Chapter 10: Silver Wadding and the Smell of Remorse
I became conscious of death as a thing that trembled around us, my parents and me, in the air, as soon as I came to the sort of conscious thought that I can recall, so around three or four years old. Death sent its messengers, as it does to small children: among them dead animals in gutters, flat mice, soggy poisoned rats in the area, the hopeless nestlings my mother rescued, the shrew in her cardigan pocket that she could not revive, with its nose like a tube, dying rabbits on country walks, the shocking deaths of the zoo animals for which my mother felt so misshapenly, inappropriately, much.
The wallpaper in my nursery held in its pattern the family whom I called the Cauliflowers who brought death with them. They bulked into the nightmares that seemed to reach me from day into sleep as I lay trying to construe its pattern.
Burglars came into the house and left you dead, the life sucked from you into them through their faces that were masked but for the mouth. I saw burglars very clearly in my mind as silent monochromatic breachers of safety. I felt about them as some people feel about cats, that they understood only their own advantage and moved selfishly in silence around and through the world they wanted to depredate; the words ‘cat burglar’ and ‘footpad’ confirmed this fear.
I cannot remember when I didn’t know that my father was liable to fall down dead at any point from his dicey heart. I first met him when he was twenty-seven, thin, prone to a racking cough, a heavy smoker; I cannot recall at any time in our interrupted acquaintance (I love him deeply to this day, more than twenty years after his death, but we had the most formal of contact) not being anxious for my father. I listened for his breath, which was loud yet erratic in his thin chest, especially when he was writing, drawing or smoking. Mostly he was doing at least two of those at once.
I knew very early on that I would myself die. I was hoping that I could buy life for at least one of my parents, by getting my own dying over with; I had this concept caught by the age of five, when, I’m ashamed to say, because it is blasphemous, vainglorious and self-dramatising, I dreamed I redeemed my parents through crucifixion on the wall bars of the school gym. I certainly wasn’t cut out for any more conventional wall bar exercises.
My mother also felt to me imperilled. This was to do with her closeness to me and her failure to hide things from me, for which I am grateful to her. She told me for example, that she loved my father. That she told me this on the day before she was no more does not empty it of a meaning that I can utilise to reflect back into the marriage, although memory also suggests that, while it wasn’t a very happy marriage, they knew great happiness at some point in and with one another.
I do not think that happiness came into it much at that time. There were other things that life was for. Certainly, you did not set out to find happiness. I don’t think that that was untypical. The explicit tracking down of happiness through marriage or indeed otherwise was not so much to the fore. Satisfaction, achievement, things seen or heard or done, rooms warmed, socks darned, were proper aims. I suspect that my mother had an almost overmastering capacity for happiness that unsettled people and made her electric, both attractive and repellent. My father not. Or rather, not with my mother, not on our watch. I think he was happy in his second family and marriage.
My father, unlike my mother, was not a soul completed by an emotion or a mood. He was completed by a thing well done or a passage of visual or auditory proportion. He closed himself off against mood, which may be why my mother thought him distant and so glamorous, at once drawn by this sealedness and unknowingly encouraging him to evaporate into thought or execution.
I thought that she was going to die because I liked her so much. Then she did. I’m not sure if that left me thinking that love from me might be fatal.
Can I really never have had that thought until this moment, when I type it blind, released into these paragraphs of truth-telling by two things in the night here on Colonsay? I shall come to them, as I must try not to flinch politely away from whatever dark moth it is I am circling with my net around the prone form of my mother, on her front in a knitted green day-dress on my bed in my mushroom-grey brocade wallpapered nursery.
My mother attracted moths and butterflies. If she did not literally do so, there were more of them around in those days, and she drew my attention to them unerringly. I think of my mother with her long hair held back in a scarf or with cat’s-eye sunglasses, holding out a brown and orange butterfly to let it go back to land as we crossed over on the ferry to the Isle of Arran. I think of her saving gold heavy-bodied dusty moths from hot light bulbs at night, lamenting the moths’ short lives.
She did her hair at the open window of their bedroom and butterflies came to her sticky newly lacquered fair fine hair and danced around her head in its staticky mist. I can see her as a healer of race-horses or an animal shrink, or an unemployed white witch. For sure, she drew familiars to herself. She was a hopeless teacher because she did things almost entirely by instinct, while my father was a splendid one, having clarity of intellect and fully trained consciousness of how our, and several other languages, had come about and what differentiated line. She would have been a marvellous…well…
My experience of her indicates that what she would have been pre-eminently, whatever job she took, is a marvellous mother. As in, a mother who provides marvels and who transmits the marvel in things.
I was reviewing her talents and atmosphere as I wrote, and it came to me without words, the sense of her kitchen and her small garden in our street, of the entertaining that she did with not much more than a cauliflower and some cheese and her stapled blue and white china bowls from junk shops. What she had was the presiding touch. Not much confidence, and less of it as her marriage progressed and she failed to live up to her mother-in-law, or to get jobs in shops, which as I recall is what she felt qualified to apply for.
Not much confidence, no, but many wasted gifts that did not yet at that time have a name, and not at all in the conventional Edinburgh of her short married life. She might be surprised to see that people pay nowadays for the things she did by nature: listening, amusing, seeing to the heart, making rooms feel whole, tracking down and reviving unloved objects, creatures, people.
My mother made jars of pink jelly that shone gold at their centre from the tart orange fruit of the rowans by the railway sidings along from the dog-racing stadium. She labelled the rowan-jelly jars with drawings of the Scottish kings (the rowan tree is the royal badge of Scotland). She made elderflower cordial with the powdery blossoms from the cemetery, after she had shaken them over muslin to spare the small flies therein a sugary death. My mother did two things or more at once and took account of other things all along, so that her life was in ribbons, but they were bright, if, by the end, pale.
It might have been enough for her to have been a wife, had her husband been at home, had he been a farmer or a farrier or something other than a man resident within his mind or else out of the house. She should have had a practical world to inhabit. Instead, and fortunes have in our time been built on such a thing (think of Cath Kidston), she made a fantasy of domesticity that was probably not to the taste of her husband, though it is a frail but vividly living thing for her daughter to handle in prose, when it would be best in transmission through re-enactment. It beats me where she got it from, this bee-loud domestic engine, as her mother could not endure anything that was unlike the neighbours’ way of life for fear, I suppose, that her origins be revealed, and her father liked his experience unvarying from day to day, shares, golf, more shares, meals, no talk, televised boxing.
Well, that is where she got it from, naturally. She was reflexive.
My mother, were the thought not transgressive, I think is the fashionable term, might have been a good wife to such a man as my first husband. I was awfully aware, when we married, that she would have been jealous of me, marrying a handsome man who understood horses, shared many of her inborn traits such as instinctive co
nservatism and innate faith, and who would have sheltered her gifts with pride. She would have adorned his world and been a good charity committee person, painting and gardening and sitting on the bench, mixing her magical attributes with her commonsensical ones, enjoying his authoritative capacities. My father would not exert authority unless he was forced to. His socialism and his classicism were each so pure that he simply could not allow for human weakness; he thought that in an ideal world people were likely to behave well, which meant modestly, unselfishly, according to principle and proportion. My mother’s humours did not accord with this conviction, requiring attention and explanation, in for which he did not go. It was his fortune later on to marry someone whose own disciplined upbringing supported him. I can offer to my mother’s shade the certainty that in his older daughter my first husband shelters aspects of her grandmother, my mother. Her way of being is in part in harbour now.
It comes to me that amid the stuttering mental pain of her last months, she did go frequently to organise things for the Scottish Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children. I was baffled by this because she would dash to her friend Kitty’s house, where the meetings took place, or to Mrs Ross-Skinner, and I would catch the drift of her errand as her basket and her scarf and her scent flew ahead of me down the windy street–that she was on her way to do ‘cruelty to children’.
I could have believed it, with the bit of me that she slapped and shouted at, but I didn’t, since, though I did fear her temper, I far more feared my father’s, that held in it distaste. And I knew that I was an abnormally fearful child and that this was not a popular way to be and made me suspect among certain of my friends’ parents.
I can’t remember whether I approached death with the same sidling fascination as I approached the sexual. My own relationship with death was almost consoling. It was part of me, not something against which I made myself. That is, I was afraid of it, but I was used to being afraid of it, and when it came it was in each case not welcome, not a relief, but a thing that in that particular instance could never quite be repeated, each death being congruent in nothing but its nothingness–but peremptorily different in shape of loss.
The two events of the rainy night in Colonsay are as follows. I dined with my not-brother Alexander and his family, his wife and son of fourteen, daughter of twelve. The willowy young people sat at the table, as some of the adults present wrangled noisily about the pre-existence of mind. The twelve-year-old retired to bed. The fourteen-year-old sat quietly, listened, took the shouty opinions, considered them, analysed them, cut them down to size and presented them back to us all, well groomed, but not thornless. He held his own soberly over the happily vinous table for about ten pleasurable minutes in the candlelight. It is particularly happy to watch the face of someone whom you have seen since babyhood and of whose parents you are fond. I held my forehead right up throughout the evening in order to watch the two children and their mother and father.
At four o’clock this morning, a helicopter took that boy to a cardiac unit on the Scottish mainland, where he presently is with his mother, while his father and sister are here on the island in the stair-rod rain. Nobody is over-reacting. The mode of this family in crisis is decidedly calm. But, while this had been going on, I was lying in bed thinking about all our ends, almost conversationally, while my cheap pink CD player relayed in the hush the speaking voice of a friend, reading his most recent book, that is, among other things a disquisition upon mortality.
‘Whenever the moon and stars are set,
Whenever the wind is high,
All night long in the dark and wet,
A man goes riding by’
the rain was saying, completely reassuringly.
‘Late in the night when the fires are out,
Why does he gallop and gallop about,
Whenever the trees are crying aloud,
And ships are tossed at sea’,
said the rain and the wind against my bedroom shutters, while I listened to my friend’s voice and was for a good part of the night less afraid than I have been for weeks, on account of the reassuring family supper; two of whose protagonists were during those same hours in another part of the house, praying for regularity to return to a beloved, faltering, human heart.
The last lines of Robert Louis Stevenson’s poem, which has been one of my lifelong sleep-charms, read first to me by a parent, brings something more frightening into focus. The lovely hoofed clatter of the lines returns insistently as a firmer knock altogether. Is the night rider someone more threatening than a highwayman?
By, on the highway, low and loud,
By at the gallop goes he.
By at the gallop he goes, and then,
By he comes back at the gallop again.
Deacon Brodie was the famous Edinburgh highwayman, a minister by day and a robber by night, robbing the rich to succour his poor. He died on a gibbet of his own devising. Miss Jean Brodie is, as she explains, his descendant. Each of them is meting out a certain sort of justice and living out that famous Scottish doubledness, in order to shake things up. The pub named for the Deacon, on the Royal Mile in Edinburgh, had a sign that used to haunt me when I was small, and that has supplied one face of my fears to this day. The deacon is masked, up close, his eyes seen through holes in a tight band of cloth.
With one of the earliest book tokens I was given aged about six, I bought, on my own, operating under some compulsion to look at what struck fear into me, an American paperback of A Journal of the Plague Year by Daniel Defoe, precisely because its cover bore a depiction of a face looking through a white mask of cloth. It was a good read for the child I was too, as it happens, full of herbs and philtres against death.
Aged ten, I read both Aldous Huxley’s The Devils of Loudun and a sort of shocker called The Nun of Monza, because they had covers that featured burning eyes staring through holes in otherwise anonymous masks of cloth. I cannot suppress fear at such spirit-extinguishing masks and my dreams employ extras in the tall pointed headwear of Ku Klux Klan or of Inquisition, hoods down over faces like snuffers over candle flames. I cannot bear large groups, in film or in life, of undifferentiated beings without faces. Orcs are perhaps are the worst, but wasps are bad, though I was ashamed to learn from the diaries of Simon Gray that wasps have specific jobs and roles in the wasp world and establish committed domestic loyalties. He learned this when he and his wife called in the pest control officer, who was a fond amateur of the creatures he was paid to exterminate, a relationship gamekeepers will find familiar.
Nothing more undoing to the tender heart than a glimpse of the exterminee’s home life.
Or so you might have hoped had people themselves, once the numbers are large enough, not disproved this.
The sky in the Western Isles moves from dark to light to dark with flashy effect upon mood. It’s as enlivening as strobe lights, disconcerting, choppy, dashing. The sun is forever stripping right down to pure light and then bundling all its grey shawls on again. Today has delivered three dousings of rain from a black sky, several seemingly tented interludes of white sun from a white sky, and one golden bolt out of the blue that came down to earth with a pennant of tight respective strips of rainbow, only loosening into pallid pink green blue violet rayed haze when the next rain, as it had to, came. I feel the weather on my back as I work by the open window and I feel it over my own shawled eyelids.
In one of these gaps of light over dark, Alexander has set off in his little aeroplane towards the mainland with his daughter. He’s taken a packed lunch on the plane for when they all meet up in hospital in Glasgow. He gets into the air, and sometimes, if things are jaunty and he feels like it, he tips his wing at whichever members of his family he’s leaving behind.
I never saw this gesture in war, of course, but have seen it in countless films. It is hard not to get a lump in the throat, the tall man and the small machine.
Two writer friends, Janice Galloway and Julian Barnes, have recently written autobio
graphical works that stressed they were not autobiographies, each emphasising in its title a word of negation, even, denial. It’s the intelligent way. It’s the only remotely truthful way; all ambiguity in that phrase fully loaded and intentional. Her This Is Not About Me and his Nothing to Be Frightened Of both deployed to the full their very different powers of negative capability. Her book was nicotinous with slanted, smoking recall, the underskirt under the skirt, while his boned out to its full pit-haunted beauty the typical cleverness of that title. You cannot deflect his eye from the heart of his matter.
It is indeed nothing itself of which we should be frightened.
This book is among his most imaginative work. Apparently conversational, certainly lively, it is nevertheless made of prose so very clean, so deadly serious in intent, that it should hold out longer than bronze, prose that, its author knows, will, naturally, not so last.
These books are under-books, if I may make up a term for the works that form first as clouds then distil then fall during the life of a writer, who is making, or thinks he or she is making, quite other works. They are what else is going on.
The trouble with writing any book at all, though, is that it will produce its under-book, so the process is, by definition, an endless one. During the writing of fiction, this can be a beneficent, even invigorating, force. The shape of the next book consolidates beneath the one you are extracting from the waters. Reasonable enough to object that I can’t have much experience of this, as I’ve not written a novel for so long, but that does not mean they haven’t been circling me, and showing their backs up through the deep.
What to Look for in Winter Page 41