What to Look for in Winter

by Candia McWilliam

  As a by-product of a memoir already written, the notion of the under-book leads to the sort of puzzle that is by turns a charming and a terrifying idea, one that first took hold in me when I saw in a doll’s house a doll’s house that contained a doll’s house. I think that this realisation of infinite contained diminution comes to every child in one collapsed flash at around the age of three. It then returns, complicating and developing itself, over all the coming years as they pull themselves out of what looked like just the one vessel, but is actually a telescope, diminishing but not terminating–until it does.

  My experience of Russian dolls was later, when I was about four, and somehow less interesting, because so well defined, the big capacious hollow doll on the outside, the little solid doll in one piece at the end of the, not actually in detail identical, row. The idea of the infinitude of entities fills the mind much more crammingly than its embodiment in wood and varnish dolls.

  I saw the idea animated out at sea off the northernmost point of Colonsay. I mentioned the sight before in my spoken memoir, and round it has come again; it is what lies beneath, coming up each time from further below.

  In engravings of sea battles, you may sometimes see in the corner, near the compass rose or churning against a fleet in order of battle, big-mouthed fish swallowing fish swallowing fish swallowing fish right down to sprats, and, it may be imagined, to fish too small to be drawn, smaller than a water drop, a single egg this size.

  We were mackerel fishing in a clinker-built boat, adults and children, dipping and shaking darrows with metal and rubber lures at intervals along the simple line. The sea was neatly choppy, then stood still like setting jelly.

  A breath was taken, somewhere. There began a sequence too remorseless to have been organised by anything but nature. From the sea dimpled a cloud of million upon million tiny fish the size of escaped swarming semicolons from this page, full-stop eyes and transparent comma tail. Next came the fish the length of little sentences, strips in the air, many more. Behind them and pulling some sea up with them came the flock of good-sized pollock, about a paperback long, soft and floppy and innumerable, followed by the vigorous black-printed hard-backed spines of the mackerel themselves, purposeful, rigid, silvery in flight, determined to avoid whatever it was by leaving their element. Some even fell into the boat they braved in their great print-run of collaborative fright.

  In its own time, the basking shark surfaced, voluminous, dark, impossible to read, never seen entire until finished, forming and pressing aside the waters from its back, as slow as the last word, holding time up; as the small fry before it had splintered time into fraught literal quickness.

  Our own amateur dipping into that sea for a few fish to clean and split, to dip in oatmeal and place in butter in a pan, was shown up as the interruption we humans are to what is actually always going on.

  After that easier time in February of this year staying with Fram and Claudia in Oxford, I understood that habituation was what I must use to drive out habit, and that, were I to be confronted with the reality of their life together, I would not be able to cleave so dearly to some trapping notion of their life’s perfected surface. Not that their life is any less happy than I imagine it, but instead of being as far from it as I can arrange to be and thinking of nothing but it, I can try although I am blind, to see it in truth.

  It is not so dreadful not to be loved as it is not to feel able to give love: ‘Let the more loving one be me.’ It was the thing I could do, and somehow I have so scared myself as to feel that even the love I give, that came so easily, to my children, has been chilled by my shutting myself out in the cold.

  I’m running out of things to lose and therefore find myself, to my shame, with rather less to give. It happened more suddenly than I had reckoned with. I think that it must be like that for everybody. It’s always too soon.

  The weekend after I had spent quite a time in Oxford with them, Claudia invited me to stay again. Toby again cooked a roast with vegetables from his allotment and an aunt of Claudia’s was staying. Claudia has many aunts. There are many parts for women in her family drama.

  The oven hadn’t been cleaned for a bit, so there was a smell of cooking. Fram is exigent about smells; they lighten or darken his mood. He was once angry when I made popcorn before Steven Runciman came to lunch at our flat in Oxford. The great student of the patriarchate of Constantinople was then in his late nineties. The air in the flat where we lived was blue with popped kernels and burnt corn oil, a seedy sort of hecatomb. Why did popcorn suggest itself as an appropriate snack?

  That Friday evening in Oxford decades later by now in our own lives, Fram was scratchy, though the supper was delicious. I wondered whether it was all a put-up job, Claudia being so considerate of my feelings that she arranged to rile Fram to show me that their relationship isn’t perfect. Or the two of them setting it up, with Toby, spreading carbonised fat on the innards of the stove. Or…these are the tergiversations of my obsession in all its banality.

  The evening passed happily, robustly, confidentially. I didn’t cry that much in bed after we had said goodnight and I managed to do what I do so that I will not howl like a dog, which is to have Proust ready in CD form on the turntable of the CD machine I take with me and put on the pillow next to me if I’m in a double bed. I hold another pillow and lie and listen.

  Sometimes I wake up in the night and remember that I am I and what has gone before and I burn. My eyes stare open at these times, but what’s the point? They aren’t open, like water to light, for reading. They look at the carnage and they sting from the carbon of the burnt-up days and hopes. I burn with remorse. Its name, Remorse, suggests it is a practice form of death, ‘mors’, though its root is not death but the bite that it holds on the spirit.

  No professional associated with the so-called ‘psychological approach’ to my blepharospasm had taken seriously the idea of remorse by this point. Every one of them flinched from any term that implied moral judgement or any system beyond the pragmatic, what you might call, even, the self-centred. How swiftly self has replaced even the sense of social responsibility. There is a free-market psychiatric bias in the establishment.

  Perhaps the most rapacious free marketeer so far has been the hypnotist, famous and by all accounts highly effective, whom I visited just once in the New Year of this year. Her secretary took my credit card number. The waiting room offered the usual macabre trailer for what is to come. As has become familiar to me, magazines are laid out with exaggerated care as though they were learned journals, and loose-leaf files of before-and-after shots of plastic surgery procedures are helpfully disposed on a side table near the artificial flowers, that are periodically refreshed with scented spray by outside contractors. In the winter months, there may be a replacement flower arrangement in carmine and spruce. At Christmas the tree will be equipped with shiny empty presents hanging from the plastic-needled boughs.

  I entered the studio (too creative in arrangement to be called a consulting room) of the renowned hypnotist, and she addressed me, looking at my woven leather handbag that I’d bought from a hippie outlet online. She spoke one word, which will be familiar to fancy shoppers.

  ‘Bottega?’ (Bottega Veneta is a, very expensive, Italian fashion house.)

  No, I said, my bag wasn’t from there.

  She interrogated any of my clothes that were susceptible of such a nakedly undeserved upgrade, and, when I wouldn’t play, she laid me low on a long leather lounger with a sticky bolster for my head. There was an almost fresh towel over it.

  She encouraged me to think of a beach, on which I was lying, maybe in company, ‘feeling great about myself’. I took a beach from my extensive collection, a good cold beach, with pebbles and reeking seaweed. I added litter. I am made itchy by the idea of the hot palm-fringed beaches of the brochures, so in a way I was selecting a more relaxing setting in which to become porous to her trickling syrup.

  She told me that I was right under now and that men preferre
d blonde to grey hair, so I might think of getting my hair highlighted. I was there because I couldn’t see, not because I was looking for Mr Anyone at All. Her own hair, I could not help having noticed, was what advertisers believe all men adore to run their craggy yet strangely sensitive fingers through, teased, red, and full of product. She encouraged me, in a special swooping, supercaring voice that sometimes left her grammar in trouble, to find a secret place within myself where I was ‘very very calm’.

  I’d rather have been reading a book.

  When she started talking in a normal, coarse, ‘real life’ voice again, I sat up and hoped that I could disappear for good.

  ‘It says on your paperwork you are a writer,’ she began. ‘I’ve written a book. Would you mind casting an eye over it? It’s going to be called I’m Alright, so Fuck You.’

  The extraordinary thing is that I didn’t say, ‘I came to you because I cannot see and it is driving me mad.’ I said, ‘Oh, how very interesting. Is it about self-esteem issues?’

  ‘You are very sympathetic, Candida,’ she said. ‘You could be in my line of work.’

  So now I know. I could talk rubbish to desperate people and be paid for it.

  I cancelled the next two sessions (you had to book in batches, such was the demand). The secretary explained in a soothing voice that they would have to keep my deposit for the missed sessions. A hundred per cent. It may indeed be my path on life’s winding yet rewarding journey to utilise my prodigious empathic powers to print money with the sad press of others’ credulity. The book, over which no eye of mine had been cast, emerged, and is a big seller. That’s most likely because I went nowhere near it. Unsympathetic magic.

  The worst of the remorseful nights have been in hospital, where you are more alone for not being alone. You cannot weep. It would be cruel and selfish, among the sick and dying. And if you start to weep, you may start to howl, and call down the shape that is lying in wait for us all in the dark, coming back at the gallop (or jig, or silent tread) again. Always coming back for more.

  The next day, in Oxford after the smoky roast, Fram asked me how to clean an oven. I told him and he bought the materials. Because no one else in the household bothers, he did it, and took pleasure in it. I offered to do it, and with some patience he resisted the temptation to say, ‘You silly bitch, your willingness to clean the ovens of others blind while they pick flowers has got you where you are today.’

  While he cleaned the oven, wearing gloves, with bicarbonate of soda, I cleaned the silver, much of it his parents’, that had lived so tidy–though not tidy enough–a life with us, but a tidy life that had let it down. It was now rubbing along with all kinds of impurities and no one was bleeding.

  I reunited forks with forks, knives with knives, rubbed with silver-polish-impregnated wool, and realised that I was achieving nothing but the temporary cleaning of some silver, and that it was not a metaphor for anything at all.

  If I was cleaning silver, it was just so that the silver might be clean. I had lived my life trying to implement the beautiful ideal of Fram’s subject of study, George Herbert, ‘Who sweeps a room, as for Thy laws, Makes that, and the action, fine’, but I had confused the terms of life and art. I was cleaning a lot of forks that would get dirty again as they should in the ordinary process of life.

  I must not place myself in the category of one whose life is not real, since it is the life that I have.

  I cleaned the bath, here on Colonsay, doing it by feel, with gloves, and a pungent wholesale chemical scouring ointment that suited just fine. It is dangerous to live wholly through others if there is anything at all impure in your nature. I must put myself out into the warm and light, that I am convinced I do not deserve. I lie cold and burning in the drawer where I have stowed myself away like an old knife, blackening and growing self-sharpening as remorse grinds at me, burning away like this in the cold.

  This pain is not even useful.

  I think that I’ve seen it off every time, this shameful pain.

  But it returns.

  It is the sense that I earned my blindness by every lovely thing I saw and my unhappiness by every moment in my life that was good that galls and imprisons me. It is so trite, so dull, so inutile.

  It is cold and the doves are roosting in the garden on this island. Soon it will be dark, or the light that passes for the dark in the North in spring.

  Chapter 11: Pollen and Soot and the Family in the Cupboard

  It is a perfect drying day, blowy, bright. The deep trees and giant rhododendrons over the terraced lawn at the back of the house make coloured walls that swim and fill up all the windows, which are wide open. Although it is Saturday, not a washday, I have washed the sheets and shirts and hung them out.

  Many visitors to Colonsay are keen birdwatchers. The chough with its red beak and legs can be seen up close as a soldier in a sentry box, with just that gap for interspecies respect. The probe-beaked oyster-catcher investigates the strand between Colonsay and Oransay with its prying disdainful notation of the polished tidal sand.

  Last night, sitting in the sun that brought out the Mediterranean smell of the fennel foaming in Katie’s raised herb bed, we heard the scrawp of the corncrake, Crex crex, its Latin name remaking its call, from the field beyond the white rose hedge, ‘Blanc Double de Coubert’, that smells of vanilla, which she made with cuttings from a hedge at a farm in the north of the island.

  On my desk is a withering newspaper cutting. In last week’s Oban Times the regular SermonAudio.com display advertisement carries as its text, ‘Like a bird that strays from its nest is a man who strays from his home.’ As if this were not striking enough to a sinner, or to anyone feeling faintly sad or guilty, the last words of this boxed item are, as they are every week, ‘YOU ARE KNOWN UNTO GOD!’

  God, whose search engine is ineluctable. Can I have been the only consumer (I can hardly say proper reader) of the Oban Times who felt discovered, found out, by these words? Is that the point of these texts in newspapers? Their applicability to everyone vulnerable, much like horoscopes, which are designed to touch all who breathe or love or doubt.

  As soon as sun is reliable, and the wind is low, there is the chance that midges will arrive. So they came. You can hardly see them, even if you can see. The first sign is that you start to twitch like a dog, and flip your paws at your ears and ankles. Midges are nanotechnologists. They reach places that you could not devise for pertinacity, the base of an eyelash, the shadow of a hair, the inner circle of a bra, the far spiral in the secret ear, the tender meat that would be an oyster or the Pope’s nose if you were a cooked chicken.

  Inside the farmhouse, itself still used to being cold after many winter months, Katie lit the stove with kindling, put in logs cut by William from the dark windbreak pines he is steadily thinning, and closed its small iron doors over the flames in the bright daylit room. You grow used to many kinds of weather in one day, in one house. Sometimes there are several weathers at the one time, a different squall or new sunbeam for each face of a house. Weather claps soon against itself, so that an unmixed day of sun or unvarying rain seems to last longer than other days.

  At nine o’clock yesterday evening, I was back at my desk in the big house, which is also table-of-all-work and dining surface, in the old nursery that is now a sitting room. Two hours of light to go, at least. Two arms of yellow dwarf azalea were dying in a dull brass vase with a smell like leaf mast and honey, too good to get rid of, though the flowers are falling in little yellow dabs and flecks down on to the table, where they stick because they are so full of nectar.

  Two of the petals of Meconopsis, the blue Himalayan poppy that loves the island soil and that Katie grew from seed, have fallen from the single plant with its one four-petalled flower that she has given me in its plain pot to have beside me while I work. The fluffy pistil sticks out beyond the ring of stamens whose anthers are golden yellow with pollen, not the sooty ring of black dusty anthers at the centre of most of the poppy family’s flo
wers.

  Like all blue flowers, it looks like an idea. Speedwell, forget-me-not, the blue poppy, the Scottish bluebell (also known as the harebell), chicory, gentian, plumbago; they recall bits of fallen sky.

  The sky that is, we are told, not itself actually blue. Perhaps that is why these flowers are like abstractions.

  As well as being a great novel, The Blue Flower by Penelope Fitzgerald has a most suited and suggestive title, evoking, as it does, the short life and foreshortened love of a philosopher from a northern country, Novalis. A blue flower is the plant badge or emblem of the kind of otherness, natural unattainability, sought in some areas of German Romantic thought.

  All flowers summon a sense of their transience that intensifies their effect upon those susceptible to their spell, plump double flowers or the fleshy hard-wearing flowers to some of us proportionately less so.

  Blue flowers seem ineffably more transient and frail. Fragile is too strong and consonantally pegged down a word for it; these flowers are frail like faded worn cloth or like those patches of sky. They are remote, as though glimpsed. They are slips of things, a hint, like very young people in the one summer when they know they are lovely but do not know the effect of it, or the sea around the next bend, or fresh water between mouth and thirsty throat. They are half-seen. Once you have lived for a certain time, a blue flower makes you at once satisfied and sad.

  You can’t keep it. Even the seemingly robust hyacinth is an emblem of vanished masculine beauty, for the drowned curls of young heroes. If you press a blue flower in your prayer book, its petals turn purple unless your prayers are acid-free.

  The poem ‘Vergissmeinnicht’ by Keith Douglas, who was killed at twenty-four in the Second World War, flowers across borders of notional nationhood with its description of the words in the notebook of a dead young man, in his Gothic German script, telling his girl, Steffi, not to forget him. The myosotis around the door of the church at Balbec are what the enraged Charlus upbraids Marcel for failing to recognise–‘Ne m’oubliez pas!’