On Marriage

For a few weeks now there has been an entry in my diary to remind me to attend a wedding. That Saturday is now free. I have just crossed the entry out. One or, I hope, both parties have thought better of it: a third party had the job of getting the message through. A headline with, as yet, no full report. This is a personal disappointment because wedding invitations don’t often come my way. I mainly seem to knock around with the sorts of people who now shun the institution, or don’t give it a thought—which is not to say I don’t know and am not fond of married couples. I am. I’m not against marriage outright. Some of them are, I think, happy in the loose sense that word is used to describe people who have not felt the need to untie the knot. But then, you never really know, or want to, what goes on in someone’s marriage.

When detail of that kind emerges, over a drink or two for instance, and possibly at great length, the frontline report makes for grim listening. A married person, after the fourth glass of wine, rarely if ever fesses up that, years on, loving kindness, stimulating conversation and great sex reign under the mortgaged roof. The story will take a different turn altogether and, one hopes, the children, privy to the looming bust-up headline will never, so to speak, have seriously to read on. My younger friends have pre-empted this situation. I’m not sure which requires greater courage: to marry or not to marry, given our needs. Either way, in these more enlightened times, the force of the law will, if necessary, be ready to spring into action if one of the warring parties has changed the locks in a tactical masterstroke and commandeered the assets. So, no wedding to attend, no champagne, no bountiful nosh, no speeches, in fact, possibly no hope. Unless an alternative route to a loving domestic destination has been decided upon. I hope so.

I wonder if there are marriage counsellors who have never fallen in love, never married—rather like priests who have to listen to all manner of things about which they have no personal acquaintance. I myself have lived within the institution of marriage but am no authority. It happened this way—with little fanfare. We made a booking at the registry office in Hobart, Tasmania, and pinned down a witness. Although a weekday, it was quite a busy day for weddings though, luckily, we were able to get a slot near lunchtime on the day we required. This was a day when the witness and the other guest, my father, who lived interstate, could turn up. If this sounds like a mean, though roughly accurate, guest list I should explain: all the other relatives were a hemisphere away, not in Australia—my future wife and I had met in London—and we were new in town. The ceremony was followed by drinks in a pub, we newlyweds the centre of attention, conducted in a similar optimistic spirit towards the future when we raised a glass or two together in the same bar after our divorce. Our relationship was not restricted by legal documents. But I am getting ahead. In the car park, just prior to our entering the registry building, my father took me aside and said, with all of the casualness of someone offering a boiled sweet, ‘Why are you bothering to get married?’ I was unprepared for this question. It was a hammer blow. As it was, I think, sometime later when, perhaps inappropriately—though truthfully—1 mentioned this query of my father’s to my wife, one of the most honest and understanding people I have ever met and who was now pregnant.

The answer was that we were doing it for him and the aforementioned non-libertarian relatives who couldn’t attend and didn’t have the contraceptive pill in their day. It was, under the cheerful circumstances, an obligation, the done thing. We, after all the generations of marriages in our families, didn’t want to go it alone, cause upset, be shunned. All of a sudden, minutes prior to signing the marriage certificate, the sense we had of generational coercion appeared to be radically misplaced. It put me off my stride when going up the steps. But too late to say, ‘Hey look, it appears out of the blue we can take an alternative route’, which is what my friends may be considering now, the institution ever being reinforced by politicians, churchmen and other parties with a necessary interest in social order. Besides, those missing relatives were, in an incorporeal way, present in large numbers, might hold an opposite view and let it be known. There is mercy in very small ceremonies.

My father’s next brief words about the marriage were in the form of a statement —some years later. He was of the unswerving opinion that if a marriage ended it had failed. I could only give him half marks for this analysis—or not even that. Failed! I would express the view that an ended marriage or relationship had simply run its natural course. Unless there’d been, say, a death or disappearance. But for reasons that will become apparent I didn’t say that. Clearly, in each other’s eyes, neither of us was or ever would be an authority on the matter. There is professional training for marriage guidance but not, if you decide to go in for it, marriage itself. So there are a lot of people with the experience of marriage but few who can claim authority on the matter. However, if there’s formative experience to be had it comes in twos: parents. Many a child would wish on occasion that a helpful person with authority, if their whereabouts were known, could step in and make sense of what was going on around them at home. I was such a one. Marriage failure was looming, if I’d known it, and its natural course had me stumped. That’s how mysterious other people’s marriages are, even close at hand, and the character of my parents’ marriage even now.

If there is one piece of advice I would have given to my parents at the Anglican St John’s church, Hampstead, London, in 1947 it would have been Stop! Don’t get married. Think again. This might sound odd coming from the single issue of that marriage and with all the benefits of being alive, but then plenty of good inexpert advice is never taken. I have scrutinised the flagstones out of the front of St John’s, stood where my parents stood in the wedding photographs and looked out, as they did, through the main gates—through which they would that day pass into the afternoon. I did this with a real need to get some perspective. It would all end in tears for the groom, and worse for the bride, in a faraway place, in 1962.

They were both good caring people if this is part of the definition of those who voted Liberal in the United Kingdom during the fifties (my mother) or Labour (my father). I was also for those parties. Both on my preferred side of the then Conservative-dominated electorate. On my vague understanding at the time, the Liberals and Labour had a belief in social justice, concern for the underdog almost wholly to themselves. I was concerned, more particularly, with the condition of my mother when I said to her in 1962, Beaumaris, Melbourne, ‘Why are you so unhappy?’ We were standing next to the polished oak sideboard that had recently followed us by ship to Australia. The answer from the woman whom I, aged eleven, naturally loved more than any other, was also a question: ‘How do you know?’ I knew the answer to that was beyond words and, like politics, complex so I just said ‘I know.’ I think she realised I was firm in this knowledge, worried too much about how it was affecting me, and this may have played a part in what was to come. She could probably see I was firm too in the way that I would find myself making a choice, based on all the available feeling and knowledge, on which parent in my mind eventually to side to side with, and cast a secret, unalterable vote.

Some while after the question, weeks, my father and I went out looking for a puppy—the first pet we were to have in Australia. It was a Sunday, so it was window shopping at a pet shop I’d spotted from our new company-provided Holden car. When we got back I felt something was wrong. Or more wrong than usual. Recently, my mother had been found by the window-cleaner, collapsed in the garden. Another time she’d been to the cinema with my father, and vomited during the screening. I wasn’t meant to be privy to all this but an only child has a lot of spare time to overhear things. For days, or longer, she would be lethargically quiet and then, behind the closed bedroom door, there’d be screaming. Home life was unpredictable. I was concentrating hard on my mother’s condition and this no doubt contributed to the sense that my father was remote. As I would later find out, a lot of the behaviour I was witnessing was the product of being English and buttoned-up—my father a slave to good form. We didn’t appear to get on well with Australians who in manner were very different to us. It was only later, much later, when I had undertaken a serious investigation of this marriage, that I discovered that after I was born my mother had been ‘mentally ill’ and been committed to a hospital. Or as my father would occasionally but concisely put it, she was ‘mad’. But that’s the kind of extreme, distorted thing a person will say after a few glasses of scotch when attempting to provide some insight into a failed marriage, and get himself off the hook.

It was mid-afternoon. There was a chill in the air—our first Australian version of autumn. My mother had said before we left, not wanting to join us, that she needed an afternoon nap. So it was surprising to find her still up and about when we got back—and she said she was surprised we were back as early as we were. I noticed she was unsteady on her feet and wondered whether my father also noticed this. Soon she said that she’d take her nap. I was puzzled as the rest of the afternoon slowly passed—my father in his study, me loafing around – why she hadn’t reappeared. What would we have for dinner? I crept into the master bedroom, as the estate agent had called it, and saw she was still asleep, lying on her side, right arm over her shoulder, at the edge of the bed. I knelt and looked at her serene face—said some quiet things. It was during this time, not long, though ever since it has seemed very long, I realised she was no longer alive. I just knew. It was not only her pallor, but something else too. She was utterly still and, unfathomably, absent. I didn’t move for a while. Then with the self-possession that seems, necessarily, to accompany a crisis, I realised I’d have to rise, leave her, and announce what had happened to my father in his study.

He didn’t believe me. Perhaps it was the self-possession. I had on occasion lied to cover my more adventurous tracks, and been found out—it was a severely punishable offence—but I was not equipped to make up a story that meant he no longer had a wife nor I a mother. Lying was an accusation he would continue to level at me too frequently, perhaps because in a subconscious way he remained angry that I’d appeared to take a senior role in this family catastrophe, taken control, initially, out of his hands. Certainly, when the police arrived, my first encounter with police in Australia, they believed my story. Or perhaps, more simply and charitably, he thought I’d made a misdiagnosis. I talked him round and he agreed to come and see for himself. A local GP arrived shortly afterwards. I was blocked from the room. By then the lights were on in the house.

It was the police who, next day, would start the hunt for the suicide note—taking the empty brown bottle of barbiturates as evidence. Though a crime had been committed—suicide is, mercifully, no longer one—and decisions made in the light of a situation for which no-one had been remotely prepared, the atmosphere was coolly rational. My father was, after all, an actuary—a person who calculates, mathematically, life expectancy for the insurance industry. I don’t think he ever saw the irony of this. Talented and hard working, he’d been appointed to an important executive position in Melbourne. A professional, even a marriage counsellor, may not bring the wisdom of work home. One decision made was that the nature of her death was not to be talked about—this decision was made unilaterally. We could, we both agreed, still have a dog. We would ‘soldier on’ in Australia, although I found out many years later, from the papers relating to the coronial inquiry that, in her note, my mother had said she was ‘a failure’ and wanted me to be looked after by her younger sister back in England. I think my mother had also behaved rationally and, clearly, worked out a strategy. She didn’t want to be found by her husband dead in the marriage bed during the night. Nor when she had the most time at her disposal, on a school day. This is consistent with her wanting to cause a minimum of distress. Her one miscalculation, I’m sure, was that it would be her husband who would find her. But since it was also decided that it would be inappropriate for me, being too young, to attend the funeral—a funeral with one mourner in this far-off country—and that I’d be better off at school, I might never have had the chance, finally, to see my mother. If it had been possible for me to realise this then, I would have been thankful for it, as I am, in a way, now.

My father was not a ladies’ man, as people of his generation called certain men. In his remaining decades, there would be no other women, no marriage. He wasn’t cut out for it. Though I’m not saying he didn’t have normal, even considerable, longings. I think he did. No other responsive women came his way. He, a modestly paid professional without family assets, had entered the marriage contract at the age of thirty-five on the grounds, postwar—he had been in the Home Guard—that a wife was a requirement and, when others might have gone somewhere to dance, he looked no further than the office. There sat my mother, lovely, aged thirty-seven, at a typewriter. She, the eldest sibling of four, who had been exhausted from caring for her—by then deceased—parents, was the only one not ‘spoken for’. Recently she’d had to part, painfully, from a married lover. Loneliness consumed her, and the widening prospect of more. For neither of them, just then, was there any alternative but to walk down the aisle.