Private Papers

by Margaret Forster

  Despite the casualness of our relationship, I had been to see Emily quite often since Vanessa’s birth, though never to stay. A day was long enough, not because of the children, but because of Mark, or rather Emily and Mark. There was nothing wrong with Mark, really. He was a nice man, a good husband and father. Mother hasn’t done him justice and I don’t suppose I’m going to, either. It was the way he planned his life that I couldn’t stand. It was all worked out and he liked it that way, he said he got the best out of every day by organizing it properly. I remember, one day when I was there, Emily sent me to get some soap powder from the utility room. There wasn’t any left, just a box of Persil with about a spoonful in the bottom. I put my coat on and shouted that there wasn’t any soap powder left, that I’d go and get some. Mark suddenly appeared. He looked at his watch and said, ‘Of course there’s no soap powder. It’s April 30th. It arrives today.’ I was mystified until he smugly explained that he had worked out how much soap powder – and cat food, cereal, paper nappies and God knows what – was used in a month, and every month a new load was delivered from a bulkbuying firm. Even as he was talking, a van drew up outside the house and there was the bloody soap powder and everything else. He was triumphant. But he was lovely with his children, playing with them, taking them out, always very affectionate. I felt quite jealous watching Daniel entwined in his arms while Mark read him a story. I even pretended I could remember sitting like that with my father (which I couldn’t). He was good in the house, too, automatically sharing all the chores, without pointing it out. But what he wasn’t so good at was being a husband, he wasn’t so good for Emily, I mean. He worked hard, earned a good bit of money, was obviously going to be a junior partner at some amazingly young age, but all this made him so dull. It was what Emily had admired and I could quite see why. All three of us were probably looking for the inevitable father figure, lacking in our lives. Mother had been nothing if not dependable; we didn’t look to men for dependability but for some other more impressive evidence of absolute strength and confidence. Mark seemed to have it, and indeed he proved he had. Emily could lean on him as much as she liked and he would never crumble. But he lacked imagination and what I can only call verve, and, increasingly, that was what Emily began to want. She did love Mark and she was passionate about her children, but as time went on she felt constrained by them. There was no possibility of change, she told me fretfully. In five years Mark said they would buy a bigger and better house, in a more attractive place, but that was as far as any upheaval would go. It was no help saying, look, you were told you ought to live a bit before you married and had kids. She knew that. She didn’t regret marriage and children, it was all the rest that she didn’t want. Why, because they had children, did Mark expect them to live as they did? Why couldn’t they go and live on a boat, or tour round America or do something different? What Emily was discontented with was Mark’s preconceived notions as to how life would be. And that worried him.

  God knows why I had this need to go around telling everyone I was going to choose to become a mother, but I did have it, and I told Emily and Mark. Mark was even more outraged than Mother. It was the first and last time I ever saw him furious and I must say it was almost a relief to find him capable of shouting. He said it was both wicked and irresponsible. Children were not self-indulgences, something you treated yourself to, like a new dress, and then discarded just as easily. They were a sacred trust and every child had the right to be given the best start possible, which mine could never have. Why not? Because I was going to handicap them deliberately from birth. I laughed in his face at first. I said I could think of quite a few children whose biggest handicap in life had been their father and quite a few women who had managed very successfully to be both mother and father, mentioning no names. Mark said that was not the point. My mother couldn’t help being widowed, nobody could help accidents, and certainly she and all the others like her had coped magnificently, but those were false circumstances, quite unpreventable. What I was doing was cold-bloodedly robbing my child of its father. Not cold-bloodedly, Mark, I said, it won’t be cold, it will be very hot blood indeed. He said, if I was reducing the discussion to such a level, there was no point in continuing. I said there was no point anyway. There was no discussion. I would do what I wanted to do and my conscience was quite clear. I wasn’t feckless. If I thought I did not have an even chance of giving my child as good a life as he gave his, then I wouldn’t go ahead. His final shot was that I had no respect for the family, to which I riposted that he needed to examine his definition of what a family was. We parted quite good friends after an awkward hour or so – Mark was far too kind a man to be dictatorial. I think I’d just caught him, as I had caught my mother, completely and totally unawares. They just could not believe I seriously wanted a child and so, I suppose, I sounded flip and casual, which antagonized and offended them. But, of course, their resistance to the idea had the effect you would expect: it stiffened my resolution. I began to wonder who to choose as my child’s father.

  *

  — work was more important. But John was significant, too. To describe his background would tell you very little about him. He was that rare thing, a man with a real sense of community. He was unmarried but did not live, as I did, in a little world of his own. On the contrary, as well as his job as a probation officer he had always been an indefatigable worker for community welfare, belonging to a score of different organizations all concerned with making people feel that what mattered to one was of concern to another and that they did not live in isolation. He had run all sorts of clubs and associations, was a local councillor and a governor of two schools. I was never entirely clear as to why he had taken the Centre job, but he was apparently instrumental in setting it up and was on the board which interviewed me. He was my immediate superior.

  John was an immediately attractive man, but not because he was handsome – he was not. He was tall, far too thin, and had a scholarly stoop. He had been wounded in the leg in the war but I never asked how. His left leg dragged a little when he walked. Sometimes, when he was in pain from this leg, he would look ashen but mostly he had a good colour, from being out of doors as much as he could. That, originally, was our great link: neither of us could bear to be inside a moment longer than we needed. On my first day at the Centre, when I went out for air, I ended up on the same seat as John, in the forecourt of the building where we worked.

  John and I had an intellectual companionship. There is a tendency to think that two people in their fifties would have no other sort, but it is equally surprising how often people mistook our relationship. We were often regarded as a married couple, by those who did not know, and even those who did read more into it than was in any way justified. It is not that I minded this confusion – I would not have been ashamed or indignant or embarrassed about being thought of as John’s wife or mistress – but just that it ought to be cleared up. I think even my daughters imagined things. They did not realize that what drew John and me towards each other, apart from work, was conversation. We liked to talk to each other. Each of us was, to some extent, starved of conversation and needed a confidant. Mind you, unlike me, John had many friends, friends stretching right back to his childhood in Gloucestershire, where his father had been a vicar. He was one of five sons but the other four, all of them, had been killed in the war. The burden of his parents’ sorrow had rested heavily on him ever since. His mother was dead but his father, at the great age of ninety, was then still alive. John went to see him every weekend at a Home, near the village where he had been vicar for so long. That was our first conversation, really, about parents. He felt miserable and permanently guilty that he did not have a home to which he could welcome his ailing and aged father. My comforting words as to how well he looked after his father’s welfare nevertheless irritated him, and we began to discuss the vital difference between love and duty, or rather between acts performed for one’s family out of love and those carried out to fulfil an onerous sense of duty.


  John very quickly knew all about my past and present life and I knew about his. It was not possible that such an attractive man could have reached fifty-four without having some romantic attachment and I was prepared for the discovery that first John’s fiancée had been killed many years ago, when he was still a young man, and secondly that he had had a long affair lasting nearly ten years, with a woman who was already married and whose husband would not give her a divorce. I didn’t ask why this affair had ended and I was not told. So John had had, in one way or another, a good deal of heartbreak in his life. Maybe he would have been compassionate, anyway, but his experiences had made him more so. Whereas I was quick with my judgements about the people we dealt with, and often severe, John was slower and kinder. He always looked for the good motives, always gave people the benefit of the doubt, whereas I was much more suspicious. And his idea of family was much wider and more all-embracing than mine. In our interviews we were supposed, among other things, to assess the quality of the family life being offered by our clients. There were all kinds of trick questions we became skilled at asking and from which we had been trained to extract the most. John was always gently pointing out to me that I was looking for a degree of perfection, perfection according to my own very stringent rules, which not only could not be offered by many people, but which it was not necessary for them to have.

  The reasons given for wanting to adopt children were an odd mixture. I realized that, if the Centre had existed when I was abandoned and if through it I had been adopted, I might have found myself with some very unexpected parents indeed. Not all the people who came to us were consumed by a passion to be mothers or fathers, though you might think they would have to be. Some of them saw adopting children as a way of making a contribution to society, not at all the same thing. I was against such applicants, but John was not, not necessarily. He argued that such a feeling was good, that we needed more of those feelings in our society, anyway. Our social structure was too rigid, with its tight little family units, which might be strong in themselves but which were an encouragement to exclude everyone who did not belong. What we needed to encourage, John said, was a wider sense of family. He met my scepticism calmly, said he knew it sounded far too idealistic but that he believed in it. He said his own particular family unit had been smashed by the war and that he had never reconstructed one to replace it, but felt he belonged to all sorts of different families, all the same, and that these were just as satisfying. He rhymed off all sorts of such ‘families’ and would not accept that they could not be thought of as I thought of mine, would not concede that blood was the vital factor. And he said that he now had another family, the Centre, and that I was part of it.

  This made me uncomfortable. I respected, admired and liked all the people with whom I worked, especially John. I certainly felt solidarity with them. Within a very short time, I knew all about their problems and felt involved with them: any of them could (and did) ask for my advice or help and were given it. We shared treats together and celebrated each other’s good news. When any of us was sick or depressed, the rest rushed to succour them. But did that make us a family, as John alleged? I thought not. There was no common background, no common base, never mind a blood connection. With my daughters, I had a sense of total familiarity, which never in a million years would I ever have with my colleagues at the Centre. Family means more than being together. Family means a common ancestry, which in turn presupposes a common stock. Family is more than being a group, it is being a group without choice and that is at one and the same time inhibiting and relaxing. It can be a curse or a glory, but it exists.

  Naturally, I discussed my family with John, especially Celia. I told John about Frank, about Celia devoting herself to this fifty-five year old, broken-down Irishman, with no prospects whatsoever. He scolded me for judging my daughter by my own standards. Celia was obviously happy, that was all that mattered. I said it was not, that the future mattered, too, and Frank could offer Celia none. He would never get a proper job, never marry her – indeed I would not want him to – never give her all the things she needed. ‘You need. Not Celia,’ John said. I was quite shocked. He exasperated me. Then he surprised me by confessing that marriage with all it entailed was important to him as well as to me. He had always wanted to marry and felt himself incomplete without a wife. He asked me if, during all the years my husband had been dead, I had not been tempted to marry again.

  We were sitting at the time beside the river, on the south bank. It was a brilliantly sunny day. We sat side by side on a bench and John had his arm running along its back, holding the wooden paling I was resting against. I was encompassed by his arm without being touched by it. I remember very vividly, not so much the rest of our conversation – how can I, at this distance of time – but being aware that John could quite easily move his arm a millimetre or two and drop it on to my shoulders. I was so afraid he would do this that I sprang up and brushed some imaginary crumbs off my dress (we had been having a sandwich together). I said it was time to go. He looked at me curiously, smiling in a contained sort of way, and I knew he knew what I had been thinking. I cursed myself for bringing up the subject of marriage in relation to Celia or anyone else. I wanted to be honest with him but I could not. I wanted to tell him that, yes, I had had dreams. When I jumped to my feet it may have been through fear —

  *

  Fear? Mother was shit scared. John Grey was in love with her, it was obvious to anyone with half an eye. Mother didn’t invite any of us to meet him formally – she wouldn’t have been able to bear what we might think that implied – but, inevitably, we all met him. He was the biggest thing in her life for years. She allowed him to ‘drop her off’ at our respective residences and there was a good deal of casual oh-by-the-way-this-is-my-boss stuff. Didn’t fool anybody. I invited him in the second time it happened, which she didn’t like but couldn’t do much about, because he accepted with such alacrity, and she was indebted to him, anyway, because nobody in their right mind could have believed someone who lived in Camden Town was dropping off another person going to Fulham, without going hellishly out of their way. I quite like him. That’s grudging, I like him a lot. He has a nice, dry wit and makes gentle jokes at Mother’s expense while clearly admiring her. He is one of those people who are interested in everyone, he asks genuinely inquisitive questions, not just polite ones. When we first met, I could see he was appraising me in the light of what Mother had doubtless told him. It struck me as distinctly odd that, all these years when we had been growing up and Mother had been in her prime, we might reasonably have been expected to face this situation, but we had never been called upon to do so. Never. We’d never had to face up to a man who found our mother attractive and to whom she was attracted. I gave John every encouragement I could, without being indecently pushy. So did Celia. She met him the same way and was equally taken. He was so suitable. Neither of us could decide, though, whether he loved her. I wasn’t sure. Did he want to go to bed with her? I wasn’t sure about that, either. But he did want to be her friend, and she was afraid to find out whether that was all he wanted. I think. Mother didn’t want to be put to the test, that was for sure. It was all right bringing us to decision point but not herself. Avoidance was her technique, one denied to us. We had to ‘face up’ to things. We were brought up by her to believe we were in charge of our own destinies but Mother apparently wasn’t. She was different.

  June 1st

  WALKED IN ST JAMES’S Park with Celia. She misses that silly gardening job so much, especially watching the birds. She talked all the time about birds. She doesn’t chat, she lectures, but she can’t help it. She lectured me on the tufted duck and the nesting habits of the pochard. Tried so hard to take an intelligent interest. Expressed concern that in 1963 many pochards died due to the excessively cold spring. Wondered all the time what a pochard actually looked like. Thank God, I can recognize a pelican. Celia says the pelicans have been there since at least the seventeenth century and t
hat in 1930 one pelican actually started to eat young tufted ducks. No wonder Daniel loved going to the park with Celia – his mind responded as mine could not. While Celia related some story about a mute swan cob, I was wondering why she dressed as she did. Covertly, I glanced at her dreadful skirt. Tweed, in June and gathered, with her enormous hips. Doesn’t she see what gathered skirts make her look like? And corduroy shirts, straining across such a bosom? She should have her hair cut. It is too long. Beautiful hair, but nothing made of it. Looks incongruous at her age. I’ve bought her clothes, in which she would look good, but she wears them once, politely, then never again. She can’t even be comfortable in tweed, in corduroy. She looks constrained. When we rested near the drinking fountain, she told me she had once seen a pied flycatcher there and a wheatear bobbing on the grass. Autumn mornings, just after dawn, used to be the best times, she said. I thought she spoke nostalgically. Couldn’t help asking her if she missed her old job as a gardener. She said yes, she did. As ever, she gave no reasons. Was it being out in the fresh air, I asked? She said not. Suddenly, she blurted out that in gardening there was ‘no agony’. It never worried her. Social work did, it was all worry, she would never be really good at her job because she could not cut off. She had to deal with so many people who had never had a chance and never would, and there was no real help to give them. I knew she was thinking of, and remembering, Frank and found myself squirming on the bench with irritation. Celia’s simplistic assumptions do irritate me. For someone so clever she is stupid about the ways of the world. And I disliked the realization that her job was, to her, a kind of penance, a hairshirt she put on every day. Quite illogically, I found myself wishing with passion that Celia had not given up the oboe. She might have joined an orchestra and met—