by Jenny Diski
I had a way of looking at the painting in private. By manoeuvring two armchairs in a particular relation to each other across a corner facing Stanley’s wall, I created a dark triangular cave to huddle in. The arms of the chairs could be raised and lowered, and if I raised both arms I had complete seclusion, except for a carefully arranged crack between them. I spent hours staring at Stanley from my hideaway. Sometimes I just looked at him, but at other times allowed us to look at each other, imagining we each had an eye to either end of the same telescope. His was the end that made things seem more distant than they were, though sometimes, if I gazed long and hard enough, the perspective changed, and I found myself looking at my brother Stanley from an immense distance, a greater distance than any I had ever seen in any other circumstances. That was how I knew how I looked to him, since he had no choice but to stare long and hard and forever.
It was the look in my brother Stanley’s eyes that I remember best, though I searched the rest of his features thoroughly to find angles and aspects that reminded me of me. We were, after all, closely related; his father was my father.
The thing about Stanley’s eyes was that they seemed to know what was going to happen to him, and that he would be looking out on a future from which he would be absent. The eyes knew that. They were almond-shaped, just like mine—that much we had in common—but mine were very dark, almost black, so that people often said I seemed to have no pupils, or nothing but pupils, depending on how you looked at it. Stanley’s eyes were an astonishing cerulean blue, which must have belonged to his mother, or someone long gone in my father’s family, because our father’s were like mine—black.
Stanley’s eyes may have been a vivid blue, but they were not clear—they seemed misted with foreknowledge, occluded with sadness that was matched by two lines on either side of his young, full lips (again, like mine) which seemed to turn the corners of his mouth down slightly. It might have been that Stanley’s grave look was what we had in common, some gene that made us seem, in repose, unhappy. People have always told me to cheer up, even when I feel perfectly fine. There’s something about my features. “Do you have to look so miserable?” my mother would say when I sat lost and quite contented in a daydream. Or, “Cheer up, love, it may never happen,” was the version out in the streets from builders or bus conductors. So I could simply have taken Stanley’s gravity for proof of our relationship along with his almond-shaped eyes.
But knowing what I knew of how Stanley’s life was to be, it was impossible not to read loss into his eyes. Even so, I could have concluded that Stanley’s expression was the result of the knowledge the portraitist had of his subject. Such a look might have been imposed on those young, blue eyes by an adult’s hindsight. But I knew better, because in the right-hand cupboard of the looming sideboard was the very photograph the painter had used as his model. And however limited his artistic talents, the portrait painter knew how to make a good likeness.
In the left-hand cupboard of the sideboard were glasses, bottles of sherry and advocaat which only came out at Christmas. In the middle were cutlery and napkin drawers—all the clutter of respectable dining—waiting (still waiting in my unsociable family) for their time to come. In the right-hand cupboard were two—to me—gigantic books. I have one of them still.
Now, I realise, they were not gigantic, just the size of photograph albums. Each book was covered in grainy Moroccan leather and came from Aspreys, which, as my father told me, meant they were very expensive and very special. I knew how special they were just from the smell and the weight of them. I couldn’t carry both at the same time to my hideaway (equipped with a torch) but had to make two trips. They were identical except for their colour. One book was a strong air-force blue, the other a rich maroon, with matching stitching. The edges of the pages were gilded a dark gold, like the frame around Stanley’s portrait. The blue album was Stanley’s, the maroon mine; one for each of us.
Only twenty-four of the thirty-nine pages (not counting the marbled first and last page) in Stanley’s book had been used. The photograph that the painting was based on was alone on the twenty-third page. On the twenty-fourth page there were no photos, but there was a daffodil, flattened and dried, like tissue paper that had had its colour bleached by the sun—pale golden-yellow flower, straw stem and dull, dark green leaf—fearfully delicate. After that, the pages were blank.
It was a studio photograph, posed and with a mottled white backdrop, taken in the early 1940s. The painting was an exact replica, except that the photo showed Stanley to the waist, and the painting, as I said, stopped at his shoulders. He was sitting on a stool, probably, as he is rather hunched and round-shouldered the way that children naturally sit when there is no supporting back to their chair. He was wearing a short-sleeved white shirt with a striped tie knotted a little askew at the collar, and over it, a sleeveless ribbed woollen jumper, wrinkled around the waist because of his posture. He hadn’t been specially tidied up for the picture, though his side-parted, thick, light brown or dark blond hair looks as if it might have had a comb run hastily through it.
But it was the face that engaged my interest, and particularly the quality of his gaze towards the lens. The painter captured it exactly, but the photograph proved, as I checked from one to the other, that Stanley’s look was not a piece of retrospective sentimentality on the part of the artist. It was there in the living, breathing ten-year-old boy on the day he went to the photographer’s studio. Stanley’s stare is direct and unsmiling.
We never knew each other. Stanley was killed two years before I was born. He wasn’t even really my brother, but only my half-brother from our father’s previous marriage to a woman whose name I never knew. In the album there are some pictures of her with Stanley. She is elegant and beautiful in that way which women aren’t any more, broadfaced, the bone structure not angular, but softly rounded, and she wears delightfully frivolous hats over complex hairdos. She’s smiling in all the pictures, gently, lovingly, but it’s hard to tell if that was her nature or simply an expression for the camera. There is one photo of her and my brother which is signed, but it’s no help so far as her name goes. It says: To Darling Daddy from Mummy and Stanley, Sept. 9th, 1940. Of course, there are photos of Stanley and our father. On the beach, walking together along a promenade, in a suburban garden I’ve never seen, having tea with some old people who must be my paternal grandparents. In these photos also my father is smiling. But again, that’s what people do when a camera is pointed at them, and though I do remember his smile, I also remember when he was not smiling.
I was an only child and Stanley was my ghost brother, my friend, familiar, a “guarding angel” (as I thought they were called). It was to Stanley that I would tell all my troubles, wishes and hopes. I seemed always to have known about him. My father told me about him. How he’d sent Stanley and his mother to America to get away from the bombs and yet, having crossed the most dangerous strip of water twice in safety, Stanley had come back only to be knocked down by a bus outside the house. My father said that for some time he was distraught and wandered around London searching for the bus driver (though it wasn’t his fault) to kill him. My mother suggested she had come along soon after the accident and helped to heal my father’s hurt. The marriage with Stanley’s mother had long been as good as over. But once, when my parents’ marriage was as good as over too, my mother said, “Now I’ll tell you the truth. Stanley was killed because he ran out of the house to get away from their screaming and fighting.” I thought I was lucky to live on the third floor of a block of flats—when I ran out of the flat to get away from the rows, there was only a corridor outside.
I dream about those flats, even now, and in reality I pass them probably twice a week or so. In the dream I can only get as far as the lobby, and this is true in reality, too. I walked around there recently, and though the exterior is exactly the same—white stone steps up to glass entrance doors—there is now an entry-phone system which prevents you from going any further withou
t a reason. I don’t have a reason, except that I used to live there thirty-five years ago and would dearly love to have a wander round the corridors where I played. There’s no real need for it. Just the fact that where my childhood took place is still there, rock-solid but impenetrable. Some people want to climb mountains; I’d like to walk around the corridors.
It was also where Stanley and I were last together. His album and mine parted company in those flats, after eleven years of sitting on top of each other in the sideboard. My father left and took one of the books with him. When my mother and I left the flats some months later, we had no room, in the small bedsitter we moved into, for any more than the essentials. She asked the man who stoked the boilers to take care of some things for her. Among them was the remaining photograph album. It seems odd now that there was not room enough for a photo album even, but things were very fraught and my mother could manage only what she could manage. She told the stoker—Bill, I think he was called—that she would collect the things when we were properly sorted out.
Of course, things never did get properly sorted out, and bigger problems arose which made retrieving a photo album irrelevant. Perhaps she just forgot. I didn’t, but it wasn’t wise to make demands on my mother at that time.
Several years later I was working in an office near to the old block of flats. One lunchtime I phoned the porter’s lodge and asked to speak to Bill the stoker. A porter told me he’d left. I explained who I was and that my mother had left some things with Bill. The porter remembered us—we had been rather memorably evicted from the flats—but said that he thought Bill had burned the things when no one came for them. Anyway, he didn’t have any idea where Bill was or how to get hold of him. I didn’t press him. I almost hadn’t believed that Bill the stoker existed, suspecting he might be no more than a fantasy belonging to a story I’d once heard. But Bill was real enough, and even the porter remembered that we’d left some things with him. As to what happened to them, perhaps it was best to leave that question lie.
In the end, I did get one of the books back. My father died in 1966, and the woman he had been living with gave me the air-force-blue album he had taken with him when he left my mother and me. Back at his house, after the funeral, she handed me Stanley’s book. The painting was on her wall. I said I wanted it, but she told me she was keeping it for herself because it had meant so much to my father. We’d never liked each other; I think she felt I was being greedy, asking for both the album and the picture.
I settled for the album, which I still have and look through from time to time. I love Stanley’s mother’s hats more with each passing decade. And the look in Stanley’s eyes reiterates his demand to be remembered. Which, of course, I do. I remember him very well, indeed.
Bath Time
Eventually, everything had fined down to a single dream. It was this: a bath. But no ordinary bath. It was the perfect bath Meg wanted, the one she had been waiting for, building up to by degrees, as it seemed to her now.
It was perfectly simple, really. She wanted to spend a whole day in the bath. To go to sleep the night before knowing that the next day was her bath day, and wake in the morning and remember that her waking hours were to be exclusively devoted to it.
Easy, some might think, but not so easy, actually. It required the right bathroom, and a hot-water system that could keep the bath at the right temperature for as long as necessary. It meant a day when there were no interruptions: no phone calls, no doorbells ringing, no appointments, guaranteed solitude. Not impossible conditions, either singly or combined. There were probably thousands of people—more, hundreds of thousands maybe—who had, or could create, the right circumstances. But, for one reason or another, Meg had never managed to achieve a combination of all the circumstances needed for the day-long bath. The day-long bath was a notion that had come to her more than eighteen years ago, but which she had never been able to put into action because unless everything was right, there was no point. And everything had never been right at the same time.
The size of the bathroom was not a factor. Meg was perfectly happy in small rooms; unused space tended to make her anxious. The bathroom she had had as a child was perfectly adequate, she remembered, though no larger, in the tiny two-roomed flat, than it had to be to contain the bath, washbasin and toilet. It was clean, neat, and although she couldn’t actually visualise the walls, she supposed that they must have been a bathroom sort of colour, pale pink or eau de nil. Not to her present taste, but she didn’t think she’d have minded as a child. The actual suite, as they say, she was certain was white. Baths and toilets didn’t come in any other colour then, unless you were a starlet or a duchess. Still, satisfactory as it was, as a physical environment, when she remembered that first bathroom, it was with fear. She always saw herself sprinting from it, dragging her knickers up from around her knees as she ran, while the waterfall rush of the cistern filling up threatened to engulf her. It was always essential to get out as fast as possible after she’d pulled the chain—yes, it was a proper chain, hanging from the raised cistern. She always left the door open, of course, to facilitate her escape, once the time had come when her parents had insisted that the toilet had to be flushed.
Water had scared her, then. She used to wake at night screaming, and when her mother arrived would tell her that she was afraid of drowning in a flood. It did no good for her mother to point out that it wasn’t raining, there was no flood, and that, even if there had been, Meg was not at risk in her bedroom on the fifth floor of a block of flats in the middle of London. The flushing of the toilet seemed to Meg a premonition of rising waters breaking down the brick walls, seeping, then surging, through cracks in the window frames, and overwhelming her. She was aware from a very young age, for no reason she could now fathom, of the lethal power of massed, fast-moving water.
The only thing she remembered distinctly about the first bathroom was that her mother always poured disinfectant into the bath when she ran it for her daughter. She could see the bottle of Dettol up-ended in her mother’s hand and the brownish orange liquid hitting the clear bathwater in a thin stream, instantly clouding it. It seemed like a magician’s trick, or later, when she heard the story at school, the miracle of Christ changing water to wine. But she wondered also what germs she carried that her mother battled against. Dirt was dangerous, of course, there was no doubt about that. Her mother cleaned the flat and washed clothes and herself with a vigour that plainly was keeping something terrible at bay. Illness, the plague, perhaps? But that wasn’t really it—her mother had no understanding of the virus theory of disease, colds came from wet feet, flu a willed perversity on the part of her daughter to make cleaning activities next to impossible. Mrs. Tucker was keeping away dirt, which she called germs, because it was bad and threatened the fabric of niceness which it seemed to be her job to maintain against all the odds. She put Dettol in her own bath, as well as her daughter’s, and complained each morning, her face heavy with disgust, about Meg’s father’s casual attitude to cleanliness.
“He never washes above his elbows,” she would say, hissing almost, at the horror of it, as she scrubbed vigorously between her legs at the washbasin. “I’d rub myself away if I could, keeping clean. He only has a bath at the weekend because I nag him. Filthy pig.”
Mrs. Tucker had had an impoverished childhood, deprived of everything, as she told Meg, including the luxury of a bath and hot running water. The germs, Meg came to understand, were mainly to be found in that area that her mother paid so much attention to in the morning. Her mother stood naked at the basin, her legs apart, and washed down there as if her life depended on it, while Meg sat in a foot and a half of opaque, pungent water, watching. She concluded it was from that place between her legs that the dirt originated and where the Dettol was supposed to do its germ-assassinating work. Meg wanted bubble baths and creamy soap like she’d seen on the television, but always it was milky, sharp-smelling water and coal tar soap, and every nook and cranny to be washed so that when
she called her mother to tell her she’d finished she could answer each element of the litany—“Have you washed your . . .” (the list included all the cracks and crevices that might be passed over by a haphazard washer)—with a truthful “Yes.”
Leaving home had been no hardship, she’d had enough of her mother’s scrubbing of things and herself, enough of her father’s tight-faced loathing of everything his wife and his miserably small, clean home represented. She went with a light heart to teacher training college and the flat she would share with four other students. Then, the world was full of promise.
The bathroom, however, was a disappointment. Well, hardly a disappointment, only to be expected, really. The flat was soon covered with cheap and cheerful things to negate the unaltered fifties drab. She and her flatmates flung colourful bedspreads over dull moquette, put up posters of the Beatles and other dawning heroes of the hour and lashed out on a set of stripy mugs to drink their instant coffee out of. There wasn’t much that could be done about the bathroom. That one was eau de nil (though pock-marked by patches where age and damp had flaked off the paint), and by now Meg minded. The lino was icy and cracked, wind whistled in from a broken corner of the window, and there was no kind of heating. But there was, as her mother would have pointed out, a bath and hot running water. At least, it was sometimes hot, and it did run, though so slowly you could write the best part of an essay while waiting for it to fill even a third full. It was a huge, cast-iron bath, with claw legs, of the kind that later would become much sought after, but this one was chipped and caused the already lukewarm water to chill almost as soon as it finished falling from the chrome swan’s neck tap. The water heater made such terrible, threatening noises, clanking and burbling, that Meg and her friends would turn it on at arm’s length as the pilot light whooshed the flames into action, and then run for their lives back upstairs to their room, just in case, this time, it really did explode.