Serial Monogamy (17 page)

T
he girls' banner almost broke my heart. It was hand-lettered with marker in their best grade two block capitals on what appeared to be an old sheet and was hung across our front hall on two bits of green garden twine.
WELCOME HOME MUMMY! CONGRATULATIONS! YOU DID IT!
There hadn't been quite enough room for “congratulations” on one line so the
N
and the
S
were mashed together with the exclamation mark tucked in below.

It was late September and I had just completed my final round of chemo. Al had picked me up at the hospital in the car and we had driven to the community centre where the girls had been enrolled in an after-school program ever since I began treatment and couldn't be sure to get them at three thirty every afternoon. I waited in the car while Al went inside. I was exhausted and didn't feel like moving: the effects of chemotherapy are cumulative and I was reaching a low point by this stage. When the three of them emerged, the girls were all giggly and kept
whispering to each other. Al smiled—clearly he knew what was up—and, as soon as he had belted both of them into the back seat and took his place at the wheel, announced, “So. Mummy's done treatment. Tell her congratulations.” They cheered from the back seat but kept up the silly stuff all the way home.

As I came through the door I saw what the surprise was: the pink-and-green banner strung across the room and a huge bouquet of yellow lilies and ornamental daisies sitting on the hall table. I swallowed, bit my lip and told them it was a lovely banner and a fabulous way to celebrate finishing treatment and I loved them very much, all of which was true.

“Lily helped us. It was her idea.” Lily was one of the young instructors at the community centre, a gentle soul who was a particular pal of Goli's.

“And Daddy hung it up for us after you left this morning. Didn't he do a good job?”

“And he bought the flowers.”

“There wasn't room for
congratulations
, it's a big word,” Anahita pointed out, adding airily, “but that doesn't matter.”

“Anny thought it should say
get well soon
but I said you're finished being sick and
welcome home
was better,” Goli said.

“It's wonderful the way it is. Thank you, girls. Thank you so much.”

“And Daddy got a cake for dinner.”

“Anny. That was supposed to be a surprise.” Goli gave her sister a little shove of annoyance. Anahita, older by twenty minutes, could be bossy and Goli sometimes resented it, but when I thought about it I realized it had been months since they'd had one of their knockdown, hair-pulling brawls. There had been a lot of tears and complaints and temper tantrums when Al was gone from the house, but since I had been sick the girls always seemed sweet and quiet. Maybe Al had just been particularly successful at keeping them out of my way when I was in bad shape.

“The cake will still be a surprise because I haven't seen it yet,” I reassured Goli.

The real surprise would be if I was able to eat it. During chemo I'd lost ten pounds and was continually being lectured by the nurses about keeping my strength up. Al had bought a cake at the grocery store with
YEAH MUMMY!
piped on it in blue icing. Sitting at the dinner table when all I longed to do was sleep, surrounded by my girls' excited and expectant faces, I thought I would cry. They just wanted life to return to normal. They wanted a healthy mother they could trust to pick them up after school and make their meals and read them stories. They shouldn't always have to be good because Mummy wasn't feeling well or quiet because Mummy was resting. Was it right to let them think that we were out of the woods?

I thanked them for their surprise, and I thanked Al and leant across the table and kissed him on the lips. The girls clapped delightedly: they never seemed to pay that much attention to our interactions as long as they were polite, but they must always have had their antennae out. When Al first came home, they would cheer encouragement anytime we offered each other a peck on the cheek or a hug.

“I think Mummy better get to bed now. She's had a long day,” Al told them, giving me cover to retreat.

Thirty hours later, at dawn on the second day after the treatment, I was back on the bathroom floor with the toilet seat up, longing to vomit so that I could get some relief from the nausea.

Al appeared at the door, shrugging on a bathrobe and tying the belt around his waist. He seemed prepared for a long haul that night.

“It's okay. Just leave me. Go back to bed.”

“I can stay, in case you need me.”

“I'll be fine.” I waved him away and gulped; there was a lurch in my stomach. And then I remembered Al saying those same words on his way out the door, that I would always be fine, and now I wasn't. “I'm not fine, Al,” I corrected myself tearfully. “I'm not fine.”

“It's okay. I'm here,” he said, gently patting my back. After a bit he added, “It's nice to be needed, you know. You used to need me, when we were younger.”

“Did I?”

“Yeah. This whole thing has felt like the first time in, I don't know, the first time in years that you have actually needed me.”

“You make me sound like an Amazon or a rock or something. I've always needed you.”

“Not really.” He stretched his legs out in front of him and considered for a moment. “Not the way you used to. Not the way it was at first. I kind of missed that, I missed being useful to someone, you know, being necessary.”

“You're necessary to the girls.”

“It's not the same. They're children, and they're my children. I would expect them to need me. You're the only adult, except I guess my parents, who ever made me feel if I weren't there it would have mattered.”

“The only one who ever needed you?” I asked. “All those women, before, when you were a student…”

“They needed me because they needed a fuck or they wanted to prove something to their last boyfriend or their mother or whatever. It's not the same thing. You remember that email you sent me? You told me it wasn't working for you. It wasn't working for you being without me. It was like a cry for help.”

“And you came riding to the rescue.”

“Yes, because you had just rescued me. You had made me necessary. Otherwise, I was invisible. But somehow you've always been able to see me.”

I hadn't felt like I had been able to see him, or anybody else for that matter, for months—sickness makes
you self-absorbed—but it was the kind of connection I had been at such pains to remind him of when he was trying to leave. I squeezed his arm and then leant on it to pull myself to my feet. My nausea had passed.

Do you take any interest in mesmerism, Mrs. Ternan? No? You never fell victim to that particular fashion. It was a great passion of my husband's for some years. Oh, thank you. I am always partial to a bit of gingerbread. So good for the digestion, I do think.

Magnetism, they used to call it, submitting a subject to magnetic powers. My husband was quite convinced of his own magnetic powers in the early years of our marriage. He could easily put myself or my sister into a trance. He would do it to entertain our guests, although they say the practice has therapeutic benefits. Dr. Elliotson was certainly convinced it had medical applications, but in our house, it really began as a parlour trick.

Dr. Elliotson was our family doctor. Lovely man. He had become convinced that mesmerism could help those with nervous complaints and he regularly gave demonstrations and lectures on the subject. When he noted
Mr. Dickens had an interest, he suggested he try his hand at it, showed him how it was done, the most effective gestures for achieving the trance state, and how to rouse the patient once he was finished. Mr. Dickens began practising on me and Georgina and seemed to master it right away.

Oh, it's an odd sensation but not unpleasant. Your eyes are closed; you can hear people's voices but as if they are very far away. The sensation is, well, very lazy, comfortable. You feel unworried and rather warm. A bit like being at the seaside on a nice summer day and closing your eyes but not actually falling asleep.

Well, I wouldn't really call it obey. I would respond to his voice and certainly do as he said. But I wouldn't jump out a window on his command or run into the street in my petticoats. That kind of thing is nonsense, put out by people who want to discredit it, I imagine. It is not really about actions anyway; it is more about a state of the mind. I would think what he suggested I think or feel what he said to feel. You know, he would say you will stop worrying about your mother's health or you will feel more charitably toward, I don't know, some friend of his I didn't like or something of that nature. And when I came out of the trance I would be very calm and feel much more kindly disposed to the person or less unsettled about my mother.

We thought it was all good fun but then Mr. Dickens found a subject with more serious worries to address. It was in Genoa. It must be at least ten years ago now, fifteen perhaps. We often travelled on the continent for lengthy
periods in those years, taking houses in Italy for some months. That time, we had been in Genoa hardly a week, I think, when we met the de la Rues. M. de la Rue was Swiss, I believe, a banker, a prosperous man, very proper in the way Europeans are, always immaculately dressed and very formal in his manners. He would kiss my hand most gallantly whenever we met. His wife was English, so naturally we were friendly, the way one is meeting a compatriot in foreign parts. They had a beautiful apartment at the top of a grand old palazzo and they showed us around the city, acting as the most generous hosts and guides.

I must say that to an outsider Mme de la Rue appeared quite healthy; she was an amiable person, a good conversationalist in company, although very quiet at some other times, a pretty woman only a few years older than myself, but M. de la Rue soon confided in my husband that she was very ill, plagued not only by burning headaches but also by the worst anxieties and fits that came over her, especially at night, as well as terrible nightmares that disturbed her sleep. By day she could remain calm but as soon as the sun set she became increasingly fearful of what state she might find herself in as sleep approached, to the point where she did not wish to go to bed at all and then suffered terrible exhaustion as a result. As we came to know her better, I did notice she also suffered attacks during the day. On one occasion when we were lunching she clutched the side of her face. She cried out to her husband that she could not
stand the pain, as though this were not the first occurrence of such an attack. It passed in a moment and we tried to resume our lunch; he explained that she was a martyr to tic douloureux, and the attacks could sometimes be triggered by the motion of the jaw while eating.

Mr. Dickens said, “Imagine living a life where one would fear to eat during the day and sleep at night for the pain both might bring!” Mr. Dickens quickly suggested Dr. Elliotson be consulted, for his magnetic treatments had particular success with just this kind of nervous complaint. M. de la Rue thought they might travel to England to consult Dr. Elliotson. I don't know if they ever did in the end—we have fallen out of touch with them in the intervening years—but in the meantime, Mr. Dickens suggested he might attempt to mesmerize Mme de la Rue himself. I believe their initial agreement was that he would make some trial so that M. de la Rue might see how the process worked and whether his wife was susceptible or not. Some people, you know, are not the least susceptible and will sit there staring at the mesmerist quite perplexed as to what it is they should be experiencing for they feel nothing at all. Mr. Dickens once tried to mesmerize our coachman to no effect whatsoever. The young man kept turning his head about, all the time his eyes were shut, saying, “Have you started, Mr. Dickens?” Mr. Dickens was not very amused.

At any rate, Mme de la Rue was highly susceptible. From the beginning, she made an excellent patient.
Mr. Dickens was delighted; at least, I could see he was delighted. One did not like to express it in exactly those terms to M. de la Rue, since his wife was so ill. Mr. Dickens indicated he was pleased that he could be of assistance, and both husband and wife were hopeful that mesmerism might show results and very grateful to Mr. Dickens. In her sessions with my husband, Mme de la Rue would have visions. Now, I have been placed in a mesmerized trance on many occasions and I have to tell you, Mrs. Ternan, that I do not see visions. Clearly, Mme de la Rue was a much more suggestible creature than I am for she saw all kinds of things while in a trance, dream-like places, landscapes and such, peopled by friends or members of her own family. But especially she repeatedly saw some fearful character that Mr. Dickens called her bad phantom. Some sort of ghost or devil who hovered about at the edge of view; it sounded to me just like a bad dream, the way you sense a wicked presence in a dream but can't really say on waking who or what it was.

Mr. Dickens became fascinated by this bad phantom to the point where I believed he put Mme de la Rue into trances in the hope of glimpsing the creature himself, somehow conjuring it up or perceiving it through her descriptions. Apparently, her dreams seemed entirely real to her; he said she shook in terror when she described the phantom. You must understand, Mrs. Ternan, that by this point I was no longer present for these experiments. Mr. Dickens felt Mme de la Rue was more likely to trust
him and fall into a trance if they were alone together, so I don't really know how this phantom manifested itself or what form her reaction took beyond what Mr. Dickens told me and her husband. Mr. Dickens now said he wanted to exorcise this evil figure from her mind and so he began to mesmerize her almost daily.

She became increasingly dependent on their sessions and would cling to Mr. Dickens whenever we met, hanging on his sleeve and telling him how clever he was and how grateful she was. When they were not together, they would exchange regular notes and letters about her mental state and, I have to say, Mr. Dickens seemed to rely on their regular communication as much as Mme de la Rue did. She did seem to improve. Perhaps any woman would have felt better given an important man's undivided attention. At any rate, she was calmer both during the day and at night, and as well as repeatedly expressing her gratitude to Mr. Dickens, she would thank me most touchingly for sparing him and allowing him to devote so much time to her cure. That was always the word she used,
allowing
. I have to say I might have laughed at such language had I been in a happier frame of mind. I don't know how your marriage operated, Mrs. Ternan, perhaps being an actor your husband was a more liberal sort, but in my experience one does not allow or disallow a husband to do anything. A husband does what he wishes, what he thinks best or what pleases him, and there is little point arguing about it.

However, I did think Mr. Dickens' attentions to her were becoming unseemly and that he was motivated as much by his own appetite for her pitiful reactions as by any desire to cure her. Even though he was not a doctor, he liked having a patient. He often called her that, the patient. At any rate, I gently suggested that, now she was improved, we must make a planned sightseeing trip to Rome, which we had delayed for some time. Mr. Dickens agreed we would leave soon but would not specify a date. And then Mme de la Rue, with an uncanny knack for timing, took a turn for the worse, and M. de la Rue called Mr. Dickens to her side one night, sending a messenger to our villa to wake us from our sleep.

At this point, I had to remonstrate. Mr. Dickens was not, I repeated to him, a doctor. What would people think of a man attending another man's wife in the middle of the night? Surely I would not be alone in considering such a thing beyond the bounds of propriety, no matter how desperate the cause or how deeply desired the cure. I know Emile de la Rue was none too happy either; he agreed with me that the situation might easily be misconstrued. He said as much to me one day by way of an apology, and I think he felt increasingly uncomfortable that it fell to another man to help his wife out of her troubles. Mr. Dickens accused me of jealousy, that I feared being displaced by Mme de la Rue, and said I did not understand how his artistic temperament gave him an inquisitive mind and required him to make such experiments. Of course,
I am not an artist, Mrs. Ternan, but I think I am as inquisitive as the next person; I am not without an education. One can study a subject without becoming enthralled, and I do not think that my concerns and my requirements at the time were unreasonable; surely I was owed more delicate behaviour. I had discovered by then that I was expecting our Alfred, my sixth, and, of course, we were not at home in England, so I expect I was feeling a little vulnerable. Perhaps Mr. Dickens was right, that I just wanted his attention for myself; that might explain what I did next.

It was a little ruse, Mrs. Ternan, just a small one, and I believed at the time that it worked rather well. After that difficult night, I insisted we depart for Rome immediately, saying no matter how much we might wish to help the de la Rues, we had given them enough of our time already and could not completely rearrange our travels for them. If we wanted to see more of Italy before we were due to return to Genoa and collect the children for our return to England, we needed to make our trip. Let M. de la Rue take his wife to Dr. Elliotson if she seemed to profit so much from mesmerism. So, at my insistence, we left for Rome that week, but only after Mr. Dickens and Mme de la Rue had agreed that he would attempt to magnetize her remotely at eleven o'clock each morning by means of both parties concentrating their thoughts deeply on each other at that precise moment.

We set off for Rome by coach one morning with Mr. Dickens checking his pocket watch from time to time
to make sure he would keep this mental appointment. I looked out the window and admired the scenery; it is a beautiful road from Genoa to Rome, along the coast with views of the ocean much of the way. Mr. Dickens often sits silent for long periods on a journey, or at home for that matter, thinking, pondering his writing or his ideas, so there would be nothing unusual about him not speaking to me while we travelled and I would know never to interrupt him under those circumstances. I would not dare speak unless he spoke first. I am sure you would agree, Mrs. Ternan, that a great artist requires a certain deference that a wife might not show an ordinary husband.

So, on this occasion, I was silent as always, but did pay close attention to the time; I had a small watch secreted in the work bag I had with me—needlework is all but impossible on a coach, don't you find? But I do sometimes manage some simple tatting. So, when eleven o'clock arrived, and Mr. Dickens continued to sit silently, I knew he was now attempting to mesmerize Mme de la Rue. I have no idea if his long-distance mesmerism worked—later Mr. Dickens always claimed it did—but I gradually gave way to a trance myself. Or, at least, I let him suppose that was what was happening as I slumped against the side of the coach and began to murmur his name in my supposedly magnetized state. It took some moments for Mr. Dickens to realize what had happened; at first, he tried simply to shake me, assuming I had fallen asleep, but I did not wake and now called out his
name more forcefully and more desperately than before. He soon realized that, whatever was happening back in Genoa, he had succeeded in mesmerizing his own wife, seated at his side. And when he made that realization, he very gently and very properly brought me back to myself.

The de la Rues followed us to Rome not long after, and Mr. Dickens did several more sessions with Mme de la Rue, but eventually we continued on our tour of Italy and then returned to Genoa to take the children home to England. The following year, when we travelled to the continent, I insisted we go no farther south than France, and on this occasion Mr. Dickens took full consideration of my wishes. Eventually we fell out of touch with the de la Rues. To this day, Mr. Dickens maintains I was unnecessarily jealous of her, but privately I felt it was perfectly natural to be alarmed by the connection and take steps to sever it.

His experiments with mesmerism ceased soon after that. I suppose you could say he fell out of love with the practice. At any rate, we found other parlour games to amuse ourselves and our guests, and my husband threw himself into amateur theatricals.

I wonder at myself for talking on at you all this time, Mrs. Ternan, but I suppose the story I am telling you is something of a warning. My husband has abandoned mesmerism but he remains a magnetic personality who likes to have his way. Mme de la Rue was not the first woman to fall under his sway. People very seldom say no to my husband; I certainly can't. Why else would I be here today?