Jerusalem the Golden

by Margaret Drabble

  ‘I really can’t quite decide,’ she said. ‘Why do you think it can have been? In a way, I think it was a kind of pride that did it. I had two, and then Gabriel was an accident, and somehow the thought that he was an accident was so insulting to me that I had to have some more, to prove that he wasn’t. Everyone thinks Annunciata was an accident, being so much younger than Clelia, but she wasn’t, I had to work terribly hard to get Annunciata. So I must have wanted them, you see. For some reason. Or another.’

  ‘You like to tell people,’ said Clelia, ‘that you’ve had five children. Because you like to see them gasp in amazement. And then start to flatter you about how thin you are, and how productive you are, and all that. Don’t you?’

  ‘I suppose I must,’ said Mrs Denham. ‘But it doesn’t seem a very good reason, does it? I mean, it sounds more like a justification than a reason. And then, you see, it’s always such a wonderful excuse. For not having done other things.’

  ‘How vain you are,’ said Martin.

  ‘But it’s true,’ said Mrs Denham, ‘that I really do like to have James. Otherwise I would surely have sent you packing, wouldn’t I? It must be because I need him. It’s nice to have a baby in the house again. Clelia, would you mind making his bottle?’

  ‘Martin, you go and make his bottle,’ said Clelia.

  ‘Must I really?’ said Martin.

  ‘Yes, you must,’ said Clelia.

  ‘Oh, all right,’ said Martin, and got up and went.

  ‘He gets worse and worse,’ said Clelia, when he had gone. ‘Why on earth don’t you back me up when I try to get rid of him, mother?’

  ‘It seems so crude, somehow,’ said Mrs Denham. ‘Just getting rid of him.’

  ‘You might at least ask him to go and make his own baby’s bottle,’ said Clelia.

  ‘It’s all very well, but I’m sure he doesn’t boil the milk. I’m sure he just heats it, I’m sure he doesn’t actually boil it. I only ask you to do it because I know you’ll do it properly.’

  ‘What happened to his wife?’ said Clara, not for the sake of asking, but because she really wanted to know. Clelia and her mother looked at each other blankly, and ‘We don’t know,’ they said, ‘we never like to ask.’

  When Martin returned with the bottle, Mrs Denham picked the baby out of his chair, and settled back with him in her arms. ‘Do let me give it him,’ she said. ‘Do let me, I like to hear him suck. Go and show Clara the garden.’

  And they went. They went through the French window at the end of the room, and down the stone steps into the garden. When they got there, Clelia said to Martin, ‘You really do get on her nerves, you know. She’s not joking.’

  ‘I know I get on her nerves,’ said Martin. ‘But she likes things on her nerves.’

  ‘Not things like you,’ said Clelia.

  ‘Anyway, she likes James,’ said Martin.

  ‘Of course she likes James, I mean to say, there’s nothing to dislike in James, is there? She likes all babies, you can see her outside the fishmonger’s peering into other people’s prams. But that’s no reason for taking advantage of her weak points.’

  ‘She’s not a child herself,’ said Martin. ‘And when she says she wants a baby in the house, I do her the credit of believing her.’

  ‘Well, that’s very hypocritical of you,’ said Clelia, ‘because you know quite well that she only wants to have James so as not to hurt your feelings. She’s getting old now, she’s fifty next year, she doesn’t want to run around making bottles and changing nappies. And she’s got quite enough grandchildren without having to borrow other people’s spare babies.’

  ‘Why should she care about my feelings?’ said Martin.

  ‘Goodness me, don’t start taking that as a compliment, she cares about everyone’s feelings, she’s an archetypal victim, she’s an absolute fool about other people’s feelings, and let me warn you, I may as well warn you, the more she dislikes somebody, the more somebody annoys her, the more careful she is not to hurt their feelings, in fact the only people she is ever rude to are people like me and Gabriel and Papa, I mean people she cares for enough not to worry about being fair to. My goodness, Clara, how frightfully boring for you, how can you bear to listen to us. Let’s go to the end of the garden and look at the ghastly thing that Martin flogged us.’

  ‘It isn’t boring at all,’ said Clara, truthfully. ‘I find it quite enlightening.’

  ‘Enlightening, enlightening,’ said Clelia, ‘I don’t at all like the sound of that word. I don’t want you to find things out about me, I don’t want you to stop liking me.’

  ‘Enlightenment,’ said Martin, reaching for Clelia’s arm, ‘can only endear you. The more one sees of you, the more …’

  ‘Oh, lay off,’ said Clelia, and pulled away from him, and skipped a few steps on the green short grass, and then did rather a professional cartwheel. ‘Can you do cartwheels, Clara?’

  ‘I can,’ said Clara, ‘but I won’t because my pants would show.’

  And she followed Clelia, more decorously, to the end of the garden. At the end of the lawn there was a sundial; they looked at it and it had got the time right. ‘I’m always amazed,’ said Clelia, ‘to find the sun is so reliable.’

  Behind the sundial there were a few trees, some of them in flower: a small path led into their deceptive shallow depths, and there, in a hollow a few yards from a high brick wall that bordered the garden, stood a sculpture. The trees grew closely round it, and willow-like fronds drooped upon it; it was made partly of bronze, and the bronze had taken on the colour of green bark.

  ‘We tried to hide it,’ said Clelia, and laughed. ‘We shoved it down here because we wanted to hide it. It’s quite horrible, really. But you can’t see it properly here. You can’t see how bad it really is.’

  ‘I wouldn’t know,’ said Clara, ‘whether it were bad or not. But it looks quite pretty with all the leaves.’ And she stared at it, glad to have been told that it was not good, for she could make nothing of it: it stood about five feet high, on a stone lump, and it had holes in it and stretching arms.

  ‘Look inside,’ said Clelia. ‘Look inside, through the holes.’

  And Clara went and put her eye to the hole, and inside the block swam sadly a drowned lady, some seaweed, and an orange.

  ‘How strange,’ said Clara, stepping back from it. ‘I think I rather like it. How do they make it look so huge inside? Who made it?’

  ‘It’s all done by mirrors,’ said Martin, and Clelia said, ‘It was made by an awful Frenchman that Martin discovered, wasn’t it, darling? Though I will say this for you, my love’ – and here she put her arm most affectionately round his waist, ‘in the years I’ve known you, he’s been your only real disaster.’ And, turning to Clara, ‘His taste is most remarkable, you know. Really remarkable.’

  ‘He was such a charming fellow,’ said Martin. ‘And I thought some people might like them.’

  ‘But nobody liked them,’ said Clelia. ‘Nobody at all.’

  ‘Why ever did you buy it then?’ said Clara.

  ‘My mother bought it,’ said Clelia. ‘He got round my mother. She wanted something for the garden. So he told her how marvellous it was, and how misunderstood this wretched Frenchman was, and she bought it. It was thoroughly unscrupulous.’

  ‘No it wasn’t,’ said Martin. ‘She knew quite well it wasn’t worth what she paid for it.’

  ‘That doesn’t make any difference,’ said Clelia. ‘Just because she does it with her eyes open. That doesn’t make it any better. It was lucky we had enough trees to hide it in.’

  ‘It isn’t as bad as all that,’ said Martin. ‘It’s nothing to be ashamed of … It’s better than that junk she’s got on the lower level. And I know what she paid for that too.’

  ‘The trouble with you,’ said Clelia, ‘is that you don’t appreciate the distinction between the decorative and the creative arts. It may be junk, but it looks all right in a garden. You don’t understand. Look what a frightful sight
your flat used to be. All those white walls and contemporary curtains. And I mean to say, who would want to live in your gallery?’

  ‘I always thought that gardens,’ said Clara, as they progressed slowly back along the long stretch of grass, and down the steps to the lower level, ‘I always thought that gardens were for growing flowers in. But you don’t seem to have much in the way of flowers here.’

  ‘We don’t go in for flowers,’ said Clelia, displaying with a sweep of her arm the lower level, curiously cluttered with urns, a bench, a dislocated piece of mosaic resting on its end, and a functionless fountain. ‘We don’t understand flowers, we can never remember their names. And we’re too lazy to do any gardening. You don’t have to bother with all this stuff, you just leave it, to grow weeds. It doesn’t need any attention.’

  ‘I see,’ said Clara, descending: and she thought of the square flat patch that extended beyond her mother’s house at home, and of the grudgingly mown grass, and the dutifully weeded herbaceous borders, and the complaints about neighbouring cats and dogs that would come and dig in the unrewarding earth. Her family did not much understand gardening either, and took little pleasure in the fruit of their unskilled, social labours; as far back as she could remember, Clara could recollect her mother’s perpetual nagging at her father to cut the lawn, her father’s occasional outburst of resentment against the boys who trampled on the borders. It never looked very impressive, at the best of times, though in spring the daffodils would lend it a brief colour: all the plants were dirty, with the insidious industrial grime, and the evergreens were particularly filthy. She remembered the leaves of the laurel, a thick, tough, leathery spotted green and yellow: she was obliged, through ignorant association, and through a learning far wider than her experience, to picture poets and emperors crowned with such grim suburban foliage. The garden’s sole glory was a laburnum, which blossomed wonderfully each year: but even that she associated more with its dry black fatal pods than with its flowers, so often and so rigorously had she been warned of its poison. When her father died, her mother continued to look after the garden, though Alan would come home at weekends, even after his marriage, to mow the lawn; it gave her so little enjoyment that Clara wondered why she did not let it go to seed. There was a widower, two doors away, whose garden had done just that: he never touched it, and grass grew feet thick all over it, and weeds flourished, and roses climbed the hedge, unpruned, and ramped across the soil. Mrs Maugham would often abuse this garden and the widower’s laziness, with a self-righteous, alarming complacency, saying that it was a scandal and a disgrace, and that it ought not to be allowed: and when one day Clara, exasperated, as she sometimes rashly was, out of her usual silence, asked her what harm it was doing anybody, Mrs Maugham had snapped triumphantly that it was harming everybody in the street, because it helped the weeds to spread. ‘You can see them,’ she said bitterly, ‘all those dandelions and thistles, and all that bindweed growing under the fence. It’s a blot on the whole neighbourhood, that’s what it is.’ And Clara, abashed, had retreated into silence, because she could see that it was true. One could not rot peacefully and harmlessly, in such a neighbourhood: the airy seeds of debility would float too easily over the garden walls.

  The Denhams’ garden seemed to have no walls, so thoroughly were its boundaries screened and disguised. Clara liked it, as she had liked everything that afternoon, but even as she stood there and admired, and heard the history of the lump of mosaic, and listened to Martin’s views on Candida’s view on the social connotations of goldfish, she began to feel a sense of overwhelming fatigue. Her head ached: she could encompass no more. She felt as she felt at the end of some long and erudite lecture in a foreign tongue; her mind would no longer pay attention. Whole concepts, whole reorganizations of thought swam drunkenly through her head, and lurched and revolved like the drowned woman and her orange: she no longer knew what gardens and houses were for, and their distinctions, once clear, had grown confused. She followed Martin and Clelia into the house, and drank, eventually, a large gin and tonic, and then she went home on the bus, and when she got home she was suddenly and violently sick. She could not assimilate, however hard she willed to do so, such strange food: and she woke in the morning hungry, but with her head still aching.

  6

  The sense of exhaustion which the Denhams produced in Clara took some time to wear away, and she grew accustomed to leaving their house with a headache and with a sense of familiar fatigue, as though she had walked for too long, and made too much conscious effort of application in front of works of art arranged in some peculiarly absorbing art gallery. She wanted to see, but the things that she saw were too much for her; her mind stretched and cracked in an effort to take them in. It was not that they did not make her welcome; indeed, she suspected from time to time that it was the warmth of their emotion as much as the strangeness of their ways that tired her. She was not used to such interest, such demonstrations, such inquiries, such overwhelming faculties of sympathetic recollection. Nor was she used to so large a family. Her own home, even when it had contained, at its fullest point, two parents and three children, had always given the impression of silent pockets of isolated, self-contained, repellent activity: the children had lived as much as possible behind closed bedroom doors. Whereas the Denhams seemed to be perpetually, intricately, shiftingly involved, each with the other, and each with a whole circle of cross-threaded connections. It did not take Clara long to notice that Martin was as much taken with Clelia’s mother as with Clelia, and she thought she once surprised in Sebastian Denham’s eye a glance, directed towards herself, that she would never have expected from so old a man. Such mingling of the generations confused her, although it filled her, at the same time, with hope, for had she not always known that life did not, need not, end so grimly and so abruptly?

  The relationships between the brothers and the sisters were also a revelation to her. The feelings between them were peculiarly intense; their concern for each other was unfailing, and they spoke of each other with absorbed and passionate affection. Only the unfortunate eldest, Amelia, was excluded from the close circle of mutual admiration, and she had cut herself off, had deserted them, had gone away with a dreadful man to live in the country. They mourned over her, and recalled together the happy past before her severance, and discussed her plight with endless solicitude, but to no avail; though constantly invited, she never came. And Mrs Denham, when she spoke of Amelia, which she often did, as though in nervous, restless propitiation, would seem overcast by some real shadow, a shadow that for Clara merely heightened the radiant intimacy of those that remained. She had never in her life seen or heard of such a mother, a mother capable of such pleasant, witty and overt concern, nor had she ever seen an image of fraternal love. She had read of it, in the classics, as she had read of human sacrifices and necrophilia and incest, but she had not thought to see it with her own eyes.

  She never met Amelia, but she met all the others. She met them gradually, by means of a photograph album. Had she not been past astonishment, she would have been astonished when Mrs Denham, after supper on the first whole evening that she spent with them (an evening specially arranged, or so they managed to make it seem, to celebrate the end of her examinations) had produced this photograph album, for she had always been taught that such objects were marks of vulgarity, manifestations of the worst possible taste, as fatally revealing as a pet Alsatian dog on the windowsill or ferrets in the back yard. Her own mother had had much to say on the subject of pricey albums entitled ‘My First Baby’ or ‘Our Wedding Day’ purchased by other residents in Hartley Road. But the Denhams seemed gaily unaware of the dreadful risk that they were running, and Clara, looking with Clelia and her mother at the strange pages of strange photographs, could see that they had little to lose. The pictures were a weird mélange; some of them were classical family groups, of weddings and christenings and birthdays; some of them were amateur holiday snapshots; some were highly glossy, highly expensive posed pi
eces, of Mrs Denham at her typewriter, Mr Denham by a garden urn, Mrs Denham with a baby on her knee; and some were photos cut out of newspapers and magazines. Clara stared at them, enthralled. She did not know which amazed her more, the pictures of Mrs Denham holding some lace-trailing infant with all the gravity of tradition behind her, or the pictures of small children disporting themselves in classy sunhats on the beaches of southern Europe. It was by means of these photographs that she finally managed to sort the family out: the two eldest, Amelia and Magnus, closely resembled their father, being tall and heavily built, whereas the three younger ones, Gabriel, Clelia and Annunciata, were all amazingly alike. The same face stared out of all their photographs, the same distinctive face. The similarity startled her, for she had thought that Clelia must be unique. There was one photograph in particular that caught the whole family, in sudden clarity: it had been cut out of a glossy magazine, together with its caption, and the caption said:

  Candida Gray, seen here with all the proof of her creativity over the last twelve years, including her newest production, A Fall from Grace, published by Walter Bruce and Co. Ltd, and her newest baby, Annunciata. The three youngest children are wearing clothes by Hesther Laprade, whose new shop, L’enfant gâté, opens this week.

  And the picture showed Candida, sitting in the very armchair which she was at that moment, sixteen years later, occupying, with a pile of her own books on a small table by her side, a baby on her knee, and four children ranged neatly around her. When Clara exclaimed upon it, and upon the exquisite scowls adorning the faces of the older children, Mrs Denham started to apologize for it, saying that she had never meant to let the children be put in magazines, and that really she did find it a little, yes, just a little embarrassing, to see what she’d allowed to happen, but that she’d only really done it for Hesther’s sake, and that it had all been wasted effort anyway, for Hesther was no business woman, and had indeed gone bankrupt, and that all that anyone had profited from it had been her own acquiring of a free set of clothes for Gabriel, Annunciata and Clelia.