Undersong

by Kathleen Winter

  Was that womanliness? Or might womanliness mean when I went to Germany with Wm & kept our fire going whilst we both translated German to make pennies? The cold unbearable, & neighbours refusing to believe we were brother & sister, not man & woman living together unwed. We had no language, no friends, & no real fire, as I was—I must face it—a terrible fire-keeper, most unwomanly.

  Is womanliness in my love of flowers? In my naming of them, my lying in grass on the soft earth who is, herself, womanly? But no—I left off naming, or I named wrong, or I concentrated on nameless curves, pistils, trumpets. I concentrated on a most unwomanly, piercing blue, for my favourite flowers were blue & they had about themselves something merciless.

  Or might I have become womanly through having looked after enough children of other women, when those women were away or ill or indisposed? Certainly like you, Mary Lamb, in your mothering of young Miss Isola, did I not mother my little Basil when Wm & I were still a couple? Taught him to read? Gave him jam & bread with cream? Did not suckle him with my breasts but lo, how could these small breasts suckle a whole child? I am such a small person! Still, some sort of woman, & not a man. Nobody has suggested I am a man.

  Womanly, then, how?

  You could say I have roasted a few chops so the fat glitters & drips & makes mouths of men water like crazy mouths do when they foam with lust.

  Or you could say that when Sam Coleridge & I stood under the hanging birch bough gemmed with frost, I wore a bridal veil studded with heaven’s jewels if there be a heaven, & Sam did not deny I was womanly, for if he had denied it, he would be denying the times we were together with ferocity, though frozen not hot—we had a frozen burning. But a frozen burning is perhaps not the womanly evidence for which I search.

  I have a bosom, a bonnet, a lump of cheese in my pantry to share, a tart whose edge I crimped with my thumb, & that crimping extended the flesh of my thumb into the pastry of the tart before baking, so that the pastry itself was like a piece of my flesh—Here, this is my body to be broken for you. This is my flesh for you to share. Eat it in memory of me.

  No, apparently that is not womanly either.

  & Whatever all the things might be that I have outlined, doesn’t there always loom a time when they become defunct? A time of war, a time of men chasing their own fame, a time of famine or plague, a time of catastrophic cold or storms? When the details of womanliness, or all details whatsoever, become a thing of the past, or an extravagance, or—& this one is very womanly I have been told—a frill?

  Eye-skin. Endless intrigue—I have descended into the kaleidoscope. There is a hole leading to a staircase leading to an intricacy of streets with pieces of every colour glass you can name—pea-green, turquoise, garnet or gold—pieces of glass & when you come close you do not need William Withering’s optical glass but can look through the transparencies with your bare eyes. Naked flesh has nothing on the naked eye-skin.

  Naked flesh is fat & bread, lard & bun. But the skin on the eye is so thin as to be made of fish skin from the depths of the ocean. Eyeball membrane separates me from wonder & the separation is unmeasurably thin, thinner than glass or even than new-formed ice in November on the Lake’s edge.

  Thinner than thought itself is eye-skin, & who has ever peeled it or looked through it except the medical experts, the surgeons & body-thieves? I have my own eyes to look through in the streets of London with Mary Lamb. Together we name for each other the things we see, & what we see is not what our brothers see! The kaleidoscope is a gift for a young girl who already knows what we know but has not named it. Emma Isola, if only Mary Lamb & I’d had mothers as you have in us. We would have trusted far sooner the visions we saw through our own eye-skins.

  The gaping give-mouth in our skulls.

  Mary Lamb is older than I am & she is completely porous when feeling my situation or anyone’s. Her sympathy knows no bounds if she chooses to award it, & if she does you had better say yes. For Mary Lamb’s sympathy has saved me.

  I do not think she gives it to everyone, or that she could if she desired, because it takes something from her, much like the spark they say Christ felt depart from him once touched by a woman in a crowd. But Mary Lamb gave me more than the Lamb of God ever gave that woman in the book of—what book was it? I do not remember those books. That woman in that book did not then go on & proclaim her joy from the rooftops but here I am, writing down exactly what transpired for me when I had my fortnight with Mary Lamb—ostensibly to get my teeth renewed—but in fact to renew my whole Self, through the power of Mary Lamb’s own experience. Her womanhood. Her descent into what they call madness. Her murderous past, her matricide, & most important—two blessed weeks uninterrupted by the male members of our families.

  Her first instructions came before my teeth were pulled & replaced. Why, I asked her, have I become exhausted in this perpetual & enervated manner that means I drag myself around like seven stones of flour in a sack?

  The reason, she said, is the very gaping give-mouth in our skulls, whose openness is a perpetual asking of what we can do for everyone in the house, even when they have not asked us. It is the controlling force behind our every move on behalf of the mother, the father, the husband, the brother, & any baby or child in our sphere. What, asks our gaping give-mouth, do you need, & how may I present it to you? & there we go, walking miles into the village or the town, stooping to pick things dropped on the floor or the ground that might be in the way of our family members or of value to them. Moving this package here & that bottle there, this burden here & that burden there, carrying like a donkey every little scrap & morsel whether it is a jar of milk or a broken heart.

  We carry it all, says Mary Lamb, & we carry it down the miles & when we sleep, or so-called sleep, there we are, still carrying gingerly so as not to lose or drop all that requires carrying in our beloved families. So that by the time we are fifty as you are now, my dear Dorothy, you are left with your giving gape-mouth hanging on its hinge ready to wail with tiredness, & your shoulders are tired to the bone, & you are tired to the bone, yet what do you do but keep going, for you do not even realize you are tired, only that you hurt in a blinding way.

  Blinding, yes, I said to Mary Lamb, for my vision itself is getting blurred at morning & at night with increasing labours & I cannot read as much as I should. I am losing my reading.

  Reading, she cried! You wear your eyes out mending the shirts, all the little stitches for everybody, sewing not only their garments but their broken souls, sewing their weary thoughts with your comforting words but never hearing the one sentence that would quell the bleeding lining of your own perception.

  & when Mary Lamb said the bleeding lining of your own perception I did not hesitate to know what she meant. For inside me is a layer like wet silk that lines my brain & heart & bowels & if I am honest it has a wet silken twin that lines my womb, & that one—that one!—has never been attended to. I told Mary Lamb this & she said yes, this is why you have to do as I say whilst you are here with me, while you wait to have your jaw renewed with its teeth & its hinges & its sadness that runs deep as oceans.

  I don’t know—it’s as if someone whilst I slept peeled my skin off so I awaken all of a sudden skinned & raw with no knowledge of how I became thus. I look at the hills, & they have nothing to do with me but have turned their backs. Their shoulders are blue & their faces are turned against me. No hope of comfort there, best turn to the trees—but no, the trees also have become uninterested in me. Something has changed their sympathetic leaves which no longer contain green blood but are dry & swish like threshed hay, the green gone out of them & a greyness greeting me instead. Granted this happens more often in August than it does in winter or early summer.

  Is it the late summer, then, that gives me this merciless feeling as if I am nothing to any of the beloved hills & fields that once held me in their regard?

  I wake raw & peeled & bleedi
ng. My emotions have all run to the surface of my limbs & they writhe there in agony like orphaned worms. The sky glares down at me with a merciless blaring blue. Where is the beloved & merciful rain? Where is mist or fog? Why am I caught in the lamp of the sun’s stare, as if the sun wanted to witness me curling up & burning with arid fever?

  But I lie. It can happen at any time of year. In the tenderest April shower or the newest froth-greened baby birch half-leafed bowers, I can be this spectral lone wolf, this animal caught in mid-howl with a cold grimace for a face & a blind sleet-storm for tears, & no reason for any of it. No reason but being a crazy lonely soul with its skin peeled away & its muscle, blood & nerves pulsating purple & blue & garnet like a monstrous wound bound by a membrane thin as a berry’s skin—oh but a word will puncture it & my blood will obliterate my world.

  If only I were that lucky—if only I could end everything with a needle-prick. I would do it—it would appear like a sewing mishap or simple kitchen accident…She was one minute dressing the fowl, & the next, the tip of the blade merely pricked her thumb & she burst like a ripe fruit in the centre of the kitchen, & was whole no more, but shattered & scattered & spilled so that every bit of her became formless—there was a pool where our Sister once stood.

  This is what happened in Mary Lamb’s mind only it was her mother she pricked & the pricking was not small or incidental but massive, a slaughter. So it was not the same. Yet—if I could simply end my life by seeming to cut my finger with the point of the meat knife or the embroidery needle or the darning awl, then nobody could fault me & nobody need know about this torment I feel, this peeled, raw state that comes upon me in which I feel the cruel ache of having to move & stand & walk & be alive among other living beings, who do not seem to feel these torments at all. Except Mary Lamb, whose raw agony is even more excruciating than my own. In fact, my own, next to hers, becomes insignificant, & that is what makes being with her a relief.

  I wish I knew what causes the peeled state with its unbearable harshness. If it were aloneness then I would simply try to spend more time in company. If it were feeling overwhelmed by social demands, why, I could easily plead a headache or bad bowels—god knows I often do! If it were simply too much glaring sunlight I could stay in the shade of a willow or rest behind curtains like the lovely curtain Mary Lamb hung at my window during my convalescence there. But I sigh with incomprehension of my own self, for any of these things might set me off the wrong way one day yet bother me not at all the next. I do not know what it is that causes the light or the darkness to overtake me.

  When it is at its worst I cannot even grieve or cry—my chest & throat & eyes become encased in a leaden shield. I go around like this for days or even weeks, not knowing what caused it or why it started, though I can always pinpoint the moment at which my joy departed…& then—a moment later & who can tell when it might happen—joy flies back into my body exactly like a wild bird that has been away & flown back of its own sweet accord!

  I wish I could beckon it somehow when I feel ready to give up, when my body becomes immobilized, my legs wooden & my fingers dead, & my mind unable to remember the idea of any kind of future, let alone a beautiful one.

  At home at Rydal of course I do not tell anyone this. I do not tell Wm, who would medicate me.

  & I certainly do not mention it to our wife Mary, who would admonish me—who would say—who has said—For heaven’s sake, woman, rise above it! Every woman’s throat has a burning coal stuck red-hot in it. If we patiently endure as we should then the coal will eventually behave itself. The coal will tinkle & dwindle to grey & settle into words we can share with the people around us as if they were normal words. As if they had always been normal words & not a wild woman’s incendiary wails—is what our wife Mary would say. Not out loud, of course. Never out loud.

  Is London a dream?

  Or is it real? I never know!

  I dreamed not once but many times that I travelled its lanes, the back lanes behind the grand displays are the thing, places that begin in a narrow passageway then beckon with colour & sound just around the corner. A shout, a scrap of garment hung to dry, white that contains all colours or blue reflecting in a white garment from the sky above all the soot—blue filtering down or mauve filtering up from the shadows.

  All the lanes, the little ones, the little busy ones, there they start all narrow & they last long & blossom out as if into fireworks, or the bloom at the end of a stem, or the fantastic scene at the end of this, the toy we found for Emma Isola—yes, your mother’s friend has not forgotten it. But it is not a toy, inasmuch as every grownup in London has one in his hand & peers into it for dear life, to escape this world & join the indescribable glories of heaven.

  I say I dreamed my London walks & I did dream them. I dreamed them in Grasmere & in Germany & I continue to dream them as I grow old in Rydal. For each night once my eyes shut upon the spangled fields where Dixon drags me in our cart, upon what should they open but sister-gems of the city! I doubt I only dreamed London’s most beguiling streets. Yet I think—though I’m strangely never sure—that the most tantalizing, the mistiest streets, faint or lurid in equal measure, all jewel-clash like Emma Isola’s new toy—the purest streets, the most dreamlike alleys with the best stories or fragments of tales—those I did dream. I walked them with these same feet that strode the Lakes.

  I love London, when I am in it, every bit as much as I have loved my country home with all its flower gems, its lake-shimmer, its diamond crowns sparkling in hidden places, its cascades of silver, falling water. The city is all this & more once I am in it. It is only when listening to Wm that I forget & believe it dirty or fearsome or a place in which I might get lost. Listening to Wm you would think we were a pair of fragile & new-hatched swallows unable to stand a smudge of chimney smoke or eat a Cheapside bun. Maybe Wm is that fragile.

  It’s wonderful how I can roam the streets invisible. A man lords it over a woman but once in the streets of London, hark! He is constantly seen as a mark—offered companionship or wagers or the latest swindle-toy or defunct pocket-watch—or offered nothing but the unseen hand filching from his trousers soft as a feathered bird that has no bones. Yet a woman past fifty can walk the streets for an hour & be seen by no one at all. As if by magic, she is unseen like the wind itself, known only by other women her age, for we see each other with special eyes that live all over our bodies.

  Yes our bodies are covered in sensitive eyes.

  Some of the eyes see in the way normal to ordinary eyes: they see form & hue & can read signs or tell when a thunderhead looms. But our other eyes can do all sorts of things. They can smell, only it is not a nose-kind-of-smell they know, but a sharp curling of the air from a doorway or back lane—we know if someone is being hurt or maimed or loved in the shadows—& some of our eyes can hear, only it is not an ear kind of hearing—it is more as if our skin has scales like tiny herring scales except these are old woman scales, yes, we have them all over our skin & all we have to do is adjust them like miniature sails in this direction or that, & we can sense any sound through six walls, through an earthen roof over a work cellar, through a bell tower high over St. James’s Street. And lies!

  We have eyes lining our throats like keyholes, & where are the keys but in the raindrops or songs of street starlings & the keys tell these, our throat-eyes, all sorts of songs-of-the-day, such as how long it will be before anyone notices us noticing them, which is very long—in fact months & sometimes years or even forever.

  We can, & this is the part Mary Lamb & I most enjoy in our fleet-footed romps around London, we can stare into the faces of all & sundry & we can, with our combined old-woman bodily eyes, read the fortunes therein, all the woes & waiting, all the hurt & betrayal, all the hope & lust, all the forlorn aloneness, all the greed or very occasionally greed’s opposite which is a pouring-out of love so great no one but we can discern its end, for it has no end. This is so
mething we see in the hardest places, where women older & more invisible than ourselves sit by themselves thinking no one can see them at all.

  We can stare all we like, with all our eyes, at all these things, & nobody knows.

  Our age & sex have drawn over each of our heads, Mary Lamb’s & mine, & over the heads of any women like us in age or sensibility, a silken cowl.

  The late, great Antoine Lavoisier, shouts Mary Lamb, finding his name in the Gazette after our egg bun, for they were comparing his discoveries with those of a new genius named Faraday. Dorothy, do you remember Lavoisier’s most famed finding? Rien ne se perd, rien ne se crée: tout se transforme. Ha! I could have told the world that the moment I turned thirty. In Nature nothing is lost, nothing created: everything transforms…She shoved the paper in her bag to show her brother when he came back from the prize fight. She still showed Charles everything as I used to show Wm.

  When we turn thirty, according to Mary Lamb, we become old in the sight of men. Then in our forties our blood runs like the gore of slaughtered pigs & each step squelches in a red flood & our bodies become suddenly changed—on some ordinary Wednesday our arms become someone else’s arms. Our faces become those of our fathers. Our sense of smell alters. As a small person I have always smelled the ground as my nose is nearer it than Wm’s nose. But now I sniff deeper in the ground & in the air high above it, for scents have whirled into a vortex whose point is attracted to my nose. Sardines! Earth! Feces! Carnations! Peppery & coppery or stinking of sweet, rotting fish—all of London inhabits our noses.