I shook my head, wondering at the perversity of nature. He scooped out the clothes from the dryers into my ready arms, and my body warmed as I held them, through my ribs from front to back; my legs still ached with an old singing pain, which could not be, surely—could not by now be growing pains? I imagined the sun, the balcony, the scarlet flowers spilling from their pots; the torrid world of the curtains, when the curtains were drawn. Could we go there, I said? I don’t mind anywhere really, somewhere hot or somewhere cold, jungle or tundra is all the same to me. Somewhere else.
A big question of Jack’s was this: why are women always smiling? Look at them, he would say, pointing to the television screen. Smile, smile, smile.
Jack banned Shakespeare and mashed potato. Shakespeare was a subject, not a person. It was an unfortunate prescription of weak-minded women schoolteachers. It was an exam subject and could be tolerated if kept between the covers of my Complete Works, but it was not permitted to leak out into the real world—it should not be viewed on television, and especially not when it clashed with the wrestling. Shakespeare, when it occurred, was on the BBC. Wrestling was not. The BBC was bunk.
Potatoes should be chips or plain boiled in big chunks. It was forbidden to squash your potato surreptitiously with the side of your fork.
I was in trouble for sitting too close to the fire, “pretending to be cold.” I was in trouble for being a girl, for being thirteen, for being fourteen. All my behavior seemed to anger him, just by the fact of being behavior: but silences, absences, were also a provocation to him. I have heard of fathers who said their daughters would grow up to be whores, or hairdressers. Jack said that I would grow up to be a lab assistant. This would be my fate if my math didn’t improve. It didn’t seem to occur to Jack that I might have a career outside the sciences; perhaps he didn’t think there was one. There were only little jobs that women did: smile, smile, smile.
Life was a hair shirt to Jack. Like me, my mother claimed, he had been forced against his natural grain. His youth had been an unhappy one; his father had deserted his family and Jack had been forced too early out of education and into a job, into earning money for his mother and his younger sister. Given his choice, she said, he would never have been an engineer; he would rather have been an artist. Forgive me, I would say under my breath, if I’m a little skeptical here. What would Jack say if he saw any signs of artistry in me?
Yet we had never forgotten his big success. I had been nine, maybe ten, when Jack’s article on physical culture was published in Health & Strength, when the letter of congratulation came in, “Yours, Oscar.” His article began in this way: “PC is the Aunt Sally of the sporting world.” I thought that a dashing turn of phrase. I experimented with its meaning. Probably only someone London-born, like Jack, would know anything about an Aunt Sally. Was it a target everyone threw at? At some Cockney sporting fair? Was a target not a legitimate aim? Was Sally some doll you knocked over? I turned it about and about. Ilary is the Aunt Sally of the sporting world. Sally is of the sporting world the Ilary. Jack got a book from the library, called Teach Yourself Freelance Writing. It had a black-and-yellow jacket; I turned it over in my hands, I looked into it. I read all his library books, though they were usually science fiction. Use good grammar, it said; be original. My mother’s books were historical novels, their contents sometimes quite louche. I thought I could write a book, from the commandments I’d acquired: use good grammar: be original: be historical. I wrote a few lines of my projected book. Disconcertingly to me, it was in dialogue, but I didn’t know who was talking, or quite where; it seemed to be Belgium, but I didn’t think they had Belgium. Flanders then? It was definitely a seaport; I could hear the gulls, and see a man in dark garments lurking on the steps of a church. I said to my mother, Henry VII is interesting. No he’s not, my mother said.
I said, I like the imposters you see, the pretenders to the crown, I could write a book about that, except you can’t have a book about someone called Perkin Warbeck; that’s a bit of a blight on the whole thing, you know, a hero called Perkin? But I thought I would like to have a book on the library shelves with my name on its spine, its plastic cover bubbling, the corners of its pages broken, yellow, thumbed. When I was fourteen, I was loosed at last into the adult library, given six tickets of my own to choose what I liked. A library lady followed me, trailing me around the shelves, smiling and offering to help. “You may find it bewildering,” she said, “so much choice!” I gave her a furious stare, edged away pointedly. For two pins I would have knocked her flat to the dusty parquet.
Unlike the doctor, Jack didn’t name me. Once I had been Ilary, but after I was fifteen or so he called me they. “They always do this,” or “they always that,” he would sneer. I felt as if I were a survival, a relic, a small squat subject race, whose aboriginal culture was derided; like the Welsh, for example, a nation for whom Jack had no time at all. Suppose you had grown up speaking Welsh, but now its use was prohibited. Even if you were obedient, if you were too scared to break the law, you would go on having Welsh thoughts, and the powers-that-be would always be scrutinizing you, for evidence of subversion on your face. When you were silent, they’d be looking for clicks of your tongue and contractions of your jaw, to see if you were dissenting. They’d be listening at doors, to find out if you talked in your sleep.
Jack liked the people around him to be in the same frame of mind as he was. So if he was tense, injured, and gloomy, you would be in trouble if you went calmly about your business. If he was in the mood to be jocular, the whole household must sit before the TV set and roar at some low comedian. I kept out of the TV circle, and stayed in the dining room with my homework. He said, “They never laugh.”
I would shut myself away and write history essays, derivative in content but of formidable length and grubby appearance. The pen called Swann moved as if it were writing on water; you wrote, and hardly felt the grain of the paper. But the use of Swann was many years behind me, and we were not big on office supplies when I grew up. When I was sixteen I wrote in leaking and blotchy Biro, a hundred pages of black bad handwriting, the quarto sheets held together—for want of staples or paperclips—with embroidery silk that I picked up from my mother’s offcuts: coral, fern-green, the scarlet shade of the tip of butterflies’ wings. The silk looked grimy after I’d twisted it up with my inky fingers, after I’d carried the pages about for a few days, scuffling footnotes into place and scratching second thoughts in the margin. Truth isn’t pretty, I thought, and the pursuit of it doesn’t make pretty people. Truth isn’t elegant; that’s just mathematicians’ sentimentality. Truth is squalid and full of blots, and you can only find it in the accumulation of dusty and broken facts, in the cellars and sewers of the human mind. History’s what people are trying to hide from you, not what they’re trying to show you. You search for it in the same way you sift through a landfill: for evidence of what people want to bury.
There was tension in the air of our house, like the unbreathing stillness between the lightning and the thunder. In this space I went to and fro, clutching my essays with their slipping knots and scattering pages. Thin and pale, with long legs and a long fall of colorless hair, I was impeccably suited to my era, though the sixties were late in coming to the north. The girls at school were always combing through their biology textbooks to find something wrong with me. I was hyperthyroid perhaps, or anemic. Envy was the name of their disease.
Those were years of financial struggle for my family, and strange expedients to make money. Appearances had to be kept up, and our history suppressed. People now will ask, what’s so wrong, what’s so difficult about running away and changing your names? But there were big problems in that era, especially if you only ran away for about eight miles: even if it was eight miles over the county boundary into Cheshire. In provincial England at that time, if you didn’t want trouble you had to be like everyone else. If for some reason you weren’t the genuine article, you became a pretender, an imposter; imposting not for a d
ay or a week, but simulating as a profession, simulating as a way of life. If you were living with someone you weren’t married to—even if, and especially if, you were still married to someone else—you called yourself just a regular family and hoped people bought into your fictions; but at any time a person who knew better might come along and explode them. My brothers remembered little or nothing of their early history. Jack brought them up and Jack was their father. They were English, without religion, and without a Hadfield accent. Because I was enrolled at a convent school I was nominally a Catholic, outwardly conforming, though all—even Top Nun—knew my views. After my bad time in the secret garden, my mauvais quart d’heure, I stopped believing in an omnipotent God; I believed in him as a pretty conceit for a year into high school, but I didn’t credit him with much pull, and after I was twelve I didn’t believe in him at all. And as my great-uncles and great-aunts died one by one, I lost my consciousness of being Irish. The Hadfield accent never completely shifted, but it was my long memory that was the problem. The past could not be knocked or pulled out of me. It seemed to be knitted into my nervous system; I recalled conversations from long ago, even conversations I had never heard. I was troubled by dreams of alien but familar cities, by mental pictures that were insistent but unresolved. A man in dark garments lurks on the steps of a church.
As the decade wore on and my family became established in its new life, I felt like a death’s-head at a feast. Henry, my father, might as well have been dead; except that the dead were more discussed. Perhaps my mannerisms recalled him, as an unwelcome ghost by the fire: the clerkly droop of the head, the habit of reading a book as if your eyes were hoovering the words from the page.
He was never mentioned after we parted: except by me, to me. We never met again.
After my first week at the convent, I went home to my mother, worried. “Big girls at school,” I told her, “ask me why I’ve changed my name.” (Eight miles: a county boundary: Catholic gossip permeates civic barriers, runs freely between parish and parish, an underground polluted stream.)
“Tell them,” she said, “that it’s for private reasons.”
I tried out this turn of phrase: private reasons. “Oh yes,” the big girls said. “We understand that. But we want to know what they are.”
Once you have learned habits of secrecy, they aren’t so easy to give up. That is why this chapter is shorter than it might be. When I was growing up, my stepfather, Jack, lived in an emotional labyrinth through which I could not begin to follow him. I knew a bit of his story then, I know a little more now; it may be, though, that what I think I know is misleading, and now is not the time for it, and here is not the place. Jack was a person who was loyal to what he believed; in those years, his mind was never changed. Facts in which he had faith were invested with great emotional weight—facts indeed were judgments, and if you knew a contrary fact you had better keep very quiet about it, since mere possession of it was an offense. Even when he was wrong he was right; that was the arrangement. His status as father and wage earner gave him a moral rightness that was separate from accuracy or even likelihood. He was right because he was entitled to be right.
I learned from Marx how the brute facts of economic interaction underlie our notion of human nature. I wished Marx would come for his tea and bring Engels, and that they would sit and squash their potatoes and see how far they got.
When I was eighteen I left home to go to the London School of Economics. My course was law, and my burning desire for equity made me peculiarly unsuited to the subject.
Show Your Workings
By the time I was twenty I was living in a slum house in Sheffield. I had a husband and no money; those things I could explain. I had a pain which I could not explain; it seemed to wander about my body, nibbling here, stabbing there, flitting every time I tried to put my finger on it.
When I packed my bags for London, at eighteen years old, I went to live in a women’s hall of residence in Bloomsbury. It was a haven of warmth, calm, and order. My university course was engrossing, and it was taught by lawyers and academics of stature and reputation. I got involved in student politics, in meetings that dragged on toward midnight. I didn’t think it was a waste of time; student politics at the LSE had at least some crossover with the real world. The school was mostly postgraduate, and cosmopolitan. Whatever foreign event made the news, there was someone who would tell you about it, explain the background from their own experience. The rattling, downat-heel, overcrowded buildings pleased me better than any grassy quad or lancet window. And I was doing well; my tutors were beginning to talk to me about where my interests lay, about how I might like to specialize, in my third year. One of them invited me into his office, which was the size of a modest broom cupboard, and said, go in for constitutional law, constitutional and administrative, you’ll study under Professor Griffith; that’s my strong recommendation to you. How do we delimit authority, where do the powers of the state begin and end? My path seemed to have taken a new turn; it seemed I was a step or two from success. I hugged myself and thanked my tutor, but I walked away thinking, third year, third year, by then I won’t be here.
There are times in life when the next, clear, logical step seems one you can’t take at all. I found it difficult to see myself completing my course, and emerging as a grown-up London person on the verge of a career. I seemed to have less money than other people. I had the state grant and—in theory at least—the small yearly contribution that my parents should make. I schemed to do without that contribution, to spare them the expense, but my schemes didn’t work. The hall fees took a huge slice out of my grant and left me with little room for incidentals, but they covered heat and light, breakfast and supper; in between came a pot of yogurt. In my second year, I was aware, I would not be able to stay in hall and would have to find somewhere of my own to live. Any place I could afford would be well outside the city center, so I would have to budget for fares, instead of walking everywhere as I did at present. In those days, students didn’t generally get term-time jobs to supplement their grants; your course demanded your full-time commitment. Intermittently through my first year, I worried about this, and about something more serious and long-term. I wanted to be a barrister. How was I to do this? The facts of life pressed in on me. I was female, northern, and poor. My family would not be able to help me through my postdegree studies, or my pupilage—that is to say, the barrister’s apprenticeship. Women barristers were then in a small minority. A few brave women from unhelpful backgrounds had crashed the system. I had assumed I would be one of them. But now my resolve was undermined. I was acquainted with the facts of life, with some unpromising arithmetic. Also, I was in love.
I had known this a while before I came to London, but by the time the calamitous fact was admitted, between myself and the boy who was in it with me, we had already chosen our universities, and secured places at different ends of England. He had just turned eighteen, I was six months younger. We couldn’t do anything about the parting that loomed ahead of us, but we had decided to be married, whenever it looked possible: sooner than that, if by any mischance I became pregnant. When we had a daughter, my lover said, he would like to call her Catriona; would that be all right by me? I was very happy about it. We were both admirers of Robert Louis Stevenson. Kidnapped was really our favorite, but we couldn’t call our daughter David, or name her after Alan Breck. She’d have to be named for the sequel.
Like all my contemporaries, in those first years when the contraceptive pill was widely available, I only half-believed I could coerce my body, and suspected that it might have some filthy tricks in store; but the filthy tricks would be on the line of putting a baby in your arms before you were ready. I assumed I would be able to have Catriona at a time of my choosing. I didn’t know she would always be a ghost of possibility, a paper baby, a person who slipped between the lines. It’s a pity we didn’t like Travels with a Donkey. There’s a good name for a ghost: Modestine.
In our year apart
my boyfriend and I wrote to each other every day. There was a hiatus when the postmen went on national strike; I don’t think it was to protest at us personally, though some of the letters were very weighty. In later years, we carried the correspondence about with us, in a plastic bin bag, but when we first went to work abroad we threw it away. After all, we were planning never to be parted again.
Though I was happy in my London life, I looked forward with a sick intensity to his arrival for weekend visits. He had to be smuggled in, and kept like contraband in my room, my roommate quartered elsewhere and. a whole corridor of girls sworn to complicit secrecy; it was like Malory Towers, but with sex. When the girl along the corridor had a boyfriend stay with her, the fire alarm rang in the small hours, and I met her among the crowds on Malet Street, two hundred girls turned out in their night attire into the winter cold. Her face was white, her eyes were staring; “Where is he?” I whispered, and she hissed, “I put him in the wardrobe.”
The expense of traveling, the logistical maneuvers required, the wear and tear on the nerves, meant that the visits had to be well spaced out. And gradually, I realized that my world was changing. Light and color were draining from the streets, and even spring didn’t restore it. The gray ache of absence was too much to bear; why bear it, if it could be remedied? I thought it could. By early summer, when my surroundings had taken on the chewed, grainy monochrome of crumpled newsprint, I went to the university authorities to put my case. Did they think I could go up to Sheffield, and continue my course there? My boyfriend couldn’t come to me, I explained, because he was studying geology, and geology isn’t portable. He had already chosen his mapping area and walked it at weekends, and it was easier to move one law student with a suitcase than to relocate a massive chunk of carboniferous limestone from the Peak District, four square miles of rock swarming with corals, nautiloids, and the ancestors of starfish.
Giving Up the Ghost: A Memoir (John MacRae Books) Page 14