The Deadly Space Between

by Patricia Duncker

  THE DEADLY

  SPACE BETWEEN

  PATRICIA DUNCKER

  Contents

  1 MEMORY

  2 LABORATORY

  3 BONFIRE

  4 JEALOUSY

  5 JUSTICE

  6 FLIGHT

  7 BODENSEE

  8 FIRE

  9 ICE

  Acknowledgements

  A Note on the Author

  By the Same Author

  Copyright Page

  For S.J.D.

  What moral lesson can be drawn from the story of Oedipus, the favourite subject of such a number of tragedies? – The gods impel him on, and, led imperiously by blind fate, though perfectly innocent, he is fearfully punished, with all his hapless race, for a crime in which his will had no part.

  Mary Wollstonecraft

  Death of the Father would deprive literature of many of its pleasures. If there is no longer a Father, why tell stories? Doesn’t every narrative lead back to Oedipus?

  Roland Barthes

  To pass from a normal nature to him one must cross ‘the deadly space between’. And this is best done by indirection.

  Herman Melville

  1

  MEMORY

  She came home smelling of cigarettes. She didn’t smoke. So either she sat in a place where everyone else smoked, or she was going out with someone who did. Someone who smoked bitter, foreign cigarettes. Someone I hadn’t met. Someone I had never seen. Where did she go? I began asking myself questions. Endless staff association meetings? She was no longer chairwoman. The Art Group Collective? This had been dormant since the last exhibition. The pub? Which pub? She never went to the pub. She never met her friends in the pub. She met them in restaurants. If she intended to meet them she told me where she would be in advance, or she rang from the restaurant itself, warning me that she would not be back for supper. Yet she came home late, smelling of cigarettes. She must be going out with someone who smokes.

  It began in October, three weeks after my eighteenth birthday, the year I was preparing for my A-level exams. The wind was increasing, leaving damp leaves in piles down the pathways. She came home after dark. Once a week at first, on different days, then more often than that, late, often slightly anxious, jittery, excited. She kissed me quickly and asked me what homework I had to prepare. Then she flung her bags into the corner of her studio, that long room of shadows and gaunt spaces all along the back of the house, and made off into the kitchen. I heard the radio, the sound of water bursting from the taps, and the fridge door, opening, closing, again and again.

  The smell of cigarettes, passing, incriminating, pungent, the smell I could taste, just for a moment, when she held me in her arms.

  * * *

  I can’t remember any other house. I have always lived here in this draughty, comfortable, mid-Victorian mass of red brick and white gables. I have always played in the attics, come in at dusk from the long garden, knees stained green with moss. I marked the trees with my knife as a child and watched the bark ooze round the cuts as the years passed. I saw the white shed rot, turn green and black at the corners and finally end up on one of the Guy Fawkes bonfires. I killed woodlice on the tiles in the back porch, watching the remaining carapaces, squat like small tanks, scuttle into the cracked skirting boards for safety. And it was I who warned her when the greying stained floor above the cellar was rotten and dangerous.

  My childhood is a long peaceful memory of rain. An English childhood of respectable suburbs, minor events and a pale stream of drizzle, punctuated by the odd June day of green lawns, pale sunshine, the sound of mowers cruising through damp grass, croquet and daisies.

  This is my first experience of sex. I fell in love with the neighbour’s daughter when I was five and she was seven. I followed her about down the prickly trails in the next-door garden, which was wilder than our garden and flowered weeds, turbulent, unchecked, unkempt. The girl accepted my adoration as a form of homage that was legitimate and deserved. My mother was obscurely disapproving. Then, one day, when I was playing with my tractor in the long grass, the neighbour’s daughter declared, ‘Let’s show our bottoms!’ and pulled down her plain white panties. She sat down flat on the grass with her legs apart and presented me with a surprising, narrow pink slit. I stared at it amazed. She assured me that I could lick it if I wanted to, but that I had to promise not to tell and that it would be our secret. I wasn’t sure that I did want to, but I said that I might reconsider the situation on Sunday afternoon. This was my first sexual excuse, an attempt to buy time. She pulled her pants back up and stormed off to her room in a huff. She didn’t make her offer twice. I forgot all about the incident until, years later, after the family had moved away and I was about ten years old, my mother told me that the child’s father, a paediatric physician, had been jailed for abusing his patients. He was also accused by his daughters, one after another, as they grew up. I asked what abuse meant, fearing that it might involve whipping. She said that it was fiddling with children in a way you shouldn’t. I asked whether that involved licking other people down there. She stared at me and said that she supposed it might. I said nothing more, but was very pleased that I hadn’t taken up the neighbour’s daughter on her kind offer. It was clearly a game that led straight to jail.

  Other people had grandparents. I didn’t. When I reached the plastic animal and model weapons stage I asked my mother why. Other people’s grandparents were a great source of Lego battleships and red-eyed dinosaurs. She hesitated a little, then told me part of the truth. They were serious, religious people. She had been very wild when she was younger. She had not been married to my father. Her parents had not been able to accept her decision to keep the child. She was speaking to me. But she still said ‘the child’ as if I were royalty and she had to use the third person. Or as if I were someone else. The Christian charity of her parents’ religion did not extend to children that were loved, but not legal. I didn’t understand this. No, she never wrote to them and they never wrote to her. No, they never sent Christmas or birthday cards. Then, oddly, as if she were imparting a mighty revelation, she told me that some things, sometimes, could never be forgiven. Somehow I knew that she was no longer talking about my grandparents. She was thinking of someone else.

  ‘Remember that,’ she retorted, as if we had been having an argument.

  I promised to remember every word and dropped my demands for grandparents. In fact, I was simply disappointed that the new model laser kit, with coloured ray firing equipment and optional sound effects, was now for ever beyond my grasp if no grandparental contribution could be expected. Children’s desires are very material. Food, cuddles, guns.

  Fortunately I was blessed with aunts. Aunt Luce was like a ship in full sail, layers of clothes in great gusts of colour, billowing around her. Aunt Luce invented new combinations of colour. She specialized in fabrics for women prancing down catwalks and rich people’s furnishings. She made money, big money, out of cottons, silks, velours, crêpes, cheesecloths, felts, linens and rolls of 100 per cent acrylic. Everything she did was wholesale, generous, vast. She bought me a rocking horse. She was a great source of plastic and metallic equipment, some of which produced giant bangs. She did not disapprove of items which could realistically imitate mass slaughter in the way that my mother did. But her generosity stopped short of the animated laser gun.

  From my earliest days I remember the smells of lipstick and independence, her frequent visits in a Volvo estate with the back flattened by rolls of fabric, huge cylinders of colour, an Arabian cave piled in the boot. I remember her house. She had blinds, not curtains, in Bauhaus patterns and a completely white kitchen.

  Aunt Luce lived with another woman who was even younger than m
y mother and who therefore must have been at least twenty-five years younger than Aunt Luce. She was stocky and flushed and turned an even deeper shade of pink whenever she initiated a conversation. This made everyone smile. Aunt Luce’s companion was called Liberty. I once asked her about her odd name. We were putting a new chain on my bicycle, sitting with our bums sunk in damp gravel out on the front drive. Our fingers were covered in oil. I scraped at the dirt caked under the back mudguard and it came showering down in little flakes. She explained.

  ‘My parents were flower children. They bought a small-holding near Hebden Bridge but never managed to grow anything successfully. I was born there. I was born at home. They wouldn’t risk the hospital. They educated me at home too, which wasn’t so usual then. Calling me Liberty was meant to symbolize the fact that I lived outside the capitalist state. Theoretically, at any rate.’

  I shook my head doubtfully, wondering if this evil state was located in South Yorkshire.

  ‘But did you want to live outside the capitalist state?’

  ‘Dunno. They did.’

  There was a pause. Then she said:

  ‘I don’t think my name’s silly. One of their friends had a daughter called Ince. And we used to play. It was only when I was twelve or thereabouts that I discovered that it was short for Incense. And her second name was Rainbow. No hope there.’

  I sat twirling the toecaps on my pedals.

  ‘She called me Tobias. I wonder why.’

  ‘Maybe your grandfather was Tobias. No, on second thoughts, given what Luce says about your grandparents she wouldn’t want to name you after him. Maybe your father is called Tobias.’

  ‘I don’t know what my father’s called.’

  ‘Ask her. He can’t have been the Angel Gabriel.’

  ‘He could be. I’ve never seen him.’

  Liberty realized that she was submerged in unknown family waters and changed the conversation.

  But I did sometimes wonder if I had ever seen my father. When I dredged the silt at the bottom of my memories I was aware of an event which had terrified my mother. I must have been about four or five at the time. She had received a phone call, and upon hearing the voice, flung the machine against the wall. I stood open-mouthed in the hallway, while she ripped the wire out of the skirting board. Then she spun round in search of me, snatched me up onto the hall chair and forced my arms back into the woollen lining of my anorak so that I began screaming. Ignoring my yells, she strapped me into the stained child’s seat in the Renault 4 and roared away down the road. I howled all the way with fright and pain. I can remember howling, but I can’t remember where we went.

  And this is the moment I can remember clearly.

  We are hidden away with Aunt Luce. Someone is at the door. Aunt Luce locks us into a cupboard in the hall, which she calls ‘Deep Cloaks’. There is a gap under the door and a zigzag series of holes to aerate the cupboard. We are crouched in a tangle of shoes and plastic covers from the dry-cleaners. There is a terrible reek of mothballs. I have my nose in the sleeve of a real fur coat. My mother is stifling my every breath. Her hand is clamped over my mouth. Her breath is a sequence of hot gasps. I am terrified because she is frightened. The front door is to the right of the cupboard. The doorbell sounds again and again. Now Aunt Luce is opening the door. She tells lies.

  ‘She isn’t here. I would have thought that you would know better than to look for her now. And I won’t have you in this house. If you don’t leave I shall call the police. Go away.’ Her voice rises. ‘I said, go away at once.’

  I hear a low voice. This voice is too low and too quiet for me to distinguish the words. This voice is calm, patient, firm. I see a pair of black shoes with a dotted swirling pattern pierced in leather. My mother now has one hand on my head, pushing me down, the other around my waist, clutching me to her chest. I am convinced that I am going to sneeze. I want to sneeze. Aunt Luce is shrieking.

  ‘Get out. Get out. Get Out.’

  And then the voices recede. For no reason that I can ever explain I am certain that this man is my father. But I never ask. I say nothing.

  Years later there is another incident, which I never forget. It is summer. I am ten years old. We are having tea on the back lawn. My aunts are visiting. Liberty is making me a daisy chain. She slits each stem with a thumbnail and threads the flowers through. Aunt Luce already has two lots of fluttering daisies attached to her left ankle. My mother is wearing a necklace of flowers. Liberty has made me a white and gold crown. She sets it on my blonde straight crop. I look like an Aryan Cleopatra.

  ‘You’re all ready to worship Dionysus,’ Liberty exclaims.

  ‘Goodness,’ says my mother, ‘that’s the sort of thing his father would have said.’

  ‘Oh, that’s the sort of thing he said, is it?’ snaps Aunt Luce, her voice suddenly dangerous. My mother glares at her. Everyone is silent, embarrassed.

  Aunt Luce knows something. But not enough. And she feels that she ought to have been told. Liberty doesn’t know. She hasn’t been told. I will never be told. My mother hasn’t refused to tell me. She has just never created the conditions within which it would be possible to ask. But I searched for Dionysus in her Dictionary of Greek and Roman Myths. He is the god of wine and ecstasy. Worship him, and you run mad, cannibal, murderous.

  Aunt Luce made it clear, for reasons I could never quite grasp when I was small, that the existence of Liberty was one of the living imperatives that had transformed us into a family and in part, the cause of our continuing solidarity. She was fond of saying that we all had the honour to be family scandals. She described our lives, unrepentantly, as a sequence of delicious, deliberate disgraces. She urged me to keep up the family tradition of colourful infamy.

  ‘Put it all in the papers if you can,’ she said, ‘or better still, go on television. Two minutes of television is worth six columns of print.’

  Aunt Luce helped out with donations for holidays, special projects, major repair works and colossal financial undertakings; like updating the bicycle and the computer, re-roofing the studio and purchasing the car, second-hand, but with very low mileage. She gave us money, gifts without interest and apparently without strings, for any adventure which required large sums. She never offered her opinions until she was asked, but always made it clear when she was desperate to hand out her views, like an oracle, blessed with an excess of prophecy. She had a pointed arresting face, like a whippet. When my mother talked she would sit, reflective and intent, on the edge of her chair, with her clothes settling around her, waiting for the right moment to intervene. If Liberty wanted to say something Aunt Luce would hold up her hand like a traffic policeman until the young woman’s blushes had subsided. Whenever Luce and Liberty came to visit I brought them everything I had invented or drawn and stood there expectant, craving their approval.

  This triangle of women, Aunt Luce, Liberty and my mother, was like a companionable Greek chorus. They were all the family I had. But there was another, disapproving chorus, offstage, which dared to comment on our private acts. I followed the scandals and disputes at second hand, absorbing the fact that we were not independent, autonomous, a little Amazon republic with a son to inherit the kingdom. Everything we did was watched. Family quarrels, always, finally, boil down to arguments about money. I imagined that we were cut off without a penny. This seemed Victorian and final, yet new outrages were always taking place, elsewhere, at regular intervals. Here was a history of share certificates in my mother’s name, which nevertheless required my grandmother’s signature to release them from fiscal bondage. Permission was angrily withheld. Aunt Luce was the messenger. I saw the tall, peculiar form of Aunt Luce, smouldering in the doorway, holding a letter.

  ‘Outrageous! How dare she?’

  It was my unseen grandmother who dared. Here stood Aunt Luce, elegant, intolerant and enraged, in the midst of an indiscreet waterfall of abuse, in which my name was mentioned, several times, while my mother brewed tea, murmuring replies to my aunt�
��s threats.

  ‘Why won’t they sign? Is it because they don’t like me?’ I asked, interrupting the kitchen discussion of my grandmother’s iniquity. They swivelled round in their seats to stare at me.

  ‘It isn’t because they don’t like you. They’ve only ever seen you once. They don’t know you.’ My mother tried to be reassuring.

  ‘I want to know why they never see us and why they write angry letters.’

  Aunt Luce burst out laughing.

  ‘Your grandmother is my sister,’ she cried, ‘she loathes other people and she loves writing angry letters and making scenes. Listen, my dear, you may not have a grandmother, but you have been spared the discomfort of a dozen teatime scenes. My sister sits in a cloud of righteousness over her cheap Darjeeling and Mr Kipling’s fairy cakes, criticizing other people, that is, other righteous people. The lower classes are de facto not righteous, and therefore beneath contempt. We ought to be grateful for her persecution. At least she takes notice of us. She has never had the misfortune to be in the wrong and is therefore perpetually on the attack. She has the right, not only to judge other people, but also to comment, with great candour from her position of Olympian rectitude, on their morals and behaviour. She thinks that being rude, which is the same thing as being right, is one of the cardinal virtues. Her New Year’s resolution is to make more enemies.’

  My mother sat grinning at Aunt Luce, who was now well into her stride, cigarette alight and aloft, clearing the harbour bar of restraint.

  ‘One step off the narrow path of lower-middle-class morality, which is all recycled paper napkins and malice, and, my dear, you are doomed. You can never be visited. You can only be vilified.’

  She stared at me speculatively.

  ‘Thank God you don’t look like her – or indeed, him,’ said Aunt Luce, sighing. I wondered what would have happened if I had done. And concluded that I would not have been loved.