15 August 1999

Last night I went into the attic and got some of my journals and sat out in the late evening sun reading them. Curious, now, to think of how long it took Ellen and me to get personal, to tell each other about our losses. And even when we did, when Ellen spoke of her dead child slipping away and I spoke of the smell of John’s skin burning, there was sorrow but it was muted - not dulled, never dulled, but muted. We both deal with these things in the same way and that’s why we spend so much time together.

I remember her telling me that John and I had to move away from each other’s concern, because that’s what she meant. Now I worry that we’ve moved too far apart. We don’t see each other often enough and I feel I’m powerless to help him now that he’s hurting. I drove to Bristol and saw him outside the deli and left. I call him on the text phone and he replies with bland statements about work and the weather. Sonja is the same — comments about the shop, about the house. Asking how I am, not, I suspect, meaning it. I was always prepared to let John go, to let him be with someone else, but I’m not prepared for him to be damaged again. What can I do? Ellen says leave it. I don’t know.

When I drove John to school in Exeter that first day, it cost me so much to walk back to the car and leave him there, towering above the other children, his blue eyes working, flitting everywhere. I felt the same as when I left him to his screaming in the hospital. But I wanted John to have a life, to want things, to aspire. I wanted him to be able to talk, to be able to read and laugh and learn. I wanted him to have a wife, children, sex. To be as normal as he could be. But we’d been together all our lives — in the cottage as easy friends, in the hospital as the equally desperate, and in this house as the recovering. To leave him there and drive away — it was the first time in his life he’d been on his own, apart from that week in hospital and even then he had Hyacinth and Harry. So I drove to Ellen’s and slipped through the house in the night and drank a bottle of Crown Royal.

Now he’s a carpenter. I wished many things for him yet that wasn’t one of them. I suppose I wanted him to be an academic, a barrister, whatever. But perhaps it’s right — a silent world, where he can touch and chisel, plane and measure in silence? It turns out that all he wants is security and the predictable. And, of course, he wants Sonja. But I’m not sure that he has her any more. I know John won’t fight for these things, just as Dai Davies didn’t. Merboy went to London and he never came back. Someone else did.