limits

The Midwinter sun dips in the South Italian sky. Early season oranges dimple the trees. This morning’s snow has melted in what became a shirt-sleeve warmth.

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The violence, if it did not begin as mutual, became so. The last year we shared turned into a kind of grand guignol. Black eyes, livid bruises, suspected dislocations, worse.

I suspect there is a limit to anyone’s sang froid, or patience. She found mine. At what point, under attack in an even-handed physical contest can you afford to no longer fight back? Which are the things you will automatically try to defend? She rooted out my weak points. In particular, an unhealthy attachment to books. The stages became Pavlovian. She would stand with a favourite book in her hand. I would try to stay above the fray. She would begin to tear the book apart. I would attempt to rescue the book. We would fight. She would get hurt. I would get hurt. The book would get hurt. Long after the scars healed, there remains a collection of spineless books in the library: Derrida, Marx, Auden and more.

The point you reach when you cross that limit is shame. In which I lived. A world turned on its head. You were trying to act through kindness, now you act through force. All the evil things that were ever said about you have come to pass. The harder you struggle, the more you lose. Once you have crossed this limit, there is no escape, except through flight.

If you asked why I stayed… I thought, as I always had done, since the violence began and I could still laugh it off, I thought I could make things alright. I thought that if only I could turn the tide, which some days I believed I might have done, she would be happy. We would be happy.

The last Christmas, I did run away. We had planned to spend it together, up in York. No family. I cracked at the last minute. I fled down the M1 in the red Renault, drove to Rayner’s Lane. George booked me on a flight with him and Dorothy, to Dusseldorf. She went home too. I called her from Germany. I cannot remember how the call went. I just remember being scared to make it.

I came back to our little house. We only had six months left there. Perhaps I thought I had no option. Perhaps I thought it would have been still more cowardly not to.

Bad things happened in those final months. And yet, in the middle of the domestic hell we created, with our shame, and the instinct to separate, there were moments - maybe whole days, maybe weeks – when we still had that thing which made it all worthwhile. Enough to glue us together for the final straight.

It was not a straightforward time. I remember all kinds of unspeakable things. But, to return to the theme: I know there is nothing worse than finding yourself converted into an aggressor. Causing physical pain to the one you love. Caught up in a fight which will destroy your dignity and undermine your sense of self. A foolish fight which you can never win. A fight which reveals a you which you do not want to know could ever exist.