Текст книги "What to Look for in Winter"

Автор книги: Candia McWilliam

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Chapter 8: Eyes Half-cut

A kind friend drove me south to Fram and Claudia’s house, where I was due to spend a week or so over Minoo’s birthday.

We all wanted the idea of spring, no, more than that, the reality of spring. I had frozen my life so capably for so long while they were living through normal, seasonal, you might reasonably say seasoned, time.

They extended another chance to me. If it were a children’s game, it might be thought of as another ‘life’. Those reprieves feel like new breath in the playground, a fair portion of offered hope.

Fram tried to coax me into liking, even loving, myself again. The very notion of self-loving brings me out in an allergic unthinking nettle rash – we Scots may be prickly but we’re also dead allergic, and often to ourselves. I have made a fair job of burning up what was ostensibly loveable and now I’m left with what remains. There’s not much to love, while there is all too much of me. It’s not a new story. The phlogiston has burned off – the mothering, any glamour, the cooking, the social fun, the jokes, the pretty ways in a house, the observantness – which were all but mothering, fair tosh anyhow – and we’re left with the calx, which feels as reduced as it sounds, a shrivelled residue. How can I love that?

The answer is further in. Love in yourself what you would love in anyone, anyone at all, certainly in a sick person no matter how repulsive their illness, just because they are human and still retain life, or the vestige of it.

So, treat yourself as you would an employee. That’s what shrinks say, because they know that I can’t imagine treating another person as I treat myself, which is with automatic torrents of abuse that Fram thinks come from having experienced their like too early on. He also says they are part of a longing to have someone silence them by saying nice things.

The row over ransomed milk was so bad that I thought that was that. I had seen how exasperated they were by my incapacity to be helped and just to accept that this was now; they were there; I was here; and that life is not fair.

Gestures are often insincere and lead almost always to regret. The two pounds for the milk was a gesture. Gestures may be staged for the notional watcher, who is the spirit of Punch and Judy, and, worse, of the Colosseum. Gestures may be lies, waiting for their big fat bluff to be called.

I will not forget the one time I slapped a young man for kissing me, in the dark after a dance here on Colonsay. The slap was pure gesture as the kiss was not. I was showing off to whoever was watching the film of my romantic life; that is no one at all. Or, at most, just me. Unforgivable. I apologised to this young man’s grave this week (he never grew old but lost his life to a knife in a city), but I did not say so to Katie. That would have been gestural. Whether or not it’s gestural to mention it here, I am attempting to discern as I write. Writing about private things can be gestural, and it can not be. The reader will have to decide.

I arrived at their house in Oxford from the North and, not meaning to but not knowing how else to be, set about being as tiresome as possible almost before I was through the door. I could see very little, and just wanted to hide. I went to Minoo’s room, which is my room when I am there, and although I couldn’t see, I scraped my bruised newly stitched eyes open so as to ingest anything new that might hurt about the room, packed as it is with memories of our marriage and of Minoo’s childhood, photographs of the other children, the cats, the poem written for our wedding by Peter Levi, framed, the sparmannia cuttings from our drawing room, the pink Roberts radio, Minoo’s soft tiger Siberia and his wife and son, Blanche and Albert, the various sketches of the house in Italy Fram’s mother made, Minoo’s clothes, many of which are clothes I bought for his father, my father’s furniture, my own, the painting of a Roman street vendor with buck teeth that once belonged to Henry James. So what? It is all Minoo’s life.

He is the wholeness that emerges and it is fitting that his life should be whole around him and his home also.

To fuss about things at all is symptom of nothing more than the awful ‘meum – tuum’ of bourgeois marriage. That is almost the whole truth. Occasionally, Fram gives me an offering he has come across from my past: my christening mug or my leaflet of Cardinal Newman’s Dream of Gerontius that I bought for six old pennies at McNaughtan’s second-hand bookshop in Leith Walk in Edinburgh before I went away to school in England. I carry it in my handbag. He can’t give me big things because where would they go now I’m a mobile mother? And do I actually want the things themselves? I want the continuity, the unbrokenness, the dream not woken from.

Which is like the burglar crying aloud for the uneased, unbroken window. Worse, like the roiling thug weeping over the grief and bodily harm he has inflicted. The things tell a more whole story under that happy roof than under any I might offer them.

After about one night and a bad morning when I even broke my own artificial taboo and went up on to the floor of the house where Fram and Claudia’s bedroom is and where you can see the crowns of trees and be among the church bells even higher, I decided to face the fact that I could either shut up and keep all this to myself or just move my suitcase to another pitch and get on with moaning, and I was running out of places to be. The reason I tell Fram and Claudia about the sadness’s shape is because they understand the metaphorical terms I, unconsciously but thoroughly, use, and that is more important to me than practically any other intimacy, the sense of swift mutual understanding. Even I could see that it was unjust to punish them for their pre-eminence among my loved ones.

So, there was a morning of me racing around trying ever more closely to define my understanding of the lostness which was of course like sewing hems with smoke. Then I settled down to their life, her taking him breakfast, and bringing it to me too, which seemed like far too much kindness, their trips to London for meetings, libraries, theatre, her book plans, her reviewing, her columns, her cousins and siblings and their babies, his going to college and returning exhausted and then working till three or four in the morning, her seeing friends, dealing with the animals, with family, the coming and going of Joanna the ironing lady who had been for ten years a steady soothant in the children’s lives under our roof, and whom somewhere along the way I loosed my bond with, like so much else that had been treasured and familiar.

Who would grudge anyone that? Anyone whom they love?

And I do not.

I have, however, and it’s quite an achievement, managed to empty my own life to the extent where I have made it a cell. Not St Jerome’s calm study, but a prison. I haven’t made a charming minimalist environment for the contemplation of the good, I have fixed up a metal cave. I think I did it with drink first and with a good disinfecting blast of high-pressure shame after that. Then I went blind.

It is easy to forget how to live. I did it. Getting back up is not easy. Getting back on, I am trying now, but the laps are faster and faster that the carousel is making, and those who are thrown off it or throw themselves or fall off it – why hadn’t I noticed this at the Dutch amusement park I so hated as a child, the Bedriegertjes? – never get back on if they are tentative. You have to leap and then be rock steady. You have to leap into the centre of the awful spinning thing to find any stillness; the edge will throw you off.

.

Chapter 9: Two Instances of Spring

The darkness brought down by my closed eyes is a new way of being shut out. Since that darkness is my circumstance, unless this operation which I am awaiting works, it is surely the right thing to turn that darkness into a new way to be alone.

The stay with Fram and Claudia over Minoo’s birthday was full of things that worked, as long as I kept the past from my mind. If I ceased thinking of my own life, that I had no job, no home and no systems within which to do more than exist as an organism from day to day, beyond the sketchy membranes of prayer and washing, then it was pleasant to be part of this busy house with the comings and goings of young people, conversation, and the tenor of wit and shared myth that lies at the heart of full lives.

Fram said, I am sure truthfully and I know welcomingly, that it was a matter of indifference to him whether I stayed for two hours or two years with them, they would carry on as they do with their lives, to which I might be as much of an addition as I wished. Claudia finds me easier. I second-guess his boredom and in doing so bring it into being.

Clementine and Rose came for Minoo’s birthday lunch, and Olly in the evening. At lunch, there was prosecco and a roast made by the twins’ father, Toby, and Clem and Rose brought presents wrapped in sparkly paper that left granular silver dust on our hands. Both girls had silvered their eyes like fish scales. Claudia’s son Xavier was there, and they shared a cake sent by Cousin Audrey in Edinburgh. The garden was sunny and early flowers were through in Fram’s newly made garden, scented paperwhites and wintersweet with its strong scent of milky Earl Grey tea. Clem likes Fram’s gardening and enjoyed the thin squeaky-stemmed fragrant narcissi. I was glad for her that the vase and the cutlery, the napery and some of the plates were familiar to her.

I loved it that she enjoyed the ironed flowered napkins that reminded her of Fram’s mother, who had chosen and hemmed them. Fram’s parents were fond of my older two children.

At tea that day, there arrived Claudia’s cousin Alexander with his family. He crowned the day by telling Clem and Rose that he and Claudia are their cousins. This gave plurality and wreathing life to the already happy day, so far is Alexander Waugh from the dead hand of genealogy and self-importance, unlike those satiating moments when Marcel notices how often he hears the word ‘cousin’ in the world of the Faubourg Saint-Germain.

Minoo became twenty, his siblings and coevals celebrated, several of his parent figures rejoiced, and his parents spent the week roughly under the same roof.

It was a blossomy time when I was in Oxford, a forward part of the country. Colonsay is slower to come into bower, so I’ve had two springs this year.

Claudia was establishing a new outlet for a small independent publishing house during that week, so she was busy in the most congenial of ways to a blind onlooker. Fram showed towards her the mock-exasperated mixture of pretend scepticism and actual loyalty that is his braced and bracing form of support. Their days went forward in separateness together, that state praised by Fram’s friend and colleague John Bayley in his book Iris.

Claudia introduced me to a friend of hers who does massage. I am struck among some of her friends by their attention to the state of their own health. I might have done well to take account of the rules by which they are defending and monitoring their bodily lives, but at their age and younger, I would have thought it narcissistic to be so in touch with the body; my mistake, my very Scottish mistake. I think mean old baglike thoughts about their comparative youthful being and my own blown body and disability.

This woman however did something unlike any other massage I had undergone. There were no words, oils or embarrassing wavy or whaley soundtracks.

She used wordless intuition to make me breathe so slowly and deeply that my thoughts ceased for a time to race and repeat themselves. Her discipline has been learned over decades; she is not a proselytiser. Something really works. Regrettably, she lives on a beach with sharks in its sea at the very top of northern Queensland, but this spring I met her as often as possible before she and I went to our separate homes on islands of very different size. She has done more than most to see off the incessant internal instructions I give myself. You can attempt to defy what she does by pulling tension and acid into your mind, but she feels what you are doing and makes minutely inflected pressures that force you to release the knots and poisons. She leaves your organs with nowhere to hide. Meanwhile, you are fully clothed and forgetful of self. The sense afterwards is that you may, after all, have another chance, that you may have the equipment remaining within you with which to love.

Chapter 10: Silver Wadding and the Smell of Remorse

I became conscious of death as a thing that trembled around us, my parents and me, in the air, as soon as I came to the sort of conscious thought that I can recall, so around three or four years old. Death sent its messengers, as it does to small children: among them dead animals in gutters, flat mice, soggy poisoned rats in the area, the hopeless nestlings my mother rescued, the shrew in her cardigan pocket that she could not revive, with its nose like a tube, dying rabbits on country walks, the shocking deaths of the zoo animals for which my mother felt so misshapenly, inappropriately, much.

The wallpaper in my nursery held in its pattern the family whom I called the Cauliflowers who brought death with them. They bulked into the nightmares that seemed to reach me from day into sleep as I lay trying to construe its pattern.

Burglars came into the house and left you dead, the life sucked from you into them through their faces that were masked but for the mouth. I saw burglars very clearly in my mind as silent monochromatic breachers of safety. I felt about them as some people feel about cats, that they understood only their own advantage and moved selfishly in silence around and through the world they wanted to depredate; the words ‘cat burglar’ and ‘footpad’ confirmed this fear.

I cannot remember when I didn’t know that my father was liable to fall down dead at any point from his dicey heart. I first met him when he was twenty-seven, thin, prone to a racking cough, a heavy smoker; I cannot recall at any time in our interrupted acquaintance (I love him deeply to this day, more than twenty years after his death, but we had the most formal of contact) not being anxious for my father. I listened for his breath, which was loud yet erratic in his thin chest, especially when he was writing, drawing or smoking. Mostly he was doing at least two of those at once.

I knew very early on that I would myself die. I was hoping that I could buy life for at least one of my parents, by getting my own dying over with; I had this concept caught by the age of five, when, I’m ashamed to say, because it is blasphemous, vainglorious and self-dramatising, I dreamed I redeemed my parents through crucifixion on the wall bars of the school gym. I certainly wasn’t cut out for any more conventional wall bar exercises.

My mother also felt to me imperilled. This was to do with her closeness to me and her failure to hide things from me, for which I am grateful to her. She told me for example, that she loved my father. That she told me this on the day before she was no more does not empty it of a meaning that I can utilise to reflect back into the marriage, although memory also suggests that, while it wasn’t a very happy marriage, they knew great happiness at some point in and with one another.

I do not think that happiness came into it much at that time. There were other things that life was for. Certainly, you did not set out to find happiness. I don’t think that that was untypical. The explicit tracking down of happiness through marriage or indeed otherwise was not so much to the fore. Satisfaction, achievement, things seen or heard or done, rooms warmed, socks darned, were proper aims. I suspect that my mother had an almost overmastering capacity for happiness that unsettled people and made her electric, both attractive and repellent. My father not. Or rather, not with my mother, not on our watch. I think he was happy in his second family and marriage.

My father, unlike my mother, was not a soul completed by an emotion or a mood. He was completed by a thing well done or a passage of visual or auditory proportion. He closed himself off against mood, which may be why my mother thought him distant and so glamorous, at once drawn by this sealedness and unknowingly encouraging him to evaporate into thought or execution.

I thought that she was going to die because I liked her so much. Then she did. I’m not sure if that left me thinking that love from me might be fatal.

Can I really never have had that thought until this moment, when I type it blind, released into these paragraphs of truth-telling by two things in the night here on Colonsay? I shall come to them, as I must try not to flinch politely away from whatever dark moth it is I am circling with my net around the prone form of my mother, on her front in a knitted green day-dress on my bed in my mushroom-grey brocade wallpapered nursery.

My mother attracted moths and butterflies. If she did not literally do so, there were more of them around in those days, and she drew my attention to them unerringly. I think of my mother with her long hair held back in a scarf or with cat’s-eye sunglasses, holding out a brown and orange butterfly to let it go back to land as we crossed over on the ferry to the Isle of Arran. I think of her saving gold heavy-bodied dusty moths from hot light bulbs at night, lamenting the moths’ short lives.

She did her hair at the open window of their bedroom and butterflies came to her sticky newly lacquered fair fine hair and danced around her head in its staticky mist. I can see her as a healer of race-horses or an animal shrink, or an unemployed white witch. For sure, she drew familiars to herself. She was a hopeless teacher because she did things almost entirely by instinct, while my father was a splendid one, having clarity of intellect and fully trained consciousness of how our, and several other languages, had come about and what differentiated line. She would have been a marvellous…well…

My experience of her indicates that what she would have been pre-eminently, whatever job she took, is a marvellous mother. As in, a mother who provides marvels and who transmits the marvel in things.

I was reviewing her talents and atmosphere as I wrote, and it came to me without words, the sense of her kitchen and her small garden in our street, of the entertaining that she did with not much more than a cauliflower and some cheese and her stapled blue and white china bowls from junk shops. What she had was the presiding touch. Not much confidence, and less of it as her marriage progressed and she failed to live up to her mother-in-law, or to get jobs in shops, which as I recall is what she felt qualified to apply for.

Not much confidence, no, but many wasted gifts that did not yet at that time have a name, and not at all in the conventional Edinburgh of her short married life. She might be surprised to see that people pay nowadays for the things she did by nature: listening, amusing, seeing to the heart, making rooms feel whole, tracking down and reviving unloved objects, creatures, people.

My mother made jars of pink jelly that shone gold at their centre from the tart orange fruit of the rowans by the railway sidings along from the dog-racing stadium. She labelled the rowan-jelly jars with drawings of the Scottish kings (the rowan tree is the royal badge of Scotland). She made elderflower cordial with the powdery blossoms from the cemetery, after she had shaken them over muslin to spare the small flies therein a sugary death. My mother did two things or more at once and took account of other things all along, so that her life was in ribbons, but they were bright, if, by the end, pale.

It might have been enough for her to have been a wife, had her husband been at home, had he been a farmer or a farrier or something other than a man resident within his mind or else out of the house. She should have had a practical world to inhabit. Instead, and fortunes have in our time been built on such a thing (think of Cath Kidston), she made a fantasy of domesticity that was probably not to the taste of her husband, though it is a frail but vividly living thing for her daughter to handle in prose, when it would be best in transmission through re-enactment. It beats me where she got it from, this bee-loud domestic engine, as her mother could not endure anything that was unlike the neighbours’ way of life for fear, I suppose, that her origins be revealed, and her father liked his experience unvarying from day to day, shares, golf, more shares, meals, no talk, televised boxing.

Well, that is where she got it from, naturally. She was reflexive.

My mother, were the thought not transgressive, I think is the fashionable term, might have been a good wife to such a man as my first husband. I was awfully aware, when we married, that she would have been jealous of me, marrying a handsome man who understood horses, shared many of her inborn traits such as instinctive conservatism and innate faith, and who would have sheltered her gifts with pride. She would have adorned his world and been a good charity committee person, painting and gardening and sitting on the bench, mixing her magical attributes with her commonsensical ones, enjoying his authoritative capacities. My father would not exert authority unless he was forced to. His socialism and his classicism were each so pure that he simply could not allow for human weakness; he thought that in an ideal world people were likely to behave well, which meant modestly, unselfishly, according to principle and proportion. My mother’s humours did not accord with this conviction, requiring attention and explanation, in for which he did not go. It was his fortune later on to marry someone whose own disciplined upbringing supported him. I can offer to my mother’s shade the certainty that in his older daughter my first husband shelters aspects of her grandmother, my mother. Her way of being is in part in harbour now.

It comes to me that amid the stuttering mental pain of her last months, she did go frequently to organise things for the Scottish Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children. I was baffled by this because she would dash to her friend Kitty’s house, where the meetings took place, or to Mrs Ross-Skinner, and I would catch the drift of her errand as her basket and her scarf and her scent flew ahead of me down the windy street – that she was on her way to do ‘cruelty to children’.

I could have believed it, with the bit of me that she slapped and shouted at, but I didn’t, since, though I did fear her temper, I far more feared my father’s, that held in it distaste. And I knew that I was an abnormally fearful child and that this was not a popular way to be and made me suspect among certain of my friends’ parents.

I can’t remember whether I approached death with the same sidling fascination as I approached the sexual. My own relationship with death was almost consoling. It was part of me, not something against which I made myself. That is, I was afraid of it, but I was used to being afraid of it, and when it came it was in each case not welcome, not a relief, but a thing that in that particular instance could never quite be repeated, each death being congruent in nothing but its nothingness – but peremptorily different in shape of loss.

The two events of the rainy night in Colonsay are as follows. I dined with my not-brother Alexander and his family, his wife and son of fourteen, daughter of twelve. The willowy young people sat at the table, as some of the adults present wrangled noisily about the pre-existence of mind. The twelve-year-old retired to bed. The fourteen-year-old sat quietly, listened, took the shouty opinions, considered them, analysed them, cut them down to size and presented them back to us all, well groomed, but not thornless. He held his own soberly over the happily vinous table for about ten pleasurable minutes in the candlelight. It is particularly happy to watch the face of someone whom you have seen since babyhood and of whose parents you are fond. I held my forehead right up throughout the evening in order to watch the two children and their mother and father.

At four o’clock this morning, a helicopter took that boy to a cardiac unit on the Scottish mainland, where he presently is with his mother, while his father and sister are here on the island in the stair-rod rain. Nobody is over-reacting. The mode of this family in crisis is decidedly calm. But, while this had been going on, I was lying in bed thinking about all our ends, almost conversationally, while my cheap pink CD player relayed in the hush the speaking voice of a friend, reading his most recent book, that is, among other things a disquisition upon mortality.

‘Whenever the moon and stars are set,

Whenever the wind is high,

All night long in the dark and wet,

A man goes riding by’

the rain was saying, completely reassuringly.

‘Late in the night when the fires are out,

Why does he gallop and gallop about,

Whenever the trees are crying aloud,

And ships are tossed at sea’,

said the rain and the wind against my bedroom shutters, while I listened to my friend’s voice and was for a good part of the night less afraid than I have been for weeks, on account of the reassuring family supper; two of whose protagonists were during those same hours in another part of the house, praying for regularity to return to a beloved, faltering, human heart.

The last lines of Robert Louis Stevenson’s poem, which has been one of my lifelong sleep-charms, read first to me by a parent, brings something more frightening into focus. The lovely hoofed clatter of the lines returns insistently as a firmer knock altogether. Is the night rider someone more threatening than a highwayman?

By, on the highway, low and loud,

By at the gallop goes he.

By at the gallop he goes, and then,

By he comes back at the gallop again.

Deacon Brodie was the famous Edinburgh highwayman, a minister by day and a robber by night, robbing the rich to succour his poor. He died on a gibbet of his own devising. Miss Jean Brodie is, as she explains, his descendant. Each of them is meting out a certain sort of justice and living out that famous Scottish doubledness, in order to shake things up. The pub named for the Deacon, on the Royal Mile in Edinburgh, had a sign that used to haunt me when I was small, and that has supplied one face of my fears to this day. The deacon is masked, up close, his eyes seen through holes in a tight band of cloth.

With one of the earliest book tokens I was given aged about six, I bought, on my own, operating under some compulsion to look at what struck fear into me, an American paperback of A Journal of the Plague Year by Daniel Defoe, precisely because its cover bore a depiction of a face looking through a white mask of cloth. It was a good read for the child I was too, as it happens, full of herbs and philtres against death.

Aged ten, I read both Aldous Huxley’s The Devils of Loudun and a sort of shocker called The Nun of Monza, because they had covers that featured burning eyes staring through holes in otherwise anonymous masks of cloth. I cannot suppress fear at such spirit-extinguishing masks and my dreams employ extras in the tall pointed headwear of Ku Klux Klan or of Inquisition, hoods down over faces like snuffers over candle flames. I cannot bear large groups, in film or in life, of undifferentiated beings without faces. Orcs are perhaps are the worst, but wasps are bad, though I was ashamed to learn from the diaries of Simon Gray that wasps have specific jobs and roles in the wasp world and establish committed domestic loyalties. He learned this when he and his wife called in the pest control officer, who was a fond amateur of the creatures he was paid to exterminate, a relationship gamekeepers will find familiar.

Nothing more undoing to the tender heart than a glimpse of the exterminee’s home life.

Or so you might have hoped had people themselves, once the numbers are large enough, not disproved this.

The sky in the Western Isles moves from dark to light to dark with flashy effect upon mood. It’s as enlivening as strobe lights, disconcerting, choppy, dashing. The sun is forever stripping right down to pure light and then bundling all its grey shawls on again. Today has delivered three dousings of rain from a black sky, several seemingly tented interludes of white sun from a white sky, and one golden bolt out of the blue that came down to earth with a pennant of tight respective strips of rainbow, only loosening into pallid pink green blue violet rayed haze when the next rain, as it had to, came. I feel the weather on my back as I work by the open window and I feel it over my own shawled eyelids.

In one of these gaps of light over dark, Alexander has set off in his little aeroplane towards the mainland with his daughter. He’s taken a packed lunch on the plane for when they all meet up in hospital in Glasgow. He gets into the air, and sometimes, if things are jaunty and he feels like it, he tips his wing at whichever members of his family he’s leaving behind.

I never saw this gesture in war, of course, but have seen it in countless films. It is hard not to get a lump in the throat, the tall man and the small machine.

Two writer friends, Janice Galloway and Julian Barnes, have recently written autobiographical works that stressed they were not autobiographies, each emphasising in its title a word of negation, even, denial. It’s the intelligent way. It’s the only remotely truthful way; all ambiguity in that phrase fully loaded and intentional. Her This Is Not About Me and his Nothing to Be Frightened Of both deployed to the full their very different powers of negative capability. Her book was nicotinous with slanted, smoking recall, the underskirt under the skirt, while his boned out to its full pit-haunted beauty the typical cleverness of that title. You cannot deflect his eye from the heart of his matter.