‘You explain your family of origin pretty well,’ Rose says. ‘A life of never confronting anything, of emotional cruelty, the silent treatment. How could you have knownthat was wrong when Geoff began doing the same thing to you?’
Dianne drinks some of her sparkling water.
‘Perhaps you didn’t choose him, either, Dianne. Perhaps he chose you. Abusers are very good at finding the sort of people who’ll …’ Rose reaches blindly for the words.
‘Who’ll be stupid enough to put up with them?’ finishes Dianne harshly.
‘No, not that. People who are gentle, people who are used to being treated badly within their families: there are a lot of people like that in the world. They’re not victims, Dianne, they’re simply people who did not see the red flags. If you’ve been raised to think that anger and cruelty are acceptable from the people who are supposed to love you, then you assume that you are loved by people who do that later in life.’
‘When Geoff died the girls were so upset and I didn’t know how to comfort them. After the numbness wore off, I had to pretend to be sad, pretend to keep the whole thing going. Otherwise, I’d be saying that their whole happy childhood is a myth. I can’t do that, can I?’
‘Perhaps you can?’ asks Rose. ‘Tell me, how did Geoff die?’
Dianne closes her eyes as if she cannot possibly look at another person while she recounts this part of her story.
‘We were home together, he was up on some steps trying to change a lightbulb. The back of the house has an extension and there’s a high ceiling with the skylight.
‘I had to wait around always whenever he did any stuff around the house, like his slave. And then one moment, his face changed. I could see it happening, it looked as if he was in pain and he dropped the bulb and he grabbed his arm. I knew he was having a heart attack.’
‘Go on,’ says Rose gently, but Dianne doesn’t open her eyes.
‘He fell onto the floor and he lay there still moving, calling out for me to call an ambulance. If he’d been able to cry out loudly, some of the neighbours might have heard him but his voice was so faint. So weak …’
Dianne finally opens her eyes.
‘I sat on a kitchen chair and I watched him,’ she says quietly. ‘I watched him die, Rose. It didn’t take long: five minutes, a hundred minutes, I don’t know.’
‘You didn’t kill him, Dianne, you know that,’ says Rose, wondering if this is what upsets Dianne.
‘I know I didn’t,’ says Dianne, ‘but I had so much guilt about it, for not calling the ambulance. I could have saved him.’ She shrugs. ‘I could have performed CPR. But I didn’t. For about a week after the funeral, I was numb. The girls were worried about me. Ellie said I needed to see the doctor and I thought of all the times I’d go to the doctor for nerves and he’d tell me I was lucky I had a good man – ha!’
Rose feels overwhelmed with compassion for Dianne but the only thing she can do right now is hear her confession.
‘Then one day I woke up and I realised he was gone.’
Dianne is whispering now.
‘I was free. There was nobody to tell me that I was stupid, nobody to shout at me. I didn’t have to jump through hoops any more for Geoff. Do you know what I felt then, Rose?’ Dianne asks, not waiting for an answer. ‘Bloody rage. Rage that I hadn’t known how to escape, rage that he’d won in the end. He was dead and he’d destroyed my life. The rage won’t go. It’s there all the time—’
‘You’ve lived on an emotional tightrope for years,’ says Rose, ‘living in virtual battlefield conditions for years. That takes its toll on every part of the body. I think in time, andyou’ll need to discuss this with a future therapist, but you’ve got to think of telling your family what it was really like. They’re going to want to know where the rage came from, what made you so upset,’ Rose adds.
‘That’s ruining the memory of their perfect childhood,’ says Dianne sadly.
‘Do you think it’s possible that they already know the truth?’ Rose asks carefully. ‘They might never have put words on what they grew up with but they’ll know somewhere deep inside that their father treated you badly. Just because he didn’t hit you does not make it OK. It’s still domestic abuse. Emotional abuse.’
‘If a man hits you, you have a bruise, wounds. What Geoff did to me – the wounds were on the inside. I still can’t cry about him, though. I didn’t cry at the funeral. Everyone thought I was too numb with grief,’ she laughs loudly. ‘It wasn’t grief, it was numbness …’
‘It might take a long time to cry,’ Rose says. ‘Please realise that your anger makes total sense. All your life, you haven’t been able to be angry in case it upset someone. That anger goes somewhere – inside you. Now that it’s safe, the anger is coming out.’
They sit there in silence. Rose drinks some water. Minutes pass. Twenty minutes.
Rose knows that sometimes walking alongside someone in pain, being silent with them, is enough.
Finally, she notices that Dianne has started to cry. Not heaving sobs the way children cry. But a stream of silent tears.
Dianne doesn’t move to wipe them away: instead she lets them flood out.
Rose picks up the box of tissues from the shelves and puts it beside Dianne. Then she sits back in her chair, silently. She has nowhere else more important to be.
