Thank God, thank God, she was not her mother.
Spring settled firmly in Cassell with a spate of thundershowers. The perennials – the myrtle and grape hyacinths – blossomed around town in a kind of civic blue, and the warming air brought forth an occasional mosquito or fly. The Transportation Commission meetings were dreary and long, too often held over the dinner hour, and when Agnes got home, she would replay them for Joe, sometimes bursting into tears over the parts about the photoradar or the widening interstate.
When her mother called, Agnes got off the phone fast. When her sister called about her mother, Agnes got off the phone even faster. Joe rubbed her shoulders and spoke to her of carports, of curb appeal, of asbestos-wrapped pipes.
At the Arts Hall, she taught and fretted and continued to receive the usual memos from the secretary, written on the usual scrap paper – except that the scrap paper this time, for a while, consisted of the extra posters for the Beyerbach reading. She would get a long disquisition on policies and procedures concerning summer registration, and she would turn it over and there would be his face – sad and pompous in the photograph. She would get a simple phone message – “Your husband called. Please phone him at the office” – and on the back would be the ripped center of Beyerbach’s nose, one minty eye, an elbowish chin. Eventually, there were no more, and the scrap paper moved on to old contest announcements, grant deadlines, Easter concert notices.
At night, she and Joe did yoga to a yoga show on TV. It was part of their effort not to become their parents, though marriage, they knew, held that hazard. The functional disenchantment, the sweet habit of each other had begun to put lines around her mouth, lines that looked like quotation marks – as if everything she said had already been said before. Sometimes their old cat, Madeline, a fat and pampered calico reaping the benefits of life with a childless couple during their childbearing years, came and plopped herself down with them, between them. She was accustomed to much nestling and appreciation and drips from the faucet, though sometimes she would vanish outside, and they would not see her for days, only to spy her later, in the yard, dirty and matted, chomping a vole or eating old snow.
For Memorial Day weekend, Agnes flew with Joe to New York, to show him the city for the first time. “A place,” she said, “where if you’re not white and not born there, you’re not automatically a story.” She had grown annoyed with Iowa, the pathetic thirdhand manner in which the large issues and conversations of the world were encountered, the oblique and tired way history situated itself there – if ever. She longed to be a citizen of the globe!
They roller-skated in Central Park. They looked in the Lord & Taylor windows. They went to the Jofffey. They went to a hair salon on Fifty-seventh Street and there she had her hair dyed red. They sat in the window booths of coffee shops and got coffee refills and ate pie.
“So much seems the same,” she said to Joe. “When I lived here, everyone was hustling for money. The rich were. The poor were. But everyone tried hard to be funny. Everywhere you went – a store, a manicure place – someone was telling a joke. A good one.” She remembered it had made any given day seem bearable, that impulse toward a joke. It had been a determined sort of humor, an intensity mirroring the intensity of the city, and it seemed to embrace and alleviate the hard sadness of people having used one another and marred the earth the way they had. “It was like brains having sex. It was like every brain was a sex maniac.” She looked down at her pie. “People really worked at it, the laughing,” she said. “People need to laugh.”
“They do,” said Joe. He took a swig of coffee, his lips out over the cup in a fleshy flower. He was afraid she might cry – she was getting that look again – and if she did, he would feel guilty and lost and sorry for her that her life was not here anymore, but in a far and boring place now with him. He set the cup down and tried to smile. “They sure do,” he said. And he looked out the window at the rickety taxis, the oystery garbage and tubercular air, seven pounds of chicken giblets dumped on the curb in front of the restaurant where they were. He turned back to her and made the face of a clown.
“What are you doing?” she asked.
“It’s a clown face.”
“What do you mean, ‘a clown face?’” Someone behind her was singing “I Love New York,” and for the first time she noticed the strange irresolution of the tune.
“A regular clown face is what I mean.”
“It didn’t look like that.”
“No? What did it look like?”
“You want me to do the face?”
“Yeah, do the face.”
She looked at Joe. Every arrangement in life carried with it the sadness, the sentimental shadow, of its not being something else, but only itself: she attempted the face – a look of such monstrous emptiness and stupidity that Joe burst out in a howling sort of laughter, like a dog, and then so did she, air exploding through her nose in a snort, her head thrown forward, then back, then forward again, setting loose a fit of coughing.
“Are you okay?” asked Joe, and she nodded. Out of politeness, he looked away, outside, where it had suddenly started to rain. Across the street, two people had planted themselves under the window ledge of a Gap store, trying to stay dry, waiting out the downpour, their figures dark and scarecrowish against the lit window display. When he turned back to his wife – his sad young wife – to point this out to her, to show her what was funny to a man firmly in the grip of middle age, she was still bent sideways in her seat, so that her face fell below the line of the table, and he could only see the curve of her heaving back, the fuzzy penumbra of her thin spring sweater, and the garish top of her bright, new, and terrible hair.
Curved is the Line of Beauty
Hilary Mantel
Hilary Mantel (b. 1952) is a British writer who has twice been awarded the Man Booker Prize. She won her first Booker for the 2009 novel, Wolf Hall, and her second, in 2012, for Bring Up the Bodies, making her the first woman to receive the award twice. She has published twelve novels and one collection of short stories, Learning to Talk.
When I was in my middle childhood my contemporaries started to disappear. They vanished from the mill-town conurbations and the Manchester back-streets, and their bodies – some of them, anyway – were found buried on the moors. I was born on the edge of this burial ground, and had been instructed in its ways. Moorland punished those who were in the wrong place at the wrong time. It killed those who were stupid and those who were unprepared. Ramblers from the city, feckless boys with bobble hats, would walk for days in circles, till they died of exposure. The rescue parties would be baffled by dank fogs, which crept over the landscape like sheets drawn over corpses. Moorland was featureless except for its own swell and eddy, its slow waves of landscape rising and falling, its knolls, streams and bridle paths which ran between nowhere and nowhere; its wetness underfoot, its scaly patches of late snow, and the tossing inland squall that was its typical climate. Even in mild weather its air was wandering, miasmic, like memories that no one owns. When raw drizzle and fog invaded the streets of the peripheral settlements, it was easy to feel that if you stepped out of your family house, your street, your village, you were making a risky move; one mistake, and you would be lost.
The other way of being lost, when I was a child, was by being damned. Damned to hell that is, for all eternity. This could happen very easily if you were a Catholic child in the 1950s. If the speeding driver caught you at the wrong moment – let us say, at the midpoint between monthly confessions – then your dried-up soul could snap from your body like a dead twig. Our school was situated handily, so as to increase the risk, between two bends in the road. Last-moment repentance is possible, and stress was placed on it. You might be saved, if, in your final welter of mashed bones and gore, you remembered the correct formula. So it was really all a matter of timing. I didn’t think it might be a matter of mercy. Mercy was a theory that I had not seen in operation. I had only seen how those who wielded power extracted
maximum advantage from every situation. The politics of the playground and classroom are as instructive as those of the parade ground and the Senate. I understood that, as Thucydides would later tell me, ‘the strong exact what they can, and the weak yield what they must’.
Accordingly, if the strong said, ‘We are going to Birmingham,’ to Birmingham you must go. We were going to make a visit, my mother said. To whom, I asked; because we had never done this before. To a family we had not met, she said, a family we did not yet know. In the days after the announcement I said the word ‘family’ many times to myself, its crumbly soft sound like a rusk in milk, and I carried its scent with me, the human warmth of chequered blankets and the yeast smell of babies’ heads.
In the week before the visit, I went over in my mind the circumstances that surrounded it. I challenged myself with a few contradictions and puzzles which these circumstances threw up. I analysed who we might be, we who were going to make the visit: because that was not a constant or a simple matter.
The night before the visit I was sent to bed at eight – even though it was the holidays and Saturday next day. I opened the sash window and leaned out into the dusk, waiting till a lonely string of street lights blossomed, far over the fields, under the upland shadow. There was a sweet grassy fragrance, a haze in the twilight; Dr Kildare’s Friday-night theme tune floated out from a hundred TV sets, from a hundred open windows, up the hill, across the reservoir, over the moors; and as I fell asleep I saw the medics in their frozen poses, fixed, solemn and glazed, like heroes on the curve of an antique jar.
I once read of a jar on which this verse was engraved:
Straight is the line of duty;
Curved is the line of beauty.
Follow the straight line; thou shalt see
The curved line ever follow thee.
At five o’clock, a shout roused me from my dreams. I went downstairs in my blue spotted pyjamas to wash in hot water from the kettle, and I saw the outline of my face, puffy, in the light like grey linen tacked to the summer window. I had never been so far from home; even my mother had never, she said, been so far. I was excited and excitement made me sneeze. My mother stood in the kitchen in the first uncertain shaft of sun, making sandwiches with cold bacon and wrapping them silently, sacramentally, in greaseproof paper.
We were going in Jack’s car, which stood the whole night, these last few months, at the kerb outside our house. It was a small grey car, like a jelly mould, out of which a giant might turn a foul jelly of profanity and grease. The car’s character was idle, vicious and sneaky. If it had been a pony you would have shot it. Its engine spat and steamed, its underparts rattled; it wanted brake shoes and new exhausts. It jibbed at hills and sputtered to a halt on bends. It ate oil, and when it wanted a new tyre there were rows about having no money, and there was slamming the door so hard that the glass of the kitchen cupboard rattled in its grooves.
The car brought out the worst in everybody who saw it. It was one of the first cars on the street, and the neighbours, in their mistaken way, envied it. Already sneerers and ill-wishers of ours, they were driven to further spite when they saw us trooping out to the kerb carrying all the rugs and kettles and camping stoves and raincoats and wellington boots that we took with us for a day at the seaside or the zoo.
There were five of us, now. Me and my mother; two biting, snarling, pinching little boys; Jack. My father did not go on our trips. Though he still slept in the house – the room down the corridor, the one with the ghost – he kept to his own timetables and routines, his Friday jazz club, and his solitary sessions of syncopation, picking at the piano, late weekend afternoons, with a remote gaze. This had not always been his way of life. He had once taken me to the library. He had taken me out with my fishing net. He had taught me card games and how to read a racecard; it might not have been a suitable accomplishment for an eight-year-old, but any skill at all was a grace in our dumb old world.
But those days were now lost to me. Jack had come to stay with us. At first he was just a visitor and then without transition he seemed to be always there. He never carried in a bag, or unpacked clothes; he just came complete as he was. After his day’s work he would drive up in the evil car, and when he came up the steps and through the front door, my father would melt away to his shadowy evening pursuits. Jack had a brown skin and muscles beneath his shirt. He was your definition of a man, if a man was what caused alarm and shattered the peace.
To amuse me, while my mother combed the tangles out of my hair, he told me the story of David and Goliath. It was not a success. He tried his hardest – as I tried also – to batten down my shrieks. As he spoke his voice slid in and out of the London intonations with which he had been born; his brown eyes flickered, caramel and small, the whites jaundiced. He made the voice of Goliath, but – to my mind – he was lacking in the David department.
After a long half-hour, the combing was over. My vast weight of hair studded to my skull with steel clips, I pitched exhausted from the kitchen chair. Jack stood up, equally exhausted, I suppose; he would not have known how often this needed to happen. He liked children, or imagined he did. But (owing to recent events and my cast of mind) I was not exactly a child, and he himself was a very young man, too inexperienced to navigate through the situation in which he had placed himself, and he was always on the edge, under pressure, chippy and excitable and quick to take offence. I was afraid of his flaring temper and his irrationality: he argued with brute objects, kicked out at iron and wood, cursed the fire when it wouldn’t light. I flinched at the sound of his voice, but I tried to keep the flinch inwards.
When I look back now I find in myself – in so far as I can name what I find – a faint stir of fellow feeling that is on the way to pity.
It was Jack’s quickness of temper, and his passion for the underdog, that was the cause of our trip to Birmingham. We were going to see a friend of his, who was from Africa. You will remember that we have barely reached the year 1962, and I had never seen anyone from Africa, except in photographs, but the prospect in itself was less amazing to me than the knowledge that Jack had a friend. I thought friends were for children. My mother seemed to think that you grew out of them. Adults did not have friends. They had relatives. Only relatives came to your house. Neighbours might come, of course. But not to our house. My mother was now the subject of scandal and did not go out. We were all the subject of scandal, but some of us had to. I had to go to school, for instance. It was the law.
It was six in the morning when we bundled into the car, the two little boys dropped sleep-stunned beside me on to the red leather of the back seat. In those days it took a very long time to get anywhere. There were no motorways to speak of. Fingerposts were still employed, and we did not seem to have the use of a map. Because my mother did not know left from right, she would cry ‘That way, that way!’ whenever she saw a sign and happened to read it. The car would swerve off in any old direction and Jack would start cursing and she would shout back. Our journeys usually found us bogged in the sand at Southport, or broken down by the drystone wall of some Derbyshire beauty spot, the lid of the vile spitting engine propped open, my mother giving advice from the wound-down window: fearful advice, which went on till Jack danced with rage on the roadway or on the uncertain sand, his voice piping in imitation of a female shriek; and she, heaving up the last rags of self-control, heaving them into her arms like some dying diva’s bouquet, would drop her voice an octave and claim, ‘I don’t talk like that.’
But on this particular day, when we were going to Birmingham, we didn’t get lost at all. It seemed a miracle. At the blossoming hour of ten o’clock, the weather still fine, we ate our sandwiches, and I remember that first sustaining bite of salted fat, sealing itself in a plug to the hard palate: the sip of Nescafé to wash it down, poured steaming from the flask. In some town we stopped for petrol. That too passed without incident.
I rehearsed, in my mind, the reason behind the visit. The man from Africa, the frien
d, was not now but had once been a workmate of Jack. And they had spoken. And his name was Jacob. My mother had told me, don’t say ‘Jacob is black’, say ‘Jacob is coloured’.
What, coloured? I said. What, striped? Like the towel which, at that very moment, was hanging to dry before the fire? I stared at it; the stripes had run together to a patchy violet-grey. I felt it; the fibres were stiff as dried grass. Black, my mother said, is not the term polite people use. And stop mauling that towel!
So now, the friend, Jacob. He had been, at one time, living in Manchester, working with Jack. He had married a white girl. They had gone to get lodgings. At every door they had been turned away. No room at the inn. Though Eva was expecting. Especially because she was expecting. Even the stable door was bolted, it was barred against them, NO COLOUREDS, the signs said.
Oh, merrie England! At least people could spell in those days. They didn’t write NO COLOURED’S or ‘NO’ COLOUREDS. That’s about all you can say for it.
So: Jacob unfolded to Jack this predicament of his: no house, the insulting notices, the pregnant Eva. Jack, quickly taking fire, wrote a letter to a tabloid newspaper. The newspaper, quick to spot a cause, took fire also. There was naming and shaming; there was a campaign. Letters were written and questions were asked. The next thing you knew, Jacob had moved to Birmingham, to a new job. There was a house now, and a baby, indeed two. Better days were here. But Jacob would never forget how Jack had taken up the cudgels. That, my mother said, was the phrase he had used.
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