The Line of Beauty - Alan Hollinghurst [182]
14
WHEN HE GOT back to Kensington Park Gardens he didn't tell Catherine about Leo straight away. To himself he seemed to gleam with his news, to be both the pale bereaved and the otherworldly messenger. He found himself lengthening his natural sighs and stares to provoke a question. But after ten minutes he accepted that she hadn't noticed. She was slumped in an armchair, with newspapers all around her, and half-empty glasses of water and mugs of tea on the table beside her. He looked down on her from behind, and she seemed as small and passive as a sick child. She looked up and said, with an effort at brightness, "Oh, Nick, it's Election Special after the news," as though it had taken great effort to find this out, as though it was itself a piece of good news.
"OK, darling," said Nick. "Great, we'll watch that." He gazed round the room, feeling for the precedence, the protocol of their relative afflictions. "Um . . . yes . . . OK!" It didn't seem right to land her with the news of a death. He felt that like all news it had its own momentum, and it would somehow go stale and unsayable if it was left too long.
He went up to his room with a slight mental stoop from the burden of Catherine's condition. It was hard work living with someone so helpless and negative, and much worse if you'd known them critical and funny. Well, sometimes, perhaps, it made your own problems look light; at others it amplified them, by a troubling sympathetic gloom. He had borrowed a book of Rachel's by Dr Edelman, who was treating Catherine, A Path Through the Mountains: Clinical Responses to Manic Depression. He had groaned over Dr Edelman's style, and corrected his grammar to protect himself from a superstitious fear that the book awoke in him: of finding the symptoms in himself, now he knew what they were. They certainly seemed to be present in all the more volatile, the more irascible or oddly lethargic people he knew.
The book had helpful facts in it, but it left Nick with an imaginative uncertainty, as to where Catherine was when he looked at her and spoke to her: not in the black and shiny place of her old depressions, but in some other unfeatured place, policed by Dr Edelman's heavy new dosage of lithium. She lacked the energy and motivation to describe it herself. She said she couldn't concentrate on a book, or even an article. Sometimes she acted in her quick pert way, but it was a reflex: she observed it herself with bewilderment and a kind of longing. Mostly she sat and waited, but without any colour of expectation. Nick found himself talking with awful brightness of purpose, as if to someone old and deaf; and it was more awful because she didn't find it condescending.
There were various phone calls that evening. Nick's mother rang and talked excitedly about the election, which she seized on as a chance to share in Nick's London life. He was cool and humourless with her, and saw himself, as so often, almost blaming her for not knowing the important thing he was incapable of telling her. She had never heard of Leo, and he thought if he did try to tell her they would work each other up into a state of mutual resentment at the fact. She gave an account of Gerald's performance on the local radio, as if Nick needed to hear praise of him. "He said we don't want these, you know, lesbian workshops," she said, not unaware of her own bravery in using the word. Then Gerald himself was on the other line, and she rang off as if she'd been caught. "All well?" said Gerald airily, obviously wanting to talk about himself. It was the long evening's wait for the results, when his confidence was the most stretched, and he was fishing for sympathy, almost as though he'd lost. "How did your speech go?" said Nick. "Went down like dinner," Gerald said. "Which is more than I can say for dinner itself—what? God these provincial hotels." Nick felt a punitive urge to make Gerald listen to his problem, since he'd met Leo and had even been gingerly in favour of him; but he knew he