Grace and Mary

by Melvyn Bragg

  But it was a worry and he suggested she try a light course of citalopram. It took six to eight weeks to have an effect but it might calm her down. If it did not work then they would reconsider. He needed John’s permission to deliver the drug.

  John soon ran out of questions. The psychiatrist was so far ahead of him in knowledge of this drug that in the end John had to rely on him, which he did not find difficult. He had come to trust him. Rather self-consciously he gave his permission. So now there was a progression. There was a story leading to an ending.

  He had been there since just before midday. She slept soundly, unmoving. He plugged in his laptop, put the mobile phone on silent but in view and settled down to the Middle Ages.

  It was not a fashionable period for historical biography but John had been captured by it at university. His retirement had given him the chance to turn a part-time hobby into a full-time pursuit. He was working on John Wycliffe. Wycliffe was the man who had organised the first translation of the Bible into English. John felt a rare happiness as he sat there, invigilating the unconscious of his mother and excavating the conscience of this radical and erudite fourteenth-century Oxford theologian. If only they had not banned smoking and he had the nerve to ask for a cup of tea, life, in this small anteroom to nothingness, would have been near perfect.

  But nothingness could not exist. That was one of the mysteries Wycliffe was exploring. Nothing could come of nothing. What that original and final something might be was the cause, the worth and the curse of religion. What was in Wycliffe’s mind? That was the challenge John had set himself to take up. An astoundingly clever man he, like everyone else about him, believed that the Old Testament literally related the history of the world and the New Testament told the story of God’s only begotten son coming to earth by way of a virgin in Bethlehem. He was a sensitive and radical man yet he had lived largely acceptingly in a society in which the Bible was used by the powerful to impose grotesque sexual domination by the male, slavery on the female, a time when the people tried to throw off serfdom, a reign of terror on non-believers, and a time of a determination to exclude the majority from knowledge. But above all, as far as John was concerned, this great intellect unswervingly believed in eternal life. What could be learned from him on that subject?

  What sort of mind did Wycliffe have? It was, John thought, much like the effort he made to understand what was happening in his mother’s head. Only imagination could unlock it. Wycliffe, to his mother, to his own thoughts – how else could they be assembled out of the anarchy of sensations that bombarded them? But how had this conviction of the existence of a soul persisted through many thousands of years and been cleaved to by so many men and women in so many different civilisations?

  The nurses came in at five to get her ready for the night and John went outside, to give them room and to devour the cigarette he had denied himself for almost three hours. What had they used for the addictive tendency in the Middle Ages? Beer and wine – there was plenty of that in the records. And a measure of complicated drugs – but nothing, surely, as stomach calming and mind sharpening as a cigarette.

  When he returned, she was fully awake.

  ‘Hello,’ she said, with that lovely lilt of surprise and happiness, which made him feel that he had won a prize.

  ‘It’s been a long time,’ she said.

  ‘Yes.’ He tidied away the laptop.

  ‘I haven’t seen your dad either.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘How is he?’

  ‘He’s well,’ said John, making rather a business with the laptop.

  ‘Is he?’

  Her tone was sharp and he looked at her directly. ‘Yes. He is.’

  ‘Your dad we’re talking about.’

  ‘I know, yes. Harry.’ He had been dead for fourteen years.

  ‘Well? Is he all right?’

  ‘Yes.’

  She pointed her forefinger at him. He was convinced the lie was plain on his face.

  ‘I’ll believe you this time.’

  ‘Good.’

  There was a span of silence between them.

  ‘I wish he would come and see me,’ she said. ‘I miss him terribly.’

  ?He sat down beside her bed and took his mother’s hand. As usual it was cold. He massaged it lightly and said, ‘Should I talk about Dad, about Harry?’

  ‘Oh, yes! Oh, yes, please. Just to put me on. Till he can get here himself.’

  ‘He would sit where I’m sitting,’ said John, finding it difficult to keep his voice steady. He took a couple of deep breaths. ‘He would have his left leg cocked over his right and be leaning forward, his elbow on his other knee, and in his other hand there would be a cigarette.’

  ‘He liked his cigarettes.’

  ‘He did. And then he would be doing what I’m doing. He would be holding your hand and trying to put some warmth into it. And he would talk away. He was a good talker.’

  ‘He was! He was that.’

  ‘He’d talk about who he bumped into up street that morning. There was Tommy Jackson.’

  ‘He played the drums. He was a clever man, was Tommy. I was at school with his sister.’

  ‘And Tommy told him he’d been offered a new job, in Shap, looking after a haunted house.’

  ‘Tommy Jackson said that?’

  ‘Yes. And then he met Francis Robinson with his pedigree Border terrier.’

  ‘All those Robinson lads had dogs. Francis had a lovely voice. His mother was a friend of my mother.’

  ‘He slipped into Martin’s to put on a bet. Then across to the Kildare for a half. They talked about football and I’ll tell you who was there, Arnold, Arnold Miller.’

  ‘He was a lovely pianist.’

  ‘He still is. And then he went to buy you some flowers – those white tulips over there that he asked me to bring for him because he knew I was visiting you. He said he would come and see you tomorrow.’ He paused; her sweet and intense concentration was, suddenly, hard to bear.

  ‘Then he went down to the allotments to talk to the pigeon men . . .’ John said – and more . . .

  And so, he hoped, Harry was in the room with her. He, too, saw his father as he told the story of his morning in the town. John saw the smile – ‘He had a lovely smile,’ his mother had once said, an unguarded, unexpected compliment. Then he saw a man shriven of petty faults, still ghosting around the town, missing his wife, looking for her.

  He saw him now, more powerfully as the story went on. And he saw himself with his father. He was the child carried on his father’s shoulders in the park, or being taken for a walk beside the river Wiza. Now his father was setting off to a dance with his mother, on their bicycles, both ‘dressed up to the nines’. And while John spoke he looked at her and at the stillness of her, in a dream, he hoped, of his father whom she had met when she was sixteen and to whom she had been true and with whom she had kept faith ever since. And he talked more and more quietly until she fell asleep.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  Work, for Grace, was the salvation. The Logan household had an inflexible routine. Morning: fires, breakfast, the beds, cleaning, shopping, and then what Grace was urged to call ‘lunch’. Afternoon: tidying up, tea, or rather high tea, more like a supper at five, and a final snack at eight. Free time was not something sought. Free time was too available for thought, for regret, for pain. Activity could defer pain and pain deferred might weaken its hold. Every day when she woke up she had to steady herself. To get out of bed felt like levering herself out of a vault.

  One part of the day struck calm and that was the morning’s shopping. Mrs Logan liked the food to be fresh every day. She also liked Grace to be out of the house for a while. There was a heaviness in Grace’s dutiful presence and a slight disturbance about her good looks (enhanced by Mrs Logan’s knowledge of her sexual history) that made her absence necessary and welcome. Mrs Logan drew up her shopping list with care but also with some cunning so that Grace would have to criss-cross the villa
ge. And she would urge her ‘not to rush’ and insist that she need not be back before midday.

  Grasmere was the perfect Lake District village. It carried a promise, in those post-war years, of healing through the presence of Nature. The guns of Passchendaele, Ypres and the Somme were finally silenced. The war memorial in the churchyard stood as a tribute to the past and a vow to the future that such a war would never happen again. The peacefulness of the landscape ringed the village and set it in that bowl, that vale, which had drawn in the Wordsworths and their friends. The small lake, the steep-climbing bare hills and the wooded paths, and all the harmony of form that had worked its way into the poetry of Wordsworth, and from him into the growing love of the landscape of a nation, was there for Grace to see and to sense.

  Perhaps because it was so different from the bare uninterrupted shallow seaward slope of the land on which she had grown up, these new prospects seemed so rich, so much more lively, so much more varied, pinching you with pleasure even when you were not looking for it. This was her one span of freedom from quiet desperation. She could not wait to step out of the door and be in the middle of it. She would look around her at the hills as if picking out friends, ancient, unchanging and unchangeable, in some direct but inexplicable way, a reassurance, above all a calming.

  Early on in her employment Mrs Logan had caught her loitering by the grand, glass-fronted bookcases and told her she could take any book she wanted. She took down her own favourite – a fat, rather floridly bound selection of Wordsworth’s poems, the shorter ones were the best, she said, and handed it over.

  It was good for Grace to read these poems – of birds and flowers, of local places she was coming to know, of ordinary people in a tranquil area that, like the landscape on which they drew, began to help her lose that deadening numbness. She did not examine the reason for it but she found that her religion was little help to her. These poems became her hymn book now. They were blessedly at a distance from herself.

  After a few months, Grace was looked out for in the village. She exuded an air of self-containment that impressed and pleased the residents of what had been until recently a remote and unvisited spot. She was like them. She knew about farming and village life. She kept herself to herself. She put on no airs even though she would have been entitled to a few, looking as she did. She was pleasant without overdoing it, and polite without making you feel put down. She became a favourite.

  But there was another layer of life in the village, one that more intensely interested Grace. It was one that had built up since, and partly because of, the residence there of Dorothy and William Wordsworth and their family and friends. Followers of literary fashion began to take the trip to the Lake District. Painters, too, set up studios in Grasmere and elsewhere or came for a few weeks to produce a landscape for the London market. More recently, adventurous young men in boots and ropes had joined in with local climbers to go rock climbing. And there were ramblers sometimes from universities who came for walking holidays.

  Grace liked to watch them. She liked to catch snatches of their conversation. She would sit on one of the two benches beside the stream or the seat outside the church and pretend to be reading or be absorbed in gazing around her, which was a common pursuit in the Lakes, and she would overhear sentences from these clusters of ‘foreign’ people, who sailed past her as confident as clouds. Their accents were different from those of Miss Birkett and the Logans, all of whom retained and rather relished a little local burr. Alan’s accent had aimed for that of these ramblers. Perhaps she sat there and eavesdropped and played the innocent voyeur to innocent tourists in order to be able to think of Alan, a little, not have him dead inside her.

  What world did these people live in? How amiable and relaxed they seemed. How full of laughter and earnest discussion. Sometimes they would sit nearby and she would be treated to a conversation that flitted from subject to subject like a butterfly flitting from flower to flower, so brightly, Grace thought, so attractively. Alan had been like that. She knew she could never be like that now. Books would be her equivalence and her consolation. But the sight – so many of them so handsomely sure of themselves – and the sound of them, could infuse her senses like the embracing landscape.

  She worked for the Logans for nearly four years. Mrs Logan made two or three suggestions about ‘an eligible local swain’ but Grace’s cool, stern reaction soon stopped that. Despite being integral to the functioning of their daily lives, Grace stood apart from them, which Mr Logan admired, Mrs Logan rather resented and Grace herself was not aware of.

  She had her own path to walk. The ground lay between Mary and Ruth. Mary, she knew, as soon as she began to come out of that plunge of despair, had to be her prime concern. Ruth’s courage, the knowledge of which was her father’s gift to her, was her help and inspiration.

  She went to see Mary at regular intervals during those years. Mrs Johnston’s advice was reliable, she thought, and despite bouts of violent longing to take the child away, she resisted. Where could she keep her? Who would take both of them in?

  Wilson was still alive, though now affected by a stroke that had put an end to all outside work. While he was in the house, Grace was not welcome, and that hurt her so much that she would not go to Oulton, not even to see Miss Birkett who, after the war had ended, had stayed in the Hall and remained there even after the death of her sister, though she still kept up Prospects. Grace corresponded with her and she was relieved that the older woman’s advice complemented her own instinct. Now and then she would meet Sarah at Temple’s tea rooms in Wigton on one of her visits to Mrs Johnston’s. Grace was not comfortable in the town. She always felt stigmatised, the public sinner.

  She went through to Wigton on Mary’s fourth birthday. It was less conspicuous to buy the present in Keswick. She chose a doll in Victorian dress. A spare set of clothes went with it. There was a tiny umbrella. It was, by Mrs Johnston’s standards, extravagant but not swanky. Grace wanted to spend money on her daughter. She sent the maintenance fee every week in the post with an extra sixpence for pocket money for her daughter. Mrs Johnston put the sixpences in a teapot for the future. Grace was thrifty. The plan was to amass as much as she could for the time when she and Mary could live together. That was the plan, the saving dream.

  The little girl loved her birthday present. She hugged it and walked it and was soon murmuring to it. Grace had timed her visit for the early afternoon of a school day when Mrs Johnston would be alone in the house with Mary.

  Grace could not take her eyes off the child. Mrs Johnston watched with a guarded tolerance. She liked this young woman even though she rather feared for a sudden switch of mood that would, she had told her husband, ‘upset the apple cart’. But how could anyone not be moved by the hungry look, the struggle against tears, the thwarted passion?

  Mary had the original clothes off the doll in a trice. The new set were admired and then a mixing of the clothes got under way, all the time the little girl cooing to the doll, cradling her and swaying with her, as Grace had so briefly done with the little girl herself.

  ‘She’s sharp enough,’ said Mrs Johnston.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Still no trouble. And she talks away. She’ll talk to that dolly for hours.’

  ‘She looks very well,’ said Grace, who knew that it would have been more accurate to say, ‘She looks very happy,’ but could not bring out those words.

  ‘They all like her in the yard,’ said Mrs Johnston. ‘She’s quite a favourite on washing day. She tries to help them to peg up the clothes. She can sing. She starts them off “The maid was in the garden hanging out the clothes,/When down came a blackbird and pecked off her nose.”?’ Mrs Johnston laughed, a warm, tender laugh, Grace thought, a laugh that drew on a warm, tender memory, a mother’s proud laugh. ‘And some of them will pretend to peck off her nose.’

  ‘It’s a good yard for her to play in,’ said Grace, dry-mouthed.

  ‘And she likes the horse – she’ll try to help
with anything that’s going and get under everybody’s feet.’

  ‘Look!’ said Mary, and held out the doll to Grace.

  ‘She’s very pretty,’ said Grace. Like you. Why could she not say ‘like you’?

  ‘Can I call her Sally?’

  ‘Yes. I think Sally’s just right. Sally. Where does Sally come from?’

  Suddenly Grace was all but crushed with the voice of Alan reciting ‘Down by the salley gardens, my love and I did meet . . .’ She breathed in deeply.

  ‘Sally Army,’ said Mary.

  ‘I take her to watch them play at the end of Water Street at the end of a Saturday afternoon,’ said Mrs Johnston, again proprietorially. ‘She likes the big drum.’

  ‘Sally’s a good name.’

  ‘Can I take her to bed with me?’ Mary turned for permission to Mrs Johnston.

  ‘You can, yes.’

  ‘Can I take her upstairs now to see if she likes it?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Without a glance at Grace, the child went over to the stairs.