He had found me out. I had always known that it was lucky I was good at schoolwork because I was so ugly. The odd thing is, why did I not think that this relation, this non-relation, of mine was telling the truth? After all, I couldn’t imagine him telling a lie. During those summers in Holland, I too took a holiday from telling lies.
LENS II: Chapter 3
The first large family in whose cousinhood I tried to affix myself was the great clan of Mitchisons. It was a joke in scientific circles at the time that more than half a ton of human flesh answered to the name Professor Mitchison. Naomi Mitchison, the sister of J.B.S. Haldane, was the matriarch and pivot of the family. She lived to be one hundred and three, the oldest Old Dragon that doughty prep school has yet produced, and one of the first baby Dragons. Doris Lessing has described in her autobiography the atmosphere of intellection at Carradale, the Mitchison house in Argyll. I doubt if I can match her for I recall the passage as absolutely spot on and now of course can’t find it, though maybe I should learn to delegate now I am blind. That would make a drastic and rather late character change.
Naomi was known by her children, her grandchildren and her friends as ‘Nou’. One son, Geoffrey, had died in childhood from meningitis. The death is described by Nou’s friend Aldous Huxley in his novel Point Counter Point. There were five remaining children, Denny, Murdoch, Lois, Avrion, Valentine. Murdoch was Professor of Zoology at Edinburgh, his wife Rosalind Professor of History. Rosalind was known as ‘Rowy’. Rowy had been a close friend of my mother and her daughter Harriet was my friend; each pair of friends was as dissimilar in the same way as the other. That is, where Rowy was effective, certain, dark and convinced, my mother was indecisive, unsure, blonde and ductile; the same was so of Harriet and myself. Harriet’s younger sister Amanda went on to become a journalist who came from the Independent Magazine to interview me. When she was a refinedly pretty little girl, I had, with Harriet, tormented Amanda by telling her long, plotless, essentially theologically based stories about a monster we called the King Devil. I can’t think where we got him from, since the Mitchisons were sternly rationalist and unbelieving. Harriet’s reading tastes ran to The Lord of the Rings, which I could never hack, though I was a sucker for Narnia, so it looks as though I should bear the brunt of the responsibility for the King Devil. When Amanda came to interview me, I felt it only right to give her, in every regard, the upper hand. I was ashamed of my beastly stories in the dark at the commodious Edinburgh house of her childhood. The interview was perfectly nice, though it implied, which may be possible, that my mother’s suicide was the result of incompetence rather than volition. I’ve always comforted myself with the thought that what my mother did was what my mother wanted, but maybe it is good, if sore, to keep an open mind.
Harriet and I both wanted to be doctors. Harriet became one and I still think about it. That’s a difference between us.
The village of Carradale lies in a bay on the eastern edge of the Mull of Kintyre. In recent years, it has been tragically newsworthy because almost every member of its small fishing fleet was drowned. That guts a community for generations.
The big house was harled and painted white, pepperpotted and roofed in slate the colour of lavender when dry, of thunder when wet. There were never, it seemed to me, fewer than twenty adults in the house at a time, always a few babies and then there were middlies and, what we were becoming, teenagers. That I did not fall completely into internal delinquency is almost certainly due to the Mitchisons, Rowy at the core of it, but all those others each of whose names I can remember, with their faces, for ever, at the age they were when I was turning twelve, though most of them now are professors themselves and members of the intelligentsia, whatever it is now called. Certainly not the ‘chattering classes’. They were nothing as trivial as chatterers, rather forceful, indeed irresistible, asserters.
During our teenage years, we were sent to sleep at The Mains, the Scots word for the home farm. This was a sensible decision. Dressing for dinner took me about four hours, though I’ve never met a vain Mitchison, including those who possessed beauty: Clare and Kate, Mary, Valentine and Josh. It was in the bathroom at The Mains that I first saw underwear made for the delectation of men rather than at the behest of spinsters. It had been hand-washed, evidently, and was dependent from the taps of a washbasin in the freezing bathroom. It was at once very small and very emphatic, lacy, red, and belonging to the girlfriend of Francis Huxley.
The drawing room in the big house was full of the sort of silence that is made by eight or nine good-quality brains working hard and separately, absolutely not a library silence, more like being in a vast digestive system. Small, fierce Naomi sat typing at her desk that looked out over the unsmooth Highland lawn, a hedge of Rugosa roses, the path to the sea, Carradale Point itself and the sea beyond. She wrote well over ninety books. The light in the room was low and seemed to be green. There was a sizeable mobile made of metal fish that very probably interpreted Darwinian theory.
In the plain, loaded shelves was a tan first edition inscribed to Nou by its author of The Seven Pillars of Wisdom, on top of which I had one Easter found a chocolate egg hidden. This was a rare success for me since the annual egg-hunt clues had as a rule a scientific and mathematical bias, with a strong seam of Scottish history. After Nou’s death, this volume went up to auction and I saw it again in a newspaper; what it was and what it meant to me so separate.
Nou was, in addition to being an Argyllshire councillor, though devoid of any whiff of landlordism or lairdliness, Mother of the Bakgatla tribe in Botswana, and frequently one or more of her honorary Bakgatla children would be staying at the big house.
Nobody said, but Nou, as well as coming from the intellectual purple, was also, though it infuriated her to be addressed thus, Lady Mitchison. Her late husband had been made a Labour life peer. I mention this at all only to introduce the ticklish subject of what to call the people who worked for her, since she was at once so clearly the product of at least two kinds of aristocracy and a good old-fashioned Red.
One evening we older children were asked by Percy, who did the gardening, although one did not call him the gardener, to gather caterpillars from the kitchen garden. The cabbage white has a caterpillar that is fat and striped like a wedding cravat; when you pick it up it looks interested at both ends. We took our catch, if you can call anything as docile as a few bowls of caterpillars a catch, in to Nellie, who certainly was not the cook.
The caterpillars, dipped in flour and nicely fried, appeared as the first course that night in deference to the palates of Nou’s guests from Botswana.
The dining table was enormous, thick, not polished but raw wood, aged, stained, practical; it was a rectangle with curved ends; there must be a geometrical term for this figure but I lack it. I do not mean an ellipse. There seemed in that atmosphere of intellectual certainty so little that was elliptical in the way my father was in person and in the way his mind worked. I am ashamed to say that I escaped from his intelligent failures of certainty to the Mitchisons’ apparent categoricalness with the cowardice that goes with a callow mind aspin. My father’s way offered no shelter, while that of the Mitchisons offered much of it and, or so it seemed, to spare. I was, as I am not now, sick for certainties. I now find them infertile and too often rooted in prejudice.
I wonder now whether I was ever actually invited at all to Carradale or whether I just hid within one family or another’s capacious kindness: Rowy was kind all through my youth in a sort of improvement on her late friend, my mother’s, way. An improvement, I mean, in that Rowy was alive. Nou’s daughter-in-law Lorna, married to Av (Nicholas Avrion in full, meaning the Victory of the People), came from Skye and always seemed to be carrying a baby in her arms. She never raised her voice and had the balanced selflessness that comes to only very few mothers. She was impossible to lie to. It was Ruth, Naomi’s oldest daughter-in-law, whom I loved and to whom I clung like stickyweed for years, though she never complained about it, even wh
en I started sticking to her in the South as well. She was not a physically large person, nor did she shout. She seemed to see a great deal and to interpret it correctly but in silence. She was a doctor, musical, wore slim brown or grey shirts and sat at a tangent to the table. She was tangential in manner yet direct in thought; a mode I find increasingly appealing the longer I live. I wish she were alive now; hers was a singular note amid so much information and embodied, biological almost, confidence.
At the far end of the dining room was a sizeable brown painting, thickly impastoed. It was known as ‘The Goat in the Custard’, and worked surprisingly well as a splashback for the kippers that were left for each individual to fry for him or herself at breakfast, in a then remarkable item of culinary equipment, an electric frying pan. It is a miracle that the house smelt not of frying red herrings but of heather, wood, pipe smoke and wool. Heather smells like dust and honey both. Intellectuals smoked pipes then.
Sometimes, a piper would come up from Lochgilphead, and, perhaps, a squeezebox player, and we would dance in the library, which was called the ping-pong room. Nou, short, dense, wore garments of fantastic tribal splendour and simultaneous rationality, sandals, bright yet serious skirts and perhaps a serape or sash in acknowledgement of one or another of her encyclopaedic interests and convictions. She was unbending, solid, frowning; she looked like strength itself, like an animal, an armadillo or a Galapagos tortoise; absolutely not a pangolin. The pangolin looks as though his armour has only recently been donned. Nou was born in hers. She danced in a stately manner that attested to her sublime physical confidence. She was an advocate of the benefits of free love. I feared to be addressed by her, yet longed to get a smile from her. I felt easier in her house when she was not in the room and that this is not a particularly healthy state of mind. I do not think that she cared much for my mother or me; even as lame ducks, a class for which Nou had time, we were not interestingly lamed. I can imagine my mother getting Carradale all wrong, talking in the drawing room during the daytime or gossiping or noticing clothes or foods or smells. Certainly she would be overdressed. We were there together only one time, when I was two, so I cannot speak for her outfit during that summer of 1957.
Mealtime conversation was on the whole abstract or theoretical, whatever age you were. There was little people-talk unless it be of use, attached to a paper written, a law made, a proof offered. Avrion had made butter with Lorna’s breast milk, I seem to remember, and there was talk of self-made blood-pudding.
Two years ago, wandering around the Scottish National Portrait Gallery, I came face to face with Nou. There she was, miraculously at about my height, as never in life, dressed in blue, frowning, chin on hand, looking me straight in the eye. It was her portrait by Wyndham Lewis, which had been on the ping-pong room wall and under whose gaze, dancing this time to records of Scottish dance tunes, I fell in love for the first time with a grown human not resident in the ancient world. It is a love that came to nothing in the conventional sense so that it remains, for me at least, complete. Nor is it untried. The one who generated it absolutely without intent remains today a beloved friend and provided for years as it were an internal moral thermostat that I fell short of, but knew when I was doing so. It is not coincidental to my life as a novelist that he was a child in India and is a musical scientist. Nor is it coincidental to my private life.
Wyndham Lewis was a good choice to paint the young Nou. He got that density, that energy, that intellectual force. In the corner of the painting to the sitter’s right is a curious pair of antagonistic marks, written in paint, like scallops inverted, or fists opposed, conjunct yet fierce. If they encrypt Nou’s character, they do it well. The other attribute caught is her uncompromising seriousness, combined with an irresistibility, like that of some metal.
In the long-playing-record trunk in that library, there were also to be found the speeches of V. I. Lenin and a Russian phrase book from which I copied into my diary at that time ‘A rose is a flower. A man loves a woman. Death is inevitable.’ I also found a book on medieval Latin lyric by Helen Waddell and remember the words:
‘Vel confossus pariter
Morerer feliciter,’
that she translates as:
‘Low in the grave with thee
Happy to lie.’
I’ve used these words as soothers for years. They work as phrases whose meaning either dissolves, leaving you in a state of meditation, or tightens up, giving you plenty to think about.
I had discovered a great pleasure of the painful side of life: its relief, or exacerbation, by literature. Of course I’d been doing it all along but hadn’t realised.
It was typically bifocal of me to have lit upon the object of my distant love since his delightful brother was my first proper boyfriend. Between them, they constitute immortal disproof of the proposition that all Mitchisons are brilliant but not always super-subtle. Terence Mitchison was an undergraduate medieval historian at St Catherine’s College, Oxford, a place that was to recur and grow in my life. We met during the famous summer that Anthony Appiah, the grandson of Sir Stafford Cripps and nephew of the Queen of the Ashanti, said, and we were just thirteen, ‘It depends whether you have an eschatological Weltanschauung.’ The thing about Anthony was that he had some paisley flares and a blue rollneck and he could play the piano. The other thing was that we became best friends and that he’s never shown off in his life. He just was that far in front–like Prospero, but kinder.
Terence courted me with letters that would, if anyone knew where they were, constitute the most colourful archive you could wish for, literally. He breathed jokes, mainly of the verbal kind, and sent them to me colour-coded, brown for medieval jokes, green for rural jokes, pink for jokes to do with the history of Empire and so on. And, of course, puns resulted in multicoloured words. It was not that Terence was, as I am, a synaesthete whose synaesthesia is redundant or at any rate useless; he was an etymologist with a grip on detail. So considerable was this grip that when we took a holiday, later in our friendship, on a barge on the Brecon Beacon canal with schoolfriends, Terence had embroidered his Admiral’s cap with the barge’s name, Samuel Whiskers. Everything about Terence was thorough and good. He had embroidered another cap: HMS Leaky.
Which makes that swivel of disloyalty, or whatever it was, in me towards my idol, his older brother, extra mortifying, and I only hope Terence was well shot of his schoolgirl correspondent. At the start, I suspect that I fell, as through a trapdoor, for the blameless older brother for the simple, no doubt tediously biological, reason that he was, and remains, the single individual who has, since my mother and father, been able to carry me. His areas of specialism included blue-green algae and dreams. I used to read books about finite-dimensional vector space and Riemann surfaces to try to make myself appealing to this distinguished ludic individual. When he remarked, glancingly, that he thought blue more becoming than pink, I did as my mother would have and made a stew of woad, or rather Dylon dye, in Strong Navy and bunged all my clothes in. Nothing could have prepared this poor man for cause and its effect upon his silly child-friend.
I drooped around after him for pretty much a decade, during which his circle of friends, to some degree, took me up and conducted the kindest of intellectual experiments upon this peculiar child. So it was that I found myself building sandcastles (one, for example, of the Gesù in Rome) with the right-wing philosopher John Casey, being introduced to green Chartreuse by the composer Robin Holloway who later wrote me properly critical letters about my work, which he did not like; and becoming a friend for life of my idol’s lodger, with whom he would play piano duets, Roger Scruton, who was then a boy of twenty-seven with hair that flamed over a face that also burned white with seriousness. The architectural historian David Watkin taught me to dance the galope and asked me to marry him, which he must have forgotten, or at any rate I notice that we don’t seem to be married. They gave me books to read and were, I suppose, waiting to see what the result would be when I had groun
d my way through whatever it was: The Anatomy of Melancholy, Hadrian VII, The Quest for Corvo, all of Firbank, Memoirs of a Mathematician. Unknowing, I was a kind of Maisie. Their patience with me and tolerance of my mooncalf presence among them was admirable. I was a bit of a liver-enriched goose, I’m afraid. What kind of egg they expected me to lay I cannot imagine, but not this life that I am laying out now, I’m sure. I still possess the label of the 1955 Veuve Clicquot bottle that we shared, perhaps eight or ten of us, on my fifteenth birthday, over lunch. It is, with all my possessions, not to hand but in store, awaiting a return to a life unpacked.
Before these loves, though, came rupture and detachment from my father’s house in my early teens. He and I never exchanged words about it, but I left his home and did not come properly back to it again, and certainly not to live.
I had become compact of lies, a child of flies, a beelzebubbler, as my stepmother apprehended it, and she did not, quite understandably, want me near her children. I suspect too that I was growing to resemble my mother and that my father could not face another unhappy marriage; since the only thing that was wrong with his marriage to my stepmother was me, might there not be benefit for all concerned were I to be removed from the sum?
What to Look for in Winter Page 13