by A. S. Byatt
Barnet, Arthur, Gladys, Sylvia, Lucy and Freddie, who was my father. I met some of them, extremely briefly, though not Barnet and Sylvia. They are not part of my life, only of stories and sharp pictures, which, if they have anything in common, have the idea of furious energy, unmanaged passion, thwarted and gone to waste. The Arthur I saw I associate with thick carpets and golf clubs: the Arthur of the myth wanted to live dangerously, was a skilled pilot, a motor-cycle speedway racer in the Isle of Man, a volunteer rear-gunner in the First War. He flew, my mother said, round Conisborough Castle, a gloomy circular ruined tower, visible in my childish imagination from the upper windows of Blythe House. I see him roaring and dipping, looping the loop and circling, watched by the red-headed siblings envying the brief speed and freedom. The only other thing I know about Arthur is the manner of his death. This story is my father’s, unusually. He had a heart attack from which he recovered, assumed, without evidence, that he had an undivulged cancer and a short life expectancy, and went out, belatedly, to live dangerously again, thus precipitating another heart attack and a fatal collision with the back of a stationary bus. “Wine, women and song,” my father said darkly, partly shocked by his brother’s failure to examine the evidence properly, partly envious of the extravagance. Arthur never left Conisboro’ and the boiled sweets, however. I remember him red and solid and a little bluff. I remember a resemblance to his father.
Gladys married young, and briefly, because she had to, my mother said. She married a coalminer and divorced him with considerable firmness once the immediate need for respectability was past. My mother did not expatiate on Gladys, whom she clearly disliked. I can’t remember how old I was when she first told me these few facts — old enough to have read some Lawrence as well as suffering Jane Eyre, old enough to imagine a romantic red-haired girl in a long serge skirt running through fields, hiding behind hedges, with courage and fear, to a place of secret and absolute emotion. I see always a dry stone wall and grey green, slightly sooty Yorkshire hill-grass. This imagination was daunted by my incapacity to connect this girl with the wild, ageing aunt who visited us briefly, in Sheffield, when I was thirteen, and presented us with two huge, pink-cheeked, rose-pouting, lacefrilled dolls in cellophane-covered boxes, and a diverse and lavish set of manicuring tools in a soft red leather case. My mother made this transient visitor most unwelcome and she never came again. My mother in fact hated any incursion by any guest into her fenced and indomitably comfortable domestic territory. I remember them sitting at tea, on two corners of the dining-table, my mother’s mouth pinched with disapproval and distaste. My aunt was large and alarming. She wore an odd hat, which I have recreated as a bright purple silken turban, though I think that is my invention, and had a great unruly mass of wiry gingery hair and very pale sharp blue eyes, close to the sides of a prominent beaked nose. My mother poured tea, and waited very obviously for the visit to be over. My aunt began various jerky speeches which trailed away; her movements were abrupt and awkward. After she had gone, my mother spoke with concentrated and sharply expressed distaste of the vulgarity and unnecessary extravagance of the silly presents. It was only this year that my younger sister told me that she had found the dolls magical and beautiful. Later, this aunt spent several years in a caravan perched on the North Yorkshire coast. I remember my father’s alarm when the radio reported that part of these cliffs had been swept away, perhaps in the terrible storms of 1953. I remember him going north to sort out some trouble in which she had threatened a neighbour with a garden fork. She was, my mother said, “quite mad”. Certainly she died after some years in a mental hospital. My father went to visit her, during her last years, and reported that she failed to recognize him. He never I think described her, or her acts, to me, except during those last null years, when he would say sadly that it made you wonder what it was all for. I found her story hopeful and exciting, against the evidence. What I was afraid of, in the days when I first learned about her, was the “normal”, the respectable, the quotidian domesticity which my mother claimed to be happiness, suffered with savage resentment, and exacted payment for, from those she cared for.
My grandfather’s two youngest children carried out acts of considered rebellion and escape. My mother’s favourite tale, apart from the tale of the teapot perhaps, was the tale of my father’s act of severance. She herself, a girl from the working class, from a back-to-back house with no inside plumbing, but supported by her father, had won unprecedented scholarships to Cambridge where she went in what I imagine as a frail tremor of intellectual will and unimaginable social terror to read English. Her Cambridge was the Earthly Paradise and the Queen of Hearts’ garden of arbitrary obstacles and disgraces rolled into one. Until she died she went over and over moments of solecism she had too late detected in those years. She dreamed at least yearly, perhaps more often, that she was to be forced to resit her finals with no warning, and consequently to be exposed as a fraud. My father, who was, my mother acknowledged, the only student in her year who did better than she did in exams, had been briskly removed from school by his father to become a commercial traveller in boiled sweets. My mother said that this was a black time of his life, and that he became very ill, frightening his mother once or twice by fainting into the coal bucket. The “into” was part of her graphic style. As a little girl I had a clear vision of his pale limbs somehow telescoped and contracted into this dirty receptacle, like a discarded dead root, though I think now that he was probably trying to lift it, that the blood ran to his head. I knew exactly where this coal bucket stood in Blythe House. It stood on the threshold between the kitchen and the cellar, whose dark door led into a frightening blackness I remember stepping nervously back from. I must have been three. The coal bucket can never have been there, but I associate the two blacknesses, the fear of uncontrolled falling. My mother said my father would never afterwards talk about this time. In Amsterdam he did, a little, half apologizing to some unseen presence for the great trouble he had caused by his mixture of deviousness and distress. He had worked, my mother said, secretly and alone and late at night, unknown to his father, to take the Cambridge entrance exam, had saved and skimped every penny of what she called his “pocket money” and he later, in the hospital, called “my wages” and had finally won an exhibition to read law. So he had confronted his father, and had explained that he had saved, from this allowance, enough money for his first year’s fees and lodging, and that he meant now to go to Cambridge, because that was what he wanted to do.
The end of this tale always puzzled my imagination. My grandfather, my mother said, had been filled with pride and delight at this announcement, and had “fallen upon your father’s neck” — an unlikely motion, I always thought, in that portly and rigid trunk. I think now the phrase derives from the good father’s reception of the Prodigal Son, but that is confusing, for my grandfather’s hypothetical embrace welcomed revolt and prodigality. In any case, my mother said, Pa had immediately put £1,000 into my father’s bank, in order that he should live comfortably at Cambridge. No sentence of my grandfather’s speech was recorded in my mother’s account of this episode, which, although dramatically delightful, causes problems about his nature, and the true nature of his unreasonable rigidity and his children’s incapacity to communicate with him. How could they have had no inkling that he would have been proud or pleased? Was he capricious? Stubborn? Easily enraged? Had his children ever tried to explain to him what they wanted or hoped for? Had they inherited from my saintly grandmother an expectation of self-denial and strict obedience which precluded any attempt at dialogue? Was he formidable, was he wrathful, was he stony, was he emotional? No one has told me, I do not know anything about him. My father said, “Pa tried to do the best for us according to his lights, but he couldn’t conceive of things outside his business.” Where did it all come from then, the drive, the ambition, the passions of his offspring? I associate him with Dombey, if only because I think my father did. He once said that Dickens’s observation of Florence
Dombey was a miracle, that a child neglected and passed over and denigrated does indeed become more and more self-critical, more anxious to please, to find authority reasonable. But he himself did not submit for long. He went to Cambridge, and did well, and had tea in punts with my pretty and fragile mother.
The story of Lucy parallels that of my father, in some ways. This again is my mother’s version. At some point my grandfather had sent Lucy and Sylvia on a world cruise, for what reason my mother did not say, though she made it clear that in her view a world cruise was a poor substitute for higher education and some degree of financial independence. Lucy had been ravished by the open spaces and free life of Australia during this journey. It was an idea that at second-hand moved my father, too. When I was myself sitting Cambridge entrance and he a very successful junior barrister, or perhaps during the first slacker year after he took silk, he found time to write a thick, escapist novel, in which the hero moved from the dark, dirty and dangerous world of Sheffield steel mills to a land of clear, clean deserts and great flocks of wheeling, pearly parrakeets. He threatened occasionally to emigrate. It was his generation’s dream in the years of austerity and the choking class structure and battle fatigue. Lucy did in fact carry out this post-war dream, appearing one morning at breakfast in Blythe House to announce that she and a young woman friend had passages booked to sail that very day. “That very day” is my mother’s contribution, and perhaps suspect, but the tale is the same. My grandfather could only tolerably be dealt with by faits accomplis. His reactions to this announcement are not known to me. Lucy went to a life of violin-playing and the breeding of Airedales. In the early years of his retirement my father went out to see the deserts for himself and came back troubled about the corruption of the aborigines by alcohol, and perhaps a little lowered, as a man is whose dream vision has been replaced by a solid and limited reality. I was glad he never emigrated for I early developed a passion for languages, and thus for Europe. My father died European, despite his vision of deserts, as a direct consequence of a journey up the Rhine, which he thought over, as he sat in his high Dutch hospital room, talking to the Humanist visitor about the novels of Conrad and Charlotte Brontë she brought him, and to a young surgeon about the kinds of hawk planing over the roofs which were all he could see. “It was civilized,” he said with satisfaction, of his last painful venture. He described cranes and herons and castles and the moonlit water. And his own defeat by a brief climb from mooring-place to town centre. He was also a good raconteur, not like my mother, deliberate, weighing his words, judicious, telling you some things and holding others back.
When did my mother first tell me the story of Sylvia? I must have been too young to be told it, whenever it was, for I remember it as my first absolute confirmation that my mother’s myth was untrue, that the hearth’s warmth did not keep off the cold blast, that there was no safety. Before, I thought there were two sorts of people in the world, those to whom terrible things happened, as in books and the news, and those condemned to the protection of normality and the threat of boredom and custom. I believe my mother told me this story in the war itself, in Pontefract, where she kept house miserably whilst my father was away, except for a brief period of anxious and exalted activity when she taught English to grammar school boys. I loved her then. She talked to me about subjects and predicates, Tennyson and Browning, the Lady of Shalott, and not about household dirt and failures of attentiveness. I should already have known about uncertainty. I was a gloomy child and was in my secret soul certain that my father would never return from wherever he had abruptly vanished to, his red hair shorn, hung around with canvas buckets and kitbags under his ugly folded blue cap. There was a boy, too, at school, who died one night of diabetes. I remember being distressed that I couldn’t really know he was dead, that everything went on just as if this wasn’t so. Perhaps I only really learned about Sylvia later, but associate the learning with these other losses. Sylvia had fallen in love, on that fated world cruise, with someone whom my mother described as a “remittance man” in South Africa. They had married, and my grandfather had provided for them by offering them a workman’s cottage he owned, in Conisboro’. There was a child, another Sylvia, who was, I believe, more or less my own age. They were very unhappy. The remittance man, according to my mother, was “very cold. Pa didn’t understand. He came from a warm country. He was desperately cold.” My saintly grandmother visited, furtively my mother managed to imply, with blankets and hot soup. She provided these also for the local poor. Quite what happened to the remittance man I never dared to ask. As a little girl I thought the word meant that he was somehow provisional and not to be considered. Perhaps he went home, to the hot sun and the gold mines and his life before the incursion of my tragic aunts. I have given him, in my imagination, the features of a South African novelist I know, thoughtful, considerate, secretive, withdrawn. When I was little I saw him as a Gilded Youth, in a boater.
At some point in her own history, and certainly when I was only just born, Sylvia killed both herself and her small daughter. I know this, because I inherited certain toys belonging to this destroyed cousin. There was a dog, or nightdress-case, zipped, furry, black and white and peaceably couchant, whom I loved for years before I discovered his provenance. And after. I remember with terrible courage shouting, when some clearance of outgrown toys was proposed, “You can’t throw Wops away. He was Sylvia’s.” Knowing I did not know what this sentence meant to them, using it to save my dog, shamed. “Your father smoked terribly for two years after Sylvia died,” my mother said once. This at least explained why he, who never smoked, owned a chased silver cigarette case. I could not imagine his feelings. My mother had reduced her accounts of Sylvia to various manageable dicta. Sylvia, she gave the impression, was the most gifted of the gifted gaggle. She could have done all sorts of things, my mother said, and always added, “It was like putting a racehorse to draw a milk-cart.” She said also, scornfully, “She was no housewife, she had no idea.” I imagined a hut-like house, stone-floored, coal-fired, with barely room to turn round in. There must, however, have been a gas-oven. I think I took Sylvia’s fate as a warning against both brilliance and sexual passion. My father used to be partly amused, but ultimately more alarmed, by any evidence of extravagant passions in his daughters. He was a romantically-minded man, and believed that the first lover is always the most important. He was a virtuous man, and was, it seems clear, steadfastly faithful to my mother. He spoke of his brother Arthur, in Amsterdam, with a kind of mild envy. He felt he had always been too cautious. “When I come before my Maker,” he said, sipping the glass of wine the doctors, despairing of cure, had permitted him, “which I do not expect will happen, I shall have to beg him to forgive me my virtues.” My mother said he had learned from the others’ disasters, he had learned to be careful and to value security and domestic peace.
My mother’s accounts of my grandmother’s selflessness were like pearls, or sugar-coated pills, grit and bitterness polished into roundness by comedy and my mother’s worked-upon understanding of my grandmother’s real meaning. Whilst I cannot remember any quoted instance of my grandfather’s speech I can remember various sayings of my grandmother, including her welcome of my infant self, on my first visit. There she stood on the doorstep, my mother said, rigid and doubtful — I imagine it for some reason taking place on a snowy evening, in the early dark. She did not say, how lovely to see you, or let me see the baby, or come in and get warm, but “It hardly seems worth the trouble of all that packing just to come here. Babies are always best in their own house, I think.” My mother would always add a long explanation of this ungraciousness — my grandmother was genuinely self-deprecating, she was very well aware of the real trouble of transporting a baby with all her equipment, she was thanking my mother for having made the effort. The grit inside the pearly sugar-coating was a fear of rejection by both women, perhaps. “I nearly just turned round and went home,” my mother always said, and always added, “but it was just her ma
nner, she meant very well, really.” And “she was really very fond of me, she came to see me as a daughter, I was a favourite.” The famous teapot story is another such instance. It took place, I think, in the war, during petrol-rationing. My grandmother was driven over by the chauffeur, from Conisboro’ to Sheffield, to take tea with my mother and to see another baby. She sat briefly, talking to my mother. But when offered tea, she stood up abruptly and said no, no thank you, she had stayed too long, she must get back to pour my grandfather’s tea for him, he expected it. My mother’s emphasis in this story was on the childish helplessness of my grandfather, who, with a houseful of servants, could not stretch out a hand and lift his own teapot. My grandmother’s formidable manner and her excessive dutifulness were part of each other, in my mother’s vision, a kind of folly of decorum in which the result was the rejection of my own mother’s carefully prepared tea and cakes. “All that way, and the petrol, and the chauffeur’s time, wasted just to pour a cup of tea,” my mother would say scornfully and yet with fear. This story runs into the story of my grandmother’s death. Even in her last illness, my mother would say, when she was weak and in great pain, my grandfather would not allow her to sleep alone in a spare bedroom. She gave the impression, my mother, of the elderly man howling like a lost child, “creating” on landings until my grandmother wearily “dragged herself” downstairs again, to his side. “He couldn’t sleep without her,” my mother said. And “he had no consideration.” This inarticulate crying out is the only image of his speech I have. I see him pacing in an improbable nightshirt, beside himself. My mother’s contempt for male helplessness was edged with savagery. This operated even during my father’s last illness, which she persisted in seeing as a fantasy and a betrayal, which could have been better handled. Her original announcement of his collapse included the authoritative and unfounded assertion that he’d be perfectly all right in a day or two, there was no need for anyone to bother. Her account of my grandmother’s death is riddled with doubt, but I have nothing else certain to hold, or imagine, my father never got round to telling his version of that story, so the enraged and frantically obtuse old man persists in my memory.