the nurse had asked kindly.

I don’t want to hear from them. For twenty years. They didn’t listen to me for twenty years so that’s how long they aren’t allowed to speak to me.

I had no voice, no say in anything for all that time.

They can’t have a voice for that time either.

Dear Bink. Your illness had dominated our family for twenty years.

No voice?

Your older sister, your youngest brother, no voice at all.

My writing silenced all that time.

No voice at all.

Serena and Ben weren’t even in the room but I could hear their hurt in Bink’s lacerating accusations. They had truly had little voice in our family life, for all the screaming of Bink’s dæmons.

So we sat and took the punches.

To meet us, you’d think Shaun the phlegmatic one. Inscrutable. Unflappable. The rock, as I believe I’ve said before. 

I am the Tigger. The spontaneous, emotional one. What you might expect of a mother, perhaps?

And yet I was the one who let it wash over me. She’s ill, I said to myself. This is not the dear, loved and loving Bink. This is no more our daughter than a cancer might be, or a possessing devil.

Whereas Shaun was cut to the quick.

Many years later, she apologised. Blamed the advice. She was in a terrible state; may have said she didn’t want to see us; too much anger.

And the psychiatric nurse told her to talk to us anyway: that we would want to hear.

I suppose I would. Would prefer anything – loathing; vitriol – to being cut out of her life. Isn’t that what a mother is for?

To absorb the blows…

It has taken me some time to write this post. I’ve had to keep coming back to it.

It is only now, five and a half years on, that I fully face the implications.

Could we have done anything? Could we have rescued her? And with her, the next five years?

The nurses asked where she would go after discharge.

Gatsby jostled in. She’s living with me.

They were far too professional to tell Bink what to do. The steer, however, was obvious. You need to be where there are plenty of people to look after you. Lots of company.

Our house is never short of people.

We were eventually vomited back out into the waiting area.

You should go now, Gatsby said. She really doesn’t want you here.

Thing is – I have discovered this over and over again – until you have to fight for survival… until you are forced to... well, it’s rather a rude thing to do, isn’t it? To fight back?

That’s how I was brought up, anyway.

How polite I was, when Alex’s head master drove him to near-suicide when he was ten! How much more assertive I have been over Rose’s probably-far-more-bearable unhappinesses at school twenty years later...

How deferential we were, when Shaun’s employing church put my children out on the streets! It was three and a half years before I was cornered and frightened enough to win the compensation which provided our present home...

So it was with Gatsby. Reading the recent post about the April Fool that year, Shaun said what he should have done was punch Gatsby in the face. You don’t, though, do you?

(Sure: you would face prosecution for a crime. But perhaps our moral crime, not fighting him, was worse?)

And perhaps, if he were before me now, I would tell him what he did to her and us. Or perhaps I wouldn’t be bothered: they say he’s a broken man.

We meekly filed out of the hospital and went to the car.

We shouldn’t have left her, Serena said straight away. It was wrong to leave her. She said it several times.

If she’d put it in the present – if she had said, we mustn’t leave her now: it is wrong, not it was – would we have turned around? We were only a few paces from the hospital door.

Why didn’t she scream it and shout it and make us turn? Because that isn’t Serena’s way. And because Serena, too, hadn’t had any sleep.

Would it have made any difference?

Could we have rescued her?

I can’t bear to write any more.

I was so, so tired, I couldn’t think at all. None of us could.

Except Serena.

Gone

October 2013, Wednesday morning

I’d only been to the US once before, when we all went ranching together in 2007. Rose had been just four, rounding up cattle all day, her tiny pony galloping up the hillside and getting there as soon as any of us. Her feet not reaching any stirrups, no hard-hat small enough, falling asleep in the saddle on the way back home at the end of the long hot days. Great for her balance, we were told: what the real cowboys do.

That autumn of 2013, my brother, who works for the Templeton Foundation, had kindly put an opportunity of work my way, to visit America again: interviewing Desmond Tutu’s daughter – the man himself, awarded the Templeton Prize that year, due at Buckingham Palace – for the presentation, at a theological conference in Baltimore.

So I arranged to go half a week early, to stay with friends of my brother’s in Washington DC and discover a bit more – enjoy my first real taste – of the New World and its history. An agent had advised me I must include the States in my next book, so I had planned a scene in Washington DC.

I was due in Heathrow by midday on Wednesday, the day after Bink disappeared. From the police’s point of view. She had disappeared from our lives long before.

You must cancel, Serena said.

We must all be here for her.

She was found at six am.

Angry with Gatsby – perhaps desperate more accurate – because he had promised to look after her. The only reason she was living with him. She needed a carer. The only way he could make her part of his life: promise round the clock, twenty-four-seven, solo saviour.

Then found he couldn’t care for her twenty-four-seven after all, because his daughter needed him.

We must be there for her, Serena said. Such a cry for attention, such a strident and disruptive-of-everything cry, obviously means she needs attention.

Why would you cry for it, otherwise?

As before, I have no detailed memory of what we did between six o’clock and eight, except try to find out which hospital she was in.

Gatsby said he didn’t know.

She won’t want you to turn up, he said ominously. Dread the fall-out, if you do.

(We really don’t care, Gatsby. She is our daughter. You look after yours.)

So we just took a guess.

In the car on the way, I managed to get hold of Helen, Bink’s wonderful psychologist.

Are we doing the right thing? Should I cancel my flight?

I can’t tell you that, Helen said. It’s your call.

Is she just being manipulative? She we ignore it?

I never use the word, Helen said. We all manipulate each other, to get what we need. Just, some people do it better than others: less inconveniently.

I rang the airline. Changed my flight to Friday. Not much penalty. Except, of course, the penalty of missing my experience of Washington DC.

The opportunity never came up again. The scene in my book, based on the city, had to be researched online.

Gatsby was there before us. Interesting, given that he didn’t know where she was. Given that his own daughter needed him.

Respect for a minor prevents my explaining why; but she really, really did.

Staking his claim to Bink had suddenly become more important.

The drive of the loins taking precedence over the fruit thereof.

I stared, aghast.

None of the men in my family even noticed. There are some things – I never used to be sexist like this: life and experience have changed me – there are some things men just don’t seem to get.

Her hair: grubby, grey, tied back with a rubber band.

And all gone.

All that beautiful gold... gone gone gone.

What happened?

Chopped it off with my kitchen scissors, Gatsby said proudly.

It’s cool, isn’t it?

Not for the last time that day, I could have done things to him with those kitchen scissors.

Dark waters

October 2013

It was gone eleven on Tuesday night, a few weeks later, when we got the call.

So many. So often.

So many ambulances, police cars, spent nights.

You weary of the worry after the years.

Gatsby wouldn’t have told us: of course not. But he had been frightened into ringing the police, and they at least have the sense and compassion to care about the next of kin.

About the people who really love you, when the chips are down. And go on doing so thirty years later. 

For all that Bink eventually started calling him “my partner” – mostly to entitle her to have her carer, her stooge, at social events – they really weren’t.

Not at all.

And of course the police wanted information. Unlike Gatsby, they had the wit to realise we might know something. Because we had known and loved her a very great deal more and longer.

Walked out into the night.

Left what they took as a suicide note.

Perhaps now you’ll take me seriously. Something like that.

Serena often seems the only one with a clear head.

What do you do, how do you spend the time, when you are up all night worrying? I can’t remember. I’ve done it for Bink so often I can’t remember how the hours pass, exactly.

Two am.

Serena said, the only one who might know where she is, is Rosie. She might have kept contact with Rosie.

Rosie. Ten years old. Just started as a chorister in Durham Cathedral, over two hundred miles away.

We asked the police for advice.

You have to, they said. If there is any chance she might know, you have to ask her, yes.

As Alex pointed out very much later and far too late the next day, that is their job. It’s not the police’s responsibility to work out what that does to poor Rose. Or whether Bink really is suicidal. Or any of the finer points.

The police’s job is TO FIND HER. Whatever it takes. This classifies as a suicide call. It’s not their job to weigh up whether it really is, or indeed to care about anything else.

After all, losing your sister to suicide is going to be a lot more traumatic than being hauled out of the dormitory at two am, however bad that is.

Poor Rose...

Groggy as she was. She had no idea where Bink might be.

Could she find her telephone? It was an old-fashioned school: we used the call-box to speak to her.

In my locker, maybe? Can’t remember. Yes, there it was found, eventually.

Out of battery. Couldn’t remember where the charger was.

Could the school IT man be roused at this kind of time?

Perhaps it’s in my desk. In my classroom.

Eventually, yes, there was a message from a number she didn’t recognise. Few days before. Something like, hope to see you soon.

Could it be Bink?

Could it be significant...

She was ten years old, for pity’s sake.

In the hour of the darkest hour of the dark night.

She had hardly been there half a term.

Eventually, some time after three, the dear child was allowed back to bed. In the sick bay, so as not to disturb the others. The matron with her for company.

Oh dear God, spare us.

Before it was dawn she saw it, Bink’s body, swirling in the dark river of the black water in the murk wood.

She was the one to find her.

No child should ever have to dream such dreams, or nightmare such nightmares.

Contact

Autumn 2013

By the summer holidays of that year, the year of Serena’s wedding, Bink was no longer in touch with home.

Thus, we knew nothing of the clifftop walk versus the beach walk, or the long shadow its significance cast across her life.

The estrangement had crept up on us, like Gollum after the precious ring, long before the wedding. Mysteriously, and most distressingly. There had been no falling-out, or obvious reason. 

An early indicator, at least a year before, had been Bink’s email signature – in the days when she still used emails, as all Cambridge undergraduates do – advising that her home address, during the vac, was not her family home... but Gatsby’s.

Why? I asked her on a rare opportunity.

(They were not living together in any conventional sense. Gatsby was not, that we knew anyway, her boyfriend. Heaven forbid. For all her lunacy, Bink has never been completely mad.)

Why have you put his address instead of home?

Post goes astray at home.

True, there are a lot of people in our family and household. And we have a perfectly serviceable pigeonhole honeycombed to the wall.

Alex, being Aspergic, is capable of far more objectivity – in some ways, much more uncomplicated pure affection – than the rest of us.

I had tried to contact Bink, of course I had. I had broken myself, repeatedly, on the wall of her silence.

So I had learnt to grit my teeth. You have to, not to go mad yourself. With grief.

If she wanted to be in touch with home, she knew how to be. I certainly wasn’t going to contact her through Gatsby. Just what he wanted. Ownership. Control. If we needed her, we could only find her via him. Just as if she really did belong to him.

I wasn’t going to play that game.

My father was ninety-six. If she wanted to know he was dying, she would have to ring home.

Alex doesn’t play games at all. Except Dominion, in the pub. He doesn’t allow personal hurt to get in the way of common sense. (And of course he is not a mother. Worn down loving a daughter you can’t stop loving, however much it hurts.)

If his grandfather was looking frail, Alex would ring Gatsby himself.

Could you get a message to Bink?

Possibly. Possibly not. Can’t say.

(For f’s sake! Who’s playing games now?)

Well if you can, Alex continued quite unperturbed, please could you tell her Grandfather isn’t well. She might want to say goodbye.

That was how we heard. Eventually. In a very roundabout way.

Bink was in a psychiatric hospital.

Had been putting electric wires around her neck.

You’d think you’d tell her family, wouldn’t you?

If you had any heart at all.

Cliff edge

Back to 2013.

We left Bink in the summer of 2013. The year of Serena’s wedding.

The year it began to be so obvious.

Again, I suppose. Obvious again.

Unravelling again.

Before I gather up the threads of Serena’s wedding, I should tell you where we are going together. When you pick up a book, you can see how long it is.

Life, alas and fortunately, isn’t quite so predictable.

I started this blog as an act of gratitude, for those who enabled Bink’s stay in the Priory... and we haven’t even reached that, not by five very painful years.

She has now left the Priory and still has a long way to go.

(Am I discouraged, that Bink isn’t better, or more better, already? Serena says I hope too much. It’s who I am and how I keep going. She expected less of Bink’s stay in the Priory, so is happy that all she has done is break free of the Lorazepam.

But isn’t that wicked, I said. That she needed four and a half months in the Priory to escape what NHS doctors put her on?

Yes, she said. It is wicked. But she’s done it now. At least, now, somebody might treat her. You couldn’t even get treatment for her before, because of the Lorazepam. Now you could.

Yes… if we can find any. And she is well enough to embark on it…)

In the meantime I’ve become very fond of you, readers (specially those of you who leave comments and “likes”; thank you).

And the story is far from over.

I started last July, 2018.

So I plan (no promises!) to finish the history of Bink’s illness by this year’s July.

After that, I will keep you updated in Bink’s life: of course I will. (As long as she allows me, I will.)

And perhaps persuade her to write for you, too. If I can.

So after July, I will post when there is news.

Not necessarily every day.

Bink had graduated. Not as spectacularly as if she’d never been ill, perhaps. But with a very respectable Cambridge degree.

She had been elder of the two of the loveliest, most beautiful bridesmaids at the loveliest, most beautiful wedding: sang a song, written a speech, looked gorgeous.

(Even if she did spend the last few hours outside, in the cold, in tears... With Gatsby.)

Now, the future beckoned...

All graduates, step up to claim your glittering, exciting new jobs!

Bink had talked of work she would like to do. The only suggestion I can remember from her was being a bicycle pizza delivery person. Then she would get exercise, and be paid for what she enjoyed.

Perhaps I should have shown more enthusiasm…

She decided, which seemed quite sensible on the face of it, that as it had taken her ten very painful years to graduate, she had earned two or three months off, celebrating and catching up with friends.

As I say, it sounded reasonable.

This is where we started to lose touch with her, and I have to shift to her viewpoint.

Gatsby asked my father if he could borrow his seaside home for a week, to take a party. He’d done this before, giving my father a financial contribution to the running costs. My father loves the house being used (and doesn’t object to a contribution) and very happily said yes.

(As an aside: this second time, Gatsby never gave my father anything. My father happened to mention this, and was puzzled. A few months later I had an opportunity to ask Gatsby if he had meant to... and he claimed my father had been most emphatic in saying he didn’t want anything. My father may be a hundred and one and a half, but he is in very full possession of all his mental faculties, and quite a lot more that the rest of us are. So I found this very interesting.

Because it meant that Gatsby no longer was.

As yet, I had no idea why…)

Bink was one of the party.

I knew, she told me years later, that I had to break away from him. My future, health, welbeing depended on it. It was vital.

I had to escape… or be destroyed.

Even if I simply walked and walked and walked, and dropped in a ditch exhausted, and slept under the stars... I just had to get away.

So I did.

I walked and I walked.

I left the house, and turned right, and walked along the cliffs. To keep going until I was free.

Oh! she said with agony. If only I had walked along the beach! I so nearly did…

Or if she had turned left instead of right. Or rung and asked us to rescue her.

Anything!

Gatsby went looking for her.

And as with so much that Gatsby did, he thought he was being loving.

He walked along the clifftops too.

And he found her.

Please come back! he begged her. Please.

So she turned.

And did…

You'd (almost) never know

Easter Monday

Can there be any better way to spend a day?

Beginning of spring.

Bathed in sunshine.

Most important day in the Christian year.

With everyone you love the most.

Everyone.

Well, nearly everyone. I started the day at my mother’s grave, putting flowers from our garden upright in the deep moss.

(I thought to photograph them for you but the moment was too precious. Too holy. And now the Garden of Rest will be locked against the tramps. People like Bink. Ill and homeless.)

My father and I, hand in hand, tear on tear, remembering what we remember every day.

How much we miss her.

I was a bit naughty. A bit devious.

My father has been so miserable, for the last few days. My mother managed him: I’ve never known how.

In my Easter card to him, I thanked him for living with us. And thanked him for helping enable Bink to come home.

I wrote, in my card, that I had told Bink her coming home was the only thing I could imagine which might cheer him enough to spend the day downstairs with us.

And she did.

So he did.

He couldn’t not, really, after that, could he?

First time Bink home since Christmas. Her hair whacky now, a few inches long and the tips mad-blonde.

I said I loved it.

She said she hates it.

I reminded her that any time she wants to go to my favourite hairdresser, I will pay. (My dear friend Garry has gained at least one client, via this blog…)

But I won’t get done to it what you want, she said.

Bink, I want you to love your hair and feel good about yourself. Get done what you want.

You would never, never, ever have guessed that this fun and funky person wasn’t well.

All day playing with her nephew, cuddling him and laughing with him, naked water baby on Bink’s lap all afternoon.

By evening, Baby could say, Bin!

What can we do to help you, Bink? Have a life. Make friends. Be happy.

Do exactly what you are doing. Don’t make demands. Just be there for me.

But I want to help...

Well, I could invent some silly jobs which won’t do any harm, to make you think you’re helping.

No, I don’t want to help in that way. I just want you well: I don’t care who helps you get there.

As I say, you’d never have known.

Until about seven o’clock. Ben had picked her up from Cambridge in the morning, and I, in my delight, had forgotten to work out how we would get her back. We’d been drinking Pimm’s in the afternoon.

Would the X5 bus be too difficult for you, Bink?

That’s when you would have known.

Tears. Panic.

Wash it again, Serena, again, round the rim of the plate, please can you wash it again? Again!

Bink, what’s the matter? Is it because I asked about the bus?

I don’t know. I don’t know. How pathetic do you have to be, not to be able to take a bus? I just don’t know. I’m sorry.

It’s all right. Shaun will drive you: he hasn’t been drinking. It’s my fault for not planning it properly.

Is it?

Yes. It is. It’s normal to panic when something hasn’t be planned properly.

Yes, it is, Serena agreed.

Later.

Wanting to be well is all, Bink.

How can you say that? It makes me feel terrible. As if I haven’t wanted it enough, over the years.

Sorry: I didn’t mean that. I meant wanting it is the first and most important step by far. The rest follows.

Does it?

Will it?

We thank God for one good day. And pray on.

A life of small miracles

Easter Day.

Bink is coming home for the day.

(And the tomb was empty.)

Enjoy Easter Day!

Trapped

Holy Saturday

Bink, I said. We have two hot tubs in the garden.

(We have let our house out for the day for a 13th birthday party… for seventy guests. So we’ve organised a walk, for the whole street, to the park to get away.)

I’m too dirty, Bink said. I haven’t washed for months.

(This is partly why she can’t come home. She’ll contaminate everything, and then not be able to come home when she’s clean.)

But they’ll be taken away on Monday, and all your contamination with them.

Did you say two?

Yes.

Are we allowed to get soap in them?

We haven’t been told we can’t.

Oh my goodness! I could have dirty wash in one and then a clean wash in the other.

And then, Bink, they’ll be collected and taken away, and no one you know will ever be in contact with them again.

Ohhh! It’s very tempting…

Same chance many never come again.

But I just can’t do it.

Later.

I don’t know whether to tell you this, Bink. I don’t want to put any pressure on you.

Try me anyway.

Grandfather has been really miserable these last few days. He’s going to the ear clinic next week, but in the meantime can hardly hear anything. And missing Granny dreadfully. Very, very lonely.

Oh, no! Bink said.

Weeks ago we all arranged to get him downstairs for Easter Day, and we were all looking forward to it... but now he’s saying he’ll just go to church and put flowers on Granny’s grave, and go straight back upstairs again.

That’s so sad, Bink said.

Please don’t feel any pressure, Bink. But the only thing in the world I can think of which would cheer him up enough to have Easter lunch with us, is seeing you. Should I not have told you?

No, you should have done.

Does it make it harder for you to come home, because you feel pressurised? Or easier, because you have more reason to?

It doesn’t make it any harder or easier.

It just makes me even more sad when I can’t.

Lord help me want to want.

Good Friday

I spoke to Bink yesterday.

Rose rang her.

(I wish I could do that: just ring and speak to her when I want to.)

As always, what a tonic to speak to her it was!

One thing worse than your daughter telling you her troubles? Not telling you.

How she wants to come home! And how she can’t…

Too minging. Too depressed. Too completely and utterly incapacitated and incapable of doing anything.

After an hour, she said, I have achieved something today.

I have wanted something.

(Shaun, I said. Which theologian said something, like, Lord help me want...

Augustine. Lord make me chaste but not...

No not that one.

No idea. Anselm probably. Ask Ben.

Ben, what did Anselm say about Lord make me want something or other...

No idea.

Do what Bink did, Shaun said. That’s how she got her degree.

In the well-loved words of St Decanius the Less, Lord help me want to want what you want.)

Ring of truth

Midsummer 2013... and a few months earlier

Shaun and I and the rest of the family were happy to sleep in the marquee, in Serena’s lovely wedding field half-way to Grantchester. But we had lots of friends who wouldn’t be. So we commandeered Ben’s digs; Serena’s college room; Bink’s.

As I was getting Bink’s room ready for the wedding guest who would stay there, I noticed a sonnet to her on the mantel.

I already knew Gatsby dabbled in poetry.

I see, I thought.

I skated over a revelation a few months earlier.

Easter Monday. Everyone at home. Which meant, of course, Gatsby too.

Everything manically busy.

Can I talk to you? Bink asked after lunch.

It was a couple of hours before we could grab a room to ourselves.

Would Serena be very upset if I don’t want to be her bridesmaid?

Deep breath. Say nothing for a moment.

The beautiful dress, designed and made and already paid for doesn’t matter... of course it doesn’t.

Bink, Serena wants you to enjoy her wedding and be there to celebrate her joy with her. If you are uncomfortable being a bridesmaid, we’ll find a way around it.

Thank you, she said.

May I know why?

She looked very uncomfortable. I don’t want to wear the dress.

(Why on earth didn’t you say? It was designed especially for you...)

Would you be happy to be bridesmaid if you wore something else?

Um... I suppose so. Would that be possible?

Of course it would!

Somehow, between us, we came up with a trouser suit. Did we discuss cream silk, or is that something I just imagined?

Bink still looked very troubled.

That’s not all of it, though.

Can you tell me?

She was clearly finding this difficult. In the end, she just came out with it.

I’m pregnant.

There’s only one thing you can do.

I hugged her. Told her we would all help and support her. And the baby of course.

While a black, hungry cavern opened beneath and swallowed me whole, as I saw the next twenty years of my life disappear into the bringing-up of Bink’s bairn. I would never get back to my beloved work nor ever write another book, ever again.

I could never condemn anyone who has an abortion, whatever your views on it. Unwanted pregnancy is almost the most terrifying thing I can imagine.

Utterly.

Even when it’s not your own.

Bink has always been even more pro-Life than the rest of us.

I parked my life. All of it. Never to be mine again.

Who is the father? Will he help?

I don’t know him, she said. We only met once.

She thanked me for my reaction and went to join the others.

I found Shaun upstairs. He is pretty inscrutable anyway, and didn’t seem the slightest surprised.

You haven’t heard the half of it, he said.

That morning, Gatsby had sought Shaun out and told him he was marrying Bink, so the baby would have a father.

Horror upon horrors.

Gatsby would think he was doing us a favour. Nearer our age than Bink’s, he dared describe my objection to cannabis as because we were ‘fuddy-duddies’.  He honestly would believe he was galloping in as some sepia hero rescuing a fallen daughter.

I gathered myself and went back downstairs to resume cooking dinner.

Bink came into the kitchen.

Look!

My eyes gaped. It must have cost thousands. The biggest, most vulgar clump of stones I’d ever seen. Worthy of Joan Collins, or... I don’t know. Donald Trump.

Gosh, I said. I hugged her again, and noised some enthusiasm suitable for one’s daughter’s engagement.

She took it off her finger and urged me to look.

Very generous, Bink.

Are you looking at it?

I can’t miss it.

I hadn’t yet discovered contact lenses, nor had my eyes done. All I could see was a blurred tangle of flashing.

Put on your reading specs on.

So I found them, and did, and turned this hideous monstrosity in the light.

Look inside.

Tiny, tiny. Microscopic. Tucked inside the ‘diamonds’. In little capitols.

‘April Fool’.

I screamed. And was shaking for the rest of the evening.

Asked Christian to take over the cooking. Ben to get me a whisky.

Downed three large ones. Still shaking.

I’ve never known such relief in my life.

I have engineered some fools in my time. What you dish out, you have to take.

I admitted it was a very, very good one. If you judge fooling by persuasiveness and impact. Rather than, say, wit or amusement.

The acting, from both of them, first-rate.

I kept saying so.

Well done, I said. It was a very convincing fool.

At least I must have communicated how overjoyed we were, that Gatsby wouldn’t be our son-in-law.

The next day, Shaun was angry. Not at being duped. Fair cop, we both said.

But at Gatsby’s posting it all over Facebook.

One thing to fool your friends. Another to make fools of them to the world.

As for me, I kept all these things and pondered them in my heart.

It was Gatsby’s dream come true. That was what disturbed me.

Bink fallen.

Gatsby to the rescue.

The rest of us supposed to be grateful.

O my prophetic soul.

Midsummer wedding

Midsummer 2013

Serena’s and Christian’s wedding was remarkably similar to Shaun’s and mine. 

Trinity rather than King’s... That’s about it, really. Which is fine, because our wedding was lovely.

Halcyon summer’s afternoon. Beautiful service. Three hundred family and friends and more, milling over delicious tea and bubbly in the college courtyard.

Main difference being that these days, brides have rather more say in what happens at their weddings...

Thus, Serena had a few details which never quite happened for me.

Her bouquet turned up, for one thing. And she was allowed to choose her readings, including the Song of Songs which I had so wanted, rather than the day’s obligatory lectionary.

And Shaun and I had planned the James Bond theme tune, Nobody Does it Better, to be woven surreptitiously into our opening voluntary… which never quite happened either. Partly because this was King’s, Cambridge; and partly because the organist who was supposed to be writing it out for our organised turned out (years later) to have been in love with Shaun all along, so understandably wasn’t particularly enthusiastic about our wedding.

So Ben, who was organising the music for Serena’s wedding, snuck it into everything, purely for my amusement: the congregation would open their mouths to sing some lusty hymn or other, and find themselves diverted for a couple of slightly unusual bars before diving in…

And lastly, I had particularly wanted to get married on my grandmother’s birthday, Midsummer’s Day. My parents said this was too soon after Finals so we wed on St Swithun’s Day.

So, Midsummer for Serena it was.

The next challenge was to knit Norwegian and English together… without reviving the tensions sometimes experienced a millennium or more ago.

Thing about Norway is that there are long winters’ nights. Have been for centuries. So they get quite good at whiling them away.

Sagas. Beowulf. Tolkien. Stories with stamina, all.

Thus, for Scandi weddings, anyone who feels like it can get up and talk for as long as he or she likes.

Yikes!!

If you have ever been to an English wedding you will greet this news with the same screaming horror Serena and I emitted when Christian said: My relations all want to know when they are to give their speeches.

There were sixty Vikings coming over the seas. That’s probably as many as laid waste to Lindisfarne.

In this country, we’re used to the speeches being the absolute pit of the day. What we didn’t yet realise was how entertaining these Norsemen and -women can be when they get to their feet and keep going, spontaneously, until a dawn which won’t be there until spring.

So we told Christian there are very strict rules about wedding speeches in England. 

Father. Groom. Best man.

End.

If anyone else gets up to speak the groom is honour-bound to run him through with the ceremonial cake-cutting-knife, for insulting his new wife. (And if any woman so much as thinks of opening her mouth she will be stoned to death at the city gates.)

So why, Christian asked, if these traditions are so unbreakable, are your brothers giving your Father’s Speech, Serena?

Ah, we explained. Yes. Well. There is a perfectly good explanation for that…

You see, that’s another very ancient English-wedding-tradition. Father’s Speech can be given by uncle, family friend, godfather... (at my wedding, the Vice-Chancellor of the university; just because he happened to be a very good friend of my parents and a close neighbour and the father of my very best friend of all… and knew how to give a thirty-second speech). And of course brothers. Particularly brothers.

Especially if the real father is preaching the sermon.

So Alex and Ben delivered it.

Bink wrote it. Took her a week and a lot of herself.

And it was quite the funniest and most entertaining wedding speech I’ve ever heard.

While Christian’s was the most moving.

Gosh they are good at this, those raiders from the North.

No notes. No preparation. Just got to his feet and told Serena how much he loved her – and how much we were all missing my mother although he never even got to meet her – and there was not a dry eye under the summer’s sun beaming throughout Nevile’s Court.

(There hadn’t been a dry eye after Bink’s speech delivered by Alex and Ben either, but that was for a different reason.)

And then that night all his aunts and uncles and cousins got to their feet after dinner and before dancing, and were all equally impressive. Poetry; song; even some tradition about the bride standing on the table or being pelted by bread rolls or something I can’t quite remember.

And then we danced, and danced and danced...

And it was some time and quite a lot later when Gatsby happened to slip into the conversation that Bink had been outside in tears the entire night. While he comforted her.

Ohh!

Usurped. Guilty. Very, very sad, that she spent her sister’s wedding evening exiled and crying.

And really very wrong, that he had comforted her, instead of one of us. Why hadn’t he told us?

Deeply ashamed that we, I, hadn’t noticed.

And a very, very long time later, angry.

I knew, somewhere deep and unarticulated in my soul, how this had happened and why.

Gatsby needed to be needed. That’s why he was always so helpful. (And he genuinely was: he had driven Rose’s harp to the field where we had pitched Serena’s wedding tent, for instance.)

So Bink had to be in tears.

Because Gatsby needed her to be.