‘It’s lucky she’s got a rich husband and nothing else to spend it on,’ my father would say, with a disapproval that the years rendered ritualized.
‘But Bertie, I think that’s why she does it,’ my mother had regularly responded in an equally traditional tone of conscious concern.
As a young man, I accepted this standard view, that ‘poor Madge’, childless as she was and married to that boring (if well-to-do) Scot, was sublimating unhappiness in the obsessional provision of embroidered napkins for tea parties. But even I, with my inherited work-ethic and my acquired intellectual arrogance, couldn’t help noticing that Auntie Madge seemed perfectly happy. She had many friends, and a boundless and rather attractive enthusiasm for trivial excursions and treats which she indulged all the more fully once her husband had retired and was available as a full-time, if dourly unresponsive, chauffeur. I don’t think she ever learnt to drive herself: perhaps it would have seemed to her unfeminine.
When her husband finally died, I wondered if this airy, concocted life of hers would collapse onto its empty centre, but the next time I visited her she seemed as busy as ever and quite happy, having joined innumerable clubs. She was learning highland dancing (‘Yes, at my age, Tommy!’). She was singing folksongs with a choral society and she had ‘taken up dressmaking again’; the dining room in the high, narrow Morningside house was covered in a rich profusion of silk and wool and tweed, and the excuses for ‘running up to Princes Street’, to match a cotton reel or choose some buttons, were now almost continuous. I felt then that, in her own way, my aunt had discovered some secret of life that many more introspective people never find, and that I need not worry about her: Madge would be all right.
I was therefore unprepared, on this visit, to find a new development. But perhaps, after all, she had been rather lonely in her great, soft, draped bed without her husband beside her, or perhaps some more recent deaths of contemporaries had dented her self-confidence and made her wish to replenish her life with people. At all events, Auntie Madge had discovered Spiritualism.
She did not call it that, but then I believe its present-day adherents often avoid the name, wishing to distance themselves from connotations of table-rapping and ectoplasm. The weekly session at the home of a ‘sensitive’, which Aunt Madge now attended, was not called by the debased word ‘seance’ but was a ‘Communication evening’. The assembled company did not receive ‘messages from the dear departed’ but were ‘put into natural touch with those on the Other Side’. However, the banal and sentimental content of some of these communications, as retailed to me by my aunt with many pauses for effect, seemed to indicate that the cult was in essence the traditional death-denying bromide.
All my life I had felt a mild contempt for cults of this kind; that attitude is, I suppose, the usual one among people like me. But now, superimposed on this, was a sharper and more personal sense of offence, of territory that was rightly mine being violated by cant. Could my aunt really fail to realize this? She was babbling on about her friend Moira who had messages from her cousin about bills and the new curtains –‘things he couldn’t possibly have known about unless there was Something In It’ – and about a Mrs Cullen who had had such interesting experiences with her plants growing before her eyes … I felt anger, dark red, beginning to swell obscurely in me.
‘Don’t –’ I said suddenly, interrupting her in full spate of language and also with a buttered tea-cake in arrested motion half way to her lips. ‘Don’t you say anything to me about people close to me, Aunt Madge, I warn you. My wife – my dead wife, that is – and my daughter are mine, not yours. I won’t have your group laying a hand on them, or – or using their names.’ (I had been about to employ the old, biblical formulation ‘taking their names in vain’, but at the last moment I shied away from it.) ‘Just you lay off them,’ I finished, rudely but lamely.
My aunt had set down her tea-cake and put her head placatingly on one side. I saw that she was not entirely unprepared for some such reaction from me; my horrid suspicion that she had been leading up to a ‘tactful’ mention of my own loved ones had been justified.
‘Oh dear Tommy,’ she said – in obvious sincerity, damn her – ‘It distresses me to see you so bitter, so closed up to Communication. We won’t talk about it any more just now if you don’t want to, but I do wish you’d have a little think some time about what I’ve been telling you – the proofs I’ve been giving you … I can’t tell you what a comfort it is, as well as so exciting, when you are able to accept that it really is all true. They’re alive, Tom! Alive and continuing just as we are.’
‘Aunt Madge, I don’t want a belief as a sort of hot-water bottle. That’s exactly what I’ve got against Spiritualism –’
I wanted to go on to intimate that I also found preposterous the idea that the dead, if sentient at all, should have nothing better to do than fuss over the bills, curtains and house-plants of those still on earth. But I was afraid that I could not embark on this without invoking the two names I had just loudly banned.
‘Anyway, Auntie, what makes you so keen on bothering the dead? Uncle Andrew was all very well in his way, but you never had that much in common with him, don’t kid me you did. He wasn’t particularly interested in new bedroom curtains in his life, or in anything much in his last ten years come to that, so he’s hardly going to join in cosy chats with you over astral air-waves, is he? In fact I should think he’d disapprove of any such attempt – a low churchman like him. Or is part of the idea that the dead stop being themselves and lose all their bad temper or stupidity or prejudice or whatever other distinguishing traits they had, and turn into uniform ideal old pussycats?’
I knew I was behaving ‘badly’, in a way the many bright adolescents I have taught might be allowed to behave, but not a man well into middle age and not to an old woman. But if I expected, or even unkindly hoped, that Madge’s rouged cheeks would be drawn in, that she would purse her lips in distress so that the lipstick disappeared into the small lines of age surrounding the once-full mouth, I was disappointed. Madge was more resilient than that, and her adventurous life long ago, before she settled down into the respectability of Uncle Andrew’s carefully invested fortune, must have taught her a degree of resourcefulness. Mustering some dignity, and even a slightly patronizing manner, she informed me that Uncle Andrew was ‘at rest’ after all his hard work and his last illness, and that she had no intention of disturbing him. Her interest, she said, was not with those who had ‘moved to the Other Side’ after a long, fulfilled life, but those who had been snatched from life prematurely and suddenly. Did I imagine, she enquired, warming to her theme, that they were immediately happy with what had happened to them. Did it not occur to me they might need comfort and support for a while, just as the living did? What, for example, could poor, darling little Marigold have felt, when she first woke after the accident and realized that she was on the Other Side?
There was more of the same kind, but somewhere in the middle of her impassioned and obviously predetermined lecture I got up, abandoning tea-cake, pastries, Earl Grey tea and the rest of the afternoon, and announced that I was going out. I would be back later, no, much later, that evening – and when I did return could we please regard this subject as closed for good and all?
Then, of course, having made my demonstration, I had no alternative but to go, out into the raw, misty, darkening avenues of surburban Edinburgh, with nothing to do and nowhere to go till I was due at Humphrey’s flat towards eight o’clock.
… She’s gone forever.
I know when one is dead and when one lives;
She’s dead as earth.
Another father, another daughter. Lear and Cordelia. Marigold had King Lear as an O-level text; I took her and a school friend to a performance at Stratford. I had barely known the play till then, read it for the occasion, watched it, stunned but wary. And read it again, with passionate concentration, several years after. After, after.
… Do you see this? L
ook on her, look, her lips,
Look there! Look there!
With a dead person, the best-loved photo (I have it in my study) becomes an ikon. You get used to that particular version of the individual and to the idea that that one is dead. This is, however, no protection against the repetitive stab to the heart when other versions of that unique person abruptly present themselves to memory. Marigold as a small child, solemnly fingering Aunt Madge’s fur coat and asking if it had been a bear … Marigold at about twelve, induced to play the guitar and shyly sing The Four Maries, to her aunt’s effusive Scottish acclaim.
… ‘Oh little did my mother think, the day she cradled me,
What lands I was to travel through, what death I was to dee …’.
Marigold at fifteen, chattering passionately to me across a restaurant table in the Creuse about the differences between the various world religions, shovelling in confit de oie the while.
Gone. Nowhere. Over, finished, wiped out.
Simone, though just as surely vanished, had had a whole life before she died – too short a life, but one full of joys, fulfilment, things done and seen. Like Jacquou before me, speaking of his own wife, I feel the need to affirm this. And Simone had achieved Marigold, and seen her grow big and left her to me as a legacy. But Marigold, in whose death I had also lost Simone more completely, had hardly had time to live at all. Not what we call living. She was all promise. But the people she would, as an adult, have loved, the things she would have experienced, the children she might have borne – these were lost with her. I would never be called Granpa. And never again Daddy. It was not for weeks after her death that these flat, chill facts suddenly came to me, like another death in miniature: a death of some key part of myself.
When my aunt was gone there would be no one left who called me ‘Tommy’. As a younger man I had been embarrassed by this childhood version of my name on her lips. Now I found myself mourning in anticipation its passing: Aunt Madge had always been fond of me and I, in a vague way, of her. But as I strode along, shoulders hunched (my anorak had been left with my suitcase in her spare room), I was filled with an angry misery that this, this indecent old woman, with her cowardice and gullibility in the face of the human lot, was my only surviving relation.
As I went on under dripping trees, I passed one of those Scottish churchyards full of heavy wet stones like dwarf billiard tables: such an inappropriate image to be evoked by a religious cult not noted for its tolerance of earthly pleasures. Or its tolerance of many other enterprises. When I had said to Aunt Madge that surely Uncle Andrew would not approve of bothering the dead, I had been summoning up almost random jibes. But now I realized that among the general repugnance I felt for my aunt’s attempt to appropriate the dead, my dead, was a sense of atavistic fear and disapproval. For what, essentially, were she and her accomplices doing but trying to raise the dead, a practice frowned on by most Christian churches, high and low? I felt my decent low-church ancestors (hers too, come to that) stir within me in revolt at this spirit-raising. A few minutes ago I had been condemning Spiritualism as naïve, but now, as I walked on fast and unseeing, muttering to myself inside my head and perhaps audibly as well, it took on a more sinister aspect. I now saw my aunt as playing with fire, or at any rate dabbling her fat fingers near it. It was a fire I had skirted with dread, turning aside my eyes.
That dream I had, five months after Marigold’s death … I had longed, and dreaded, to dream of her. By which I mean that I had flinched from the possibility of dreaming that she was there, that life was ordinary and whole, and then waking again to sickening disappointment. But my dream, when it came, was not like that. In it, time had passed as in waking life, everything had happened as it had happened. But Marigold still existed. She did not understand what had taken place, and was distressed because she thought that it was everyone else who was dead. She was alone and I longed to comfort her, but could not reach her.
I knew, too well, how Aunt Madge would interpret this dream. The idea made the hair prickle on the back of my neck. Not because I thought she might be right, but because I recognized the temptation the dream represented.
I had longed so much for my daughter – longed for her now even more, though differently, than I had done immediately after her death – that I felt weak with the effort of maintaining my own creed, which is to say my own lack of belief. In my darkest moments I became afraid that integrity and intelligence (the very qualities I had prized and encouraged in Marigold herself) would become casualties also of that murdering driver; that I would be reduced to a pathetic old man whoring after a debased cult, pampering my imagination with spurious ‘messages’ and empty convictions. We betray the dead in any case simply by continuing to live, and thus willy-nilly driving a great wedge of alien days, months and finally years between them and ourselves: I felt this keenly. But how much worse a betrayal it would be to attempt to negate this process by self-deception?
And yet I longed and longed for another dream – all right, all right, what a believer would have termed another sign – to keep a tiny spark of agnostic hope for reunion alive in me through whatever long years still lay ahead.
Strung out between shamed longing and disgust, growing colder and damper as I walked and as the rain came on more definitely, I finally reached the edges of the eighteenth-century New Town where Humphrey’s flat lay. It was long before the hour for which I had been invited, and I did not like to appear early given that I had not yet met his wife; in any case I was in no state for company. Instead I took refuge in a pub which, in spite of its genteel location, turned out to be the usual Scottish drinking house, shabby and male, with a raucous juke box. Here I drank several whiskies, and read and re-read uncomprehendingly sections of the barman’s local newspaper. ‘Weir site in dispute’ … ‘Mackie 7–4’ … ‘Girl in heather, man sought’ … Scots wha’ hae’ wi’ Wallace bled … Oh bugger Scotland. I’d never liked the place anyway. I yearned briefly for France, with its superficial similarities to Scotland, its profound differences. But what remained for me now in France, after thirty years of passionate identification with the country? Only the space where others no longer were.
By a quarter-to-eight my mood had not greatly improved, but I was a little calmer. I was also very slightly drunk.
And in the end I turned up rather late and breathless, having forgotten the exact route to Humphrey’s address and mistaken one ponderous neo-classical crescent for another. On the doorstep as I panted up was a figure already stooped towards the answerphone. It straightened up and greeted me by name with a mixture of warmth and embarrassment, but even so it took me a moment to recognize who it was: Jeffrey, unseen for several years, and now seeming taller than ever; Marigold’s contemporary and one-time admirer.
‘Admirer’: I use the old-fashioned, non-committing word deliberately. When Jeffrey, as a schoolboy, had got over his shyness and natural defensiveness with Marigold, produced as she was to be a ‘nice companion’ for him, he had become loquacious towards her, even proprietorial. On holidays at the mill Humphrey and I used to listen with paternal amusement to him lecturing her on his latest interest: geology, or buzzards, or traditional jazz or economic theory. Sometimes, in London, bulky letters for her would arrive from his boarding school, later from Edinburgh. Marigold never said much about him, but I knew she had been flattered by his continuing interest and was eager to talk to him when, at long intervals, he telephoned her.
Marigold was pretty, and matured early: by the time she was in her mid-teens many young men came to our house, and some of them were much better looking and more obviously engaging than Jeffrey, but she seemed to go on valuing Jeffrey, which pleased me. Perhaps it was because, as she maintained, he was ‘just a good friend’, but I felt that, on his side anyway and potentially on hers, there was something more. Unlike many girls she seemed in no hurry to acquire an official boyfriend: I vaguely perceived, without quite wanting to look harder at the matter, that with me still as the centre of her li
fe, she did not really need a boyfriend.
When she was killed Jeffrey wrote me a long, agonized letter in his chaotic handwriting, raging at fate, full of reminiscences of their times in France together – of swims and picnics and bicycle rides and ‘Jacquou le Croquant’ with the local garage proprietor as the Wicked Lord: real memories abruptly revalued as the archetypal, idyllic childhood. ‘Some of the happiest times,’ he wrote, ‘that I ever had as a kid.’ Of course, I thought, if they had clasped each other on hot afternoons beneath the prickly, concealing bracken, he would hardly tell me that. But I wanted now very much to believe they had and, yes, more – that my lovely, desirable Marigold had at least known that … It was in fact just as likely or unlikely that some young man at college who was only a name to me had shared all that with her. She had spoken quite often of a Peter, a Daniel used to telephone in the holidays … But Jeffrey was the one who was real to me.
Give Them All My Love Page 15