The letters to the dignified women who are supposed to know about these things all evince the same perplexity, albeit in different guises. ‘Should I let my boyfriend go all the way?’ The answer is always the same: if he respected you he would not demand it, even suggest it. This prospect of shamefaced young people—for the young man must have been in a state of disarray—is amazing to me. These days intimacy takes place at the beginning of the affair rather than at the end, and the women giving the advice are only too eager to reveal their own histories of alcoholism and anorexia. In the letters to ‘Worried. Ealing’, tolerance is urged on the less than happily married. Also humorousness. This might have made for an easier life but it seems unnecessarily fatalistic.
It is the illustrations to the stories that capture my attention, one in particular: a woman is shutting the garden gate of her house behind her as she prepares to do her morning shopping. She wears gloves and a small hat shaped like a pancake; she has a wicker basket over her left arm. The gate behind her is the sort of sunray pattern that probably still exists somewhere, for people do not change their garden gates in obedience to the dictates of fashion. Needless to say we do not have that sort of gate in the environs of Montagu Mansions. I do not know what this woman does when she gets home again. She manages to be elegant in an old-fashioned way. It would not occur to her to worry about her weight.
From three o’clock onwards, or so it seems to me, she anticipates her husband’s return on the evening train. What does he think as he strides manfully in at the sunray gate? Not a lot, I would say. They are both bound to be very well mannered. On what happens when they retire to the bedroom, having spent the evening darning socks and listening to the wireless, the magazines are silent. A virginal discretion is maintained throughout, as if married couples need no instruction, are privy only to their own secrets. Sex is underdeveloped, and yet it seems so peaceful. Naturally someone of my generation could not envisage such a union, which seems faintly dreadful. And yet the image of that woman in the pancake hat, on her way to the sort of shops where customers are served by a man in a brown overall, has stayed in my mind for some time. It holds a definite attraction, as if one might, if one were very lucky, attain to a similar plateau of satisfaction. The woman in the pancake hat wears an elusive smile. Maybe her husband is not such a bore after all.
I do not wish this consummation for myself. Rather, I wish it retroactively for my mother, of whose life it is so natural for me to think. My mother was taken straight from her parents’ house to this slightly forbidding flat where her husband had pitched his tent some years previously. The kitchen cupboards were still filled with his first wife’s glass and china. There had been no children of that earlier marriage, although my mother would have welcomed them—she was still young enough to crave companions. And the stout authoritative man to whom she was married was no companion. I knew this at once, from a very young age. It was not given to my mother to wear the elusive smile of the woman in the magazine. Her smile was always a little puzzled, as she made her dutiful way round the galleries. I dare say my birth was the ultimate proof of her married life. For that reason she loved me too much, as I loved her. We were both discreet about this, tacitly acknowledging the absence of a man who would have made possible an easier relationship, one less charged with the mournful consciousness of lost alternatives. I never heard her complain, yet as my father grew more handicapped and more selfish her smile became more diplomatic, as if aware at last that this was not a normal life for a woman with a simple, loving nature. As a widow she remained virginal. I would have liked her to marry again; instead she kept up an unalterable wifely routine, shopping in the morning, looking at pictures in the afternoon, I was a sort of company, I suppose. Not for a moment did I seriously think of leaving her alone, and yet it now occurs to me that this was what she was waiting for, her final release into freedom.
On the evening of the day on which she had died, and died in the company of strangers, I said something of this to Wiggy, who merely remarked, ‘It’s you who are free now. Will you make any changes, do you think?’ She views our lives as anomalous, as I do. She loves her married man, but knows that he has arrested her development: no garden gate and shopping basket for her, and yet I know that with her country background she would accede almost gratefully to such a condition. As for me, my days have settled into not very interesting compartments: our life, now my life, at home, and the excursions into what I think of as cathedral territory, where minor adventures may or may not take place. None of this is entirely satisfactory, which is why I have become something of a mental stalker. In my observations, as I go about my days, I feel as if all my activity has been forced upwards, into my head. I know remarkably few people in what I am tempted to call real life, and yet I seem to get closer to them when I construct their lives for myself. Wiggy says I should write a novel, but in fact I read very little. Working in a bookshop makes one acquainted with titles rather than texts, and in the evenings I long to get out and about. I walk a lot. That is how most evenings are spent.
‘When will you go back to work?’ Wiggy asked me.
‘In a day or so, I suppose. Well, no, after the funeral, in fact. They won’t want to see me before then.’
All at once I was filled with a painful longing for my working life, now denied to me for a decent interval of observance. (But it seemed to me that my mother had died long ago, and more recently in those mute days at the hospital, when she was almost pulseless.) I love my work, which takes place at the top of Gower Street, in a second-hand bookshop called Ex Libris. It belongs to two aged sisters, the Misses Collier, Muriel and Hester, although only Muriel sits behind a desk, usually reading. Hester, who is the elder of the two, and that means in her mid-eighties, turns up every afternoon with a cake for our tea, which is my signal to emerge from the basement and put on the kettle. Hester is pretty deaf, but very spirited; Muriel is more austere. They were both Land Girls during the war, which may explain their durability, despite Muriel’s knotted legs and Hester’s hearing aid. They seem to be in the best of health, although both are frighteningly thin. It is difficult to imagine their existence away from the shop, which they inherited from their father, St John Collier, on whom they have bestowed the status of a man of letters, although I dare say he had already claimed this for himself. It is their intention that his various writings should be gathered into publishable form, be privately printed, and be available in the shop. They are, and always have been, unmarried. Father looms large in their conversation. Mother rarely gets a look in.
My job is to extract St John Collier’s articles from the piles of rotting newspapers and magazines, to transcribe them on Muriel’s huge upright Royal, and to arrange them in some sort of order. ‘Naturally you will feature in the acknowledgements,’ I am assured. The late man of letters operated on several fronts, as a minor belletrist, as a contributor of nature articles to Reynolds News, and, on the strength of having been a lay preacher in his youth, as the author of homilies in those women’s magazines that I find so beguiling. These homilies are not half bad, if you care for that sort of thing. Reassurance seems to be the keynote, as if God had cheerful plans for us all. To tell the truth I prefer these messages to the ones about the spotted wagtail and the willow warbler, which occupy another sizeable section of his output, but I plough on conscientiously, amid the smells of defunct newsprint and the occasional floating fragment of disintegrating paper. I do all this in the basement, where the foreign language books are kept. I am rarely disturbed by customers. In fact most people do not realize that the shop is open for business, since the door sticks so badly that it is almost impossible to gain admittance.
‘You must do something about the door, Muriel,’ shouts Hester.
Muriel looks up briefly from whatever she is reading. ‘We need a man for that,’ she says, and the subject is dismissed.
I have no fantasies regarding Muriel and Hester, who have always struck me as creatures of the utmost rectitude,
and therefore somehow not interesting. I prefer those who go about their business with an obvious burden of feeling. ‘The Man of Feeling’ was the title of an (unpublished) essay by St John Collier, which will be the lead in our book. It is incredibly complacent, like his interpretation of God’s purpose. But I know those unconscious gestures, those suddenly lowered eyes that give away inner conflict. I can read them like a book. This I prefer to all those books I have not read and whose titles I know so well. I could sell you anything in the shop, since I am so familiar with the stock. But I prefer the living flesh and its ambiguity. I am in my element there, a hunger artist whose hunger is rarely satisfied.
During the few days I spent alone after my mother’s death I was able to observe a slight alteration in my behaviour. These days were worse than I had anticipated. The floorboards echoed as I moved from my bedroom to the sitting-room, and I was reminded of my father’s lumbering progress, and also of the slight feeling of fear I had always experienced at his approach. This fear had always been baseless; my father was not a threatening figure, merely an inconvenient one, but it now occurred to me that he must have been unhappy. He was in a position to register his deterioration; his one good eye was sharp, and he knew that he was now a clumsy elderly man, whose wife’s relative youth disturbed him, as if he had not sought it in the first place.
Their marriage had always struck me as a cynical arrangement. My mother, impractical as she was, had little hope of an independent life, particularly as she had a slight fear of the outside world and was only able to function if she kept to a rigid routine. It probably reassured her to be taken over by a will stronger than her own. She must have felt a certain relief as this substantial stranger translated her from one life to another. As for my father, his predominant emotion must have been gratification. My mother, at the time of her marriage, was young, certainly unspoilt. I doubt if he were very experienced himself, in spite of that brief first marriage that had ended when his wife died of cancer. ‘To Madeleine, the epitome of womanhood.’ As he seemed to descend gratefully into uxorious habits, and as I was alerted to these at a young age, I sensed that what he appreciated was a certain continuity, with my mother drafted in to make sure that the pattern was not disturbed.
This she did impeccably, and for this reason was perhaps secretly relieved when he died, after a second stroke, gracelessly, in hospital, his hand fumbling under the sheet. She too had observed her period of mourning, in the flat, as I did now, before resuming her regular way of life. But it seemed to me, as she went out in the afternoons, to some gallery or other, that she was still fearful, or perhaps more fearful than she had been when my father was alive. For this reason she sometimes spent whole days at home, reading, in the silence of the long summer afternoons. This made me uneasy, but she showed no signs of depression, discontent. My return home in the evenings, from whatever I had been doing, occasioned a joyful smile. The book was laid aside; she was ready for my news. I offered it, with suitable omissions.
I once, rashly, asked her if she was lonely. She frowned in concentration, duty bound to be accurate, to render an account, to herself as much as to me.
‘Not lonely, exactly,’ she said. ‘But an odd thing happens. I think back to the people I knew when I was young, and realize how good they were to me. My friendships seemed to me then, and seem to me now, so secure! As an only child—like you, my poor darling—I relied on my friends a great deal. We lived a little way out of London, and everything seemed safe. In the evenings I could go over to a friend’s house and we would go out for walks. Can you imagine such simplicity?’
‘I go out for walks too,’ I reminded her.
‘But, darling, your walks are dangerous! London is hardly the place for an evening walk. I am anxious when you are out. Not that I should ever try to stop you.’
‘Nothing has happened to me.’
‘Of course not, you are a sensible girl. But I remember those evening walks I took with my girlfriends, one in particular, Cathy; we were inseparable. I would walk to her house, and then she would walk me back to mine, and so on. It sounds silly, I know, but there seemed to be a golden haze about the evenings then. Very few cars. And we discussed secrets, although of course we had none to speak of.’
‘What happened to her? Cathy, I mean.’
‘Well, she married very young. She was eighteen. She had been to a cousin’s wedding and met a man not much older than herself, and in due course he very properly proposed to her and they were married. In her wedding dress she looked different, older, and for the first time in my life I became aware of separation. It affected me deeply. Cathy and her husband moved away, and the evenings were never the same again. It struck me at the time that in any event I would be excluded. That’s what makes me so unhappy when I hear about children being excluded from school. It is a brutal business: one never quite forgets it.’
‘So you were lonely, then. Even then.’
‘Well, of course. But I had already met your father. He was at the same wedding, a friend of that same cousin’s parents. And it seemed to me that Cathy conspired to encourage us: she probably wanted me to feel, what? Not left out. Because our conversations were no longer transparent. Her husband-to-be was rather jealous of an intimacy in which he had no part. And your father was courteous, respectful.’ She paused. ‘He restored my pride,’ she said finally.
‘That doesn’t seem to me a very good reason for marrying the first man who asks you.’
‘Oh, but it is, Claire. Not that I hope you’ll ever understand this.’
‘And now?’
‘Well, I have no friends now. Cathy and I still send Christmas cards, but that is all. These days I only have acquaintances, neighbours, people I pass in the supermarket. We inquire pleasantly after each other’s health. And at my age I can hardly expect to make new friends. But I can’t honestly say I’m disappointed about this; it seems part of a natural process. I appreciate my quiet life. Of course, I miss your father.’ My expression must have been sceptical, because she shook her head and smiled. ‘The early days of our marriage were lovely,’ she said. ‘We had holidays—Venice, the South of France—and it was delightful to have a companion. And we had weekends in the country, looking for things for the flat. I knew he was a good man. But then he had that little accident’—she meant his stroke—‘and I had to get used to looking after him. He loved me, you know. And he was so proud when you were born.’
Reading between the lines I could see that my father’s stroke had put an end to her physical life, but I was careful not to raise this matter. In any event she would not have enlightened me.
We had lived affectionately, but also carefully, together, each anxious to protect the other’s privacy. It comforted her to know that I was respectably employed, while in my basement I was able to chart her tentative afternoon progress down Bond Street to the Royal Academy, or on the bus to the National Gallery, or in a taxi to the Tate. I could have done that last journey on foot, but my mother had become frail, and in the weeks before her death had not gone out at all. Her death was like her life, modest, self-effacing. I was unprepared for it. Perhaps I wanted to be. A superstitious, even terror-stricken part of me was glad that she had left no trace. Yet I knew that I should miss her for the rest of my life.
I was also in a quandary about what was expected of me. The flat was mine, but I hated to be alone in it, and besides, there was no food. Was it in order for me to go out for a meal? I felt ridiculously self-conscious, as if the whole world must be aware of my plight. I concluded that the sensible thing to do was to stock the bare cupboards and the fridge. There was an all-night supermarket at the top of Baker Street, and I was surprised that it was so empty, until I realized that it was nearly ten o’clock at night. I had spent the whole day in a swoon of memory and reflection. The evening air reassured me; I was not in a hurry to return home. I took a walk: George Street, Marylebone High Street, New Cavendish Street, into the unpopulated regions of Wimpole and Harley Streets. It w
as finally the absence of people, of familiars, in this minatory district, that caused me to turn back, but the experience was salutory. I vowed to resume those evening walks that I had previously kept short in deference to my mother’s anxiety. I was less lonely in the street than I was at home.
As I let myself into the flat I reflected that it would be pleasant to know there was someone already there, albeit in another room. I saw the point of a marriage even as discreet as my mother’s. Yet what I felt was a wistfulness all my own, a dangerous longing for company. And not any company. I thought with pity of my mother’s girlhood, her evening walks with her friends, the wedding at which she had been eagerly and awkwardly introduced to my father, their long, long engagement … I thought of her as a virgin, sacrificed, and then I thought of the days of their companionship, in Venice, in the South of France. And I almost envied them. I thought of my friend Wiggy, waiting in for a visit from her lover, and grew angry on her behalf. Better a marriage, however brief and unsatisfactory, than an arrangement such as hers. I thought I ought to get married; I thought that Wiggy should. It seemed to me that neither of us had the least idea how to go about this. If anything Wiggy’s case seemed even more extreme than mine. Yet when she rang, as she had taken to doing every evening, I detected no unhappiness in her voice. She is dear to me, but we share no secrets. I visit her for a cup of coffee in her flat in Museum Street; she is always taciturn and even-tempered. She says I cheer her up, by which she means that I entertain her. She loves my stories, my fantasies (everything is connected), and settles back to listen. After which I usually go on my way quite light-heartedly, feeling in control, colourful. Except that my mother’s absence made me too aware of my mental processes, aware too that I had tried to supply myself with a form of company that now appeared ghostly, too obviously invented. Somehow I felt uneasy about my behaviour, in a way I could not quite define. I looked forward to going back to work. What I needed was the soothing company of St John Collier. Surely no one could devise a better ally in difficult times.
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