The Private Parts of Women

by Lesley Glaister

  ‘“It’s a mercy she’s got the one,” they said,’ she said bitterly. She continued stroking my palm with her thumb but now I could feel the edge of her nail and the thinness of my bones between her fingers. ‘How little they knew! How little insight … Charles wanted a boy, do you understand that?’ She looked at me fiercely. ‘Do you, can you understand the … disappointment is too slight a word. He wanted a son. And there was this son, a fine boy, handsome, perfect in every respect … but dead. It killed something in him. Do you understand that?’ I winced at the pain of her hard fingers.

  She sat still for a moment and I listened to her breathing calm. She loosened my hand quite suddenly and stood up. ‘A dull day,’ she said and twitched the curtain. ‘I’ll send Louise up with some soup.’ And then she left the room.

  If it had been the other way round I wouldn’t have existed. That is what they would have preferred. Benjamin Charles and not Trixie. I lifted my hand and studied it. It seemed a horrible guilty thing that hand – a hand that had no right to be.

  After that, when I saw the boy, I knew him for what he was. The brother I had killed. It was not for a long time because there were no punishments from Mother for a while. After she told me about Benjamin Charles, she was ill. I do not know the name of her illness but it meant that she sat still for hours at a time, her eyes open but unseeing, her fists clenched on the arms of her chair. Sometimes a string of dribble would dangle from her chin, sometimes a tear trickled down her cheek. And sometimes when Father – or Auntie Ba, who always came to help when Mother was ill – sometimes when they moved her there was a terrible dark wet patch on her chair cushion that made me hot and crawly with shame.

  I think Mother was ill for weeks or months that time. I don’t know. I think spring turned to summer because I remember the curtains drawn against the light when I went to bed. Auntie Ba used to sing to me about the gypsies and I liked it so much when she sang:

  What care I for my goose-feather bed,

  With the sheets turned down so bravely, oh?

  Tonight I will sleep in a cold open field,

  Along with the Raggle Taggle Gypsies, oh!

  It gave me a feeling of lightness inside as if a little bit of gypsy freedom had got into me from the song. I used to try and sing but my voice had gone very small after my accident, like a little shivery thing huddled under my tongue so Auntie Ba had to put her ear against my mouth to hear me.

  ‘What’s got into you?’ she’d say, but kindly, and she cuddled me when I shook my head. She was lovely my Aunt Barbaria – that’s what I called her when I was learning to talk, trying to pronounce Barbara and it was one of the only times that I can remember when Father was pleased with me. ‘What’s that? Barbaria?’ he shouted, thumping the table so the knives and forks jumped. ‘Barbaria! That’s a good one.’

  She was really my mother’s aunt though not much older than her and looked very much the same only her hair was cut short in a way that made Father hoot with scorn behind her back. And she was kinder with soft hands and little gifts of time in her lap, up her sleeves, in her pockets, time to give to me. She had had four children, though her first son, Tom, the oldest by several years, had just been killed in the trenches. She bore it well, Mother said. I never saw her cry, though if his name was ever mentioned, her hand flew softly to her heart as if to hold it still.

  I did not dare ask Auntie Ba about the boy, not at first. But one night when she sat on the edge of my bed after her song she said something that made me sad and afraid. ‘Trixie love,’ she began. ‘I’m going home in a day or two. Jack and the others need me … and your mummy’s nearly better now. Why, today she ate a bit of Welsh rarebit and asked about the laundry. What’s that long face for now?’

  ‘Can I come with you?’ I asked. ‘Can I be your little girl?’

  She sighed and kissed me. ‘Silly. You’re your mummy’s little girl … What would she say if I took you away?’

  ‘She wouldn’t mind. You see, they really wanted the boy.’

  Auntie Ba sat up very straight and her pink smiling mouth went straight. I could see she was older than Mother then with deep lines printed on her forehead.

  ‘Now that is nonsense,’ she said. ‘Nonsense good and proper. Whatever in the world?’

  ‘She said …’

  ‘Forget about it,’ she said, smiling again, though not with her eyes.

  ‘Father blamed Mother, and Mother blames me.’

  ‘Blame! These things happen. How could you even think it! You’ve misunderstood, my love. Put it out of your mind.’ She sat me up and held me against her, the edge of her brooch digging into my cheek, but I didn’t mind. I started to cry which was a horrible, dirty, leaky, weak thing to do. Crying was nearly as bad as wetting yourself Mother said, and I never ever did it. I kept my eyes dry. Tears smell, she said, though there were her tears when she was ill, water came from every part of her that I could not bear to see, could not bear to breathe in the smell.

  ‘That poor baby died, but you lived, that was the important thing. Oh she always was a tragedy queen that mother of yours. Why she didn’t get straight down to it and have another one, I don’t know. Oh my poor lamb, I almost think I should take you home.’

  ‘It’s all right,’ I said suddenly, pulling back, dashing the tears from my eyes. I thought Auntie Ba might go and tell Father what I’d said and he might come and see me. He’d hardly noticed me since Mother was ill and that was the best thing.

  ‘She didn’t exactly say I was to blame,’ I said. ‘I just thought …’

  ‘Well you can just unthink …’ She wiped my eyes with an embroidered hanky. Then she ran her finger along the scar on my forehead. It was healed but still a bright shiny pink like an upside-down smile above my eyebrow. ‘How did you say you did this?’ she asked. She had asked before but I had only said I’d fallen. ‘By being clumsy,’ I said and she smiled, comforted I think, and kissed me goodnight.

  When I was older I learned how babies grow in their mothers’ wombs. That a womb is like an upside-down draw-string bag inside the mother and when the baby is ready the string loosens and it comes out. The bag is full of water in which the baby swims like a fish. After that, I had dreams about the boy and me. I saw us swimming in a tank in our coats and shoes, tiny children in Sunday hats with bubbles streaming from our mouths. That was a happy dream but another was terrible. It was a dark, cramped, slippery dream of slithering limbs and a struggle in which I killed Benjamin Charles who was not separate at all but was another part of me. I knew, even when I was a little girl, that I could never ever have a baby. That I could not be trusted with a baby.

  Father’s punishment. He stripped me of my clothes. Hard and rough, his face a blank, his fingers cold as metal fingers. He stared at me as if he hated me, looking at my shivery body. Then he made me dress in boy’s clothes: underwear, buttoned shirt, trousers, jacket, woollen socks. My fingers fumbled with the buttons. He stood over me watching every move. And when I was dressed he would look at me with tears standing in his eyes, and a white tremble in a muscle by his mouth.

  ‘Boy,’ he would say. And then he would open the wardrobe door and push me in and lock it behind me. The lock had a tickly curved sound like a silver S. Then I would hear the bedroom door slam, then silence. Almost silence. I’d have my face pressed into the folds of Mother’s dresses and coats, silk, velvet, fur. Sometimes my mouth filled up with fur. She had a beaded dress that rattled softly when I moved. There was a choking smell of camphor and stale perfume. There was no light, not the merest chink round the door.

  I thought I would choke to death in the folds of the clothes, the stiff, scratchy and soft fabrics against my face, the beads so smoothly cold they felt wet. My legs would tire and I’d sink down among the lumps of shoes and other things on the bottom of the wardrobe. Once I put my hand by accident into the pocket of a fur coat and I pulled out something hairy, sticky, an old peppermint sweet that I sucked.

  I did not fight or scream beca
use I thought I would suffocate. There was no air only cloth and fur. Perhaps I slept because I never remember coming out of the wardrobe, only going in.

  BOY

  Couldn’t Father see me?

  When I stood in front of him

  Me

  He only saw Trixie

  I was out and I did bad things for him

  To show him

  But he looked at me and saw Trixie

  He wanted not her but me

  I made Trixie let me do things

  Steal things, eat things, spoil things

  Run and climb and hurt

  I was strong then

  I am strong now and I am awake

  Why can’t I get out?

  I am getting stronger

  I am moving in her and shouting

  BONNY

  Our kitchen windows face each other over the fence so we could smile at each other, Trixie and I, as we stand at our sinks, but we don’t. We preserve the pretence of privacy. There is a Venetian blind pulled up above the sink with a greasy black knotted string but it is too disgusting to use. I let it down once and bits of God-knows-what fell out from between its slats so I pulled it quickly back up and left it. I considered getting a new one but it would seem rude to stop pretending not to see and put a real one up.

  It might be nice to have a pet. Maybe I should get myself a dog, a puppy. For what? To clutter up and complicate my life. Why can’t I just be. Anyway it would seem disloyal to Bonny, my dog-sister I used to call her as a child.

  Before my parents went away, Bonny had been ill. I thought she’d seemed better during the holiday but when they didn’t return she got worse. My parents’ house was sold very quickly and I went to live with my aunt in Colchester. I was rich for a young girl, but useless. I was a few weeks off starting my teaching degree. I should have been looking for somewhere of my own but I couldn’t do it. My aunt, Daphne, said I could stay with her until I felt better, me and Bonny. Bonny hated it there. It was a cats’ house. There were three of them, sneaky looking creatures with long, liquid eyes and lashing tails. They perched high up on shelves and window-sills and regarded Bonny scornfully.

  Daphne was like a cat herself, graceful and self-sufficient. She moved about her little house on silent feet and was always startling me by suddenly being there, behind or beside me. Not that she had much to do with me. She was a painter, a vague woman who lived outside the normal rules of time. I remembered my mother describing her as scatty, but she was not at all. She was quite methodical, it’s just that because she was used to living alone she didn’t subscribe to things like mealtimes or bedtimes. She tended to sleep more in the day and rise at night. For days there would be nothing but fruit to eat in the house and then I’d be woken up at 3 a.m. by the smell of frying mackerel.

  We didn’t like each other very much. She was my mother’s much younger half-sister. We had nothing in common. She smelled of linseed oil and wore long, paint-splashed skirts with fishermen’s smocks over the top. I don’t know if she’d ever had a lover. I don’t think she could have stood one. She couldn’t bear touching. She gave me one stiff, sympathetic hug at the funeral but I could tell she was flinching inside. After that, no more touching, though she lavished love and kisses on her ginger cats and cooked them little messes of chicken and fish which they’d eat fastidiously with their paws.

  About a month after we’d moved in, five weeks after my parents’ death, Bonny died. She wouldn’t eat, she whined and moped and shrank. One day I realised with a shock that her coat slid loosely over her rib-cage, there was no flesh in between the skin and the bone. A few days later she refused to go for walks any more. I took her to the vet who called her a poor old lady and offered to put her to sleep. I refused. I would have felt like a murderer. I took her back to Daphne’s and there, after two days, she died. I knew it was the end by the odd smell that came from her and the noisy way she was breathing. Her nose was hot and dry but her eyes were bright, and between naps, she kept her eyes on me, looking deep into my eyes as if she was trying to communicate something. Right to the very end, when I stroked her head and spoke to her she wagged the tip of her feathery black tail. And then it stopped wagging and she gave a rattly sigh, closed her eyes and was gone.

  I cried more for Bonny than for my parents. Or was it myself I was crying for? Daphne kindly took Bonny’s body to the vet’s to be hygienically disposed of since there wasn’t anywhere in her tiny garden to bury her. I manoeuvred the heavy, blanket-wrapped body into the back of her 2CV but stayed at home. I didn’t want to think about what they’d do with her. If we’d been at home, my dad and I would have buried her behind the greenhouse and we all would have mourned.

  Daphne was kind in her cool vague way. She made me a little meal, like a cat’s meal, of lightly-cooked chicken breast and poured me a tiny glass of thin, pale sherry.

  ‘Fino,’ she said. ‘I know how I’d feel if it was one of my sweethearts …’

  The next week I went to college and hardly ever returned to Daphne’s house after that. I doubt if she noticed. Less than a year into my degree, I met Richard. Dr Goodie. He was a junior houseman, worn down with all the hours and the strain of the job. I fell in love with his exhaustion which was so impressively greater than my own. I quickly moved out of my stuffy hall-of-residence and in with him. I was in love with his need for me. I made coffee and took his clothes to the launderette and was always ready to make love at any odd time that he had the energy. I never decided to give up my degree, it just slipped away, became irrelevant. I loved him partly because he understood death, or so I thought, because he had seen it. I wonder if people fall in love with murderers for the same reason? I suppose I thought he was wise.

  When I remember that time, I can hardly believe I am remembering myself. It is all so dim and far away, like the memory of an old film. After Bonny’s death I don’t think I felt anything else strongly, not even love. I felt nothing much except guilt and loneliness and then immense relief at being needed by Richard, wanted and loved. I felt nothing strongly until the birth of Robin, and then I felt too much.

  A FUNNY TURN

  Mother and Father kept me a child for longer, far longer, than it was true. I was bad, ‘a problem child’ though I don’t think such a handy phrase was in currency then. I was lonely, cruelly sheltered even into my early twenties. I don’t blame them. I was not safe to be left alone, that’s how they saw it. They were afraid of my growing up, quite sensibly frightened of how I would cope with the world. I was no better. Still the blank spells came, though sometimes I was able to cover up the absences, for I was left very much alone.

  The house was quiet. Father was out a good deal of the time. He was having trouble with labour relations in his rubber goods’ factories. Demands for better conditions, shorter hours, more pay. Father was incensed by the ingratitude of his workers. At breakfast each morning, the newspaper would tremble in his hands. ‘Two million unemployed!’ he might say, waving the headlines in my face. ‘And still they threaten action.’ Then he’d subside behind his paper, muttering, Commie traitors, and Bolsheviks. He always drank his tea too hot, slurping it. The noise made me wince. There was no conversation. Father didn’t like to talk at breakfast-time. Louise, the cook, served our food and slunk away, repelled I’m sure by the atmosphere. Father would have preferred to be alone, but he pretended, quite successfully mostly, that we weren’t there. And sometimes, I think, I wasn’t. And neither was Mother.

  One day we were eating sausages, I remember, slightly blackened, and I suddenly saw us as we were: Father muttering over his newspaper, chewing and slurping; Mother silent, staring wild-eyed at the tea pot; myself, a woman dressed as a child, eating neatly, cutting my sausages into tiny pieces and chewing each one twelve times, and it made me laugh. Laughter was a rare sound. Mother did not seem to notice. Father whipped his paper down and gave me a look. Louise who had come in with fresh toast, pulled a droll face at me and backed out of the room closing the door behind her.r />
  ‘I fail to see the joke,’ Father said. He had a smear of fat on his immaculately shaved chin. I thought it funny, him so dignified, a scarecrow dressed for the office. Oh I knew he was a scarecrow, I could still see the straw sticking in bunches from his nostrils and ears. ‘Pray enlighten me,’ he said. Red spots were growing on his cheeks though his lips were white.

  Mother reached out for the tea pot. ‘Another cup, Charles?’ she asked, though her eyes were not with us. He banged on the table with his fist and my tea slopped on the tablecloth.

  My laughter stopped. I don’t know how I had dared. It’s just … it’s as if sometimes the light changes and makes quite ordinary things seem absurd. Looking at a bus, I sometimes want to laugh even now. All those people, two tiers of them, sitting still and travelling forward; sometimes the bus disappears, that is all that makes sense of it, the bus and then all that’s left are the absurd people plunging seriously forward through the air.

  Apart from breakfast I never saw Father. He was always at work or out elsewhere. Mother had settled into a sort of trance. She wouldn’t move for hours, sometimes days. She emerged briefly sometimes, like a dreamer, wild-eyed with dreams, fighting the descending blanket of sleep. I sat with her, tried to bring her back. ‘It was the schooner Hesperus that sailed the wintry sea …’ I kept starting to try and rouse her, but her eyes were empty. It drove me half mad. Louise clattered in the kitchen and moved about the house, making pleasant remarks, even singing sometimes, and it was as if a real bright person moved among ghosts.

  I read the newspaper and the Bible. I was Mother’s nurse. Auntie Ba didn’t come any more now that I was grown-up, she said that, grown-up, though it made Father snort. He was glad to see the back of her though, he’d always despised her. So I was left alone for much of the time – except for Mother. I sat with her, sometimes reading aloud; when she was at her worst, wiping her dribble, holding a spoonful of broth to her mouth.