“Attention Deficit Disorder” (there was no hyperactive back then).
“Bipolar depression, Obsessive Compulsive Disorder”.
And night after night Wendy sobbing herself to sleep: “I knew I should never have had kids, I knew the family bloodline should have ended with me!”
Clinical evaluations pockmarked by tears piled high on both bedside tables. What consolatory words could he, engulfed by such misery and fatigue, have given her? Understanding as he did that a woman could bear or admit no greater suffering, whilst at the same time being scarcely able to keep his eyes open? Instead he would hold her tight and read the Wife of Bath’s tales – they always made her laugh – or a poem:
Pretty, Pretty Robin!
Under leaves so green
a happy Blossom
Hears you sobbing, sobbing,
Pretty, Pretty Robin,
Near my Bosom.
After the last girl left home, burning – like the others – with hatred for her parents, it took less than a week for Bryan and Wendy to understand that their love too was gone. Intact for as long as was needed, it could not survive the onset of retrospect, of reflection, of unfettered self-judgment, just as a human being fares no better in a dramatic loss of pressure than they do in a dramatic heightening of it. Their love had served its purpose – sending the three vulnerable beings it had engendered safely into adulthood. Bryan had laboured through that PHD chiefly to provide for his partner and baby daughters.
Everything he had was because of her. All the same though, when Wendy left not a single tear was shed by either of them. “Maybe in six months, or a year,” she had said, “we’ll be able to look at each other again the way we used to”. Now alone, Bryan was forty-six years old but tired as the dead, with only the sense of tragedy and absolute relief – and his photographs – for company.
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