This was her year of being wicked. So she described it. All those years, decades, of being good, of being a good wife, no eye or mind or body for anyone else but her husband, but being good as well, and now she is being wicked. Which is why she was in bed with this man.
Being wicked. Another way of putting it is accepting new experiences as they offer. The good person would have said, no, not proper, not a good idea, not right. This one says, I wonder what it would be like? And goes ahead and finds out.
And then writes it down. Transcribes the stories that her life offers as she turns its pages. Maurice Schwob says poets listen to themselves live and sing what they hear. In her case, she said to herself, the singing is for me, nobody else will hear. Or read. She will not publish these stories, her grief and the expression it’s found in making love will remain as secret and as private as the adultery. Which means that she gave them to her lover to read. They delighted him. It was like making love twice, once in the flesh, again as these other people.
But then the wife found out about the adultery, and it stopped.
But there were still the stories. She wrote them and her lover read them. Keep them safe, she said. They are a secret. One day the wife found them and she read them too.
They are love letters to you, says the wife to the husband.
But I am not the person in the stories, he says.
What nonsense.
I am not. They are fictions.
That is special pleading. It’s a lie.
Moreover, the wife does not like the portrayal of herself, and tells the mistress so.
The mistress says that in these stories the wife is not her. The wife has no name. The mistress has a name, but the wife doesn’t. She is left as a kind of lay figure. The mistress could write a story in which she tried to capture the nature of the wife, gave her form and character, but she thinks that would be taking liberties.
You think it’s okay to sleep with my husband, but not make me a fully fleshed character.
That was life. This is art.
Art. It’s not very nice to read all this detail in a story about your husband.
You weren’t supposed to read them. How would you? I was never going to publish them.
But you wrote them.
I’m a writer. That’s what I do.
How could you do such a thing? I don’t mean the writing, I mean the . . . other.
It was meant to be secret. For comfort. And for grief. For a little while. Illicit, not known. It would have stopped and stayed that way. Not known. Not existing any more.
Until he started leaving me.
Ah. I had not thought of that. That was never my idea.
But you went along with it.
I did not think it would happen. And you see it hasn’t.
You’d have been pleased about it.
No. No I wouldn’t. I wouldn’t have known what to do.
Have a nice time. Enjoy yourself.
He’s your husband. I don’t actually want to live with your husband. Different habits.
Sex. It’s some of the best writing you’ve ever done about sex.
Not really.
Pretty explicit.
I’m often that. All my books have sex in them. I put in something you told me once, remember? Making love under the willows by the lake. With that man you nearly left your husband for. I’ve always written about sex. But these are about mourning. About grief.
The other woman looks at her.
It’s hard to explain.
Yes.
But it’s important. It’s the hard things that are important. It’s because it’s hard that I have to try to do it.
And what you’ve ended up with is love letters to my husband.
I think if you look carefully you will see that they are love letters to my husband.
Or so the conversation might go. Something like that. Maybe not so neatly, but that the gist of it. It’s the mistress that’s writing it. Ending up with her saying that she has let go. That’s the phrase she uses. She has let go, stepped back, turned away, and the stories are a way of doing that. The wife is a remarkable woman, and when she has said these things, the various versions of them, chooses to remain friends. The lover wants it, the mistress wants it, she will want it too.
The writer thinks of writing it all down in detail, this working back to the friendship, as a kind of tribute to the wife, and as well it’s a terrific narrative, but decides not to. Decides to leave her the lay figure, not a personality, not a person. This is something of a sacrifice, because the wife has achieved this marvellous degree of unstereotypicality, she would make a good character, but writers cannot always be cannibals. So they tell themselves.
Clare has usually felt strongly irritated by writers who write about being writers. She’s always avoided it herself. Who wants to read about what it is to be a writer writing about being a writer writing about being a writer, like the old Uncle Toby’s oats packets which if you could only squeeze yourself small enough you could walk into forever and make yourself a master of infinite space, only the wrong way round. Infinite smallness. But now her life has begun throwing up stories, they fall around her like pages of a book, and when she picks them up they find their own order.
Ah, but do not underestimate the writer in this; the vasty subconscious that knows what’s going on even if she doesn’t, the imagination that sees how to do it.
The wife is quite clear that the writer ought to stop this writing. But they are what I do, says the writer. She thinks that the wife has the husband to herself in every important way but she has the pleasure of finding words as she wants them. As she wants them, not as they are. The wife has the marriage, she has the stories. Of course these stories are not the wife’s version, or the husband’s, though it is possible that they would be closer to his. If the wife doesn’t like it she can write her own. Except one of the nice things about the wife is that she doesn’t want to be a writer, and since almost everybody else the writer meets does, this is a great charm.
Clare is in a state of nervous excitement over what her life is offering her to think about. A whole lot of things that hadn’t occurred to her before. She’d always known about the pairing of sex and death, from Alfred Deller singing, I weep, I die, I die for love of thee, to Georges Bataille pointing out that after sex the only thing left for people is to die because once they’ve reproduced themselves they’re redundant. But now there’s this discovery of the merging of grief and sex, how the sex doesn’t only comfort the grief, it intensifies it, so she can live in it and desire it. She has learned that grief is like desire, that she needs to feel it as she feels desire. Grief isn’t sadness. Grief is a kind of passion. Pleasure, pain, a whole panoply of experience. A gamut. It is ambiguous, paradoxical, counter-existing. Splendid.
And all these things she has already written in stories.
And now these stories that she always told herself were unpublishable. Because she would not have the wife read them. They were written for herself. And she could show them to the lover, because he shared the secret they were about. Maybe she would put them with her papers in the National Library. When everybody is dead, they could be . . . resurrected may be the word.
But—and here’s the irony, an exquisite one—now the wife has read them and knows the secrets they contain, they are no longer unpublishable. Now the wife has read the stories she has given to their author the possibility of publishing them.
When she wrote her first story ever she didn’t imagine anybody reading it. She wrote it because it was there to be written, a marvellous narrative, that she could form and shape and find her own words for. She gave herself all the freedom she needed in following her imagination. She was thrilled when it was accepted but then when it was published she was astonished by the result. Of course the story, though a construct, a fiction, got its elements quite directly from people and things that had actually happened, first stories usually do, and she was naively shocked to find reader
s observing the connections. She had imagined the story, but not its readers. Not even the man on whom it was based, her old professor; it had never occurred to her that he might read it. That was almost a criminal innocence, she thought, looking back. Not because he might not have liked himself, she thinks he might have been flattered, but because she ought to have foreseen it. Innocence is not always virtue.
When he died, some time later, her words were quoted in his obituary. The archivist from the university he’d worked in rang her up and asked her permission to put it in his files. But it’s fiction, she said, it’s a story. Oh, said the archivist, you put it so well. We all know it’s him.
It had always disturbed her, that response, the obituary, the archives. It was fiction. She’d made up names, events. It was as much about her as it was about him, the ignorant schoolgirly student, it was about her own education. She had offered it to the world as her own narrative. You could draw parallels between it and real people, real events, but you couldn’t say the story was them. If she’d been asked to write an account of her relationship with this man she would have done it quite differently. Marked fact from speculation. Not invented.
It’s not history, she said to the archivist. You can’t let people think it’s history.
Can you hear a shrug at the other end of a phone line? I suppose I could mark it as fiction, if you like, he said. But people know it’s him. You catch him so well.
She wrote another story, a sequel, after the old prof’s death, finishing the narrative of his life, with his suicide, in fact, and it an entirely factual story, no inventions, but discussing her speculation with the reader, wondering what could be known, telling the reader she was imagining him dead in a squalid boarding house with a bag of oranges rotting as the hot summer days passed. The oranges documented in the newspaper report, the rotting her idea. Discussing the way she had turned him into fiction in that long ago first story. Redressing the balance, putting the earlier one in perspective. She’s learned sophistication in her writing, and how to play with narrative forms, how to use her own voice.
Sometimes she writes essays. She knows the difference between a story and the sort of thing that claims to be non-fiction. Take Villette, she says. Villette is a fiction. Maybe you can say that Charlotte Brontë based it on her own falling in love with a professor in Brussels, but you cannot say, It is the story of her life. It has autobiographical elements, but it is not her autobiography.
She is surprised that it should be necessary to keep on spelling out these things.
The other thing she learned from that first story was that a writer writes to be read. This is what she does. The work does not achieve its existence until it has been absorbed by another set of eyes. And of course it is what she has been wanting all along. No matter how much she told herself it was a kind of therapy to get her through a bad time, and that was true at first, she wrote as a gardener might mattock up hard earth, or a confectioner make elaborate cakes or a window cleaner polish glass to invisibility, because that is what you do and when you are unhappy you do what you do with energy and conviction, so maybe you will be tired and forget, but at least you are doing. When being is unbearable. But she’s known for a while that since the only valuable thing a writer can do is find words for things so other people may know them too, so she has wanted her stories to be read. And now they can be.
This is the gift of her lover’s wife.
Once upon a time . . .
There was that time, quite short, when her lover thought that he was going to be able to walk away from a marriage that had ceased to be interesting, to him or his wife, in an amiable, it’s been great, have a nice future, we’ll always be friends sort of way, not denying affection or connection, If she were ill, he said, I would go and nurse her, and it was at this time that Clare, a bit dizzy from the sudden move from sex nicely enclosed in the tight little box of adultery to lifetimes together, said that she would have to wait a year and a day before she could know what would be right for her. The fairytale length of time, the year literal, the day figurative, meaning a year plus a bit more time. From Geoffrey’s death, she meant.
The year and a day was a ceremonial space, for mourning. Something that was owed. The least, you could say.
But it is also necessary as a time for understanding. For coming to terms. All her writing of stories an attempt to achieve that, and she hadn’t yet. Might not have done so, in the potent ceremonial lapse of time. But she certainly hadn’t yet. She was in no fit state.
She suspects a lifetime and a day might not be long enough.
If a good fairy were to come and offer her a wish? Once she’d have said, perfect eyesight, all the time, all my life. Followed by eating as much as she liked and staying slender. But now there is no question. Any offer of a wish, she will choose being unwidowed. She will ask for Geoffrey back. And she wouldn’t be like Swift’s foolish Struldbrugs, organising eternal life but forgetting to mention eternal youth. She’d have him in brilliant health, not necessarily a lot younger, maybe her own age, and in health and vigour for another couple of decades, at least. No point in being modest, with wishes. Firm and clear and spell it out.
Not forever of course. Death eventually is essential. But they could do it together.
But the thing here is, being widowed is so much part of her now, is so important to what she’s become, could she undo it? She certainly doesn’t want to as things stand, it’s hers, it’s priceless, it’s taken enormous work and concentration and anguish to achieve. She likes the clarity it’s given her, the awareness, the insights. Likes having become a harder wickeder more selfish person. Could she go back to being the wife she was?
Oh yes. For Geoffrey she could.
Well, good fairies are not known for being good at putting people back together from ashes. She’s never heard of it. She’s heard of good fairies but only in old books, no recent sightings. That leg which was lost in America, that arm in Africa, so Donne describes not just the resurrecting but the reassembling of the body . . . but it takes the Last Judgment to put those together. It is not Geoffrey who will unwidow her.
Clare is a naturally optimistic kind of person. Her Pollyanna instincts are highly trained. She may be myopic, but is hawk-eyed when it comes to searching out silver linings. No luck so far. The best she can do is consider blue skies rather harsh: clouds may be a comfort, even grey, even indigo. Perhaps a dull pewter colour.
Still, she went on searching her life for positive ideas. There weren’t many. Only one that had any legs at all, as they used to say in her bureaucratic days. And they were pretty tottery. But could be trained to support her, maybe could be walked on, could even manage to dance, one day. That idea was being her own mistress. That was good. Of course being somebody else’s mistress was very nice too. But you could still go on being your own as well as somebody else’s mistress, which might sound like a paradox but could be a given. But being a wife again, a wifeish person. No, Geoffrey was the only man she would want to be unwidowed by. But a man in her bed, and in her life sometimes, to have conversations with, a man who read the same books, what a treasure.
Once she bought a book at an airport because she’d read everything she had with her. Ann Tyler, The Patchwork Planet. Oh yes, her lover said, I read that a couple of months ago. Very good, but the ending rather disappointing. Arbitrary. Ostentatiously confounding, somehow.
Oh yes, she said, exactly what I thought. And did you see, it’s dedicated to her husband, who’s just recently dead, and it’s full of sad old widows with nobody to bury them.
Yes, he said.
And he bought a copy of Irving’s A Widow for a Day, and let her read it first; she loved it because it was about writing. The widowing wasn’t very sad, either.
A man in her bed, in her life. Accidentally or on purpose reading the same books. A man to have conversations with. But a man in her house. No.
Well, it was all theoretical now. It wouldn’t happen. Not with this lover. Former l
over. He was happily staying where he was. Clare suspected that he let his wife find out so that she would call him back to her. Suddenly finding change too dangerous. The workings of the human heart are hidden in murk and quite bloody. Or as Ted Hughes says, What happens in the heart simply happens. So he is safely called home, to comfort, a constructed past, and the hope that compromise may be done with integrity. She wishes him well, both of them well, it is the right suitable proper thing to do, she would have it no other way, and if at moments she regrets he isn’t choosing his old world well lost for love, they both have read enough books to know that it is always a disaster and death its only logical end. The only moment of logic involved.
And anyway she’s always understood that its illicitness was its power. Something that you can hardly ever have, that has to be . . . she was going to say snatched, but is that the word? Greedy children snatch toys, or food; there seems to be something bumbling and obvious about snatching. Public, even, if you’re a bag snatcher. Body snatchers are more secretive, and planning, so are baby snatchers. But all rough. Whereas an affair is delicately plotted, and its givens are always somebody else’s. That is its wickedness, and when it works, its delight. It thrives on parting, separation, unprivate meetings where good behaviour must be sustained. It hides behind veiled eyes, bored conversation. This creates longing. It fans desire. You don’t need languid afternoons in shuttered rooms to feel the heat of desire. It is stoked by its own impossibility. If it could happen whenever it wanted to it might not want to.
Actually, they were never good at bored conversation. Even now, when they are friends, their conversation is full of passion.
There are different kinds of love making. There are the plotted voluptuous adrenalin-fired dialogues of adultery, and the long slow luxurious murmurings of marriages.
She remembers the image of herself as the koto, the beautiful long wooden finely crafted musical instrument, and the tense erotic chords that can be drawn from it by skilful fingers, practised learned fingers. But even without the music, it is still a beautiful intricate instrument; the music is mute, but is still present. The koto always contains its music, whether there is someone to play it or not.
The Fog Garden Page 20