That Glimpse of Truth

by David Miller

  If you want to make yourself useful, you could lay the table, his mother said.

  What I don’t understand, his mother said, is why you have to be so heavy about all this. If your friends don’t like the vocabulary I use, couldn’t you make a joke of it? Couldn’t you just tell them your mother is an eccentric old bat? That sort of confession would improve your street cred no end, I should’ve thought.

  There isn’t any point in going on with this, he said. There isn’t any point in trying to have a serious discussion with you. You’re the personification of the English disease, the English upper class disease, of superciliousness. Everything you’ve said this morning, and the way you’ve said it, is offensive, but you can’t even see it, you can’t even hear it. If you knew the way you sound to ordinary people! “Our Malcolm” and “our Joanne” – mocking and superior, that’s how you sound.

  Diane, his mother said, Diane, not Joanne. I wasn’t mocking, I assure you, I was borrowing. I was repeating. And who’s calling who ordinary? No one’s that ordinary. In my experience most people, when you get to know them, are extraordinary. Look, if you’re not going to lay the table, d’you think you could stop hovering and sit down?

  I didn’t mean “ordinary”, he said, I meant “other”. Other people. You mentioned palaces and stately homes a minute ago, he said. What you don’t seem to understand is that this place is a palace to some of the friends I bring here. In fact that’s exactly what Julie said the first time she came down. She walked in the door and said, God, it’s a palace! You never told me your mother lived in a fucking palace, Kit.

  I don’t get this, his mother said. First it’s “drawing room”, then it’s the way I talk, now it’s this house. You keep moving the goal posts. Are you saying people shouldn’t be allowed to live in five-bedroomed houses, in five-and-a-half- – if you count the box room – bedroomed houses in case other people, who live in two-bedroomed houses or flats, might think of them as palaces? Is that what you’re saying? I happen to know that Julie liked this house. She came down early one morning that first visit – you were still in bed – and had breakfast with me. She said, I really love this place, Elizabeth – it’s magic. I’m going to live in a place like this one day. We went round the garden and she knew the names of everything. Monkshood! she said, my dad won’t have monkshood in the garden … I was fond of Julie. She was a very nice girl. I was sorry when you gave her the push.

  Martin found you frightening, he said. D’you remember Martin?

  That’s okay, I found Martin frightening, his mother said.

  When I say “frightening” I mean “posh”, he said. I met Martin in the pub the other night and he seemed a bit down and fed up with life – well, with his job really – and I asked him if he’d like to get away to the country this weekend. He wanted to know if you were going to be there. I said probably you would, it was your house. And he said, Well, think I’ll give it a miss then. No offence, but your mother and her “drawing rooms” and “wirelesses” and “gramophones” are a bit posh for me. He pronounced it “poshe”.

  Well that hurts certainly. Yes it does, his mother said. Could you come here a minute, I can’t read this without my specs, does it say two ounces or four?

  Martin spent a lot of his childhood in care, you know, he said. Four ounces, he said. He was shunted from council home to council home. From the age of seven, that is. Before that he lived in a one-room flat with his parents. They ate in it and slept in it and his parents screwed in it. A lot of pain went on in that living room. His father beat his mother up in it – night after night after night. Dreadful, bloody beatings. If Martin tried to stop him he got beaten up too.

  That is very dreadful, his mother said. Poor child. Poor Martin. I didn’t know that. I am very sorry indeed about that.

  So you can probably see why “drawing rooms” and such would put him off, he said. Piss him off. I mean, what the fuck have they got to do with his life, or with anything he knows about? Like fucking nothing.

  Yes I do see, his mother said. I understand now why he’s on the defensive. What I don’t understand is, why, if you’re so fond of him, you didn’t warn me about all this before he came down here. It would have saved me asking him all sorts of tactless questions about his life and family, and him having to skate round them – which is what he did do.

  How patronising can you be! he said. Martin doesn’t need explaining, or explaining away, by me or anyone. He is himself, he is a valuable human being.

  His mother took her mixing bowl and egg whisk to the sink and ran the tap over them. She turned the tap off, twisting it hard. Remind me to get something done about this washer, she said. She said, Why do I get the feeling that, for you, only one sort of person, from one sort of background, is a valuable human being? Why do I get the impression that, in your view, a person has to have been brought up in an obviously deprived environment to know anything about pain?

  I haven’t said that, he said.

  So much so that I feel I’ve failed you, that you’d have preferred to have had Martin’s childhood, that kind of misery being the only passport – as you would see it – to full membership of the human race.

  You’re silent, his mother said. She tapped him on the shoulder. Hey, look at me.

  He looked out of the window.

  Let me remind you of your father’s childhood, his mother said. It was a very comfortable, green-belt childhood. There was a cook, Inez I think, and a maid. Two maids. There was a nanny until your father went away to school. There was a big garden with a shrubbery one end to play in – though he had to play by himself most of the time, of course, being an only child. There was all that. There were also your grandparents who hated each other. They slept at different ends of the house, but in the evenings when your grandfather came home from his office they sat together in the drawing room in their own special chairs and tormented each other. Your grandmother had the edge, she was the cleverer. She was frustrated. Nowadays, I suppose, she’d have been a career woman, and perhaps not married. From all the evidence she despised men. While this ritual was going on, while they goaded and persecuted each other, your father was made to sit in a corner and play with his Meccano or read a book. He was not allowed to interrupt and he was not allowed to leave the room. At six-forty-five on the dot your grandmother would take a key from the bunch on the thin leather belt she always wore and unlock the drinks cupboard, and the serious whisky drinking – and the serious torturing – would begin.

  I know about that, he said, you’ve told me about that.

  There was no blood, his mother said, there were no visible bruises, just –

  I’ve got the point, he said, you’ve made your point.

  When your father was dying I thought about the nightmare he’d had to endure while he was growing up. I wondered if it might have been responsible in some way for his illness, if the stress of it had made him vulnerable, damaged his immune system. D’you think that’s possible?

  Could be, he said. Could be. I don’t know.

  I wish you’d known him, his mother said. That’s the worst of it, your never knowing him, or rather being too young to remember him. That photograph on my dressing table, the one of you aged eighteen months or so with Daddy. You’re looking up at him and you’re hugging his knees. Now I remember that occasion – I took the photograph. I remember the way you ran, well, staggered up the garden – you were a very late walker, you know, very slow to get yourself off your bottom – and threw yourself at him. You nearly toppled him. And then I pressed the button. I remember that afternoon very well. I remember your father telling me there was no point in taking any photographs, the light was too poor … well, I remember it all. I remember how tired your father was. He was already ill but we didn’t know. I remember that you had a tantrum about ten minutes before I took the photograph. You lay on the grass and kicked and screamed. But you don’t remember. You don’t remember him, and you don’t remember you – or any of it. It’s just a photog
raph to you.

  Cass and Anna remember him, he said, they say they do. They’ve told me things.

  He did his dying in the drawing room – as it was then called – his mother said. He wanted to be downstairs so he could see into the garden – walk into it to begin with. When he was given his death sentence, at Christmas, he set himself some targets. The start of the cricket season – on telly – was one. The peonies and irises out was another. We had wonderful irises in those days, the proper rhizomatous sort, the tall bearded ones, a huge bed of them your father made. He was passionate about his irises, quite boring about them. Irises are tricky things, they like being by themselves, they don’t like being moved, they have to have full sun, you’re supposed to divide them every three years immediately after flowering – it’s quite a performance. It takes patience to grow good irises, and your father was not a patient man. He was a quick-tempered man. I was quite jealous of his irises and all the patient attention they got. Every weekend spent in the garden – or the bloody potting shed. Graham Greene has got a lot to answer for, if you ask me.

  He had not known about the irises. He said, Did he see them? Were they out in time?

  Some of them were out, the ordinary white flags, and the blue ones. The red peonies were out, the officinalis, but the pale ones weren’t – you know, the Chinese ones. The ones he liked best weren’t.

  I don’t think I knew he died in the living room, he said. I don’t think you ever told me that.

  He didn’t die in it, his mother said. About three weeks before he died we moved him upstairs. It had become impossible to look after him properly downstairs, and it was too noisy. Small children – you were only two and obstreperous – kept bursting in. When they carried him upstairs, which was difficult because he was in agony, I waited at the top, on the landing; and when he saw me he said, Next time I go down these stairs, folks, it’ll be feet first. He said it to make me laugh, to make the doctor and the nurse – who’d made a sort of chair for him out of their hands – laugh. It was brave to make that joke, but it was cruel too, because three weeks later when he did go down the stairs, in his coffin, I kept remembering him coming up, I kept hearing him say, Feet first.

  If I don’t talk about it much, his mother said, it’s because I don’t like thinking about it. I prefer to remember your father before he got that bloody disease. He was a different person before he got it. I don’t mean just because he looked different – obviously if someone loses six stone in a short time he’s going to seem different, he’s going to feel unfamiliar – I suppose because we tend to think of a person’s shape as being part of their personality, of being them – but that wasn’t the real problem. The real problem I discovered was the gap there is between the living and the dying. An enormous, unbridgeable gap.

  We’re all dying though, aren’t we, he said. From the moment we’re born you could say we’re dying.

  Don’t give me that, his mother said, don’t give me that claptrap. Could you move your elbow please, I’m trying to lay the table. I want to give you a knife and fork.

  Sit down, he said, stop working and sit down and talk to me. Just for five minutes. You never sit down and talk. You never tell me anything. You never tell me anything about you.

  It’s lunch time, his mother said, we can’t talk now. Grandpa will be starving. Could you go and tell him it’s ready and give him a hand down the stairs. I fear we’re going to have to have a lift put in, you know, or –

  What is lunch? he said. What are we having? Fish fingers and peas? he said hopefully, beefburgers and beans, sausage and chips?

  I wish you hadn’t mentioned sausages, his mother said, why did you have to mention sausages? Okay, I’ll tell you, his mother said (as though he’d asked her to, which he hadn’t, he hadn’t said a word), why not? I’ll tell you. When your father was dying, before he got to the point of not wanting anything to eat at all, the only thing he wanted was sausages. I’d put my head round the door and ask him, What d’you fancy for lunch today, darling? and he’d say, Bangers and mash. Then I’d go away and cook him something quite other – something I thought would be nourishing and easy to digest, that would slip down. I’d bring in the tray – he’d be sitting with his back to me, shoulders stooped, head supported by a hand, looking out at the garden – and he’d say, without turning his head because turning and twisting were very painful for him, Doesn’t smell like bangers. And I’d say, You just wait and see. I’d put the tray down on a chair, and tuck a napkin under his chin and adjust the invalid table and wheel it up over his knees, and put the plate on it and whip the cover off and say, There! Doesn’t that look delicious? And he’d stare down at the plate. I asked for bangers, he’d say eventually. I was expecting bangers.

  I don’t think I let him have bangers more than twice in the whole of that five months, the whole time he was dying, his mother said. I don’t know why I didn’t give him what he asked for. I’ve tried to work out why I didn’t.

  He said nothing for a minute. Then he said, You thought they’d be hard for him to digest, you thought they’d make him uncomfortable.

  Did I? his mother said. What would a bit of discomfort have mattered? He was dying, for God’s sake! He wanted bangers.

  Say something! his mother said. I’ve shocked you, haven’t I? I can tell.

  No. No, you haven’t, he said. Look, I’d better go and get Grandpa, I’d better go and find the girls.

  Could you bring me my wireless at the same time? his mother said, I want to hear the news. I’m not sure where I left it, downstairs I think, in the – in some room or other.

  LIZZIE’S TIGER

  Angela Carter

  Angela Carter (1940–1992) is best known for her novels Nights at the Circus and Wise Children, but might be better known for her journalism, criticism and her short stories. Perhaps her finest work in fiction were retellings of tales told before, especially The Bloody Chamber and her two Virago Book of Fairy Tales. Fearsomely intelligent – “a day without an argument is like an egg without salt,” – and wickedly funny, her death, aged fifty-two from cancer, only makes me wonder at what she might have gone on to do. She said, “Reading a book is like re-writing it for yourself. You bring to a novel, anything you read, all your experience of the world. You bring your history and you read it in your own terms.” The story here was one of the last she wrote.

  When the circus came to town and Lizzie saw the tiger, they were living on Ferry Street, in a very poor way. It was the time of the greatest parsimony in their father’s house; everyone knows the first hundred thousand is the most difficult and the dollar bills were breeding slowly, slowly, even if he practised a little touch of usury on the side to prick his cash in the direction of greater productivity. In another ten years’ time, the War between the States would provide rich pickings for the coffin-makers, but, back then, back in the Fifties, well – if he had been a praying man, he would have gone down on his knees for a little outbreak of summer cholera or a touch, just a touch, of typhoid. To his chagrin, there had been nobody to bill when he had buried his wife.

  For, at that time, the girls were just freshly orphaned. Emma was thirteen, Lizzie four – stern and square, a squat rectangle of a child. Emma parted Lizzie’s hair in the middle, stretched it back over each side of her bulging forehead and braided it tight. Emma dressed her, undressed her, scrubbed her night and morning with a damp flannel, and humped the great lump of little girl around in her arms whenever Lizzie would let her, although Lizzie was not a demonstrative child and did not show affection easily, except to the head of the house, and then only when she wanted something. She knew where the power was and, intuitively feminine in spite of her gruff appearance, she knew how to court it.

  That cottage on Ferry – very well, it was a slum; but the undertaker lived on unconcerned among the stiff furnishings of his defunct marriage. His bits and pieces would be admired today if they turned up freshly beeswaxed in an antique store, but in those days they were plain old-fashioned
, and time would only make them more so in that dreary interior, the tiny house he never mended, eroding clapboard and diseased paint, mildew on the dark wallpaper with a brown pattern like brains, the ominous crimson border round the top of the walls, the sisters sleeping in one room in one thrifty bed.

  On Ferry, in the worst part of town, among the dark-skinned Portuguese fresh off the boat with their earrings, flashing teeth and incomprehensible speech, come over the ocean to work the mills whose newly erected chimneys closed in every perspective; every year more chimneys, more smoke, more newcomers, and the peremptory shriek of the whistle that summoned to labour as bells had once summoned to prayer.

  The hovel on Ferry stood, or, rather, leaned at a bibulous angle on a narrow street cut across at an oblique angle by another narrow street, all the old wooden homes like an upset cookie jar of broken gingerbread houses lurching this way and that way, and the shutters hanging off their hinges and windows stuffed with old newspapers, and the snagged picket fence and raised voices in unknown tongues and howling of dogs who, since puppyhood, had known of the world only the circumference of their chain. Outside the parlour window were nothing but rows of counterfeit houses that sometimes used to scream.

  Such was the anxious architecture of the two girls’ early childhood.

  A hand came in the night and stuck a poster, showing the head of a tiger, on to a picket fence. As soon as Lizzie saw the poster, she wanted to go to the circus, but Emma had no money, not a cent. The thirteen-year-old was keeping house at that time, the last skivvy just quit with bad words on both sides. Every morning, Father would compute the day’s expenses, hand Emma just so much, no more. He was angry when he saw the poster on the fence; he thought the circus should have paid him rental for the use. He came home in the evening, sweet with embalming fluid, saw the poster, purpled with fury, ripped it off, tore it up.