Could you murder a baby as it slept in its cot? Could you batter your children to death with a claw hammer? Would you rather see your partner dead, than happy and safe with someone else? If you can answer yes to those questions, would you describe yourself as "jovial", "decent", "happy", "outgoing"? If you can answer yes, then what do those words mean, and what happens when language and meaning shear apart so violently that a brutal killer is described as a good father and tender husband?
I have been trying to understand the media reports on PC Karl Bluestone's murder of his wife and children, followed by his suicide. The tabloids have been more reliable than the broadsheets. We are used to the Sun inventing English - Sun readers speak a language unrecognisable outside of its pages - but "Madcop" "Monster", and "Bloodbath bobby" seem closer to the truth than the restrained "Murder" of the Independent, or even more bizarrely, the Guardian's "Strife".
"House of Hate", said the Mirror, while the Telegraph was still using the words "jovial" and "devoted". The Express sided with the quality papers, and went for "doting".
What are we to make of this? Are the tabloids going for an easy kill while the rest of us try to understand what really happened - or are we so caught up in psychological theories, that we would rather talk ourselves out of the horror than face up to it?
It was horrific. A policeman allegedly having an affair, finds his wife apparently doing the same. She wants to leave him. He bugs her car with a listening device. Although she is two months pregnant, he beats her to death, and slaughters their children.
"He was a man devoted to his children, dedicated to his job and in love with his wife," said his parents.
As I put the pieces together, I find it is the wife who is going to bear the brunt of this - the claw hammer was just the beginning. She will be to blame. She will become the true murderer. PC Bluestone will go on being "a smashing bloke". How true.
Mrs Bluestone earned more than her husband. She was a high-flyer with Essex Council, while her husband, at 36, was still only a police constable. Mrs Bluestone wanted to move nearer to her job and she wanted her husband to end his affair. In the miles of print on the murders, I find, at last, one person admitting that Bluestone had had other affairs: "This was not the first time Karl had cheated on his wife, but I'm not sure if his wife knew about the others."
Mrs Bluestone's affair was widely reported from the first. It was given as the reason for the violence in the household. Only as the matter has unravelled have we heard about Bluestone's history of violence, and the fact that police had already turned a blind eye to what they continue to call "a domestic".
Not interfering in a domestic really means letting a husband brutalise his wife. It is not women who beat and murder their partners and when they do, like Tracie Andrews, or the former aide to the Duchess of York, they are shown no mercy. They are not pictured by the newspapers as happy and smiling. They are evil women. Life imprisonment is routine.
Women's groups have long campaigned against our double standard towards male and female violence. Our culture still accepts violence in men. In many ways we support it - TV and film are full of violent men. Soldiers are heroes. Anything less is seen as emasculating men and feminising society.
I do not know why men murder women and children but I know it has to stop. We hear endless amounts about zero tolerance for drugs and drink driving, how about zero tolerance for violent men?
I am sure that PC Bluestone was suffering. I am sure he needed help - help that might have come sooner if his colleagues, the police, hadn't covered up for him once already. It is right to ask ourselves what went wrong in this particular family, but we have to look at the wider picture of domestic violence in Britain. Men hurt women. Neither feminism nor social progress has been able to change that yet, and it seems to me to be one of the most urgent problems of our struggling civilisation.
How are men and women to live together and to love each other? How are they to bring up their children in safety? To address these questions is to do more than to say that men are insecure and out of touch with their feelings. Men have battered women in every century. Unless men and women working together want to change this culture of violence - and that includes not beating your children, not exposing them to thuggery at home, and not raising boys to solve problems with their fists - there will soon be another PC Bluestone.
Perhaps the tabloids and the broadsheets were not so far apart after all. "Monster" is someone who is not us. "House of Hate" is a creepy thriller we can switch off. "Strife" is a mild word that neutralises our feelings. The paradox of the doting, devoted husband and father who goes berserk with a claw hammer, pushes the problem outside of normal human relations. We are not like this. He must have been mad.
We have to take responsibility. We have to take the blame. This is not an isolated incident, it is an extreme version of the routine tensions in so many homes. How can we heal this pain? How can we build a society that is gentle without being weak? How can we be gentle ourselves?
It took two world wars for us to say "never again" to some of the brutality in our souls. What will it take to say "never again" to domestic violence?
