Private Papers

by Margaret Forster

  On the way back to our hotel, we got caught up in a procession in a street on the south side of Arno. We parked the car, with difficulty, and stood on a corner watching. Hundreds of men marched past, all in magnificently colourful fifteenth-century costumes. They marched slowly to the sound of drums and trumpets, their step measured, their feet heavy in strange, clumsy shoes each with leaf-shaped patterns on the front, like the dancing shoes of a giant child. We stood entranced, our backs pressed against an ochre-coloured stone wall. Four English tourists lost in a tradition they knew nothing about. Four women watching the men go by and marvelling. Even Emily was spellbound. And when the last row of men had passed, for a fleeting instant we were as one and the first timid hope arose in me. We turned to each other and there was that flash of recognition —

  *

  Now wait a minute. All that happened was that this amazing procession – incongruously, it turned out to be after a football match – was enjoyed by us all. It shut us up, knocked us out, made us forget ourselves. What Mother so poetically calls a ‘flash of recognition’ was a simple reaction to what we had seen, that momentary pause, a sort of group relaxation that you can get in a theatre after a good play. It was a physical thing, meaningless, soon over. We caught each other’s eyes but what Mother calls recognition was the exact opposite, none of us saw each other. We were dazed, smiling stupidly, a little drunk on the unexpected thrill. Why Mother says it made her hopeful, I cannot imagine. What did she hope? That we would get on better? I hoped no such thing. I knew we wouldn’t, not ever, not so long as Emily fouled things up.

  *

  — which all families can have, when suddenly a mutual understanding passes between them. I did not expect it to last, and it did not, but that did not matter. I needed the reassurance that it was still there even though buried under layers and layers of mistrust.

  On Monday July 2nd, we went to Siena, by car, a long, interesting drive through Tuscan countryside. Nobody spoke but by then I had grown used to the silence, it was not so oppressive, I did not feel the need to try so hard to break it. Siena was a revelation. When we came upon the great bowl-like piazza, we were literally stopped in our tracks and once more I felt that surge of unity. The colours made us reel, the purples, oranges, greens of the banners and flags draped over every wall to celebrate the Palio were so startling in that dull yellow setting, like icing on an already rich cake. We sat and drank coffee beside the boarded-off race-track, from which the dust rose in puffs of powder as it was prepared for the afternoon by the race officials. The boards round it were strengthened, the sand watered, and across the fan-shaped cobbles the crowds spread out, in search of seats for the great event. After an hour, Rosemary insisted we left, before the city grew too crowded. Emily said why did we always have to rush about, why couldn’t we just go on sitting in the sun. Out came Rosemary’s reasons, all excellent: we had no seats for the race, we would get hopelessly penned in and see nothing . . . Emily trailed behind us, sulking.

  We lunched at Coll ’Alta, a fourteenth-century hill town we hit upon by accident. We sat in a courtyard and ate salami, thick and peppery, and warm bread and tomatoes. We drank a good deal. The sun, which previously had not found its way into the courtyard, suddenly blazed down from behind the high wall. We basked in its warmth, drank wine and ate peaches. I prayed that Rosemary would move us on, that this harmony, a silent harmony, would come to a natural end. And it did. On the way back to the car, walking four abreast, I noticed Emily’s arm lightly resting on Celia’s waist. Celia’s arm was linked through mine and my hand held the little basket with some peaches in it. Rosemary’s hand was next to mine, helping me carry the basket. Flesh touched flesh —

  *

  Here we go again, romanticizing. It was a pleasant lunch which was lucky, considering it began as a mistake. My mistake of course, all mistakes on that trip were laid at my door. I was the organizer, the leader, there to take all the responsibility, to carry the can. We’d been heading for San Gimignano and took a wrong turning and, once we had done so, I damned well wasn’t going back, not at one o’clock on a blazing hot day. I made them eat in that funny little place, so it was a miracle it turned out well. But not that well. Mother writes as if we pranced off into the sunset wrapped in each other’s loving arms, all best-friends-and-jolly-good-company. Not so. There was a modicum of contact, where before there had been none. Nothing significant really happened till the next day.

  *

  — the Casa Guidi: ‘I heard last night a little child go singing/’neath Casa Guidi windows . . .’ To me, the house where the Brownings had loved and lived was of great fascination. Not so to my daughters but they were prepared to indulge me. We had great trouble finding the place, though. We found the Piazza San Felice easily enough, but there was no sign to tell us which house, of the many identical houses, had been the Brownings’ home. When we did locate it, the disappointment was acute. They left England for this? So bare, so bleak and forbidding. Where was all the light and sunshine, the beautiful view of my imagination? Not here. We went through a heavy double street door into a cold, stone hall and up echoing stairs into a dark hall on the second floor. No light, no sunshine. The apartment the Brownings had occupied was extremely dreary, the drawing room vast and ugly with its apple-green walls, the bedroom austere and grim. We were shown Pen’s christening robe, unbelievably white and fresh and modem. ‘She worshipped her son,’ the custodian told us. Emily’s eyes filled with tears. She was allowed to touch the robe and held it against her cheek. It was Emily, not I, who insisted on going to the cemetery once the custodian had mentioned it. She said that the English cemetery was —

  *

  It was a terrible mistake going there at all, that’s what it was. One of Emily’s morbid, mawkish fancies which ought not to have been given in to. Why did I ever agree? Because once Emily had got this stupid idea in her head, she would have gone anyway and Mother would have been too worried if she had gone on her own, so it was better to drive them and get it over with. The cemetery turned out to be a glorified traffic island, not at all the spooky, mysterious place Emily had doubtless longed to see. It was just an oval piece of land, round which scooters shrieked and cars screeched. There was a sort of wall round it, with an iron railing fence and a gatehouse and double gates. The gates were locked. We shook the gates, as instructed by the custodian at Casa Guidi, and eventually the caretaker came out. As soon as I saw her, fat and squat, a memory came back to me of Grandmother Butler – she was the absolute image of her and just as terrifying. When she’d hobbled over to the gates she stood glaring at us, shaking her head and pointing to her right leg which was heavily bandaged. Money changed hands through the bars of the gates and then, with great reluctance, they were opened. We were in a hurry to get away from her but she insisted on taking us into the gatehouse and on flogging us a booklet, and even then she wouldn’t let us go until she’d made it absolutely plain that we only had twenty minutes because she was closing.

  The graves were horrible. No flowers, not much greenery, too much gravel and remnants of burnt-out candles. And all the time the hideous noise of the traffic. Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s tombstone was ghastly, a great ugly lump of granite, dwarfing the more modest tribute to Holman Hunt’s young wife. Quite without thinking, entirely naturally, surely, I said I thought this the least atmospheric cemetery I had ever been to. Imagine a poet being buried here, I said, the least romantic place in the world. Her sensitive soul must be turning in its grave. I prefer the place where Daniel is buried, I said, all windswept and wild and remote. Mother went white. She frowned and shook her head at me and pointed surreptitiously to Emily. I turned away, exasperated, so I did not see Emily collapse. When I turned back again, ready to urge them to go, she had her arm hanging over the little iron railing round the sarcophagus, her fingers straining to touch the nearest marble column upon which it rested. Her red skirt spread like a bloodstain over the plaque recording Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s name. She was so
bbing, her tears falling fast and furiously. I watched fascinated. By this time Celia was on her knees, awkward as ever, her arm round Emily’s heaving shoulders and such a silly expression on her face. Oh, they made me tired, all that play-acting. To my immense relief I saw the caretaker waving at us, scowling, pointing at her wrist, upon which sat an incongruously large wristwatch. When none of us moved she began to walk up the path towards us, her sore leg dragging. Still Emily bawled. I knew I had a contemptuous expression on my face and struggled to get rid of it. The caretaker reached us. She stood looking down at Emily. It was impossible to decide what she was thinking. Finally, she shook her head and said something, which of course none of us could understand. But she patted Emily’s shoulder with her heavily blotched hand and made clucking noises which passed for sympathy. Feeling this hand, Emily at last got up, her face destroyed. With Celia on one side and Mother on the other she trudged off towards the gate, with me following, fuming. What a performance Emily made of grief. She hadn’t a shred of pride. Call herself a Butler? And it was too absurd, that level of grief so long after Daniel had been killed. To think that Pen Browning’s christening robe had provoked such emotional extravagance. It angered me. I felt instinctively that it also angered and repelled Mother.

  *

  — was fascinating but it was not. Going there was a terrible mistake. I cannot bring myself, yet, to write about Emily’s hysterics. What so shocked me was my own detachment. There was my child, giving herself over to the wildest abandoned grief, and there was I, repelled by the bathos of the scene. Instead of thinking my poor, poor Emily, oh my darling, oh my love, instead of cradling her in my arms, there was I, her mother, thinking only how can she be so absurd, I stood there, pawing at the ground with my shoe, a good yard or so away from her. Not wanting to touch her, only wanting her to stop. Why did I not empathize with this, my most unhappy of children? I had nothing to give her, I had long since become tired of giving. The mother-love, which once had seemed limitless, had run dry. I had reached a stage where I found myself judging as others judged. I stood there, stiff and useless, wishing someone would take the pathetic, shuddering mess away. To me, the one who had conceived and borne and succoured and reared her, the one who had known every crevice of her body, who had adored every fold of her skin and hung on every word she uttered, to me, she was, if not a stranger, strange. It had gone, all the intense closeness, all the ‘love for love’s sake’. My thoughts and feelings were no longer twined and budded about her as wild vines a tree —

  *

  Jesus Christ. I hate Mother when she’s pretentious. She’d come out with yards of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s stuff in the car on the way to the cemetery and we’d all put up with it without complaint. It’s rather like her so-called passion for Art Exhibitions, this passion for poetry. It doesn’t convince me, I’ve never felt it came naturally. She can spout endless verses. The ones she recited in the car were the Sonnets from the Portuguese, with those lines about ‘If thou must love me, let it be for nought except for love’s sake only’, and ‘my thoughts do twine and bud about thee, as wild vines, about a tree’, but her approach is purely sentimental. All she wants poetry for is what she wants art for: to see herself in. She ignores the important fact that maybe the poet or the artist had a little more on their mind than how useful they could be to one Penelope Butler. But, anyway. If it helped Mother, I suppose that is what matters. Did it help her? Not much, I shouldn’t think. She was as shaken as Emily when we got back to the hotel. Both of them went straight to bed, even though it was only seven o’clock and light and sunny. Celia and I had a sandwich and some wine and sat moodily in the garden. ‘I think I’m beginning to hate Emily,’ I said. ‘She puts Mother through hell.’ Celia said Emily put herself through hell and Mother joined her. ‘We haven’t any children,’ Celia said in that virtuous, pompous way she has always had. ‘We don’t know what it’s like. We’re not in a position to judge.’ I told her to shut up. We were in the most perfect position to judge.

  *

  — but instead could find nothing to attach themselves to, except memories of what had once been. I had to leave Celia to attend to Emily. I went to bed and lay in the darkened room, first weeping and then thinking. Not really thinking, meandering over Emily’s life. In the end, to my surprise, I slept and stayed asleep until eight the next morning.

  I awoke feeling cheerful. Not even thinking of the day before robbed me of this cheerfulness. Nothing was resolved, but I felt as though it had been. It was our last day. Instead of dreading the thought of seeing Emily at breakfast, I welcomed it. She met my eyes, quite at ease herself. She told us, all of us, as she drank her coffee and ate her croissant, that she was sorry about embarrassing us the day before. It was not really the christening robe or the stone coffin or even thinking about Daniel, it was being suddenly overwhelmed by the thought of love getting wrecked all the time, of it never really lasting. She said it depressed her to think of it never being safe to build on any relationship: either it went wrong or it was taken away. If it had been late at night, we might have responded, but the busy dining room of a hotel at nine in the morning was not conducive to philosophical discussion. Emily’s own tone had been matter-of-fact and we replied in the same vein. Yes, Rosemary said, life in that way was bloody silly but there were other things in it. Yes, said Celia, Emily was right, but on the other hand it was amazing how there not being any point did not stop one being happy sometimes all the same. And what did I say? I said, I think – it is much harder to listen accurately to oneself – I said —

  *

  Not much. That was the surprising thing. Just up Mother’s street and she fluffed it. Deliberately? She looked very composed that morning, just how I like to see her, not all taut and anguished, as she so often can look. She wasn’t stiff and distant either, another fault. No, she was in good form, smiling, reasonably relaxed, managing to keep that over-personal look out of her eyes. I’d dreaded her crawling into the dining room looking harrowed and soulful and fixing us with that plaintive, suffering expression she adopts at her worst. She was at her best. So was Emily. Her eyes bore clear evidence of the previous day’s crying, but she wasn’t sullen and she didn’t look too droopy. I didn’t feel I wanted to yell at her to straighten up. She even smiled. And she spoke directly to me for the first time in two years. What more could I ask?

  Mother, then, said very little. After I’d come out with my platitude and Celia had come out with hers, Mother left a pause and said she didn’t quite agree. Love – a little cough and fiddling with the teaspoons – love, of any kind, was worth having for its own sake, for its own length of time. She said it might always get wrecked, or come to an end in one way or another, but she didn’t see that this wiped out what had existed. Then, there really wouldn’t be any point, and now what were we going to do on our last day, mm?

  *

  — that I thought they were all being too greedy, actually expecting love, or loving relationships, not to be wrecked or ended, that they were forgetting what such love had been like. I hope I expressed myself better than that. For some reason, not just the location and general circumstances, I did not want the conversation to continue, so I changed the subject and asked what we were going to do on our last day.

  We packed and drove into Florence and went straight to the Uffizi. Rosemary said there was not time to see it properly. She took us up in a creaky lift to the top galleries and marched us to Room 25. We stood in an obedient row and looked at Michelangelo’s Holy Family. Emily shifted restlessly from foot to foot, Celia looked surreptitiously at her watch. After a long, long five minutes – does Rosemary never sense other people’s boredom or does she not give in to it? – we were led off to see Botticelli’s Primavera and Birth of Venus. The colours shone, the white almost effervescent. The galleries we passed along were cool and dark, windows opened to catch the morning breeze. Pleading fatigue, I was allowed to sit on a window seat and wait while the others plunged into more rooms. Emily soo
n joined me. She was dreamy that morning, as she used to be when she was a child. I was afraid to speak as we sat there on the wooden seat, with so little distance between us. I did not know what I wanted to show but I knew I wanted to show something.

  In Pisa, where we returned the car, we climbed the leaning tower as all good tourists should. I had imagined something raw and concrete, besieged by the ugly flotsam of tripperish commerce, but the feeling was like that of a cathedral close. The grass was lush, the stone of the buildings white. I climbed, not intending to at my age, in bare feet. The indentations of the steps fitted smoothly. At the top, breathless, a little giddy, I felt exhilarated, as I lurched around the platform. The vast Tuscan plain was spread out below us and, all around, the hills enclosing it were blue and mellow. The sun blazed down hot on our backs as we stood, holding hands for balance and safety, staring down.

  Home. They all came back with me, to my flat, before going their separate ways. I hoped, fervently, that none of them were going to their own homes thanking heaven their duty was done, the ordeal over. Rosemary was the last to leave. I found myself thinking, as I watched her drive away, that her life was the one I understood least. It should not have turned out as it has. But I am not sure why I think so —

  *

  Holy shit. If anything keeps me blaspheming in this vulgar childish way it is Mother coming out with things like that. So my life should not have turned out as it has. That kind of crass comment makes me so exasperated I want to scream. It would be no good tackling Mother head on, no good dragging her to that page and pointing a finger at those words and saying what the fuck does she mean? And really I ought to smile, not rage. Mother’s never-ending desire to analyse, synthesize, is surely funny. She is nearly seventy. I am twenty years younger, but I know what she claims to know, but does not – that you can’t take a life and organize it as you would like to. Life, all lives, defeat such strategy. Luck does exist, or fate, call it what you will, and it upsets all attempts to impose a pattern. Mother is stubborn, she won’t acknowledge that. To her, luck is a dirty word, very similar to all those other four-letter words of mine she finds so objectionable. She persists in believing that it is how people deal with the things that happen to them that is important. So my father’s death, Jess’s death, they were not allowed to be bad luck. Mother would not let herself say, ‘I have had bad luck, there was nothing I could do about it, my life was ruined.’ To her all tragedies must be surmountable. She wants to move us around like counters on a board, up the ladders, avoiding the serpents. It can’t be done.