What to Look for in Winter

by Candia McWilliam

  I very much didn’t wish ever surgically to interfere with my face and now am committed to doing it twice in a single year. It wasn’t particularly that I was vain, though I was, but that I didn’t fancy that shared look of terror and conformity that declares cosmetic surgery’s costly untruthful ghost to have passed. And I thought that I was interested by time and its effects upon a face. My children, too, had mentioned their misgivings about cosmetic surgery, the batched moms, the party lines of preservation. And it is expensive and self-necessitating; and I am a Scot and we don’t do that like of thing.

  I no longer physically recognise my face. My body is another matter that I would rather leave aside for the moment, which may have been something of the problem all along. Scotswomen make crack dualists; we are at odds with our bodies often, especially if we have early been fingered as being possessed of a brain.

  I took the train to Glasgow from King’s Cross. Since not noticing that my own house was on fire till I was nearly smoked, I have been staying at various places in London.

  At Glasgow, I was met by the husband of my sister who is not my sister. So many of the relationships in my life are this kind of double negative adding up to a positive. As has been true throughout my life, quite little is what it seems, though much feels straightforward. I think this not unusual for people who make things.

  I described earlier how I subtracted myself from home in my teens and added myself to the Howards in the Hebrides. Each of these islands is geographically, culturally and linguistically identifiably its own place. Smallness does not wear away individuation; rather the opposite.

  I am here now, on the island of Colonsay, the place in the world where I borrowed a second childhood. I just sort of sank out of one life and emerged into another. It was not a kind thing to do. It may have set a pattern of which I cannot be proud and that my blindness may have given me the insight to break at last.

  I’m renting a flat in the big house where we were children and where I learned, if I learned, to share and transmit. This flat is made from rooms that were once nursery bedrooms; the flat’s sitting room was the bedroom where my not-sisters Caroline and Katie ate Eno’s Fruit Salts off their fingers in bed, and on the wall as he ever was is an engraving of Sir Wm Hamilton, Bt, Professor of Logic at the University of Edinburgh, published, as it happens, on 4 May 1857. Today is 4 May. I began this chapter on the 1st.

  Next to Sir William is a coloured map of the Western Isles of Scotland, done into the Latin as befits a Scots nursery: ‘Aebudae Insulae, sive Hebrides, quae Scotiae ad occasum praetenduntur, illustratae et descriptae de Timotheo Pont. Colonsay appears, lying on its side as is the whole of the West Coast, preserving the modesty of the usually incontrovertibly (though docile) phallic Mull of Kintyre, under the cursive word ‘Collonsa’. The part of the island where this house would be built bears the label ‘Killouran’. Oransay, the small island off Colonsay, appears to be designated ‘Gruonsa’, though that ‘G’ may be a ruptured ‘O’.

  The bathroom of the flat contains a small modern plastic bath that just holds me. Once, in its place, was a cast-iron bath that held all six of them and me, with a heavy steerable cylindrical contraption between the taps that was the plug. The bath (and all other) water in those days came off the hill and was the colour and flavour of peat. Now it is clear, though it still comes off the hill down from the loch above the house.

  My brother Alexander who is not my brother is in charge here now, though his father, whom I call Papa, as all his children do, is completely alive. My not-sister Katie is Alexander’s assistant and right hand and her husband William is woodman, dustman, playwright, diplomat, angle-grinder, freight-sorter, mandatory representative non-native at community meetings, and maker of vital connection. That is he takes life and rebags its stuff into packets that people can enjoy and be fed by. The blindworm boredom dare not come near him.

  I have come here to recuperate in advance of whatever comes next and to allow to settle the furious ineffectual seething of my inward life of this last year, and of too many of those years that preceded it. To some extent, too, I am getting myself, and the problem I constitute, out of the way. Where do you put a blind mother who falls over quite a lot and is not yet old enough to fold away for the winter with the barbecue and the swimming towels? It is I, not the children, who think like that, I know, and it’s no help to anyone.

  Upstairs a family who have rented a flat in what used when we were young women to be called the bachelors’ corridor are preparing their tea. The father is talking. I cannot hear his words. It is not unusual for families to rent an annual holiday on the island over the whole transit of the raising of a family, whose progress may be followed through those irresistibly voyeuristic and eventually shaming comments books that are a feature of rental property. One is ashamed because one hasn’t recreated the idyll recorded by some family more ideal, better at spotting otters, happier within itself, than one’s own.

  Or maybe that’s me, who have been playing at families all along, with deadly seriousness and an eye on the competition because I’ve so little idea of how it works, my darling mother’s surprising disembarkation having left me to improvise.

  It is bath time upstairs. A tired young child is grizzling without commitment, nothing that a story will not sort. A radio is on. Water carries radio waves and I can hear enacted conversation, perhaps The Archers, under the living voices with their more convincing scoring for rests.

  Outside, after a day of rain, the light is glittery. Through one window of the room where I am slowly typing may be seen the deep garden over and beyond a stream that is itself well beyond three swooping levels of lawn. Two huge trees, Cupressus macrocarpa, twisted by wind and time, hold the last evening sun till late (this is the North). Daisies and blossom smutch, sparkle and powder all the green lawn. Several surprising palm trees announce the passage of Victorian plant-hunters through this lush declivity, actually a geological fault, through Colonsay, this old small rock, nine miles by three, covered with green and surrounded by that light-reflecting north-western sea. I know these sights because my memory provides them, though I can with discomfort and a certain stiff pincering address hold my eyeballs bare to take them in, even if it is not the same as the absorptive wash that soaks all-gathering sight. But it’s something, and I do count my blessings.

  I am unsure how good blessings-counting is for the character, or am I the only person who resents it when others tally your reasons to be cheerful for you? It’s hard not to observe that they are finding coloured veins in the rock that sparkle best in rain. Also, don’t lists with an uplifting undertow almost mandatorily make one gloomy?

  A less negative aspect of blessings-counting came to me. Two electronic benefits occurred. I turned on a kettle, with whose product, hot water, I made a cup of Scottish Blend ferocious strong tea, with milk, and I received a text message from Claudia telling me of her doings today, and those of my son and Fram. I read the message by feeling my eyes and holding them bare, open.

  Annabel and I also exchange texts most mornings. We have communicated daily for years. After all there are children in common. We are close friends who lead widely different days and may think we hanker for the other’s way of life, but actually probably favour our own. I like the detail of her day; she accompanies the emptiness of mine and does much spiritually to fill it.

  When we count blessings as they occur, we have a greater chance of valuing them. I cannot remember when I have not, having lived at certain times of my life without one or other of them, been grateful for plumbing and electricity. Hot water almost demands a deity of its own before which to lay oblations of scented soap and rough dry towels.

  Which leads me to the pattern revealed in sleep to me, not for the first time, but with the soothing power of pain relief. My actual father, the man who with his short-lived first wife, my mother, conceived me, liked to ask me when I was small, ‘Do you know how to make a fishing net?’

  The answer is that you fin
d a lot of holes and tie them together.

  Upstairs the toddler is gurgling. Voices through pipes make of the largest house a shared familial linked system, those rooms of space connected by the web of piping, the moving webs of water telling their message through the darker parts of the whole constructed system. Water is making comment throughout the pipes of the old house. A hum, the inception of warmth, accompanies the low hint of heated water through them. Flushes fall back and rise again within the white bathroom walls.

  The best way to tell it is perhaps to try to thaw out that declared winter and to attempt to capture now what may be the actual, not the fancied, scene in the thaw. It is time to see that what felt like a sentence to emptiness may be an offer of air.

  Chapter 2: Saw/See

  I thought that I would take two lenses of time, one from after finishing the first part of this memoir, and one from now, here on Colonsay, this place that combines the present with the far personal past, and try to adjust them so as to see through or even catch some light to partly melt the snowy cover that lay across some of the bleaker branches or wider wastes of the earlier chapters.

  There is a newish convention, that goes against any observation or experience of life that I have, that characteristics and narrative must not be ambivalent or ambiguous, or the reader will be confused. Since this is the condition of language itself, we are talking here about books brought to the level of nursery school reports, or of bad film synopses.

  Ambiguity is there at all times. Tolstoy and Proust catch it. In triumph lies defeat, in consummation boredom, in despair self-watchfulness and the resurrection of attention. When I was told that I would never see my mother again, I felt not one but many things. As well as the confirmation that I was now unaccompanied, as well as the questions as to the cause of her death, that might not be asked, there was the unpleasant gratification of the event, that could not be admitted, but was nonetheless an attribute of that time. I knew that, for this probably very short time to come, no one would be unpleasant to me for being peculiar or showing off, or being fat, and that I would for a time be at the focus of something. In neither case was I in fact especially rewarded along the lines I had envisaged as parallel to feeling that harsh deep abandonedness. But I certainly knew that there was never going to be the simplicity and clarity I had previously imagined went along with growing up.

  And surely it must grow one up remarkably, becoming motherless as quite a small child? Yes and no, of course. I have always tried to think how another person would behave, given my circumstances. I may think I can imagine this, but I cannot. Can I? Can you? I can think how a character taken from a book would behave with more success than I might think how a friend or a member of my family might behave. I can guess, and I may be right, or I might be confounded, I cannot even imagine how I might behave. I just behave.

  I may think that I have taken stock, but what will most likely have happened is that curdling mixture of inanition and violence that have characterised my life and that are more usual than either literature or our understanding of life conventionally allow. For if we were fully conscious of this catch all the time, it would be as impossible to live as if we were able continually to look at that glaring fact of mortality against which we have to fold our time away, and from which we must avert healthy eyes.

  Our character and our personalities lie in the torsions between ambiguities, no matter how Romanly straight our apparent, enacted, nature. In fiction too it is these electrifyingly unsmoothed characters who most live, as against characters taken from stock. In life we are drawn often to people as unlike ourselves as possible. That compensating attraction means we outsource traits we do not possess but require. I twine like a convolvulus about people who apparently know their own minds. In very few, but how beloved, cases, have I been right.

  As for such people as pride themselves on self-knowledge, it is as with those who admit with sheepish self-tenderness that they pride themselves upon their honesty. They are playing to their own gallery.

  Some people do act without reflecting. They may be stupid, very brave or extremely well trained. Almost without exception there will be a sadness about them at the weight of those closed chambers and tightly stifled reflective surfaces within. Unless they are beyond privilege naïve, they are made jumpy by the untested and will not allow of the unknown. They curtail their vision with the red denial of a butcher insisting that his bloody crib is not an ox’s carcass.

  It is still raining in the Inner Hebrides in early May 2009. Through the water pipes I hear the upstairs toddler and through the window that is opposite the one that steams with garden green, I am aware–the window is at my back–of a conflict of rooftops, one curving over an arm of the house, the others sheltering its kitchen and offices, finished with softly bent pale lead and tiled with slate as deeply purple as pigeons. Everything is wet, the window as well. I am conscious of this sight because I have in my life seen it so often, so often that I am not sure that I need to see it now, such that I am saving my eyes for this screen rather than for the window whose view I am describing as I tap laboriously trying to elicit some scene from the past in order more clearly to stalk the truth like a white hare through the thaw, although I am pledged to the idea that truth about one’s own life melts, or flits, again and again just as you breathe on it.

  Not long after I spoke the words ‘Let’s see’, just after my birthday, I had the first and so far only grand mal fit of my life. It felt as though I were an old-fashioned camera, into which innumerable heavy lenses were being inserted one after another, each at a different and more acute setting, and then as quickly and clatteringly taken out. The world weighed heavy, shivered, fluctuated, jerked, grew too heavy utterly and fell to the ground in pieces as though my limbs were dud and chopped like fallen empty armour.

  It felt not unlike the aftermath of drinking till blackout and indeed Fram, who saw me in hospital, at first wondered if I had been. For me the consequence of taking one drink is that I cannot stop for ever longer and more deeply degrading periods afterwards. If only it had been that simple. I do not know why my brain took this great insult and gave me a fit. I know that I was saved from something worse by my god-daughter, who was with me, and who rang an ambulance because she was afraid for both of us. She told me later, doing an imitation, that I hid from the ambulance men, and questioned their choice of shoes for hospital. I can remember nothing, just as after a blackout.

  It was in A & E that I came to. I felt as though I was in the middle of a painting of a deathbed. I lay on a foreshortened bed off which I hung in a curtained space, with, to one side, a slim young man with striped hair in a stream like Beethoven running, and at the foot a group of young people in summery motley, cotton, stripes, lace, shawls, hoods. Two of them were blond and one had the dark hair and eyes of a young knight in a painting from the Renaissance. I remember thinking all that, the Beethoven, the clothes, the similarity to a painting, and I thought at that same moment that if I had had a stroke I was still myself within. I was frightened. I was worried that I had disrupted a number of people’s days. I was embarrassed. I wondered how I could ever make it up to the children. There was also the startling fact that I could see.

  I knew that I could not simply be polite and get out of this one. Something had occurred and the event, whatever it was, would not go away. I could not pretend that it had not happened. I was unable to remember that morning save for two detailed things. My first visitor that Sunday morning had been my daughter’s friend Edward Behrens, later to be the Italian Renaissance figure at the foot of the bed in A & E. We had discussed the mushrooming scene in Anna Karenina, the moment when Tolstoy says that you could almost hear the grass growing, and describes a blade of grass that has pierced its way through a grey-green leaf of, I think, aspen. I said that I wanted to learn Russian and we discussed audio systems of teaching oneself a language. I suspected that I would be too passive to compensate for the absence of a teacher. Something was wrong that morning and
I sent Behr on his way. It was a sunny day in Chelsea. He was off to lunch with friends. I felt as though the inside of my body were heating up and going to split my skin. I was afraid that I might be sick or worse in front of this clean young man who has been so good to me over these blind years.

  The next thing I remember is that my god-daughter Flora appeared in the dark of the hall at that flat. Its lighting was faint, its mood brown. The hall featured several subfusc contemporary oil paintings of Italian street scenes and a large bronze sculpture of a multiple demonic head that cast a horned shadow. When Flora arrived, over six foot two and thin as grasses in wind, she stood in the light of the front door and I saw her in the kind of intense detail that came to me often when I was very drunk and that was one of the reasons why I continued to explain my drinking to myself–that crack of clear high vision before passing out. It felt a bit like some kind of love, or doting.

  I saw Flora heightened, as even more porelessly exquisite than her genes and mien have made her. She might have been the last thing I ever saw. For all she knew, she was. I scared her terribly. My last mortal sight before the new, fitting, world was a young woman of disproportionate height and slenderness in the lace and pinny of a Victorian child, complete with bloomers and smock. Below this stretched her long white legs, ending with ballet pumps. Her chiselled pale blonde head is perhaps a ninth of the length of the rest of her. Her hands waved like white cloth under water. She looks at the world through specs. God knows what she saw.

  And then, for me, nothing. For poor Flora, panic and telephone calls, chasing to ground diverse family members, keys, messages, toothbrush, the intimate chores of sudden event. We get no rehearsal. She did it all with the kind of competence that can come only naturally.