Caveat. Other people's stories can be much worse than mine. My material circumstances are good, I'm articulate and advantaged. I write this in a large, comfortable, warm house which I own outright. I am financially very comfortable. I am white, cisgender, and was born into privilege. I grew up in a comfortable (if single-parent) household, had many educational opportunities, have the gift of the gab, have so far and have always had relatively good health and sound mind, and I have lived in three of the wealthiest countries in the world two of which have universal health care. All of this makes me very lucky. Bear with me though, because in spite of all the above, I have put up with some shit. It’s nothing compared to the shit millions of others, particularly women, have to put up with, but shit is shit whichever way you look at it.
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| Peace and Quiet in Satan's Kingdom, Massachusetts |
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We're all afraid, aren't we? Even the fearless are afraid of being afraid. Right now, we're all afraid of Covid, or climate change, or civil war, or social media, or not getting any likes, or accidentally eating a nut, or of being mean, or of being thrown in jail by a dictator, or of being poisoned by Bill Gates. We live in a well-maintained climate of fear. Below is a personal exploration of one particular experience of fear. It may shock, it may alienate, but please read it anyway.
A few weeks back, I watched a BBC four-parter called Deadwater Fell. I can't say it was very good, because it wasn't, but it was picturesque and not bad. It ticked a lot of 21st century boxes and it starred David Tennant as Tom. For me, David Tennant is right up there with Olivia Colman. I will watch almost anything he is in. But it turned out that David Tennant was not the most important reason for me to watch Deadwater Fell . The series had a wholly unexpected effect on me, one which it could only have on those women and men who share the experience that I lived for 27 of those 33 years. It painted an unnervingly accurate picture of what it is like to live in a coercive, controlling relationship with violence served as a sidedish.
That, dear reader, is my dirty truth, and that is why I would like to talk here about fear. And since I’m on the subject, how to live with it and stay alive. I lived with fear and shame silently for 27 years. I learnt to be ashamed first of myself, and then of my fear and my silence, but now I know that fear and shame were never my whole life, which is why I can talk about it. Before I get into particulars I would like to address one mystery that haunts both us survivors and those who are still living in this particular circle of hell, which is the big question: “Why didn't you just leave him?” The answer is "77 percent of domestic violence-related homicides occur upon separation and there is a 75 percent increase of violence upon separation for at least two years."
Fear is one of the weapons at our disposal when we wish to stay alive, and most of the time I have wanted to stay alive. I am happy now that I was afraid, because I am still here. Fear drove me to keep quiet, drove me to carry on as though nothing was wrong, drove me to wear long sleeves and make-up and to make up stories about horse-riding accidents, to laugh even though my broken ribs screamed, to apologise for incidents that were not of my making, to 'make love' when every cell of my body said no until it didn't, to try to understand and love a man whose nickname at school was "Decent" and whose anger switch could flip from off to on without a word of warning. Nevertheless, something stronger than fear drove me to find moments of joy and laughter and creativity as often as I could, and all those moments have added up to a life.
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| me now, ish. |
For perhaps half of those 27 years I deeply, truly believed that it was all my fault. If I wasn't so whatever it was that I was that was wrong, none of this would be happening to me. So I was told, and so I believed. That I believed this, and that my personality meshed so perfectly with Joe's needs - well, let's just say that understanding myself is a work in progress. Meshing there was. In ways I find it difficult to face up to, Joe and I were made for each other. He needed to humiliate; it seems I needed to be humiliated. I have a temper too, and nearly every incident of physical violence occurred during the course of an argument, during which I screeched like a banshee and emitted hot angry tears. Hot angry tears always worsened the situation, but some dark force in me sought the worsening of the situation. It’s the old story of the chicken and the egg. I was an actor in those scenes, but I do not agree with Erin Pizzey who argued that women are as responsible for the violence inflicted on them as the men who inflict it; when the dust settled there was one person who heard the cutting insults and had the bruises, and it wasn't Joe.
For years I repudiated the word “victim”, and to a certain extent I still do. Domestic violence is a complex, multi-faceted beast, as is its slippery consort, coercive control. I don’t believe that Joe wanted to behave like a monster, and I know that I didn’t consciously want to be his prey, but I also know that this is not a situation in which most partners find themselves. I think that if you are one who does, then there is an element in you which for whatever reason seeks outs the attempted annihilation. And you become afraid, and you beat yourself up for being afraid. Now I understand that fear is one of the healthy possible responses to the threat of physical and emotional violence, and fear hands you a series of weapons to defend yourself. Fear means that you know that you are somebody worth defending. As with any martial art, you learn to master those weapons through leaps and bounds and steady, steady practice.
In Deadwater Fell, Tom's farewell voicemail to his mother said "I only tried to do my best." I still believe that Joe tried to do his best, but was bested by his worse self. Where that worse self came from, I do not know, and I believe that it is not my job to know. My guess is that his need to control, to bind, to pulverize me emotionally stemmed from a vulnerability so profound that it surpassed any effort he could make to live up to his nickname. I can only be so understanding, though. I too tried to do my best, and my best was better than his best. I was the victim, of his blows and his constant need to humiliate, and of the way I felt after yet another incident. He was a victim of his inability to love or to allow himself to be loved. I sought answers and change, and he did not.
Here are a few facts from that period, just to give a clear picture. Twice Joe broke three of my ribs. I have a dent in my shin where he kicked me. The first time he punched me in the stomach was a week after I had given birth to our oldest child. My ribs were broken for the second time two weeks before 9/11; like the first time, he had broken three of them with a single punch. On more occasions than I can count my face was red from being pinched and scratched, and my arms and legs were covered in bruises. More days than not, at some point, he belittled me, insulted me or humiliated me. He made me believe that I was no good. No good as a human being, no good as a wife, no good as a mother, no good at all. As he often said, when I protested that others didn't seem to agree with his assessment, "Ah, but they don't know you like I do." That was unanswerable.
I recount this so that you have an idea of the climate in which I lived. These bare facts are the trees sticking out of a rich subsoil of everyday abasement. The expression 'walking on eggshells' doesn't even begin to cover the anguish of having no idea what random act or remark will trigger the next explosion, or the next almost-unbearable insult, or the next smashed artifact, or the next slammed door. 'Walking on eggshells' meant listening for a footfall and judging from its quality whether to stay in the room or slip out quickly. It meant wearily recognising a particular steely timbre creeping into an otherwise anodyne conversation and backing off subtly, because the Other was an expert in blocking exits, metaphorical and physical. It meant apologising for things that had no reason to be apologised for. It meant learning to keep my own temper in check when anger was justified, because the consequences of expressing it would be unpleasant. It meant constantly juggling the needs of two small human beings while placating the demands of the other adult responsible for them. It meant incessant exhausting vigilance. It meant never relaxing and enjoying the present entirely, because the future always held payback.
Fear still haunts me, though not the fear of being hit by a man I love. Joe died in 2020. He was diagnosed with fronto-temporal dementia in February 2016, and in December of that year, after an assault on me in a public place to which the police were called, ended up in residence for the rest of his life. By that time, I knew that he was seriously ill, and knew too that in order to care for him in the ways which he would need, I had to stay alive. He was still strong and physically fit, and as the disease had progressed, the violence he showed towards me had become increasingly random and increasingly less inhibited. After the first three nights that he spent in a geriatric psychiatric unit, I understood that he could not come home. I had spent three days and nights where I did not have to lock myself into a room on occasions, where I did not have to run out of the house, where I did not have to hide the kitchen knives and scissors or make sure that I always had my car keys and a charged phone on me at all times or hide a bag of overnight necessaries with a neighbour just in case. Naturally, I will always wonder at what point the illness took over, how much of his behaviour towards me was due to his tangled neurons, but I have pieced together enough of his family history to know that physical violence by men towards women was an element of his upbringing. The first time he punched me was in 1990; he was diagnosed in 2016. The jury is out on nature vs nurture, but it's not out on whether I had a right to live free of fear.
The fear that remains is the constant, exhausting fear, of doing or having done the wrong thing. I’m afraid it may be the wrong thing for our children that I tell this story. It may be the wrong thing for those of you who read this and knew Joe well to learn all this. Second-guessing myself became a habit over those years. However, this is not just a moment of 'healing' or 'self-empowerment'. The dirty truth is that domestic abuse thrives on, and in, silence. If someone like me can tell this tale, it could be one of a million tiny cracks in the wall of silence.
At this point, I am addressing my children. I hope and trust you can deal with me speaking. You showed extraordinary, exemplary, necessary love towards your father throughout, and particularly during the years of his illness. I am sorry I couldn't be braver or more honest when this was going on, because that might have made what was happening less difficult for you to bear. I am glad though to still be here to speak.
Only our children can know what living in this particular kind of fear meant and means to each one of them, and each one of them will have lived it differently. All I can do for them now is to listen and listen and talk and talk, and sincerely hope that they continue to build networks of others who will do the same for them. I know how bad an atmosphere this was for them to grow up in, and applaud every action they took to get out, to breathe healthier, saner air. I am very glad that they had other adults in their lives who were not locked into a dark neurotic game. I am also glad, and immensely proud, that they showed such loving courage throughout Joe's illness right up to his death. They appear both to embrace life in a way that shows that they know its value, and they clearly picked up something about love from both of us along the way.
For those of you, and you are many, who loved Joe and supported all of us during the hard years of his illness, I apologise for shocking you. It's not your fault that you didn't know, and what you did know and loved about Joe was true and lovable; it just wasn't the whole picture. My complicity in hiding what was going on could be seen as incomprehensible, I get that. It could be seen as reprehensible, given that there were two young children involved who witnessed scenes that no child should have to witness, and who grew up hyper-vigilant and extremely protective of my person. All I can say now is that I did as best I could during that time, that they grew up in a small community, and extended family with many loving responsible adults around them, and that all of us, including Joe, were pretty damn good at snatching every moment of fruitful happiness that we could. As a family we created some excellent memories as well as some very bad ones, and the years of his illness gave all of us, including Joe, I believe, a chance to repair some of the damage and redefine the meaning of love.
This raises another good question which is asked almost as frequently as the first, and that is "Why did you protect him by hiding and dissimulating?" My answer is that it is very hard for an outsider to understand the extent to which the victim feels like a rat in a trap. The structural boundaries of my world - my home, my work, my financial security, even the country I was living in - were set by the choice I had made to be with Joe. The emotional boundaries too: my love, in spite of the way he treated me, for him, my hope that he would stop, our shared love for our children, the strong ties that exist when you weave a thread with another person and which sustain you as well as confine you. Of course I thought about leaving him. But when I considered the idea, the same questions flooded my mind. Where would I go? How could I safely take the children with me or leave them with him? What would happen to the dogs? The cats? What would his revenge be? As long as he was alive and living under the same roof as me, I never found an answer to any of these. His illness, which was terrible to behold, provided the answers. This means that my attitude towards it is ambivalent. It saved me from a life that was hard to live. It gave us both the opportunity to love each other differently, in ways that were unimaginable before his mind was ravaged. Nevertheless, dementia is a terrifying disease to watch and I imagine even more so to experience. I now think that all of us - Joe, the children and myself - lived through those years as well as we possibly could.
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| Together at the Farren Care Center |
One reason I am writing this is to try and understand what anybody can do to to help somebody who is or has been in that terrible situation, and another is to lay out in the open the weapons that fear handed to me in case anyone reading this thinks they might need them, or their own version of them.
Reader, I did not keep completely silent, especially during the earlier years. I told several people, except it turned out that they weren't competent to deal. The first time Joe broke my ribs, I went to the neighbours in the small village in Provence we lived in at the time, whom I did not know. They expressed outrage, and having patched me up, took me to the police. Two policemen escorted me back to the house to collect some essentials for myself and for my daughter, who was then 6 months old. Joe, who was asleep by the time we arrived, assured them that I was safe, and the police left me there. Joe went back to bed without a word, and I stuffed as much as I could in my car and fled with our baby. So the police, who could have been expected to be competent, were not. This was over 30 years ago. Perhaps they have better training by now.
There were two other people whom I told who could have been expected to be competent but were not. One was my mother. She told me, when I rang her in tears the second time I was been badly beaten, that I could be very annoying sometimes. The other was my psychoanalyst who pointed out that I was a tall, strong woman and that if I wanted to, I could simply tell Joe not to lay a finger on me. It was, she said, a question of attitude. That was not helpful.
So, ladies and gentlemen, if you are in the sad scenario which I inhabited for so long, my advice is to choose your interlocutor wisely. The best would be to pick up the phone and speak to somebody on a domestic violence hotline (1-800-799-7233 in the USA, 0808 2000 247 in the UK, 3919 in France). But you may be like me, and afraid of what this would trigger, or you are telling yourself that it's your fault, or that it's not that bad. If this is so, that's okay, but try, with all your strength, to convince yourself that it is NOT your fault, that it IS that bad, that there ARE ways out, and go to somebody and tell them. It could be a stranger, like the neighbours who took me to the police that first time, it could be your doctor, it could be a teacher at your child's school, it could be your best friend. Just try to tell somebody so that you are not all alone with your fear of what is happening and what might happen. Ask them to stand by you when you call the hotline. The people who answer your call will talk you through the next steps.
If you are approached by somebody who is living this hell, and they ask you to help them, try and persuade them to contact a hotline. Most often this is a case for specialists, not for vengeance. The priority must be to get the victim and those that they care about, including pets, to a safe place. They need to be with people who understand what they are going through, who understand their fear, and who have some idea what to do next. If the victim is not ready to take this step, comfort them as best you can, make sure they have your number on speed-dial, and let them make their own decisions, however misguided their decisions may seem to you. Contact the hotline yourself afterwards and ask for advice.
It's been over a year now since Joe died. The crazy part is that I loved that man, I really did, and miss him in expected and unexpected ways. I would also like to state here that Joe never showed any physical violence towards our children. Joe provided very well for us all, was in many ways an excellent interlocutor, a good and creative business partner, and an imaginative, caring father.
But this post is not about him, it's about my fear which was real, and the thread of life, which was on occasion terribly frayed but never broke, which allow me to still be here. Of course I live with the consequences of having been afraid for so long. I am lucky enough to have found a partner who instills no fear in me. Even so, if he shows a flash of irritation, my reaction is visceral, physical and immediate. Flight or freeze are my go-to. If I have made a mistake that affects him, it is as if the earth dropped from under me. He says "It's okay! It was a mistake, that's all", and he means it, and perhaps one of these days I will accept that 'that's all' is real.
I have no regrets. I mean, I do have regrets, but they concern mean and unpleasant ways I have treated other people, not the mean and unpleasant ways I have been treated. Because, you know what, it's all been an adventure, and the result is that I'm sitting in my fine log cabin in the woods in Massachusetts with two fine dogs, two fine offspring not too far away, knowing that a fine man lives at the end of a 25 minute motorcycle ride. I have friends, I have family, I have two motorbikes and a Subaru with snow tyres, I am surrounded by trees and rocks and fungi and stuff, I make friends with random people in small shops and go out on my bike with them, I have learnt about The Cosmopolitan Medieval Arabic World, and I get to listen to dub reggae as loud as I want. I hope this doesn't sound smug or self-centred. This life I have led has been a long strange trip, and the only thread running through it is me. I haven't had a career, I haven't "done" anything, but I have paid my dues and in some ways, I have got lucky. I am very comfortable financially, I own my house, I have health insurance and health, for the moment, a brain that seems to work in spite of the punishment I have inflicted on it - I was once a great believer in better living through chemistry - and legs that carry me. The main thing is I am still here, which is better than the alternative, and every day there is something that reminds me of that. Except on some rare occasions, I have always thought it was better to be alive than not. The years I lived with Joe were dappled, with enough light to make the darkness tolerable. Where did that light come from?
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| Teletubby flowers |
God: My faith is a wavering, unorthodox thing, but my experience has been that God has provided me with enough concrete examples of His, or Her, or Their existence, for me to fall on the side of belief. Hesitantly, but with no evidence to the contrary, I say therefore that They are the ultimate source of the light. I acknowledge that not everyone will agree with me, but I humbly suggest that allowing the possibility of the numinous, the ineffable, the transcendent can open doors of perception that change lived reality. That’s all. I am a stumbling, flailing Catholic, assailed by doubt and self-doubt. The one thing of which I am absolutely convinced is that nobody knows, which is why I resist and resent certainties on matters of faith, whether they be Christian, atheist, Muslim or any of the hundreds of other iterations of our struggle to answer the question "Why me?” As Graham Greene said, “when we are not sure, we are alive.”
When I look back on the dappled years, it’s obvious that for me creatures, human and other, and the physical world we inhabit provided the tempered steel of my most potent weapons. Children first and of course. An old friend, a French intellectual who wrote complex and incomprehensible erotic utopian novels with a limited readership, said once that our children act as guard rails against being really stupid. By really stupid, he meant topping ourselves. I do not deny that I sometimes lay in bed wondering how I could possibly go on. I even planned out the how, in some detail, but never the when. There probably was never going to be a when, as there were two young human beings who had never asked to be born, who needed me, and who were fun to be around. Children are fun. They're fun when they're tiny, they're fun to watch as they learn to stop being tiny, and they continue to be fun even when they have turned into real people. They bring their friends into your life, and the friends are fun too, and awaken distant memories of what it was like when you were young and silly, and all of a sudden you find yourself as one of the matriarchs of a tribe whose identity fluctuates over the years. I don't mind that at all.
Friends. The moments I spent with old and new friends, the laughter to tears, the sharedness of it all, that kept my fading batteries topped up. What is it about friends that help keep us alive through difficult times? It's the craic, that's what it is. My modus operandi has always been to maximise any possibility of spending time, whether virtual, telephonic or real, with friends because early on I recognised this as a vital necessity. Friends held up a mirror to me other than the dark one that I was so familiar with. They helped, and continue to help, me see myself as containing multitudes, and through them I was able not to define myself either as a controlling harpie with an insidious agenda, or as a miserable battered wife.
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| Family, a while ago |
Family. Ah, family, and mine are battery-toppers-up all. My family is my four brothers, my sisters-in-and-out-law, living and dead, my tribe of nephews and nieces. I am the youngest of five, and my youngest brother is nearly seven years older than me. The oldest, is fourteen years older than me. People always said that they must have spoiled me when I was little. They didn't. But each one of my brothers came to stay in France during the last terrible summer there with Joe, to do what they could to make an impossible situation just possible. One heroic brother came twice, once at 24 hours notice when I was at breaking point. You don't forget these things.
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| Me and my brothers, also a while back |
My sisters-in-law. How have they managed it, being married to my brothers? Or, in the case of one, wisely not being married. I admire them, I love them, they are the nearest I have to sisters. My nephews and nieces, too numerous to name, are spread between a nephew who is 41 and a lovely niece, who is 19. I am friends with them all, some I correspond with regularly, and I flatter myself that one of my roles is to straddle the generational divide. After all, I saw punk bands live on more than one occasion, and my brothers did not. So yes, family is important to me. They love me, and I love them. That helped, always. One bad day, when Joe was already seriously ill and I was spread as thin as marmite on toast, I stood in the bathroom while he hammered on the door asking me how long I was going to be in there, and I whispered out loud as I looked at myself in the mirror "You are not just Joe's wife. You are Elizabeth. You are mother to your children, sister to your brothers, sister-in-law to your sisters-in-law, aunt to your nieces and nephews, friend to your friends. And these people all matter too." They do.
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| Fifi |
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| Tatu |
Dogs. Specifically Tatu and Fifi. Tatu came along at just the right moment. We chose to get a West Highland terrier because the dog breed book said they had a sense of humour. "I want a dog with a sense of humour", said Joe, but Tatu always took himself seriously. He was an arrogant, stubborn, intelligent little dog, with not a playful bone in his body. For Tatu, it was always about him, never about us. So we sought out another dog, to jolt Tatu out of his only-dog complacency, and found the opposite to him in Fifi, a brindled Cairn. It was Joe who named her la Déesse de l'Amour, the Goddess of Love, and that dog could love. She was not bright, but she was faithful, and in particular she was faithful to me. She became my shadow, to the point where I would regularly trip over her when looking for her. The dogs had to be lived for, which was good, they had to be looked after and laughed at and tolerated and fed and they were always, always good company for me.
Horses. I bought my first horse, Flicka, in 2002. Flicka, who was already old when I acquired her, taught me how to treat a horse with respect in and out of the stable, and gave me moments of great pleasure. She was a bit too old and a bit too fine-boned for me, and after God knows what life by the time she came to me, she developed severe arthritis. Her pain became unmanageable and eventually I had her put to sleep and learnt the hard way that a horse, when injected with barbiturates, subsides into a sad heap. I bought Alice, a six-year old chunk of a horse, part Appaloosa and part something much bigger and heavier. Her warm, sweet nature and lack of folly suited me perfectly, and she became my Great Escape. I am not a horsewoman, in spite of my childhood pony-mad years, and my technique is lousy, but with Alice I quickly learnt enough to set off and wander the vineyards and hills of the Luberon for as many hours as I could get away with. The time that I spent with the horses, on or off, was time when I was entirely with them, and entirely myself. Gradually Joe's demands chipped away at that time, and in the end I gave Alice to my riding teacher, who loved her.
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| Alice, looking big. |
Trees, hills, skies, I've known a few. They are the gift that keeps on giving. Trees of the Luberon: knotted olives, sturdy little white oaks, skeletal almonds, and the pinky-white dreamscapes of the cherry orchards in April. A tree is a fine thing to hug when you need to hug. It doesn't hug back, but it certainly doesn't mind. And a hill is a fine place to find a tree. The village we lived in is on the southern slopes of the Luberon, at the entrance to the sinuous pass which divides the massif in two, connecting the port of Marsiglia to the Via Appia. The hills of the Luberon are bony and fragrant, harsh with limestone and dry, stumpy herbs in summer, purple and inviting in winter. It took me ten minutes to walk from our house onto some stony path, dogs in tow, to stumble on a track taken by donkeys and mules and hunters and charcoal burners and lose myself far from the fight. Those hills, and the sky above with its ever-changing light, crushing in summer, wicked in winter when the Mistral blew, sometimes soft and grey, sometimes black with thunder and almighty rain, they were always a refuge.
Wine. Yeah, I know you can't drink your sorrows away, but wine as a shared pleasure, wine with a meal around the table, wine as fun, I believe in. We had the luck rather than the judgement to live in a wine-growing area of France which morphed during the twenty-five years we lived there from a region producing large quantities of bad wine to a region producing smaller quantities of very good and underpriced wine. I now know quite well how the wines of south-eastern France can and should taste, although I'm still shaky on vintages. I love vines, and vine landscapes, I love their twisted, wind-blasted stocks and the bloom on the grapes as they ripen, I love the men and women who make wine with humility and passion, and I even love the ancient tractors that snarl up the roads in September. Wine goes with food, and I love that too. The cooking of it, and the eating of it. Of course, all that is much easier when you live in a place where it's easy to lay your hands on good ingredients, where serious chefs choose to set up their establishments because of the former, and where old ladies will tell you their recipes as you stand in line at the fruit and veg stall at the weekly market. Times spent around the table, the wine and the conversation flowing, were times of camaraderie, times when I topped up my tanks, times when I remembered how much I loved to live.
Books. All my life books have been a refuge for me, and the times when I can’t or don’t read are bad times indeed. Joe was a reader, until he wasn’t, and when he stopped being a reader, I had to snatch my reading time when I could. Over the years, I raced through an alarming number of thrillers by some very good writers and some much less good ones, and unmemorably indeed, the whole of The Outlander series on my Kindle when Joe had serious dementia and I had to spend most of my waking minutes and hours and days just being with him. He neither noticed nor cared whether I was listening to him, as long as I agreed with everything he said, so I sat for hours at a time nodding my head and murmuring accord with my Kindle on my lap as I galloped through the entirely improbable tales of dashing kilted Jamie and sexy yet competent nurse Claire and their adventures across time and continents. Just occasionally I managed to escape the world I was in entirely, with Annie Proulx, TC Boyle and Primo Levi, but it was rare and not clear if the world I had escaped to was preferable.
Random encounters and random flings. There were neighbours met at night when walking the dogs, and neighbours who in the French tradition of discretion took me into their homes and asked me nothing about what had propelled me out of my own. Next door there lived an apple-cheeked old lady straight from a children’s book, who after a particularly audible showdown between me and Joe invited me into her house, saying that she had no idea that Englishwomen could be so excitable. Then she told me that she had had two husbands, and they were both right bastards. Or the member of the a celebrated French publishing house, whom I met in the dark one night as our dogs both peed in the patch of green around the corner from our house where I used to go to smoke and breathe and sometimes weep. The publisher, with whom I became quite friendly, introduced himself that first night in an existential way by telling me in a lugubrious voice that his dog would soon die, which it did.
Flings kept me alive too, and reminded me that I was a desirable woman. There was D., considerably younger than me, who called me “Miss Kiss” after he had once taken me completely by surprise by kissing me on the lips across the counter in the shop where he worked. He lived in a small stone cottage, and sometimes I would tell Joe that I was going for a walk and come back two hours later, tingling and alive. Joe did not notice; it never crossed his mind that anybody might desire me, and when he did find out, from reading my journal, that I had slept with somebody else, he sneered and never mentioned it again. There were a couple more unsuitable and unconsummated flings too, and I don’t regret those either.
Kindness is very undervalued in France, where we lived. Sometimes I felt as though I was a wild animal being forced backwards by my husband into a thicket of thorns, with no escape, so when somebody showed me kindness, it was unexpected as a lottery win. There was the young swimming instructor who noticed how tense my shoulders were as I hunched at the side of the pool and gently and entirely appropriately massaged me until I relaxed. I wept afterwards. I remember the sales lady who asked me if I had ever been a model, and M. Ginoux, our next door neighbour, a very small and wrinkled farmer, who looked at me appreciatively when I was wearing a flashy, wide-brimmed hat and said “I love to see a woman in a hat.” A colleague welcomed me and my daughter, who was then a toddler, into her house for several nights after a particularly vicious fight. She asked no questions, just fed us and allowed us to be quiet there. That’s where Pay it Forward comes from, I think. You never know how hard a time a stranger is having, which is why you try never to be unkind.
Music has always been the food of love for me. Joe had very pronounced tastes in what he liked, and while many of mine overlapped with his, some of them didn’t. That’s why I could be seen whizzing around the lanes of Provence in my little Mercedes Classe A listening to 1970’s dub quite loudly, weeping to Elgar’s cello concerto, shouting angrily along with Joy Division, or nodding furiously to Ever Fallen in Love. Where Joe and I did overlap was mainly in the realm of classical music. We shared an abiding love of Bach; he introduced me to Yo Yo Ma playing the cello suites. Once we went to see Zhu Xiao-Mei play the Goldberg Variations. There are thirty of them, and at the end we just wanted her to start again. The concerts we attended were each a miraculous hiatus in the war of attrition that was our life together; each time we marvelled at the effect. It wasn’t just classical music. We saw Paolo Conte, BB King, Jimmy Cliff, Chuck Berry, Lionel Ritchie, Dylan and Nina Simone, and the magic always worked. I suppose this is what art is for, and why we both sought it out.
Another safe space was the cinema. Joe, when I was but a slip of a thing, introduced me to European art house movies; I was more of a westerns and The Wind and the Lion sort of a girl. But we found common ground in the cinema during the 1990’s and went as often as work and babysitters permitted. The relief came when the theatre went dark and there was nothing but the big screen and two blessed hours where I didn’t have to act or react. We were good at choosing movies together, at enjoying them, and at discussing them afterwards.
Culture as catharsis. Art works, theatre works, cinema works, live music works. We would go for a weekend to London when cheap flights were available, stay in a hotel and do two or three theatre performances and two or three exhibitions in three days. It was exhausting, but at least we were unlikely to have a fight. The thing about art is it takes you out of yourself and puts you somewhere else, and we both desperately needed that. The imposed silence of the theatre and the parade of ideas and resolutions allowed me to relax and be absorbed, and not be afraid. We were good at doing exhibitions, and often he would do one and I would do the other and then we’d swap. This gave me the chance to form my own opinions and bounce them off an intelligent interlocutor, which in turn gave me a chance to realise that I was an intelligent interlocutor too. On some level Joe recognised this in me, as long as I didn’t challenge him too directly, and when I was buoyed by the work of others I was more adept at not challenging.
Stuff. Les Olivettes, our third baby, was made of stuff and full of stuff, and it became obvious from the start of the project, when the backhoes were busy and lines were being drawn in the sand, that this was an arena in which Joe and I would not compete but complement. He was very good at the big stuff, I loved the small stuff, and we consulted and conspired and inspired each other in such a way that we virtually never clashed. Together we created a place, a concept and a style, together we decorated and adorned, together we wrote copy for our websites and compiled a rich trove of cut-and-pastes for clients, and together we welcomed guests and somehow magically managed to give nearly all of them a very good time. The arena of our business was one where we both played torero and bull and made something out of nearly nothing. The business, which I am in the middle of selling as I write, allowed me to know that I was competent, even if I often didn’t feel it.
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| A bit of Les Olivettes |
Words. I love ‘em. Just as other people’s words have always been a mirror world to which I could escape, so the words that I put down on screen or paper map paths I have taken, meanders I have enjoyed, landscapes I have glimpsed. Writing was a double-edged sword in my panoply of weapons against fear, however, as Joe envied and resented this encroachment on what he thought was his domain. My words in the service of the business were okay; my words for words’ sake were not. Nevertheless, I snatched moments here and there and even managed to produce a slight book. The putting down of words, in email, text or comment form counts; I learnt that anything you make where before there was nothing is a vessel for yourself and yourself only, and that vessel’s cargo is what you take care of.
T’ai chi. I started learning t’ai chi a hundred years ago in a previous life, first from a Welsh lady called Pamela Hiley where I kept going to classes because I fancied her senior student, and then from the remarkable Miss Rose Li. Miss Li showed me enough for me to keep going, alone, over the years and the decades until this very day. At the moment I am taking online classes with the very wonderful Maurice Passman. I can’t put my hand on my heart and say that I have practiced every single day since 1983, but I can say that I have thought about t’ai chi every single day and practiced, one way or another, almost every single day. As with the whole list above, it’s part of who I am.
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| Miss Li |
My non-exhaustive list of what helped me to live through this years will not be anybody else’s, because what the elements add up to is my own sense of self. My advice to anybody who is in the situation that I was in, who lives in fear of the person with whom they share their life, is to learn to recognise and snatch anything at all that reminds you that you are as valuable a human being as any other. Be ruthless. Seek out moments alone. Enjoy that time you spend in the toilet or at the supermarket. Prolong that chat with a neighbour, and don’t answer your phone. Take the time to examine a leaf or a cloud or the reflection of a building in a puddle. When you kick yourself for having let it happen, remember that it would probably have happened anyway, because it actually has nothing to do with you and you have no more control over what they do than you do over the moon or the stars. By all means, duck and weave, appear to abase yourself in order to live to fight another day, lie, cheat and steal, because what matters is that you live to live another day. Have no shame.
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