What to Look for in Winter

by Candia McWilliam

  Comics were early stirred into the reading mix. With some tact, my father pretended to like comics too and would pay me half the price of my WHAM! in order to ‘read’ it. WHAM!, which had an excellent strip called Georgie’s Germs that had those satisfying battles between microscopic life forms that are always so rich a culture for silliness, cost threepence-halfpenny a week, pronounced, I should perhaps tell you, ‘thruppence haypenny’. Where can one begin to translate?

  The source of most comics, especially in Scotland at that time, was the ultra-conservative publisher D.C. Thomson of Dundee, to whose products I was early addicted, and still am. They did not come to our house but I knew where to get them. The Dandy and the Beano I could manage without, but still must have my Broons Annual, my Oor Wullie, reassuring and harrowing in equal part. They have moved with the times. While they were stuck in the forties or so in the sixties, with a few references to Mop-Top laddies or jukeboxes, they are now shockingly less sexist and no one is picked on for being fat and or ugly.

  No one was ugly in the world of the comic that addled for good my drawing style, Jackie. (‘Be bolder! Be bolder!, my father would say, and once I heard my parents saying to Janey Allison’s parents at kindergarten, ‘She can’t yet get Klee.’) Jackie was thrilling pap, tame girl-friendly romance. Other girls brought it to school. I can to this day draw any Jackie type you will, daffy blonde, speccy brunette with latent romantic promise, spirited redhead, polo-necked love-bruiser, handsome toad, reliable mother’s boy. Golly, that sugar, that romantic sugar, it rotted my line. I can draw nothing like as well as either parent did, having trained myself to be more decorative than truthful in the shapes I make on the page when I draw.

  But look! The blinding may be helping that, too. I’m starting to learn to draw again, teaching myself from a book given to me by my second husband. The book is called The Tao of Sketching, and it is by a Chinese artist called Qu Lei Lei, who has made an enormous portrait of our son, with a kind of predella feature, about the size of a bath, of his beautiful, strange, extra-bendy hands, folded, which is to be framed separately from the vast head.

  So, there will be two ways of looking anew, with these modified eye sockets and with the help of The Tao of Sketching. I have had a good deal to unlearn, my cramped pretty curlicues, my symmetries, my velleity that tends to tidy, stretch, elide, as in fashion magazine drawing. My mother was trained in fashion drawing, and it was her work I copied at the kitchen table as we made all that fun on our own.

  My father could draw, where ‘to be able to draw’ means to be able to transcribe that which you see, and pleasingly, in a way that does not betray but rather finds out, and is true to, the object seen. He could also draw decoratively from his imagination, with that trick that takes knowledge, so that he could make a line look as though it were taken from a certain architectural period, or even a period of design-influence. It is not surprising that he loved the architectural jokes of Osbert Lancaster. He had a friend, Peter Fleetwood-Hesketh, who had a similar talent. You are never quite alone with that percipience of eye, that witty strand. You can always make something of what you see. I have a few letters written by my father when he was still very young; he cannot restrain the pen. Finials grow, acroteria sprout, domes swell, columns are tactfully broken to accommodate the script; it is like wandering in a neoclassical garden, a spritzed Piranesi. He could cut paper into Corinthian capitals, into palm trees, into knights on horseback, into fretwork minarets, into a vista of a city. In one letter to a cousin he makes of a telephone receiver an Ionic capital.

  My mother could make patterns, strings of cut-out dancing dolls, and she did such things with colour. It was her habit to buy second-hand clothes and to dye them in the big jam pan. Often when I got home from school, she would call out ‘I’m dyeing’ from the basement. Her colours were always changing but her favourites were silver and pink, smoky grey and mauve with no red in it. We mixed colours a lot, at the kitchen table. Guessing what the outcome would be if we mixed powder paint or watercolour or oil paint or Smarties or icing or ribbons, this was a good game. She let me paint potato crisps and offer them around when her friends came to drink coffee or–at Christmas, I think–Cinzano Bianco. She scribbled with wax crayons on cartridge paper–very expensive–and let me colour in all the little moons between the waxen boundaries of scribble, and to try never to have a colour adjacent to itself; was that possible? We used her paints from her student days, a Rowney set with little replaceable pans of watercolour, and a Cotman set whose replacements came wrapped in paper like sweets from Aitken Dott the art supplies shop on Hanover Street.

  I had some triangular wooden mosaics with which I made patterns, and some wooden sticks named Cuisenaire that my poor parents hoped would make me better at mathematics, and architectural wooden blocks from Germany in a duffel bag. I would ask my mother all the time, ‘Which do you like best?’, ‘Which is your favourite?’ She would make a case for each. I do it with my children. The youngest gets cross. He thinks that I am being politically correct, that I am in thrall to the tediously New Labourite phenomenon he calls ‘the Equal Elves’. I’m afraid I am just copying my mother.

  I cannot remember much about my mother, but I shall try, now, to do it. I am looking for her and with her for my ability to look.

  I have looked away from it for a long time while pretending to look at it. God knows how it is for people who contemplate the disintegration or physical fission of someone they love. At least she was in one piece in my bed where she, at thirty-six, lay dead.

  I regard (a word of seeing, I see) that last sentence as too aggressive to the reader, too showy, to remain. It is bad form. I cannot, I observe, look at it. So I’m going to make an experiment, and leave it.

  I will now try to remake my mother’s last day during which she took me to the Nubian goat farm at Cammo to choose a pointer puppy, a dog that must have been a sop to me, or perhaps to herself, like the drugged meat burglars are said to throw for guard dogs. I remember the lop-eared goats and the brindle pups.

  When with either of my parents, I had the sense that each was fragile. I asked them that disturbing incessant question, ‘Are you all right?’ a lot. His breathing sounded wrong, they fought too much, she cried on the edge of her bed. I avoided them on account of this, and hung about after school with the boarders, or walked home with other girls, bribing them with the bus fare I would save by walking. I had friends by now, other children of bookish homes, or daughters of my parents’ friends. I wasn’t popular, but I was on the verge of being a cult. Something was happening at home and other girls’ parents talked about it.

  By no means all fathers liked finding me at the after-school tea table when they got in from work. There was something provisional and not respectable about me. It wasn’t just that my mother was tall and sexy and wore sometimes a silver and sometimes a pink wig, that she smoked or had that Englishy voice, the Siamese on a lead, the black poodle-cross (named Agip after Italian petrol–‘supercorte maggiore, la potenta benzina Italiana’) or the yellow Labrador Katie. It wasn’t really anything as simple as that I was not named Fiona or Elspeth. I was a Mc, after all, if not a Mac. It wasn’t as though she didn’t hand out jars of home-made, misspelt ‘blackcurrent’ jam, that delicious staining preserve with something of its leaves’ cat’s-pee tang to the black fruit.

  It wasn’t Mummy’s awful driving. She learned only late in her life and had a half-timbered Mini van that got into scrapes. She might put the card discs from tubes of Horlicks tablets in the parking meters in Charlotte Square instead of sixpence.

  That’s the worst thing, morally, I saw her do.

  She was pursued by more than one man who was not within her marriage. One of these, later, after I was the mother of three, came round for lunch with me in my marital home.

  ‘What happened to your mother?’ he asked.

  ‘She died,’ I said.

  ‘Oh,’ he said. ‘What are you doing this afternoon?’

  As I’v
e said, a number of people have wanted to tell me what my mother did in her last days, or on her last day. I have no desire to know. I may be wrong in this. Other people are involved, and I don’t want them hurt. I don’t want anecdotes or gossip. I want the emotional truth, so I can make her better. And that I cannot have. I want the printout of her human heart.

  I do not think that we can at this distance know the truth.

  I do not think that we could even then have known the truth or seen it.

  I have very often wanted to take from her thoughts whatever it was that so hurt her that she felt she had to die, and to replace it with the complete certainty that she is loved, and that by people, my children, their fathers, who never even knew her. I do not know how I know this save that she has grown less fragile, less contingent and less fantastic in my mind, the longer she has been dead. In life she felt frail to me, like a story, unless stories are not frail.

  Bridge

  My house in Oxford lay, and still lies, last in a Regency cul-de-sac of artisans’ houses behind an almost Georgian street that is at right angles to the comely parade of Beaumont Street that itself holds both the Ashmolean Museum and the Randolph Hotel.

  I finished writing the last chapter you read on Ash Wednesday 2007. I am now speaking to you.

  Deeper into the year on a hot May day, I very nearly burned my house to ash. Being an old terraced house made of wood and lath, it might as well have been a blue touchpaper.

  As had become usual, I couldn’t see that day. I had become used to groping my way up and down the narrow staircase of the house, much as you do on a boat. For reasons to be seen, I have spent a good deal of my life in boats. Nonetheless, I am no good in on at or with them. I had acclimatised myself to the layout of the house but still banged into things and fell over frequently, especially over the piles of books. The things I loved had, though I didn’t know it, become a danger to me, and twice I slid gratingly face first down a flight of stairs over a slither of hardbacks, old TLSs and magazines. I was used to having bloody knees like a schoolboy and bruised hips like a mother with a granite baby. That hot day I was as usual pretending to myself and to the nobody at all who was looking that everything was all right.

  I had run dry on doctors. My condition’s intractability either exasperated or baffled them and such significant words as ‘referral’ and ‘Queen Square’ had been muttered. One psychiatrist who vividly reminded me of the Scottish wizard Michael Scott who is mentioned in the Purgatorio, said that I had chosen to close my eyes against the unbearable sight of Fram’s happiness with his new love Claudia; I came back with the old argument–that since I love him I wish him to be happy. There was an air of psychological manipulation in that expensive room that might be better kept for playwrights than appointed healers.

  There was the episode of the wonderfully named Alexina Fantato, who turned out to be not a strapping Italian glamourpuss with sexy but stern spectacles but a dear lady from Scotland married to an Italian. There’s a tradition in Scotland for these feminine-ending masculine names, Donalda, Kennethina. It seems that all note of disappointment is unintentional, unlike those long declensions of heir-hungry hermaphroditic names to be found in Burke. Alexina shrewdly saw that I had ‘issues’, as she kindly expressed it, with self-esteem. I made my usual noises about preferring to live by suppression than by spillage. She made a sensibly pawky face of disbelief at how someone this old could so mismanage her life.

  When Proust comes to his account of the death of Marcel’s grandmother, the old lady and her grandson pay a visit to a distinguished doctor whom the narrator will not even dignify with an invented name. Simply referring to the smug physician with his failure in humane understanding, the prerequisite of good doctoring, as Professor E——, Proust has the man manifest his heartlessness and hypocrisy under cover of a decorous but fishy anonymity. My own Professor E——washed his hands of me in sight of a witness, Claudia, whose sharp large blue gaze saw and recorded it all. She is more direct than I could ever even try to be. Professor E——, intelligent, disinfected, effective, spoke:

  ‘I have done all I can for you. Some people may suggest that there is a non-physiological aspect to this unhappy condition of yours, which is always a distressing one. They are wasting their time and they would be wasting yours. You will not find it profitable to go down that route.’

  I am still cleaving my way down that route, although the route itself has sometimes seemed to be narrowing, the stream drying up to reveal only little pebbles, hard stones hardly wet at all even by the grace of artificial tears, and this book is part of the walk following that diminishing way to some kind of resolution, if not the open lens of sight itself. Of course it is physiological; of course the cause of my blindness is neurological. But who says the life lived is separate from the body that has lived it?

  Back to that stuffy day in May, my cats and I shut in the small wooden house. I was in my workroom and felt my eyes’ heat and discomfort become sharper. I pulled them open, unsticking my eyelashes. Even peeled, my eyes saw nothing. But this nothing was not black or stippled or veiled or any shade of the blindings I had grown used to; it was thick white.

  That is how slow I was to realise that my small house was full of smoke. I did not think at all, which must have saved my life. Usually I am a great one for telling myself not to make a fuss and certainly not to bother other people, especially not the already overloaded public sector. I banged my way to the telephone, rang 999 and got a woman in Glasgow.

  For the first occasion in my life, and not the last, I used my newly acquired unfair advantage, and I expressed it in words that felt like rhubarb in my teeth. ‘My house is on fire. I’m partially sighted.’ The woman with the reassuring Scots voice asked where I was and I replied to her as if we were sharing a sofa and a biscuit, ‘I’m in Beaumont Buildings. It’s a street in Oxford. It’s not a building.’

  On I prattled in my burning house.

  ‘We’ll be with you right away, dear. Hold on and get out of the house right away, closing all doors you can behind you.’

  ‘But I’ve two cats.’

  ‘You’ll have to leave them.’

  Now I see how patient she was with me, with all the flaming nation clamouring for her attention.

  I didn’t obey and I did try hopelessly in the, I was now aware, reeking house to find my cats. I chased them, for some reason I can’t understand, into the basement and shut them in, or so I thought, but my thinking was as fogged as a choking drunk’s, and I was left to reflex alone and to action, perhaps my two weakest behavioural suits.

  All that in a whisker. I was soon in the street with three fire engines and a score of strong young competent people. Yes, a firewoman too, and all of them concentrated on reducing harm and bringing later calm.

  A neighbour took me in. A fireperson like the young Hector stayed with me and asked my neighbour to make tea. He actually asked me whether or not I took sugar. We conversed. Again it was the sofa and biscuit feeling. I learned that he was a keen hunt-follower, and that he and his wife couldn’t afford to buy a house in the Oxford area so that he had a long commute to his extraordinary work.

  ‘In fact,’ he said, ‘we’re really grateful to you because we had a city councillor visiting the station with a view to cutting down the service. Then you came through. You won’t mind my saying that it’s extra good you’re blind.’ How could I not love him?

  Two hours later, everything but my oven was spick and span. Having seen smoke damage and water damage and having lost one house to arson, I was astonished. It was just like magic. The ‘emergency services’ had been heroic, the staled newsreader’s words had immediate Homeric meaning. These stern-faced young people had entered the house, located the source of the smoke, hacked the oven out of the wall, taken it outside, extinguished what turned out to be spontaneous chemical smouldering, sucked all the smoke out of the house, swept the kitchen, wiped the surfaces, and all but put a nosegay on the draining board. They had also
attended to any over-spilling olfactory offensiveness that might have been caused to my next-door neighbour who had of course been regrettably interrupted by the bells and smells of the fire engines.

  I asked them all when they stood round me, helmets off, after it, what I could do for them.

  ‘Write a letter to head office, that would be great. If you think we did our job properly.’

  I wrote several such letters in my best writing that looks like my old worst writing. These were love letters.

  And the cats? Of course, an officer had been deputed to find and liaise with them, so much so that his uniform may never recover from the cuddling.

  That night, without my knowing it, my translation was organised. My second husband telephoned to my first husband and got my older son. It turned out that the fire, which could have been so much worse, came like a catastrophe in a play, a kind of relief, so that at last my family could talk about my blindness and where to put it and me and my two cats.

  The novels of Iris Murdoch are, for the time being, out of fashion. She has become someone in a film, someone pitiable even, someone who has been impersonated by souls who haven’t read her work. It is not my place nor intention here to play reputations but in her time she was an enchantress and her philosophical work contains much that is luminous; as a girl, she presciently noted Simone Weil’s words suggesting that deracinated people can be among those who cause the most damage.