Constance McGill’s alcoholism

Constance McGill’s alcoholism is presented chiefly through its consequences: the collapse of her marriage to Paul McGill, her repeated need for institutional care, and the anger and helplessness her condition leaves behind. Paul’s account makes her illness both a personal crisis and a continuing constraint on his hopes of building a different life.

Marriage and drinking

Paul tells Emma Harte that Constance was already a heavy drinker before the war and identifies her drinking as one reason their marriage broke down. By the time he returned to Sydney, he considered her beyond his ability to help and placed her in a nursing home. He also attributes the death of his love for her to her drinking and promiscuity; this is his account of the marriage, delivered after years of estrangement.

Escape and institutional care

Constance ran away from the nursing home shortly after Paul buried his father. It took Paul five weeks to find her. He describes her when found as physically debilitated and mentally deranged, a condition that had delayed his intended return to England while he tried to arrange her care. Later, he tells Emma that Constance is still in the nursing home. Although staff have dried her out, she remains profoundly weak and unable to look after herself or function normally; Paul expects that she will have to be institutionalized permanently.

The cost to Paul

Paul describes years of trying, unsuccessfully, to help Constance and says he lost patience long ago. His visit to her nursing home shows how far that patience has deteriorated: leaving in torrential rain, he is so angry that he has only just restrained himself from striking her. He says his pity has gone and that he now loathes her, repeating the point as he resolves to consult his solicitor and seek a way out of a marriage that, in his view, had ceased to be one twenty-seven years earlier. His determination to gain freedom is explicitly tied to Emma and Daisy.

A continuing legal and emotional barrier

Constance’s Catholic faith is another impediment to divorce, as Paul explains to Emma, though he has not abandoned hope of eventually securing his freedom. The narrative does not establish here that he succeeds. Instead, the later account of his visit ends in a sudden reversal: driving away at high speed through worsening rain, Paul loses control of his car and crashes. Constance’s alcoholism therefore remains more than background to a failed marriage; it shapes Paul’s efforts to leave it, his volatile state during the nursing-home visit, and the circumstances immediately preceding the accident.