Private Papers

by Margaret Forster

  She was about twelve when all this trouble began, still a child, and I was so thankful she was a late developer. I knew that, once she became mature, another element would enter life that she would be unable to cope with and which was likely to wreck her more thoroughly than any other influence up to then. Boys would be able to do what they liked with Jess. It would not be a question of morals, she was just used to going along with whatever stronger people suggested. I suppose today I could have put her on the Pill – though I would not have done so – but in the 1950s that was not an option for teenage girls, or anyone else for that matter. I did not know what to do when, at the late age of fifteen, Jess at last started to menstruate and generally develop. The odd thing was that Jess and I became closer during that time than at any other. She was very, very frightened by menstruation, even though she had had it all explained to her and had been surrounded by menstruating women. It was hardly a mystery to her with Celia sharing a room, and Rosemary at one stage making a point of talking about it loudly, because she thought it was ridiculous that it should be whispered about. But, when she began to bleed, Jess literally collapsed. She and I were alone in the house. I was in the kitchen and I heard a thump from above which I ignored, thinking it was just Jess knocking something over. But then I heard this sort of keening sound, a high pitched repetitive wail and I ran upstairs to find Jess on the bathroom floor, ghastly white, and the lavatory bowl full of blood. It wasn’t in the least comical and I never even thought of laughing. The girl was genuinely terrified and made ill by the sight of her own blood. As luck would have it, Jess was the only one of my four who, right from the beginning, had exceptionally heavy periods. They lasted ten days and for four of those she practically lived in the bathroom changing sanitary towels. I felt desperately sorry for her and quite unable to take the brisk attitude I had with her sisters, who were brisk about it themselves. She clung to me, her little thin narrow face even more pinched and miserable than usual, and she liked me to cosset and indulge her and in general treat her as though she were facing a terrible ordeal. She would not go to school at first and I did not make her. She wanted to hole up in her room like an animal in its lair, or, more aptly, like one of those women who belong to tribes that banish women when they bleed. I don’t know why it was so traumatic. I sensed Celia despised Jess and, of course, Rosemary strongly disapproved of my allowing her to be what she called ‘so melodramatic’. But, for once I think, even now, I did the right thing.

  Jess as an adolescent was never very attractive. She always looked bedraggled and cowed. I so yearned for some kind, earnest young lad to take Jess under his wing and give her that confidence she had needed all her life. I thought it was probably her only chance. But how can parents engineer such things? They cannot, not for any of their children. Jess was no different in that respect from Rosemary or Celia or Emily. For all of them I wanted most a partner who suited them exactly —

  *

  Here we go again, the old tune. Don’t you think it is strange that a woman who goes on so much about partners should have spent the majority of her life without one? I mean, if partnership is so great, why not make more of an effort to start another?

  By the time I was twenty, I was asking my mother this a lot. I remember her fortieth birthday rather well. We were all amazed that she could be so old, we all thought forty sounded so terrible. Emily in particular hated Mother for owning up to being such a dreadful age – it quite worried her, at eleven, to have a mother with one foot in the grave, as it were. It really did seem too near old age and death for comfort. Mother laughed and said she couldn’t help it, she was forty and that was that and she didn’t mind. I suppose that was what made me angry, that she professed not to mind. I wanted her to mind, a lot, I wanted her to rage, rage against what I comically saw as the dying of the light. But she accepted ageing so philosophically, it was indecent. When her hair began to show some grey she didn’t even remark upon it, and the lines on her face never bothered her. She never seemed to think it mattered whether she looked good to other people. I knew, by then, that she did. I knew men did find her attractive, forty or not. And I knew that she deliberately rejected all advances, however harmless.

  There was the teacher who lived in a flat across the road, who ought to have been just my mother’s type and, God knows, the poor man tried hard enough. He was absolutely respectable, had lived there five years and more than served his apprenticeship in getting to know us, in the way Mother thought ‘natural’. He said hello, as he got in out and out of his car, offered lifts when appropriate, picked up Emily when she fell off her bike, brought our newspaper over, when he got it by mistake (his name was Buckley, Gerry Buckley, and ours was Butler and his number was 8 and ours 18, so a certain amount of mixing up did go on). He did everything right, I would have thought. He wasn’t a wet either – he was quite good-looking in a conventional English old-fashioned way, and rugged with it. He played tennis and ran in the park. He had a nice smile, and he was the right age. But Mother wouldn’t let him become a friend. Worse, she positively put him off.

  I happened to be there when Gerry came round once, to ask her if she would fancy the occasional game of tennis with him. Mother smiled and said she was afraid she wasn’t up to his standard. He said that didn’t matter, he wasn’t exactly much good himself, just liked the game and the exercise and it seemed such a waste having a possible partner so near – no, said Mother, I really don’t think I could, thank you. Then she must have had just a slight prick of conscience, when he flushed and looked hurt, because she added something like, ‘I haven’t really the time, you see, it’s all I can do to find time for a game with Celia.’ I waited until he’d gone and said, ‘What a lie.’ I suppose I must have said this – as I did most things at the time – with unnecessary vehemence, because she started defending herself, saying it was perfectly true, there was this to do and that to do and every day was hectic. I cut into her spiel. I told her it was obvious she just didn’t like Gerry Buckley because she was always distant and off-putting. More denials, and then I can’t remember how we got on to the next bit, but she was suddenly saying she had no desire to get involved with anyone, she had her family and that was enough. I argued heatedly with her, along the lines firstly that it was not enough and secondly, which I thought cunning, that it wasn’t enough for her family either. Oh, nothing crass like we wanna new Daddy, but that we wanted her to have someone apart from us, that it would make us feel better. If bloody Emily hadn’t pranced in at that point, we might have got somewhere, but she did and that was that, subject never returned to in quite the same way.

  My mother was funny about sex. Now that’s a laughable statement. All mothers are funny about sex, especially mothers on their own, who in the nature of their situation haven’t had any themselves for ten years. But she was odd in that she rated it, without participating. On the whole, Mother was a puritan. No excesses, endless control. You might have thought she would bring us up to shudder at the thought of sexual intercourse, but not a bit of it, she went out of her way to acknowledge its existence and the power of this human act. We’d be discussing some newspaper case about lovers murdering rivals, or something, and I would say how unbelievable, and my mother would chip in and say no, people who loved someone passionately would do anything to keep them and sometimes were almost unhinged just by the act of love itself. She would say we would be surprised when we experienced the force of attraction. So what happened to this force in her? That’s what I want to know.

  *

  — exactly as Oliver had suited me. Naturally, when everything began to go wrong with Jess, I longed for someone with whom I could share my distress, someone who would be as concerned as myself. I used Rosemary and Celia. I knew I used them, and I knew I should not, but there was no alternative. Jess needed a father, I needed a husband. There was no one who could be both.

  It would have been easy enough, I suppose to provide the girls with another father. I know Rosemary thinks I chose not to d
o so and that she resents my ‘choice’. But she forgets, or perhaps has never known, that marriage is not just an economic arrangement. If I had held that view, I could have married one of several men, men like Simon Birch or Gerry Buckley. Simon came back from the war uninjured. He went back to University College Hospital where he became an eminent anaesthetist. He came to see me often at first, anxious to stand by his dead best friend’s wife and, though his embarrassment at my grief inhibited him, he did manage to comfort me in a curiously clumsy way. He brought me flowers and took the children out for the occasional treat. I knew he liked me, because Oliver had teased me about it, and I knew he had no girlfriends. He was shy and rather nervous and found all human relationships difficult, and so I was well aware of how important our friendship was to him. Simon would have married me any time I chose but I went to great lengths to avoid humiliating him by letting him ask me. In the end, inevitably, he grew tired. He wanted a wife and family. I was not going to give them to him. So he married someone else (and was very happy). I never felt guilty about this. Why should I? I hadn’t loved Simon, I hadn’t even been attracted to him. There was no basis for anything but a marriage of convenience.

  Gerry Buckley was another matter (and so, much later, was John). He was a neighbour of ours, a handsome, lively man, very kind and considerate. I was slightly attracted to him, or at least I felt I could become so. He was very attracted to me. I knew he was my age, unmarried, that he shared some of my interests, that he was a decent, good man, highly thought of at the nearby boys’ school, where he taught English. It might have been pleasant to get to know Gerry better. The children would have been glad. I was afraid, I suppose. It was simple fear that made me keep Gerry Buckley at arm’s length. I was afraid to put myself to the test. It hurt me to think I might, after all, find a substitute for Oliver – I did not want to be able to substitute him. I really did believe that in my case ‘love strikes one hour – LOVE! Those never loved/Who dream that they loved ONCE.’ I just could not believe my love had stopped even after all those years. It was there, somewhere. If Gerry, to whom on one level I was indeed attracted, if he had been stronger, more determined, and if Jess, if Jess – that is, when Jess – everything that summer was bound up with Jess. Afterwards, everything was tainted by it. I did not even notice when Gerry Buckley moved away. What happened was —

  *

  I know what happened. I neither need nor want Mother’s version. I’d rather set down my own and not even read hers. It’ll get it over a bloody sight quicker.

  Jess went from bad to worse. Nothing dramatic. More truanting, though no more shop-lifting (discovered, that is). As the time for her to leave school grew closer and closer, Mother grew more and more desperate. I’d taken ‘A’ Levels and gone to art school, so that was all right, just (she really wanted all of us to go to Oxford). Celia was obviously going to go into the sixth form, but Jess was just as obviously going to be out on her ear, without a qualification to her name. She was incapable of taking charge of herself, had no ideas about what she would like to, or at least could, do. Mother had awful visions of her in a factory, doing some mechanical job like packing cartons. Jess did once venture to say that she liked shops, that she would like to have a go at Marks & Spencer. This was followed up eagerly, but Jess hadn’t a chance. Her arithmetic was terrible, she would never have been able to cope with a till. This might have been a surmountable difficulty, if she had impressed in other ways by being keen, but she didn’t. Nobody, giving Jess an interview, would take her on. Then, there was her professed love of babies – she ‘wouldn’t mind’ being a nursery nurse or a nanny. Poor Jess. She had no idea how very well qualified a girl had to be if she wanted to be either. Loving babies was not enough. What Mother most wanted for her was some kind of proper training, even if it wasn’t for anything very grand. She needed, Mother said, to be given some sense of pride, or her confidence would never be established. She would drift, as she had drifted through school, attracted to all the wrong elements.

  It was Celia who suggested cookery. Celia herself was a brilliant cook, up to her elbows in flour, making cakes by the age of five. Jess ‘helped’. Celia pointed out that Jess was actually good at doing all the little jobs in the kitchen that no one else would do. She liked chopping vegetables or grating cheese or any of the other bloody boring, menial jobs Celia graciously allowed her to do. In fact, she was probably at her happiest helping Mother, or Celia, prepare meals. Once Celia had suggested it, Mother couldn’t imagine why she had not thought of it, too. I suppose there was something horribly patronizing about the way we all leapt on this solution, something insulting in our enthusiasm, but Jess didn’t seem to notice it. She seemed quite taken with the notion of becoming a cook. At least, I remember she said she ‘didn’t mind’. It was easier said than done of course – not even a poly was going to snap Jess up, even then. But Mother at last had a bit of sense. She realized she’d have to pay to get Jess trained and she was prepared to. She enrolled her for a six-month course at quite a reputable cookery school. There isn’t much to the rest of this story, however long Mother has managed to make it. Jess started in the September of 1956.

  She did well. One of the few things in Jess’s favour was her efficiency when she did concentrate on a job. That was part of Mother’s training that had stuck. Jess was never self-motivated but, if confronted with a task, and especially if supervised, she was extremely neat and methodical. Then, she could’ve passed for a True Blue Butler. She thrived on the cookery course. And it was at that point, precisely when everything should’ve taken a turn for the better in Jess’s life, that it took a turn for the worse. Celia had a lot to answer for. Oh yes, she bloody had.

  Celia always pleased Mother by being so protective of Jess. Suddenly, Jess didn’t want protection because she had a boyfriend. Jeremy, he was called, as pretty as his name and not the ogre of Mother’s imagination. He was on the cookery course, too. Celia detested him from the moment Jess brought him home. She was forever trying to make jokes about him – spiteful, unfunny remarks about his general weediness and his rather squeaky voice – and, whenever she came out with them, Mother would be furious and aghast: how could any daughter of hers, etc. etc. We had some classic family rows over Jeremy. I wasn’t living at home then, but whenever I came for a meal we’d have one of those ding-dong sessions in which family love is so rich. It would go roughly like this: Celia would make some heavy-handed observation about the length of Jeremy’s eyelashes, say; I would tell her she was just jealous because Jess had a boyfriend and she didn’t; Celia would then say jealous was the last thing she was, that nobody could be jealous of Jeremy; I’d say he seemed rather attractive to me; Celia would say anything in trousers was attractive to me, I’d say no, I prefer no trousers, they do get in the way so. Oh, what larks! It would end with me calling Celia a cow and Celia at her most self-righteous, saying all she wanted was Jess’s happiness and she very much doubted if Jeremy could make her happy.

  He didn’t, of course. He lost interest, or found other ones. Celia ostentatiously comforted Jess who was devastated and stopped going to the cookery class, even though she was more than half way through and certain to get a diploma. Instead, she lay listlessly in bed all day, eating biscuits and listening to records. Nothing would move her. Celia would manage to force her to get dressed and washed and to comb her hair, but the minute Celia left for school Jess either got back on to her bed or lay in a hot bath for hours and hours, claiming she was cold and that was the only way she could get warm. Mother said she was simply depressed because her first boyfriend had let her down. All she needed was kindness and help to get over it. I said she was sick and something drastic had to be done. Mother’s mind leapt ahead to mental institutions. I think she had a picture of a kind of Bedlam with Jess in a canvas straitjacket locked up in a padded cell. I couldn’t bring myself to start a train of events which might lead to such horror, so I left it. Mother went on making tasty morsels for Jess, soothing and comforting her, wil
fully ignoring all the signs. She had no excuse. She wasn’t ignorant. She’d trained as a nurse, knew something of medicine, yet she behaved like a peasant. Her faith was in rest and care and camomile tea. Jess died. Aged not quite seventeen.

  She didn’t have the slightest intention of killing herself. It was quite absurd to think that she had. What happened was that we had a sudden cold spell in February. Thick snow, ice, howling east wind from Siberia, the lot. Mother’s house was like an igloo. We’d never had central heating and the 1940s electric wiring wouldn’t stand up to more than a two-bar electric fire in about three rooms. In spite of Mother’s precious log fire in the sitting room, two lethal oil stoves in the kitchen and another in the hall, there was no real warmth anywhere. Nothing in the bedrooms, naturally. It was heaven going back to my bedsitter, where I could easily get a good fug up. Jess was wretched. Even her hot baths weren’t very hot and in the ancient bathroom there was ice on the inside of the window. So one day, when Mother was out, she took a one-bar electric fire into the bathroom and balanced it on the washbasin, facing into the bath, and plugged it in. I didn’t even know there was a plug there – it had certainly never been used. Then, with the blessed heat beating on to her, she got into the bath and the fucking fire toppled over into the water. She was electrocuted. Mother came home an hour later and found her. Burned, drowned.

  I need hardly say that my mother suffered terribly. She never spoke of finding Jess. I suppose I ought to read what she has to say about that but I can’t bear to. I can’t bear to experience her horror, even at second hand, even at this distance of time. I imagined it all at the time – the body floating, the burn marks, the hell of trying to get it out, the ringing for ambulances, the presence of the police, the statements that had to be made and nobody there to cling to. Celia was on some course, part of her Biology ‘A’ Level syllabus. I was in London but it took four hours for me to be located and told. Not even Emily was there – thank God, Mother always said. I forget where she was but, anyway, Mother was quite alone until I got there. I hadn’t been told Jess was dead, just that my sister had had an accident and would I come home as quickly as possible. I didn’t even know which sister. The house seemed full of people when I got there, all curiously silent. My mother was sitting in a chair, bolt upright, transfixed by some sight only she could see. Somebody told me Jess was dead and I went into the usual routine that people do, bumbling on about how did it happen and so on. Mother didn’t speak. I went to her and knelt down and laid my head on her lap. I couldn’t look such suffering in the face. Eventually Celia got home and between us we cleared out all the people. Our doctor had left sleeping pills, but Mother refused to take them. Emily stayed at her little friend’s for the night so she didn’t come into it at all, then. We all sat up until the early hours of the next morning, with first me then Celia taking it in turns to say to Mother she mustn’t blame herself, it wasn’t her fault. At least neither of us was crass enough to suggest it might be for the best. That was what I was thinking, of course. Appalled by my own callousness but thinking it all the same. Where Jess was concerned I was stone. She meant nothing to me. But my mother loved her, and was deeply wounded and scarred. I saw, with fascination, how close the bond had been. She looked as if her own heart had been torn out, as though beneath her ever-neat blouse was a great, gaping, bleeding hole. We put her to bed, Celia and me. Celia was very shaken, quite unlike her usual solid self. Her hands trembled when she tried to pour some water for my mother and she spilt it over the eiderdown. I think now it was guilt but then I thought it was shock. There is nothing more to say.