Mollie led me back to my room. ‘You could have given Frank a turn, Nell. I don’t know what got into you.’
‘I was lonely. I wanted to be with my parents.’
‘I don’t know how as you can’t spend a few hours on yer own, and seeing as I made you so comfortable – mi feather-stitched weddin sheets …’
She began fussing with the bed.
‘Blow me – you wet it too!’
As it was only the pillow, I wondered what athletics Mollie Dobbin visualised me getting up to in bed. She didn’t give me time to explain that her wretched cat … People don’t believe, anyway.
‘It’s almost morning,’ she said. ‘I can’t change you. You’ll have to make do. Settle down as best yer can.’ She switched the light off and went. Morning was certainly on its way. Grey was seeping. I did not know whether to feel glad or sad. I leaned my face against the cold pane. I had been returned to that limbo where I spend so much of my time. Nobody ever believes that inside an old woman there’s a young girl waiting. I pressed my rounded mouth against the grey-washed window. Fresh from their roost in Neptune’s Cave, gulls were starting to limber up with long slow sweeps of their aluminium wings. The grey distance was infused with red, the scarlet threads bringing to my mind the unhatched, shell-less eggs dragged from the innards of a slaughtered hen. My head bumped against the glass in time with all these revelations.
Later when Mollie and I had finished our cups of milky tea in the kitchen, I asked what had become of Frank.
‘Frank’s down the garden with ’is termarters. Pinchin’ out the shoots.’
‘Can’t I help’ him? Can’t I do something for somebody?’
‘You must never ever intrude on Frank when ’e’s with ’is termarters. He’d never forgive me. Termarters are holy in Frank’s book.’
At that moment we heard him call out, ‘Can’t you winkle ’er number out of ’er?’
Mollie grunted. She didn’t answer because she knew I must have heard.
‘Frank’s a very reasonable man,’ she told me. ‘He knows the only reasonable thing is for us to contact your family. You must know that,’ she hesitated, ‘because you’re reasonable too.’
She had been assembling the wherewithal for baking bread. ‘Eh, Nell? What about giving us yer telephone number? Yew must ’uv got it written down somewhere.’
‘I haven’t, I tell you. I lost my bag. Before I visit you next time, I’ll have the number tattooed on my wrist.’
‘Arr, Nell, you’re a fair trimmer!’
She was breathing hard as she kneaded the dough. Her long white floury laundered apron nearly killed me with its cleanliness, its sweetness. She divided the dough, formed it into loaves, and arranged them in tins, to ‘prove’, she said. They looked to me like babies awaiting birth or burial. I could hardly restrain my sobs.
The cat no doubt thought me a fool. She had stretched herself full length at the back of the stove. She would never stop her green-eyed observation of me. She was the only cat – I think – who hadn’t liked me. She had crooked one of her paws as though preparing to scoop a goldfish from under the water-lily pads.
I had to tell Mollie, ‘somewhere I think I heard about furry water-lilies.’
Mollie rubbed a cheek with a floury hand. ‘There’s a lot of funny things,’ she admitted.
‘What can I do?’
‘Stay quiet,’ she advised.
Had I been a nun I could have told my beads. I could have meditated if I had been a Buddhist. I could have done almost anything if I had an identity, like the furniture inside this house or dahlias the other side of the window. But I hadn’t found the frame which fitted me.
That’s rot of course. I’ve always become anything I intended to. Mollie Dobbin would have grasped that from all I had told her, so I stayed quiet as she advised for fear of making a fool of myself.
It must have been well into the morning, the loaves had proved themselves and gone inside the oven, and Mollie was sweeping the floor of her hygienic kitchen, when we heard the sound of a vehicle crunching over stones down the road which led from the upper reaches. The sound must have encouraged Frank to leave the company of his tomatoes. First his head, then his shoulders, appeared from the garden below.
Mollie flung aside her broom. I was struck cold by what might be preparing for me.
‘It must be … Yes, it is!’ Mollie jerked at me over her shoulder as she hurried outside.
Very cautiously I followed. There was nothing else I could do. If I hid they would only drag me out, from under bed, or out of cupboard. If I ran up the hill in the direction of the Gap, they would catch me before I jumped.
It was the Great Booby of a cop who had charged me – yesterday, was it? or several days ago, now squeezing his swollen body out of a shiny paddy-wagon.
‘They tell me you’ve got a visitor.’
Who told him, I wondered.
‘That’s right.’ Grinning wider, Frank eased himself higher, out of his asylum, into the real world.
Mollie would have joined him in his affirmation (such people are the greatest joiners) if a second person had not been ejected from the paddy-wagon. She came round from the offside – my daughter Hilda in grey cotton gloves. The state of her emotions could be measured by her hatlessness. Otherwise, there was no sign of emotion on her little face: she was a Gray. I turned my own identifiable face away from the chorus waiting to accuse.
‘Mrs Eleanor Shadbolt,’ Mollie led the prosecution.
Hilda and the Booby exchanged glances, not to say smiles. Had something come into my Hilda’s life in the shape of a Booby? Surely not; she was too great a snob.
‘Never ’eard of a Shadbolt.’ The policeman crunched any possibility of that into the drive.
Frank: ‘That’s what the lady told us.’
Hilda: ‘She’s my mother – Alexandra,’ after embarrassed hesitations, she came up with a cough, a sigh, and a compromise, ‘Gray is the family name.’
She sounded so cute and believable, my little daughter.
The Dobbins (in unison): ‘Waddayerknow!’
I was exposed on all sides. I could only hold up my head for my throat to be slit or garrotted. At least there was a sky above with clouds and gulls sailing in it.
The cop thanked the Dobbins, so did my Hilda to a lesser degree; she is one of those who expect to receive rather than give thanks.
They climbed back inside the wagon, dragging and pushing their prey.
As they started up, the victim leaned out calling to her surrogate mother and reluctant dad, ‘Thank you, thank you! I love you! You are my – more than friends – my family. Don’t worry, I shall be back.’
The Dobbins waved. They wanted to do their best by one, but didn’t believe anything of what I had said.
‘Yes, yes,’ they called, they waved. ‘No doubt about it!’ Frank’s teeth were lying together, Mollie’s giggles were knotted in her throat.
We waved, and might never have stopped, till Mollie let out a shriek.
‘The bread! The bread!’
She tore inside, dragging her husband by a scabby wrist.
Hilda and the Booby were chuckling together, looking at each other. How much they understood about the burnt loaves, I wouldn’t have known. Even less, probably, about the babies my surrogate mother and I had prepared for their holocaust.
Soon I was back home on the edge of the Park writing and writing as though nothing had happened (everything always has, of course, and a bit more). I have to catch up. At the same time I am protecting myself by cultivating this jungle of words. None of the Boobies will investigate me if I plait the branches densely enough. Does Hilda have continued contact with the prosecuting Booby of those days? I wonder. I listen for the telephone, but cannot arrive at a firm conclusion. She comes in, on the pretext of bringing me marrrow-on-toast or a cup of bouillon. I curve an arm around my work to protect it from the cheat who needs my answers to pass her exam.
She goes. To report back
to the Grand Seigneur of the Sublime Porte. Little knowing what I know or what I am.
She doesn’t know I could have snitched her Booby from under her nose, twitching off his jewelled turban with a flick of the fingers. I could have dragged my surrogate father Frank Dobbin by a horny hand into a bed of incest if I had ‘so desired’, having learnt a trick or two from my mother-in-law Magda Demirjian down the wrong end of Smyrna. None of the Xenophon-Papapandelides would have been seen dead talking to her on the Prokymaia had she dared show herself in those parts – as the Smyrna Breetish, the great Joneses and Llewellyns, the Burstalls and the Brummages would not have recognised the Xenophons and Pa-pa-pans within sight of St James’s.
I know them all. I am them all. Most of all that snotty little Jewess with the fly-encrusted eyelashes and nit-infested hair, who saved her Jewish bacon by charming a Gauleiter with her voice when she learned how to use it.
‘She was the daughter of a carpenter, an honest Jew who smelled of shavings and beeswax.’
Hilda always comes in if I happen to express my thoughts aloud. ‘I thought Magda was really the daughter of Diacono, the Syro-Maltese station master at Benha.’
‘Oh yes, she was that too.’ Hilda ties knots in my gut by knowing too much and not enough. ‘I would love to give a dinner party for all the people I have ever known.’
‘Would they forgive you?’
‘Probably not. But I would love to give it. I’d wear all my jewels. I’d wear …’
‘It’s late, Mother. Shall I bring you a boiled egg?’
‘Oh, yes, And hard. All your culinary science goes into the boiling of a hard egg – but hard.’
I know I am hateful, I cried awhile after she had gone to do the deed. Poor Hilda! She is one of my burnt offerings to the jealous god.
And Hal. It is time my son appeared. It is difficult to introduce Hal. He is so subtly camouflaged nobody but himself or his mother could have invented him. Deliberately I say ‘invented’ because I didn’t just give birth to Hal. No ordinary mother could have had him. Mollie Dobbin, for instance, though she too had her troubles with Charlie from what she told me about the false amber necklace he sent her before he was torpedoed.
But Hal …
All mothers think their sons have issued from their wombs. A son like Hal would never admit this, and I am ready to agree. We have never had this conversation and I expect we never shall. I might have it with old Patrick, who was, I suppose, my collaborator in, not so much inventing Hal, for I cannot deny he originated as Hilary’s sperm, but as creators of the finished wretch. He was what Patrick and I both looked for as part of our complicated, many-faceted lives.
Hilda might announce, ‘Patrick rang.’
‘What about?’ Too sharply by half.
‘Hal. He thought you might like to see him.’
‘If Hal wants to see me, surely he can come?’
‘It isn’t always as easy as that.’
‘I know.’
She is looking at me in her little screwed-up way.
‘When I was pregnant Patrick and I were listening on one occasion to The Trojans. We were holding hands. Hilary can’t bear Berlioz. What he really goes for is Mahler – because Mahler is so full of self-pity.’
Hilda looks at me more closely than ever.
‘Yes. I know what you’re going to say – that your mother … that Alma … and the rest of it … that when I was pregnant with Hal, it was Alexandria and no one would have heard of Berlioz, let alone played him, they were too busy getting on with adultery and bridge.’
When I begin to laugh, to retch, she goes away, leaving me to deal with my thoughts.
One day after I returned from my stay with the Dobbins, Hal appeared. I could sense he was materialising. There is that about a son like Hal and his relationship with a mother like me. There is no ringing of bells, it is like a change in the weather, winds veering, a fall in temperature, veils of cloud. So on this occasion I knew Hal was mounting the rise towards the veranda. I could feel a cool draught between my calves and the backs of my knees.
I was sitting writing in what I am vain enough to call my study, though I have studied practically nothing beyond my own intuition – oh, and by fits and starts, the Bible, the Talmud, the Jewish mystics, the Bhagavad Gita, various Zen masters, and dear old Father Jung who, I am told, I misinterpret. When I felt the draught that Hal’s arrival creates, I put aside my pen. I knew I was relatively free, Hilda having gone off on some mysterious mission of her own. I opened the glass doors to the veranda. I had very little time in which to rehearse the approaching scene with my son. I could have turned on the mumsie act, he would have hated that, but so would I. Instead, knowing he would hate it equally, I played it cool.
‘How’s business?’ I asked.
An aesthete, coming of a business line of Gray antique dealers, each performing the role more amateurishly than the last, he could only resent the remark. Certainly Hal carried on the business with enough flair to live tastefully. There was no more to it than that.
‘Business!’ His nostrils contracted at mention of the dirty word.
He had such a delicate nose there were occasions when I could have bitten it off and returned it to the womb of my imagination.
‘Actually,’ he said, coming inside, ‘I’ve just picked up a very charming piece – an agate and silver-gilt snuffbox set with brilliants, said to have belonged to Lieselotte von der Pfaltz.’
‘How very charming!’
‘Actually, that isn’t the whole provenance, it plays a little tune when opened – well, some German jingle, still to be identified.’
‘Ending in a fart, surely.’
‘Mother, you’re everything the dreary Hilda says you are!’
‘But Lieselotte was the Queen of Farts. She challenged her ladies and nobody dared outfart her.’
Hal subsided in what is almost the only comfortable chair. ‘Pouf! What a ghastly fug in this den of yours.’
‘Memory germinates in fug, I find.’
I was already weary of my son and could have returned to my writing, not without first brushing my lips, I have to admit, against his deliciously tended little moustache.
‘May I kiss you – darling?’ I ventured from behind my teeth (I could have bitten off nose, moustache, the lot).
‘Kissing is out, Mum. So unhygienic.’
He dissolved into a laughter I recognised as mine and in which I joined him.
In spite of the Gray trademark, Hal was almost entirely me, descended from the Xenophons, the Papapandelides, and regrettably, from the other end of the scale, the Demirjian-Diacono-Bogdarlys, and many other crypto-relatives.
‘What have you done with your friend?’ I asked.
‘My friend?’ He parried the blow with a skilful twitch to the right.
‘Father Whatever – Joel, isn’t it? The Jewish priest.’
Hal sat with his legs thrust out straight in front of him, his chin sunk in an exquisite Roman cravat held in place by a turquoise ring.
‘Father Joel’, his mouth formed the word ‘Father’ with the greatest reverence, ‘is a very spiritual man. His regret is that I am not a Christian, his hope that I may turn.’
Did I see the Jewish priest’s blue-shaven jaws glitter in the dusk beyond the hibiscus, as he waited patiently to continue proselytising his lover?
Hal jumped up from his no longer easy chair. ‘But I am not his lover!’
‘Who accused you? Or did you plug into my thoughts, my poor darling boy? Everybody needs a lover, a father, a God. I’m only in doubt about a mother.’
The scene might have ended in worse knots if Hilda hadn’t come in. ‘You must have wondered where I was,’ she began like most unwanted people. ‘I found it was late-night shopping. Quaker Oats was on the special.’ She shook her plastic bag in a gesture of triumph.
Hal let out a moan, and stamped off, slamming the glass doors behind him. As Hilda remarked, he could have smashed them.
‘He’
s gone to join the priest.’
‘The who?’
‘I believe his name is Morgenstern – “Morning Star” if you must know.’
‘Never heard of him. But what a lovely name.’
‘That’s what Herman Wouk thought.’
It was wasted on her. She had gone to deposit the rolled oats in one of those corners of the pantry only she has ever explored. Hilda has her pantry. I am stranded again on the shores of memory and the detritus of what I imagine as future.
I must never let Hilda see I envy her, but I do. She is self-satisfied. She has achieved all she ever aspired to. I don’t think she aspired to a man. I believe she is a virgin in spite of that conspiracy with the Great Booby of the Police Force. She may have aspired to Patrick, but he let her down lightly. Whereas I who have had men, women too, have never been consummated in a true sense. During the sleepless hours I am a failure. I hate myself because I know the inner me. My beauty is a mask, my writing a subterfuge.
Once in the night I jumped up and looked at myself. I encountered a ravaged ghoul, member of an order to which I had never belonged in memory, Sisters of the Sacred Blood. It was dripping from my mouth. At every level above this limbo of vampires, I had failed. In the order to which I had been admitted, I like to think, at one stage of memory, my vocation was a farce, on looking back. Finbarr of the farmyard, who tended the chooks and piglets, who renewed the water for the stinking ducks, was more acceptable in the eyes of Reverend Mother and God. She had freckled hands caked with pollard and bonemeal. She had a squint. I believe the others all saw through me, but accepted Benedict as a joke. My dignity never atoned for my duplicity – I believe only Bernadette ever saw the worth I hoped might be found in me and this through the age and sanctity Bernadette herself had achieved. Possibly the sanctity of innocence. I loved her, as I loved our old Smaragda, the nurse from Smyrna.
After I got back into my bed the whole potful of dreams was boiled up together. Smaragda’s kerchief, pollarded hands, the green, slimy duck water steaming with the laughter of vampire nuns.
I was released exhausted at first light yet refreshed in a sense. I was sitting at my dressing-table combing out my hair when Hilda brought me a bowl of coffee and some rusks.
Memoirs of Many in One Page 5