Private Papers

by Margaret Forster

  They were a surprise, the islands. Like everyone else, I had this image of them being bleak and grim, with a barren and intimidating coastline. I imagined the islands as colourless, but with black rocks, like landing on the other side of the moon. But they were not like that at all, not then. It happened to be a pleasant, sunny day – it was early April – and, as I hung over the rail with most of the others, my first glimpse of this battleground I had learned to hate was beguiling. The coastline that arose from the calmest of blue seas was soft and even pretty, a blurred impression of greenery and gentle blue hills. As we drew closer, everyone fell silent. The little whitewashed, red-roofed houses clustered round the bays looked so friendly. Fear and hate were dispelled. The islands, at that distance, had a charm that was almost shocking. It didn’t last, of course, but I remained grateful for that first impression. It helped me cope with what followed, with the shabbiness of it all. Port Stanley was a dump, squalid. Someone had thought up this insane scheme which involved us in lunch with 150 local families who wanted to show their gratitude. My God. Emily was not the only one who stalked away in disgust, from the handing out of commemorative plates and posing in front of Union Jacks in Falkland tee-shirts.

  The war memorial, to which we made our pilgrimage in due course, was on a treeless hillside above Blue Beach. We climbed up the hillside, some carrying wreaths of poppies and lilies, to the cemetery. This was a circular corral, about fifty feet across, enclosed by a wall. The sun lit the honey-coloured stone tenderly. Inside, there were 14 gravestones set in four neat rows. I was disappointed that these monuments were made of granite, glinting wickedly above the violently orange marigolds planted all around. Granite. Solid, enduring, hard and cold inside the warm, pretty sandstone wall. I stepped forward when my turn came and read the inscription. Daniel Butler 1963–1982. Dear Christ, so short a life. Then, I cried too. I don’t think Emily noticed. I don’t think she noticed anything at all. Later, when I mentioned how crudely cheerful the marigolds had seemed, she looked at me in amazement and said, ‘Marigolds?’ as though I was deranged. I don’t think she heard the wailing tune of ‘Praise My Soul the King of Heaven’. Just as well. Nor did she hear any of the prayers. ‘Be with them in their sorrow, support these families in their suffering, oh Lord.’ Emily didn’t hear a word. The Last Post, which echoed plaintively round the bare hills beside us, rising above the distant throb of helicopter engines, went unnoticed by my sister. Her suffering was so terribly evident I think it first frightened, then angered, others who were suffering, too. They avoided her. In any of the shuffling gatherings in which we found ourselves, as we were politely herded to this place and that, Emily and I had an empty circle around us. Even the wild geese – oh, where was Celia? – even the geese flying overhead seemed to avoid us.

  We shared a cabin, naturally. It was pretty spartan and cramped, but that was irrelevant. We had to spend quite a lot of time in it while we were there. Em wouldn’t eat or sit with the others, and though this made me cross, I felt there wasn’t much point in having come with her, in the first place, if I wasn’t going to be with her literally, so I stuck it out. It was the first time in our whole lives that I had ever spent any length of time alone with Emily. We were not strangers to each other, not even figuratively speaking, but we were certainly not intimates. But intimacy was what she seemed to fear, which was why she’d asked me, I suppose. Celia or Mother would’ve driven her crazy with their fussing. I was quite surprised when another mourner – no other way of referring to them – said how alike we were, even before she had been told we were sisters. I couldn’t see it myself, and pointed out that I was dark and Em fair, I was tall and Em smallish. I had brown eyes and a straight nose and she had blue and a decidedly snub nose, and so on. ‘Oh,’ this woman said, ‘I didn’t mean the actual features, it’s more the expression, you’ve got the same expression, the same way of holding your heads and looking at people.’ Considering Em was shrouded in a veil worthy of Greta Garbo, I thought this uncomplimentary to me, to say the least, but maybe there was something in it. I knew I did feel some connection with Em, as I didn’t with Celia, but that connection was Mother, Mother in us both. Where Em reminded me of Mother I felt connected to her. I felt no kinship to her other than that. And when we spent that time together, time that seemed an eternity because of the peculiar circumstances, I discovered there was not as much of Mother in her as I had always thought (and been envious of). It was not simply that Em’s wallowing in grief was the antithesis of Mother, but the much more complex matter of the way that Em related every damn thing to herself. I suppose I am trying to say it was her supreme selfishness which distanced her most from Mother and made her almost intolerable to me. I tried not to quarrel but I did, regrettably, have one outburst on our second day.

  We had been round the battlefield – so called, though by then hard to imagine as one – for the third time and then we returned to our quarters, where we were asked if we would like some hot soup or coffee. Em said no, she wanted nothing, she was going straight to bed. I said could they send some soup to me. When we reached our cabin and Em lay down as usual on top of the bed and closed her red-rimmed eyes, I asked her why she had refused the soup so curtly. She in turn asked me how I could bear to think about soup, about any sort of food at all. She, Em, would never be hungry again. I tried at first to keep my temper. I said I was tired, that I felt depressed and low and needed something to put some life into me. Em laughed, an awful, hard, false little laugh, and said that was how she liked to feel, low. It was what she was, what she would now always be. The idea of soup – the stupid laugh again – soup making her feel she had some life in her, just showed the difference between us. Then I burst out, I said she was fucking right it did. I said what it showed was that she was utterly and completely self-centred and that she was proud of it. I told her not to give me any shit about my not understanding, that I understood only too well what she was doing. She was making Daniel’s death into a cast-iron excuse for giving up on other people. I told her Daniel would have absolutely rejected her way of grieving, that he would have wanted to see some of the bravery and compassion Mother had showed in her time. Then Em sprang at me, she jumped off the bed and rushed to where I was sitting in the chair, and shrieked that Mother could not have even begun to experience what her love for Daniel had been like, that, if Mother had felt that way for our father or Jess, she could not have carried on as she had done. She said she didn’t choose to be like this, that she couldn’t be anything else, that she felt totally empty, that her life was now meaningless. I told her to think of Vanessa, who needed her so much. And then, I know unforgivably, I said she was exaggerating her love for Daniel, that like all children he had grown away from her and died a kind of death a long time ago, and that what she was mourning was her own failure and disillusionment and general unhappiness: Daniel’s death had just brought all this to a head and the sooner she faced up to it the better. She said, ‘I will never speak to you again’. And she didn’t, not directly. Not until Florence. Extraordinary, but true. Even when I instantly and sincerely apologized and pleaded with her, she would not relent. But I had definitely achieved something. Em returned from the Falklands in a new mood entirely. It was not a matter, either, of anything fanciful like having laid a ghost to rest. On the contrary, she clung to Daniel’s memory fiercely and still does, but at the same time she did what people always tell you others will if you upset them sufficiently: she pulled herself together. What she pulled herself into may have been a shell, but it was preferable to the jellyfish mess she had been up to then. ‘Emily seems very composed,’ Mother said, with satisfaction when we returned. She had no idea then how composed.

  *

  — Mark married again soon after Daniel was killed. The wedding was in August and Vanessa came home with me afterwards. It was, of course, a very quiet wedding indeed, in a register office, with only about twenty people at the luncheon afterwards. Daniel’s recent death cast a pall over everything. Voices wer
e subdued, smiles tentative. One’s heart could not fail to go out to Caroline, Mark’s new wife. She was a nice girl, shy and quiet and a little pathetic in her eagerness to please. She was only twenty-five to Mark’s thirty-eight, but somehow that seemed fitting. I have forgotten how they met but it was through work: Caroline was an aspiring accountant, just over her intermediate examination. They seemed eminently suited. It touched me that Mark had introduced me to Caroline originally as ‘my friend, Penelope Butler’ and not as his ex-mother-in-law or his children’s grandmother. He also touched me by asking me to tell Emily he was going to marry again. They hardly ever met. She would very probably be appalled that Mark could contemplate marriage when his son had ‘just’ died. In her twisted way, she would see it as a kind of treason. So I told Emily that Mark was to marry again and to whom and where and when, and I told her Mark thought Vanessa should live with me while he went on a long honeymoon. If she came to me, she would have company and a change of scene and it might stop her becoming depressed. ‘Depressed?’ shrieked Emily. ‘Don’t be silly, Vanessa doesn’t know what depression is, she hasn’t a clue, but, yes, take her, I don’t care, whatever Mark thinks, what does it matter, anything.’ I suppose I looked as pitying as I felt, because then she shouted at me not to look at her like that.

  Emily did not come to the wedding, not that she had been expected to. Not many first wives would do such a thing, in any case, so it was in no way abnormal. But Emily’s spirit as well as Daniel’s hung in the air. Mark’s mother and I exchanged glances at one point and we knew we were both thinking of Emily, so beautiful in her white satin dress, so utterly and completely radiant in her love for Mark. Caroline could not compare with that. She was an insubstantial moth to the remembered glory of Emily as a bride. And Mark, who on that day twenty years before had looked distressingly young, was not to Caroline the trembling lover he had been to Emily. He was a tired, even bowed figure, brave and worn, full of affection for the girl at his side, clasping her hand fiercely, but without passion. Or so it seemed. Only Vanessa lifted the heart, standing not behind the couple being married but, at her father’s insistence, upon his other side. She wore red, the colour Rosemary had always looked best in, and, though she was slightly embarrassed, her smile was the one purely happy sight in that dull room. She liked Caroline. She was glad about the wedding, glad too to have the chance to be glad about something. At the luncheon she was exuberant and carefree, the only one drinking her champagne with zest. And Mark was so proud of her. His little speech, quite moving enough because of his brief and restrained reference to Daniel, became unbearably so when he turned to his daughter and said she was, quite simply, the joy of his life. We all stood and toasted Vanessa who blushed and beamed and kissed her father and there was no more loving picture in the world —

  *

  Pause for special effects. Some soppy music please and dim the lights. ‘No more loving picture in the world . . .’ Oh dear. It just sounds so good and it wasn’t. Everyone was so tense, so jumpy. Nobody really knew how to behave or relate to each other. Mother goes on and on about Vanessa adoring her father and how wonderful he was to her, but it isn’t like that. Certainly, they love each other, but Mother implies, without actually saying so, that there were no problems, and there were and are. Vanessa and Mark are not easy together. They are not spontaneous together. At the wedding they were both shying off each other like startled deer. Their embraces, their kisses, which Mother so loved seeing, were in reality acutely painful to witness. They were neither natural nor convincing. They were a performance. Not that I want to throw doubt on their love for each other, but it’s not an enviable sort of love. It was that raw, agonizing type of which so much family love is made, and if that’s Mother’s idea of a loving picture she can keep it.

  *

  — Vanessa came home with me and Rosemary and Celia. We flopped in the garden and wondered aloud how many weddings we had been to. Our particular family contingent was always so small, I remember complaining, and Rosemary mocked me for wanting to be flanked by seven sons and their seven brides and their forty-nine offspring. ‘You’re never going to make it, Mother,’ she teased me and I said ruefully that I would settle for the few I had —

  *

  I did not say anything of the kind – ‘teased me’ indeed. She makes me sound so vacuous. I don’t tease Mother, the very idea is monstrous. How can she employ such a word to describe my attitude? All I did was make a plain statement of fact. I thanked God our family was small. That’s all, and it is different entirely. Why put in all that totally invented inane remark about seven sons and so forth? Why on earth does she barley-sugar everything? But I can’t correct every single silly remark she makes.

  *

  — the wrong thing to have said. The atmosphere changed, I remember, and none of us asked what the others were thinking because we all knew. And just as we began to rally and to realize that we must not upset Vanessa, Emily arrived. We could not believe it: she had been so adamant that she wanted nothing to do with any of us that day. But now she stood there at my door, defiant and rebellious, saying she supposed it was all right if she came in, she wasn’t banned or anything? As soon as she was seated with a drink in her hand, she began her bitter remarks, one after the other, addressed to all of us in general. She said what a fine family we looked, what a credit to the Butlers, how smart, how colourful, my goodness me how sophisticated. She invited us not to spare her the details, to tell us how the bride had looked and what the speeches were like and the flowers and did Mark look his usual noble self? Had we eaten our fill, were there any nice people on Caroline’s side, had the champagne flowed, did Grandfather Perrit make a fool of himself as usual . . . do tell, she said. Vanessa made a halting start to oblige, not fully realizing how angry, how murderously angry, her mother was. And Emily turned her big blue eyes upon her and parodied rapt attention and oh reallyed until the rest of us felt slightly sick. Then she asked us if we could guess what she had done and, when nobody replied, because we all were afraid to, because we suspected it was a trap, she said brightly that she had been to church. She had gone back to Pinner and sat in the church where she had married Mark. She asked us if we didn’t think that was a pretty touch, imaginative, sensitive and neat. Vanessa said, ‘Why, Mum?’ and Emily mimicked her. ‘Why, Mum, why, Mum? Ask your clever grandmother or aunts, they know why.’ I said quickly that all I knew was that she was being melodramatic and that I wished she would stop it. Rosemary chose that moment to say she had to go. She kissed me and Vanessa and said goodbye to Celia and to Emily. Emily ignored her and Rosemary smiled with what looked like, but she assures me was not, enjoyment. Celia left soon after, as it began to get dark and, as she did so, the telephone rang. It was her father for Vanessa.

  Emily and I were left in the shadowy garden, hardly able to see each other’s face. In the background, through the open window, we could hear Vanessa laughing. ‘Don’t pass your unhappiness on, Emily,’ I dared to say, ‘please’. She snapped at me not to be so stupid. I wanted badly to ask her why she had come at all but feared it would prove a fatal inquiry. Instead, I chose a less contentious question, the one she wanted me to ask, about why indeed she had gone to that church if, as she claimed, Mark now meant nothing to her. She was very pleased to have the chance to answer me. She had gone, she claimed, to try to remember herself, because she was unable to. Everything that had gone wrong had, she was convinced, begun at the altar. She had gone to sit there hoping that she would be able to call up some psychic power out of the air that would put her in touch with the person she had been. She wanted to understand her own former madness. I told her she had not been mad but perfectly sane which was perhaps not the case now. ‘I’m a suitable case for treatment as they say, am I Mother?’ I replied that she was quite capable of treating herself. She had the necessary mental equipment and should use it. She had to decide what she wanted from life and then she had to achieve her ambitions as far as was possible in an imperfect world. I poi
nted out that all her family were in a position to understand the meaning of disappointment and frustration and even despair, that she was no special case. I told her to think about us and to stop treating us as privileged creatures, with lives untouched by sorrow. I told her to draw strength from us, not beat us off. She said, ‘As Rosemary would say, I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about.’ Then Vanessa came back.