Private Papers

by Margaret Forster

  For weeks afterwards Celia was on my conscience, which made me furious. I worried about her in a vague sort of way but didn’t do anything about it, except ring Mother up, which I did pretty frequently, and ask her how all the moving was going. They were all moving: Emily and Mother to one small flat and Celia to another. It was about six months before I visited Celia in her new abode. I’d had lunch at Mother’s, as she had, and I went back with her, genuinely curious to see what she’d got together. The flat itself was brilliant – all that garden down to the canal and the big, spacious rooms – but what she’d done to it in the way of decoration and furnishings was awful. I saw Mother’s influence everywhere – itty-bitty, sprigged wallpaper in the bedroom, carefully matching tiles in the bathroom, gleaming Formica units in the kitchen. Foul. And all immaculately, frighteningly tidy and arranged, so much so I felt there must be chalk marks on the floor in case anything got accidentally moved. Celia seemed small in this flat. Of course, I gooed and said how lovely and how lucky you are and God I wish I had this space, what I could do with it. I even went so far as to admit I wished I had bought something, it was bloody awful paying rent for what I had. I was going to have to leave my room that summer and start looking again and I hated that. Celia said I could stay with her, if I liked. I was so horrified at the thought I couldn’t think what to say, so muttered something about not being tidy enough and having noisy visitors.

  I didn’t see Andrew that time but I heard about him quickly enough. Mother forgets how terribly pleased she was at first. ‘Celia’s got rather a nice boyfriend,’ she told me triumphantly over the telephone and there was more satisfaction in her voice when she said he was a policeman, a police sergeant. I roared at that, it was so fitting. Mother prattled on about it being nothing serious, goodness me, but it was so nice for Celia and, oh, if I could see the difference in her already and what a lot of interests they had in common. It was Emily who told me, the next time I dropped in, that he was old and boring, and, frankly, she couldn’t see what Celia saw in him. I took Emily up on this verdict at once and got her to describe Celia’s policeman. Mother was listening all the time and was furious at how Emily put him down. Mother said he made Celia very happy and that was all that mattered, that was all she had ever wanted for any of us, just somebody to make us happy. ‘He doesn’t make Celia happy,’ Emily said. Mother told her not to be so arrogant. How could she tell? Emily shrugged and said, quite calmly, that it wasn’t worth arguing about, she just could tell and she didn’t care what Mother said. By that time I was so intrigued I made immediate arrangements to come for lunch and meet this Andrew Bayliss.

  He was dreadful. The lunch was purgatory. He was pompous and prim and, worst of all, a fascist, if not made then in the making. We had several arguments verging on the political – it was the time of the Profumo scandal – and his views and opinions ran so counter to our own that it seemed unbelievable that he could be connected with any of us. He sat there, coming out with this hang ’em and flog ’em and castrate ’em drivel. It was extraordinary. And Celia at his side didn’t bat an eyelid. Discipline, order, authoritarian rule, that was what the country needed. Celia looked at him adoringly, once or twice, and I saw him squeeze her hand under the table. I thought that was rather sweet. When the meal was over, he sprang up and insisted on cleaning up, said he was highly domesticated, wouldn’t be put off by Mother’s protests. I liked him for that. He did a good job, too, left the kitchen gleaming. Then he and Celia went off for a walk and I didn’t see him again for quite a long time, not until he was very involved indeed with Celia and Mother had stopped being pleased and was beginning to be frantic and frightened.

  *

  — and devious. Once I grew to recognize this, and I admit it took me a very long time, I did not know what to do. I, a mother, was not supposed to interfere. I have noticed this attitude in general, noticed people talking on buses or trains about family matters almost boasting that they ‘kept well away’, as though this is a matter for congratulation. Of course I should have liked, these last twenty years, not to have been implicated in the tragedies which have befallen my children. I should have liked to excuse myself of all responsibility, to have successfully assured myself that not only was I not called upon to do anything, but that there was nothing I could do. I do not know where people get the idea that family catastrophes are a kind of spectator sport from which any member can avert their eyes if the going gets too rough. They are not. They are quite impossible to sit through without leaping up to staunch the blood. So I am not going to apologize for ‘interfering’. I had no alternative, witnessing what I witnessed.

  And what I witnessed was Celia’s incarceration. Andrew Bayliss began to dominate and crush her from the very beginning of their association and she seemed incapable of extricating herself from his clutches. I would never have believed it of her, never for one minute have imagined Celia could become so feeble. The entire thing baffled me. How could her nature have undergone such a swift and total change because of a love affair with a man? That is what I have to call it, but I saw precious little love there. Lust, yes, I saw that. Andrew Bayliss knew perfectly well that Celia was a virgin, inexperienced and shy, and he determined to have her. She responded to his attentions like a flower to the sun, she opened out, glowed, smiled so much more and it was lovely to see. But only for a while, then the new vitality began to wane. She lost weight, became tense and brittle and started to keep away from us. Instead of dropping in every other day, it became once a week and then there were sudden phone calls cancelling Sunday lunch, which was a sacred date in our family calendar. I told myself to be glad about it. Had I not longed for Celia to have such a hectic social life that, like Rosemary, she could no longer fit us in? Had I not yearned for her to have a life of her own? But those were two illusions: she had no social life at all, but instead was virtually walled into her flat by Andrew Bayliss, who permitted her no freedom. I was astonished when I called round one day, to see if Celia was well, to find him opening the door and appearing to bar my way. ‘Celia’s in bed,’ he said, ‘she doesn’t want to be disturbed. Can I give her a message?’ I simply stared at him, huge and broad, filling the doorway, and said nothing. ‘It’s just that she’s tired,’ he added, scratching his cheek which was half covered in shaving cream. He was in pyjamas and a dressing gown. I finally found my voice, a very faint one, and said I was sorry to have disturbed them, perhaps I could telephone later. When I did telephone, after a day of agonizing, I got him again: Celia was in the bath, was there anything in particular I wanted?

  It was all so sudden. Up till then, Andrew Bayliss had been careful to be well-mannered. Then he just stopped. He looked at me as though he had never seen me in his life before and was barely civil. I could not understand it. Why did he think I was an enemy? How could he think of me as wanting to hold Celia back from anything she really wanted to do, including take him for a lover? And the worst thing of all was that Celia herself, when I saw her, had become remote. She had transferred her allegiance to Andrew. I tried so hard to take an interest in Andrew (not then knowing a thing about his background), but every question was regarded with suspicion. Why did I want to know his age, where he grew up, where exactly he worked and what exactly he did. What for? All those questions seemed normal to me, but Celia resented them. I suppose she knew by then that Andrew had been married twice and did not want to tell me. It spoiled her happiness to present to us a twice divorced man. She did not like any questions about their living arrangements, either, though I had no desire to be censorious. She knew I had never objected to Rosemary’s adventures so why should I have been likely to disapprove of hers? But I tried, for several months, to abide by the new rules. I did not call round, nor did I telephone. I waited patiently for her to come to us and when she did I was scrupulous about not making resentful remarks or cross-examining her about her recent movements. I always tried to be glad and welcoming and uncomplaining, though it was very hard not to complain about one important
point, which was that she never came alone. Andrew Bayliss accompanied her at all times, his hand literally grasping her elbow in a most proprietorial manner. It made all conversation stilted. I found myself having to invent things to do, while they were there, to cover up the awkwardness. Celia’s eyes never seemed to meet mine, she fidgeted, looked this way and that, and was clearly relieved when Andrew announced they had to be going.

  This unhappy state of affairs went on for, oh, I forget how long, months, almost a year, and, though the hurt continued, I had practised accepting the virtual loss of another daughter with such ruthlessness that I was half-way to being reconciled. I do not deny that I was bitter: other women seemed to have daughters who, when they became attached to men, widened the family circle instead of dropping out of it. I had always believed that, as a parent, you received back what you put in. I thought I had instilled warmth and mutual support, but it seemed, then, quite otherwise. I was cut off. Even visiting me had become not a pleasure but a duty. If I had not still had Emily at home, I expect I would have toppled over into a real depression. But Emily kept me sane. She was as brisk in her judgements as Rosemary had been, but kinder. ‘Don’t fret so, Mum,’ she would keep telling me and then she’d hug me and I would feel greatly comforted for a while. Emily’s common-sense and open affection helped me to keep at bay the awful fear that I had founded my life on quicksand. My family did not want to be a family. Soon, I would be left as I had begun, a woman without a family.

  I see now, of course I do, how very silly I was. At nearly seventy, I can look back and feel sorry for my middle-aged self. But that is what life looks like at that age to widowed ladies to whom family has always been all. It is a female predicament. The trouble is that one is so busy marking the passing of time in one’s children’s lives that one fails to relate it to the passing of time in one’s own. I grieved that my daughters were not the same to me, without stopping to consider that I was not the same to them. I took their problems into myself and brooded and made myself unhappy over them, and that is what grown-up children absolutely cannot bear. They want you to get on with your own life and not upset yourself over theirs, because then you become a burden to them and, if they are burdened already, that is the last straw. Such wisdom now, such a lack of it then. In many ways, that was the worst period in my life, until Celia herself precipitated a crisis.

  She rang me one morning, early, sounding very secretive and said would I like to meet her in the park, Regent’s Park, and have a walk before she started work. I leapt at the chance, naturally. At eight o’clock I met her in Queen Mary’s rose garden. She was in her dreadful, ugly overalls. We climbed a little mound behind the waterfall and sat on the seat there. There was no noise at all. Celia explained that the hedges round both the Inner and Outer Circle roads deadened the traffic. I admired the roses. She told me there were 20,000 rose bushes, at least, and that there was only a staff of fourteen to look after them. She said black spot had been very bad this year, and mildew, but red spider hadn’t been such a nuisance . . . A duck, or what I took to be a duck, flew overhead. Celia said it was a mallard. She said she would show me where the mallards nested in hollow trees and in the cornices of Bedford College. I said how interesting. There was a further bit of chitchat and then she said she was sorry she had not seen much of Emily and me lately and I interrupted too quickly, in my haste to be agreeable, and said that was all right, I quite understood, and she said no, I did not, that was the point. I did not understand about Andrew. He was, she said, very possessive, he could not help it, it was just how he was. It made him nervous, if she kept coming to us all the time, it made him think he was not enough for her and that made him feel a failure. Then she told me he had been married twice before and each marriage had gone wrong because he discovered he was not enough for his wife. The trouble, really, was that he had had no family life himself and had no concept of what belonging to a family meant, that it was not a threat to other personal relationships. Andrew thought it was. She had told him that I was an orphan, an abandoned baby, brought up in an institution, as he had been, but it did not seem to make any difference. He still mistrusted me and the whole family scene. So, and here she stopped and turned to look at me with such real pain in her eyes, so she had promised him not to see us for six months or so. We would telephone each other but not meet. She knew it was stupid and ridiculous but he got upset about it and she could not bear it.

  I tried to smile and shrug and be casual and reassuring but I do not claim to have succeeded. All the time I was thinking how dare he, how dare he, and how can she agree. It sounded mad. It was the most preposterous request I had ever heard. I felt shamed by having to listen to it. What kind of man was this who could be so childish, who could make the person he loved so wretched? At the forefront of my mind was the thought that the whole situation was dangerous. I managed to keep relatively calm and asked her only if she was sure she knew what she was doing. She said she did. She said at the end of the six months Andrew wanted to marry her and then everything would change. All he needed was confidence. She told me how each of his wives had deserted him. Fortunately, there had been no children. Now, at thirty-nine, he was ready to try again and this time he knew it would work. Celia said she knew, too. She loved him. She knew he was odd, but then, she said, so was she. Andrew was the first person whom she had ever felt to be like her.

  What I felt, as I listened to this halting account in the cold morning air, was disbelief. I did not, for a start, believe a single word about the reason for those marriages breaking up. I did not believe Andrew was going to marry her, either. I did not even believe he had been an orphan. Instead, I had this fixed and unshakable conviction that Andrew Bayliss, policeman or not, was a liar and a cheat who had duped my innocent daughter. There and then, even while she was still talking, I resolved what I was going to do. As soon as I got home I began to put my plan into operation: I rang a local solicitor and asked him how I could hire a detective. He told me. I hired one. I told this detective to find out for me as much as possible about Police Sergeant Andrew Bayliss, aged thirty-nine: the dates of his marriages, the grounds of divorce, his background and upbringing. Within a few weeks, I was sent copies of birth and marriage certificates and of divorce proceedings. As I had sensed, Andrew Bayliss was a fraud.

  The degree to which he had lied was not really very great, but it was revealing. The only serious factual lie was that his wives had not left him, he had left them. It was true that, until recently, there had been no children. It was also true that, although not brought up in an institution, as he claimed, Andrew Bayliss had been fostered from the age of ten and had clearly had a rough time being passed from one family to another. I suppose I might have begun to feel sorry for him, if it had not been for the most interesting revelation of all: he had married for a third time two years before he met Celia. No divorce had been applied for. And, according to my detective, he was still in touch with this third wife. Occasionally he spent weekends with her. Worst of all, she had a baby of about eight months.

  I had all this information for a week before I did anything about it. I read it over and over again, trying hard to be rational and logical. I saw that, as one would expect of a policeman, Andrew Bayliss was certainly not engaged in any illegal activity. There was nothing legally wrong in living most of the time with another woman, while still seeing one’s wife and child. There was only Celia’s word for it that marriage was indeed in the offing. So what could I do?

  Going to see Andrew Bayliss was one of the most terrible things I have ever had to do in my whole life. I tried to convince myself that a letter would do just as well – indeed, I wrote several drafts of such a letter – but I always knew it would not. It would be both dangerous and cowardly. I was tempted to consult Rosemary and Emily, but resisted the urge. It would have been wrong to implicate them in what had to be my decision. So, greatly daring, I went to the police station where Andrew Bayliss worked, at a time when I thought him most likely to be there,
and I asked the duty officer if he would be so good as to ask Police Sergeant Bayliss if I could see him on an official matter. I gave my maiden name. In no time at all, a puzzled Sergeant Bayliss presented himself and stopped short when he saw me, He was ready to refuse to speak to me, but the Duty Officer was there and he could not risk a scene. He said, abruptly, that he was busy and could not spare me any time. I said, if he preferred, I could say what I had to say there and then, it would not take a minute. I was careful to speak calmly, though my heart raced and the hands clutching the counter in front of me did not feel like mine but like shaking gloves I had to control. The duty officer looked at me curiously. I was, I hope, dignified and, that word much loved by policemen, ‘respectable’. Andrew Bayliss was well aware of the excellent impression I was giving. He opened a door into a small room leading off the entrance hall, and gestured for me to go inside. There was a desk, which he immediately placed himself behind, and a chair which he did not invite me to use and of which I did not avail myself. I said I would come to the point immediately, that all I had come to say was that I knew he was married and had a child and that, if he did not immediately either leave my daughter alone or tell her at once about his circumstances, then I would do so myself. I said all that concerned me was that her choice to live with him should be a real one and that, at the moment, in possession of only half the facts about him, it was not. Then I walked out of his office. He said, ‘Now look here,’ but I had the door open and when I stood in the open doorway and turned back and said, ‘Yes?’ I suppose he did not dare say what he really wanted to say. I said goodbye to the policeman outside and left the police station. When I got home, I felt drained and exhausted. The humiliation of it all was hard to bear. It was not that I felt either ashamed or guilty, though I did feel apprehensive about how Celia would interpret my action. But I cannot say, even now, in spite of what happened afterwards, that I have ever regretted it —