Trials of the Monkey

by Matthew Chapman

  But, as with all addictions, there are side effects. Every day, you stimulate a kind of mental infection. The brain’s septicaemia is released, oozes up toward the surface, and makes itself accessible to your nib. The transfer of this substance from brain to paper is the transmogrification of chaos into order, and so long as the brain is narrowly engaged in this activity, all is well: the illusion of meaning, of release, of cure even, is maintained and apprehension is held at bay. But when the day is over, sometimes it is impossible to stem the flow provoked in the morning. The infection continues to produce pus, but no nib is there to draw it off. At best, I feel removed. At worst, apprehension blossoms into anxiety, paranoia even. Perhaps this is why so many writers become alcoholics. They attempt through drinking to experience life directly, as others do, as it is, not as it might be, and discover, over and over again, that reality cannot compare to the fermented emotion of their imagined worlds. For me the use of alcohol, at least in sufficient quantities to make me feel part of the community of man, carries too great a price. A hangover renders me incapable of taking to the streets. Cornices and air conditioners will fall on me, terrorists have poisoned the air, and everyone I love is dying. Should all this somehow be miraculously prevented, it is only so I can die alone and mediocre, back in the sluginfested basements of my early twenties.

  When it’s time to sleep, I lie on my back, a book suspended above me on locked arms. When I can no longer hold my arms up, when I’ve read the same sentence ten times, when I feel oblivion close enough to fall into, I dump the book off the side of the bed and try to turn the light off before the visions begin. Since my daughter was born eleven years ago, the most awful of these centre on her. Abduction, pain, disease, death, loneliness and sorrows of all kinds …

  I have read by the dim light beside the noisy bed and I am exhausted and still cannot sleep. I lie in the darkness, trying to find my way out of an adrenal tube echoing with regret and grief.

  On nights like this I try to calm myself by going back to a time in my life when I was happy and at peace. Often I find myself returned to the mill house where I spent most of my childhood. Usually I start by remembering my bedroom, an attic room on the third floor where, on quiet nights like this, I could hear the trains which ran between London and the north. They were further off than the ones here in Dayton, but had the same quality of loneliness, yellow-lit boxes hurtling through blackness.

  I try to recall in detail my narrow bed under the low vaulted ceiling and the sound of the weir. I remember the hours spent tramping across the fields with my two cousins and the day when, passing by an old tapped-out quarry by the tracks, we heard someone working below, picking away at the chalk. Having crawled like commandos to the edge, we looked down and saw, a hundred feet below and to one side, a solitary man working steadily with a pick. As we watched, he stopped and walked over to a rock where he’d placed his bag. He opened it, took out a Thermos flask and a china cup and poured himself some tea. Having taken a sip, he put the cup down on the rock and went back to work. My cousin, Dan, who was older than me, said, ‘I’ll have that,’ and picked up a stone.

  It was an impossible shot, the cup a speck below us, but the idea of it was too sweet to resist. No matter what happened, the man could not possibly climb out of the quarry before we had fled back across the fields and disappeared.

  Dan stood cautiously so he could see the cup of tea but not be seen by the man, who was now back at the face. Without even seeming to take aim, he unleashed the stone. The mug evaporated. With a light pop, it simply ceased to exist. The man turned and stared at the damp patch, steaming on the rock. And we were off across the fields, laughing so hard we could hardly run, heads down, arms across our aching stomachs.

  I remember the winters when we would skate on the millpond, or the summers when we would swim in it, or the time when the River Board came to dredge it, sandbagging the millrace to divert the river through a side stream and then pumping out all the water. This process took a day or two and each afternoon I ran down the lane from the bus which delivered me from prep school to see how small the pond had become. For years, we existed on the surface. Now the mysterious depths would be revealed. Before long, the half-acre pond was reduced to a rich-smelling, slippery brown oval crater and, down in the bottom, ten square feet of muddy water thrashing with fish. The first time the pool was dredged, the digger dug up a bomb. The man saw the bomb in his bucket and ran for it. The RAF was called. To my disappointment, it turned out to be an English practise bomb, not a live German one. The sight of all the unlucky fish, however, was some compensation. There were minnows and trout and pike and eels. Here was revenge for the hours spent gazing at floats which remained placidly on the surface, for the tangles, for the grotesquerie of digging and impaling worms. Even now, however, the fish were victorious. My mother tried to cook one but it had ingested so much mud it was inedible.

  When the pond was full again, I put out night lines, lengths of ordinary string with a rock tied on one end and a large hook, baited with bacon, on the other. In the morning I’d wake up early and hurry into the cold dawn to see what I’d caught. Usually I’d pull out at least one eel. Eels were fantastic beasts, prehistoric, mythical, and hard to kill. They could survive out of water, travelling through damp meadows like snakes, and, or so it was said, their heart was in the tail. In the evening when my mother finished the washing up, she would take the plastic rinsing bowl and lie it upside down in the kitchen sink to dry. One morning, I got a two-foot-long eel, black, shiny and alive, and hid it under the bowl. When she came down for breakfast, she lifted up the bowl as usual and after that night-lining for eels was frowned upon as cruel.

  I bring to mind my father’s small engineering company, which I watched grow each year, from just my father and his partner, Peter, in the wooden shed, until the enterprise filled every floor of the mill. I remember the early days, when there were ten men or fewer, Ping-Pong at lunch-time, fishing, and most of all, the practical jokes: the day some workers lifted a car-enthusiast’s old Austin Seven onto the parapet of the bridge while he was out, and balanced it there, or the time they put stones in someone’s hubcaps; or the man who didn’t mind electric shocks and how he’d electrify the factory door-handle and then, holding it with his left hand, greet unwanted salesmen with a handshake. Or being in the shed with Peter and my father, listening to the radio, ‘Music While You Work,’ and ‘Before Time Began,’ the latter being dramatised accounts for schools of prehistoric times. ‘I’m looking down on a vast plain dotted here and there with huge trees and among the huge trees, I can see enormous dinosaurs feeding on the lush vegetation …’ All this and the smell of oil and metal and the low, powerful grinding sound of a lathe.

  I remember strange things, days you’d think would be forgotten. I remember with extraordinary vividness an hour—perhaps it was only half an hour—spent with my father when I was four. It was just after the mill house was bought and we had not yet moved in. The two of us drove over there, I don’t know why, and kicked a soccer ball up and down the sloping gravel drive alongside the house, I above, he below. It was summer and I was covered in scabs from the eczema, which itched incessantly in the heat and which I scratched at without control; but all I remember was the intense joy of being alone with my father, entirely in his focus. (When I was born I was so ugly, he said, ‘Oh, dear, we’re going to have to be very kind to this one,’ and as a child I was convinced, correctly I’m sure, that he preferred my sister.)

  And then I remember the birth of my two brothers, first Francis, when I was five, and then Ludovic, when I was ten. I never went through a phase where I thought it unmanly to enjoy babies and adored them both. Francis was the most beautiful of children, with long, curly blond hair and an amiable disposition. Ludovic, a more aggressive child, was born at home. Each day, as I had waited for the pond to empty, so now I would race down the lane to see if the baby had arrived. One day, I rushed into my mother’s room and there he was, only minutes old. �
�Look at him,’ my mother said, ‘he has balls down to his knees.’ It must just have been his scrotum, I suppose, but anyhow the two of us laughed in amazement.

  All these and other memories I call to mind during the hour of the wolf, that sleepless hour plagued with the sorrow of wrong choices and impending death. All this and more I run on my inner screen, trying to trick myself back to a period when I was, if not happy, at least at peace.

  But when I remember these times, my other mother, my dark, intoxicated mother intrudes and a burst of something more powerful than sadness flowers in my torso. Sometimes I try to remove her from the picture, but it’s impossible; she was, after all, my mother. I try and cloak her in memories of happiness. I try to remember her when she was young, the striking woman in the bold floral summer dress cinched tight at the waist, her hair gathered back by two large combs. I try to remember her humour, which was savage and mordantly perceptive, or her kindness when at night my itching became intolerable and I scratched my flesh through to the bone and she would sit with me. I’ll remember her retelling with rueful pride the story of the allergist saying, ‘I’m sorry, but this boy is allergic to life.’

  I try to remember happiness, but I cannot. I can remember almost no incidents of joy. I hear her singing in the car on the endless journeys of childhood, ‘Greensleeves,’ ‘My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean’ and ‘Early One Morning.’ I remember her cooking breakfast, the smell of bacon and coffee. But if I try to flip back through the pages of the internal album of my life, I can bring to mind no picture of a woman dancing out of sheer delight at being alive, no memories of interrupted sex or furtive parental kisses. I remember, instead, returning home from prep school to find the mother of the morning, the kind, oddly childlike mother, transformed into a bitingly cruel wreck, and the same feeling, decades later, bringing back girlfriends and wives and finding the same tragic figure in the kitchen.

  There must, I tell myself, have been some happiness for her, some tranquillity at least. I try to think of what she loved: the swans on the river, the rare flash of a kingfisher, the changing seasons. Yes, she enjoyed nature. She would see a flower out of the window of the car, frequently on a dangerous bend, and say ‘If you wouldn’t terribly mind, I wonder if …’ We’d pull over and watch her step gingerly into a nearby field to gather a plant which she would then identify later. She was only interested in wildflowers. Our back garden, the one that ran down to the river, contained no ‘kept’ flowers, which she considered distastefully suburban. She did, however, have a herb garden under her kitchen window and, behind the barn, a large vegetable garden.

  She came from a class of women who had been raised in households with cooks, most of whose culinary skills were basic at best. Now, when no one in the middle class was rich enough to afford a cook, this duty fell to them. As they often spent their holidays in France and Italy and therefore knew what good food was, they began a revolution in English cooking. Clare had a bookcase full of mostly French cookbooks and cooked as well as anyone I’ve ever met, beautifully, almost obsessively. Two thoughtfully prepared meals were served every day, lunch and dinner, at least part of each coming from the kitchen garden. This large garden behind the barn was a source of delicious suspense for us all: the arrival of asparagus, digging up the first new potatoes, watching the sweet corn ripen.

  In Norfolk, she and my father owned a cottage less than a mile from a converted windmill which her parents owned when she was a child. She would drag us along the mile-long dyke at Thornham to a beach where the sea often receded yet another mile, and where the wind was so strong the blown sand stung your legs. Although she had no interest in gems or jewellery, she loved pebbles which she collected at the shoreline, her favourites being cornelians. She had a bowl of these on the kitchen windowsill, kept in water to make them shine.

  A moment: once, when I was grown up and already writing, we were walking out along the dyke, the wind as usual ripping at our clothes, when she saw a plant and rubbed her hands together. She had the habit of stretching monosyllabic words or pausing in the middle of longer ones and then stretching out the following syllable for emphasis.

  ‘I think you’re going to like this one, Matthew. I can’t imagine who on eaaaarth would come up with such an extra-oooordinarily unpleasant name for such a harmless plant but that is shrubby sea-blite! Isn’t that abso-loootely marvellous?’

  These forays into the fresh air were when she was happiest and when my father clearly loved her most. There was an innocence to her, something invigoratingly fresh and pre-war English about her. ‘Crumbling jumbos,’ she’d declare as we tramped back from the beach, leaning against the wind and shivering, ‘it’s not that cold. Pull your socks up!’

  Yes, this she loved, the bleak, chilly, windswept beauty of Norfolk.

  And she loved us, her children.

  But nothing works, least of all this last assumption, because now my mind lurches, as always, back to the great mystery. How could she be so melancholy when she had us, her four children, to love? How, if she loved us, could she inflict so much pain? How could she be so miserable that nothing would induce her to seek help if only for our sakes? What incredible depths of sorrow could so contort a woman that she’d lay waste to all she loved with this ravaging despair?

  I want to believe that my mother’s life was worth living, that the sum of happiness was greater than that of sorrow. I want to believe this, but cannot. I think she was fundamentally and profoundly unhappy most of her life.

  Born in 1924, she grew up among the most interesting and artistic people in Cambridge. Her mother, Frances Darwin, daughter of Sir Francis Darwin, had married another Francis, Francis Cornford, Greek scholar and Professor of Ancient Philosophy at Trinity College, Cambridge. Both Frances’ parents, Francis and Ellen, were prone to depression. Frances was far worse, suffering, during her life, three long and severe depressions, the shortest lasting two years, the longest six. Hugh, my uncle who was a doctor, described the condition as ‘depressive psychosis.’

  My grandmother is most famous for a poem she did not much like, ‘To a Fat Lady Seen from a Train.’

  O why do you walk through the field in gloves,

  Missing so much and so much?

  O fat white woman whom nobody loves,

  Why do you walk through the field in gloves,

  When the grass is soft as the breast of doves

  And shivering-sweet to the touch?

  O why do you walk though the field in gloves,

  Missing so much and so much?

  Her husband, Francis, was a brilliant but introverted scholar whose translation of Plato’s Republic is still used in universities. He also wrote The Origins of Attic Comedy, Thucydides Mythistoricus, and Before and After Socrates, all of which examined Greek philosophy from a modern psychological perspective.

  Clare was the youngest of five children, three boys and two girls. Until she was ten, her life was that of a fairly normal upper middle class girl. The family lived in a large house a mile outside Cambridge. Named Conduit Head, it had been given to Frances and Francis by her father as a wedding present. Frances did not like being a grown-up and had no interest in taking care of domestic matters, but this was not a problem because there was a cook and two or three other domestic servants, including a gardener who maintained the large garden with its tall hedges, beds of roses and snapdragons, and at the end, most important to us children, a rotating wooden sun-house which could be spun like a roundabout.

  When she was not depressed, Frances was lively and engaged. For the first decade of her childhood, Clare was close to her. Summer holidays were spent in Norfolk, in the converted windmill overlooking the sea. Before the Second World War, the servants were sent ahead by train while the family went by car, a Bean. The eighty-mile journey took all day. Later on, after Francis died, everyone would go by train to Hunstanton. On arrival Frances and the younger children would take a taxi while the rest of the family rode a collection of bikes brought up in the guard’s
van. My oldest cousin, James Cornford, described them as ‘hair-raising contraptions’ which sometimes collapsed while being ridden. They were provided by the gardener at Conduit Head and if there were not enough of them the family would play bicycle leapfrog. One person started out on a bike and after half a mile or so got off it, left it in a hedge, and started walking. Whoever had started out walking, now picked up the bike, rode past the first rider, and left the bike for him another half mile along the road. Once they were settled in, there were rides on these bikes to the vast beaches of that coast. In the evenings they’d play games and talk. It was a large, happy, intelligent, gregarious family.

  In the middle of the summer of 1934, however, when my mother was ten, life suddenly changed. Frances sank into her longest and most severe depression and was sent to a nursing home. Two and a half years later she was still there when Clare’s eldest brother, John, father of James, a strikingly good-looking poet and Communist, went off to fight with the International Brigade in the Spanish Civil War. In January 1937, he was killed in battle, shot through the head by the Fascists on his twenty-first birthday. His body was never recovered.

  Clare was then twelve. If you look at photographs of her as a child, there is, long before any of these tragedies, a withdrawn, melancholy expression on her face. Afterward it is more marked. I see the same expression in my own face and sometimes in the face of my daughter.

  Clare was sent to St. Christopher’s, a co-educational, vegetarian boarding school in Hertfordshire, where I would later go myself. One of her two remaining brothers, Hugh, the closest in age to her, was also there. He fell in love with a girl from the school, Jean, and later married her. They adored each other until she died. Clare’s older sister, Helena, a dancer, went off to America and married Joe Henderson, a psychoanalyst and former patient of Carl Gustav Jung, who later wrote one of the chapters of Jung’s final book, Man and His Symbols. They also loved each other deeply, even after she collapsed into mental illness and, like my grandmother, had to be hospitalised. Her other brother, Christopher, became Dean of the Royal College of Art. He married a beautiful older woman and they too loved each other.