The Scent of Dried Roses Page 23

  With this in mind, electric shock treatments and lobotomies became the favoured treatment, particularly in America, where unhappiness was considered a kind of antisocial deviancy. In the 1940s, 20,000 people had their brains deliberately damaged in operations. In the mid-1950s, Professor Freeman at George Washington University developed the treatment of thrusting an ice pick through the frontal sinus at the root of the nose once the patient had been rendered unconscious by ECT. As news of these radical treatments leaked out, the idea of modifying personality by drugs, shock and surgery became tainted; the whole idea of an ‘organic’ personality began to fall out of favour.

  Yet, in the same decade, Robert Heath at Tulane University discovered that if you implanted electrodes at the base of the forebrain, intense pleasure could be produced. Janice Egeland claimed to have discovered a depression ‘gene’ in her study of the Amish. Twin studies showed time and again that there was a concordance of depression in 65 per cent of cases with identical twins, even when separated at birth, compared with 14 per cent for non-identical twins. New antidepressant drugs like Iprioniazid, which, unlike tranquillizers, restored ‘balance’ rather than ‘damping down’ mood, were tested and found to work. Cross-cultural studies showed that depression appeared in every society.

  All these studies seemed to show that there was something in the brain called a ‘mood centre’ and this ‘mood centre’, in certain kinds of depression, simply malfunctioned, like a heart with angina or a liver with cirrhosis. Certain kinds of unhappiness – in some versions, almost all forms of unhappiness – were simply a kind of illness, as often as not inherited.

  The 1960s, with its emphasis on freedom, the individual, nonconformity and the ‘spirit’, found the model of the mind as a kind of soft machine, a bundle of chemicals and meat and electrical impulses, revolting and, perhaps worse, unpoetic. Hence films singing the praises of antidepressants and electric shock treatments were in short supply. Thinkers such as R. D. Laing, Thomas Szasz and Michel Foucault – none of whom, of course, I had even vaguely heard of in 1975 – helped create a new climate. In this world, madness – including depression – was simply an invention, got up by society or doctors or drug companies. An increasing interest in Freud, Jung and a variety of therapies – gestalt, rolfing, EST – underpinned this reaction against medical solutions to ‘broken brains’, to what was increasingly not even seen as mental illness so much as convenient myth.

  And this, on the whole – since I was unquestionably a child of the 1970s – was my view of the whole thing, inasmuch as I thought about it at all. Had I known about Marie Asberg, my mind would hardly have been changed. In those days I still had the trick of believing in whatever I wanted to believe, and I didn’t want to believe in depression, because it let the weak, the fuck-ups, the lazy and the stupid off the hook, because it turned people into what they increasingly seemed to want to be: victims. And we were the C2s. We were not victims, we were conquerors. We were the new society of choice, and will, and endless, guilt-free shopping.

  Chapter Thirteen

  ‘It is not knowledge men desire so much as certainty’– Bertrand Russell

  My story, my story. It’s getting muddled up once more. It doesn’t add up, it doesn’t cut a swathe that is clear. For if my mother and I were simply ill, am I not wasting everyone’s time? England, history, family, love, regret, identity, meaning. Does their poetry fall apart under the prose of science? Is it as absurd as looking for the meaning of a headache in history, the meaning of cancer in culture?

  I’ve never claimed to know, to be the voice of authority, as it were. I never claimed there was just one story. There are dozens, some of them this much true, some of them that much true. I’ve never been good at coming down on one side or the other. I’m a wobbler, you might say. Uncertainty, it’s a function of my class. Go up a bit, they think they know what’s what. Go down a bit, they don’t have any doubt. But here, in this mind-suburb, this ribbon-built self, everything changes as you look at it. One moment tragedy, the next, simply biology. One moment choice, the next, accident.

  Perhaps there’s a middle course, though it is confusing to think so. Surely each explanation cancels the other. There are more clues to consider, anyway, more facts to select and examine. Perhaps they will add up. I doubt it somehow, but I cannot shake off this idea that, in a blink, I will achieve some revelation, arrive at some place, which will explain everything to me, where everything will slot into place. I will be in bed or on a bus or out for a walk and it will all make sense, suddenly. I will smile, and nod, and the problem of life will be solved. I will have arrived. I will know what is what, what it all boils down to.

  The 1980s begin well, not just for me but for all the children of subtopia, the second or maybe third generations of the respectable working class who bled out of the inner cities after the war. They are now commonly identified as a political tribe: the C2s. Ambition courses down the arterial roads, buzzes along the tube lines, like a force describable in physics. The nanny state has given us homes, health, education, hope, prospects. Now it is time to ditch the pilot, to kick away the ladder.

  We are tired of the dull, soft round of consensus and compromise. We are no more or less selfish than our parents; simply, in spite of our view of ourselves, more naive, or perhaps the word is stupid. We have become unhinged from common sense and think that if we have more money, we will automatically end up with more liberty. We do not understand consequences. We trust simultaneously in beliefs that must contradict each other, both freedom and security.

  We look out eagerly from our terraces in Southall, Streatham, Dagenham and Walthamstow towards villas in Iver, Epsom, Chigwell and Cockfosters. Money seems to thicken and spread, another force of nature. Our houses gather value, the weight of our taxes drops, oil floods the economy. We thrash the Argie menace. Our self-confidence ascends slowly, invisibly, into a kind of hubris. There is after all, it seems, such a thing as a free lunch.

  By now, galvanized by the spirit of the times, I am running my own off-the-shelf company out of an office on the murky side of Marylebone with my partner, Barry. We have bought the freehold on the building and fly estate agents tell us it is already worth double what we paid. We have abandoned tabloid journalism and started publishing glossy, trivial magazines about the pop stars that surface after the decay of punk: Adam Ant, Duran Duran, the Human League. To our surprise, the magazines sell prodigiously. Cheques of a ridiculous size keep arriving from the distributors in the office post. We laugh incredulously: it is so fucking easy.

  I discover Armani and Brylcreem, Church’s shoes, John Smedley shirts. I show off my Paul Smith linen suit to my father, who shakes his head in wonderment, and perhaps disgust.

  How much?

  Three.

  Three what? Hundred?

  Unhmm.

  It’s all creased.

  It’s meant to be like that.

  I don’t know. Really, I mean –

  He shakes his head in genuine incredulity.

  What a racket!

  I laugh, and reprise my teenage mantra: You just don’t understand. Yet at the same time I wonder if it is true that labels, the shapes of packages, the quality of typefaces, can make me real, as they somehow, obscurely, suggest. For I still cannot shake this sense of… what? Of unease. Of imminently falling. Of being held in place by thin and fraying ropes.

  Oh, but we are living, though. We lunch, we dine: Ma Cuisine, Tante Claire, The English House, Joe Allen, L’Escargot, Julies, Mon Plaisir, Frederick’s, Ken Lo’s, La Pomme d’Amour. At Inigo Jones we giggle as we stump up more than a hundred and come out hungry. We eat at Pru Leith’s, paying £5 for a few mush and pots and toms bought from the shop my father works in to garnish some piece of semiprecious fish. We both buy brand-new Jeeps and Barry follows his up with a Porsche. We travel, to Barbados, Costa Rica, Cancun, New York, LA. The world, the world is unreal, it really is. And what is most unreal of all is that I have fallen in love, really in love, for
the first time in my life.

  Her name is Kate and I meet her at a friend’s out in Harrow. She has long chestnut hair, a leather jacket and motorcycle boots. Her eyes are hooded and lidless, like Charlotte Rampling’s, and her lips are bee-stung and full. Between bad teeth, she clenches a cheroot. Her neck is graceful and long. She rides a 250cc bike, too fast, despite the fact that she suffers from petit mal and might fall into an epileptic fit at some fast turn on the clearway. She is brave. She is what my mother would call a bit gawky and she has slightly knock knees.

  Kate is not like Debbie, Marion or any other girl I have been with, although I cannot at first put my finger on why. It is some time before I realize what makes her so particular, but then it dawns. She knows who she is. Despite her natural introversion, she has a bred, central confidence. It is not the brittle kind, the flipped mirror of denial. She knows where she begins and she knows where she ends. She cannot be bullied or intimidated, because it is her who does the defining, not me. Yet there is a sense of raw honesty about her that makes her vulnerable and therefore lovable. My overbearing, bombastic character runs into something as tough and soft as chamois. To me it is intoxicating, for I see that she is a woman instead of a girl, a person, not an adjunct, or decoration, to my life and my vanity.

  And – perhaps more to the point, I don’t know – she is blatantly middle class. Her father owns one of the biggest advertising agencies in the country. She has been brought up in Kensington and a large, beautiful farmhouse in East Sussex. She has a degree in literature and was once presented with a prize for poetry by Ted Hughes after winning a competition at university. Although I am reluctant to admit it, she is cleverer than me, or at least wiser. She has books, she can ride, she has been blooded on the hunt. Oh, Kate is progress, there is no doubt about it. Kate is more than a girlfriend. She is the expression of a sort of wish.

  We start, as my father and mother still call it, going steady. I do not see stars or walk on air; like my father, I am a practical man. But in a way that I cannot articulate, I have found what I did not even know I needed, a soul firm enough to steady my faintly sketched self, to hold the gyroscope that is spinning always in a thin vacuum. The dislocated rage I have felt since I was a child fades in the face of her calmness, her simple, sure presence. Before, I now realize, women had only blurred me; Kate seems to focus me, sharpen my always misted, just-out-of-sight horizons.

  For someone unrooted, someone like me, to know this is a wonder, not only because, obviously, it is love, but because, even more important, it is known. For the first time since being a child, I have discovered a truth that is certain, incontrovertible, something simple and clear in an inner landscape of fading, shifting shapes and doubts. I love Kate and I am proud, confirmed at last, in the fact that she loves me. It is that simple a foundation, a crampon through shifting gravel into bedrock. It is a cliché, like love always is. I am so grateful. I hold her in my arms and thank the gods, the gods I have never believed in.

  The 1980s wear on. I am in my mid-twenties now. The meaning of money is suffering a sort of psychological inflation in that the more I have of it, the less it seems to be of value. I have too much time on my hands, for my job, with all its income, is easy, no more than a couple of days’ work a week. I am losing structure. Kate seems to be the only thing mooring me to the earth.

  My relationship with my parents, in my teens abrasive and frayed, has turned entirely around. I no longer see them as shallow and dim, but as what they in fact are: decent, kind and ordinary people. Although my father remains miserly with praise, I believe that they love me without question or complaint. We have become good friends who see each other out of pleasure rather than duty.

  Jean and Jack seem happy, although the force of change that is the 1980s does not seem to affect them much for the better materially. Southall is becoming uglier, more threadbare by the day, as the little front gardens are ripped out to be replaced by concrete car ports. Stone-cladding and double-glazing ruin the simple harmony of the streets; it all looks broken up and bitsy. Jean’s house, which she loves, is still immaculate, but something is changing. There is dog shit on the pavements. The children seem louder, more threatening. There are even beggars in Greenford High Street, with rat’s-tail hair and gypsy rags. It is a strange world in some ways, very different from the place she once so modestly dreamed of. She wishes sometimes she could pick up her house and put it somewhere else – in a pocket of the England she seems to remember. She cleaves to, she longs for, what I have spent all my life trying to leave.

  Jeff has settled in New Orleans now with his wife, Helma. They married in England in 1981. None of the family were present since Jeff did not wish them to attend. He said it was a marriage of convenience and therefore not proper – it was merely to secure a green card. Neverthless, he and Helma subsequently lived together as man and wife. Jean was hurt that she was not invited, but accepted Jeff’s decision without complaint.

  James is a teenager now, a Goth with purple hair and black fishnet tights, good but uninterested at school. He disdains the ILEA teachers who insist on being called Dave or Sue instead of Mr this or Mrs that. The world he is taught about has changed from the one Jeff and I were shown: now Sir Francis Drake is a slave trader and the British Empire an exercise in colonial asset-stripping. Greenford County Grammar is now Greenford High, a comprehensive, predominantly black and Asian. But, though not academic, James is – like Jeff was, like I was – a centre of attention. He is charming and funny, he is handsome, he is careless of custom and adventurous. Jean knows he will leave home soon. How will she take to it, having no child in the house? What is she without a family to look after?

  But my new concordat with Jack and Jean does not extend to worrying about my mother’s life and future. The problems that concern me, as ever, are my own. Which is how Jean and Jack want it, because they dislike the sort of parents who try to extract some emotional levy simply for having brought their children up. You have to let them go, Jean.

  My sense of purpose continues to dissipate. I can earn the equivalent of my father’s weekly salary at the greengrocer’s in a day, without getting out of bed in the morning. And yet in a strange way, I am bad at being an Essex Man. I do not feel particularly acquisitive. I am finding out that another of my parents’ trotted-out clichés – money can’t buy you happiness – is turning out to be true. Questions chivvy me. Why get up? Why work to make more money, when the money you have does not satisfy you? What do I do next? In other words, I am still asking the question of my age, of my class. Am I happy? Am I happy enough? And the answer is the same as ever.

  I am not quite sure why it is, in the end, that I apply to go to university. I am not academically minded and was a mediocre school pupil. I rarely read books and my attention span is short. Nor do I imagine that it will advance my career; in fact, I know it will lose me a considerable amount of money, since I will have to withdraw from my publishing company. But some dumb instinct tells me that this secret of life, the secret that some day will be revealed to me, lies not lodged in the world itself, but in the way I make sense of it all. My thoughts feel cheap, ephemeral, unsatisfying and I want them fleshed out. I want them laid complete, laid out in rows, neat and tangible, instead of fractured, always unfinished, written in invisible ink. I want them to be lovely and elegant and copperplate instead of brazen tabloid headlines.

  And there is something else. Perhaps on some level I feel that there is something in Kate that disdains me. I feel sure that she loves me, but sometimes when we are out at my parents’, when we are drinking with my loud friends in a loud bar, when I pronounce Goethe wrong, or Jean Rhys, or Beauchamp Place, I see something in her eyes that… Or perhaps I imagine it. I am, after all, a little paranoid, like all social climbers, like Philip Pirrip in Great Expectations or Leonard Bast in Howards End. I do not admit it to myself, anyway. But university it must be, if I am to be properly reinvented.

  But which one? I know nothing about universities. I d
o not know what a fresher is, or a faculty, or an alumnus. I do not know if York is good and Heriot-Watt is bad, or if Bradford is good on political science while Newcastle is famed for literature. No one in any part of my family has the faintest idea. I assume that Oxford and Cambridge are pretty good, but you have to pass an entrance exam. I do not know what subject to study or how to find out.

  In the end, for no other reason than I happen to meet someone who went there and enjoyed it, I decide to apply to the London School of Economics. Apparently it has a good reputation, and it is easy to get to by tube. I decide, on little more than a whim, to study social anthropology. I go for an interview and am grilled by two professors, who ask me a lot of questions that seem easy enough to answer. A few weeks later, I am offered a place and I accept.

  It seems sometimes that nothing I ever go for am I refused, not in jobs, not in women, not in life. My family love me, I adore my girlfriend and I am rich. Life, for me, is apparently charmed. So why do I always feel… what is it, what is that feeling? It’s so familiar, yet so elusive. I feel – I think this is correct – ashamed.

  It is six months later, the September of 1983 and my first week at university. Kate has inherited some money. Like many women of her class and generation, she is superstitious, far more so than my mother and her down-to-earth friends at the Tupperware parties and golf fours. Thus it is that she believes in omens and signs, astrology and fate, things that I think of as daft. When a shaft of light falls on a small ad in the Evening Standard for a houseboat on the Thames, she simply goes out and buys it, cash, believing that destiny has revealed itself to her. It is twenty miles out of London. I visit at weekends, but I have made up my mind now that I want to live with her. I take it for granted that she will agree. We will live in Hampstead and use the boat as a weekend retreat.