The Private Parts of Women

by Lesley Glaister

  He went downstairs. I took off my nightdress. He said something to the children. Robin followed him out into the hall asking something. I rubbed a little nub of strawberry soap that smelled of jam on to my flannel. Robin’s Christmas-stocking soap. I washed under my arms. The front door banged. I washed between my legs. My stomach was skinny and hollow. I dried myself. I heard the car starting. I put deodorant under my arms, two sharp jets of it, man’s deodorant. His. I heard him drive away.

  ‘Mummy,’ Robin shouted up the stairs. Billie began to cry. I looked with surprise at my body in the mirror. It was like a stranger’s. I live in that, I thought, it’s mine, freehold till the day I die. And then, but what am I that lives in that? That is my last clear memory of that morning although I know I did certain things. I dressed and threw some clothes in a case, packed up my cameras. I wrote a note that asked Richard to let me go for now, promising I would keep in touch if he would not try and find me. Try and I will disappear, I wrote, melodramatic but sincere. I went downstairs and took my building society book from the dresser drawer. I put ‘Fantasia’ on for the children. I gave Billie a bottle and a rusk and Robin an apple and a biscuit. I secured the fireguard. I phoned for a taxi and stood behind the children watching the film, watching the shadowy orchestra playing Bach’s solemn and portentous ‘Toccata and Fugue in D minor’ turn to dancing lights in the sky until the taxi came. Then I slipped out, they didn’t even look round, Billie was falling asleep. She would stay asleep for an hour or so, while Robin went into a trance in front of the screen and they would come to no harm. I propped my note up on the stairs where Richard would see it as soon as he walked in. I closed the door very quietly and locked it. From a call-box at the station I rang Richard’s surgery. ‘Tell Dr Goodie he must go home at once. It’s an emergency. The children are alone,’ I said to the receptionist and put the phone down before she could ask any questions. I knew she would tell him and I knew he would try and phone and no one would answer, or Robin would, and Richard would drive straight home. They were quite safe. I had an empty swooping feeling inside, excitement and terror and yet I was not quite there. I was not quite doing this, leaving my children. I could not quite do that, what mother could?

  The train brought me to Sheffield which is a city I didn’t know. I know no one here, except, now, Trixie. I telephoned Richard from the station, to make sure he was home, and put the phone down before he could say anything. I stayed in a guest-house while I found a house to rent. It was two weeks I think. I sent postcards to the children. I spoke to no one in the guest-house unless it was necessary although I was perfectly civil. The guest-house overlooked a park. My room was at the back, a small room the window rectangle crammed with bare black branches clotted with the nests of rooks. They sound so sad, rooks. They are the black-feathered spirits of sorrow when they cry out the way they do, when they slow hand-clap themselves through the sky like old black gloves.

  I watched no television, I read no papers, I was enclosed in a slab of dullness the shape and size of the telephone-box from which I had made my call. Once again during that fortnight I rang the house to hear Richard’s voice. I did not speak but I listened for a few seconds, long enough to gather that they were all right, nothing had happened to the children, they were safe and well, and then I cut myself off.

  SONGBIRD

  When I joined the Salvation Army, I left my family. I had no choice. You cannot secretly be a Soldier. As soon as I was Saved, I told my father. He did not shout or rage. I had a choice, he said, to give up the monstrous charade or to leave home. I did not have to think long. As soon as I was accepted as a Recruit, I took my new uniform home and changed into it in my room, gladly stripping off my childish dress. It felt freeing and wonderful to wear the sober clothes, the shirt was crisp and mannish. I tied my bonnet-string under my chin and went downstairs.

  I walked into the room and stood before them, brave for Jesus. The Salvationist must gladly endure persecution. My father folded his arms and looked at my mother but there was no use looking at her – she was sitting rigidly in her chair, staring at the carpet as she did for hours on end. If you touched her when she was like that she was as cold as a statue, and almost as stiff.

  I clasped my trembling hands behind my back, told myself I did not care what he said. The Salvation Army was my family now. In the month between becoming a Convert and then a Recruit, I had managed to leave the house for several Meetings. Now I was ready to sign the Articles of War, to be publicly sworn in, to have my name entered on the Soldiers’ Roll of the Corps.

  ‘You are leaving this house?’ Father asked mildly.

  ‘Only if you wish me to,’ I said.

  I looked past him. The rain was rolling down the window. The garden looked like underwater, green things swaying through the grey.

  ‘It is your choice,’ he said. ‘And I must be certain that you understand the consequences.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. I did not care what the consequences were. I was strengthened by Jesus and my friends to this extent: that I would give up, throw off anything, without regret. I guessed he meant my inheritance. I would forfeit his wealth. I thought nothing of that … houses, factories, investments … all wordly stuff that had brought not a shaft of happiness into my childhood. I didn’t want Father’s wealth, though I knew that the Salvation Army would have welcomed it. I thought if I didn’t join the Salvation Army, but waited till he was dead which might not have been for another twenty years, the fortune would have been mine to spend as I wished. While if I joined them, it wouldn’t. Surely they would rather have had me than money, I thought.

  ‘If you walk out of that door in order to join that common, stinking, hysterical bunch of cranks,’ he said, in the most reasonable of voices, ‘then you are no longer my daughter. You never, ever dare to set foot in this house again. Do you hear? We wash our hands of you. I speak for your mother – see what you’ve already done to her with your … proclivities – and myself.’

  I looked at my mother. She gave no sign of having heard.

  ‘I need you to help with your mother,’ he continued. ‘She needs you. If you go, you are wicked, you neglect your duty as a daughter. What kind of religion encourages people to turn their back on their duty?’

  ‘Goodbye Father,’ I said. ‘Goodbye Mother.’

  I turned away and as I opened the door and stepped out into the warm lashing rain, the sense of sudden freedom was dizzying. I felt purified. My childhood was a dirty thing. Sinful. I was grateful to my father for cutting me off. I did not want him saved, or my mother. That is wrong and I know it now and I knew it then. Their Salvation should have been my first preoccupation. But I wanted them left behind. How can I bear to say this? Standing there so pious, in my uniform, I wanted them damned. I didn’t think it then, not so clearly. But my distrust of them, my fear and loathing was so complete that if, by some miracle, he had made a different response, had said:

  ‘Well Trixie, if you’re so wholehearted then I’m pleased for you. Maybe there’s something in it … you have our support.’ If he’d attended a Meeting, if he’d repented and become a Salvationist which should have been my deepest desire, if so, it would have been ruined for me. If that had been his response I might not have done it. I needed to oppose him. I wanted him to cut me off. That is my thought now. I felt pain as the heavy front door slammed behind me as if it chopped off a limb and I gasped with shock and my mouth filled with rain. Then there was the dizzying freedom. I walked down the front path and had to steady myself on the gatepost for fear that I would faint. White lilac flowers shook scented raindrops into my face. Through my wet eyelashes I saw the outline of my father’s figure behind the lace curtains. I turned and walked away.

  For a time I forgot them. If that is possible. Anyway, they did not live in my waking mind. I had some independent money, enough to donate my 10 per cent Cartridge and live comfortably enough. I had no other employment, I dedicated myself to the Army, selling the War Cry in public houses, workin
g in the Bothwell Street Shelter for down-and-outs, attending meetings, processions. I was not disturbed by the rift with my parents, rather strengthened.

  I would have been happy if I could just have shaken off the shadow and terror of the absences. There was a brief time, though long enough to fool me, when I seemed to be whole. I seemed to be one single solid human being with my name through the middle. A simple human being with one simple faithful soul. I grew more confident, I made friends. And I discovered I had a voice – that was the most glorious thing, the greatest gift.

  My speaking voice had always been small and I had hardly ever sung. There must have been nursery rhymes, surely? But there was no music in our house. It was Mother’s nerves that stopped us getting a piano, and Father would not entertain the thought of a wireless. So there was no music – except when Auntie Ba was there. She always sang to me.

  Whenever she sang, I could hear my own voice in my head. Away with the Raggle Taggle Gypsies, oh. ‘Come on Trixie Bell, you sing it,’ she’d urge but my voice was dull and flat, a fearful voice with no music in it. Auntie Ba would shake her head. ‘Ah well Trixie Bell, we can’t all be songbirds.’

  But once I’d left home and dedicated my life to Jesus I found I did have a voice. I had always been ashamed when I joined in the hymns and choruses. I would have avoided it, but in the Salvation Army you have to sing, you have to join in, voices in unison provide volume. And with the casting off of my childhood, a voice came to live in my throat and what else could that have been but a gift from God? A sign that I was truly Saved, truly Forgiven – even for the fault at the outset of my Army career, my own failure to forgive and to pray for the Salvation of my parents.

  I can remember the very hymn. My heart was still full and fat and sore from the split with my parents and with the huge love I had embraced. I was tender and trembling and open. My voice was its usual low inhibited growl. We were standing, a little group of us on a corner. It was a week or two after I’d left home. I had signed the Articles, made public my testimony. I was a Soldier. It was a warm Sunday, the air full of the scent of flowers. There were six of us, no band, just six voices and tambourines. Children had gathered to listen – and one or two men on their way to the pub. ‘Can you do “Let Us With A Gladsome Mind”?’ a little child asked. And that is what we sang and as we sang my voice climbed. Like a butterfly breaking free of its chrysalis, my voice emerged and sprouted wings. By the fourth verse, He the golden tressed sun, Caused all day his course to run, it was a noticeable voice and by the end it was rising above the voices of my fellows, strong and clear and strange in my throat. Mary, holding my elbow on the way back to the lodgings we shared said: ‘You enjoyed the singing today, Trixie,’ and her eyes were full of warmth and shine.

  ‘Everyone has a voice, you just have to learn to use it,’ she had said to me more than once, when I’d complained of my lack. I had hoped but not believed that she was right but now I knew and could hardly stop myself singing, I was like an excited child with a new toy. All the time there was a new song in my heart and rising through my lips.

  ADA

  I have talent. I can dance and sing. My lips are the most kissable you have ever seen and my eyes! How they flash, big and black, seductive. How the men fall like nine-pins. It is a waste to have been stuck in Trixie all and for ever.

  But not a waste entirely, because when she was a woman I got out.

  Suddenly I was in front. I was the one with the arms in her flesh and I was the mover. My feet at once able to dance through her feet. My body, through her body, to love. For I was born to love.

  It was my destiny to fall in love. Sitting behind the face of someone but being someone else. Can you imagine it? O la la! A pale Anglo-Saxon and me with the fiery Mediterranean blood racing in my veins.

  Was it perversity that made me choose Frank out of all the men there were? A reaction to Trixie and her Salvation Army? Bad, handsome Frank.

  Poor Trixie. You cannot help to feel sorry for someone with no spark. I am the spark! If only she would see!

  EGG

  One night, in the guest-house, I dreamed that there were babies crying in the trees, high up, tangled in the cold wire branches, babies I couldn’t reach.

  I wish he had reproached me. More. I wish he had been angry. I wish he had slapped me, punched me, punished me – because then I could have hit back. I wish he had been frail. I could not stand his understanding. He was so patient with me as if I was one of his patients. He was patient and sensitive when what I needed was a smack.

  Can you believe I’m saying this?

  I woke up with the babies’ cries in my ears and my hands all slithery wet clutching nothing.

  At breakfast the egg was gelatinous and raw on top. Why do they never cook the tops of eggs in these places? I thought egg. I thought of what it is, genetic material. I couldn’t stomach that genetic slime.

  The only other guests were men who smoked through breakfast and kept their newspapers propped up in front of them like screens.

  ‘Everything all right?’ said the girl who served. She was very young with bitten nails and bare legs marbled with the cold. She wore a brown-and-white-checked overall stretched across her chest and love-bites on her neck.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Not hungry, that’s all.’

  ‘More tea?’

  ‘Thank you, yes.’ I drank the tea. I did not feel nauseous, I had not, I realised, for days. It does not go instantly when you stop a child. It hangs on, the hormones are confused. That was what I’d wanted an end to most desperately, that nausea, but it hung on for a week or more.

  The tea was hot, it was good. ‘Good water for tea, Sheffield water,’ the landlady had said when I’d remarked on it, ‘better than London water. That where you’re from?’ I nodded and then shook my head. ‘Not really, no.’ Just in case, just in case she’d guessed I was a woman on the run.

  It took me a couple of weeks to find this house. This narrow road behind the shops. Strange that it is so quiet. Last night I heard a rushing noise, I thought it was in my ears, this morning I realised what it is, it is the river running under the road and under the houses. The cellar is wet, the landlord warned me not to keep things down there, but I made no connection with the rough brown river that emerges here and there from its channels under the roads. It is high now, full of winter rain and melted snow from the hills. Beside the church on the main road, it is quite a thrilling thing to see, a full, peat-brown rush, carrying leaves and sticks with it, gorging its banks and then vanishing again, under the road. But it is still there, of course, and I can hear it rushing.

  I stood in my little garden at first light. ‘Are you going to see to it?’ Trixie asked me. I don’t think so. That is not what I am about, tending a garden, tending anything except myself. It is a mess though, long grass and weeds, a rotting mattress, slugs everywhere and snails. The laburnum tree has no shoots yet, just warped old seed cases, dropping occasionally into the grass. The snowdrops have finished.

  I do love Billie. I do. It’s just that after the birth I couldn’t pull myself together. That is a dead as a doornail (ha) metaphor, but it is so apt. I could not pull together the unravelling strands. I could not get the will, the sense, my centre back, it hung just out of reach, a loose end. I should have said, Richard would have understood if I had said, would have understood more of my … I don’t know, of my unravelling. Is there anything he wouldn’t understand?

  A little girl. It’s what I wanted. She was born last May. I expected an easy birth. Robin’s was easy. I read books, did exercises, Richard came to classes with me and we practised breathing together. Labour was manageable agony. I remained in control. And when I held the squirming hot wet boy in my arms there was never a second when I did not love him more than my own self. My heart opened like a rose, all the fat petals of love unfurling at the sight of his crumpled red face, his downy cheeks, the dark liquid of his new eyes, the greedy lips that clamped on to my nipple and sucked so fervently, so e
xpertly as if he’d been practising for a hundred years. It was love like no other love I have ever known or would ever want to know.

  It was a terror-filled love. I used to wake at night, suddenly sit up sweating and gasping my way out of dreams of fire or flood or falling where I could not reach my baby, could not save him. I used to stop frozen at the top of the stairs, with him in my arms, afraid that I would fall or drop him. I could not drive for weeks after Robin was born, I couldn’t trust myself or other drivers. War in the Gulf broke out soon after his birth and sometimes, as I fed him, I watched the war on the television and tears would stand in my eyes. It petrified me to realise how little control I had, that I could not make the world safe for him.

  I took ridiculous numbers of photographs as if in that way I could keep moments. At least that moment was safe, at least that moment was happy, I would think, hoarding the past as if it is of some use when it is the future that is the danger. There are albums and albums of pictures of Robin, the walls at home are covered, every expression, every movement he made practically in the first few months. Richard thought I was obsessed. He wanted us to have another, get on with it, ‘get the babies had’ was his curious expression, ‘and then get on with our lives’.

  I kept putting it off. I didn’t want to have another. I didn’t want anyone else. I didn’t even want Richard half the time, but he insisted that I made time for him. Sometimes he arranged a baby-sitter and took me out to dinner or to a concert or film. Sometimes I quite enjoyed it, sometimes I relaxed, but I could never wait to get home. I was always relieved that it was over so that I could stand in Robin’s room and watch him sleep. Secretly I used to lick his sleeping cheek, just for the soapy taste.

  Not until Robin was two did I want sex again, and hardly then. I let Richard do it to me once a week or so but I breast-fed Robin until he was nearly two and my body felt like his. I did not want any hot and hairy man on it or in it. It wasn’t Richard’s fault; no matter how kind he was, no matter how much he touched or kissed me, I felt nothing. He was so patient, so insistent that I enjoy myself that I used to pretend, to gasp and shudder and sigh, with my eyes on the clock calculating hours of sleep. Only when he believed that I was satisfied would he come. I wanted to tell him not to bother – but how could I? He was so wonderful, as always, such a diligent lover. I should have been grateful.