The Pattern in the Carpet by Margaret Drabble

Author:Margaret Drabble
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Canongate Books

XXVIII

I used to think until quite recently that one would grow out of mental pain. One would simply become, towards the end, too old and too numb to feel it. I didn’t like the prospect but, looking around me, at old people I knew and old people I didn’t know, such insensibility seemed, like death, inevitable. As Hopkins warned us: ‘creep,/Wretch, under a comfort serves in a whirlwind: all/Life death does end, and each day dies with sleep…’ Bodily pains would replace the pains of the spirit. The intensity of despair would be overtaken by arthritis or cancer.

That’s what I used to think, or fear, or hope. When I was a child, my father had encouraged me to believe that the depression from which I suffered would pass with adolescence and, to a degree, he was right. Bringing up three children, working and writing to support the family and pay the mortgage, cleaning, shopping and cooking, left me too busy to sink too low for too long. I began to think that brisk activity, followed by a stiff whisky, could cure anything. My mother’s angry depression seemed to me to be clearly related to her inertia and frustration, which afflicted so many educated and half-educated women of her generation; if she’d had more to do, if she hadn’t had so much domestic help, if she’d been able to pursue a career, if she’d been more active, if she’d gone out for walks, things might have been different. I did notice that my father’s depression had not vanished with age and, indeed, began to gain on him towards the end, but I never thought this could happen to me. My father was too well mannered to indulge in complaints and laments, and I think he found some solace in a sense of religious and social hope, but he did, in his seventies, reveal dark moments of the kind of lonely melancholy that besieged Dr Johnson. He suffered as a boy and as a young man, and he began to suffer again when he retired from the bench and lived in too close a seclusion with my mother. Or that’s how I read what I observed. I should have taken warning from that.

I keep the telephone number of the Samaritans to hand. I have a very high regard for them. They have saved me on a couple of occasions. I worry now about the 1471 facility, because the anonymity of the phone calls was so reassuring. I don’t understand the new technology of witholding numbers, and I suspect no phone calls are really secure. The Samaritans assure me that they never try to contact a caller without consent, except in the most extreme circumstances, and I trust what they say. But the very possibility is disquieting.

At times I feel some pride in my continuing capacity for feeling really, really bad. I think of the envious comment of a friend of mine, at a party, observing a well-known, hard-drinking novelist who is even

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.