22 December 1972

I drove up to London last night and went to collect John from the hospital this morning. I don’t yet know if he’s forgiven me for leaving him to his screaming. As we left Tommy’s Hyacinth came running down the steps, waving and blowing kisses, and I thought John would want to go back to say goodbye but he didn’t. He’s so tall and pale and uninterested. I don’t know what to do with him.

I thought I’d tell him about the new house as we drove down, explain to him why he wasn’t going back to his old room. Prepare him for the difference. I didn’t even think about it, I was just going to do it. Set him up, ready for change, prepared for difference. But he can’t talk in the car, can he? He can’t lip-read because I’m looking out of the windscreen and I can’t write messages. So now he’s upstairs in a room he has never seen before, his mad eyes flitting, and I’m down here refilling my glass with whisky. How is the money I have in the bank going to help me make my son laugh again? What am I supposed to do?

20 May 1999

I look back over those journals that I wrote when John first came home from the hospital, yellowed now, and torn, stained by slopped booze, and I think I can see that the pattern of my drinking started then, that night, 22 December 1972, when I realised what an inadequate mother I was. What a shit mother I was. There is a problem here, and I know it. As I have said, my life has been lived in two halves: the beauty and the beast. When I was a beauty, I allowed John to thrive, to run wild, to be what he wanted to be, and what he wanted to be was a Merboy. And that allowed me to be what I wanted to be — the most envied, the most desirable woman in a tiny village in Devon. What a pitiful ambition. To be sure, the influence, the fact, of my attractions spread far beyond Noss Mayo but that’s hardly the point, really, is it?

The reason I got drunk that night, the night I brought him back here, was because I realised then that I’d done everything wrong. I was a terrible daughter, haughty and elusive, judgemental and unforgiving. I was a worse wife — otherwise why would I have been left? And a shit mother. This is not a curriculum vitae of which I am proud.

People talk about me when I walk to the village shop, whispering and pointing, even now, after all these years. Do they imagine that they say anything about me that I have not already thought myself? Things that I have not already mulled over in my whisky-sodden mind during my hours on the deck? I don’t fucking think so, as they say these days. Strange: I don’t mind them thinking I’m a drunk, thinking I’m an ugly witch. But I do mind that they think I’m a stupid, ill-educated witch. If I’m to be the Thurlestone Frankenstein, I wish to be thought of as the refined, diffident, erudite local monster. Do they really imagine they can make me hurt more than I can make myself hurt?