The Private Parts of Women

by Lesley Glaister

  Gaps then but not clean. I try not to remember. When I would come back it was like trying to remember a dream. Only the feeling is left, a trace of sensation, dim memories. No. I don’t mean memories exactly, something more like a finger prodding inside my soft brain, something physical.

  I was a bad girl. Somehow I was and there was guilt. Bad things happened: marzipan went missing, the cherries from the trifle. Someone scribbled on the wall. Father’s letters got thrown away. A bite was taken from every apple in the bowl.

  No, it was not like dreaming. You don’t get in trouble for dreaming. You don’t get accused of lying. They always called me a liar, before I even knew what the word meant. ‘You did it, Trixie,’ Mother’s face too close to mine. ‘Useless to lie, we know. You are a liar.’ Useless to protest. The unfairness battered about inside me like something wild in a box. But I kept my mouth shut, I did learn that, for whatever I said would only make things worse.

  I was a still and silent child. Indeed I was afraid to move. I tried so hard to be good and sweet and silent. Usually, I wore white. I sat with my feet together and my hands in my lap. I tried to be seen and not heard. I only ever wanted to be good.

  When I was five my father went to France to fight. My mother thought he would never come back. She took me to be photographed on my sixth birthday, a photograph to send to him. In it, my eyes are huge and frightened, my mouth so small it is only a dot. The thing was battering inside me. The dress, the special dress that Mother had knitted me for the occasion, all thin and lacy gossamer wool was stretched and baggy as if I had stretched it over my knees which Mother had warned me not to do. I did not do it and yet the dress was stretched. My leg was stinging where she’d slapped me. She was glaring at me from behind the photographer and whatever he said, that man, I could not smile or watch the birdie: there was no birdie to watch. There I stood in my sagging, ruined dress and my mother’s eyes burned at me, promising punishment. Your poor father out there risking his life for King and Country and you can’t even keep yourself decent … And there I am still, caught in a frame and terrified, my hands screwed into fists at my sides. The photograph has darkened after all those years, is stained, as if the badness has seeped out. And Father came home anyway, before it could be sent. Discharged for his bad nerves.

  All my childhood, I was frightened to move. I hardly did a thing. And yet the evidence of my badness was forever there. I would try so hard to be still and silent but suddenly there I’d be with a trailing hem and bits of twig caught in my hair. ‘I didn’t do it,’ I used to say before I learned better. ‘I didn’t, I haven’t … I didn’t do it.’ And they would get so terribly angry and their breath would be hot in my face. ‘The evidence is here,’ they might shout. ‘As if it’s not bad enough that you do these things … but then against all the evidence to deny them! It defies reason.’

  It hurt me so much that they wouldn’t believe me. But then, who on God’s earth would?

  ‘The girl’s an imbecile,’ Father might say.

  ‘The Devil’s in her,’ Mother might add.

  And then there were the punishments.

  WHITE

  Now all the walls are white. The bedroom looks all right, the bathroom too because it is mostly grey tiles mottled with white anyway. The white painted over a crust of mould makes it bright. It might come through again, the black mould, but I don’t care. It’s temporary this, little boxy, two-up, two-down, attic, offshot. Like a doll’s house, pretend.

  I love the smell of emulsion paint. It is almost delicious and just for the odd moment when I was painting, I was almost absorbed, almost, when I could just do it, let my hand roll the oozing foam roller to and fro, listening to the licky sticky sound of paint. I would not even begin to approach the word happy, but I was almost content.

  In the sitting-room though, the wallpaper flowers loom through the whiteness no matter how many coats I do. The old paper that looked so well stuck on I couldn’t face stripping it, has bubbled away from the wall. It looks awful blisters and bruisy flowers. How Richard would scoff. The Indian bedspread I’ve used as a curtain, tacked to the frame so you can’t draw it back, but who wants to look out? Looks OK. In the evening, with the gas-fire lit and a brass-based lamp I found in a skip, it looks all right. It looks possible. It’s only in the daytime when light forces itself through the rusty cotton weave that it appears amateurish – no, what do I mean? It does look pretend.

  I look in the bathroom mirror, it’s still a shock to see my new white-haired self. I’ve had long chestnut brown hair ever since I was about two. Lovely hair all my lovers and friends have always said, and my parents’ friends, stroking, so glossy, such a colour with the sun on it. And now it is short and no colour at all. When I got home from the hairdresser’s and looked in the mirror I saw I had little flecks of dark hair stuck to my face, gathered in little drifts under my eyes. My eyebrows looked heavy and too dark for the first time so I began to pluck them, but it made me sneeze, made my eyes water again. All the stinging, all the little trivial physical tears. I wanted to pluck my eyebrows because I thought fine brows would look better with my short white hair. You see? There I go again, wanting to look better which is a step towards prettier, which is a lie.

  I am a terrible woman. I have done a terrible thing. I have left my children. A month ago I was a mother now I am not. Though that is not absolutely true. Once you have been a mother you can never stop being one, not entirely, whatever happens, because becoming a mother does something … does something to your soul. But in practice I am not a mother any more.

  I have brought with me some clothes, some photographs, my cameras, some rolls of film I shot in the last weeks. I have left behind two precious children and a man I cannot blame. He is a terrible man, terribly good, patient, understanding. I left the children in front of ‘Fantasia’ on the video recorder; I left a note which tried to explain; I left my door-key and my sad reflection in the hall mirror. I left the house tidy, bleach in the toilets, the freezer stuffed, milk in the fridge. I left friends who will be hurt and angry that I never confided the despair I felt. But then I did not know I felt despair. It was just that it reared up one day without warning. Oh yes I had been miserable, depressed, Richard thought, but I was also safe, appreciated, loved.

  Somehow I couldn’t stand it.

  And now I am here in this white painted dump. The only room that is not white is the attic. I have curtained off a section for a darkroom – fortunately there is a basin up there. It is a perfect space. I’ve invested in new equipment, delivered yesterday. So I am set up. I will not waste time. I want to work. Looking at whatshername – Trixie – today I thought I might ask her if I could take some pictures. Her face is beautifully old and she has a sort of dignity. All the same there’s something not quite right about her, the way she drifts off. But thank Christ I’ve not landed up next door to a family, other people’s kids. That I could not stand.

  ‘You are greedy,’ Richard said to me once, long ago, before the children.

  ‘Greedy?’ I didn’t understand. We were in Greece, on a ferry travelling between islands. He was basking in the sunny slop of light, I was squinting through my camera lens at plush green feathers of Cyprus against the intense blue sky.

  ‘Why don’t you just enjoy it?’

  ‘I am enjoying it.’

  ‘Why don’t you put your camera down? Just look and let it go. You never just look. You always have to try and keep it.’

  I laughed at him and went on clicking. The wind got up as we moved out into the open sea and I photographed Richard leaning over the ship’s rail, his hair blowing, a spray of rainbow prisms behind him. We were in love and he was always teasing me. I took no notice. But now I see what he meant and partly agree. I do have this habit, that infuriates him, of lifting up my hands, angling my two forefingers and thumbs into a rectangle through which to frame a scene. Even without my camera, to impose edges. Now my memory is composed of rectangles.

  My head aches.
Perhaps I regret the rectangles. I don’t know. I strain to see round the edges of the things I remember, to remember the things outside the frame that I wilfully did not see. Or wilfully did not feel.

  I used to photograph sunrises and sunsets. One year, when Robin was a baby, we rented a house on the Isle of Skye. And because I was feeding at funny times I would be awake to see the sky lighten and I’d photograph the rosy or greenish or pearl grey dawn. And late at night – it must have been midsummer to have made it so late – I’d try and capture the sunset, the fantastic rose, gold, lilac, lime, all the incredible colours. I don’t develop colour film, so I took them to the studio but when I got them back I was disappointed. I didn’t say. Richard liked them. A pile of shiny colours, skies, clouds, vanishing sun, but still, lying on the kitchen table they seemed dead things. Of course they did, because the magic was in the sky itself, in the transience of the light. Impossible to shrink it through a camera lens. Audacity to think you can keep it. You might as well spear a butterfly with a pin.

  I’d forgotten until now, but last night, just as I was drifting off to sleep, which I make myself do by drinking hot milk, honey and a good shot of Scotch, I heard singing – hymns. A loud, strong, woman’s voice and the thump of a beat, maybe her foot on the floor. It could only have been Trixie, though I would not have thought such a voice could come from her she looks so done in, sort of defeated. ‘Onward Christian Soldiers’ she sang, and ‘He Who Would Valiant Be’ and I went to sleep trying to remember the words. I used to love singing hymns at school. I wonder if children still sing hymns like that in assembly. I wonder if my children will?

  THE DEVIL

  If I screw up my eyes and try to picture my mother as she appeared to me as a child, I see fine wriggly scribbles that were the strands of escaped hair. Before she was ill her hair was black and though she pulled it back, coiled it at the nape of her neck and stuck it with long, pearl-headed pins, little fizzes always sprang up around her hairline. I see her hair first, then hear the swish of her skirt, the invisible legs moving inside. When she was well and clean she always smelled of lily-of-the-valley. She had ivory skin and brown eyes. Her eyebrows were clear, straight and black. Her head was neat and oval as a wooden doll’s.

  Before she was ill she sometimes used to stand on the dining-room table with a tablecloth wrapped round her and recite, ‘The Wreck of the Hesperus’. She would put one hand to her brow, and the other to her heart and sob her way through the last lines:

  At daybreak, on the bleak sea-beach a fisherman stood aghast,

  To see the form of a maiden fair lashed close to a drifting mast.

  The salt sea was frozen on her breast, the salt tears in her eyes;

  And he saw her hair, like the brown sea-weed, on the billows fall and rise.

  But only when Father was out.

  Father’s skin was always closely shaved and he smelled of his pipe tobacco and Silvikrin hair tonic. I remember the feel of his newly shaved cheek, silk smooth if you stroked one way, cat’s tongue rough the other. I must have been very young to have been allowed to, to have wished to, touch his face like that. Although his skin was so well shaved there were bundles of bristles coming out of his nostrils and ears as if he was really stuffed with straw. His eyes were the colour of cloudy ice, frozen with flecks.

  I had no brothers or sisters to help bear the burden of my parents.

  I don’t want to go remembering all that, but somehow I can’t seem to help it. The memories are like itches you must try not to scratch but then you forget and you are scratching again and I am remembering and it feels dangerous. I feel like a bad child on a railway track, running through a tunnel just for the risk, haring back down into the darkness of my own past. Back into that big house on a tree-lined road in Holloway, hating that house, sometimes almost blaming it.

  I can’t blame next door. Inis. But she has set me off. What is it about her? I don’t know. What is it about her eyes?

  I don’t know if the punishment came first. I mean, if the punishments were for the absences or the absences were a result of the punishments.

  This was one thing and it doesn’t sound too bad. I had to stare into a mirror, at my own face. Mother said it was for three hours – it was Mother’s punishment. I do not know if it was really three hours. To begin with I had no idea how long an hour was. The end of three hours was as hopelessly distant then as the thought of Christmas in July. I had no control, and no clock. Only the oval mirror in a wooden frame. The mirror was big enough to reflect my face and most of the room behind me, including the locked door. Sometimes Mother would be reflected behind me, standing at my shoulder. In the mirror her face was slightly twisted as if someone had pulled her jaw to one side, narrowed one of her eyes. In the mirror the curly hairs round her forehead looked like stiff wires, though I knew that really they were soft. My own face, too, looked odd. Now I think the glass was warped; then, I was afraid of the odd twist the mirror gave, that made what was familiar so frightening.

  ‘Look Trixie,’ Mother would say, leaning forward so that her face loomed beside my own. ‘Look deep into your eyes. Search your eyes for the truth.’ The edge of the glass was bevelled. If I moved my head a little and squinted through my lashes, sometimes I could see rainbows.

  ‘Don’t shut your eyes,’ she’d say. ‘Don’t blink. I want you to stand there and look inside yourself until you recognise the badness in you. I want you to look until you recognise the Devil, all your badness and lies.’

  Then she would leave the room for a long time. There was a window overlooking the street where people passed by, sometimes I heard children shouting. I never shouted. I did not go to the window. I did not leave the mirror. I hardly dared to let my eyes wander from the mirror eyes. I did look at the frame. I think it was mahogany, a deeply polished, warm wood. There were little scratches on the frame and one on the glass made, Father told me, by a diamond; the hardest thing in the physical world.

  In the room for oceans of time, there would be only me. I would stand in front of the mirror with my arms folded and stare at the mirror eyes and the longer I stared the less they were my eyes. I cannot explain the dread. It does not sound too bad, I think, as a punishment. Not cruel. The mirror eyes were pale. They looked not at me but through me and my face melted away, became a white cloud on the glass, like breath that would condense and run away.

  Sometimes I fainted. My face would dissolve around the two dark spots, like frogspawn spots that were the pupils of my eyes. A sick hunger would well up from my bowels and my breath would turn to stone in my lungs and I would swallow as if seized by a dreadful thirst that turned to a thirst for air and I would open my mouth that would turn to a dark gasp in the glass before I fell, seeing through the fizzing sparkle in my head the sinking of my eyes from the glass, their vanishing.

  If I did not faint, if my face did not dissolve, I would learn that it was not mine. It lost its meaning as my face or any face. The lips were like two pink worms, fat pink edges of a trap. The cheeks were lumps of meat, the nostrils damp holes. I could stretch it and if I opened the trap I could see teeth and a moving tongue like a snake that the mirror creature had swallowed, that flickered up from inside.

  But sometimes even while I was being punished for my absences I would have one. It was all right in the end if I could just be there in the cold room. If I could just remain there for three hours until Mother came back. If I told the lie, ‘Yes Mother, I saw the Devil and I told him to go away.’ Then that would be an end of it. We could go and sit by the fire and eat our tea although I did not want it. I was never hungry and had to force the buttered bread and the little cakes down my throat, past the thick snake in my throat. I only wanted to get into my own bed and be alone. I had a rabbit my Auntie Ba had knitted for me when I was a baby, a grey floppy thing, and I liked to curl under the covers in the safe dark and suck his ears.

  But sometimes I would not stay. That is why the door was locked, why there were bars on the window, becaus
e otherwise, in an absence, my body would not stay in the room. When I came to from an absence in that room I might be bruised where my head had been smashed on the wall, I might have tooth marks on my arm, my clothes might be ripped. I might have nothing on at all. So frightening to find yourself, suddenly, naked and alone in a cold room with a locked door and a prison window and eyes sad and accusing in the mirror, when you looked.

  Once I woke in bed with my arms strapped to my sides with soft bandages and dry lint stuffed in my mouth. The doctor was there, solemn with his grey, whiskery face. ‘A fit,’ he pronounced. ‘A most hysterical child.’ He put his fingers in my mouth and pulled out the lint and it was as if my tongue went with it and I was dumb for a week, afraid to speak, afraid of whose voice was living in my throat.

  That was one thing. Mother’s punishment. Father’s was quite another. And until I knew about the boy, it made no sense.

  ADA

  Trixie and me and that boy. Why Trixie is the main one I will never understand, not that he could ever be. But I saw the opportunities for fun that she did not take. Trixie was a lump and I was her spirit but then I was dumb. I was her good spirit and the boy, oh he was her bad.

  I watched but then you see I had no strength. I could not move.

  I was in Trixie moving slow like underwater. I could not move out till we were a woman.

  Being good, being punished when it was not her that did the bad things.

  Oh that boy!

  Poor Trixie.

  But me, being suddenly a young woman.

  I could not move till I was a woman in love.

  Call me romantic,

  but still I maintain,

  I was born to lo – ove.

  If you could see Trixie’s little hands clenched in her lap while my arms wanted to fly in dance, my hair fly, my feet spin …