Beyond the High Blue Air. Lu Spinney
but visiting hours for the intensive care unit are strictly regulated. Two hours are allowed in the middle of the day, from twelve to two, and two again in the evening, from six to eight. We have some time to kill after breakfast and the girls try to study while I try to read. But reading eludes me now. I’ve lost the desire, the private pleasure; now when I pick a book up it feels flat, empty, extraneous. Fiction is impossible, as though my imagination has been depleted trying to comprehend my own story. The most I can manage is a newspaper, but even that is difficult; more than ever the papers seem filled with stories of disasters and tragedies. Miles’s situation has opened a door onto the relentless, unstoppable suffering of other people, every day, everywhere; I feel viscerally aware that this terrible thing that has happened to him is only one drop in a vast cauldron of human suffering. Yesterday I read of a little girl at a fair nearby in Germany, who somehow got tangled in a giant helium balloon that broke its moorings. She was lifted up and away in front of her parents’ eyes, her torn and battered body eventually recovered some kilometers away where the balloon had come to rest in a tree. How could you make sense of that? I feel an incoherent gathering of rage at the pain that has been endured by human beings since time began and that will continue, unabated and unresolved. Which god should be held accountable for this?
We all give up and go for a walk instead. Innsbruck is a gentle town and out on the quiet streets there is no visible pain. No homeless people, or indeed any sign of poverty, nobody who looks unwashed or distressed or intimidating, none of the enervated faces of big city life. The mountain air is healthy, the scenery from every angle calmly splendid, the streets and parks are clean and unhurried. Do we spoil the atmosphere, with our grief? But nobody would know if they looked at us; only rarely do we let our true feelings spill out in public, for that is not our way. I think about TV footage of men and women wailing and gesticulating with grief in the countries where this is their cultural norm and wonder if that helps them to bear the pain more easily.
Just before noon the girls and I turn the final corner of our walk and see the hospital once more like a glass fortress at the end of the street. We each feel the same tightening dread as we catch that first glimpse, the dread accompanied by a sudden surge of fearful hope—something may have happened overnight that we don’t know about yet. We enter the hospital atrium and cross the light-filled space to the far corner where the elevator will take us up to the seventh floor, to Miles.
Yesterday, though, the grief did spill. Marina and I had been out for a walk and passing a small church in a side street we entered it, in the hope that the place might lend us some peace.
After the glare of bright sunshine outside, the dim interior was instantly soothing, the air cool and fragrant with the scent from massed white lilies that gleamed from the chancel. It was empty and as the doors shut behind us a deep silence fell. Marina walked on along the aisle and I sat down in a pew at the back, to succumb to the silence and let the hope and faith of others with which the place was imbued envelop me. But as my eyes accustomed to the pale light coming through the high stained-glass windows and I looked across the rows of wooden pews, all I could see was the giant figure looming up above the bank of lilies at the far end. There he was, a beautiful young man, muscular limbs draped in a white cloth, hands and feet nailed through and coated in blood while his face looked down at me with an expression ghastly in its passive suffering. Instead of peace I felt a fury rising, I wanted to rage at the faith that allowed and venerated such a grotesquery. And then I began to hear a sound like the whimpering of an animal in distress, becoming louder and louder until it rose to a crescendo, an anguished howling of pain that reverberated round the once silent space. It was Marina, braced against the altar rail, her clear young face uplifted and fiercely streaming with tears.
We sat for a long time together at the front of the church. There could be no consoling, no words that could change the situation. We had already learned that comfort came from sharing the pain and waiting until its eruption had passed. When we emerged into the street some time later it was over, and we were just another mother and daughter out on a walk in the beautiful spring sunshine.
I need to write and thank all the friends who have sent letters, cards, flowers to Miles and to us as a family. Grateful as I am, I can’t find what it takes to write individual replies. So I compose a one-for-all response.
Thank you for your wonderful supportive letter/card to Miles/me/us. It is a great comfort to know that you are thinking of Miles in the way that you do.
There is so much and nothing to say. Miles is still in a coma and we wait. There is no respite from the anguish of waiting but he looks so strong and beautiful and seems so close that we feel very positive about his recovery. We just can’t wait to have him back with us again.
That feels too close to the brink. For safety’s sake I need to retreat:
Innsbruck is ridiculously pretty and it snowed right down to the town last night, pure white from mountain tip to cobbled street. I wish Miles were awake to share the strangeness of it. The linguistic delights (kieboschstrasse, crapfencake), the delicate iced cake buildings and jolly Tyrolean men with their feathered hats and lederhosen, the elegant café where a Nazi flag hangs proud above a meeting of bland young people and no one seems to notice (we complained and left, to their surprise), the pride, cleanliness and good manners of everyone, the comfortable conformity. Not one eccentric or homeless person to be seen—everybody looks healthy. Occasionally at night we hear drunken revellers but all they do is sing or yodel happily.
I’ve retreated behind some kind of glib façade. The truth is, I don’t want to share the truth. I’m not ready yet.
I’m worried about the children. Claudia is completing her MA in London, Marina is in her second year at Oxford, and Will travels backwards and forwards from London in the midst of trying to set up his design company. Their lives have been disrupted in a catastrophic way, disrupted but now in stasis. No one knows what will happen next, but we all want to be here with Miles when it happens. The future is held in abeyance.
The four children make up a unit. The boys seventeen months apart, first Miles then Will, a gap of five years and then Claudia and Marina, two and a half years apart. Together they are vibrant, warm, humorous, necessary; various, but one. It has been a constant marvel to me to watch them, know them, see how small frictions are resolved, the weight of their different personalities kept in balance. Now the balance has been upended. Miles, a heavyweight, is missing and the remaining three are having to realign the unit while united in their grief and their absolute commitment to him.
It’s impossible to say whom it affects most. Will perhaps in the physical sense, because he has suddenly lost his lifelong companion. So close in age, attending the same schools one year apart and the same university, sharing many of the same interests and now sharing a flat, they are the best of friends despite their different characters. Miles is defined by his energy, vitality, determination, ambition; he is a natural leader. Will is equally strong-minded, but is happy to follow his own path alone, having no interest in shaping other people’s lives. They share a similar intellect, but whereas Miles is a driver of ideas, Will is privately creative.
The girls’ loss is different but as profound. Miles has been both their eldest brother, a self-appointed protector, and a friend and advisor, someone to have fun with and confide in. I see him now aged fifteen, an aspiringly tough, cool teenager, awful peroxided hair, standing at the kitchen window waiting nervously for the girls to return. They’d been allowed to walk on their own down to the shops at the bottom of our quiet residential road and Miles is reprimanding me. They’re too young, Mum, you shouldn’t have let them go down on their own. I’m going to go and find them. No, Miles, you must not, I tell him. You of all people! He laughs with me, acknowledging the double standards of an independent, experimental elder sibling not countenancing it in the younger.
As the girls grew up and the age gap between them and the
boys became less pronounced, their relationships consolidated into the unit they have become. Now that all four are in their twenties their interests and many of their friends have converged, but Miles remains a powerful older brother and his absence has made a rift in
their lives. Each one is in the middle of a defining process—
university,