Private Papers

by Margaret Forster

  *

  Some droopy young bore who played the violin or ’cello, a Nigel or Julian, who was looking for a nice steady girl, like our Celia. It was one of Mother’s recurrent fantasies, hence her eagerness to encourage both Celia and Emily musically. My daughter the oboeist, my daughter the pianist: Mother hungered after socially acceptable roles. It’s weird when you remember that she didn’t want them to impress her friends or relatives, as show-offs usually do – who did Mother have to impress? – but merely to hug to herself, to give herself pleasure. She started on it very early, always prodding Celia, in particular, towards stardom. When Celia did get a place in the National Youth Orchestra, for one brief tour, Mother was ecstatic. It was like that when Emily got a distinction in Grade 8: we all had to be euphoric to match Mother’s mood. It made us all furious, Emily especially. I remember telling Mother not to make so much of these little musical triumphs, but I think she just thought I was jealous. She couldn’t help it. All success was progress to her and the only success she recognized was that which led up existing, well marked-out ladders. Nothing else. What she didn’t appreciate was that music meant very little to either Celia or Emily. They practised, they were diligent, they quite enjoyed it and were certainly accomplished, but neither of them was musical in the sense Mother assumed that they must be, simply because they did so well. Celia was always leaning over the banisters to see how many more minutes she had to do, when she was practising – the only decent clock that kept good time was on the landing wall – and I remember thinking that if, as Mother claimed, she was ‘devoted’ to her oboe she wouldn’t even notice the time passing.

  But birds, especially ducks, were a real passion. All the parks where Celia worked all those years had ducks on the ponds and she was really mesmerized by them. In her room she had a huge chart she’d made herself, with every single duck that existed in the British Isles on it. She had books and pamphlets and all kinds of material to do with the breeding and habits of ducks, and her main occupation in her spare time, before she took in Frank, was going out with her very snazzy, expensive binoculars to watch ducks. It took her out of London, too. She joined some kind of naturalist club and went off to rivers, where special sorts of ducks breed – oh, there was no end to the good ducky times. And I don’t mean to mock, they were good times. Any genuine enthusiasm leads to good times. In Celia’s case it also led to a little romance, all among the Suffolk reeds, that Mother never knew about. Another duck fancier, of course. A young farmer Celia met while duck-spotting some rare species, a crested mallard that had come from Scandinavia. These ducks, two I think, settled on this fellow’s pond and Celia went backwards and forwards several weekends to lie in the field and observe it. The farmer invited her for a cup of tea and a warm at his fire, and in the end warmed rather more than her wet feet. How vulgar of me. It lasted a few months. Mother would have been sure it was going to lead somewhere, if she had known. I don’t know how it ended. I only knew it was happening because Celia used me as an alibi to explain her absence from several of the dreaded Sunday lunches. I’m surprised Mother was taken in. If she had stopped and thought about it, she would have realized Celia and I would never spend a day together, but she always liked the notion of sisterly affection, so allowed herself to be duped. Celia managed this affair very well, anyway. She didn’t get depressed or upset, she seemed quite calm about it and certainly had a good summer out of it. She’d grown up, really.

  Frank was a further growing-up stage. How bloody patronizing that sounds, like Mother at her most insufferable. What I mean is that those two years Celia lived with Frank (or the other way round I should say) were not the wretched ones Mother infers. Oh, it’s as true that Frank was pathetic as it is that Andrew was a pig, but the point Mother never grasped was that he made Celia happy. Not only did she love him, she admired him. She used to say he had done so much in his life. This implied some startling list of achievements – brain surgeon, astronaut, nuclear physicist – yet all Frank had ever done, so far as we could tell, was bugger himself up. Mother hated him. At least Andrew had a career, at least he was handsome and terribly, terribly manly and strong, but Frank was nothing and had nothing. She was repelled physically by him, though I thought he wasn’t that hideous. In fact, old Frank wasn’t unattractive in a Brendan Behan sort of way. Battered, bruised and generally knocked about by life (or Life as I’m sure Celia would like me to put it), but not unattractive. If I could’ve understood a bloody word he said, I’m sure I’d have found him witty. About all I ever did make out was something that made me burst out laughing unfortunately. ‘Hasn’t your sister the face of the Blessed Virgin Mother herself now?’ Frank said. He was so hurt at my vulgar cackle. It wasn’t that I was thinking surely he didn’t imagine Celia was a virgin but that I was trying to imagine him making her a Mother. No chance. Frank, I’m sure, couldn’t get it up by then. He was a sick man, needed all his energy to get backwards and forwards to the lavatory.

  Their set-up was bizarre. Frank was encouraged by Celia to look after himself, to rest in bed as much as he could. He was delighted to oblige. Celia took him breakfast in bed before she left for work, plumped up his pillows and left everything he might need within reach. Frank lolled there, hawking and spitting his guts out all morning, puffing away on the fags Celia ‘hadn’t the heart’ to deprive him of, then he staggered up and consumed the delicious lunch Celia had left for him on a tray. She left him ‘a little something’ for his tea too. When I once witnessed these tempting dishes being prepared I asked her who the hell she thought she was – Mother Teresa? She blushed that awful mottled purple she goes and said she hadn’t asked me to come. No, she hadn’t. I went out of curiosity, like I do most things. I wanted to see this weird creature, older than Mother (Emily always whispered this).

  What particularly enraged Mother was that Frank did not deserve Celia’s attentions. He had brought his own condition on himself. Too true. What effort had Frank made? He’d joined the army, deserted, turned to labouring, boozed, stolen to get the booze, been put in prison for petty theft, come out, gone on the dole, boozed: it was a dismal record. But Frank was not worthless. He must’ve had something, because otherwise Celia could never have had such a deep relationship with him. And she had. Of that, I’m quite certain. Once, on one of my rare, fleeting visits, I came upon Celia and Frank unawares. They lived at the top of a four-storey house, a rooming house I suppose you’d call it, and though they had a separate front door to their room and kitchen it had no lock on it, only the actual front door of the whole house had a proper Yale lock. They did have a bell but it never worked. Frank was much too delicate to tackle the exhausting jobs like fitting a new battery, or whatever. It was quite common to have to disturb the woman on the ground floor in order to gain access. Anyway, this particular evening I was let in by her and when I reached Celia’s room the door was slightly ajar so I didn’t bother knocking. For a split second before they saw me, I saw them. They were playing a game, some crappy board game. Frank was in bed with Celia sitting beside him, her arm round his shoulders. What was so startling to me was the atmosphere which rose off them like steam – there was an immediate sense of warmth, cosiness, real intimacy. They were not only physically close, huddled up on the bed like that, but emotionally so. They were languid, relaxed, both smiling, rather dreamy. There was nothing erotic about the scene, it wasn’t that I’d interrupted any passionate embrace. On the contrary. There was an innocence about the pair of them, a wonderful naivety, that stopped me in my tracks. It was no bloody good my trying to fathom why I envied them. All I knew was that nobody had ever been in any danger of arriving unexpectedly and feeling like that about me and any of my lovers. Whatever else Mother could say about Frank, she couldn’t say he didn’t appreciate Celia. He did. Their devotion was reciprocal.

  But it couldn’t save Frank. Once he got stronger, as he soon did under Celia’s tender care, he began to wander. Not far, at first. But soon the lure of the pub on the corner got too much and
he was well away, pissed whenever she came home. It’s too familiar a pattern to need to repeat. Celia struggled, he struggled, but his liver obviously hadn’t the energy to be bothered. She didn’t manage to nurse him at home right up to the end. When he died, Mother said Celia was ‘free to start again’.

  *

  — orchestra and met someone. But she didn’t join an orchestra and ducks led nowhere. At thirty-one, after Frank died, she was as solitary as she had been at twenty. I never asked her if she had made any new friends, because I knew she hadn’t, nor could I express my anxiety to her. How can a mother commiserate with a thirty-one year old daughter because she has not found a mate? It would be offensive. I never let Celia, or Rosemary either, see how much I regretted that they were not married, though —

  *

  Oh, for Christ’s sake, she never let us see anything else. We were a disgrace as far as that went. She minded passionately and made us mind too. We felt failures –

  I’ll start again. Mother ostensibly saw nothing wrong in not being married but, on the other hand, everything wrong in not creating another family group for oneself. This meant she permanently contradicted herself. Celia and I got caught in the crossfire and grew so tired of it. Quite apart from our own personal happiness, we felt we were robbing Mother of hers. She wanted grandchildren and sons-in-law, she wanted to see us at the head of our own little units and she made us feel terrible failures because we weren’t. It was ironic when one looked at Emily, of course. Emily had a family, yet what happiness did that bring Mother? Precious little. She adored Daniel and Vanessa and saw lots of them, but she didn’t get on with Emily. In fact, from being the closest to her, Emily suddenly sank to the bottom of the popularity poll. Mother didn’t approve of how Emily was running her life. She realized long before anyone else did that Emily’s marriage, that wonderful love-match, was in trouble, and she blamed Emily. If Mother couldn’t bear for Celia and me not to be married and have a family, she found the fact that Emily might put her family life in jeopardy even more agonizing. To fail in marriage, to fail one’s family, was a much more heinous crime than not to have one. But will she say so? I want to see what she has to say about Emily almost as much as I want to see what she says about me.

  *

  — ectopic pregnancy and nearly died. Throughout my life I had had those sort of morbid dreams all mothers have, though they are not so much dreams as self-induced daydreams, masochistic in nature. Quite often, when my children were small, I would be standing in the kitchen doing something comfortingly ordinary like washing the dishes, gazing vacantly out on to a garden full of cheerful japonica and forsythia, and there would come to me this vision of one of my girls pale and wan on a hospital bed, and, above the noise of the birds through the open window, I would hear a doctor’s voice telling me he was very sorry but he was afraid . . . I was ashamed of those dreadful images, could not understand why or how they happened. I never wholly cured myself. After Jess’s death, strangely enough, they seemed to stop for a while, only to be renewed, at double strength and frequency, when one by one the girls left home. It was always when I was particularly happy that I was tormented in this fashion. I was never plagued by these fears when I was miserable.

  But of course when these things do happen, as everyone to whom they have happened knows, there is no previous apprehension. They come out of clear, blue skies to catch the contented unawares. Mark rang me up, at work, and no alarm bells sounded, even though he had never done such a thing in his life before. I thought, in so far as I thought at all, that he was ringing about the arrangements for me to have Vanessa that weekend. ‘I’m afraid I’ve got some worrying news,’ he began, and then he told me Emily was in hospital and that she had an ectopic pregnancy. My mind flew to textbook diagrams, as Mark described coming home and finding Emily on the floor, haemorrhaging, with Vanessa sitting beside her crying. Then the rush to the hospital. All the stuff of my imagination told matter-of-factly now made very little impression upon me. He said she was on the danger list, could I come. I went by taxi, all the way to the general hospital where Emily lay, perhaps dying. I did not feel numb nor did I shake or cry. I felt perfectly calm and rational, now that my worst fears were actually realized. All I wanted to do was to get there. My energies were concentrated on the journey. I sat on the edge of the seat, bolt upright, glaring at the traffic clogging up those dreadful South London high streets. Every red light was a personal insult, every hundred yards of open road a triumph. What finally released my emotions, so that at last I began to tremble and sweat and feel faint, was not the sight of Emily, still and white in her standard hospital bed, but the sight of Mark and the children, who had never featured in those dreams at all.

  Mark looked appalling. Normally so neat and fresh, he now looked wild and dishevelled. His hair, which I had never seen unbrushed, was all over the place, his usually immaculate clothes looked crumpled and stained, and his open and placid face had tightened into a thin set of lines. He had a sleepy Vanessa on his lap, and Daniel was beside him, playing with a toy car which whooshed backwards and forwards across the leather seat. My first thought, my very first thought, was concern for the children. I took the damp and sticky Vanessa from him at once. Mark was absolutely certain Emily was going to die. His fear was so great that it threw round him an invisible cordon only his children could breach. It was a relief when a doctor came to talk to us. He left us in no doubt as to the severity of Emily’s condition. Emily was in deep shock and had shown no signs of recovering from it. He thought it might help if Mark sat beside her for a while and talked to her, even if she did not appear to respond. But Mark, poor boy, chose that moment to collapse. The doctor went away to get a nurse to bring him a tranquillizer. I sat with Mark’s head on my shoulder, as he sobbed and shuddered, and the children stared in fascination. My arms would not hold all three of them. When the nurse came, I asked her if she could tell me where I could make a phone call and then, as she took Vanessa from me, I left the sagging body of my son-in-law, took my grandson by the hand and went to the telephone and phoned the family, first Celia and then Rosemary. Come, I said —

  *

  Our heroine. I don’t mean that to sound sarcastic. There’s no doubt in anyone’s mind that Mother saved Emily, perhaps not in the technical sense, but she made it possible at a crucial stage for others to do so. Mark found it hard to forgive her. I don’t think he could bear the sight of her, indeed of any Butler, for months after it all. Not that he didn’t want his wife saved, but he wanted to do it himself. Nobody blamed him or thought less of him because of his breakdown while Emily hovered between life and death, but, naturally, he blamed himself. His shame was awful. And there was his mother-in-law who, as everyone knew, had surmounted similar tragedies and never wept a tear in public. There was nothing at all that could be done about it – the facts were indisputable: Mother masterminded everything, the Butler family had closed in, just as she had always envisaged it doing. In a crisis, send for the family troops, yes sir. In we zoomed, me there in half an hour, Celia in an hour. And how we took over. Off Celia went, back home with Daniel and Vanessa, instructed by Mother as to what to give them to eat, what to buy for a treat on the way home, where their bloody pyjamas were, what the bedtime ritual was, the lot. I was detailed to support Mark who, by the time I got there, had stopped weeping and was sitting, with his head between his knees, trying to stop being sick. Mother, at her most tactful, told me to comfort him as best I could. Meanwhile, she went in to Emily.

  Mother sat with Emily all that night and most of the next day. She held her hand and stroked it, and, whenever Em flickered open her eyes, she was there, bending over her and smiling. She talked and talked and talked, quietly, so none of us coming and going past the observation window could hear a word. The nurses and doctors adored her. ‘What a wonderful woman,’ they said, as they came and went. I don’t know what she said all that time. When I asked her, she shrugged and said it was nothing much, memories, stories, just chat. Em
certainly couldn’t remember later, though she could remember Mother being there. She said she thought she was a child again and had had a nightmare and Mother was tucking her in and reassuring her and she felt happy and sleepy. By the next evening it was thumbs up. Emily came off the danger list and Mark began to pull himself together. I hadn’t done much supporting or amusing. I just sat and smoked defiantly, right under the ‘No Smoking’ sign. Mark seemed to sleep most of the time, moaning every now and again. I got him coffee and he drank it, eyes tight shut, hidden within himself. Once he came to with a start, when he’d been genuinely nodding off, and said, ‘Is she dead?’ When I said no, she was holding her own, he began to cry again. I sat and thought how curious, how extraordinary to have somebody actually caring so much about you that, in the face of your imminent death, they were themselves destroyed. When we were told, in that quaint hospital imagery, that Em had ‘turned the corner’, Mark’s first words were, ‘It was just that I love her so much – I couldn’t help it,’ said with great resentful force.