My Name Is Echo

by Marguerite Valentine

  My Name Is Echo

  Marguerite Valentine

  This edition published by Sideways On Publications 2017

  www.margueritev.org

  First published in 2016 by SilverWood Books

  Copyright © Marguerite Valentine 2017

  Contents

  Part One

  Part Two

  Part Three

  Part Four

  Part Five

  Part Six

  Part Seven

  Also by Marguerite Valentine

  Acknowledgments

  About Echo

  About Marguerite Valentine

  For all those women whose courage, humour and endurance against adversity remains unacknowledged.

  I have gone out, a possessed witch,

  Haunting the black air, braver at night;

  Dreaming evil, I have done my hitch

  Over the plain houses, light by light:

  Lonely thing, twelve fingered, out of mind,

  A woman like that is not a woman, quite.

  I have been her kind.

  ‘Her Kind’ – Anne Sexton (1928–1974)

  Part One

  I started off as an Echo. That was the name my mother gave me but it was a long time before I knew why. After all her name was Phoebe, not Narcissus and besides, that would have been too obvious. Maybe she didn’t know herself, but whatever her reason, once I knew, I had to change it. What we’re called is important and I didn’t want to be an Echo or an echo – if you get my drift.

  Growing up is hard. That’s why people write and make films about it, but for some, like me, it was worse than hard. It was excruciating. My mother used to say girls, and by that she meant me, are moody. More moody than boys? Who knows? Who cares? I’m still moody despite reaching my mid-twenties, so no changes there then.

  Thinking about my life, things began changing in a big way from when I was nine. From then on, every summer we’d leave London to spend our holidays in Wales in a farmhouse with a group of surrealist artists. The farmhouse was in a tiny hamlet called Ffridd on the Welsh side of the River Severn, not far from Chepstow. My mum’s interest was in surrealism, especially female surrealist art, and this became a major influence while I was growing up. During those Welsh summers I developed a different take on reality, as in, there’s no real in reality; it doesn’t really exist. I put this down to having been surrounded by her arty friends and listening to their conversations.

  My mum said she found her artistic inspiration there, but she wasn’t a real artist. Her actual job was teaching Classics at a posh girls’ school in Hampstead. Apart from that, she liked the weird and wonderful which is maybe why others found her fascinating. I didn’t. Not while I was growing up. She constantly gave me grief; for nothing usually, and, the older I got, the worse she got. She’d take one look at me and then she’d start. We both should have been awarded a George Cross; her for sniping and me for survival under enemy fire.

  The first summer we stayed in Wales, Philomena, one of the artists, told me how to get to the river estuary. I remember that place vividly. It was so different from London. I used to cycle there. I loved the loneliness and silence, the absence of colour, the mud, and how its flatness merged into the sombre sky so you couldn’t tell one from another. It was another world and until I left London I didn’t know such places existed. It was eerie. I rarely saw anyone and only the occasional cry of curlews broke its quiet solitude. It was in the tidal range of the River Severn and someone told me that the river had the second largest rise and fall of water in the world.

  This captured my imagination. I would dream of the river swallowing the fields and land, rushing into villages and towns and pushing inland into the woods until eventually the waters would recede, leaving the creek, lonely and isolated, with only the mud, the reed beds and the birds for company.

  The creek felt like the beginning and the end of the world and I took to visiting at dawn or late evening. The changing light made it more mysterious and I loved being there by myself. I’d listen to the bird song and the wind sighing and stand in the reeds and watch the movement of the tides and the thin, brackish water slide and swirl through the reeds. Sometimes I’d wait and watch the water creep over my shoes until it was almost too late. Then I’d run, I’d run fast before the waters swept me out to the sea far away.

  My mother didn’t like me going there. She said the tides were dangerous and that the water could move fast, faster than I could run, but I didn’t listen. I didn’t believe her and even if I had, she couldn’t have stopped me. But that was a long time ago and it’s all different now. They’ve built another bridge since then. A long elegant bridge, one that’s upriver and stretches between the two countries of Wales and England and carries an eternally restless line of cars and lorries throughout the day and night. I don’t mind because it means my creek and the woods around will stay secret forever and I need solitude now, as I did then.

  My mum had found Ffridd through reading the back pages of the London Review of Books. It’s where people advertised for relationships, places to rent, and courses to attend. I was with her when she first spotted it. She read it out to me. It was a short ad and it said the artist owners of a renovated Welsh farmhouse were looking for two temporary tenants over the summer. It said personality and an interest in the arts were the most important qualities but also paying the rent reliably and regularly would be regarded positively. My mum thought that meant they wanted somebody unconventional – but not so they forgot to pay the rent.

  There was an interview for prospective tenants. That was strange. After all you don’t normally get interviewed for a holiday, but then everything about them was strange. I remember my mum saying the wording of the whole advertisement was a contradiction in terms, but it didn’t stop her. She went right ahead and wrote back. She was intrigued. The idea of living in Wales over the summer appealed to her and she was determined to get out of London during the holidays.

  And because I was still young, I had to go with her. She wasn’t in the habit of consulting me. Usually I did what I was told to do, although you’d never think that, the way she carried on. The woman who’d placed the ad was called Philomena and her partner was Gareth and they were both artists, although in a different way. Philomena was a photographer and painter and Gareth a poet. He was introduced to us when we went for our interview, but other than that most of the time he kept out of our way.

  When Philomena got to know my mum, she told her, who later told me, they had an open marriage which was apparently alright with her. They both had a rule not to bring their lovers home so maybe that’s where he was when he wasn’t writing – making love to someone else. He was always busy. He seemed pleasant enough, although at first I found him uninteresting.

  Amazing really, when you think about it, how feelings change. When I got older, say from about the age of fourteen, I found him anything but uninteresting. I’d found one of his love poems which he’d left out on the kitchen table. Philomena was out and it was obvious the poem wasn’t about her because of the way he described this woman. He’d called the poem ‘The Girl in the Flowered Dress’ and once I’d started it, I had to read it to the end. It was so beautiful, so romantic, so full of yearning that it made me wonder if he’d made her up, because she sounded so wonderful. Almost too good to be true. But, made up or not, from then on this poem made me look at Gareth in a new light and I began observing him.

  Eventually I came to the conclusion that although he looked normal, underneath he was seething with passion and that, together with being unfulfilled, was what drove him to write love p
oetry.

  I noticed he didn’t smile much. His face was craggy and lined as if he’d suffered – like most poets – and he had intense blue eyes and long wavy brown hair which he brushed away off his wide forehead. He wasn’t very tall but well proportioned and how he moved reminded me of a flamenco dancer that I’d seen once at Sadler’s Wells. He had that kind of powerful body and a primal energy and I’m saying that because one of our teachers had a thing going for a flamenco dancer and that’s how she talked.

  After spending many hours night and day secretly watching him, and trying to find out how old he was, I concluded he was very attractive in a poetic, shambolic kind of way. However, and unfortunately, due to circumstances beyond my control, hormonal, some might say, this interest in him eventually transformed into a full-on obsession and chaos ensued.

  His partner, Philomena, was, in contrast to this imagined woman in a flowered dress, larger than life both literally and metaphorically. There was absolutely nothing mysterious about her. She was who she was, nothing more, nothing less. She was a big woman and seemed mostly to wear one of two outfits, although once I did see her in a type of cruise ship outfit as if she were an extra from a forties black-and-white film. Usually she wore baggy blue linen trousers which she never ironed and only occasionally washed and these were always worn with a sun-and-sea faded pink drill top, the kind members of the boating fraternity wear. If it got cold this was exchanged for a navy, oiled-wool, sailor’s sweater. She always wore those utilitarian Birkenstocks on her feet, which I thought were particularly hippy and unattractive and when the temperature dropped she put them on with striped socks. That was how she dressed for her art work.

  Her best outfit was a large flowing dress made out of ruby red velvet. She wore this barefoot when she (and sometimes Gareth) had supper with their friends in the house or the garden. It must have taken yards of material to make that dress, and she’d wear it with stunning jewellery handmade by one of her friends. My favourite piece was an emerald-and-amethyst butterfly but she didn’t stop at that for decoration, she’d wind a paisley scarf round her light brown hair, art nouveau style, and finish off the outfit with jangling, Celtic-designed, silver bracelets on her arms. Despite her size, she was scarily and exotically eye catching. Her voice was also gravelly or vulgarly rough, depending on your point of view, and that was because she’d smoked a lot and over the years this had coarsened her voice. She could be as noisy and raucous as her geese, and had a laugh that could strip off wallpaper. My mum hit it off with her straight away.

  When we went for our interview, she’d asked my mum if she had a memorable painting, one she particularly liked. My mum told her she had, but this could change any time. Her current favourite, she said was ‘Eine Kleine Nachtmusik’ by an American woman called Dorothea Tanning. I noticed Philomena look startled and asked why she liked it. I was alarmed about how she’d answer because my mum had shown it to me and talked about it before, so I already knew what she thought. The painting was seriously weird. I didn’t want her thinking we were mad because then we’d never get to be Philomena’s tenants and after seeing round the farmhouse, I’d already decided I wanted to give it a go.

  But there was no stopping her. My mum said she liked it because she liked paintings by artists of their dreams, that she loved the irrational and art that turned reality and the expected on its head. She went on to say how beautiful the giant sunflower was lying on top of the stairs but there was something spooky about the two young girls, one of them with her hair standing on end as if terrified out of her mind, and the other apparently in a state of ecstatic reverie leaning half-naked against a closed door.

  Philomena must have known this painting because she asked her what she thought lay behind the door. My mum said it could represent the entrance to the unconscious and that the unconscious was the root of creativity, but it was hard sometimes to access. She sounded so serious and intellectual, which I knew she could be sometimes, because of the people she mixed with and the way she talked to me, but every time she got off on one like that, she embarrassed me.

  Luckily Philomena didn’t seem bothered. She just laughed. She said she always found a whisky chaser or a spliff were good routes to the unconscious when she was painting. Then she turned to me because I think she’d forgotten I was there, and she didn’t want me to feel left out.

  She asked me what I thought but I didn’t like being the focus of attention so I said, as if I was dumb, I didn’t think, which wasn’t quite true and then I asked, as a distraction, how far away were we from the sea. Philomena said there was no sea nearby, unless you included the Bristol Channel, but there was an estuary which ran into the river and then into the sea and I could go there instead. She told me about a bike I could use and that she’d tell me how to get there when we came to stay. I gathered from this we’d passed her test for acceptability.

  She continued staring at me. Then she took out a cigarette from a silver case, tapped the cigarette on it, lit up and still looking at me through the smoke as she blew it out towards the ceiling, she said, ‘You’re a strange child, Echo. You know more than your years. There’s a wild streak in you. But I like you.’ Then she said, ‘You don’t look like your mother. Are you more like your father? Where is he?’

  I looked across at my mother but she was eyeballing me in that way only my mother could. It was the look of the gorgon and any minute longer I could turn into petrified stone. I said, ‘I don’t know,’ but before I could say any more my mother said, ‘Actually, she does look like me. We don’t talk about him. He’s an irrelevance. Echo and I just get on with our lives. I’ve told her as much as she wants to know and it’s far better that way, isn’t it, Echo?’

  I knew she didn’t expect an answer so I just looked stupid and kept my mouth shut. That was all that was required. Then, turning again to Philomena, my mother said, ‘Men can be so needy and clingy, don’t you think?’

  Philomena said nothing but she caught my eye and I could have sworn she gave me a wink. It lasted a nanosecond.

  My mum asked if she’d chosen anybody else and Philomena said she’d had lots of people replying, but most were unsuitable because she could see they’d complain a lot, or they were humourless, or boring, but there was a photographer she liked, who she thought would fit in. Her name was Gaby, short for Gabriella, and she came from

  Cardiff. She’d gone to pick up some stuff but she’d be back later and we could meet her.

  Philomena had the idea that the three of them could form a female artists’ ‘cross fertilisation’ collective. When she said this, I said, ‘Do you mean like the bees?’

  I was trying to be funny but it failed because she took no notice. Maybe she didn’t hear. But for a few years that’s what they became, an artists’ collective.

  While they were doing their art, they usually forgot about me but I was still part of what was going on. What they didn’t know was that as a reaction to being ignored or bored, I’d sometimes pass the time by observing them. Watching people when they don’t know they’re being watched is fascinating. For a while it was my favourite hobby, because if you think about it, it’s a version of bird watching. The difference being, instead of birds you watch people. You can learn a lot about them. For example, I discovered most people put on an act, they perform as if they have a secret audience that they’ve made up.

  My mum lived for those summers. The farmhouse was along the Welsh Borders, two or three miles from the River Severn and a bit like a French gîte, only the rent was cheap. It was a long, low dilapidated building with peeling pale limewash the colour of goats’ milk and surrounded by an anarchy of planted beds and natural woodland. To reach it, first you had to drive through fields, opening and shutting each farm gate as you entered and left, until finally you’d get to the farmhouse, swing open the farm gate, drive in, and park on a corralled square of rough grass. A raucous cackle of white geese would rush towards you with their he
ads held high in that imperious way geese have. Over the years I learnt not to be intimidated.

  The original building was many centuries old but the various owners had added to it so that inside it was like a maze of disconnected groups of rooms. I liked the central sitting room best because it was big and interestingly atmospheric.

  It was dark, with a low ceiling and tiny windows set into the thick walls. Philomena used to place a white ironstone jug with the flowers of the season on one of the window sills, and the light from outside streamed in illuminating the flowers as if they were other-worldly or like an illustration from Blake’s poetry. Books were everywhere, on the floor, on the sofas, on top of cupboards, and on spare window sills. Randomly placed Liberty-style oriental rugs covered the stone flagged floor and the two large, feathered, sagging, faded red sofas overflowed with variously coloured cushions.

  At the heart of this room was an enormous wood-burning fireplace. Built into the wall and on each side of it was a space for a person to sleep during the depths of a bitter winter. You had to be small to fit in there. Most people were too big, but I wasn’t, not when we first started going there. Whatever the season, whatever the time of the day or night, there was a perpetual smell of wood smoke and it must have been this that discoloured the lime washed white walls. These were hung with photographic prints and paintings, some of which were very strange.

  The three women, Philomena, Gaby and my mum got on really well. I’d hoped Gaby would have a daughter so I’d have a friend my own age, but she didn’t. She was a teacher like my mum and once, when I asked her why she didn’t have a child, she said seeing children all day and every day at work was enough, and she didn’t want any at home. I thought she was rude, so I said that’s just how I felt about grownups, but I’d never had the choice. I told her grownups were everywhere constantly interfering in my business and telling me what to do and what to think. Gaby looked at me and I could see she was wondering whether I was serious which I was, but it didn’t bother her. She just smiled at me. She was alright really. She was pretty with round dark eyes, a heart-shaped face and long dark hair and she usually wore jeans and a man’s shirt. The shirt was too big for her. It had stripes and swamped her. I asked her whether she had Birkenstocks like Philomena and she said she had, but she preferred flip flops because she could easily slip them off her feet and walk on the grass. I told her to be careful of the wasps because I’d been stung on my foot once doing that. The wasps drink the dew on the grass, I said, and I asked her if she knew about that. She said she’d be careful.