Taking My Life

by Jane Rule

  Had she heard Miss Wright’s remark? At the moment before giving a lecture, Dorothy Sayers had nothing to say to us, and we were too tongue-tied with embarrassment to say anything ourselves. That experience put me off ever wanting to meet the famous if I could avoid it.

  The lecture, given to help raise money to repair the cathedral’s bell tower, was to be about bell ringing. Miss Wright gave me a skeptical look, Dr. Pope a nervous one. She didn’t want me to be disappointed, particularly in an enthusiasm we shared. Dorothy Sayers explained she’d written The Nine Tailors some years before and didn’t really remember much of her research about bell ringing, but perhaps we’d enjoy singing some of the chimes. She divided us up into sections, each given one tone to produce by singing “bong.”

  A week later, after both Dr. Pope and Miss Wright were gone, Roussel and I heard Dorothy Sayers give a perfectly intelligent lecture in London on medieval drama.

  I took Dr. Pope to the airport and got permission to get onto the plane with her to see her comfortably settled.

  “You’d get into Buckingham Palace to sit on the throne if you put your mind to it,” she said, picking up my own bantering tone whenever I did anything to help her physically.

  “Do me the favour at least to look as if you need help,” I said as she started to walk off on her own.

  Leaving her on the plane, I knew the summer had gone relatively well. Dr. Pope would teach with a richer head, enjoy remembering plays, lectures, the landscape and architecture. I wondered if I, too, would finally remember the festival rather than the tension between us, without guilt at my own emotional withdrawal. In those days, I wanted to forget failure because I had no use for it.

  Roussel, when I reached her, was in a state of glum nerves about the results of her examinations. I had bought tickets for Antony and Cleopatra, played by Olivier and Vivien Leigh, to celebrate the day the results were posted on the Senate House wall, but Roussel had made me so apprehensive for her that I wondered if I’d made a mistake. I went with her and watched her find her number on the long list. She paused, looked, looked again.

  “Either there’s a mistake or the standards are much lower than I thought,” she said.

  She had a first. Only one English student in the whole of the University of London had a mark higher than hers. It meant she could, after her year in Iowa, come back to do graduate work on a fellowship. I was silly with relief, but I watched the play that night through the snarl of a migraine headache, so often with me at the end of long strain.

  I took my luggage and bicycle down to Horsham to stay with Roussel and her parents. I was going to leave what I couldn’t carry on my bicycle there. I was pleased with my first trial packing. All the clothes I needed, a change of shoes, notebooks and several books fit into my sidesaddles and my little eight-and-a-half-pound Skywriter typewriter strapped neatly on the flat back luggage carrier. But, when I got on it to test the balance, the bike rose up on its hind wheel like a rearing horse and stayed there. A pair of Roussel’s elderly clerical cousins having tea in the garden laughed until they wept.

  I took out the books and tried again. It was very little better. The typewriter was the next to go. The bicycle settled down on its front wheel, but, when I rode it out onto the street, it reared at the first bump of a pebble and stayed there. With the extra shoes gone, it rode docilely. I tried to lash the typewriter to the handlebars, a happy fantasy of myself riding along on the French countryside typing as I went. But finally I had to face the reality of being typewriter-less for the next months. Since I had written nothing but postcards in longhand for years, the sacrifice was a hard one.

  Roussel, who knew from experience my modest skill and stamina on a bicycle, was dubious about the whole plan. Her mockery made me the more cheerfully confident, but I still gave no real imagination to the time beyond her departure, which seemed stranger and more ironic the nearer it approached. I felt as I had on my first trip to England when I left Ann behind on the deck, that my real reason for taking the trip had been left behind me.

  “You will promise to make the whole world happy,” Roussel said.

  I was, without realizing it, emotionally exhausted by the time I met Ellen, just back from a week in Scotland, where she’d bought a first edition of Paradise Lost. She wanted to take it along, as well as some deer antlers she’d found in Oxford and enough Kotex to last the trip. In the luggage room of the Cumberland Hotel we argued until we were too pressed for time to do anything but load up and take off. We’d agreed to take a boat train from Victoria Station and begin bicycling once we arrived in France.

  Just into Hyde Park, the coat fell off Ellen’s bicycle. A young man on a motorcycle stopped, picked it up, lashed it back on with rope from his own pack and departed without even saying a word.

  At the other side of the park, we were caught on a traffic island, double-decker buses and London cabs encircling us. An amused bobby finally came to our rescue just after Ellen had tearfully confessed she hadn’t ridden a bicycle since she was seven years old.

  “Why didn’t you say so?” I asked.

  “I didn’t think it was something you forgot.”

  We did get to Victoria in time to catch the train. Neither of us was in much of a mood for the adventure by then, but Ellen got out a French phrase book and tried to coax me with learning a few before we landed in that country late that afternoon.

  “Where we can afford to stay, nobody’s going to ask if we want a room on the street or on the court,” I said scornfully.

  Disembarked at Dieppe, we both watched the train depart for Paris. We had no city map and so found our way to the main road by asking, “Oo eh Paris?” at every corner. When we reached the road, it rose, mile after mile before us, at a steep incline. We were about halfway up it, pushing our bicycles, when a truck on its way down stopped and the driver offered us a lift. We refused, pointing up the hill. He nodded vigorously, picked up Ellen’s bicycle and put it in the back of the truck with several toilets. He took mine from me and then ushered us into the cab.

  We drove with him back down the long hill, arrived at a house where he stopped, gesturing to us that he’d only be few minutes. When he’d delivered a toilet, he got back in and drove us back out of the city. We stopped at a farmhouse to deliver another toilet before we headed toward Rouen, the city where we had planned to spend the night. We reached it around ten o’clock that night. Miss Wright had suspected correctly; neither of us knew how to read a map. We could never have reached it on bicycles that night, even if the road had been entirely downhill.

  The youth hostel where our driver left us was filthy, the only plumbing having failed some years ago, but we were too tired to complain, slept badly and woke to the problem of finding our way out of Rouen on cobbled streets Ellen hadn’t the skill to ride on.

  “We’ll take the train to Paris,” I decided, “and get rid of the bikes.”

  Ellen was guiltily apologetic and relieved.

  I, who had decided to stop smoking for the time we rode our bicycles to give me more wind and to save money, bought a pack of cigarettes. The first cigarette, though I choked on it, improved my disposition. I was ready to laugh at myself when we were asked at the cheap hotel we had chosen in Paris whether we wanted a room on the street or the court.

  Jane Rule, during her college years

  Jane Rule Fonds, University Archives, University of British Columbia

  In the time we spent in Paris, we never did figure out how to ride the subway or the buses. We walked everywhere, miles and miles a day. I loved exploring the city that way, finding new routes home, feeling my body restored by the exercise I’d lacked all summer, but Ellen got tired and discouraged at our inability to deal with the language. After a week, we admitted to ourselves that we were sick of cities, could not look at one more cathedral, one more painting. So we left our bikes at the hotel and caught a train for Barcelona, planning to go from there to Majorca, Georges Sand and Chopin country.

  The two you
ng men we met on that train and the time we spent with them on Majorca are described in some detail in This Is Not for You, but the motives of the two main characters are entirely fictional. Perhaps one of the thousand seeds for that novel was sown when one of the young men did ask me if Ellen and I were lovers. No one had ever confronted me directly before. Though I’d never had any erotic interest in Ellen, telling the truth, that we were “just friends,” seemed also a lie about myself. It made me ask myself directly what I was doing there, again with a person I cared about who was far too dependent on me for reassurance, for decision making without a crippling disease for an excuse.

  I was trying to write for a part of each day. Without a typewriter, I was missing the central prop of my ritual. I began stories I couldn’t stay interested in. I wrote myself meaningless notes.

  Ellen seemed far more content, building elaborate sandcastles on the beach, sketching, going on hikes with our companions, learning to spear fish. She began to talk of travelling on with them through southern Spain, assuming that I would go, too.

  Finally, I asked her, “Could you go with them alone?”

  “Without you?”

  I nodded.

  “Yes,” she said simply.

  I wanted to explain, but I didn’t know myself why I had to leave.

  “If you have to, that’s all that matters,” Ellen said. “There don’t have to be explanations between friends.”

  She saw nothing in my desertion that she had to forgive. The guilt I felt was not strong enough to hold me there, though the flavour of it is with me still.

  I left because I was too tired to carry responsibility for anyone but myself. I left because I was under sexual pressure I didn’t want from a young man, in a growing complexity of a foursome I didn’t feel a real part of. I left because I really did want to write and couldn’t in those circumstances. I left because our money would not anyway have lasted very long now that we had given up our bicycles. I left because I was sick and frightened.

  It was September. There was no way off the island for another three weeks, every boat and plane fully booked. I couldn’t bear the sense of being trapped. I bribed my way onto the night boat and spent the night in the bar, being comforted by Spaniards because my king had just died.

  “Not my king,” I tried to explain, but they would not accept that and kept buying me drinks, not to cheer me up but to help me mourn.

  I slept for an hour or so before the boat docked. Then I caught the train for Paris, travelling third class, both the compartments and corridors jammed with people and with animals. By the time I got to Paris, I had been on my feet for thirty-six hours. If I could just lie down on the pavement for a few minutes, I thought, no one would mind, but I forced myself to keep going on my grotesquely swollen feet and ankles until I got to the hotel. I nearly drowned in the huge, hot bath drawn for me, but I revived enough to go for steak and salad before I slept.

  Before I caught the boat train the next day, I wired Roussel’s parents to expect me that night. I had decided against going all the way into London and back to Horsham. I would take local trains instead. I had an hour to kill at the station, and a worker on the tracks offered me a cup of tea. I followed him not into the station but down the line to a shack where half a dozen workers were having tea. They rummaged round until they found a thin china cup for me, and I had to try some of each of their homemade cakes. Fortunately, I had a pack of cigarettes to offer round. All of them put me on the train, choosing a “ladies only” compartment for me and stowing my bicycle in the guard van.

  As I pushed my bike up the front walk of the Sargeants’ house at dusk, I could see the dining-room table set for three.

  I stayed with the Sargeants for the five days it took to find space on a plane. They suggested, since I didn’t have to be back in college until February, I could stay along with them in Roussel’s room where I could write. I was touched by such welcome, and I had been there often enough to know how to be a daughter of the household, neither as thoughtful nor helpful as Roussel but forgiven my lapses by my age and nationality. I might have been more a distraction from their missing Roussel than a nuisance. But it was the place where I would miss her most, among her books and clothes, in the bed where we had made love.

  At nineteen, not really knowing where I wanted to be, going home was the only uncommitting option. I’d had a letter from Mother saying that Dad hadn’t been well. So I booked myself out of New York immediately when I arrived, not even stopping to check in with Ann and Henry.

  I missed my connection for San Francisco in New York by only five minutes. I phoned Ann from the airport and met a welcome which cancelled the remote unease of our last meeting.

  Ann’s third child was expected at any time, and she and Henry wondered if I could stay for three weeks until Ann’s sister would be free to come look after the children.

  Only a week after I’d left Majorca, I phoned home to say I was staying in Connecticut for three weeks and would then come home.

  “Why weren’t you planning to be here?” Ann asked. “Was I that hard on you last time? I didn’t mean to be. It didn’t have anything to do with you.”

  I knew that. Being excluded and ignored for no reason had no comfort or reassurance in it. Also, I had not known what Henry might expect of me. But he also behaved as if our brief lovemaking had not taken place. I wanted to but couldn’t quite erase the experience of that long-ago spring. It seemed to me the first in a long string of failures in friendship and love for which I felt variously responsible. Yet I also felt misused.

  “You’re so beautiful, someone must have loved you well. Who was he?” Ann asked.

  I no longer had any appetite for such games. Ann’s heterosexual demands of my life had finally made it impossible for me to talk with her, as I so much would like to have talked about what had happened between me and Dr. Pope, why intense dependency without erotic content was so claustrophobic, about my relationship with Roussel which had become important enough to me to make me apprehensive. Ann would have encouraged that apprehension, while I wanted it dispelled, for why should I be afraid of someone in whose presence I was so entirely happy? I could be candid with Roussel both as a friend and as a lover as I couldn’t be with Ann, who was passionate lover one moment, remote judge the next.

  “I want to do your portrait,” Ann said.

  While I sat and she reached across her large belly to the easel, both children were allowed to scribble on paper of their own, also propped on the easel.

  “I remember the first time I drew your mouth,” Ann said.

  When she came to me that night and made love to me, I felt her hands asking questions of my body, which was more knowledgeable. I could also feel her fear of being inadequate now, even as she hoped she would be compared to the men she wanted me involved with. My desire for her, so long held in check, was more intense than ever. It amazed me that I could have contemplated not seeing her who had been the centre of my longing for so many years.

  Yet she stayed afraid of and for me.

  Ann finished the portrait before I left and sent it with me as a present to my parents. Of the three portraits she did of me, it is the most successful, in colour while the others were charcoal, my jacket bright with autumn colours, a clear autumn sky behind me. My face is brown from the Mediterranean sun, thin, the mouth full and bright, the eyes dark, watchful.

  At five o’clock in the morning of the day my plane left, Henry woke me and asked, “Would you like a ride to New York?”

  We left Ann’s sister and the children still asleep, and I timed the labour pains while Ann read boys’ names out of a dictionary. I stayed at the hospital with Henry, but I finally had to leave for the airport before the baby was born.

  At the airport in San Francisco, Mother called across the fence, “It’s a girl, and they’ve named it after us!”

  I went home to discover my room in the house they had bought in Berkeley. I liked the room, my furniture making it familiar, and
opening off it was a flat roof over the enclosed sun porch where I could work outdoors on warm days. Libby was enrolled at Anna Head’s, and her grey uniform took me back to the year I had spent there. My brother was working somewhere out of town and home only on weekends which he mostly spent with Edy, who was sharing an apartment with Sally Millett, not far from Mills. Dad, indeed, wasn’t well. He had a skin disorder, probably from an allergy to the sun. Great, inverted blisters covered his arms and shoulders, and it had spread to the inside of his mouth. But cortisone was beginning to control it.

  Mother was determinedly pressing Mother Packer to sell South Fork so that Dad could finally go into business for himself, for she was convinced that unhappiness in his work was as much to blame as anything.

  There I finally did begin to write short stories to pass the time until Roussel came out for Christmas. I wrote her long letters, promising her relief from the Midwest winter, sunshine all day, flowers. I was promising her, too, that I could get back to England with her, where we would share an apartment in London while she worked on an MA and I wrote a novel. And, no, I wouldn’t invite the entire world to share it with us. We would have time alone and make a life together. I had not yet broached those plans to my family.

  My cousin Patsy came home from Japan where her father was on a tour of duty. We went to meet her, but there were already young officers assigned to see her through customs and deal with all the details of her arrival. I envied her the ease of that caretaking, but all my own unassisted border crossings did give me a sense of independence she never achieved, a world traveller who had no idea how it was done except in the care of the military. She stayed with us a while without much idea of what she would do next. She’d been teaching in a nursery school for military children while she was in Japan. She hadn’t the grades or the interest to go on to college. Next to her life, mine seemed more ordered and purposeful. And perhaps her lack of direction made my parents look more favourably on my own resolutions when I offered them, impractical as they might have seemed. At least I knew what I wanted to do.