Private Papers

by Margaret Forster

  Nine months to the day after her wedding Emily had a son, Daniel Oliver. I have never seen anyone so happy: to look at Emily on that day was to see happiness defined. I went down a week before the baby was due to the little semi-detached house near Cobham where they had lived since their marriage. I had been there often, of course, but never to stay, although I had been invited. I thought Emily and Mark needed their privacy and was extremely sensitive to any hint that I was being indulged or worse still patronized. So I had stayed resolutely at home until then and had never experienced what it was like living as Emily now lived. It was an entirely different world from Primrose Hill, where she had been born and brought up. Everything was duplicated. Not just the rows and rows of identical houses, nor the gardens, all the same length and width and in the same state of maturity, nor the cars, all parked in neat driveways in front of much prized garages: it was the way of life, too. The people coming out of the houses looked the same. The men really did all leave at the same time to catch the same train and they wore suits differing only minutely in cut and colour. The wives stayed at home, crisp and smart, driving their own cars to shop or to take extremely clean, orderly-looking children to school.

  I was uneasy in Emily’s house. I am uneasy in anyone’s house, but it was sad for me to find I could not feel at home in my daughter’s. The feeling had nothing to do with any lack of welcome from either Emily or Mark, but more with the actual house. I detested that house, it gave me claustrophobia. Emily had lavished great care and attention on No 32 Haven Road but this cosseting somehow made her house seem even more pathetic. Everything was freshly painted, walls all white ‘to make the rooms look bigger’ (impossible task), carpets self-coloured cord, the same light grey throughout ‘to give a feeling of space’ (no chance of this). There was evidence everywhere of Mark’s handiwork, shelves put up, cupboards made under sinks and in alcoves. The furniture was all new, and both practical and pretty. But I felt stifled and restless and completely out of my depth. I could not bear to see what Emily did every day, though it was no different from the sort of thing other young wives did happily all day long.

  The birth (at home) was straightforward and relatively short. Emily was ecstatic. Mark’s pleasure, beside hers, seemed flat. He was far more tired than she was, but then he had been far more anxious. Emily’s love affair with her son excluded Mark from the first. Her passion for Daniel was a consuming business and it absorbed her completely. I remember that one afternoon, as she sat up in bed breastfeeding him, while I sat beside the window sewing, aware of the touching tableau the room made, she suddenly said, ‘Poor Mother, you never had a son. It wasn’t fair. I should have been your son.’ I smiled and felt quite calm, as I told her that, yes, of course, I had wanted her to be a boy, especially because her father was dead, but that it had been astonishing how soon that had stopped mattering. I had not craved a son for years and now I had a son-in-law and a grandson and was very well off. ‘It isn’t the same,’ Emily said, a look of great pride on her face. She bent her head over her baby son and then looked back at me and then at him again, quite suffused with adoration. I felt alarmed and just slightly irritated: there was something too intense about Emily’s affection. All she wanted to do all day was feed, bath, clothe, walk and cradle Daniel.

  The next year Emily had a miscarriage and the year after a still-born baby, another son. I went to look after her each time and observed with distress how she doted on Daniel even more as he grew older. It was natural, of course. Each time she lost a baby it was easy to understand why she clung to Daniel. Everyone, including me, told her she was young and healthy and had plenty of time to have a dozen children, but she had lost faith and was terrified she would only have one. ‘One isn’t a family,’ she wept after her still-born son had been taken away. I tried to convince her one could be a family, but she shook her head.

  Vanessa was born the following year, when Daniel was three. It was quite obvious from the beginning that she did not love her daughter as she had done, and still did, her son. Emily now conceded that she had a family and might call a halt to producing more babies for a while. Mark, I think, would have made a stand in any case. They had their house, their car, their boy, their girl. All was well, all firmly on a par with the neighbours. Emily had made her bed and I must leave her to lie on it. I had to stop wishing I could have prevented her marrying so —

  *

  What a farce Emily’s wedding was. I really don’t know how Em put up with it. I’m sure Mother’s passionate objections pushed Em into it, or made her more determined. And Mother’s snobbery came to the fore with a vengeance. If dear Lionel and Freda had been anything but lower middle-class shopkeepers with a few bob, Mother would have reacted differently but, as it was, she saw Emily not only throwing away her education and a career but also her social advantages. I swear she hated what Mark Perrit was, more than who he was. He was terrified of her. Emily told me he was so nervous, when Mother spoke to him, that he developed a stutter and to be left alone in the same room as her scared him rigid. Because Mother had become formidable. All that reserve, all the quiet dignity she had always had when she was younger, had metamorphosed into a coldness which belied what she really was. Her restraint, instead of being charming, was off-putting. Her diffidence had hardened into abruptness.

  Emily’s marriage was a watershed for all of us. Mother was no longer the strong centre point. There wasn’t one. And this, I suppose, was the testing time for all her passionately held theories about the Family. I think she knew that none of us, for a mixture of motives, would ever say goodbye-mother-now-I-am-pissing-off-on-my-own, but I do think she feared a growing indifference between the three of us.

  I found myself thinking about her a lot, after Emily got married. It was lucky she’d sold that big family house some years back and had been settled in her flat for a good few years, or it would have been pitiful to think of her rattling around. She couldn’t rattle much in three rooms and a garden, so there was no special poignancy in Emily moving out from that point of view. But I thought about her in the late afternoon, not having anyone coming in, and knew how she would mind. What she needed was to be coming in herself, from a job. Mother had walled herself up in her precious family, and now look where it had got her. I would fret a little each time I left her, feel guilty, then think, oh damn her, I can’t bear it, and become involved once more in my own concerns, which, God knows, were complicated enough. At Mother’s lowest trough of inactivity, I was at my own peak of action. I was living so hectically, there didn’t seem a spare five minutes in a day. The tiny firm I had joined blossomed in the design-conscious climate of the Sixties and, against all expectations, especially my own, I had become a partner in an enormously expanding and lucrative business. I headed the graphic department, where we employed a staff of thirty. Every day brought new orders, new ideas, new excitements. And I loved it. No two days were the same, that was the great joy, and I was able not only to decide what I wanted to design but also to carry out the designs. Oh, happy days. I was the whirlwind of the family.

  Mother did once say to me, on my thirtieth birthday, in 1965, just when our firm was really beginning to expand, ‘How different your life at thirty is from mine at thirty.’ I said, ‘Thank Christ,’ but it turned out she wasn’t getting at me for having no husband, no children. I would have expected her to think of me with sorrow, as a poor misguided creature to whom the delights of mother love were unknown. But not a bit of it – Mother appeared to approve of my career. She was eager to share in every detail of our developing firm’s progress, liked to hear of my trips here, there and everywhere. It was Emily, happily married suburban Emily, with her own sweet family, who came in for Mother’s wrath. Emily was wasting herself, that was Mother’s opinion, though she never actually said so to me. (She was always so careful not to talk to each of us about the others in any critical way. Pass on news, yes, but offer criticism, no.) Mother used to tell me frequently how well I was doing, how pleased she was. She w
as not so pleased, of course, with my personal life. I didn’t hide my lovers from her. Sometimes, even in the few meetings she had with them over Sunday lunches or suchlike, she would take a particular fancy to one of my men friends. Then hope would spring eternal and she would be disappointed when the favoured one disappeared. Not that I was by any normal standards promiscuous: my liaisons lasted a year, two years, long stretches of time, I thought. I never again got myself in a Tony situation. All my affairs were with men who were much better for me than Tony, but not one of them meant as much to me.

  When I was thirty-five, I began to think I would like to have a child. What an extraordinary thing! I actually found myself looking at children longingly and wishing I could have some close to me. It was nonsense, pernicious nonsense. I had never, like Emily, drooled over babies. On the contrary, I had gone out of my way, perhaps falsely, to mock them, to say they were disgusting smelly things, knowing that this was how I was meant to react, that it was in keeping with the image people had of me. But it wasn’t true, even then. Watching Emily or Mother playing with Daniel and Vanessa, I covertly examined the Infant Phenomenon and was fascinated. The usual stuff, how tiny the fingernails, how perfect the feet, that kind of thing. What I never did was handle them, babies I mean, yet I often wanted to. Babies seemed to cleave to Emily and Mother, to fit so easily into the contours of their bodies, and I was afraid they would not find my body so accommodating. With small children, it was different. Once they could talk, I got on well with them, and rather prided myself on doing this without any of that icksy-bicksy baby talk. I loved Daniel and Vanessa. There, Mother, I often felt like saying, you haven’t failed: here is your sense of family, not much in common with each other, but a great deal with the next generation. I was delighted that Vanessa looked exactly like me and that I could see that she did – how amazing, all those genes stepping smartly sideways. Naturally, I was made her godmother, Emily still being into pleasing her dear (then) husband’s family with christenings. Emily called her daughter Vanessa Rosemary Celia, which both Celia and I took as an enormous compliment. Em, amenable in all matters like that, would have been perfectly willing to make Mother happy by using her name but, strangely enough, Mother said no. She preferred Emily to use one of her sister’s names and so Em bunged us both in.

  The christening was, if anything, even more ghastly than the wedding had been, but Mother behaved better and, as she was in charge of Daniel, she had something to occupy her. She had by then let go quite a lot, let go of Emily I mean, even if in a pretty fatalistic way. She didn’t approve of Emily’s life, any more than of Celia’s or mine, but she accepted now that there was nothing she could do. And, of course, she was no longer sitting at home polishing the silver and other silly things. Mother had got a job. Not only had she got a job, she’d got a Friend, definitely a matter for a capital letter. What will she have to say about him?

  *

  — saw an advertisement, it was as simple as that. I cannot remember the exact wording, and I am surprised to find I have not kept the cutting, but it was something like ‘Mature lady with family experience required to assist in setting up of Centre for Adoptive Parents. No professional training necessary but nursing, teaching or other skills to do with caring for children an advantage. The work will be mainly of a counselling nature.’ Something like that. I read it several times, feeling pessimistic. I was fifty-one, was that too mature or not mature enough? I had had no nursing experience for over thirty years. I was sure I was unsuitable, that I did not stand a chance, and yet I wrote off immediately. Naturally, the letter took all day. There seemed so little to write about myself. What had I to say, beyond the bare fact that I was a widow with three grown-up daughters? I did not know whether to make much of the fact that I had been an orphan myself and that I had had an adopted child. What happened to Jess would hardly be considered to my credit. But I decided truth was of the essence and wrote briefly about it. I did not tell any of my children. It seemed too pathetic, I was too proud and embarrassed.

  I received a reply almost by return post, which surprised me. It was a simple acknowledgement, from the GLC, of my application. Then there was a wait of some three weeks before I was asked to come to County Hall for an interview the following week. More hesitations and agonizing. Was I wiser to try to look efficient and smart or homely and motherly? I could not imagine. My best clothes, the dress and jacket I had worn for Emily’s wedding, seemed far too frivolous and I remember thinking I would have to buy something new. But I controlled myself, choosing an ordinary dress I was fond of, even though it was well worn. I did buy a hat though. I have always liked hats, wished often they were not so unfashionable. I felt transformed when I put on a new hat, it gave me a lift as nothing else could. I went for that interview, which was most alarming, and then a week later for another, before a board, which was even more frightening. The job in question seemed too humble to require such a powerful selection body, but I know now that this was just the usual government bureaucracy. The questions themselves were harmless enough, it was the people asking them who appeared intimidating. I remember the final question was ‘Tell me, Mrs Butler, why do you think you’re suitable for this job?’ I said I did not know if I was suitable, that all I knew was that I thought there was nothing more important than the family unit and nothing in which I was more interested, or felt more sympathy for, than the problems of the adoptive family. I got the job. I was euphoric —

  *

  Here it comes, there’s nothing like a convert when it comes to proselytizing. It really was rather wearing to have Mother constantly extolling the joys of a career, as if they were her own personal discovery. That’s what is so bloody annoying about her – all this insistence on analysing what doesn’t need analysis. So OK, she started work and liked it and that’s fine, that’s great, now can we get some sleep. But no, it all had to be exclaimed over, as though she’d discovered penicillin or something. Christ knows what she did at that phoney-sounding centre, anyway. It didn’t sound as if it added up to much, but, if I tried to get down to brass tacks, she went all mysterious and self-important, as though she was working for MI5. Everything was ‘confidential’. She bustled off to this dreary place, somewhere near County Hall, and there, so far as I could make out, she sat all day talking to people who wanted to adopt kids. It was just an office job really, not that I want to knock it. I was grateful it had come along and only hoped it lasted. But what was maddening was the way Mother jumped to quite unwarranted conclusions. She always did that, always, about everything. She assumed, after working five minutes, that careers, jobs, anything outside the domestic bit, went on being exhilarating. She assumed being ‘a different person’, which was her own banal description, was something one went on wanting to be. Well, I for one was tired of it. Work made me feel different, too, but by 1970, when I was thirty-five, I was played out. I wanted that other scene, the one Mother had already had. When I said to her, ‘Mother, I think I’m going to start a baby soon,’ she almost had a heart attack. Scarlet face, puffed out cheeks, great gasps for breath – it was a pantomime performance. ‘What do you mean?’ she asked. I said, funnily enough, I meant what I said, I wanted to have a baby, and she said why and what, without a man. Not quite, Mother. With a man, yes, I said nastily, no hybrids for me. With a man, but not a man I’m either married to or necessarily living with. It’s the baby I want, not the man.

  Her response was so disappointing. I suppose I had always looked to my mother to rise to the occasion and not act like other mothers. The one thing I’d always been proud of was her ability to treat pieces of startling news calmly, without hysterics. Think of the infamous abortion: not a flicker, whatever I now know she felt. But, when I gave her this bit of news, she let me down. She didn’t, as I had imagined, begin to discuss the pros and cons (I knew it was asking too much to expect to get away without that), but instead was instantly scandalized. She said she didn’t know how I could, why I wanted to, what on earth I thought I was doing, at
my age, throwing away a wonderful career for the sake of some sentimental whim. I had never liked babies, never had anything to do with them, wouldn’t be good with them. And, as for deliberately choosing a man to father a child and then denying him the rights of a father, it was monstrous, it was unnatural. For a while I countered this with all the standard arguments. What, I argued, was unnatural about it? All nature decreed was that a man was necessary to fertilize the ovum; after that nature left it to the mother to house the unborn child, bear it and feed it. Nature had nothing programmed for the father, after that one second’s involvement. Society imposed the paternal connection. Mother interjected with the usual stuff, about how could I support a child, and I said very easily, no problem, my insolvent days were long since over. And what, Mother shrilled, about when I went back to work, was I going to shove my child into a nursery or find a babyminder? What kind of life was that? A fine one, I said, but I was only being facetious. I tired very quickly of arguing with Mother and I was angry with her, too. She’d made us worship at the family shrine all our lives and now, when I showed the first sign of true conversion, she didn’t like it. She calmed down eventually, of course. Even apologized. Said it was just that she didn’t think I quite realized what I would be taking on, how lonely and hard it was bringing up a child alone. I think that was supposed to be a poignant reminder. At least she didn’t ask what people would think. She didn’t care what they thought, only what she thought. Her next tack was to say I ought to go and stay with Emily for a week and that would change my mind. Emily, Mother said, was drowning in motherhood and it wasn’t a pretty sight.