Spiderweb

by Penelope Lively

  ‘Of course not. I’m sixty-five. What is there to be happy about? Reasonably content, if you like. Most of the appetites still in good shape – bar one.’

  ‘Oh, that …’ said Judith. ‘Why one ever made such a fuss about sex seems quite extraordinary now.’

  Maybe I should enquire politely after Mary Binns, thought Stella. No – maybe not. It is perhaps from Mary Binns that Judith is taking a break.

  ‘What happened to Dan Mitchell?’ said Judith abruptly. ‘I mean – you don’t see his name around in the papers any more …’

  ‘Your train of association is disconcertingly direct, but never mind. He went to the States, a while ago. He worked there for Reuters. He had married an American lady.’

  ‘Oh. I didn’t know. I see.’

  ‘My heart was not broken, if that’s what you’re discreetly not asking. It would never have worked out. By the time the American lady hove on the scene, we were exchanging the occasional postcard, that’s all. I was even invited to the wedding.’

  ‘Did you go?’

  ‘Dear me, no. Old flames are spectres at the feast on such occasions. I wished them well and left it at that.’

  This account perhaps begged questions and Judith was perhaps aware of this. ‘To be honest,’ she said, ‘I can’t remember him very well. You brought him to the dig once and another day we all had a picnic. That was about it. A funny time, that summer.’

  ‘You can say that again.’

  There was a silence. Both women revisited that other place, their other selves.

  My turn, thought Stella. ‘And Rosie?’

  ‘Oh, Rosie … God! That’s the first time I’ve even said her name in years. Mary once met up with a photo of her in my desk and … well, suffice it that Rosie became dangerous ground. I’d long since lost touch anyway. After Malta she got involved with a commune somewhere in Suffolk – remember communes? – and eventually drifted out of sight. But – oh, dear – we did have a nice time together … And now -wherever she may be – she’s fifty-four. Year younger than me. That I don’t believe, frankly. Up here – ‘ Judith put her hands to her head – ‘up here, in here, she’s just as she was then. For ever will be.’

  ‘Quite so,’ said Stella. ‘That’s the saving grace, isn’t it?’

  ‘It’s always knocked me sideways – the thought of what we carry around, stashed away. Not just what we know, but this business of stowing other people in the mind. I’ve always had an obsession with heads. Looking at people’s heads. I can entirely understand the excitement the Victorians felt about phrenology. Burial excavations were always my favourite. That thrilling moment when you realize you’ve got the outline of a skull. I was dotty about skulls. Holding an entire skull. Looking into the eye sockets and thinking, inside there, once, were the answers to all the questions we’d like to ask …’

  ‘You and Hamlet.’

  ‘Don’t be frivolous. I’m talking about a consuming passion. Some of my happiest hours have been spent putting together bits of cranium. Sherds always bored me stiff – the small change of archaeology, all those bloody pots. It was people I wanted to get my hands on. Reconstructing a cranium out of a heap of smashed bone.’

  ‘Any chance of a dig?’ Stella hardly liked to ask. Judith exuded discontent. Professional frustration was no doubt a large part of this.

  Judith shook her head. ‘And there are young turks coming on – they don’t want the likes of me, even when there is something. Fair enough. I’ve had my turn, I suppose. But it doesn’t come easy, kicking my heels day after day. I’ve been doing some copy-editing and proof reading for one of the trade publications, but that doesn’t exactly stretch the mind. I’m like a dog that’s tied up – I’ve always needed to be out and about.’

  ‘Too true,’ said Stella. She associated Judith with movement, action, exterior scenes. Conversations in hired cars whipping through Italy and Greece; on foot in pursuit of remote Macedonian churches or belting around the cities of Europe. Those brief snatched holidays over the years: ‘I could do a week in May – what about you?’ Always with a charged itinerary – distances to be covered, unfrequented sites to be tracked down, elusive ruins to be notched up. As little time as possible to be spent under a roof. Even now, on a not especially warm day of early summer, they were out here – a rug spread on the damp grass – because Judith didn’t want to be cooped up inside.

  She sprawled there in jeans and a sweatshirt. Adolescent dress. An adolescent outline, too, from the rear – thin bony backside, dark cropped cap of hair. Only when she turned her head did you see the years. The decades engraved there in texture of skin, the set of lips, the fold of an eyelid.

  ‘I don’t resent getting older.’ Judith rolled on to her back and stared up at Stella. ‘Most of the bones I’ve dug up kicked the bucket long before my age now. Three score years and ten is a lot of nonsense – there weren’t many in biblical times who got to that. We have a pretty good run for our money these days. It’s not ageing and it’s not the banking of the fires and all that. It’s being put out to grass. Sidelined when you’ve still got plenty of mileage left. Don’t you feel that?’

  ‘I’m ten years older, remember. But yes – quite often I do.’

  ‘We’re in the wrong business. Politics is the thing, if you play your cards right. Prime ministers and presidents totter on into their seventies. Always have done. Old bones are likely to have been powerful bones – that was a good excavation rule of thumb.’

  ‘I thought it was more a case of “Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown …” ’

  ‘You’ve got Shakespeare on the brain today. He’s not infallible. He coined truisms to suit circumstances. And he didn’t know anything about demographic history. Right?’ Judith cocks an eyebrow at Stella, grins.

  ‘No one did, until recently. He based his statistics on the life expectancy of medieval rulers, presumably.’

  ‘Where better than average living circumstances had to be offset against the risks of assassination or death in combat. Always the problem, for the aristocracy. But physique wins out – more protein – larger, stronger, longer-lived people. The case here, until recently. Tory members of Parliament were several inches taller than Labour members, on average.’ Judith sat up abruptly. ‘However did we get on to this? But you’ve perked me up. Served up some distraction. I don’t feel quite so glum. I’d better be off now, though, or …’

  Or what? thought Stella later. Or Mary Binns will be asking questions, probably. How did Judith get herself into that? The same way, of course, that any of us fetch up with someone else – that combination of happenstance, passion, opportunity, inertia … The same way others of us fetch up alone, for better or for worse.

  For better, she felt at that moment, recalling judith’s restless state. Pedigree Chum for supper, she said to the dog. Chicken flavour. And maybe an evening walk, if you’re good.

  Chapter Eleven

  ‘It’s not ageing and it’s not the banking of the fires …’ But age and ageing are a matter of absolute confusion, Stella reflected. An anarchic situation, a Lewis Carroll state in which, like Alice, you do not know where or who you are at all. Passports and other documents made these prescriptive statements, but the reality is quite different. The reality has an eerie affinity with childhood, which is a continuous present. One moves obediently from day to day, but carrying this freight of reference that sends one flying in all directions, let loose in time and space, both then and there at the same time as one is now and here.

  The various papers in Stella’s desk told her that she was sixty-five. The face in the mirror – at which she gave only the most perfunctory glances these days – seemed like some disturbing distortion of her real face. These jowls, those pouches. The backs of her hands were brocaded with brown blotches beneath which twined the thick grey worms of veins. But miraculously preserved within this uncompromising prison of flesh and bone were all those other Stellas, all coexisting, all bearing witness, all available for cons
ultation. Tell me how it was, she could say to some vanished Stella, and back would come these accounts of elsewhere and other people. The Delta, Orkney, Malta. Nadine, Don, Alan Scarth. All present and correct. The invisible universe to which each of us has access.

  In dreams Stella revisited all these other incarnations of herself. She was never Stella now but some free-floating, ageless, unconstrained Stella for whom all options remained open. Like a child, she accepted without question the circumstances in which she found herself. Babies might turn into pigs, pigs might fly, clouds become loaves of bread. She dreamed of sex and love with vivid strangers. She moved through bizarre landscapes which melted one into another like the chessboard squares beyond the looking glass and then she awoke to the relentless solidity of the real world, astonished at the ingenuities of the subconscious.

  She woke also to a reality that continued to surprise her – this house that was apparently hers, this pleasant landscape in which she had fortuitously arrived with her little cargo of tangible possessions and that huge invisible ballast to which she made continuous private reference. She was comfortable enough with these surroundings, but still not certain how she had got here or why. In the past there had been good reason to be wherever she found herself. Now, she was where she was simply because one had to be somewhere.

  And in the past there had been work. Each day sprang up to meet her with its agenda of goals and obligations. There were mountainous days and days when the going looked good, daunting days and days that induced a glow of anticipation. Now, days stretched ahead undemanding and indistinguishable – a bland flat track marching into the distance. Come along, they said. Go ahead. What’s the problem?

  The problem was this unchallenging vista, Stella realized. If you are conditioned by a lifetime of endeavour, then lack or direction is unnerving. And thus it was that the letter from the editor of an anthropological journal came as a welcome prompt. The editor – a former colleague – reminded Stella of her promise to supply an article and hoped – sardonically? prophetically? – that she was now sufficiently settled and restored to contemplate a mild professional work-out. Wonderful if you could. Five thousand words for the winter number?

  The article was to be a personal perspective on the issue of gender in field work. The gender of the ethnographer, of course – the gender issues of those under study were another matter and already discussed into the ground, over decades. Stella was to consider her own experience in the field and examine the implications of being a woman, with the wisdom of hindsight and comparisons of her reception by different cultures and communities. She was to record her own problems in relation to such questions as conformity, reciprocity and culture shock, and discuss how her own attitudes and methods of adjustment had altered over the years. She was to take a long view. She was to consider herself a guru, a pundit.

  Be personal, said the editor. Most of our stuff is so dry. Inevitably, but even so … Give us a shot in the arm.

  And so, pleasurably propelled into activity, Stella set to. She cleared her desk, located a wodge of A4 typing paper and unpacked her old portable electronic typewriter from the box in which it had sat since her arrival in the cottage. She had been a competent enough user of departmental computers, but saw no reason to spend money now on one of her own. Besides, the neat little machine reminded her of its ancestral predecessors, the Remington manuals on which she had tapped away in the Delta, in Malta …

  I shall get stuck in all this week, she told herself. And the next. And quite possibly the one after. Batten down the hatches. Air the dog before breakfast and dinner. Switch the phone off.

  Message I on Stella’s answering machine

  Hi! It’s me – Judith. You’re tramping the moor, I suppose. Or throwing sticks on the beach for that ridiculous animal. Don’t bother to ring back – I’m going away for a few days. I’m not calling about anything special, just … Anyway … maybe I’ll write. Take care.

  Stella assembles notebooks and card indexes. She pores over these. Sometimes she pores for hours. She reads, intent, and then she stares out of the window. Sometimes she stares for long periods.

  The dog watches Stella. If she looks in his direction, he wags his tail in frantic appeal. Once in a while, when things get too much, he hurls himself against her knees.

  Message 2 on Stella’s answering machine

  Richard speaking – Richard Faraday. I’m sorry to have missed you. Please don’t trouble to return the call – merely one or two thoughts I’ve had that might be useful to you. I’ll try another time. I trust all goes well. Goodbye for now.

  Stella takes a pad and pen and starts to rough out a structure for this article. She will move from the general to the particular. She will look at the problems which confront all ethnographers in the field, discuss those which challenge women in particular, and move from there to an account and consideration of her own experience. She will make what deductions are possible from this and return for her conclusion to a general survey of the implications.

  Straightforward enough, you would think.

  Straightforward enough. A doddle. An agreeable, time-consuming doddle. Except that somehow it is not. This effortless glide from the general to the particular is more easily proposed than done. In fact, when push comes to shove, it seems that it cannot be done at all. The general is no problem. She can still witter on with the best of them, she discovers -hold forth about cross-cultural modes and defensive behaviours and variant roles. But when it comes to the particular … Well, the particular simply rises up with such clarity and vigour that there is no way of reducing it to words. Reaching out and pinning it down in neat typed sequences on the white page in front of her.

  Stella stares out of the window at the particular.

  From time to time what she sees is overridden by intrusive external images. A tractor grinds past. The Hiscox boys ride by on rusting push-bikes. Some while later the red car hurtles along the lane, too fast as usual. Just now, Stella is not interested in any of these phenomena.

  Their mother was waiting for them. ‘Where’ve you been, then?’

  They mumbled something. The village. Get a Coke.

  ‘You’ve been longer than it takes to get a Coke.’

  Michael’s bike. Stupid bloody bike. Chain come off and we had to fix it. If we had proper bikes.

  And she’s off, of course. ‘D’you know what a new bike costs? And where do you think the money’s coming from? Mountain bikes, you’ve got in mind, I dare say. A thousand quid. D’you think we work ourselves into the ground to get you shiny new toys?’

  And so on. Hands on hips, bawling at them. ‘Where d’you think you’re off to now? I’m talking to you. You’ll go when I say so, got that?’

  The day before, she’d caught them smoking. They were behind the sheds and suddenly she was there, too. Peter dropped his fag but Michael was too late – his was still in his hand.

  She stepped forward and clipped his hand, swiped so hard the cigarette flew up and away. His hand stung. The cigarette landed in a patch of dry grass. A grass stem flared up and then lay there smouldering. The boys stared at it – the yellow flame, the little coil of smoke.

  ‘Next time I catch you, your father’ll give you something to worry about. Got that?’

  Something boiled over. Michael said, ‘Why shouldn’t I fucking well smoke?’

  A mistake. She told him. She told them out there for ten minutes and more, shouting away. ‘Because I say so, that’s why. Because I’m your mother and I say so and that’s all you need to know, so get that clear in your head for starters …’ And she went on telling them for the rest of the day, every time she set eyes on them, every time they couldn’t manage to get away from her.

  They went and banged at the corrugated iron. The shed. This shed they were making. They hit the metal till it bounced, till the noise rang in their ears. Bang, bang, bang. She thinks she’s got everyone on the run, they told each other, she thinks she’s top dog, but she doesn’t know ever
ything. There’s things she rucking doesn’t know, aren’t there, and rucking never will know, will she? Bang, bang, bang.

  They told each other, too, that the old woman in the cottage was staring at them when they went past. Staring out of the window at them. Thinking what stupid rotten bikes they’d got. Ignorant old cow. She better not watch them like that or they’d sort her out.

  Stella thinks about Dina, in the Delta village. Dina, who was also a woman, but a woman with very different expectations and assumptions. She wonders how to draw upon her relationship with Dina to inform this article. Her relationships with Dina and with Dina’s sisters and mother, and with Saleh and with the neighbours and indeed everyone else. She toys with words and sentences – ‘The villagers’ perception of me as a woman … my sex conditioned male responses to the extent that … where the gender issue arose in my transactions with other women …’ – but the stern language immediately dissolves and is replaced by something much more pertinent. A specific problem which confronts the female ethnographer.

  The female ethnographer must take with her into the field sufficient sanitary requisites for the duration of the field trip.

  ‘What is this?’ enquires Dina, who likes to inspect Stella’s belongings from time to time. She indicates the four-month supply of Tampax. Dina is accompanied by her sister, her sister-in-law and her twelve-year-old niece.

  Stella draws a breath and explains.

  The women listen in amazement. The niece claps both hands over her mouth, aghast.

  ‘Up inside there?’ says Dina, in disbelief. There is an outbreak of shocked whispering and muttering. Stella cannot follow what is being said, until at last Dina enlightens her. She points out – none too delicately – that if and when – inshallah! - Stella eventually finds herself a husband, she will not be able to convince him of her virginity. She will not be intact.