My mother’s and my favourite junk shop was Mrs Virtue’s, in a basement on a corner with her name up in subtly shaded sign-writing emphasised in gold. The steps down to Mrs V’s had iron handrails curled to right and left. She herself wore a hairnet, a navy angora hat, a musquash coat, a pink-flowered pinny, many cardigans topped by a maroon one, a Clydella vest, fingerless gloves, varicose veins, stockings and socks, and what were called indoor shoes.
Mrs Virtue’s shop was a tunnel of mattresses twenty deep on either side, damp with cats’ piss. It was hard to imagine Mrs Virtue outside her musty nest. It is likely that she and her cats had a shared diet, though she smoked more than they did. I can’t think why I never stole anything from Mrs Virtue’s shop. Can it have been original virtue in me? The place was so chaotic and I so young that I understood the set-up as how things were meant to be and would not have dared spoil the careful arrangements Mrs Virtue appeared to have made. She had a face like chiffon for wrinkling and intermittent sets of teeth. Her eyes were dark and missed little.
Mummy spent hours talking to Mrs Virtue. They had far more than cats in common. I didn’t know then that these long conversations with people outside her marriage were a symptom of her loneliness as well as of her curiosity and friendliness. I am certain she was not signalling this loneliness to anyone intentionally, leave alone to me. She wanted to be the best of mothers.
It is not easy to say this out loud and before I went blind I would not have had to, but this greedy obsessive recall of trivial (and, it’s not lost on me, mainly visual) detail has clamped to me even closer as a habit since I lost my capacity to see. I was made of what I saw. I saw in panorama and in focus. I saw things at and even over the edge. I wasn’t half so good at hearing.
I’m scared I’ve become like an inventory for the sale of an old dead person’s house, what Scots call a displenishing; here I am, picking up lost bits and pieces of my scattered life to try to make something whole by putting it all together, my own flotsam and jetsam.
I plugged up my ears against the parental fighting. I think I knew that my parents, as a pair, were growing terribly demarcated from within, she the indoor and he the outdoor shoes. There was some scuffing. She threw and he hit. She slapped. He didn’t throw.
Both were sociable and attractive to the opposite sex. They took me with them to dinner parties and I either sat up with them or was put to bed in a guest room or the hosts’ bed. I remember falling asleep in a nightie from Mrs Virtue’s that my mother had laundered and starched. I had a tube of Smarties, too precious to open, in one hand. And I had done my teeth. The couple my parents were dining with encouraged me glamorously to call them by their Christian names, Gerald and Denise. He was what is called in Scotland a sheriff and she was French. From the age of three I had attended the Institut Français. It wasn’t a particularly fancy thing to do at that time in Edinburgh; it may have its roots in the Auld Alliance, that tie between Scotland and France against the old enemy, England.
When my parents woke me up, after dinner with the Sheriff had run its course, the bed was stippled all over the clean sheets by the gay fugue of Smarties.
It seems a pity to interpose ‘real time’ yet again, but it occurs to me that my use for Smarties as a child was only chromatic. I sorted them into colours, hoarded, hid and lost them or gave them away, mainly to my father who, being skin and bone, loved chocolate. From the first I knew that different characteristics inhered in each colour and that colours related to numbers and to letters of the alphabet.
I don’t like chocolate but I love to look at its outer casing. I am attached to those maps that come in chocolate boxes, with fanciful names for each mouthful. I still can’t face chocolate, unless, and this is awful, it is white and therefore not chocolate at all.
In fact, it’s probably my version of mother’s ruin nowadays and certainly this breast-fed baby’s only approximate mother substitute.
There was a sweet named Treets. Treets were like fatter, and merely brown, Smarties, and they had a slogan: ‘Melts in the mouth, not in the hand’.
I was first approached by a flasher when I was four. Actual manual work and melting in the hand not the mouth followed soon thereafter. There was one try to broach my milk-toothy mouth. I recall the feeling, as of a large eyeball with a thick lid forcing itself past my uvula. I didn’t seem to think this was unusual at the time. Families living many to a room in freezing poverty cuddled together for warmth; there was often a ‘simple’ son, who might wander the town. Having found the means of making a productive sensation, why might he not have taken it into his head to share the feeling? I simply stood aside from myself. I still have some of my milk teeth.
This intervention was exactly the opposite of reading. Reading was safe and something you went into. This invasive unshared business was something you stood aside from. It didn’t go on for long either in fact as an act or as a sequence in my life. Nor was the practitioner even someone whose name I knew, poor boy, trying to find a vessel for his pleasure.
Where was my mother at these times? She was being preyed upon too, by someone certainly less innocent than my poor urban simpleton.
Someone was circling her and smoothing her vanity, seeping into the crevices left by her dearly loved husband’s absence, away with his unsleeping work.
All my life I’ve had words that got stuck in my head as tunes do. When I was three it was San Francisco and Benozzo Gozzoli. I had no idea of the meaning. It was the sound that stuck. During other parts of my childhood, the needle stuck on various phrases or sometimes single words; ‘Pretty ballerina’ bounced in my brain for the obvious reason that I wasn’t. ‘Pink’ chaffinched away in my head for months. Ever since the fire in my Oxford house, the word that has been rolling around behind my eyes is ‘epilimnion’. I even wake up saying it. This may be a bad case of ‘Candia McWilliam’s swallowed the dictionary’, because I’ve only the slightest idea of what it means, which is, I think, the top surface of a large body of water, for example a lake. What I don’t know is how many meniscuses make up an epilimnion. Then other words attached themselves to it and now I’m bothered by the assonant but dead-end statement, ‘we swim the epilimnion’.
It has become impossible to write of my far past without being somewhat open about the present and its tense surface.
A carer brings breakfast to my cousin Audrey in Edinburgh; if it has not arrived by noon she’s fair mad with frustration, diabetes, hunger and very possibly loneliness. It is with grave difficulty that she gets about. Today, when I got up at six and started blindly doing my chores, I realised that I was like this, in inverse, about the arrival of Liv at 9 a.m. Just as Cousin Audrey is hungry for her breakfast, I’m hungry to pour out words and get them down. I have already after only six days become dependent upon the process and the presence of Liv. I no longer pace when dictating but sit slightly behind her to her right and hope that does not make her feel haunted; I’m less shy than I was, and can feel the sentences consequently relaxing. It’s less like doing a reading, and more like having a conversation, where the other person is not gagged but doesn’t talk quite as much as I do. I’m not naturally one for monologue, and was never, even at my most drunk, the life or soul of the party; one of the fears consequent upon my blindness has been that of becoming a big fat bore. The note I most resist in a female voice of any age is the note of complaint. Only French women do it at all attractively, and even then it seems to me too close to cleaving to the privileges of servility and aggression.
Say the present is the epilimnion, then, of this book; as we swim it so we shall feel the changing temperatures of the past rise up, the weed brush our legs; we may or may not sense schools of trout or a biding long-jawed pike. All over this house are pairs of spectacles, many of them purchased for one pound each at a Pound Shop in a subway under Basingstoke. None of these spectacles came with a prescription. I just like to have a pair of specs to hold and fiddle with and put on and wave around as though I were a person who could
see. In my old life, before blindness, I had only just started to wear reading glasses, as was normal for my age. Before that, I was always seeing, watching, gorging my eyes.
What is enough to see?
What is enough to look for?
For the last two days, I have been conducting an experiment, and attempting to use my ears to catch secrets and the almost unheard, as, I realise, I used to use my eyes. Of course I’ve always eavesdropped; it’s a form of collecting irresistible to the spy side of being a writer. But I’m trying now to hear and listen supernaturally, around corners, within trees, into birds’ nests, right into the egg within the nest. So far it hasn’t come up to the level my seeing skills were at when they departed. That sounds ungrateful; I’m aware that it will take another fifty-three years to tune my hearing skills up; I’m just a hatching tuning fork, like the one emerging from the lyrebird’s egg drawn by my father larger than life size with his Flo-Master pen on the basement wall in Warriston Crescent after another row with my mother.
So far, my only auditory revelation occurred in a doctor’s waiting room. Unless I’m with Liv or asleep or actually with a doctor, these waiting rooms are where I spend my days. I was in a department of Guy’s Hospital that is a house built upon the place where Keats did his medical training, opposite the Old Operating Theatre whose motto is COMPASSIONE NON MERCEDE, near London Bridge. I heard three pieces of scaffolding being conjoined and the dead sound was exactly that of a wooden xylophone; distance had turned metal to wood.
Occasionally, fashion demands that very pretty people wear spectacles for what is called in the world of magazines a ‘story’. This is the run of editorial pages with some ostensible narrative connection using the same model or group of models. Sometimes film stars wear specs not on account of their trouble with seeing but on account of how they wish to be seen. They may for all we know be short-sighted, but these are specs for being seen in. Today, the left-hand lens has fallen out of my favourite pair of such specs. That’s what my specs are. They are all a put-on.
I trod upon what I thought must be a very thick and large toenail with my bare foot. I felt around and realigned my mind. The only sort of animal whose toenail it could be simply could not have fitted into this flat. I thought directly of our Latvian lodger, who often babysat me. That’s how my mother was able sometimes to leave me, I remembered all at once. I was left with the lodgers. One lodger was a sculptor in clay, his favourite subject crouching beasts, tigers in the main. His glaze of choice was an intense Middle Eastern turquoise. His hands and feet were interesting to me. He was a sweet man. I remember him clearly saying that at least the clay didn’t get under his nails. The nails of his feet and his hands had been pulled out under torture.
Unlike our lodger, my mother’s courtier was a fabulist. I would think this, wouldn’t I, but I feel it was less to my father that she was unfaithful than to the strictures of a certain Edinburgh that just couldn’t take her. If I look at this more closely, I’m aware that there was, together with the kenspeckle, right-and-proper city, a bohemian life stirring that she sensed but perhaps never quite managed to reach and that has since her death flowered orchidaceously.
It was not that my father did not love her. They were so unalike by extraction and temperament that it is evident, even to me, their child, that theirs was a real passion. It was just that he loved buildings too and the buildings of Scotland at that time were being blown up, knocked down, blasted, wrecked and swiped down by permission of the state in a way that called directly to my father’s dedicated curatorial heart. It was a love, and it was a love for life.
Several times, Mummy’s admirer turned up at our house dressed in costume. This wasn’t to fool me but to amuse her. I don’t think I crossed his mind. I seem to remember him turning up as Mr Toad once, but maybe that was a mufti-day. He certainly had a veteran open-topped vehicle of some sort, that necessitated the putting away inside our overcoats of my mother’s and my waist-length hair. Mummy had a circular thing like a fur hoop; it was called a ‘rat’. You pulled your hair through it and arranged a bun or a beehive or a twist or a chignon or a cottage loaf. You fixed the arrangement with long hairpins of the sort that come in handy in old black-and-white films, for lock-picking, car-starting, etc.
Just as she was an early user of the contraceptive pill, my mother was a pioneer hairdryer user. Like all her machines, it had a name and broke almost at once, to be half mended by her. One morning as we sat in my nursery, I on her knee, Morphy Richards sucked instead of blew and we spent a morning disentangling, you could almost say lock-picking, our long hair, hers pale blonde and mine more brown, from this space-age machine, with its cunning design suggestive of weaponry and air travel.
My mother followed with complete involvement the lives of many of the animals who lived at Edinburgh Zoo. We wept together when the elephant seal perished after choking on an ice lolly stick someone had given him. Why had they not given him a cornet? We observed the high-held pregnancy of Susu the giraffe. My mother tried to correct me for mourning the zoo’s elephant, Sally, more than my great-aunt Beatrice, known as Beadle. The defining triumph of my mother’s animally attached life was when, unanswerably, the zoo’s golden eagle, William, laid an egg. We both of us feared the salamander and the electric eel, looking at their flaccid yet potent inertia in absorbed disgust. My mother was warned off by zookeepers for hanging around the penguins and the ring-tailed lemurs. The keepers were right. She wanted to bring the creatures home with us. After she died, I was turfed out of the zoo for trying to catch a chipmunk. Actually, I wanted a pygmy hippo.
When you fly up to Edinburgh, if you look under the left oxter of the plane as it commences its descent into the airport, you will see what remains of my parents’ idyll. Its name was Craigiehall Temple and we went there on summer weekends towards the end of my mother’s life. It stands above the banks of the River Almond, a folly three storeys high growing among the wild white raspberries and enclosing beeches. Its stairs wound through its three octagonal rooms, the top one with a golden ceiling around whose cornice ran plaster ribbons held by plaster doves. It had a doll’s house portico and no amenities at all. My parents furnished it from street sales and Mrs V’s. The piano in the top room cost half a crown, of which there were eight in the pound. There was a large cane chair that extended and had a pocket for magazines and a place where you could put your sundowner. My father called this chair ‘the British Fascist’. The middle room was where we all slept on camp beds that rolled away in the day. I lay on mine in my sleeping bag pretending hour upon hour to be a caterpillar, then a chrysalis. I was usually asleep by the time I was due to break open as something more glamorous and winged. There was a chemical lavatory and at night, with much care, as though handling moths, my parents lit the gas mantles of hurricane and Tilley lamps. The smell of paraffin makes me feel sick, as do all petrol compounds including Cow Gum, which we used to stick down layouts at Vogue; but to the paraffin-nausea there is also a dizzy homesickness for me since it was the source of much of our heat and light when I was a child.
I don’t know how long we leased the Temple; I’m sure I want to think it was for longer than is true. In the end, my parents gave up mending after the vandals who would come and play football in the top room and turn my mother’s pearl-poppit jewellery out on to the floor looking for real stuff. We did spend one Christmas there and nothing mattered at all because the world was white and we were in a stone tower with no one near us and our dogs and our cats, log fires and drawing things. I had, too, one birthday there and remember thinking that the silky-shivering fields of barley all around were not green but blue and sometimes, under the wind, silver. My father made a rope swing for me and, insofar as my first childhood goes, this was the most physical my life ever got. I had a pet snail named Horatio and a stickleback named Lindsay. We lived very considerably on hot milk with crusts in. My mother and I liked salt with it, my father sugar. We went, as Scots say, enormous walks and I could tell my mother wa
s pretending she was on a horse. The woods were full of smoking bluebells and white windflowers that, like the spirit they’re named for, lose breath when cut. It astonishes me, now that I am a mother, to observe in retrospect with how few elements both my parents could conjure magic. She was more confident at the Temple; she knew what to do in the country. She could name flowers and she knew how to kill a rabbit with a stone when it was wet and blind with myxomatosis. He was less romantic about the country-living side of things, probably because it was he who got to deal with the chemical lavatory, the log-sawing and the drive out to reach his wife’s dream-place. There was some other occlusion that I can only guess at; to do with my mother’s admirer?
To return to the epilimnion; this morning it came clearly to me that my father’s apparent absence of human demonstrativeness was just that, apparent. So intense were his emotions about buildings that he has left to me, and I believe to my half-siblings, a characteristic that sounds chilling–the capacity to be completely changed by a building, to be inhabited by it imaginatively and emotionally. Three times in my life I have been rescued by architecture. The flat where I’m staying now exemplifies this. At my blindest, I can still be consoled by the feel of the door handles in the studio where Liv and I work, their satisfying relationship to the human hand.
I used to be sorry for myself as a very small child because my father was so often away or, when present, actually utterly preoccupied by a building. It was only in my twenties that I even began to read this as not over-aestheticism but as deep humane connectedness. It is easy to misread so silent, so cultivated and so cool a character.
What to Look for in Winter Page 9