by Maggie Wadey
Maggie Wadey is a novelist and screenwriter. Her childhood was spent in England, Egypt, Cyprus and a Sussex boarding school. After a brief time as a model, she read Philosophy at University College London. Maggie is married to actor John Castle and has one daughter and two grandchildren. Among her screenplays for television are adaptations of Mansfield Park, The Buccaneers, The Yellow Wallpaper and the children’s novel Stig of the Dump. She lives in East London.
By the same author
Sleight of Heart
Published in Great Britain by
Sandstone Press Ltd
Dochcarty Road
Dingwall
Ross-shire
IV15 9UG
Scotland.
www.sandstonepress.com
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form without the express written permission of the publisher.
Copyright (c) Maggie Wadey 2016
The moral right of Maggie Wadey to be recognised as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Design and Patent Act, 1988.
Editor: Moira Forsyth
The publisher acknowledges support from Creative Scotland towards publication of this volume.
ISBN: 978-1-910985-13-7
ISBNe: 978-1-910985-14-4
Cover design by Rose Cooper, Seville
Typeset by Iolaire Typesetting, Newtonmore
To my mother
Contents
Title Page
Prologue
Part One: Childhood
1
2
3
Part Two: The Age of Reason
1
2
Part Three: Going Back
1
2
3
4
5
6
Part Four: Teachers and Soldiers
1
2
3
Part Five: The World
1
2
3
4
5
Part Six: Staying
1
2
Part Seven: Innocence and Experience
1
2
3
4
5
6
Consilience
Acknowledgements
Bibliography
Prologue
From the beginning, my beginning that is, I had a strong sense of my mother as different. My English family were small, compact and ginger-haired; my mother was dark, taller than average, long-limbed and heavy-boned. She wasn’t just different; she was special. She may have told us very little about her life, but I knew her soft white cheeks, her black hair rolled into glossy sausages – one above her brow, one at the nape of her neck – her low voice with its slightly foreign, musical cadence, her strong, careful hands that could suddenly become impatient. Her brown eyes were velvety, her thin brows two perfect arches. Her face expressed emotion very subtly, sometimes to the point of invisibility. A better indicator of her mood was her movements, the set of her shoulders, the exact position of her hands. As a child – and I was her only child – I learned to read these signs very accurately, not to understand her, but to predict her behaviour.
I knew my mother had come from Ireland alone on a ferry-boat that bucked and reared on the October night sea. All the passengers were sick as dogs. Grown men (but Irish and therefore more susceptible) called on the Holy Mother of God before vomiting into the wind. My mother travelled with only a hatbox (though it contained no hats), having left home in a hurry after poisoning her mother’s geese. I felt I’d been born imprinted with this mental image: my mother standing in a twilit field – a very green field, for I knew Ireland was called the Emerald Isle, as green as the stone in my mother’s engagement ring – surrounded by a litter of geese as dead as pillows and scalded with my mother’s tears. She was crying because she was afraid of her own mother who was a tall woman, pale-faced and, being from long ago, wore a black shawl, a crucifix, and laced boots. ‘She was a hard woman,’ my own mother said. ‘Father was a sweetheart, but she was hard.’ And when she said that I was sad for her velvety eyes, for her lost homeland and the sky darkening over the battlefield of soft white bodies.
Agnes Teresa Kavanagh was born on July 16th, 1915. Or maybe not. In the drawer where my father kept our papers – birth certificates, marriage certificates, medical records and such – there was no birth certificate for my mother. Once, perhaps when applying for her first passport, she had written to Dublin for a copy of her birth certificate only to be told it was unavailable due to a fire which had burned down the Custom House during the War of Independence in 1921. To my father and me this was an unlikely story which only confirmed the reputation of the Irish for quaint ineptitude. Another date kept cropping up, July 18th, 1911, but this was apparently the birthday of another child, an infant who had died and after whom my mother had been named. ‘When I was a child,’ she told us, ‘birthdays didn’t matter.’ In other words, my mother was evasive about her age, and this inclined us to suspect that she was older than she’d have us believe.
I was born into a world of women. My infancy was spent in the company of my mother, my paternal grandmother and my aunt, my English aunt. We lived at the top of a tower which was part of Collyer’s Boys’ Grammar School in Horsham, Sussex, where my widowed grandmother was cook. I always understood that this represented some kind of fall from grace, that I wasn’t to look on myself as the grandchild of a school cook any more than she ever considered herself to be a school cook, even though she finally held the post for over twenty years.
My grandmother was plump and petite. With her white hair and powdered face, she was sweet and light as a meringue dipped in icing sugar. I liked every so often to pat her cheeks and then to lick the powder off my fingers, murmuring exaggeratedly, ‘Mmm, delicious!’ My aunt was the same shape as her mother, small and round, with ginger hair and freckles. She had an easy way with practical affairs. She would lie on the lawn hour after hour reading instead of tidying up, and she stopped the holes in the soles of her shoes with pieces of cardboard cut-out of Player’s cigarette packets. ‘This is stitchwort,’ she used to say as we went along the tangled path to the chicken run. ‘Here’s Jack-go-to-bed-at-noon. And milkmaid.’
The chicken run opened on one side into an elderly orchard, grey with lichen. Dodging under the barbed-wire fence one day, I sliced my cheek open and narrowly missed spearing my right eye. There was a certain amount of friction between my mother and my aunt on these matters. My aunt believed not so much in scars, but in risk. My mother was indifferent to risk but wanted me unblemished. I was her creation, perfect, and the rituals of everyday life, my washing, dressing and feeding were, as she perceived them, not unlike holy rituals. We were mother and child, age-old icons, timeless, impersonal almost. My sweet-ration was given away – presumably to children whose teeth didn’t matter. A lot was expected of me. I had to be worthy of my privileges, such as the red coat bought at great expense and tailored in the same style as the coats of the little Royal Princess Margaret, in whose honour I was named. I was pleased with the coat and even more pleased with my three-year-old self in it. But it made the schoolboys yell ‘Tally-ho!’ and gallop up and down the playground spluttering with beastly laughter.
No wonder my aunt sometimes felt sorry for me. It was a relief to accompany her along the muddy path to the chicken run, fighting my way through the brambles in her wake, close up against her generous rump, watching her sturdy white legs thrust into short black gumboots flash left-right, left-right. ‘This is catmint,’ she would say, bruising a leaf between finger and thumb. ‘Speedwell.
’ And with a laugh, ‘Here’s pissenlit. Don’t chew that or you’ll wet the bed.’
At night my mother put on a trench coat and walked the streets, firewatching. She had a torch and a whistle to summon the help of men with water-hoses. But I pictured her swallowing the fire. I saw her throw back her head and open her mouth wide to swallow the flames – which was why fire sometimes came back out of her mouth, fire, and spittle, and angry words. At night the streets were dark and empty but my mother wasn’t afraid, not even when searchlights picked out heavy-bellied aeroplanes in the sky and distant guns began to fire. There were no men in our lives. Sometimes I heard the insubstantial voices of male announcers on the radio and I had a teddy bear made, so I’d been told, from the fleecy lining of my long-dead paternal grandfather’s raincoat.
But, on the highly polished sideboard in my grandmother’s sitting room, between the tin of macaroons and the empty sherry decanter, stood the photograph of a beatifically good-looking young man. I was told this was my father and that he was away fighting in the war. I very much enjoyed being given his photo to look at. Nana would buff the glass with her sleeve and, stooping, put it reverently into my hands. She reserved a special smile for this ritual, similar, I thought, to the smile with which I looked at my teatime egg before bashing it on the head and eating it. The young man wore a soldier’s uniform and looked at me benignly and, because I was his daughter, his eyes followed me all round the room when I moved. Looking at him, being looked at by him, was quickly unsatisfying. Much later on I realised the photograph had been heavily touched up, a process that romanticised and stereotyped his face.
One memory poignant above all others, from the time before everything changed: I see my mother and me, hand in hand, mounting slowly up the rim of a hill, going towards but never reaching the horizon, accompanied by the shrill song of skylarks. The curve of the horizon divides the world into two parts, one green, one blue, except for one small bright cloud floating in the sky. And on closer inspection the grass is dotted copiously with flowers: buttercups, daisies, clover and, closer still, with filigree spiders and tiny beetles. On this occasion I’m four. We have the whole late summer afternoon to ourselves. I’ve set out proudly to teach my mother the names of the flowers but she seems a bit absent-minded. I give up. But I don’t mind. On the contrary. In my mother’s world things don’t need naming and I should like our walk to go on forever through a field of nameless flowers.
Then one day the guns stopped, and the sirens, and the nights spent sheltering under the table in the school kitchen. People sang in the streets and the church bells rang even though it was a weekday. My father was coming home. The war, it seemed, was over. England had won! Peace came like a fever. A man, his face lit up like a lunatic, spat at my mother outside the big post office. The gob landed at her feet. ‘No thanks to you, bloody Irish!’ he said. My mother’s hand tightened on mine. ‘Take no notice,’ she said, and because her head was high I felt she addressed the remark not to me but to the world at large. That the shame reflected more on the man than on her. The world at large was suddenly engaged in a passionate search for extra sugar, extra butter, extra eggs. Infected by the adult excitement, I began to dash about, too, pumping my elbows and puffing up my cheeks. I fell and grazed my knee and at teatime I got hiccoughs. I must have done something else, too, because my mother sent me in from the garden. I met my aunt at the foot of the stairs and gasped out:
‘Mummy said “GET indoors”!’
‘Well,’ said Dorothy dryly. ‘You’d better get.’
That evening I was sent early to bed, where I bit my teddy bear’s fat bristly legs and cried myself to sleep.
Life as I knew and loved it was over. I drove the three women slowly out of their minds with questions: What will he be like? Where will he sleep? Where will he put his clothes? Which chair will be his? One moment I favoured the yellow, winged chair by the fire; next the old horsehair armchair with crooked wheeled feet like eagles’ talons. I spent a lot of time rearranging the cushions and dragging the leather pouffe from the sitting room into the kitchen for my father to put his feet up on. I’d noticed in my Little Grey Rabbit books that Hare had his slippers put by the fire to warm, but here there were no slippers. I went on relentlessly hammering away at the same questions, whining that there was no place where a daddy could fit in, until my grandmother turned on me.
‘This is his home, too, you know. Your daddy was here long before you were even thought of.’
The day of my father’s return arrived. My mother had a new dress for the occasion and new, uncomfortable shoes that gave her a new, loose-kneed walk. But her hair was still the same: divided at the back and pulled forward to sit on either side of her head just below her ears in two fat shiny black sausages. Every so often she cuffed them gently with the heel of her hand, checking that they were in place. I liked to stick my fingers inside the sausages, but today it wasn’t allowed, and I felt the tension in her neck, like a bow strung taut for the arrow. Earlier, my mother and aunt had carried my bed out of the bedroom – the room I’d shared with my mother every day of my three-and-a-half-year-long life – and put it into a poky little boxroom next to the sitting room where Nana slept on the sofa. I was told this was because my father was going to sleep in here, in the big bed with my mother, something I wasn’t allowed to do unless I was ill. Now, turning to the mirror, my mother plastered her upper lip with lipstick then pressed both lips together, leaving a precise, unnatural-looking print on the lower one. She smiled tremulously at herself and took a deep, shuddering breath. Her pretty new dress had oblong buttons like little biscuits, and a narrow belt with an oblong biscuit buckle. My mouth was dry with anxiety. I pressed my hand hard between my legs for reassurance that some things at least wouldn’t change.
‘Don’t touch yourself down there!’ cried my mother, rounding on me to slap my hand away. ‘Nice little girls don’t do that!’
My hair was yanked out of its paper-curlers and sprang up like corkscrews all over my head. Was I to be ridiculous as well as not nice? I kept my eyes fixed on the buttons on my mother’s dress. I considered biting them, but didn’t. Then, as we went along the corridor, we heard the women’s voices in the kitchen and the radio playing: ‘You are my sunshine’.
My mother halted, her eyes fixed on me but absent-mindedly, as if attending to something I couldn’t hear. I looked back up at her, holding my breath, and we became outsiders together, shadows in the dim corridor that for that moment lead nowhere, both of us insubstantial as ghosts. Then in the headmaster’s study on the floor below, the clock softly chimed three times and my mother, stooping awkwardly, clutched me to her breast. I glutted myself on her love and her remorse – if remorse it was – before breaking free and running ahead of her into the marzipan-scented kitchen to show off my dress. I stood in the doorway swinging a leg and humming: ‘You are my shunshine, my only shunshine…’
A booming sound rose from the distant hall. I froze. The door into the schoolyard had been opened and then banged shut, the way I was told off for doing. You had to keep hold of it right up to the moment the latch clicked. You had to be careful, that was all. I ran to the top of the stairs and looked down, four flights to the bottom. For a long moment I saw nothing, though I could hear quick footsteps. Then, rising up out of the dark into the sunlight on the first landing came the top of a man’s reddish-fair head. He took the stairs in twos the way Dorothy sometimes did and I saw his hand on the banister and the dark cuff of his suit. I fled back into the kitchen where I buried my face in my mother’s lap, overwhelmed by an emotion I still have no words for.
Moments later, I was safe down amongst the legs and the soft stuff of the women’s skirts as his mother, his sister, his wife went on tiptoe to kiss, to touch, to pat my father until he became himself again under their doubting fingers, familiar, their own in spite of the evidence of their eyes. For he’d changed. They laughed, questioned, exclaimed, their voices coming in short breathy gasps. From under their fl
apping elbows I studied his face. Whatever had gone wrong with it? The photo of the romantic young soldier was bland and smooth as a pebble. This man was thinner, older, with a fierce suntan and a ginger moustache, and when I broke away and repeatedly hurled myself at the yellow armchair his eyes didn’t follow me the way they did in the photo. He gave me an uncomfortable squeeze. His hair and clothes smelt of dust, metal and oil, the smell of faraway unknown places, the unfamiliar smell of man. Then he embraced my mother and something terrible happened. She turned to jelly. Her smile went lopsided, her proud head drooped, her body sagged. His kiss left a ‘burn’ on her white cheek, which he proudly kissed again.
The night my father came home from the war I slept apart from my mother for the first time in my life. In the little boxroom where my bed had been made up I found a bag of sweets hidden under my pillow. Apparently, even my teeth didn’t matter any more.
Now, my father lives alone, and every day in his pretty suburban garden he feeds the foxes. He comes home late at night with chicken carcasses, lamb bones, leftover mush and gravy like some kind of eccentric recycler of waste from the kitchens of friends and relatives. Which prompts my father – a retired civil engineer – to quote the old joke: ‘It may be sewage to you but to me it’s bread-and-butter.’ He trots in from the car and unloads in the kitchen, rustling plastic bags as he sorts what will be used immediately from what will be frozen in the coffin-sized freezer in the garage. Outside in the dark the foxes, a mother and three cubs, are prepared to wait as long as it takes. My father reports their imagined remarks: ‘What’s this?’ they say to one another. ‘Late again? What does the silly old boy think he’s up to?’