Sugar and Other Stories

by A. S. Byatt

  The Van Goghs were different. I could not like, I could not respond to the very last paintings, the tortured and incompetent cornfield, with the black despairing birds crowding over the paths which lead nowhere. But the great paintings of Arles and St Rémy shone. The purple irises on gold. The perturbed bedroom. The solitary chair. The reaper, making his deathly way through white light in fields of shining corn. I knew what Vincent had said about this painting as the image of a cheerful death, a secular human image, of a man moving into the furnace of light. I stopped thoughts off. I thought of Vincent in front of Vincent’s paintings. I brought postcards to my father for him to see, contained, faded diminutions of all this glory, and he painfully addressed them to my mother, her sister, his oldest friend, in trembling writing, saying that he was all right. We have all inherited his handwriting, which was cramped and nondescript. My mother’s was generous and flowing and distinguished. We were all trained differently, yet we all write his small scrawl. How does that come about?

  We talked about heredity during those long visits. He said my mother had come increasingly to resemble her mother, and that there was a lesson in that. We also talked about my mother’s untruthfulness. My father felt that it was a failure in perfect good manners to complain about her narrative onslaughts on his own veracity. (This was complicated by a powerful fear they both had of failing memory, since accuracy meant so much to both of them, after all.) He said, not for the first time, anxious about the fact that it was not for the first time, that we had been over this ground, that she had claimed to have been at his father’s death bed, where she had not been.

  “I should know,” he said. “He was my father. I was certainly there. How can I be wrong?”

  It was then that I saw that much of my past might be her confection.

  “Have you ever thought,” I said, “how much of what we think we know is made out of her stories? One challenges the large errors, like that one. But there are all the other little trivial myths that turn into memories.’

  He was struck by this, and produced an example, of how some flowers had died, and my mother had supposed that perhaps the cleaning-lady might have watered them too little, or perhaps too much — probably too much, and that that was why they had died, because Mrs Haines had overwatered them, and so hypothesis became the stuff of fact.

  Earlier that year, when it had been she who was ill, we had had a similar conversation, and I had said, joking and serious, “It’s all right for you. You didn’t inherit those genes.” Both of us, under stress, found this very funny, we laughed, in complicity. Later he told his housekeeper, over coffee, that I was the image of his mother, that I resembled that family, strikingly. But I don’t think this is true, and the photographs I’ve seen don’t bear it out. Now, in moments of fatigue, I feel my mother’s face setting like a mask in or on my own. I have inherited much from her. I do make a profession out of fiction. I select and confect. What is all this, all this story so far, but a careful selection of things that can be told, things that can be arranged in the light of day? Alongside this fabrication are the long black shadows of the things left unsaid, because I don’t want to say them, or dare not, or do not remember, or misunderstood or forgot or never knew. I left out, for instance, the tear gas. I wanted to write about Amsterdam as clean, and reasonable, and enduring, and so it was. But two of us came out of the airy space of the Van Gogh Museum into a cloud of drifting gas which burned our throats and scoured our lungs. There were black-armoured police and stone-throwing evicted squatters. Behind our hospital-headed tram was a smoking column of burning cars. For several nights we couldn’t return to the hotel directly; it was cordoned by police and the paving-stones were torn up. My father could not begin to be interested in these manifestations. He was fighting his own private battle. To omit them is a minor sin, and easy to correct. But what of all the others? What is the truth? I do have a respect for truth.

  I remember one particular day at Blythe House, when both my grandparents were alive. I remember this day clearly, though it is not my only memory, possibly because I wrote about it at the time. Now I try to calculate how old I was, I see that I am already confused. It was during the war, during my father’s Mediterranean absence, perhaps 1943 or 1944, certainly a very sunlit day during what I remember as a succession of burning still summers, the beginning of my hunger for sunlight. I had stayed at Blythe House in winter. It had seemed stiff and frightening and huge, whether because I was then very little, or because it was so much bigger than our wartime house I don’t know. I remember an enormous cold bathroom, with a deep bath standing portentously in the middle of a huge empty space. I remember a view of dirty snow, a children’s playground with slide and circular roundabout and swings on loops of chain. I remember the cellar mouth and a dark, frowsty kitchen. I remember my mother’s pervasive anxiety. But this summer visit was different. I noticed things. I was not wholly passive.

  At the beginning and end of the visit my grandparents stood formally side by side in front of the house, on a gravel drive, and I looked up at them. My grandmother wore a straight black dress, crêpy and square-necked. Her hair was iron-grey and caught up, I think, in a tight bun or roll. Her expression I remember as severe, judicious, unsmiling. Her stockings were thick and her shoes button-barred and pointed. She was composed, I could say, she made no unnecessary movements, no conciliatory speeches, no attempt at affectionate embrace. (My other grandmother rushed and enveloped us, smacking her lips.) My grandfather’s face was obscured because it was tilted slightly backwards. He had a large protuberant belly, across which was looped a gold watch-chain. I remember his belly most. He was not a fat man, nor a large man, but substantial. I thought — or if I did not think, I have since regularly thought, so that the ideas are bonded to this memory — both of Mr Brocklehurst, the tall black pillar of Jane Eyre, and of Mr Murdstone in David Copperfield. I did not expect my grandfather to do anything frightening or condemnatory, though I was afraid of committing a faux pas. He was identifiably a Victorian patriarch, that is all. Though in those days I had no idea of historical distance and supposed we were all threatened with Newgate prison for debt, and with Fagin’s night in the condemned cell. I could tell, I think, that my grandfather was not very interested in me, and that he had nothing to say to me. But in some way I cannot now remember matters developed so that he escorted us to the works itself, to see the boiling of the sugar. On this journey we were accompanied by a tall man in a brown overall, with a lugubrious, respectful and friendly face, and by some other forgotten man, who lingers in my memory only as the owner of a cloth cap.

  The works was gaunt and bare. The floor I remember as mere earth, though it cannot have been: it was certainly dark, not tiled, and dusty. It was all like an enormous version of the outdoor washhouses of the north, draughty and cold and echoing. On the left as we went in were large vessels I associated with the coppers my other grandmother boiled sheets in, stirring them with a huge wooden baton. I saw, or I remember, four of these. One was full of sulphurous yellow boiling sugar, one of a dark, cherry-red, one of bright green and one, which amazed me because it was an unusual colour for sugar, of a kind of pale inky colour, a molten sea of heaving, viscous blue glass. The colours and the surfaces were brilliant and enchanted. They undulated, they burst in thick, plopping bubbles, they swirled with curving streamers of trapped air like slivers of glass. There was a smell, not cloying but clear and appetizing, of browning sugar. We moved on and saw large buckets full of this gleaming fluid poured onto a huge metal table, or belt, which ran the length of the room. Smoking it hissed down and began to harden. Men with paddles manipulated and spread it, ever finer, more translucent, wider, like rolled pastry magnified numberless times, the colours paling so that magenta became clear peony-pink, so that indigo became dark sky-blue, so that topaz became straw-gold. And a kind of primitive mechanical tart-cutter descended and stamped these gleaming sheets, making rows of rounded discs. The process had things in common with glass-blowing, whi
ch then I had not seen, but which later, in Venice, in Biot, reminds me always of the urgent work with the hot sugar, before it cools. Humbugs ran not flat but in a long coiling serpent, thick as a man’s trunk at one end, tapering to thumb-size, through an orifice which simultaneously gave it a half-twist and bit. The most miraculous moment was when my grandfather urged the man in the brown overall to show me how the stripes were made in humbugs. Now I have it, now, almost, I hear his voice. It was both hesitant and eager and wholly absorbed in its subject. I cannot remember the words, but I can remember his certainty that I would find this process, his work, as startling and satisfactory and amazing as he did himself. This is all I know about him at first hand, that his work fascinated and absorbed him. The humbug stripes were as extraordinary as he had promised. The humbug sugar lay, hot and soft in a huge mass at one end of the table. The overall man pulled off an armful of it, which he rolled roughly into a fat serpent coil, a heavy skein, like my mother’s knitting-wool, on his two arms. We went out of the shed, into a yard, where a large hook protruded from the wall — very high up, it seemed to me, so that he had to reach up to it. But I was a very small child for my age, maybe it was not so high. The man hung the fat tube of brown sugar — dark, treacle-brown sugar — over this hook and began to whip it around, and around. I knew this motion, it was the regular turn of the playground skipping rope, twist and slap, twist and slap. And as I watched, the sugar lightened. From treacle to coffee, from coffee to a milky fawn, from fawn to a barley-sugar straw colour, and from there, through the gelatine colour of old dried egg-white to pure white, no longer translucent but streaked and streaked with infinitely fine needles of air. “It’s the air that does it,” my grandfather said. “Nothing but whipping in air. There’s no difference between the two stripes in a humbug but air: the sugar’s exactly the same.” I remember him saying, “It’s the air that does it.” I think I remember that. We took the white rope back into the factory, and laid it on a dark one, and the two were wound round and round each other, spiralling and decreasing in girth, by skilled slapping hands, until the tapered point could be inserted into the snapping machine. I remember the noise it made, moving on the metal, a kind of crunching and crackling of dried sugar, and a thump and slap of the main body of it — this last noise a magnified version of school plasticine-rolling.

  When it was over, my grandfather fetched out several conical paper bags and these were filled with the fragile slivers of sugar that fell away from the stamping machine. Those too I still remember. At first they were light and powdery and crystalline, palest of colours, rose, lemon, hyacinth, apple. Hot they tasted delectable, melting like sweet snowflakes in those days of sugar rationing. If rationed out and kept too long they settled, coagulated and became a rocky mass undifferentiated, paper-smeared, sweating drops of saccharine moisture.

  I wrote about this, at East Hardwick School. It is the first piece of writing I remember clearly as mine, the first time I remember choosing words, fixing something. I remember, still, two words I chose. Both were from my reading. One was from a description of birds on a Christmas tree, in, I think, Frances Hodgson-Burnett’s Little Princess. The birds were German, delicate, and made of very fine “spun-glass”. The word had always delighted me, with its contradiction between the brittle and the flexible thread produced. I remember I used it for the fragments in our conical paper bags. I remember also casting about for a way of telling how violent, how powerful were the colours in the sugar vats. I wrote that the green was “emerald” and I know where I found that word, in the reading endlessly supplied by my mother. “And ice, mast-high, came floating by As green as emerald.” As green as emerald. Did I go on to other jewels? I don’t remember. But I do remember that I took the pleasure in writing my account of the boiling sugar that I usually took only in reading. Words were there to be used.

  Later, my grandfather encouraged me to pick his flowers. He had a conservatory, on one side of the grey house, with a mature vine, and huge bunches — I remember many huge bunches — of black grapes hanging from the roof and the twisting stems. He gathered one of these, and encouraged us to taste and eat. “More,” he said, when we took a tentative couple of fruit. “They are there to be eaten.” Grapes were unknown in those dark days. I remember dissecting mine, the different pleasures of the greenish flesh inside the purple bloom of the skin, the subtle taste, the surprise of the texture and the way the juice ran. I was taken out and told to pick flowers. I took a few dubious daisies from the lawn. “No, no,” he said, “anything, anything at all, you help yourself and make a really nice bunch.” He liked giving, that too I am sure of, from my own experience. I made a Victorian nosegay. Everything went right, it formed itself, circles of white, round circles of blue, circles of rose, a few blackeyed Susans. And a palisade of leaves to hold its tight, circular form together. I ran up and down, selecting, rejecting, rich. My mother described the early age at which I had distinguished the names, phlox, antirrhinum, lupin. I don’t remember her much that day; she must have been at ease. Or else I was. It was unusual for either of us to be at all settled, at all confident, at all happy. It was almost like my father’s idea of his family life as Eden, though then I didn’t know of that, knew only that these grandparents were to be regarded with awe. I don’t think I saw them again. We did not go there often, and after a time my grandmother died, and then my grandfather, who could not, my mother said, live without her. “He was like a lost child. He was quite helpless, all the life gone out of him.”

  My mother only outlived my father for a little more than a year. She did not appear to grieve for him, going only so far as to remark that she missed having him around to agree with her about Mrs Thatcher’s treatment of the miners. She was curiously despondent about the prospect of dying herself under a government for which she felt pure, instinctive loathing. Immediately after the war she had once told me that when it began she had thought through, imagined through, all the worst possible things that could happen, to England, to my father. “Then I put it behind me and simply didn’t think of it any more,” she said. “I had faced it.” As a little girl, I found this exemplary and admirable. Action is possible if you stop off feeling. Some chill I had learned from my mother worked in Amsterdam when I stopped off the dangerous thoughts possible in the presence of Van Gogh’s dying cornfields or his dark painting of his dead father’s Bible. I could talk to my father about his father only by not loving him too much, not exactly at that moment, not thinking too precisely about his living ankle, cutting him off. My poor mother maybe — in part — cut him off too efficiently, too early, faced it all too absolutely and too soon. During the war, I have been told recently, the Air Force wrote to her relations begging them to influence her to desist from writing despairing letters to her husband in North Africa. Wives were asked to keep cheerful, to tell good news, not to distress the men. She faced his loss, I believe her, and then complained of her lot. She said when he had died, bewildered and uncertain, “I had got used to it already, you see, I had got used to him not being there, all the time he was in Amsterdam.” She was explaining her apparent lack of feeling.

  The day of his funeral was bitterly cold. It was just before Christmas. It was a Quaker cremation, attended mostly by non-Quakers, who did not break the tense silence. I felt nothing, I felt fear of feeling, I felt the rush of time. Outside my mother was pinched and tiny and stumbling. I said, “I remembered the day he came back from the war.” “Yes,” she said, very small and vague. He came back at midnight, or so my mother always said. He had sent a telegram which never arrived, so she had no idea. She went furiously to the door and burst out “It’s too bad”, thinking he was the air-raid warden complaining about chinks in the blackout. What did they say to each other? I remember being woken — how much later? I remember the light being put on, a raw, dim, ceiling light, not reaching the gloomy corners. I remember the figure in the doorway, the uniform, the red hair, a smile as surprised and huge and half-afraid as I imagine my own was. I remembe
r him holding his officer’s hat. Why hadn’t he put it down? Or am I wrong? I remember even an overcoat, but I confuse the memory of his return hopelessly with his parting. The hair was less red, more gold than I’d remembered. He had a hairy ruddy-ginger Harris tweed jacket which my mother had always said exactly matched his hair, and which I still think of as “matching” it, though I saw differently and remember better. (And how to be sure with all the years of fading between then and that last cold day?) I sat up, scrambled to my feet and leaped an enormous leap, over my bed, over the gap, over the bed with my small sleeping sister. I don’t remember the trajectory of this leap. I remember its beginning but not its end, not my safe arrival. I do remember — this is surely memory, and no accretion — a terror of happiness. I was afraid to feel. This event was a storied event, already lived over and over, in imagination and hope, in the invented future. The real thing, the true moment, is as inaccessible as any point along that frantic leap. More things come back as I write; the gold-winged buttons on his jacket, forgotten between then and now. None of these words, none of these things recall him. The gold-winged, fire-haired figure in the doorway is and was myth, though he did come back, he was there, at that time, and I did make that leap. After things have happened, when we have taken a breath and a look, we begin to know what they are and were, we begin to tell them to ourselves. Fast, fast these things took and take their place beside other markers, the teapot, the horse trough, real apples and plums, a white ankle, the coalscuttle, two dolls in cellophane, a gas oven, a black and white dog, gold-winged buttons, the melded and twisting hanks of brown and white sugar.