Sight

by Jessie Greengrass

  Calling this picture to mind now I place the man somewhere on the east coast, Thorpeness or Cromer, Snape—one of those long, flat beaches that separate the marshes of East Anglia from the uncompromising sea, places that Johannes and I go to sometimes, early in the autumn when the ground is warm but the air has a chill to it and when, in the late afternoons, the moon hangs like its own ghost in the sky and the reed-beds cast long shadows and everything is dusty, gold, and both of us are pierced, slightly and not unpleasantly, with a nostalgia for something that we have never seen but know, instinctively, that we have lost. The man in the photograph wore a pale-coloured shirt, open at the neck but awkwardly so, as though his tie had been discarded in a gesture of intentional carelessness, and his trousers were rolled up to show an inch of pale skin above gartered socks and laced brogues. His hair, disordered by the wind, framed a face that was little more than a smile and a squint, eyes screwed up against the sun, his features so indistinguishably ordinary that they seemed to me to approach disguise. Across the bottom of the picture the shadow of the photographer fell, clear and dark, and it is a peculiarity of the image as I remember it that there was more apparent character in this shadow—the body’s black outline stretched across the sand, straight legs set apart, elbows raised like a first growth of sharply angled wings—than there was in the photograph’s ostensible subject, the man who was my grandfather. This photo I lost years ago—abandoned, presumably, with the Kipling, cast off to become someone else’s curiosity, the sort of thing that turns up from time to time in books bought second-hand, but I remember how at the time I studied it with absolute attention, gazing at it with my nose inches from its surface. Picking at its details, I tried to find anything in it that might prove its connection to myself; but he could have been anybody’s grandfather, that man, and I wonder now if in fact the photograph had anything to do with us at all or if, rather, it came as it went, sandwiched between the verses of “Gunga Din.” It seems unlikely that my mother knew as little about her father as she claimed. Doctor K’s honesty was scrupulous, her determination that one must not hide from facts nor shirk the task of interpreting them verging, at times, on aggression. In response my mother had become pragmatic. She prioritised outcome over fact and she was not above lying, feeling, I think, that by doing so she was protecting both her own privacy and mine, the right I had to understand the world as I chose. It seems so obvious now that I wonder how I hadn’t seen it before: that my mother’s professed ignorance on the subject of her father was her own invention. Such an equivocation would have seemed to her no more than expedient, this judicious husbanding of complicated trivia a way of shielding me from something which she thought unimportant; and after all what difference is there between an honestly told untruth and a lie: our understanding of a past we didn’t inhabit will always be a fiction. To say that I might have had a right to truth would have seemed, to my mother, absurd, so that even if I had recognised this fabrication before her death and found a way to ask about it, the question rising through those empty tracts of space that filled the house as illness abraded her, then still I don’t think she would have seen any reason to answer.

  * * *

  —

  In the afternoons Johannes takes our daughter out and I lie with my feet up on a cushion and try to rest, my body an uncomfortable object to inhabit. My hips ache. The baby kicks. My fingers thicken and are unwieldy; the doing or undoing of buttons is a chore. At such times, wishing the lot of them gone—Johannes, the children both inside me and out—I wonder what they will keep of me, later; what off-cut memories will remain to be restitched, their resemblance to myself a matter of perspective. I want only what I think we all must want: to come off as better than I ought, more generous, more sure—kinder than I know myself to be; but I want also to be known, to be counted and to be excused. I can’t have both. The thought of it makes me surly and resentful and when the baby knees me in the ribs I snap at it through the intermediary layers of my flesh; and later, guilty, I hold my daughter close and sing to her as though I might with such tendernesses obliterate her recollection of all the times I haven’t come quite up to scratch.

  * * *

  —

  My grandmother lived on the upper floors of a large house in Hampstead, the heath rising like a city’s dream of English countryside beyond the end of its long garden. She had bought the house, dilapidated then, the year that she turned thirty, shortly after qualifying as a psychoanalyst, and since then she had slowly reworked it, fitting its rooms around herself, until she seemed to sit within it like a stone inside its setting. Except in the attic, which had been her childhood bedroom, there was no trace of my mother: no photographs, no mementos. Such things had no place in those high-ceilinged rooms from which emotion had been smoothed to leave reason, the salve, behind. The house’s basement had been converted, shortly after my mother had left home, into a separate flat, a source of income which insulated Doctor K from the fear of growing old, and for as long as I could remember it was occupied by a former patient, a very upright ex-schoolteacher who wore tweed suits smelling of peppermint and camphor, and seemed to live in a perpetual state of just-held-back decay. Often during the month-long holiday that I spent there each summer, while Doctor K saw clients, I would go and sit with him on the stone terrace that ran along the back of the house, separating it from the garden, and which was his to use, French windows opening onto it from his living room. These are a child’s memories perfected by adulthood’s glaze and in them the days were always hot, the sky blue, and the garden stretched out, private, perfect in the dappled light which fell through the leaves of the overhanging apple tree. The tenant made me cups of sweetened tea and we were companionable. He told me how my grandmother had cured him, years earlier, of a form of compulsive self-harm which had driven him, over the course of several years, to pull out all the hair on his head and face by the roots. Now he spent his days growing roses, and I would watch him, his fingers deep amongst the leaves, checking for greenfly. Often he would stop what he was doing and stand for minutes on end staring at nothing, his arms loose at his sides and his head bowed down towards the ground, as though he had been momentarily uncoupled from himself, and at such times I would feel pity for him and this feeling, hot and uncomfortable, would send me running back towards the house.

  In the same way that it was always hot and the garden always very green, in my memories of the summers that I spent there my grandmother’s house was always cool and always very quiet, a muted and a peaceful place where one might sit in comfort between the bookcases and feel that an escape had been effected. It was not a house that welcomed children. Its rooms had the same authoritative calm that university libraries possess—knowledge both offered and assumed, with learning the price for further learning—and it conferred on me, for the duration of my stay, a sort of precocious adulthood. I enjoyed it, the graceful shapes my body made in the armchairs, the way I walked along the corridors with steady steps, the free rein I had amongst the books. My grandmother granted me autonomy. Staying there I might do as I liked, going out alone to watch the kite fliers on Parliament Hill or swim in the bathing ponds, taking a picnic with me that I had made myself, and I was responsible for brushing my own hair and teeth, for choosing appropriate shoes and taking a coat or not, and if I got wet then it was my own fault; but I was a child still and when I came home shivering my grandmother wouldn’t run a bath as my mother would have done, or wrap me in a blanket to warm me through, making disapproval of a piece with care, and when I fell and grazed my knees it was my own hands that peeled the plaster from its plastic backing and stuck it, bloody, to my skin.

  * * *

  —

  In the morning when our daughter wakes, Johannes goes to her and opens up her bedroom blinds. He takes her to the bathroom, sits her on the toilet, makes her wash her hands. He finds breakfast, bowls of porridge or slices of toast which the two of them eat together at the table. When it is ti
me for Johannes to work I dress and go downstairs and I do the washing up while my daughter nags at me to read her a story. I fold laundry. I think about what to have for lunch. When we go out I make sure that my daughter’s shoes are on the right feet, I check the bag for water and spare pants. I take her hand. We go to the park or we sit on the upper decks of buses and travel to the places that she likes: the library where she can pretend to work at the computers, the museum with a rocking horse on which she can take turns. We do the shopping. She chooses her own fruit, apples or nectarines, and is allowed to eat some of it on the way home, juice smeared across her face and down her neck. In the evenings, after Johannes has come down from his office, we sit together, all three of us, and talk about the days we’ve had and sometimes we are happy and sometimes we are tired and cross and each minute is an effort of patience. We make dinner. We put our child to bed. This is what routine is like, or love.

  * * *

  —

  Each year on the first Saturday of August my mother and I would walk past the post office and the pub, past the primary school and the supermarket to the station and, leaving suburbia behind, would take the train into London and, changing at Waterloo, the Tube to Hampstead, whose broad streets sat above the city, looking down. As we came in sight of my grandmother’s house we would see her waiting for us, standing at the kitchen window dressed in evening clothes, a long, full skirt with a narrow waist and a high-necked blouse, a cameo brooch pinned to her throat, her hair in its tight wave and, walking in and out of the shadows that the plane trees cast across the pavement, I would feel my mother’s fingers tighten round my own, as though she were afraid that I might run away from her and that I would be lost.

  By the time we reached the steps which led from the small front garden with its clay-tiled path up to my grandmother’s front door she would be there to welcome us and, stepping forward, would take us each in turn by the shoulders and would kiss us twice, two evenly placed markers, one on either cheek; and then I would be sent upstairs with my suitcase to the small room Doctor K kept for me through the eleven months that elapsed between each of my visits. This room was in the attic, reached by a staircase whose narrow steps, rising awkwardly away from the rest of the house, were tucked in behind a brass-handled door opposite Doctor K’s bedroom. It smelled differently to the rooms on the lower floors, a musty scent like long-stored wool, and often, closing the staircase door behind me, I felt as though I were leaving the house altogether and entering a space that was both separate and my own, and each evening this came as a relief, tension leeching away from me with every ascended step. This room lacked the restrained beauty which made the rest of the house seem so much like a stage. The furniture was tatty, old: an iron bedstead, very high off the ground, its mattress covered in a patchwork quilt; an armchair upholstered in velvet, much faded and scratched; a chest of drawers with a cracked walnut veneer. Around a two-paned dormer window looking out across the roof and the garden towards the heath, the room’s whitewashed ceiling sloped towards a floor whose boards were covered in overlapping rugs, many of them with their naps worn through to leave bare patches of pale-coloured warp. I loved this room very much and still, at times, I wish that I could go back to it, to feel myself both above and alone. Before I was born it had been my mother’s, and the white-painted bookshelf which leaned fifteen degrees west of true was still filled with books which had once been hers. Sometimes, opening them, I would disturb loose sheets of paper that fluttered downwards, drifting to the floor to settle gently amongst the swirling patterns of the rugs, disjointed lists of words, phone numbers or addresses or single pages cut from longer letters, descriptions of nameless places, congratulations on achievements since forgotten. I would pick them up and hold them and, trying to connect their recipient with my mother, so uncompromisingly grown up, so firm and sure, I would catch from the corner of my eye the outline of my own inescapable adulthood flicker against the yellowed walls, a long shadow cast by a low sun.

  After I had unpacked, putting my own books alongside my mother’s on the shelf, filling the chest of drawers with my clothes, laying out my pyjamas on the pillow, I would go back downstairs to find Doctor K trimming runner beans at the kitchen table while, in the living room, my mother sat quite upright in an armchair, a gin and tonic and a bowl of crisps on the little table beside her.

  —Have you unpacked?

  she would ask, and

  —Have you washed your hands?

  and when I said that I had done both she would tell me to go and find my grandmother and ask her if she needed help but, trailing into the kitchen to do as I was told, my grandmother would tell me not to get under her feet, and often during those first evenings, uncertain of my place, I would sit outside in the hall, folded up across the span of the staircase’s bottom step, listening to the murmur of the radio spill out with the scent of garlic through the kitchen door.

  For three days we remained in such uneasy equilibrium. Each morning I would come down to the kitchen where Doctor K stood, arranging my mother’s breakfast on a tray, fresh croissants from the bakery split and spread with jam, and next to them a small pot of coffee and a jug of milk. I was not allowed to visit my mother in her room. My own breakfast was eaten in the kitchen and Doctor K insisted that I stayed downstairs until my mother had dressed, and then, during the morning, Doctor K would give me chores, laying out newspaper on the kitchen table and setting me to clean candlesticks, the damp wadding from a can of Brasso turning my fingers black while outside in the garden my mother lay on a rug, reading, and after lunch my mother was sent back to her room to rest while I was turned out onto the heath. At the time I regarded these separations as an unnecessary affront and I thought my grandmother excessive, my mother frail for giving in, because I took for granted that she resented them as much as I did. It is only now that I can see these few days for what they were: my grandmother’s only way of taking care, my mother’s only way of being cared for, this exchange effected silently while we all pretended to be occupied elsewhere. I did what I could to undermine them. Given the opportunity I would escape my grandmother’s planned occupations and run into the garden to lie next to my mother on the rug, pulling up grass by the roots and knowing that now I had won through I would be allowed to stay with my mother for the rest of the day. Doctor K would come out into the garden, hands smoothing out the creases in her skirt, and she would tell me that I must go indoors but

  —Let her stay,

  my mother said, and wrapped her arms around me. With a child’s unhesitating cruelty I made my mother choose and, as if to emphasise the strength of her decision, on those reclaimed afternoons we would go out, up to the brightly painted shops in Hampstead Village, and she would buy me things—lawn cotton dresses or handwash-only cardigans, brightly coloured sandals, kites of Japanese paper stretched across a bamboo frame or soft-haired dolls too delicate for play—things to be coveted rather than owned; and afterwards I would clutch the loaded bags to my chest and we would sit and drink lemonade in front of one of the pavement cafes. This was the closest that I ever felt to her, I think; but I felt too as though in the winning of proximity something had been dismantled which had kept me sheltered. Love, for my mother, was not distinct from action. For years she had been putting into practice the contention that we exist, not as icebergs do, nine-tenths hidden and the visible portion no more than a poor clue to the greater, deeper bulk below, but at the surface, spread out along our planes of intersection; and now for an afternoon we had replaced this solid surety of position with something else and, perched above London with our parcels, I felt the lack of it.

  * * *

  —

  Throughout the early stages of her illness I assumed that at some point in her dying the barrier between my mother and myself would be breached, no longer being necessary, and that through it some manner of truth would spill, coming as a trickle or a flood to engulf us and to wash us clean. I assumed
that I would be granted access at last to those parts of her life which, throughout my childhood, had been kept meticulously separate from me, their presence felt but unmentioned, surrounding me as though I were a visitor to a house with half its rooms unseen, and that at last I would be able to walk through them, these stores for all the private tat and trivia of thought which makes a person both fragile and themselves. I assumed, then, that in the end I would take ownership of this as I would of all the rest of it, the house, the garden—a matter of legality, a process of inheritance in which preference had no part. Through those last long months, though, the physical intimacy which her illness demanded of us left no space for any more metaphorical form of contact—the present was too onerous to allow any intrusion by the past, and the work of being kind, against the urge to hurt which comes as vulnerability’s unwelcome companion, left no energy for confession. The only times that we ever hovered close to revelation were on those afternoons in Hampstead. Then my mother would talk about herself as if she were someone else, a person whose life was meat for speculation, and she would talk about Doctor K, so that at times I could glimpse an otherwise unapprehended truth: that they were not what I had taken adults to be, each a finished entity, but rather were still in progress, and that they too were a mother and a daughter, tied to one another. Once, after we had drunk our lemonade and paid the bill, as we walked slowly back towards Doctor K’s house carrying the purchases whose extravagance already shamed us, my mother told me how, each morning during childhood, she would sit at the scrubbed table in the Hampstead kitchen, surrounded by the toast crumbs and the jam pots, the teacups’ dregs, while my grandmother asked her about her dreams, questioning her in detail about their content; and that because of this, by the time my mother was five or six years old, she had stopped dreaming entirely. Afterwards I wished she hadn’t told me. The thought of my mother as a child, her dreams jettisoned as though they were no more than empty wrappers, chilled me. All through the evening I avoided talking and at dinner I hunched over my plate as though it were a penance until my grandmother said I must be coming down with something, and sent me up to bed, where I lay, miserable, all through the fading evening, a jumper over my nightdress, an extra blanket from the bottom of the chest of drawers wrapped round my shoulders, wondering how often knowledge comes like this: a casually effected violence which throws the world just west of true.