by Barbara Vine
In the interests of observing signs I invited them in for coffee one Saturday morning. James had been staying here since Thursday evening. We went into my favourite room, Verity’s study. Like the drawing-room (Verity’s name for it) and the unused dining room and several bedrooms, it is full of books. Books on the shelves, books in the cabinets, stuffed in double in places, one row pushed to the back and another two in front of it. James picked up Adam Bede, which was lying face-downwards on the table, glanced at it, turned a few pages, and said he wouldn’t have the patience to read anything like this.
“The way he goes on and on, paragraph after paragraph and page after page. Description and dialect—bores you to tears.”
I said, “He was a woman.” I was shocked because I thought everyone knew that, and James is a published author himself. But shocked at myself too, for speaking so scornfully. I was still trying hard to like him.
“Why call himself George then?”
“Because she was more likely to get published than if she used her own name.”
“Wasn’t that dishonest?”
In spite of the way I spoke, I didn’t want to quarrel with him, so all I said was that that was an original way of looking at it and had they had breakfast? Would they like something to eat?
“No, thanks, Sis.” Andrew had taken up this unusual and old-fashioned usage when we were children. “We’ve both got hangovers. Coffee is fine.”
James stared. “Sis? That’s amazing. I’ve never heard anyone say that before.”
I managed a broad smile, but my eyes, I fear, remained cold. Still, I was determined to like him come what may and, once they had gone, return to the novel James Derain, the novelist, thought was written by a man. Verity, quoting from somewhere in the Bible, used to tell me not to sit in the seat of the scornful, so I resolved not to be scornful or scathing even in my thoughts. So back to Adam Bede (telling myself that James’s mistake was one even an intellectual might make), and it occurred to me as I read that nowhere does George Eliot actually say that seventeen-year-old Hetty Sorrel is going to have a baby. Hetty has been seduced by Arthur Donnithorne, and this we also must assume. All we have been shown happening between them is a kiss. Hints are dropped, a great sorrow weighing on poor Hetty is talked of, but that she might be pregnant is never mentioned. No doubt James would call this dishonest, but those of us who know anything about Victorian prudery are aware that the author dared not refer directly to the unmarried Hetty’s pregnancy if she wanted her novel to be published or if any publisher dared accept it. We only know of the baby’s existence when Adam is told it is dead and Hetty is on trial for murder.
We are supposed to be in 1799, but George Eliot was writing in the 1850s, and the moral attitude hadn’t changed much if at all. Before I started on Adam Bede I had been reading a paper on a school in Cheshire specially started for young mothers aged fifteen or younger to go back to school and take their babies with them to work for their GCSEs. It is a world away from Hetty Sorrel. The concept of disgrace and shame is utterly gone. In George Eliot’s day, unmarried pregnancy and birth was all about disgrace and shame, as it still was halfway through the twentieth century. About punishment and endless retribution also. I start checking on detail in Adam Bede once more, and I’m wondering if Hetty even knew she was pregnant, if living on a farm hadn’t taught her that what happened between her and Arthur might have this outcome. But, no, if girls weren’t told how they might get pregnant, would they make any connection between themselves and a cow coupling with a bull in a field?
At least all this had distracted me from Andrew and James. I picked up Adam Bede. Only George Eliot could make me—or anyone else, I should think—actually approve of a man such as Adam Bede’s marrying a Methodist woman preacher. We don’t dislike and despise him for it, we certainly don’t cast up our eyes because he’s married this woman who is also the choice of his difficult, old mother. There is even some guilty relief that now he can’t marry poor little Hetty because she has been transported for her crime. I wondered what Trollope would have made of it all. He has at least one illegitimate child in his fiction, but she is a rich, well-connected woman whose life led to a happy ending. I have moved on now to Fanny Robin in Hardy’s Far from the Madding Crowd, another poor girl whose impending “confinement” drives her to some sort of sanctuary in the workhouse; she nearly gets married but goes to the wrong church by mistake. But it is she that Sergeant Troy loves, not Bathsheba Everdene, whom he marries. And a lot of good that love does Fanny when she dies, alone and wretched, in childbirth.
I made a calculation of when the condemnation of “unmarried mothers” ended. Easy to know when it began: the distant past, since for ever, since marriage came into being—marriage that men did their best to avoid and women dreamed of and struggled for. But when did society stop ostracising these girls, even praising them and encouraging them to go back to school with their babies and plan for their futures? The conservative Christian culture of the fifties kept many women from premarital sex, but this changed with the coming of contraception that worked: with the pill. I fix on the mid- to late sixties, much the same time as homosexual activity ceased to be a crime.
My saying this, quite innocently, because we had been talking about the possibility of civil-partnership legislation’s being extended to same-gender couples, led to a row between James and me, that quarrel I was determined to avoid. I didn’t foresee this—why should I? Besides, I was trying to like him, to step down from the seat of the scornful. I had a little fantasy about that, seeing it as a cumbersome armchair that I put up for sale on eBay, nasty old antique that it is. So, having got that out of the way and trying to establish a friendship between him and me, I invited them to dinner. I was quite a good cook in that I dared to make things that are supposed to be culinary challenges, and tonight we had a cheese soufflé followed by a lamb dish with aubergines, vaguely Greek, which I knew Andrew enjoyed. James ate his without comment. They had brought the wine, a bottle of white and a bottle of red, and I resolved to drink it or drink one glass of it, supermarket plonk that it was. That the wine wasn’t good hadn’t surprised me because that was what they drank all the time. Not for want of cash. James was rich, independent of his book sales. I think he had a wealthy father.
I showed them The Child’s Child, which Andrew, of course, had seen before and James knew all about through the connection with his great-uncle, and because they were particularly apposite, I told them about its two themes. That one of those was close to the subject of my thesis was a useful coincidence, and we had moved along to the cheese when James asked me, quite pleasantly, how my research was coming along. That led me to telling him about fixing a date for unmarried motherhood’s ceasing to be shameful, and that date’s being roughly coincidental with homosexuality in private’s no longer being illegal.
James said, quite roughly, his tone changed, “There’s no comparison. Sending men to prison for being gay was outrageous, an affront to their human rights. Your girls just got looked down on by a bunch of old women.”
I said no one had ever heard of human rights in 1967, and as for “my” girls, they suffered comparably. If gay men killed themselves from fear of discovery, so did young women dreading disgrace.
“No girl went to jail for having a baby,” he said.
“But they did,” I told him. “Or the equivalent. They were sectioned and put in mental hospitals, called lunatic asylums then, for nothing more than having a child without being married. Some remained in them for years.”
“I’ve never heard that. That can’t be true. It may happen in these novels you read, but not in real life. Tell her about Wilde in chains on Clapham Junction station, And.”
So that was what he called my brother. “He’s told me,” I said. “Anyway, I knew. Believe me, I’m not saying gay men didn’t suffer terribly, I know they did. I’m only saying that women did too.”
“No, you’re not.” James filled his glass so full of pinot noir that it o
verflowed. “You’re doing what women always do, claim an unfair share of the world’s ills. Victims, as usual.”
“James,” said Andrew quietly.
“No, it’s not ‘James.’ You needn’t defend her, she can look after herself. Those girls of hers had only to put on a wedding ring and they’d be all right. Men were ostracized, attacked, killed. My great-uncle—the one the book’s based on—was blackmailed, outlawed. He lived in daily fear of discovery.” He was looking at me now, ceasing to talk as if I were not here. “That thesis of yours in making some sort of tie-up between the Act of 1967 and women taking the pill is an insult to all the men who suffered. Plenty of them are still alive, they’ll only be in their sixties. It’s an outrage to them. Luckily, it’ll never be published, or not where any of them are likely to read it.”
Andrew had got up, fetched a cloth, and mopped up James’s spilt wine. Andrew is more sensitive than I am, maybe I should say more tender, and his face had gone red. The hand that held the cloth was trembling. He was in love with this man, he must be, and I was appalled.
“Perhaps we should change the subject,” I said for my brother’s sake.
The seat of the scornful hadn’t been sold but had become a throne for James. “Obviously, you would like that. You’ve got yourself into a corner and this is your only way of getting out of it. Change the subject. What else can you do?”
I said that I could leave the room and would. Andrew said, “No, Sis, no. I don’t know how we got into this. It’s ridiculous. Please stay.”
In a mocking, rather high-pitched tone, James said, “Please, Sis, stay. Please don’t go.”
He sounded like a kid of five, not a grown man. His face had gone purple and I realised it was with rage. This meant an awful lot to him. But I shrugged and went. Down the passage and into the kitchen. I put plates into the dishwasher and washed up Verity’s silver by hand, listening for sounds from the dining room. What I was really listening for was footsteps crossing the hall and making for Andrew’s living-room or his staircase. It must have been years since I’d had a falling-out with my brother. I thought the last time was when we were children. After a while I heard those footsteps and laughter. It was James’s laughter, only James’s. A door slammed and I decided this was the last I would see or hear of them for the night.
I cleared the dining table and started the dishwasher. That was when I remembered the last time Andrew and I had a row. A table in another house, the house we grew up in, and Fay had gone to answer the phone, leaving all sorts of remains of delicacies behind. Andrew started picking at them, eating them, hunks of cheese and half-eaten pots of crème brûlée, slices of pineapple, and I was hissing at him to leave it, not to touch—other guests were in another room—and I grabbed his hand, the hand that clutched a slice of some exotica, a spoonful of damson cheese I think it was. Twelve-year-old Andrew started to cry and Fay came back, exasperated, shaking her head.
That was eighteen years ago and he didn’t cry anymore, though he was still a lot more vulnerable than I was. Still, tonight I was the one who was tender and sensitive, partly because I felt that quarrels, if they must happen, should be about personal matters, not near-political things. It made me think that this one might have been deliberately engineered. It was a fine evening, a nearly full moon shining. A walk round the garden might have done me good, made me feel calm and taken away my resentment. Like all the gardens around, ours was large and dense with trees and shrubs, a lawn like a green island in the midst of them. And because the walls between were overgrown with ivy and creeper and clematis, they were not like separate gardens but formed one great estate, the grounds perhaps of a big country house.
I wouldn’t need a coat, it was still too warm for that. I walked down the passage to the single glass door that led to the garden—Andrew’s part had French windows—and as I put the key into the lock, I saw him and James walk from under the trees onto the lawn. The moon was quite bright enough to show them to me. James had his arm round Andrew’s waist, and as I watched, he placed his hand round Andrew’s head, drew it to him, and kissed him deeply. Abruptly I turned away. I go to the farthest point in the house from the garden, the study, where all those books were. Somehow I knew, and I didn’t like it but was powerless to do anything about it, that Andrew would bring James here to live with him.
BY THE age I was then I ought to have known the truism that things always look different in the morning. As the night comes on and the deeper it gets, the more mad we are, the more prone to dreadful fears and fantasies. In the morning, not when we first wake up but gradually, things begin to look unlike what they looked like at eleven, at midnight. I don’t suppose this rule applies in the case of a terrible shock or a tragedy’s striking, but nothing like that had ever happened to me. I didn’t have presentiments either, I didn’t have a sense that something bad would happen later in the day or something good. But I could present to myself the event or sight or words uttered that so upset me and look at them in a new way. I had, after all, no reason apart from a kiss to believe that Andrew would ask James to live here with him, and I couldn’t even know that he was in love with James.
Next morning I was due to see my supervisor to talk to her about the progress of the thesis, see what she would say about including real cases in the nineteenth century of women’s giving birth outside marriage or if I should concentrate solely on contemporary fiction.
Andrew came in, looking not so much awkward as sad. “I’m sorry about last night, Sis. I’d have done anything to avoid it.”
I said that I knew he would, and his face was just as it was eighteen years ago when I grabbed his arm and a lump of damson cheese flopped onto a white lace table mat. He was not crying, of course, not quite.
“You see, James feels very intensely about what gay people went through. He feels it personally. He had this uncle, or great-uncle maybe, whose friend hanged himself because he was gay, and he’s got a friend, a very old man now, who was sent to a mental home for aversion therapy. They showed him pictures of gay porn and gave him electric shocks if he reacted—well, if he got excited by them.”
This only reminded me of those poor girls sent to penitentiaries and put to harsh domestic work for nothing more than being pregnant outside marriage. But there was no point in saying it aloud. “It’s all right,” I said, though it was not. “It’s over.” And then I asked because I had to know, “Is James going to come here and live with you?”
“Would you mind if he did?”
“Your half of the house is yours and my half is mine. You must please yourself.”
“You’d hate it, though, wouldn’t you?”
He did that a lot, told people how they felt when he didn’t really know. He did it to me, our mother, Fay, and her partner, Malcolm, and no doubt he did it to James. I told him I wouldn’t hate it (not true), but that he should think carefully before he asked James, and then I felt I’d gone too far. I was not his mother or the wife he would never have.
“I’ve done that, I’ve thought carefully,” he said, but he didn’t tell me the outcome of these thoughts of his. He had to go to work if he was to get in by ten. He’d scarcely gone when I heard James’s footfalls pounding on the staircase and the front door slamming as he went out. He slammed it so hard that the whole house seemed to shake.
CARLA, MY supervisor, cautioned me against letting too much reality creep in. If I could find a case that closely parallelled, say, the experience of Fanny Robin when she goes to All Souls’ church instead of All Saints’, where Sergeant Troy is waiting to marry her, I could use that or briefly refer to it. There was probably a case Hardy heard of, and I might try finding it. Otherwise, I should go easy on the social work and the case histories.
My head, rather against my will, was full of James Derain. Although we both knew it was a possibility, we had never, Andrew and I, talked about the possibility of lovers moving in with us. The house was left to us, and we were a brother and a sister who got on well together.
We were so excited about it, so pleased, that we shifted our stuff in without thinking much, without considering the possible pros and cons. We had both had boyfriends, but Andrew had never shared his flat with anyone. I had shared a single room once but only for a few months, it had not been a serious relationship. If James was going to live in the other half of Dinmont House, I knew I must make a superhuman (if necessary) effort to get on with him. If I examined my behaviour honestly, I can say that I did little, if anything, to antagonise him, and it looked to me as if he was one of those gay men who disliked women, all women. I had never met one before, but I had heard of them. I knew they existed. They were the antithesis of those whose closest and best friend is a woman and one of whom they are often fonder than they are of their current lover.
I delayed going home. The sun was shining, it was lovely in Regent’s Park, and I thought of walking all the way home by way of Primrose Hill. When I was a child, I used to think of Primrose Hill as being the seaside. I was standing in the sea or just on the sand and looking across the hill itself, the green rise such as English coastal resorts have, with beyond it that long terrace of tall houses like Brighton or Eastbourne. But I wasn’t standing in the sea, I was sitting on a seat on the Outer Circle. It would take me a long time to walk home and be uphill all the way, and I know I was putting it off in case James Derain was there. I heard him go out, but that was three hours ago and he might have come back, Andrew might have given him a key. I told myself that I couldn’t live like this, that yesterday I was happy or at least content, and now I was letting myself be driven out of my own home by a friend of my brother’s I hardly knew.
Instead of walking across Primrose Hill, I walked to the 24 bus stop and was turning into our street when I saw James in the distance. My instinct was to hide from him, cross the street, even just bend down to take a stone out of my sandal, but of course I did none of this. I advanced on him and he advanced on me, and he was charming, all smiles and how was I and wasn’t the sun wonderful. Then he said he was sorry for last night, he always got aggressive when he drank too much, it was a problem he had to “address.” He and Andrew had been drinking before they came and that was something he would have to stop. Could I forgive him?