Camilla
I never set out to help kill my son.
Even reading the words seems odd - like something you might see in a tabloid
newspaper, or one of those awful magazines that the cleaner always has poking
out of her handbag, full of women whose daughters ran off with their cheating
partners, tales of amazing weight loss and two-headed babies.
I was not the kind of person this happened to. Or at least, I thought I wasn’t.
My life was a fairly structured one - an ordinary one, by modern standards. I had
been married for almost thirty-seven years, I raised two children, I kept my
career, helped out at the school, the PTA, and joined the bench once the children
didn’t need me any more.
I had been a magistrate for almost eleven years now. I watched the whole of
human life come through my court: the hopeless waifs who couldn’t get
themselves together sufficiently even to make a court appointment on time; the
repeat offenders; the angry, hard-faced young men and exhausted, debt-ridden
mothers. It’s quite hard to stay calm and understanding when you see the same
faces, the same mistakes made again and again. I could sometimes hear the
impatience in my tone. It could be oddly dispiriting, the blank refusal of
humankind to even attempt to function responsibly.
And our little town, despite the beauty of the castle, our many Grade II listed
buildings, our picturesque country lanes, was far from immune to it. Our
Regency squares held cider-drinking teenagers, our thatched cottages muffled
the sounds of husbands beating their wives and children. Sometimes I felt like
King Canute, making vain pronouncements in the face of a tide of chaos and
creeping devastation. But I loved my job. I did it because I believe in order, in a
moral code. I believe that there is a right and a wrong, unfashionable as that
view might be.
I got through the tougher days because of my garden. As the children grew it
had become a bit of an obsession of mine. I could give you the Latin name of
almost any plant you cared to point at. The funny thing was, I didn’t even do
Latin at school - mine was a rather minor public school for girls where the focus
was on cooking and embroidery, things that would help us become good wives -
but the thing about those plant names is that they do stick in your head. I only
ever needed to hear one once to remember it forever: Helleborus niger,Eremurus
stenophyllus,Athyrium niponicum. I can repeat those with a fluency I never had
at school.
They say you only really appreciate a garden once you reach a certain age,
and I suppose there is a truth in that. It’s probably something to do with the great
circle of life. There seems to be something miraculous about seeing the
relentless optimism of new growth after the bleakness of winter, a kind of joy in
the difference every year, the way nature chooses to show off different parts of
the garden to its full advantage. There have been times - the times when my
marriage proved to be somewhat more populated than I had anticipated - when it
has been a refuge, times when it has been a joy.
There have even been times when it was, frankly, a pain. There is nothing
more disappointing than creating a new border only to see it fail to flourish, or to
watch a row of beautiful alliums destroyed overnight by some slimy culprit. But
even when I complained about the time, the effort involved in caring for it, the
way my joints protested at an afternoon spent weeding, or my fingernails never
looked quite clean, I loved it. I loved the sensual pleasures of being outside, the
smell of it, the feel of the earth under my fingers, the satisfaction of seeing
things living, glowing, captivated by their own temporary beauty.
After Will’s accident I didn’t garden for a year. It wasn’t just the time,
although the endless hours spent at hospital, the time spent toing and froing in
the car, the meetings - oh God, the meetings - took up so much of it. I took six
months’ compassionate leave from work and there was still not enough of it.
It was that I could suddenly see no point. I paid a gardener to come and keep
the garden tidy, and I don’t think I gave it anything but the most cursory of looks
for the best part of a year.
It was only when we brought Will back home, once the annexe was adapted
and ready, that I could see a point in making it beautiful again. I needed to give
my son something to look at. I needed to tell him, silently, that things might
change, grow or fail, but that life did go on. That we were all part of some great
cycle, some pattern that it was only God’s purpose to understand. I couldn’t say
that to him, of course - Will and I have never been able to say much to each
other - but I wanted to show him. A silent promise, if you like, that there was a
bigger picture, a brighter future.
Steven was poking at the log fire. He manoeuvred the remaining half-burnt logs
expertly with a poker, sending glowing sparks up the chimney, then dropped a
new log on to the middle. He stood back, as he always did, watching with quiet
satisfaction as the flames took hold, and dusted his hands on his corduroy
trousers. He turned as I entered the room. I held out a glass.
Thank you. Is George coming down?’
‘Apparently not.’
‘What’s she doing?
‘Watching television upstairs. She doesn’t want company. I did ask.’
‘She’ll come round. She’s probably jet-lagged.’
‘I hope so, Steven. She’s not very happy with us at the moment.’
We stood in silence, watching the fire. Around us the room was dark and still,
the windowpanes rattling gently as they were buffeted by the wind and rain.
‘Filthy night.’
‘Yes.’
The dog padded into the room and, with a sigh, flopped down in front of the
fire, gazing up adoringly at us both from her prone position.
‘So what do you think?’ he said. ‘This haircut business.’
‘I don’t know. I’d like to think it’s a good sign.’
‘This Louisa’s a bit of a character, isn’t she?’
I saw the way my husband smiled to himself. Not her too, I found myself
thinking, and then squashed the thought.
‘Yes. Yes, I suppose she is.’
‘Do you think she’s the right one?’
I took a sip of my drink before answering. Two fingers of gin, a slice of lemon
and a lot of tonic. ‘Who knows?’ I said. ‘I don’t think I have the faintest idea
what is right and wrong any more.’
‘He likes her. I’m sure he likes her. We were talking while watching the news
the other night, and he mentioned her twice. He hasn’t done that before.’
‘Yes. Well. I wouldn’t get your hopes up.’
‘Do you have to?’
Steven turned from the fire. I could see him studying me, perhaps conscious
of the new lines around my eyes, the way my mouth seemed set these days into a
thin line of anxiety. He looked at the little gold cross, now ever present around
my neck. I didn’t like it when he looked at me like that. I could never escape the
feeling that I was being compared to someone else.
‘I’m just being realistic.’
‘You sound ... you sound like you’re already expecting it to happen.’
‘I know my son.’
‘Our son.’
‘Yes. Our son.’ More my son, I found myself thinking. You were never really
there for him. Not emotionally. You were just the absence he was always striving
to impress.
‘He’ll change his mind,’ Steven said. ‘There’s still a long way to go.’
We stood there. I took a long sip of my drink, the ice cold against the warmth
given out by the fire.
‘I keep thinking ... ’ I said, staring into the hearth. ‘I still keep thinking that
I’m missing something.’
My husband was still watching me. I could feel his gaze on me, but I couldn’t
meet it. Perhaps he might have reached out to me then. But I think we had
probably gone too far for that.
He took a sip of his drink. ‘You can only do what you can do, darling.’
‘I’m well aware of that. But it’s not really enough, is it?’
He turned back to the fire, poking unnecessarily at a log until I turned and
quietly left the room.
As he had known I would.
When Will first told me what he wanted, he had to tell me twice, as I was quite
sure I could not have heard him correctly the first time. I stayed quite calm when
I realized what it was he was proposing, and then I told him he was being
ridiculous and I walked straight out of the room. It’s an unfair advantage, being
able to walk away from a man in a wheelchair. There are two steps between the
annexe and the main house, and without Nathan’s help he could not traverse
them. I shut the door of the annexe and I stood in my own hallway with the
calmly spoken words of my son still ringing in my ears.
I’m not sure I moved for half an hour.
He refused to let it go. Being Will, he always had to have the last word. He
repeated his request every time I went in to see him until I almost had to
persuade myself to go in each day. I don’t want to live like this, Mother. This is
not the life I chose. There is no prospect of my recovery, hence it is a perfectly
reasonable request to ask to end it in a manner I see fit. I heard him and could
well imagine what he had been like in those business meetings, the career that
had made him rich and arrogant. He was a man who was used to being heard,
after all. He couldn’t bear it that in some way I had the power to dictate his
future, that I had somehow become mother again.
It took his attempt to make me agree. It’s not that my religion forbade it -
although the prospect of Will being consigned to hell through his own
desperation was a terrible one. (I chose to believe that God, a benign God, would
understand our sufferings and forgive us our trespasses.)
It’s just that the thing you never understand about being a mother, until you
are one, is that it is not the grown man - the galumphing, unshaven, stinking,
opinionated offspring - you see before you, with his parking tickets and
unpolished shoes and complicated love life. You see all the people he has ever
been all rolled up into one.
I looked at Will and I saw the baby I held in my arms, dewily besotted, unable
to believe that I had created another human being. I saw the toddler, reaching for
my hand, the schoolboy weeping tears of fury after being bullied by some other
child. I saw the vulnerabilities, the love, the history. That’s what he was asking
me to extinguish - the small child as well as the man - all that love, all that
history.
And then on 22 January, a day when I was stuck in court with a relentless roll
call of shoplifters and uninsured drivers, of weeping angry ex-partners, Steven
walked into the annexe and found our son almost unconscious, his head lolling
by his armrest, a sea of dark, sticky blood pooling around his wheels. He had
located a rusty nail, barely half an inch emerging from some hurriedly finished
woodwork in the back lobby, and, pressing his wrist against it, had reversed
backwards and forwards until his flesh was sliced to ribbons. I cannot to this day
imagine the determination that kept him going, even though he must have been
half delirious from the pain. The doctors said he was less than twenty minutes
from death.
It was not, they observed with exquisite understatement, a cry for help.
When they told me at the hospital that Will would live, I walked outside into
my garden and I raged. I raged at God, at nature, at whatever fate had brought
our family to such depths. Now I look back and I must have seemed quite mad. I
stood in my garden that cold evening and I hurled my large brandy twenty feet
into the Euonymus compactus and I screamed, so that my voice broke the air,
bouncing off the castle walls and echoing into the distance. I was so furious, you
see, that all around me were things that could move and bend and grow and
reproduce, and my son - my vital, charismatic, beautiful boy - was just this
thing. Immobile, wilted, bloodied, suffering. Their beauty seemed like an
obscenity. I screamed and I screamed and I swore - words I didn’t know I knew
- until Steven came out and stood, his hand resting on my shoulder, waiting until
he could be sure that I would be silent again.
He didn’t understand, you see. He hadn’t worked it out yet. That Will would
try again. That our lives would have to be spent in a state of constant vigilance,
waiting for the next time, waiting to see what horror he would inflict upon
himself. We would have to see the world through his eyes - the potential
poisons, the sharp objects, the inventiveness with which he could finish the job
that damned motorcyclist had started. Our lives had to shrink to fit around the
potential for that one act. And he had the advantage - he had nothing else to
think about, you see?
Two weeks later, I told Will, ‘Yes.’
Of course I did.
What else could I have done?
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