by Jane Rogers
‘Mum – we might get the next bus, actually,’ said Ruth. ‘I mean, we were quite late last night and it takes forty minutes on the bus.’
‘You could stay the night,’ I said. ‘If you wanted. I mean, there’s plenty of sheets and blankets.’
‘It’s OK thanks, Mum. I’ve got to take my violin to school tomorrow anyway and it’s at ho— at Dad’s.’
‘Of course.’
‘You must be tired, with these two – you probably want to go to bed early too. Don’t worry, we’ll let ourselves out. See you.’
‘Yes, see you Mum.’ Vi not looking up from her magazine. They would be embarrassed if I kissed them.
The one that was crying had a full nappy, again. I changed it and got it back to bed. I could hear the radio still playing softly. But when I hurried back to the kitchen, the radio was playing and the light was shining in an empty room.
Wed. March 5
It’s still raining. The snow diminishes slowly. I’ve been here since Monday, it’s a quiet, comfortable place, although my room is cold. The dining room has ten tables but there are only four of us staying at present: a couple who are house-hunting and spend hours at the table poring over local papers, maps and estate agents’ notes – and a solitary, wretched-looking man, perhaps a salesman of some sort. There is a fire in the dining room, and I have taken to sitting by it after my meals, watching the coals collapse and the flames leap. My money will run out soon. There is £84 left of the £500 I took out before I left. I could take out some more, but I don’t think I will. She is only charging £11 for bed and breakfast and evening meal – and the petrol tank is nearly full.
I sat by the fire after breakfast this morning to drink my second cup of tea. The couple crackled their papers and muttered together, and planned their route of inspection for the day (they don’t look wealthy. I wonder if they are agents for someone else?) The wretched man messed with his breakfast then left it. I sat staring at the fire and sipping hot tea and when I next looked up the couple had gone too. It was nine o’clock but barely light outside, and the rain streamed down the window so continuously that it was as if we were submerged in some great river. I heard a slight noise and realized that the landlady was clearing the breakfast tables, very quietly and efficiently. She smiled at me then carried on with her work as if I wasn’t there. After a while (she’d washed up, I suppose) she returned with a bucket and cloth. She didn’t even glance in my direction this time – just made straight for the wide plate-glass windows at the far end of the room. Through the streaming glass there is a view of a small grey garden, the muddy rawness of a building site, and dim wet hills in the distance. She wrung her cloth in the bucket, and began to clean the windows. I think she had forgotten that I was there; she moved loosely, easily, with no self-consciousness. She is a big woman, tall and well built, with faded blonde hair. In her late forties, I should guess. She looks used to plenty of exercise. I watched her stand on tiptoes and reach to the tops of the windows, making huge rounds with her arms. Then she turned, stooped, dipped and wrung the cloth. She was wearing baggy trousers which were gathered at the waist, and a man’s shirt. She wasn’t fat but she had a rounded tummy – a clearly defined, rounded little pot belly, swelling under the gathered waist of her trousers – and heavy, slightly drooping breasts, outlined against the window as she raised her arm to sweep across. She reminded me of primitive figures of women, with round ripe bellies and breasts; childbearing women, symbols of fertility. There was something innocent and unashamed about her body, she did not try to disguise it, she did not care that it was not like a model’s. And the shape it had, came from the use it had been put to; it had worn to a comfortable shape.
A childbearing body. The children grew in it, I fed them. Even the twins grew in peace, were delivered safely into the world. Even though I was at my wits’ end, my body fed them. Went on making milk mechanically, knew what to do, despite me. Oh Sally, I’m sorry.
March 6
I’ve spent the morning reading all this. From the beginning – Sun. Feb. 2, when I first set off in the car, in the snow – till yesterday. A month of fun with Marion. I think it’s more than enough.
You haven’t finished the list.
No – but there’s no end to the list, that’s obvious now. It would go on for pages – for years, for as long as my life. Unless it is complete the list is a distortion, and the only way to complete it would be to write continuously.
The others are finished: David and Amanda, Alice Clough and Ellen, Leonie and Gary, Sally Clay. Their stories are complete. Thanks to me: I’ve sewn them up tight. Drawn significances, illustrated their beginnings, signalled their endings. I made their shape, I made them. Paper children, I made them.
Much more than my self-willed flesh-and-blood children. Poor paper children under my control. Fragile, tissue-thin, tear-absorbing children whose lives are confined within the white coffin-rectangles of the pages where I have set them down. I made them unhappy.
But in transferring pain to them, I exorcise it for myself. Isn’t that how it’s supposed to work? David loses the daughter he loves too much. Ellen Clough’s possessiveness destroys her daughter’s life. Leonie knows the only way to protect a child completely from an evil world is to kill him. Sally thought she was in control, and that motherhood is an instinctive state of grace.
Oh Marion! How neat! How sweet and trim as apple-pie neat. Nothing like someone else’s troubles indeed! What a ham. And the corners she cut! The sleights of hand she used. The bloody cheap tricks, the creaking scenery. Was Alice dead, at the end of her story? Where was she? What happened next? It doesn’t matter, says Marion loftily. Whether she was dead or alive is irrelevant, the story has made its point.
Oh yes? And when your story has made its point, my dear – whatever that may be – do you think it will matter to you if you’re dead or alive? Or will that be irrelevant?
And Sally; did she die? Anorexia is not easily curable, but if circumstances changed . . . Perhaps six months later she moved to a new job, and started an Open University course, and was so exhilarated by the change of scene and intellectual stimulation that she forgot to starve herself, and became plump, well-balanced and powerful. Or maybe a man (could even be he’s-only-a-sex-object-Alistair) was kind to her, and after a decent interval of time, discussed with her the idea of living together and sharing responsibility for a child in the time-honoured way; and she had a cheerful second pregnancy, and a lovely baby, and everything was fine. Until she fell in love with Alistair’s sister and he wanted custody of the child, and . . . and . . . so on.
Leonie. I can see her now, not dead, nor imprisoned, nor insane. She’s sitting with one of her grandchildren on a bench in the park, reading him a comic and feeding him Jaffa Cakes from her big tartan shopping trolley. They laugh together when a greedy duck flaps out of the pond and waddles across the path to beg a biscuit. She doesn’t put flowers on Gary’s grave. What’s the point?
All right then. Cheap tricks. False endings. Crude shapes. Where’s the good in it? What have you been doing, Marion, all the time you’ve sat with a pen in your hand and words uncurling methodically across the page behind it?
Making patterns. Exercising control. Rewriting the world so that its knocks are well timed and tragic. Instead of being so destroyingly continuous that they merely numb.
Lists are not tragic. Ruth and Vi and Paul and Penny and I, we are never at the end of the story, I am not allowed to grieve.
And when it is done, all over and done, and a story-teller, picking over the bones of my life, sees a clear pattern, a rounded story – then you will know (who will know? you’ll be dead) what a lie the story is, and how neat, and satisfying, and necessary are the lies of fiction, which impose order on the world, and punctuate it, and save us from these bloody awful lists.
Tell me a story. I told them stories all the time. From known starting points: Winnie the Pooh, Peter Pan, Red Riding Hood, Alice. All my stories were sequels. They lik
ed characters they knew, and so did I. Hop o’ my Thumb was a great favourite, all through one winter, only deposed by the Borrowers, who were just as small but pandered to their growing desire for realism (in detail, at least). I liked Hop o’ my Thumb, I liked him a lot. I still know his original story by heart.
Hop o’ my Thumb
Once a poor woodcutter and his wife had seven sons. They were all fine strong boys except for the youngest, and he was tiny – no bigger than his father’s thumb. So they called him Hop o’ my Thumb. His brothers used to mock him for his puny strength. ‘What use will that fellow ever be?’ they cried, and laughed till the little house shook.
The woodcutter and his wife were very poor, and one winter they could not feed their sons; there was not a scrap of food in the house. The couple sat up all night worrying about what to do, and at last decided to lead their sons deep into the forest and there leave them to their fate. ‘Anything would be better,’ said their mother, ‘than watching them starve to death before our very eyes.’ Hop o’ my Thumb heard that his parents were in serious discussion, and so he hid himself beneath his father’s chair and listened to their plan. Early next morning he filled his pocket with white pebbles from the path, and when the family set off into the forest, Hop o’ my Thumb dropped a pebble behind him every few paces. When at last the boys realized that they were lost, and their parents gone, they began to wail and cry. But Hop o’ my Thumb said, ‘Don’t worry, brothers, if we follow this trail of white pebbles we shall soon be safely home.’ And this is what they did.
The parents, in the meantime, had been repaid some money that was owed to them, and had been able to buy enough food to stock every shelf in the larder. Bitterly did they regret abandoning their children; each began to blame the other for so foolish a plan. How happy they were, when their sons, led by little Hop o’ my Thumb, arrived home safe and sound that night.
Clever little Hop o’ my Thumb, smallest of children, knew so much better than his parents did. No wonder the girls liked him. Hop o’ my Thumb at school. Hop o’ my Thumb gets trapped in the fridge. Hop o’ my Thumb and the pirate ship. Tell me a story.
Paper children. I used to play with paper dolls. There was a craze for them when I was a child; fold the paper, draw an outline doll with hands touching the edges of the paper, and cut around the shape. You need sharp scissors, to cut through all the folds. Unfold, and there’s a string of dancing figures holding hands. I became good at it, cut intricate hairstyles and frilly dresses, even cut little diamond patterns in their skirts. When I made a chain of them for Ruth as a toddler, she was delighted. I spread them on the table in front of her and she pored over them. Then she grabbed a crayon from her box and began drawing eyes and grinning mouths.
‘What are you doing?’ I cried.
She just beamed at me – it was a silly question. But my dolls had always had blank faces, I never drew on them. I couldn’t help feeling Ruth was spoiling them. It wasn’t what you do with paper dolls.
March 7
Ruth and Mum.
She had the first stroke when Ruth was thirteen. After a few weeks they sent her home. She’d lost the use of her legs but there was nothing they could do. Dad wanted to look after her, and the district nurse came in to give her baths. I took days, adding up to weeks, off work.
She didn’t know how to be an invalid. She hated it. I used to send Dad out – shopping, for a walk, over to see the neighbours – anything to get him out of the house for a break – and as soon as he was gone she would start.
‘I don’t know why you let me go on like this, Marion. If I was an animal, you’d have me put down. You wouldn’t let a dog live the life that I do.’
‘Mum,’ I said brightly, ‘don’t be so daft. Don’t talk so silly. You’re still alive and we’re all glad. What will Dad do if you die? You talk as if there’s nothing you can do – you’ve still got your mind, that’s the most precious thing – you can enjoy other people, read, watch telly – you can knit and –’
She stared at me with such contempt I did not know what to say. She was not afraid of death. Her bladder control was impaired and she used to cry when she wet herself. She couldn’t bear the indignity.
I tried being bright and cheery. I tried ignoring her. Then I shouted at her and told her to stop being such a self-pitying cow when we were all trying to help her and make her happy. I told her she was selfish and that she was ruining Dad’s life.
Nothing worked. We knew each other too well.
‘How would you feel?’ she said. I begged her not to kill herself, and she laughed at me.
I don’t know why Ruth first came with me. For a while I refused to take the girls because I didn’t want them to see her like that, to hear her saying those things. But one day, for whatever reason, thirteen-year-old Ruth came with me. I packed Dad off to chop some kindling, and got a brief progress report from him, outside the back door. When I went back into the house Ruth was sitting by Mum’s bed reading to her from an exercise book. I went into the kitchen to make a stew for Mum and Dad’s tea, and left the door open. It was a history essay about the First World War. When Ruth finished Mum said:
‘Don’t they teach you anything these days? What happened to English grammar? I suppose you’ve never heard of a split infinitive, have you?’ She went back over the essay correcting points of style and grammar – I heard Ruth interrupting her and standing up for her own version a few times. Then they started talking about the war. Mum was telling her about her father, Grandpa Poyser who I never met, who survived being gassed in the trenches when Mum was three years old. I finished making the stew, made a pot of tea, and took them a cup each. They were still chattering busily. So I took my tea outside with Dad’s, and sat with him on the step.
On the way home Ruth was very perky. She told me she had to do an oral history project, a tape of an old person talking about the past. She was going to use Grandma. She would ask her about the Second World War, or her education – or fashion, what did I think?
Next time I went she came with me and offered Mum a choice of subjects. They finally decided together on A woman’s place in World War Two, and Ruth interviewed her for hours. She found out about land girls, munitions factory workers, evacuated chidren, shopping and cooking on rations, clothing coupons and wartime fashions – a vast ragbag of information which took them days to unearth. A book was added to the tape; Mum made Dad go through trunks and cases to find old photos, recipes and newspaper cuttings. For two months, Mum did not talk of dying. One night on the way home I said to Ruth,
‘What are we going to do when this project of yours is finished, Ruthie? How are we going to keep Grandma out of mischief?’
She laughed. ‘Don’t worry, Mum. I’ll invent something else.’
When Mum died that summer it was clean and quick, the second stroke killed her outright. She was happily occupied writing her childhood memoirs, at the time, with pen and ink illustrations by Ruth.
Sat. March 8
The snow has retreated. Mainly thanks to rain, which sullenly washed it away over days; since Thursday, the rainfall has been interrupted by spokes of steely sunlight, which shine icily from a white sky into puddles, wet roads, sodden hills, and make eyefuls of splintered glass. The remains of the snow are dirty white patches which glint on moortops, and grey decaying mounds (which I have twice mistaken for dead sheep) by the roadsides. It’s done for, at last.
I went for a walk today, around the nearby reservoir. It is one of three flooding the valley between the moors; edged by a neat Waterways road and, to one side, a sloping hillside divided into empty faded fields. On the other side the ground rises steeply to the moor, with overhanging rocks and loose stone, sharp dark shadows. Leached of colour, the land appears dead, sparsely covered by sodden washed-out tufts of last year’s coarse grass. I walked towards the water. Most of the surface is still covered with sheet ice, but it is broken near the shore – it’s come adrift from the land. The sheets are cracked in places, and j
ostle each other uneasily on the moving water.
Near down by the shore, there is a continuous sound of ice tinkling. I tried to think what it sounded like: windchimes, tiny bells, the noise icicles would make if tapped together. But what it sounds most like, of course, is what it is: lumps of ice chinking together and melting in liquid. A thousand well-iced glasses of gin and tonic simultaneously raised and gently swirled – the clear tinkle of cube against cube and cube against glass. All across the reservoir, and amplified in the clear still air of the valley, the edges of the ice floes are cracking and exploding as they melt, in a wide chorus of gentle chinks and tinkles. The ice is singing.
At the farther, more sheltered end of the reservoir the sun is bright, the ice-tinkle distant. Small waves lap brightly on the shore. There is a steep man-made slope down to the road below, and a flock of sheep stand motionless in the sunshine, each one fixed to the spot by a small dark shadow falling to the left; as if some careful child had glued them in place, and left a pressure thumb print.
I shall go home. That is, back to the twins. For the following reasons (and let me be clear about this, clear-eyed and certain that there is no self-deception involved):
Because there is no alternative.
Because I am tired of driving about, and staying in other people’s rooms, and having my meals cooked for me.
Because the twins are my children. Ruth and Vi were instantly precious, and then so burnished and gilded by my love that their value became terrible. I wouldn’t change that – even if it was wrong, even though it was wrong. I’ll pay for it. I must, as best I can, make precious the twins. Dare to make them something terrible to lose. There is no alternative. The alternative is emptiness – nothing.