Eighty Not Out (33 page)

When Fergus returned from Thailand, I broke it to him that I had the same disease that had led to my father's premature death. He was shocked, having suspected nothing more than that I was stressed by sustained uncertainty about our future, and the onset of menopause. He was particularly apprehensive because of what he had seen during his years in Northern Rhodesia – marriages destroyed and childhood disrupted by the excessive drinking of one, sometimes both, partners. I told him how impressed I was by
AA
, and what I had learned at the Geneva group meetings, and advised him to join Al-Anon. He soon became a regular member of the small, largely female group, which met at the same time and in the same building as
AA
, thus ensuring that at least the driver of our car would be sober.

I had begun to listen with more attention to speakers I would previously have dismissed on superficial grounds. An overpowering American woman, rather showy in her manner of dress, spoke of being grateful she was alcoholic, because of the enlightenment
AA
had brought to her existence. She reiterated what Ted had said: ‘If you're not convinced, go out and try some more controlled drinking.' But it was weeks before I noticed that ‘The only requirement for membership is a desire to
stop
drinking'. I was not a member; I was merely attending meetings and learning a great deal about my condition. Still defiant, I clung to the hope that I might conquer the demon by my own efforts. I had been told to seek help, but the very idea was anathema. The word ‘denial' was freely used in the meetings – a word I was never able to utter. Another American woman, who, outside the group, ran a counselling service, spoke to me with some venom across the table: ‘You're in such denial, it's beyond belief!'

So parochial was the English-speaking population in the Canton de Genève and the Pays de Gex that anonymity would sooner or later be breached at some level. Failing to remember Dick's instruction to put the cotton wool in my mouth, I voiced the opinion that anonymity was unnecessary, as we suffered from a disease. It was drawn to my attention that if we were known to belong to
AA
and then ‘slipped', it would not be a good advertisement for the fellowship. Point taken; but many months, as predicted by Ted, were to pass before the next stage in the relentless progress of the disease set in. Dick added to the horror stories in the Big Book, telling me about a woman, now confined in a Geneva mental hospital, whose drinking had led to Korsakoff's syndrome, commonly termed ‘wet brain'. He had known her when she was a diplomat, renowned for her sharp wit and intellectual capacity. He no longer visited her, as she had no idea who he was.

I persuaded my mother to get a passport and she flew to Geneva for Christmas. Now eighty years old, it was her first flight since 1927, when I was
in utero
and she took pictures from a Tiger Moth of the Collon House where I was born some months later. She appeared in a wheelchair, escorted by a solicitous flight attendant, impressed by the efficiency of air travel, if not by the packaging of milk in ‘fiddly' little plastic tubs that she had found hard to open. During her stay, we took her to the old part of Geneva, the Jet d'Eau, lunch at our favourite pizza restaurant, the Palais des Nations, and to see
WHO
headquarters, where Fergus now had an office in a new block – the original building, with its massive, gravity-defying, concrete-canopied entrance, having been found too small shortly after completion. Fergus drove her up the corkscrew road to Saint-Cergue, then into Switzerland, along the ridge of the Jura, and back to Divonne by another equally tortuous route with panoramic views to Lac Léman, Mont Blanc, and the Alpes Maritimes. I coped with preparation of a traditional festive meal, and had a rooted Norwegian blue spruce on the balcony lit by tiny coloured bulbs and decorated with baubles, some dating from the Boston days. But often I was tired and would retire to bed for a prolonged siesta, pleading exhaustion from cooking, shopping and other chores, leaving the others to their own devices. My mother remarked that I seemed to have little appetite for the delicious food I prepared, and was surprised at my burgeoning weight; my bouts of irritability, facial flushes and girth were attributed to the menopause.

In the early months of 1977 Fergus undertook a six-week mission to China to make an assessment of the schistosomiasis problem in the hinterland of both Beijing and Shanghai. By and large I was coping at all levels, and continued to type manuscripts and translations, in order – if truth be told – to earn conscience money to pay for my drinking. A rough calculation put my annual expenditure on booze level with a year's boardingschool fees. One reason I seldom had a hangover was that my system was permanently topped up. Not only was the quantity increasing, the alcohol content was also escalating. No longer did a glass of wine or Martini deliver the kick-start required – it had to be spirits. Anxiety about a dwindling supply would make me irritable and incapable of giving my undivided attention to anything or anybody until I had stashed away what I calculated would be enough. I began, squirrel-like, to secrete emergency supplies to see me through public holidays. Small bottles in the bathroom, ostensibly of nail varnish remover, might contain vodka. A few years later, when temporary loss of memory had set in, I would search fruitlessly for a hidden bottle. Disposing of the empties became a problem; rather than put them in the communal bin, I took them to a bottle bank elsewhere in the town, or into an area where I did not risk being recognised.

Fergus and I had decided to look for better accommodation and I came across a small notice in the weekly local rag: ‘
À vendre, Villard, dans une ferme, pied de la montagne, grande appartement, 4 pièces, cuisine, salle de bains. Vue imprenable sur lac, jardin, potagère
.' I asked Eva what ‘
dans une ferme
' signified and she said it was probably part of a large traditional house. On the morning Fergus returned from his trip to China, we drove straight from the airport to view En Barye, as the property was called. At the top of the town, under cliffs beside the municipal campsite, it proved to be the precisely divided half of a stone house, built in 1857 on part of a glacial gravel deposit, and in need of substantial repair and renovation. The other side was a vast
grenier
, containing straw, the remains of six cattle stalls, and three rooms on the ground floor, occupied by a retired shepherd, M. Marc-Joseph, who could be seen observing what was going on from a small, pine-topped eminence on the opposite side of the road. The owner lived in Provence but her nephew, a schoolteacher who no longer used the house as a summer retreat, had been delegated to negotiate the sale. Now retired, he was moving to Provence where his aunt lived. As we talked, a pair of buzzards circled above the house; occasionally, we were told, they were joined by red kites searching for small mammals. There were red squirrels, noisy green and pied woodpeckers, a variety of finches, and tits, as well as a busy pair of nuthatches. To an extent it was these attractions that blinded us to the house's numerous disadvantages. And on April Fool's Day, in a
notaire
's office, we signed a complicated document formalising our ownership.

In retrospect only someone touched by insanity would have undertaken this project. It demanded determination, attention to detail, and energy, and most of the decisions would rest with me, as Fergus, hitherto to a large extent his own master, was working for the first time at the hub of a giant bureaucratic machine. Headquarters staff tended to regard those who came ‘in from the bush' with suspicion, as some proved difficult to tame. We engaged M. Gaston, who did not look like an architect, apart from the suede shoes and yellow waistcoat. He was rotund, rather like David Suchet's Poirot, and at our first site meeting jumped up and down on the living-room floor, plunging his penknife into floor and skirting before pronouncing them sound. He recommended contractors and subcontractors, and supervised the site in general, but even with my experience of properties in Ireland, it was a formidable undertaking. A convivial atmosphere pervaded the house throughout the summer – several of the workmen were bon viveurs with florid faces, their radios blaring incessantly. Gauloise smokers to a man, they never turned lights off during long lunch breaks, and their arrival was unpredictable, but they knocked off on the stroke of 5 p.m. As in Africa, they had honed their skills in the art of incomprehension – always with the excuse that my French was so deficient there had been a
malentendu
.

By Christmas, however, work was well advanced, and just before the girls joined us for the Easter of 1978, we moved in with another load of furniture from Ireland, as well as what was in the apartment. It had been sold to a master butcher, who complained of a
mauvais odeur du chien
, but paid the asking price, saying there were ways of getting rid of the smell. I was taken aback by his comment, finding it unnecessarily forthright – albeit true. A dose of my own medicine, no doubt.

My fiftieth birthday had been a few days earlier, and the gnarled wild cherry tree that canopied the access drive was in full flower on the day of the move. We were told it was traditional to plant a cherry, a walnut and a lime to celebrate the completion of a house, so the cherry, the giant walnut on the Jura side of the house, and a towering lime tree outside the kitchen, had probably been planted on the same day in 1857. So there we were, an ideal family, husband secure in a
UN
job, three happy, healthy children doing well at school, cute dog, and superwoman mother – the struggle to settle in Europe over at last.

When Fergus was not away on duty travel, we went twice a week to
AA
and Al-Anon meetings in Geneva. Pride inhibited me from getting a sponsor, nor did I warm enough to any of them to ask. I might well have met with a refusal, as it was plain to see that, while I was familiar with the programme, I had not progressed beyond mouthing the truth that I was an alcoholic: about the rest, humbly seeking help, asking for protection and care – that was alien philosophy. I doggedly stuck to the view that my life was still manageable, I did not need restoring to sanity, and I had got through half a century seldom seeking either help or advice from others. So I was not a member of
AA
– I merely attended meetings as an interested observer. But my pride and compulsion to control situations and people ensured that the agony would be prolonged, not only for me, but for the rest of the family, including Oscar the dog, who was sensitive to mood changes and raised voices.

Sybil and Iain came with their two boys and camped in what passed for a garden, before Fergus had transformed it to what would, in the
UK
, have qualified for opening to the public. (The French, in general, don't ‘do' informal gardens. There is little between a peasant plot and the formal gardens of a chateau, but regrettably some of the French now emulate the garish awfulness of
UK
suburbia, aided by most of their
hypermarchés
, which always have a garden centre.) Reminiscing years later, Sybil and Iain recalled sensing something was wrong, but could not identify what it was. I had been there in body but not in spirit, distanced by thoughts of the next ‘fix'. The children, aware of my dependence, were apprehensive about how I would behave in front of their friends, and were guarded about whom they invited to stay during school breaks. By their late teens, mostly only friends with an active drinker in their own family came to stay. Once, when Michael invited a rugby fanatic for the afternoon and evening meal, I served the food all the while delivering a diatribe about the thuggish nature of the game and the mental capacity of its followers. Michael was mortified, and his eleven-year-old friend was distressed to the point of tears; he clammed up, ate little, and never wanted to come again. He told his mother, a nice woman, who confronted me when next I met her at the school. I was genuinely ashamed, and when apologising confessed to a drink problem which I was dealing with by attending
AA
meetings. I trusted her discretion not to broadcast this fact, but suspect she did, knowing that often children other than my own were in the car with me and would have been at risk.

An appointment was made to consult a liver specialist in Geneva. The vibrations, as they say, were not good: he was a shrivelled, diminutive man who made no attempt to hide his disdain for people, women in particular, who drank to excess. In his opinion it was all a matter of strength of mind. The liver function tests were normal, and he advised me to pull myself together while my liver was still intact. Shortly after that I gave it a real bashing, called our Portuguese doctor to the house, and asked him to help me dry out at home rather than occupy a hospital bed. He gave me an intramuscular injection, and prescribed a short course of muscle relaxants and tranquillisers. Not in the least censorious, on leaving he said: ‘
Courage, madame, c'est une maladie difficile
.' Michael came and sat on my bed, the first of many times, hoping that this time I would succeed in stopping drinking. Oscar lay on the floor, or, if he could get away with it, beside me on the bed. Fergus returned from work anxious to know how I was feeling. Somehow I managed to crawl down to the kitchen and prepare their evening meal.

Repeatedly, after sobering up, I would return, shamingly soon, to drinking. Five days were spent in the psychiatric wing of one of the Geneva hospitals; another time I was admitted to hospital in Annemasse for detoxification. I was taken to a private room at midday, but by three thirty no member of staff had appeared, I had no supply of alcohol with me, and time was running out before the tremors would start. So I panicked and called a taxi, for which I did not have enough cash. The driver, pleased to have such a long run, and assured that he would be paid on arrival, drove me back to Divonne, weak with lack of food and shaking, to be met by a grim-faced Fergus, who was preparing the evening meal. The drying-out process was better conducted in nearby Nyon hospital. The message was the same: my liver was functioning normally, but from what I had told them, total abstinence would be the only cure. Medical costs for the treatment of alcoholism were not then covered by
WHO
health insurance. The organization was soon to review its policy on the treatment of what in the
US
was recognised as a disease, and footed the bill for my later incarcerations in Bristol and Surrey.