Private Papers

by Margaret Forster

  During all the weeks Vanessa stayed with me, Emily only came to my home twice. Vanessa went to see her. I wondered, incredible as it seemed, if Emily was now ‘not speaking’ to me just as, absurdly, she was not speaking to Rosemary. My horror at this stage of affairs grew with each week’s absence. It was not possible that any child of mine could descend to such depths. But, no, Emily had not cut me off, she was, said Vanessa, teaching dancing once more, five classes a week now, and just very, very busy. She would come soon, when things were easier. I sighed and schooled myself to bide my time. Maybe Emily needed to be cut off from us, as Rosemary had once. She was having a delayed adolescence in so many ways, acting now as she had never done in her teens. I must be patient. But when I took the long view I felt troubled. Emily was thirty-eight. How could she rescue herself, how could her family help her? Like some gloomy biblical text, I found myself reciting. ‘There is no help except in hope.’ And faith. That was the worst part: I had lost faith in Emily. I was deeply ashamed to confess this to myself, but I had to. For ten years now I had made excuses and I could not go on doing so, I could not accept that Emily was rotten at the centre. Every day I expected miraculous transformations in her. I really did fantasize her appearance on my doorstep, sunny-natured and warm and happy, as of old. I could not get used to this disgruntled, hard, miserable creature who wailed about her misfortunes continually. It was not my child. Somebody had substituted another woman for the one I knew to be my daughter. Emily had changed. It was perhaps as simple as that. None of us can guard against change, inexplicable and fundamental. Adult children are not small children grown to adulthood, they are an entirely different species. What I had to do was to start all over again, from a different vantage point, and make my way by infinitely tedious degrees towards Emily now. If I could do it, if I had the heart as well as the mental and emotional strength. Because if I did not attempt it, Emily was dead to me and I would never know her again. Emily needed her family. We had to —

  *

  I used to spend many an idle hour wondering if I gave a damn about Emily, or about Mother and Emily. Could I say, I don’t give a shit if I never see my darling little sister again? Probably. On the other hand I would never not want to know about her, should someone wish to tell me what she was doing, nor would I deny her support or help, should she ask for it. Big of me. Family solidarity goes that far, at least, which should please Mother. But Emily was more than a bore, she has been a menace these last few years. She has caused such misery and I grew tired of taking into account what might be called extenuating circumstances. Mother, just because she was her mother, writes about it being her duty to ‘move towards’ Emily again, and so forth, but I feel no such sense of duty. There is no sisterly duty. It doesn’t exist. If there is no natural sibling affection, then, as far as I’m concerned, there is no responsibility. Parents, children – possibly. But I’m not going to be saddled with the blood is thicker than water shit right across the board.

  And what also comes into it is that I know nobody in the family needs to feel any guilt about our Em having had a raw deal. Sometimes you look at a family and you think, well, poor little bastard, fancy being number two in that hierarchy, what pissing awful luck. You look at two handsome, clever brothers and then at the third pathetic, stupid, ugly bugger and you think how cruel that he was the runt of the litter and the others had creamed off the best genes, and you think, well, I hope they have the decency to make it up to him. Or you get one member of a family being given some amazing opportunity denied to the others and it’s so unfair that again you feel the need for some touch of justice. But it wasn’t like that with Em. She wasn’t in any way more disadvantaged than the rest of us and in many ways, which Mother has more than proved, she was actually the best off. Celia was the least advantaged, if anyone, though not by much. Mother shouldn’t feel guilty about Emily, it should be the other way round. Yet that was the extraordinary part – Em appeared to feel no guilt at all, neither about Mark nor Mother nor Vanessa, all three of whom she has hurt so badly. Well, Mark found Caroline and seems happier now than he ever was with Emily, except during their first few years together, and Mother is strong, she can bear anything, but as for Vanessa, my God. The sweetest, happiest, nicest daughter anyone could have and Em ignores her. She seems angry with her all the time, just for being what she is, eighteen now, pretty, lively, popular. And Vanessa still loves her, as any fool except Em could see. She carries Em’s misery around with her like an albatross slung round her neck, stinking to high heaven, which is why my greatest triumph has been to get her right away to educate herself in America.

  I once gave Vanessa Philip Larkin’s poems High Windows for a birthday present and I put a bookmark in the one that goes, ‘They fuck you up, your mum and dad’. I hoped the last verse, about getting out as soon as you can, would provide a hint as to what she should do. Far from being impressed at my insight she was rather hurt and bewildered – it was far too sophisticated for her then. But after the last two years of her mother’s unremitting hostility, I think she finally saw there was indeed a message there which made sense. She did get out. Mark has paid for her to do some drama course in California, and it sounds as if she is enjoying herself tremendously and the curse of Emily is lifting. When she comes back, she may be better able to cope. It would be better, really, if she thought of Mother as her mother and not as her grandmother, if she could somehow skip over Emily.

  *

  — to help her. And we tried. But even now I can make no sense of Emily’s life. I have tracked it back to where she is now, I have followed first the straight, sure, untroubled road up to her wilful marriage and every crooked turn during and after it, and I end up in a jungle of contradictions. Emily is lost, hidden somewhere under the dark, ugly, green plants of resentment that she planted herself, her feet trapped in the squelchy mud of apathy. But she took herself there, of that I am sure. Those ‘tricks of fate’, those blows of ‘bad luck’ that she blames, have really nothing to do with her plight now. It is wrong of her to act as though she was plucked out of a rose garden and hurled into this dark jungle. She was not. She cannot accuse ‘fate’, only herself. And where did that self come from? From my own dark past? From my mother or father, from genes we do not even know about? I do not believe it. Nothing angers me more than Emily’s bitterness. And I do not know how it will end. The thought of her staying as she is for another thirty years or more makes me frantic. None of all the feelings I have written about here can match the horror I feel now at the prospect of any of my children standing still, without taking charge of their own lives and moulding them before age sets them irrevocably in a pattern they hate. Emily does not realize, as I do, where she is heading. Worse, she does not care. I, caring for her, am useless. I think she feels I am a separate entity and have been for many years, but I have only to see her, however briefly, and I know that all those feelings of distance could be banished, if she willed it, in an instant.

  June 26th

  ROSEMARY DROPPED ME off outside Buckingham Palace, after we had collected the tickets for Florence and had a quick lunch. Too nice to go home, a waste to be in the centre of London and not to do something. Walked round to the side of the Palace where the striped awning over the entrance to the Queen’s Gallery made it look festive, as though a circus was there for a day. Lingered over the photographs lining the corridor leading to the pictures. Charming photograph of Queen Victoria with three of her daughters and two of her grandchildren. The Queen positively beaming at her family. Another, taken at Osborne, showed her at the centre of an enormous family group, forty at least, and there she was grim and forbidding. The smaller family unit is so much more congenial. Lovely photographs of Alexandra, Edward VII’s wife, as a young mother with a child on her back – so carefree, a real mother. It gave me such pleasure to see her pleasure in her child. The paintings, when I reached them, very disappointing. Too many Georges. No really attractive family groups. On the stairs was Hendrik Gerritsz’s painting
of Charles I, Henrietta Maria and Charles, Prince of Wales. How pathetic it was, the Queen so far away from the King and the child unhappily balanced on the table. Why did he not stand with them? Why did she not hold the child? So solitary and nervous she looked. It was a relief to pass on to a painting of Caroline, Princess of Wales, cuddling Princess Charlotte. How affectionate she looked, her arms so fondly and protectively round her baby. She knew something about mothering. Surely. Came out into bright sunshine and crowds. Walked up the Mall smiling at all the tourist families walking towards the palace, all stepping out smartly to see the Queen. Such an air of optimism and buoyancy in that area of London whatever the state of the world. What I would really like to do is be there for a state occasion, a Royal Wedding say.

  *

  Wouldn’t she just. Could Celia surprise us? I have my evil suspicions but they’re best kept from Mother – mention the merest hypothesis to her and she’ll never let it go. Celia, I think, is getting heavily involved with somebody in the office, a widower with two children. That’s all I know about him, except that his name is Leonard. She asked me to go with her last week to choose a dress because Leonard had invited her to a concert. I said I hadn’t been in a dress shop for centuries and advised her to ask Emily, but she said Emily had told her she was too busy. Christ, as if I wasn’t. I almost told her to ask Mother, then, but stopped myself just in time – how can any of us ever have thought Mother had any dress sense? I went with her to the only place I could think of that might suit, Wallis, in Oxford Street. I hate shops, new pristine clothes. Celia wanted a dreadful pale blue dress with a white collar so it was as well I went. I persuaded her into a black jersey number. I told her to think of herself as voluptuous, not fat! Now she needs her hair cut. Oh, what a caring sister I am. And where I showed it most was in Florence. If Mother turns out not to have appreciated this in these next pages, I’ll be livid. At least there are some good photographs of us in Florence which I took myself with a timed exposure. I might do worse than make one of them the basis for this wretched painting I’ve promised her.

  *

  — should write about Florence in my diary, indeed, I have done so. It is too near in time to have any place in this, in this whatever it was. (Not, at any rate, what it was meant to be.) Yet already it seems a long time ago, the events of that holiday seem to have crystallized and stand glittering in my mind. I return again and again to those five short days and I see such significance in them. I cannot just abandon them to anything so slight and informal as a diary. I do not want the mists of time to obscure my memory. I want to test myself, when everything is sharp and not in doubt, when I have no need to feel, as I have felt so often during this account, that I am not being absolutely accurate.

  But, all the same, where can I start? With the shock I suppose. I never expected to see Emily and Celia. They were waiting at the airport. I thought they had come to see us off. They were standing at the checking-in desk, looking defensive and awkward, and Rosemary said, ‘Meet our travelling companions.’ What did I say? A string of platitudes. They knew I was appalled. I knew they knew I was appalled. I could not think how it was going to work, how I was going to cope with the three of them together, how they would cope with each other. In the aeroplane we sat in twos, me with Rosemary and the others together. Even that seemed favouritism. I could not help whispering to Rosemary ‘why’ and ‘how’ and ‘do you think it was a good idea?’ and I think she was annoyed —

  *

  Annoyed? I was furious. Dear God, the organization that had gone on, the arse-licking persuading my sisters, especially Emily. And then Mother stood there, face frozen, and couldn’t even applaud my little coup. I almost said fuck this, just go home, you two, you win, she doesn’t like it. I must be getting senile and sentimental to imagine this would be the best present she could ever have.

  *

  — that I had not jumped up and down with joy. She snapped, irritably, that the’d thought it would be a lovely surprise, all the family together. I was so ashamed. I sat there feeling tense with a double anxiety: that this gathering would be a disaster and that my obvious horror had hurt everyone. Rosemary read a book. I stared out of the window. At Pisa airport we stood, Emily, Celia and I, and waited for Rosemary to hire a car. I tried to apologize to Celia and Emily, said I had been so taken aback, that I was thrilled, it was just that it took time for me to adjust. In the car I sat in the front with Rosemary, who was driving. I hardly dared breathe, sensing Emily’s resentment (as ever) and Celia’s discomfiture. It was a relief to have to concentrate on directions. We found the road and headed towards Florence. I tried some timid remarks about the countryside, the unexpected lushness of the scenery. I felt I was talking to myself. At Cisterna, we turned off the autostrada. Rosemary handed me another map showing the location of our hotel. I wound the window down as we climbed up a shady road. The scent of orange blossom flooded the car, releasing from all of us exclamations of delight. Our rooms had balconies and overlooked Florence. The city sweltered in a heat haze, the hills behind vague, like a smudged crayon drawing.

  Rosemary took charge. We showered and changed (except Rosemary), then drove immediately to the Ponte Trinità, eager to begin sightseeing. Rosemary marshalled us, two by two, down the long medieval streets to the Piazza Signoria where a band was playing. The arguments began. Rosemary wanted to go on with a quick preliminary tour, Emily to sit and eat icecream and listen to the band. I dreaded being asked to decide, but Celia nobly did this for me. She persuaded Emily to walk just a little further, pointed out that we could do a circular tour and return to the square and that she could eat icecream as we walked. (Celia has always been so good with Emily, as she was with Jess.) On we went, along the narrow streets, until the Duomo suddenly loomed above us, grey and white and pink, like a magnificently ornate wedding cake. Emily said she was hungry. She yawned, often and noisily, as Rosemary read aloud from her guidebook. Celia said, when there was a break in Rosemary’s information, that maybe we ought to eat before the restaurants got too crowded. This we did. Rosemary took us to a small restaurant in the Via dell’Acqua where we ate pasta, five separate courses of pasta, at a big communal table. How normal we must have looked: a mother and three grown-up daughters. Did anyone notice how furtively we looked at each other, all watching and waiting —

  *

  They would have had to be bloody fools, if they didn’t. I was so grateful for that restaurant, that particular type of restaurant. What hell it would have been to be sitting, just the four of us, at one table. I don’t think I could have stood it. Mother was rigid with apprehension. Emily didn’t speak at all, lowered her head over her plate for most of the time or else sighed and looked at her nails. Celia kept making inane remarks, such as I wonder what the Italian for serin is – serin apparently being the name for a finch she’d noticed in the grounds of the hotel. What a good time we were not having. But it helped that everyone else, the other ten at our table, were certainly enjoying themselves. Of course, being Butlers, we didn’t do anything so vulgar or natural as to talk to them, but our glacial indifference didn’t inhibit our eating companions at all. Sod this lot, I thought, and replied with enthusiasm to the questions asked by the young American on my left. A nice boy. Backpacking his way round Europe, so what’s new. Disappointed in Amsterdam, thrilled in Venice, next stop Greece. He’d been picked up at the station by his companion, a brash young American girl at some language school for a year. She. was quite funny, told us how impressed her parents were when they came to visit and she said ‘ciao’ to someone in the street. They cheered me up. When it was time to shepherd my miserable little crew back to the car I was sorry.

  *

  — Sunday, we went to Fiesole. We walked round the outer streets looking for a viewpoint. There was a delicious smell of many dinners, cooking. Everywhere we saw gardens with roses and lavender, so English. We passed a nunnery, saw a nun robed in white as we stared through the closed iron gates. Emily stared, holding the bars ti
ghtly. She was furious when Rosemary unkindly said ‘Oh my God, you’re not —’

  *

  — feeling a sudden vocation, Emily, are you?’ So? What the hell was wrong in saying that? It was a joke, all right? A sarcastic joke but still a joke. She looked so bloody ridiculous mooning over that nun. You could see what corny thoughts were going on in her little head. Herself in white, driven into a nunnery by grief over her dead son. What a pretty picture. How satisfactory. And Mother stood there, looking so anxious, it was ridiculous. Emily has this awful cloying quality. She irritates the hell out of me.

  *

  — lunch at Mario’s outside, in a large, paved garden, under an awning. Beside us was a child with long, black hair, one bright red carnation tucked behind her ear. Opposite her, clearly adoring her as she attacked an enormous hamshank of a bone, was her father. Again Rosemary read her guidebook aloud, describing the Etruscan settlement that had once been in Fiesole. Emily hummed steadily, a device Rosemary had herself used long ago. She and Rosemary still did not really talk to each other, everything was channelled through Celia or me, every remark oblique. Celia and I exchanged frequent glances of condolence. Such an ill-assorted trio of sisters, their only link being me. And I can no longer hold the balance, as I ought. I veer first towards Rosemary, then towards Celia, then to Emily. I approach and withdraw like the tide on a particularly rocky shore. I want them one at a time. I am worn out with them together. By the end of that lunch, of two hours of brittle non-conversation, I was drooping. Rosemary asked if I was tired, Celia if I was hot, Emily if I was bored . . . No, no, no, I said to all of them. How could I say I was exhausted with the effort of keeping them together? That I wanted to plead with them: we are a family so act like a family, please.