My machine for listening to talking books hasn’t yet arrived, so I was reduced to my own company. I tried to practise the emptying of mind–known trickily as ‘mindfulness’–that many doctors and their professional substrates have recommended. It’s easier here than in London. I listened to the water rushing together, the stream below the lawns, the rain, the burns in spate that could only just not be heard at the edge of my consciousness. I like to listen to what isn’t stated. It’s one of the great pleasures of reading.
Katie has just come in to where I am working. She starts in the office at 8.30, does her email and her mail (when there’s been a boat) and does what the day asks of her, from ironing sixty sheets and walking dogs to double-entry bookkeeping and arguing with the state about heating for pensioners or school meals for the island’s nine schoolchildren.
She comes, it seems, sideways on into a room. This is what it looks like because she is narrow and stands with her head on one side. She is still but hardly ever at rest. She carries her knife on its lanyard around her waist. Her plait is silvering. She is going out into the garden to cut white flowers for the funeral, but, she enquires, do I think that colour would be disrespectful? The red and pink rhododendrons are at their best now.
We agree that green and white, and blue and purple, if she can find any, should form the mass of flowers that she will leave at the church for the ladies of the family bereaved to set about it as they wish. Bluebells are the right colour, we decide, but they are not sufficiently respectful. They are the juicy flowers of childhood, abundant, scented, profligate and wild. They do not look like trouble taken when they are massed, and they are at their massed best when left alone to smoke up a wood with their heavy blue.
There is a jar of bluebells on my dressing table, put there by Katie’s son and his Iranian fiancée. He is a boy and doesn’t read the language of flowers. She, being Persian, like my younger son and his father, well understands some languages beyond the spoken, of which she has English, Arabic and a little Farsi. She knows the good luck in a mango, the transportable nourishment in a coconut, the relation of sugar to good words.
The men on Colonsay leave a funeral halfway through for the committal of the body to the earth. A dram of whisky for each man is passed around, and a bit of cheese.
The women remain in the kirk and weep.
Chapter 3: Milk Money
A book containing some of Chekhov’s plays arrived here on the boat last night. It came from a dealer in New South Wales. I hadn’t seen when I was buying it online that it was on the other side of the world. I was interested by the translation and the edition. Reassuringly, the edition at least is a properly Chekhovian disappointment. How can I have missed that the reason for the rock-bottom price was that the publisher is something called The Franklin Library, at the Franklin Center, Pennsylvania? The translation is by Elisaveta Fen, and copyrighted to her in 1951 and 1954. The edition is copyrighted to the Franklin Mint Corporation.
Do you remember the Franklin Mint? Do they still exist? I think that I once actually did write advertising copy for them, or have I invented that? Certainly I have not invented that they specialised in ‘Collectables’, ranging from themed thimbles with an ornamental display unit to show them off to best advantage, and poseable figurines of the late Diana Spencer in occasionwear with fully styleable ‘natural’ hair. In the early days of Sunday colour supplements, I enjoyed playing with the sorts of advertisement the slippy magazines carried on their back page. It was only in these ads that I ever did read the actual word ‘Skivertex’.
My father and I would ask one another, in a special advertising voice, ‘Have you ever longed to caress a book?’ This was the headline of a certain ad that offered classics of world literature for now and for all time in luxurious gold-tooled Skiblon, duchess green or cardinal red. I was absorbed by parallel idioms and by what you could do with words, and how words caught you out and showed you up, tickled you and took you in or left you out.
This not merely indoor but interior habit was not interpretable as much other than showing-off and time-wasting by my poor stepmother, who preferred her jokes less silly and whose ratio of meaning to word is a clear one-to-one. She was right to be suspicious of me. She thought I was a liar but actually I was something less direct: an ambiguity obsessive.
She was right that I was having a stab at making a shared world with my father, in the language we both spoke, but, to his matrimonial credit, he soon ceased to meet me on those borders and one sort of atmosphere lifted. While I love Greek and Latin, he never thought me much good at them and couldn’t understand why I had not a grip on Greek accents. In the ‘girls’ Greek’ taught at that time, accents were not included.
My stepmother to this day speaks a pure English that delighted him. English is a corrupt old tongue but in her words, spoken and written, it says what it means like a tread of precise hemming settling a margin of cloth. I listen to her talk with pleasure, and, freed from hot adolescence and respectful of her long widowhood, I realise that her speech must have been to him both a relief from his own subtlety and a line to clarity at an obscure time.
There is a line of thought that maintains that all writers of fiction are liars because they make things up. This coincides frequently with the other line of thought, which also thinks itself interestingly robust, that it is women who read fiction. And, moreover, that they do so to escape.
Proper fiction tells the truth by a means that, far from producing pain as untruth does, gives pleasure; this doesn’t mean that it fails to reproduce or convey pain. The transformative element is not lies but art. Human truth is caught in translation, such that we may briefly be as close to not being ourselves while we read as we shall ever be. It’s not a promise, but there is always the promise of a promise.
As for women reading escapist fiction, why would women wish to escape, if not from a nonsense world of material fact and of drudgery that is there, often, to free men?
And here I am in the autumn of my days, privileged at last to caress a book, gold-tooled for my handling pleasure, though the hide-type spine is not duchess green nor cardinal red but buckram brown.
Still, the book, whatever the cover, held its transmissible voltage. I am, of course, in a flat that has been made from the nursery bedrooms of a beloved old house in which a number of generations have lived. I’ve never known a time when things were at all fat on the estate. Twice at least in my time of being almost in the family it has been put on the market. Most of the children’s lives are formed by the place. William, who was an art dealer, makes his living from chopping down trees, carrying coal and emptying dustbins. The sound of an axe is rarely far off from the house. He walks around with an axe as easily as with a book.
It is May. In the walled garden lies a cold dew between the fruit trees.
I held open my eyes on this chilly early morning in May where outside the many greens under the cold wind are shivery with blossom and read the opening of The Cherry Orchard:
ACT ONE
A room, which used to be the children’s bedroom and is still referred to as the nursery. There are several doors: one of them leads into Anya’s room. It is early morning: the sun is just coming up. The windows of the room are shut, but through them the cherry trees can be seen in blossom. It is May, but in the orchard there is morning frost.
The last play I saw in the company of my mother was The Cherry Orchard. I had forgotten this till now, or so I think. I must I suppose have remembered it every time I’ve read the play since then, or when it’s been mentioned. I’ve not seen it again, which is a bit peculiar. At that first, that only, visit, I was painfully bored until the end, when I couldn’t bear it to stop in the way it did. Perhaps that’s what they mean when they say Chekhov is like life? Unbearably boring, then you don’t want it over with. Or, please, not like that. Boring isn’t the word, is it? The word is…like life.
Not ‘lifelike’. Which is for inanimate things that imitate life. The plays of Chekho
v breathe. They summon life. They are…like life.
After she died the first play I was taken to was the Alcestis of Euripides. It was in English. Alcestis, Queen of Thessaly, vows to die in the place of her king, Admetus. Admetus, aghast with grief, nevertheless proves a noble and generous host to the man-god Heracles when he visits. In acknowledgement of this, Heracles descends to Hades, wrestles Death, and returns with a veiled woman whom the King will entertain in his halls only as a courtesy to his guest. Heracles persuades Admetus entirely against his will and protesting to lead the woman to his own chambers–and the woman turns out to be his dead queen, whose absence had made the palace a grave, restored to him.
Perhaps it was a consolation. Given my parents’ milieu it may even have been a consolation that had been dreamed up. For which I thank any of them who survive, who may read this. I know I enjoyed it though Queen Alcestis herself was too short to convince in her part as my mother.
Art did some of its work then. I thought of this theatre outing with shame when my younger son and I went to Britten’s Rape of Lucretia together. Better at seeing into life at twelve than I at any age, he sat holding my hand in the airy Maltings at Snape in Suffolk. We were there in the company of Mark Fisher. It does not do to think that we will not pass on to those we love pain that we have ourselves sustained. So many kinds of blindness are involved in love that can in its turn bedizen us with sugared illusions.
We watched Tarquin sucking up to Lucretia, making his case in frontal fashion, warrior without and weasel not far within, and we watched her piteous shame. My father’s deep attachment to the work of Britten and his taste for the composer’s summoning of pity and fear without grandiosity has come straight down to me and Minoo.
It was as much the fault of the woman’s vanity, the music made it plain. Yet Minoo never let my hand go. He is a realist and a natural writer who saw it all before I did, and waited, a seasoned reader of Greek, accents and all, for the consequences of the actions and inactions that might have made his life unrecognisable to him, had he not decided that, being life, it was to be royally respected and stuffed with jokes. And taken at an angle when it was sore.
It is my lunch hour in my nursery-study on the Isle of Colonsay. The reason why I cannot hear an axe is that William is in church for the funeral. I decided that I should not go because although I knew the dead man I look so odd at the moment that I might be a distraction. Then I wondered if that was not vain. Where is the proper place to be? In church, I suspect, now the funeral is under way. What does it matter that I bore myself explaining why my face is screwed up and I am twice the size I was as a girl? No one is looking and probably the ideal place to be to avoid explanation is here, where all is known anyway. You don’t keep a secret long on an island with 120 souls.
I allow myself to listen to the radio during my lunch hour. I switched it on and there came the sigh and rush sound of an amplified seashell. ‘Ah,’ I thought, ‘that’s interference. The reception is bad here.’
It wasn’t. It was applause. A different kind of reception. It can be hard to tell what’s what in the world of sounds as well as in the world of seeing.
I had a short blast of sight earlier and looked out on the pair of tall cedars I seem always to have known. There are in fact three of them.
After my time in hospital that was in order to observe and catch me should I have another fit, I was allowed home. None of us knew what had happened. During the preceding two years, several highly qualified neurologists and neurosurgeons had taken a squint at my brain and its nervous system. A neuropsychiatrist of penetrating if iterative intelligence had reminded me weekly in a slow crisp intelligent manner of the inception and progress of my complaint, at the price of a…I can’t actually think of anything that costs as much as private medicine at those reaches of obscurity. And there was no one in the National Health, apparently, who could address my brain’s particular problem of function after the failure of botulinum toxin injections.
I have thought of a measure of cost. During my years of reclusion and then of blindness, I reverted to stereotype. Female novelists are caricatured as troubled, often overweight beings accompanied by at least one cat. As readers may remember, I had two, by the time of the fit, a Blue Russian cat called Rita and a creamy soft British cat with lilac edges and a butch glare, whose name was Ormiston, a name given to male McWilliams for hundreds of years.
If you don’t like cats, skip this paragraph. Rita came to us when our first Russian cat Sigismond was run over. She is his sister. Her first owners had not been able to care for her and her second owners became allergic. She is nervy, possessive, controlling, man-mad and clever, a bossy animal devoted to Parmesan and small warm places. Her eyes are green with a turquoise depth and she has the incomparable limbs and head of a Russian. Her middle is soft. Ormiston’s breed is meant neither to be fluffy nor intelligent. In both regards he failed, if it is a failure to be fluffy and clever. He showed from a kitten, when he was the size of a meringue with whipped cream, preposterous bravery, devotion, ball skills and single-mindedness. Prawns and human love have been his areas of study. Between the cats lay the vexed questions of all shared private lives, power and influence. Our family divided just about fairly around the cats, my older son keeping a good balance by liking neither. These animals, who comforted my nights and conversed with me through the days, who knew my goings out and my comings in, who petted me and fed my need for contact, who were the differences between the often sluggish days, cost £350 each. It is a great deal of money, but one visit to the doctor who recapitulated to me each week my illness’s symptoms and progress was two cats per hour or every part thereof.
Not one cat, or part of a cat for a part of an hour, two full cats.
Not that sight isn’t priceless, but I was being prescribed drugs. These drugs came to about two cats a month. I saw, or attended, in addition, during that time, at least two other doctors per week, at a combined cost of two cats. The cats added up.
By the time of my fit, I was ingesting multiple high doses of venlafaxine, mirtazapine, levetiracetam, and had been through exceedingly high doses of citalopram and lamotrigine. Zopiclone had wended its powerfully stupefying way among them like a thug whom you fancy. I’d abandoned beta-blockers because they scared me. I preferred the panic they were meant to stop to the nasty medicinal panic they created.
The drugs bothered the children. A number of these drugs are powerful antidepressants. When first I was blind, no one suggested that I was depressed. I was not happy, but my circumstances had been peculiar for years, and now I seemed to have gone blind. Happi ness of any marked sort at such a time might have been surprising. After I was first put on these drugs, with the primary purpose always being that they might in sufficient doses cause my brain to release my closed eyes, it was opined that I was indeed by now depressed. I was still sad, maybe sadder, but all my own observation of depressed people, and I have had a good deal of it, told me that I wasn’t depressed as they had been. I was, since becoming sober, never unable to create a pretext to enter the day. I could spur myself yet.
However, the insistence was by then that, having taken so many antidepressants, I was depressed. I was taking sufficient antidepressants to cheer up a cow by the time I fell down thwack in a grand mal fit in that shaded summer last year, just after speaking my first book for more than ten years.
After the fit, the children arranged a rota. They, or their friends, babysat me for a time, day and night. The cats and I loved it, when we were conscious. I couldn’t any longer recognise myself, even from within.
I’d grown used to my swollen and unfamiliar body, but now my mind was loosening and, it seemed, hardening too. I was returned to the same thoughts with a repetitiveness that grew tighter and tighter. I couldn’t challenge my own poisonous logic as ably as I once had. I had aged suddenly, become a dead weight on those I cared for, a bore, ugly, terrified and alone; and I deserved it.
Perhaps the antidepressants had at last
, as one doctor hazarded, summoned their customary foe. During these sweaty nights I longed for the unabridged In Search of Lost Time but listened over twenty-five times to the Naxos abridged version, read by Neville Jason. I have now, by May 2009, heard it thirty-seven times. At the end of the last uninterrupted run, I turned to War and Peace, unabridged this time. It too is read by Neville Jason. Not one of the voices he does for each character in either book is the same as any other. I cannot sufficiently thank this stupendous actor and enthusiast. I hope he already has the Légion d’honneur. By abandoning myself one at a time to the sentences of Proust, albeit translated, I saw off zopiclone, even if I did not see off nightmares. The cats came and went happily in the garden of the borrowed flat. Rita lay on the hot terrace under the olive tree and Ormy fuzzed around under the spilling hostas and catmint playing ping-pong with bumblebees. From time to time he tried to kiss Rita, holding her precise head in his feathery paws, but she cuffed him. Early in the mornings, between five and five-thirty, he would come to me. The drugs made me sweat heavily. Sometimes it was tears, sometimes it was sweat, but my cat Ormiston made as though to pat my face dry with his front paws. He held his claws quite in, and laid his pads on my eyes.
In July the builders were to arrive. They wanted to work over the whole place. They started the day prompt at six-thirty. They were drilling out a whole new basement room. Every bit of rubbish, masonry or earth or mortar, plaster or lath, had to be carried back through the building in sacks and into a lorry for deposit at a yard. Hundreds of designated sacks were filled and hoisted daily. One can only hope that the fate of these sacks of building materials was something less sad than to be tipped into the sea between islands as a metaphor for loss, like those daily sackfuls of cement on Colonsay.
What to Look for in Winter Page 33