Private Papers

by Margaret Forster

  April 2nd

  CAN’T QUITE DECIDE whether Rosemary invented her errand or not but won’t quibble, will just be grateful (have I always been grateful enough?). I know I am being ‘taken out’, no need to feel patronized. Even supposing she said to herself, it’s been ages since I took Mother out, better take her, why should that matter? It does, but there is no rational basis for it mattering. I was thought about, was taken, enjoyed it. Enough. Good just to sit beside her and be driven, talked to. So competent, Rosemary, in spite of appearances to the contrary. All thought out, knew exactly how to get to Cambridge, how to find Ely, where to find the engraver. Walked round while she looked at his work, arranged terms. Quite happy on my own, no need for her to feel anxious. Made great efforts to understand the whole deal she was negotiating, what was being engraved and then what would be done with it and how the plates would be designed and marketed. Not the sort of thing I’d buy myself. None of Rosemary’s products ever are. Astonishing that they make money. Would have liked to treat her to a nice lunch in some quiet country restaurant but she doesn’t like that, doesn’t care for the kind of pretty dining rooms I like. So we had a picnic, and ate it sitting on the car rug near the river. Rosemary hardly ate anything. She makes me feel guilty for loving food, for thinking it ought to be artistic and a pleasure to look at as well as to eat. She smoked. Once, she used not to in my company, in my house, but I urged her to do so. I hate her smoking, hate it. The need she has for it offends me. I hate to see her snatch at the cigarettes, at the matches, hate the urgency with which she lights up. If she has to smoke I wish she did so with elegance and ease, gently not frantically. She’s never even tried to give up. Still surprises me that any daughter of mine can want to smoke. We never discuss it now, like so many other things. No point. Must struggle to co-exist, as I would with a guest, a stranger. Must remind myself I have no rights, none whatsoever. Must stop feeling I have to sing for my supper or a day out, must stop that, too. But I feel beholden, always sensitive to any imbalance in my relationships with my daughters.

  *

  This isn’t good for me. It must’ve been good for Mother or surely she wouldn’t have carried on. It isn’t good for me because it not only depresses me, it upsets me and that’s worse. What upset me is the uselessless of all this. Mother writes with the apparently supreme faith that everything important is in the past. There she is, anxiously raking over supposedly crucial scenes, looking for evidence and clues and Christ knows what, to help her untangle the mess she thinks we’re all in. Quite apart from her getting things wrong she is evading the issue. And that issue is now. Mother, Celia, Emily and me now. To hell with the past.

  *

  — all went away in the summer of 1956, the summer after Jess died. It was Rosemary’s idea.

  Holidays are trying times for widows. They are the times when one feels most alone and unlike other families, and, in me, they induced feelings of panic. I had little experience of holidays, they were mysterious to me, there was no residue of experience for me to draw on. But, as in everything else, I was determined to give to my children what I had never had, and so I worked myself up to tackling holidays quite early on. For several years we went to Devon and then in 1950 we embarked on our Great Adventure. We went abroad to —

  *

  I was fourteen when we went to Brittany. It was purgatory. God knows, all the trailing to dreary little English ‘family’ hotels was bad enough but at least Mother was fairly relaxed, she could cope. The hotels were always slightly genteel, whispers in the dining room and that kind of thing, even though the family tag was attached to them. All ‘family’ hotel meant was that they would give children house room and throw a few fish fingers at them around five o’clock, as a ‘special’ supper. These hotels were always on beaches miles from any village or town. Where the hell did she get them from? Perhaps they looked enticing in brochures but, when we got there – oh, what a drag that always was, standing waiting for buses outside some small branchline station – the paint was peeling and the curtains drab, not at all the gleaming white-washed façade pictured in the brochures. Mother’s disappointment was tangible, though never voiced. If only she’d said what a bloody dump, let’s go home but, no, it was ‘Isn’t it near the sea – even nearer than it looked in the brochure – aren’t we lucky.’ We might have been, if the sea had been blue and sparkling and the sodding beach hot, but of course it was England in August and mostly cold and windy. We crouched in polo-necked sweaters behind windbreaks and moaned because it was too cold to swim. Mother tried to make us run races – gosh, what fun. If it rained, as it frequently did, it was ludo and snakes and ladders in our bedroom, because the hotel sitting room was always being cleaned and Mother didn’t think we ought to get in the way.

  There was never anyone to make friends with, nobody else had a loony mother who chose geriatric establishments for holidays. My friends mostly went on joint holidays, sharing villas with other families. But not us. We were self-sufficient, had each other, wanted peace and quiet – dear Christ, what ten year old and under wants peace and quiet? Why did Mother in her position want it? I don’t know what she can possibly have got out of it. Certainly not a rest, because it was bloody hard work for her entertaining us. The only thing I think she can have got out of it was the walking. She always genuinely loved the walks, any old weather. I hated them, even when she tried to make them interesting by collecting shells and wild flowers and so on. They just seemed so pointless, walk to A to walk back to B. It was the monotony which made me want to scream. I didn’t commune with nature at all. None of us did, except Celia of course, who collected whatever revolting thing was the taste thrill of the day, and, with her sickly love of Nature, could at least pass for enthusiastic with the light behind her. But Jess whined she was cold and tired all the time and Emily would only go if she was bribed with Smarties or chocolate drops or the promise of an icecream. Mother had to rise above all that, which she did. She shut her mind off and always loved our walks and, for once, to hell with us.

  But Brittany was an entirely different fiasco. When Mother asked us if we would like to go abroad that year I was amazed. It just didn’t seem to be us. I couldn’t hide my excitement. I imagined France as a kind of paradise, full of sunshine and attractive suntanned boys with neckerchiefs knotted jauntily round their necks and meals under vines and singing everywhere. I was passionate about change then, any kind of change, the more violent the better and the more complete. What I hated most was routine, sameness, and now were were going to fling our hats in the air and be different. I saw how anxious Mother was and, for once, I tried to help, I’m sure I did.

  In the end, it was almost exactly the same as every other rotten holiday we had ever had. Only the Channel crossing from Southampton to St Malo was different and measured up to our fevered imagination. We crossed during the day and we all stayed up on deck all the time. It was brilliantly sunny and the sea ahead was blue and endless. I remember suddenly hugging Mother and shouting, ‘Isn’t this great?’ and she was all pink-cheeked and smiling. But it didn’t last, neither the weather nor the euphoria. By the time we had docked the sun was clouded over and, as we caught the Vedette boat to cross to Dinard, it began to rain. We got a bus at Dinard which took us to St Jacut-de-la-Mer, or rather a mile or so beyond it to a small hamlet with a good beach: yes, Mother had done it again. Isolated hotel, no other habitation near. It was dark when we got there. All the way there I had watched the countryside out of the bus window and worried: it looked no different from millions of places in England. Every now and again Mother would point and say, look at that lovely clover, isn’t it pretty, and I would think clover? What’s French about clover? The trees, the roads, the animals, even the buildings looked to my panic-stricken eye utterly unremarkable. Our reception at the place we stayed did not help. No jolly striped-tee-shirted-beret-wearing patron, but a sour-faced old woman who told us we had missed supper and showed us to a spartan pair of rooms, opposite each other, in a dingy
corridor. Never mind, said Mother. I cried myself to sleep.

  Next day it was no better. It wasn’t raining but there was half a gale blowing. We could hardly see the sea for misty spray. We set off, as ever, for a walk. The coast there has lots of little inlets with pine woods coming down to the sea. It was difficult to walk along. We picked aniseed, and Mother said we would press it and start a scrapbook of French flowers. We trudged on looking for bloody French flowers, and finding only buttercups, until we got to St Jacut. Big deal. A pretty enough place, I’m sure, but not the Cannes of my imagination. Mother said to look at the interesting architecture, look at the old stone and the wide archways and the narrow bridges . . . We looked and yawned.

  *

  — and said what I needed was a holiday, a chance to get right away from the house (which she said I should sell). I sat and listened with only half my mind, not caring what anybody said to me, alert only to the tone of Rosemary’s voice and nothing else. Usually, she called in on us every other week or so and stayed at the most half an hour. It was always obvious that, as soon as she came through the door, she was wondering how quickly she could go back through it. She would perch uneasily on the edge of a table or simply prowl about, all the while giving me what amounted to a report on her doings. Never once did she ask what I or Celia or Emily were doing. If I tried to tell her what I thought were interesting bits of news about the family, she would interrupt and say that reminded her and she would be off on another story about herself. It was a varied and entertaining record (she was in her last year at the Central School of Art). But when she left I would feel flat and hollow, we all did. It was pathetic to see Emily’s eagerness to please her glamorous big sister and her disappointment when Rosemary failed to show any real interest in her. All the time I told myself I was lucky that Rosemary came at all, that I should not complain (not that I did except to myself), that she could quite easily have cut us off. And I knew that, if I betrayed how aggrieved I felt at the way she treated her family, I would alienate her altogether. She was offering what she was able to offer, and that had to be accepted. But it was hard to control the bewilderment I felt at the failure to maintain a close bond with the child who was most like myself.

  Rosemary astonished us by returning the next day with an armful of holiday brochures. It was a Sunday and she had lunch with us for the first time in months. Afterwards, we spread all the leaflets out on the kitchen table and Emily grew very excited at the idea of doing what Rosemary suggested and going somewhere really different, to the Algarve in Portugal. It was all terribly attractive, but I hesitated. I still had no energy, didn’t want to go anywhere or do anything, didn’t really want sunshine and strong light. It was offensive to me to talk about good times. It was too soon after Jess’s death. But Emily begged and pleaded, and Rosemary said sharply that I was always going on about families pulling together and, now that she was trying to do it, I was rejecting her. She said couldn’t I just for once let go and let others take charge. So I agreed.

  In fact, there turned out to be quite a lot of arranging for me still to do, not that I resented this. Rosemary was not quite as efficient as she made herself out to be. When it became a matter of actually booking a villa she was vague and offhand – one would turn up, not to worry, that kind of thing. And she hadn’t thought out details like how we would all get there. She spoiled the idea of a family holiday, for a start, by saying she planned to drive down to the Algarve with two friends, was that all right. I could hardly say no. In fact, once she had initiated the holiday, Rosemary did nothing to advance it. I found and booked the villa, I made aeroplane reservations and studied train timetables as usual. All Rosemary did was turn up – late.

  The villa was beautiful. It was near the village of Porches, three miles up a sandy track which I thought we would never reach. The people whose advert in The Times I had answered had indeed said their casa was isolated, but they had not impressed upon me just how isolated. It was perched on a cliff top with no other building visible for what seemed miles around. It was whitewashed, one storey, with a long veranda going round three sides of the house, smothered in bougainvillaea. The rooms were all small. There was no running water, of course, and no electricity. It was extremely primitive. The furniture in the small living room smacked of Cheltenham and would have been ludicrous in that setting, if it had not also been so pretty. There was a tiny button-backed sofa and a walnut writingdesk and even a fringed standard lamp, which was never likely to have light shining from it. On the walls were Constable prints and a framed Oxford rowing blue and, in one corner, an enormous grandfather clock highly polished and working.

  The ground around the villa was flat, studded only with fig trees, but we discovered, going to and from the beaches, that it was not as flat as it appeared. The ground around us undulated. As we walked half a mile or so to the path which dropped steeply to a sandy cove, we realized how deceptive the landscape was. The beaches were so unexpected. Looking from the veranda of the house to where the sea must be, it seemed that the dry, rough grass simply went on as far as the horizon and it was such a surprise to find, down below, a series of small, but beautiful, sandy beaches. When the tide was out, we could walk from one to another but, when it was in, each was separate and reduced to a yard or so of sand.

  We waited all that first day for Rosemary who, like us, had been due the evening before. When we went to the beach, we carefully left a welcoming note. What concerned me most was how would we manage if she never turned up, stuck as we were without food or drink (there was no drinkable water). We would have to walk to Porches and carry everything back and, though I loved the isolation, I did not want to become a beast of burden in that heat. But it was more than that. For once, I would not have chosen a quiet spot, if it was not to be shared with others, and I would never have agreed to a villa without prospect of company such as even the most inhospitable hotel can give. As I waited for Rosemary I was anxious.

  Late the next afternoon we heard the car from a long way away and rushed out onto the track, and there it was, a Dormobile, not the saloon car we had been looking for, and there was Rosemary waving from the window. I was so relieved I hardly took in the fact that there were three people with her, not two, and that they were all men. It had never occurred to me that Rosemary’s friends might be men. I had automatically assumed they would be girls, was sure Tanya, a friend of hers since early Camden days, had been mentioned. She had never indicated her companions would be men, and men whom I had never met. But she was perfectly at ease. She jumped out, hugely pleased with herself, actually hugged all of us and then casually introduced her friends, Tony, Seb and Matthew, as an afterthought. They all seemed large, thin and unkempt. Only Matthew shook hands. Suddenly, the casa seemed noisy and full. Everything about it had changed and for once I was glad of the lack of privacy. When it grew late, and we had eaten and drunk everything the new arrivals had fortunately brought with them, there was some discussion about sleeping arrangements. There were four bedrooms, each with two narrow, rather short, Portuguese beds. I slept with Emily and had thought Rosemary would sleep with Celia but no, she said she and Tony would share and Matthew could kip with Seb. And that was how it was.

  Rosemary was then twentytwo. She was not a child, not even a dependant. At twenty-one, she had inherited her share of Grandmother Butler’s money, which had come as a tremendous surprise to her. All through their childhood I had concealed their expectations from them, especially from Rosemary, believing no good could be derived from knowing about their inheritance too soon. But, when she was twentyone, I was powerless to stop Rosemary inheriting £10,000. I watched her reaction nervously. She was astounded, and awed by the possibilities before her. At first she said she would travel when she finished at Central, then that she would buy a cottage in Ireland and go and paint all day, then that she would buy a car. What she did do, to my relief, was leave it untouched. She decided to finish at Central, then decide what she would do next. So far as I know, she spent
nothing at all. She still dressed in the worn rags she had always liked and decorated herself with cheap baubles from street markets. There were no signs that the money would go to her head. I advised her to tell nobody, not even close friends, and asked her also not to tell Celia and Emily, whom I wished to be equally unprepared when the time came for their own inheritance.