Changing My Mind Page 8

  This was a necessary lesson, but one that sent a deep chill through me: I finally understood how vulnerable we were in Pierre’s world, how unsafe my children would always be, and that from that day on, wherever I went and whatever I did, there would be large men with earphones and guns not far away. This marked the end of some kind of innocence.

  Our vulnerability was further brought home to me by a terrible incident that took place around this time. One day the Vancouver Sun ran a full-page article under the headline “The wealthy elite that dominates Vancouver life.” Among the names of the top ten leading businessmen, ranked according to the assets of their companies, was my father’s. The following week, five young teenagers borrowed a truck and drove down to a deserted beach on the Fraser River to swim. A man with a rifle emerged from the bushes and shot four of them dead; the fifth, a boy, escaped and raised the alarm. When the RCMP arrived, they found the bodies but not the truck, which had vanished.

  Some time elapsed before the man was traced. Under questioning, he revealed that he had read the article in the Vancouver Sun and had decided to kidnap one of the men mentioned in the article, ask for a ransom, then use the money to tour the world. But to do so he needed a truck, and he had used it to drive around Vancouver casing the ten businessmen’s homes. Most turned out to live on busy streets in the Shaughnessy or Kerrisdale neighbourhoods.

  My parents, however, lived on a quiet street, shielded by high hedges. When the police arrested him, the man admitted that he had selected my father as his target and that he had planned to kidnap him, keep him tied to a tree in the forest and demand a ransom. Since I was often in Vancouver and had left Justin on occasion with my parents, security police expressed considerable concern for our safety.

  Here was a stiff reminder that my position as the prime minister’s wife now made everyone in my family vulnerable. My family was horrified, for they realized how real the threat was. We now saw the police in a new light—not as a nuisance presence, but as protectors and the first line of defence.

  The security wasn’t the only thing making me edgy. From the very beginning, I seemed fated to make appalling gaffes that drew attacks and mockery from the press. Sometimes I felt I could get nothing right. Their derision only brought out the rebel in me. When Pierre and I had gotten married, I had had a beautiful dress made—it was studded with pearls and fell to mid-calf—for the reception at which I was presented to the governor general. I was particularly proud of this dress, which I had designed. Years later, when Jimmy Carter was president, we were invited on a state visit to Washington and I decided to wear it to the White House. As it happened, Rosalynn Carter and the other women present that evening all wore floor-length dresses.

  The next morning, seeing no newspaper with our breakfast, I asked for one to be sent up to me. After considerable hesitation, a paper was produced. In the newspaper was a long article saying that I had insulted the American public in general and Mrs. Carter in particular by being improperly dressed. Instantly, Rosalynn leapt to my defence. There was no insult of any kind, she announced. On the contrary, my clothes were stylish and totally appropriate. Henceforth, she added, there was to be no discussion or comment about what was worn at White House parties.

  The next night it was our turn to host a dinner for the Carters. My reaction to the newspaper criticisms was simply to behave outrageously. I had brought with me something I had bought in Florida—a very short, skin-tight dress made of silver material and covered in sequins. Pierre loved it and approved. As it happened, Elizabeth Taylor was one of our guests, and she had tactfully chosen to come in a short dress.

  The press in Canada went to town over my sexy appearance and my seeming disregard for protocol. Pierre and I pored over the papers, which devoted their front pages to this absurd coverage, trying to understand why the political journalists and columnists felt so venomous.

  I did have one unexpected ally. The radical American feminist activist Robin Morgan wrote a piece in which she said that she was delighted to observe that women had finally made it out of the society pages and onto the front pages of newspapers, where they rightly belonged. This opinion was, in its own way, just as absurd.

  Even with Justin to care for, I felt restless and underemployed. When I first went to live in Ottawa as the prime minister’s wife, I was flooded with requests to volunteer with hospitals and other charities, as Maryon Pearson, the wife of Prime Minister Lester B. Pearson, had done before I arrived at 24 Sussex. I could have kept very busy doing that, but Pierre said no. He literally wanted me barefoot, pregnant and in the kitchen. He wanted to care for me and protect me; he knew the world that was out there and I didn’t.

  In one way, I now see, Pierre was the most tolerant man I have ever met. But his tolerance took the form of altruism aimed at the world. His was an old paradigm that said, “I tolerate you. You’re not as good as me, but I tolerate you.” His attitude was condescending.

  I was then aware that the University of Ottawa had an excellent department of child and developmental psychology and that it had a special focus on children with mental problems. I decided that I would apply to do a master’s degree there. Instinct must have warned me that Pierre would not like the idea. I went ahead, applied and only then told him about my plans one night over dinner. He was not only completely opposed to the idea but forbade me even to consider it, saying that I only suggested it because I wanted the company of young men. He was only partly wrong: I did indeed want company, not of young men but of young people, people my own age, with my interests. That these interests included mental illness, which would soon consume my life, was a coincidence, except that clearly I must have had some kind of premonition.

  Putting a stop to my plans to study occasioned the first real confrontation between Pierre and me. He thought that by bullying me he could turn me into the perfect wife—in the way that a father might bully a recalcitrant teenager. Unfortunately, Pierre was not my father; he was my husband.

  CHAPTER 4

  THE UNRAVELLING BEGINS

  “I can tell you the secret of my new deal this time. I have a train, and I have Margaret.”

  PIERRE ON THE CAMPAIGN TRAIL, 1974

  The year before the election, in the spring of 1973, I realized that I was once again pregnant, and the whole question of my pursuing a master’s degree in psychology simply went away. But once again, maternal hormones gave me rest and respite from my moods, my highs, my lows.

  Just as I had when I carried Justin, I immediately felt content, healthy and full of purpose. We decided to ask Pierre’s friend the architect Arthur Erickson to completely alter and redecorate a private sitting room for the family on the second floor, a room that would be absolutely out of bounds to all strangers. When Justin saw it for the first time in the fall of 1973, he was nearly two, and the room was still without furniture. A cheerful, bright, extremely energetic little boy, he looked around the door, burst into shouts of delight and started racing round and round, yelling at the top of his voice, “Freedom! Freedom!” Why that word? I would often sing to him the song that Richie Havens sang so famously at Woodstock in 1969. “Sometimes I feel like a motherless child” is one line, but the one word he sings over and over, the word that set the tone for that rock festival, is freedom. And little Justin liked the word. (Later, when the claustrophobia of official life began to suffocate me, I would take off on what Pierre and I called “freedom trips” to places where no one knew I was the PM’s wife. He and I laughed at first about those trips. Later still, when it was the suffocation of my marriage that I was fleeing, those freedom trips became the source of great friction.)

  From that day in 1973 on, our sitting room was our freedom room. It became my domestic haven and a pleasure to me, with its thick beige carpet, its walls of matching raw silk and its modern Italian furniture—marble tables, leather chairs, sunken stereo and television. In the evenings, Pierre worked here, looking up occasionally to eye the river.

  Possibly the most succes
sful and certainly the most unusual trip I made with Pierre was to China in the autumn of 1973. A lot rode on the visit. Although President Nixon had recognized China the previous year, Canada was the first Western nation to visit China officially, and Pierre was anxious to secure an important trade deal. I was seven and a half months pregnant, but my doctor assured me that all would be well. All he insisted on was that I take along someone to help, which was a godsend for it set a precedent, and in the future, especially when ill or pregnant, I was always allowed a companion. I chose Joyce Fairbairn, Pierre’s parliamentary assistant. Also on our plane was the deputy minister from the Department of Health and Welfare, Maurice LeClair, who was a doctor himself. The Chinese were so anxious for all to go well that they also had a doctor waiting for me at the airport.

  We arrived in Beijing in mid-October. The weather was perfect, warm by day and cool at night. I was amazed by the beauty of the city and the way that it was still like a sprawling country town, with single-storey buildings made of clay, sticks and bamboo poles. Everywhere there was green. When we went south, we found orange blossoms, jasmine trees and cassis flowers.

  I had come to China full of prejudices about the terrible health and poverty of the population. My father had travelled there, and he would admonish us as children to finish our dinner because of the starving children in China—”Well, let’s send them this meal” was sometimes my unspoken thought. But actually going there as a young woman changed my mind. The people I saw in the streets were not thin and sickly but full of energy and good spirits. I visited a maternity hospital and heard about acupuncture. I asked a woman who had just given birth if acupuncture had dulled the pain of childbirth. I was much amused when she just shook her head. It was agreed that when we returned to Canada we would put the Beijing hospital in touch with the appropriate Canadian medical authorities, for there was as yet no system in China for dealing with Rh incompatibility (when the mother’s and baby’s blood types are mismatched). At every stop, we were met by a vast, enthusiastic crowd. Little girls with painted faces and tassels in their hands danced for us and sang, “Long live friendship between Canada and China.”

  Mao was already frail (he would die some three years later), and only Pierre was taken to see him. But I did meet Premier Chou En-lai, who was a handsome, thin, elegant man then in his seventy-sixth year, with warm manners. Chou En-lai, after hearing that I was longing for a meal of Peking duck, laid on a feast of duck in our honour, seating me by his side and speaking to me in excellent English. What astonished me was the freedom of our conversation; we discussed illegitimacy, feminism and the liberation of women.

  Chinese women, the premier said to me, were still feudal in their attitudes towards their own femininity, their own bodies and their own sexuality. I immediately felt very awkward about my huge belly, grabbed a napkin and tried to cover my stomach. He laughed.

  “No, no, no,” he said. “Don’t do that. You have come to terms with yourself as a woman. You are proud. Chinese women are trying to become versions of men.”

  Unlike my first pregnancy, I had a lot of trouble with this second one, particularly towards the end. The baby was lying in an awkward position and I could never seem to get comfortable; I was also far larger than I had been with Justin and could hardly move around the house. As Christmas approached, I became determined to give Justin a wonderful second birthday, one that would be combined with Christmas Day and yet a special day of his own.

  We ate Christmas dinner on the 24th, so that the staff could spend the holiday with their families. My mother and my sister Jan were both staying with us. Just as I lifted my glass in response to Pierre’s toast, I felt a familiar twinge. Then, soon after, another. Before long the twinges had clearly turned into contractions.

  Like many men on Christmas Eve all across Canada, Pierre was upstairs assembling a toy—a plastic motorcycle for Justin. That’s all Justin wanted, a motorcycle. So there was Pierre, on the floor, with thirty-six screws and thirty-six washers, assembling this thing. I couldn’t waddle up all those stairs, so he would come down occasionally to report on how he was doing and to see how I was doing.

  Soon after ten, Pierre appeared to take me to midnight mass. I told him that we would probably need to go to the hospital instead. He laughed: “Trust you, Margaret, to think of having a second baby on Christmas Day. There’s no way. Come on, get your coat on, it’s false labour.”

  Wanting to believe him, I struggled to church and then home and into bed. An hour later there was no mistaking what was happening. “Merry Christmas” was all the doctor said when we woke him. “I just knew that this would be bound to happen to you.”

  Sacha’s birth was long and extremely painful. Nevertheless, I agreed with Pierre’s thought that the birth should be natural, with no drugs of any kind. Justin had arrived easily, but Sacha was back to front, and much as I pushed, he would not turn round and come out. Pierre insisted that I keep trying. At last, as dawn was breaking, the doctor took charge. He asked Pierre to leave the room and, saying briskly that it was ridiculous that I should suffer like this, told me he would make it easier for me. He meant drugs or an epidural, but I wanted no part of either. I turned my face to the wall and made a heroic effort to relax, though it felt as if my spine was being crushed in a thousand places.

  Eventually a rather weary and angry baby emerged. I fell in love with him at once. We decided to call him Sacha, as the diminutive of Alexandre, after Alexander the Great, and Emmanuel, which Pierre insisted on, saying that it meant “God is with us” and that this baby was indeed our second blessing. The British prime minister, Edward Heath, sent us a telegram: “My congratulations on your second Christmas baby.”

  With two children in just under three years of marriage (I was pregnant for eighteen of the first thirty-four months of my marriage), Pierre and I found that our initially strong physical attraction for one another was being seriously undermined. I seemed to stay broody and preoccupied. Very soon after the birth, I woke up one morning feeling miserable. In hindsight, this was not my first major depression, for I had been strangely low and unhappy after my return from Morocco, which I had blamed on the tremendous culture shock of returning to Canada. But the postpartum depression after Sacha’s birth hit me very hard, and it was only many years later that I realized how affected I am by hormonal swings.

  Soon I found it impossible to get out of bed and drag myself to the nursery. I possess a deep maternal instinct, and to not feel delight with my own baby in my arms was just bewildering to me. Depression robs you and swallows you down. My one longing was to stay asleep, safe and warm, and not wake up. I wanted neither to play with Justin nor to feed Sacha. I felt frantic when one of them cried, and would burst into tears myself. The world turned quiet and grey and nothing seemed funny anymore. As the days passed and I got no better, and I felt more and more alienated from Pierre, I reflected on the hopelessness and bleakness of my prospects.

  My future seemed cast in a dead, colourless light with no possibility of joy. Here I was, alone, with no work of my own, married to a dry, disciplined, rational man old enough to be my father—a man who expected me to bear his children and distract him (looking back, I can see that I was his ultimate distraction) but never to question him or raise issues of my own. When one of my sisters, anxious about my state of mind, said to my mother that I needed clinical help, my mother was furious.

  “Certainly not,” she said. “There is no way that Margaret can see a psychiatrist. He will only blame me. That’s all they do: blame the mother.” Her words and attitude spoke volumes about the stigma of mental illness in Canada that persisted well into the 1980s.

  South of the border, there were more signs that any candidness about mental illness would not be rewarded. Thomas Eagleton, the Democratic vice-presidential candidate, had been forced to withdraw in 1972 when it was revealed that he had undergone psychiatric treatment, including electroconvulsive therapy.

  At last, observing my mounting distress an
d realizing that something had to be done, Pierre agreed that I should see a psychiatrist, though his rational mind clearly found it all totally bewildering. He drove me to the doctor’s office, and I remember sitting in a chair while the doctor spoke kindly and reassuringly about what he called the “baby blues.” I look back on this “treatment” and I wonder if a psychiatrist friend of mine was right when she observed that VIP patients get the worst treatment: either impressed or intimidated, the doctor focuses on the celebrity, not the patient.

  For Pierre, it was all perfectly simple. My role in life was to be the wife of the prime minister and the mother of his children, and the sooner I could return to my duties, the better for everyone. That there might be some underlying illness, that I might be struggling to cope with a life for which I was totally unfit, was of no interest to him. The question was only how efficiently and how quickly he could make me function well again. I was made to feel as if I were a car that had broken down and had been taken to the garage to be fixed.

  Slowly, over the course of several months, the depression lifted. Seeing the state of my melancholy and unhappiness, my gynecologist had given me some Valium, then a very popular tranquilizer. I loved the sense of peace it gave me and I started to function. Only years later did I realize how dangerous a drug it was and how addicted to it I became: leaving the pharmacy, I could hardly wait to get out of the door before opening the bottle and taking one.

  But now life once again took on colour and I returned to my duties. The two little boys became the centre of my life, and Pierre and I resumed our loving relationship, though something of our physical passion was still dulled. He had clearly been very worried by my collapse and now listened more attentively to some of my concerns about my life. The staff had all been instructed to try to cheer me up and became more approachable. Pierre himself spent more time with me. The feelings of isolation diminished. One newspaper published a story of us as the “World’s Most Glamorous First Family,” which struck me as very poignant.