Giving Up the Ghost: A Memoir (John MacRae Books)

by Mantel, Hilary

  Sheffield University’s law faculty was housed, in 1971, in a former maternity home, with ramshackle partitions and makeshift corridors. The students seemed dull, hostile, and pitifully young; they were my own age, in fact, but I felt I had different experiences and was older. They were afraid of their teachers, and before tutorials they stood in rigid knots outside closed doors, waiting, tension building between them; those rooms, full of the awe and anticipation of women’s pain, were now darkened by juvenile dread of donnish sarcasm. But “donnish” is pitching it too high perhaps; one of my tutors was a bored local solicitor who made it plain that he didn’t think women had any place in his classroom. They were just a waste of space; they’d only go and have babies, wouldn’t they?

  Some people have forgotten, or never known, why we needed the feminist movement so badly. This was why: so that some talentless prat in a nylon shirt couldn’t patronize you, while around you the spotty boys smirked and giggled, trying to worm into his favor. The birth control revolution of the late sixties had passed our elders by—educators and employers both. It was assumed that marriage was the beginning of a woman’s affective life, and the end of her mental life. It was assumed that she neither could nor would exercise choice over whether to breed; poor silly creature, no sooner would her degree certificate be in her hand before she’d cast all that book learning to the winds, and start swelling and simpering and knitting bootees. When you went for a job interview, you would be asked, if you were not wearing a wedding ring, whether you were engaged; if you were engaged or married, you would be asked when you intended to “start your family.” Whether you were celibate, or gay, or just a sensible preplanner, you had to smile and jump through the flaming hoops held up for you by some grizzled ringmaster, shifty and semi-embarrassed as he asked a girl half his age to tell him about her sex life and account for her next ovulation.

  My transfer to Sheffield University was not as smooth as I had hoped. On paper, my first and second year fitted together. In practice, they didn’t. While the LSE was occupied in wrenching its first-year law studies into some sort of social context, Sheffield was sneaking in extra property law, under the guise of legal history. I found myself at sea, both baffled and bored. My fellow second-years mostly intended to be solicitors. They were going into daddy’s practice, or into their uncle’s. I got into trouble by claiming mischievously that jurisprudence was all an elaborate bluff and that legal language was cognate with magic. “Sign your name here or make your mark: pronounce a formula: abracadabra, you are man and wife. I put on a wig, I indict a scroll: abracadabra, your marriage is dissolved.” If you are right, said my tutor heavily, I suppose we may as well all go home. He stood up and clasped his arms behind his back, and looked out of his window, melancholy, toward the distant hills.

  All the same, Sheffield was a good place to be if you were a student. The townspeople talked to you at the bus stop and in the shops, and they didn’t seem to have any money either, so you could buy cheap cuts of meat and bargain tins and sustaining fresh loaves hot from the oven. Do you realize, I would ask my boyfriend, that at your tender age of nineteen, you both run a car and keep a mistress? The car was the product of his summer working in a factory that made cardboard boxes; his hands sliced to pieces, but pound notes stacking up. The car’s laboring engine often jibbed at Sheffield’s steep hills, and gaping holes in its bodywork were patched with a substance called plastic padding, but it hauled us across the moors to see his family; we made the trip often, as his father was sick. I cooked for us every night at my lodging, an attic room in the house of a kindly, absentminded divorced woman who didn’t mind that two of us were trooping up her stairs.

  There were two electric rings in my room, one for our carbohydrate of the day—pasta, rice, potatoes—one for our meat or fish. We were ingenious cooks, and sat smiling over our yellow Formica table, as our dinner bubbled and simmered; I would be shivering slightly, because the only means of ventilation was an open window that admitted the piercing wind. One day, as I was hauling a great bag of potatoes uphill, my landlady stopped me at the gate. Her brow was furrowed. “Ilary,” she said, “why are you doing this?” I dumped my bag at my feet, and smiled up at her, bent double, massaging my carrying arm. “You should be going out,” she said.

  I flew out of myself, saw myself through her eyes: a small pale child with cropped hair, wearing a coat outgrown by one of her younger brothers. “It’s all right,” I said. “Don’t worry, I’m fine.”

  I never quite understood what this was, this “going out.” What was the gratification in it? It seemed to me, generally, just a polite prelude to sex; if you’ve got beyond politeness, why get dressed up and go off into the cold? You have a person you want to be with, who you’d rather be with than be on your own; isn’t that, by itself, a sort of fiesta? As for the grocery shopping: I liked to be able to say we ate well, that we stretched our small amount of money as far as a proper meal every night. There was nothing left over. And besides, I was trying to feed us up, trying to pad us against the disaster to come. That was a dark winter; the miners were on strike, and there were long cold hours without electricity. On a January night, we were called home, and the expected death occurred.

  My boyfriend’s father was called Henry. He was fifty-three, a professional man, wry and studious, a father of five. In summer he was a well man and in September he was sick and the following January he was dead: cancer. A year later, to the day, my grandfather would die of the same disease; more winter journeys, over the dark Pennines, to stand about in hospital wards while screens were drawn around beds. But we were married by then, and living in a rented room over a garage, a jerry-built extension with a leaking roof; and when we returned from the funeral, we found that the cracks in the wall had grown wide, and that an aggressive black mold had grown on our food and on our clothes.

  Married, why? Because in times of disaster, it’s what you do. When families are destroyed suddenly, you pick yourselves up and glue yourselves together to form new units. More practically, and immediately, we married so that we could spend the night together, so that he did not have to roll out of bed and roll home over the midnight cobblestones; even the kindly divorcee, thinking of her two growing children and their moral development, would not let me have a man in the house till dawn. We had tried to find a place together, in anticipation of our marriage, but the landlords demanded certificates from the university, endorsements, and validation on oath to say that we had really truly booked the priest and the registrar. They wanted no fornication among their Formica, they were not about to yield one curling inch of their old linoleum to the mad young seeking to gratify themselves. In mouse-dropping hallways we pleaded our purity of intent. But the faces were stony with rectitude: no room at the inn.

  Yet not everyone was hostile to romance. Some comfortable soul could always be found, in those days, to recall, “They say two can live as cheaply as one.” Can they? My family fell out with me, and didn’t fill in the forms for my subsistence grant. So we were about to find out if the saying was true.

  Seventy-eight Roebuck Road was a back-to-back house; that is to say, it was one room deep, with a cellar, a room, a room on top of that, and an attic. It had one cold-water sink, a shared outside lavatory, and a single metered gasfire. Even the hardy cockroach gave it the go-by, but a darting population of creatures we used to call “silverfish” lived in the old chimney breast; they were harmless, I said to my husband, we used to have them at Brosscroft, they’re okay, not dirty. I counted Roebuck Road as one of the greatest pieces of luck ever to come my way. We had not been able to afford the room over the garage: still less, the extra we might have been charged for growing the black mold. One of my tutors—a woman—had told me about a cheaper prospect; her cleaning lady lived there, but was moving on to something grander.

  No. 78 was the cheapest house in the world. We had to go right across town every fortnight to pay the rent, but the car took us, and even we, having paid the rent, could affor
d to eat. My grandmother gave us a water-boiler to hang over the sink. My new mother-in-law gave us a cooker and some furniture. We slept on a sofa that flattened in the middle and so made into a bed. We couldn’t get the stately family wardrobe upstairs, so it stayed down, its fine mirror reflecting the flickering of the silverfish as they busied cheerfully about their lives. I made stews, pies, cherry cakes, chocolate cakes, and chocolate cherry cakes. I answered, as law students do, my weekly “problems,” in the set legal language, and each week turned out essays which were simply a more prolonged exercise in sifting and shuffling the same chary formulations. I complained that law was wrecking my English style, which had been sturdy by the time I was sixteen, a little oak tree: that it was teaching me to equivocate and hedge, to stick to the literal and to lower my intellectual sights.

  I complained I had a pain in my legs, and I went to the doctor: and that was my big mistake.

  Writing about your past is like blundering through your house with the lights fused, a hand flailing for points of reference. You locate the stolid wardrobe, and its door swings open at your touch, opening on the cavern of darkness within. Your hand touches glass, you think it is a mirror, but it is the window. There are obstacles to bump and trip you, but what is more disconcerting is a sudden empty space, where you can’t find a handhold and you know that you are stranded in the dark. Each day I was taking, though I didn’t know it, a small step toward the unlit terrain of sickness, a featureless landscape of humiliation and loss. At Roebuck Road, the stairhead was dark; and some previous occupant had pinned, on the blank wall you saw as you descended, a poster with an owl on it. It was a child’s owl, a simple and almost a cartoon owl, not less baleful for that. I wanted to rip it down, but I couldn’t reach it.

  Letters from the Inland Revenue arrived, tax demands addressed to a “Mr. Judas Priest.” These made us laugh. I set out my aspirin, one two three four five six. I swallowed them. Once, in error, I picked up and almost swallowed a shirt button, lying on the table waiting for me to sew it on.

  “Sick?” said the doctor, down at the Student Health Service. “Throw up? I’m hardly surprised. You do know that taking six aspirin is no more effective than taking three?”

  I didn’t. As it was double any ordinary pain, I’d thought I could double the aspirin. We weren’t very sophisticated in those days. I don’t think we even had paracetamol. I had a big bottle of a hundred aspirin, and I used to take whatever number I thought would get me through the day.

  “Well, Miss—” said the doctor. He glanced down at his file, and a little jolt shot through him, as if he were electrified. “Mrs.?” he said. “Mrs.? You’ve got married? Pregnant, are you?”

  I hope not, I thought. If so, I’ve overdone it with the aspirin. It’ll have fins. Or feathers. Three extra aspirins, three extra heads. I’ll exhibit it. It will keep us in luxury.

  “I’m on the Pill,” I said. An urge rose in me, to say, we are sexually very keen so I take three pills a day; do you think that’s enough? But then a stronger urge rose in me, to be sick on his shoes.

  I can see him, now that the years have flown; his crinkly fairish hair sheared short, his rimless glasses, his highly polished brogues. He was a nervous man, and when I bowed my head toward his feet he shifted them under his desk. I wasn’t sick, not there and then. I put my hand across my mouth, and went outside, and threw up in the Student Health Service lavatories. It was quite a luxurious vomit, private and well lit. At Roebuck Road, our facility was shared with next door, and you had to plow down their garden to get to it, so that at night dogs barked and householders with their torches came out shouting, “What’s all this?” and you were caught in the cross beams, your loo-roll in your hand.

  I went home. “What did the doctor say?” my husband asked.

  “He said, don’t take so many aspirin. I said my legs ached and he said it was accounted for by no known disease. Except one called idiopathic something-something.”

  I didn’t say how I had grinned, when he said “idiopathic.” I knew it meant, disease about which we doctors have no bloody idea. So he had bridled, and swallowed the rest of the medical term; he wasn’t, anyway, entertaining it as a possibility, he was just boasting, showing he remembered his textbooks. And my smile called his bluff; I shouldn’t have smiled it. He was not on my side now. I thought that probably he never had been.

  Go back, said my mister, grimly. You haven’t really told him. How tired you are. And how upset.

  I was upset, it was true. I couldn’t bear my smashed relationship with my family. That my brothers should think badly of me. That I should have no money to buy a present for Father’s Day, only a bag of toffee, and nothing to give for Christmas but a box of biscuits and a bottle of wine.

  That I had money to give even these was because of the intervention of a bureaucrat at County Hall in Chester, where lived the authority who paid (or not) my maintenance grant. For my visit I composed myself into pliant, pleading mode. We went to Chester by way of the grumbling, grunting, plasticpadded car. I went to see him in his office, the necessary man, the bureaucrat who was on my case. I explained that my father hadn’t signed my forms to testify to his income. So therefore, he said, I could get no grant, not even the fifty pounds that every student got, even the rich ones: for those were the rules. I know this, I said, but you see I shall just have to sit here till the rules are amended in my favor, because if I don’t get some money from you I’m out of house and home.

  I don’t remember his face, only his office, his desk, his chair, the slant of the light. He left the room. I studied his carpet, on which I had sworn I would be sleeping: unless I slept on his desk. It was a warm, blossoming, summer day: perhaps I could sleep in a flower bed? Sunlight rippled on magnolia walls. He came back smiling. I have got you fifty, he said, and let’s see, hereafter, maybe it can be worked—there are always some strange circumstances …

  Perhaps he was an angel. Perhaps a mortal, but one of the elect. I’m praying for him still, in a wild agnostic fashion. Hoping he wins the national lottery: I pray some irregular prayer like that. Or that he’d come to see me and I could make him a pie or a cake.

  Go back, said my husband; tell them how you really are. Here you go, said the doctor, scribbling me a prescription; I think what you need is some antidepressants. I was depressed, so I knew it made a kind of sense. Twenty-four hours later, I found I couldn’t read; print blurred before my eyes. I went to the university library and tried to look up the side effects of the drug, but I was laboring under the obvious handicap. In those days, pills didn’t come with a patient information leaflet. Your doctor had all the information you needed, and whether you could get it depended on whether you had pull, face, and cunning. I had none of these.

  I went to see my tutor in Equity, and said, look, Mr. Loath (it wasn’t his name, I didn’t say it, it was just what the frightened spotty boys called him), look, Loath, I’m coming to your next session, but don’t harass me, right? (Really, of course, I spoke to him much more nicely than this.) Loath, please understand that I’ve been prescribed some necessary drugs that mean I can’t read my books. Blurred vision. Side effects, I said. Under my breath: you must have heard of side effects? Loath gave me a puzzled look, as if he’d never heard of any such thing.

  I tried some other tutors. I was asking for a week’s grace, or perhaps a fortnight’s, to audit my courses but not take part. Their reaction was all the same: why was I telling them this? The medical textbook (if I’d read it right, squinting, aslant) suggested that the blurred vision would last only a week or two, whereas the course of drugs lasted six weeks. Six weeks, in clinical practice, was the term set to depression; six weeks was a cure. After that, I was sure, I’d be happy. Never mind who was dead and how. Never mind how few the coins in my purse. I’d be up with the lark, and rejoicing with the wrens: I’d be skipping up the hills of Sheffield, my pains vanished, my joints springing, swinging my bags of potatoes and self-raising flour as if they were feathers, as
if I were self-raised myself: and scattering my careless laughter to the winds. For the time being, though, my spirits had sunk. The drugs seemed to be having an effect, but not the one required. The pangs of bereavement, of estrangement, had given way to a dull apathy. My sleep was broken and the climate of my dreams was autumnal, like the dim leaf-mold interior of a copse; their content was exhausting and yet somehow banal.

  A day or two later, Mr. Loath presided over his tutorial: the pasty, sweating, spotty boys, one other girl, and me. A small question of criminality was raised, and Mr. L. got testy: come along, come along, he said, do you know the maximum penalty under the Theft Act, do you, boy, or next boy, do you? I had to speak up and spare the boys from their humiliation; oh, Mr. Loath, I said, is it not ten years? Mr. Loath, fuming with frustration, was just about to snap the arm of his spectacles; his fingers relaxed, and “Thank goodness!” he said. And just as he replaced his glasses on his head, a pain sliced through me, diagonal, from my right ribs to my left loin. It was a new pain: but not new for long. It stole my life: it stole it for ten years and for a double term, and then for ten years more.