She’d seen the law at work, watching her husband and his lawyer friends who came to the house, listened to their talk of trials and the points of law on which they turned, congratulating each other as if in a debating contest. And the man in the dock? she’d ask. Did he think it was such a good point? The men would shuffle and fall silent, holding out their plates for another serving of the dinner she had made for them – and so did we, her watching daughters. Fifty years after Mrs Ramsay presided at the table in To the Lighthouse, serving the boeuf en daube, there was Poppy doing the same. ‘The whole effort of merging and flowing and creating rested on her. Again she felt, as a fact without hostility’ – this is Mrs Ramsay, not Poppy – ‘the sterility of men, for if she did not do it nobody would do it, and so giving herself a little shake that one gives a watch that had stopped, the old familiar pulse began beating, as the watch began ticking – one, two, three, one two three …’30 Poppy would sigh and glower. The watch had stopped, but still she was there at the table, and afterwards at the sink, washing up, tears on her face. Nothing was going to get that watch ticking, and in the end Patrick knew it and left for a wife all too happy, or so it seemed, at least for a while, to preside at his table.
Poppy began her work with the day centre as Margaret Thatcher came to power. She loathed Thatcher. No such thing as Society? Does she not remember the war, the coming through together? Where would we be if there were no society? We’d have riots on the streets and overflowing jails; didn’t Martin Luther King say that riots were the voice of the unheard? I wish I’d been able to tell Poppy what Dorothy Green had said about Mrs Thatcher wanting to be a General – she’d have liked it, but she was dead by then. She had recognised the conservative shift as the break it was, while my friends in London still thought it could be resisted, that Society would prevail.
It was a strange experience researching Poppy in those years after her death, catching the train from Waterloo to Farnham, as I had the night she died, or to Guildford, carrying a tape recorder to interview the people who’d worked with her at the probation centres named after her. Everyone spoke of her with respect: her vision of the possible, her dogged persistence. ‘Your mum used to put flowers on the table,’ one of her boys said, one who’d broken the cycle of jail, had a job and his own motorbike, licensed and everything. ‘She was like that, and at first we thought, this will be a pushover, but she weren’t. Some of the lads laughed at the flowers, but you wouldn’t laugh at her.’ ‘She changed the way we worked,’ a colleague in a woolly jumper said, showing me the statistics, good enough that they’d managed to keep the funding, even with the cuts. Did I find it hard, discovering this side of my mother, this man asked me, seeing as I lived in Australia, which to him, then, meant conservative, provincial. I bet you had no idea, he said with a grin. We have a Labor government, I said, as if that was an answer that made Australia other than it was, and me along with it.
My bag filled up with tapes of interviews, my notebooks with observations and thoughts as I walked back to the station for the train to London, back to Waterloo.
Back and forth, up and down. Past and present. Maternal and paternal. Inner and outer. Society and the individual self.
Making shapes square up. For a long time I had these words – from Virginia Woolf, slightly adapted – pinned above my desk. They were there as I wrote Poppy, and I didn’t take them down until I moved from that house on the corner. They come from Woolf’s diary in 1928 when she was reflecting on the writing of To the Lighthouse. It was there that she had returned to the shock, the wound, of her mother’s death, and it was there, in the writing of that novel, she wrote, that ‘I … got down to my depths and made shapes square up.’
8
The house where I went for therapy was the only one of its kind on that street. Set back from the road, I always thought of it as English, or perhaps Scottish, with its steep slate roof. It would once have stood there alone, surrounded by sheep as the forests were cut; without the bungalows that stretch around it in every direction, it would have been a short ride to the Lane Cove River where the Eora still camped, what was left of them after the diseases that had arrived with the settlers. Would the inhabitants of that house have pitied them, or feared them, eyes seeing where they could not see? Or would they not even have noticed them as they waited at the river for the boat to Sydney Town? This is the past I gave the house that I drove to three times a week, parking round the corner, walking back to the house with its own shade of trees, its short driveway, gardens that had been adapted to the needs of working psychiatrists. Two of them: husband and wife. They had two daughters. Beyond that, I knew almost nothing of the thin, quiet man who opened the door to his room punctually for each session and closed it behind me. The room was at the front of the house, large, a little gloomy despite the windows, spare dark furniture and a fireplace I never saw used. I thought of him as well as the house as English, though I knew he was not. In a sense it didn’t matter what he was, which is not to be disparaging, for that is what an analytic psychiatrist is trained for. Unlike the mirror of Ross, which was entirely about wanting and not having and striving to have – the looking glass of desire – here, the projections, the fractures, the desires, the angers, the griefs, the ambivalences and contradictory versions were heard by someone who could not be damaged by them. Unjudged, they were received and considered, reflected on, and not so much offered back in a new form as reconfigured in the air around us in that room. It was a strangely cerebral experience, full of feeling, yet consisting entirely of words and tears, and on the days I didn’t drive there, I went to the pool and remembered I had limbs and muscles, length after length, kicking off from the wall at each end. At weekends we’d go to the beach, whoever was in the house, whoever was staying, whoever wanted to come. Waves, a towel in the sun, fish and chips on the grass. And the next week I’d drive the half-hour to the stone house and that austere room I came to like. He once put his hand on my head, just briefly, a moment of comfort when the toxoplasmosis had attacked my eyes, the retinas had bled dark swirls, and I asked, Must I give this up too, the gift of sight? Was this, too, being asked of me? My tears were operatic, and his hand returned me to the room, to the now, to my still-seeing eyes. It was the only moment of touch between an initial handshake at the first session and the end of the last session three years later when he held open his arms and smiled as I’d never seen him smile, and hugged me. It was the embrace of a father. A father, not my father.
I’d known right off that he was the analyst for me, in the very first session, after trying two others, both women, neither of whom came anywhere near Doris Lessing’s Mother Sugar in The Golden Notebook, that ‘vigorous old woman’ with her ‘efficient blouse and skirt, her white hair dragged back into a hasty knot’. This time I knew, and was consequently offended that he insisted we still had six trial meetings. There will be times when we won’t like each other, he said. We must know that we start from a strong base. I never didn’t like him. How much I liked him varied, as did his age, or how I registered it: over those years he became younger, closer in age to me than to my father. My view of him changed, and I suppose that is an indication of how therapy changes us, and how we view those around us. There were times when I bored him, times when his lids became heavy, and even as I saw them droop I’d keep talking, a torrent of words, words, words as if to remake the world, my world, in language, and banish uncertainty. ‘This danger coming from inside,’ Louise Bourgeois wrote, ‘that only this continual flow of words could push aside.’31 Then the words would stop, and in their place an inchoate swelling, a field of feeling, unexpressed, raw. I once read an essay called ‘A History of My Tears’; I remember nothing about it but the title, and now can’t find it, but it seemed to me the perfect description of what took place in that room, the streams running under the house, streams of tears, mine and all the others who went there, each stream with its own history making its way down to the Lane Cover River to join that other, greater history of
tears that lies beneath the shiny surface of this city. And all the time the house sat there, solid beneath its high, sloping roof, dry on its hill in a suburb with no whiff of river through the houses pressed around it. Whatever it was that happened there was profound. Analytic psychotherapy is rather like writing a book and can take the same kind of time. Day by day, week by week, nothing much seems to be happening – you might think you are writing one book, one sort of book, and find yourself writing another; you follow one river and find it runs dry; you turn your attention and there rises another, a damp patch of earth, and beneath it a spring. Sudden images, a rush of pleasure, or understanding, and then the days return, one after another, and your attention is turned to just this paragraph, just this session. The end is a distant prospect rarely contemplated from the daily mulch – and yet cumulatively there it is. In the case of a book there’s a manuscript, piles of typed pages. Psychotherapy is not like that, obviously; there is no manuscript, not even a certificate. There is language and metaphor. There is the rest of your life.
Towards the end of Barack Obama’s Dreams from My Father, his Kenyan half-sister Auma tells him that she sometimes has ‘this dream that I will build a beautiful house on our grandfather’s land. A big house where we can all stay and bring our families, you see. We could plant fruit trees like our grandfather, and our children would really know the land … and learn our ways from the old people. It would belong to them.’32 And then she sighs and says she’ll never build it. It doesn’t matter that the young Obama says, ‘We can do all that.’ She knows it can’t be built. This dream isn’t about a house – if it were, it might be easier; it’s about the father who not only provides that house, but is the house. It’s the dream of the good father, that figure, both real and symbolic, who stands for the embodiment of memory and connection, the steady centre from which we step into the future. As it is, Auma’s the one to send money when someone needs it, and to fix things when they break. ‘Why do we have to take care of everyone?’ she asks. ‘Everything is upside-down, crazy.’
We don’t need to be in Kenya, or abandoned as a child, to recognise the dream of the good father, or to ask where it’s gone, or to know the cost of living in the upside-down world where, too often, there is no father.
I did have a good father. He did have a house where we could all go. He did send money when we needed it. The problem was that in hope of a new and lovely wife, he’d married a woman who had six children of her own and did not want the benefits of this saving marriage diluted by three interloping cubs. Poppy said that when Betsy’s first husband left her alone with the children and not enough money to keep the electricity on, she tried out every husband in the area, including Patrick. Poppy is probably not the most reliable witness – there were stories about books thrown out of windows, clothes dumped on doorsteps – but actually this I do believe if for no other reason than that when Patrick was dying and things in the house were particularly bad, I stomped down to Betsy’s daughter, who lived in the same village, and said that something had to give, it was intolerable, and maybe this daughter could get through to her. The daughter agreed that it was hard, but beyond that was not sympathetic. You have to understand, she said, that she realises she’s probably too old to find another husband. Another husband! And this one not yet dead!
When Patrick left Poppy for a woman she’d thought was a friend, she was stricken with fury, an impotent vengeance that lasted a year, or maybe more, before she, too, found the room in which she could deposit the history of her tears and begin the work of finding or re-finding life. I missed most of that maternal rage, being elsewhere – Patrick waited until I’d married and left England – but not its echoes, the reverberations that arrived in letters which, with the efficiency of a colonial postal service, reached me even in a remote district of the Highlands of Papua New Guinea. In the drawer in which, after Patrick’s death, we found his letters to Gertie, there was also a cache of letters from me to him, most of them written in the house by the airstrip at Lake Kopiago. I didn’t read them until recently. They are typed on a typewriter I recognise with a strange pang, most of them two pages, single spaced, written to catch the weekly plane that brought in supplies and exchanged the bag of mail. The government station at Lake Kopiago, I told my father, ‘is in a high valley, a couple of miles across with beautiful mountains rising up on either side and a kidney shaped lake at the far side. We are staying in a house built out of bush material for the princely sum of 180 dollars by an ANU student called Lyle who is working with some people a five day walk away called the Hewa.’ A letter from Nick catalogues the population as ‘4 kiaps, 8 missionaries, 3 anthropologists, 1 land rover, 4 motorbikes, 1 tractor, 2 stereophonic tape-recorders, 3000 Duna, and an estimated 1000 Hewa (visible now and again when not running from the police – nevertheless the Hewa have a real sense of decency and they always insist that Lyle wear a shirt whenever he visits them)’.
I describe patrols we took, the bush house a day’s walk from the station, where we lived for weeks at a time, and the sound of whooping and yodelling when a travelling geographer and his patrol came into the valley, through the gardens and up the last hill towards us. I lamented the parties we knew we were missing in Port Moresby when a conference at the university brought people in from across Australia and beyond. I described the parties of the year before, when we’d been among people ‘leaping through the house and garden dancing to early Beatles (we’re not very up to date in Moresby)’. But for the most part I portrayed myself as content with the life of the anthropologist’s wife. ‘Last week dawned blue and beautiful,’ I wrote in April 1970, ‘and everyone immediately said, Ah, Time good. We must go over the mountains to gather wily karoka. Right, we said, we’ll come too. I don’t know how we managed it, but we did. It was quite an achievement and now we can look up at those mountains looming greyly above us and say we’ve been over the top of you.’ I remember it, the hardest of the hard walks we made in those mountains, up beyond the line of agriculture and gardens, beyond the hunting grounds, to the peak of a mountain – which Nick reminded me recently was called Halepula, meaning banana skin – and over into a high, crater-like valley of moss and ‘perfectly shaped’ lakes. ‘I arrived,’ I told Patrick, ‘in what I suppose would be medically termed “a state of exhaustion”. We were in moss forest and I’d never seen the like of it before yet I didn’t notice it at all until I woke up the next morning. We’d been walking through it for over an hour! Nick said I walked along logs and over things that normally I would have at least commented on, if not detoured. I can’t remember anything about arriving at the shelter, finding it collapsed, building another, etc. I just lay on the moss with a tarp over me. I vaguely remember Nick holding me up to drink boullion and the sting of the antiseptic he put on my cuts and sores; but it all happened as if I didn’t exist. Anyway I recovered with remarkable alacrity (as always, hoho!) and made the journey down without a hitch.’
Oh, for youth! It’d be good to wake again with that particular form of vigour, though beyond that carefree spirit of adventure, I meet my young self of those letters with a kind of dismay, so distant does she seem not only from the me I am now, but from the me I remember having been. After a ‘dismal’ week of rain, I describe a sunset we watched from the steps of the house on the government station. ‘The air was warm and the lake was a shiny silver and smoke was coming from the little houses beneath us and roosters were cockadoodadooing and children singing … We feel a bit like God, surveying everything from our perch up here.’ God, I suppose, should be taken as a metaphor. Even so, it has to be said that the colonial order is lived in the letters as the natural order of things, for all that I set us ‘long haired, left wing, anti-racialist’ research people against the ‘conservative and mostly boring’ officials of the ‘system’ that brought our mail and ensured our safety and sent a plane for me when I was bleeding from a miscarriage that the maternity welfare nurse at the mission could do nothing to staunch. There’s a brief mention
of that, which surprised me almost as much as God, the tepid Anglican version in whom I couldn’t believe, even as a child. We never told our mortal father when something went seriously wrong: abortions, miscarriages, a rape, these were not for him to know. I wrote of it after I’d returned from the town of Mount Hagen – a one-hour flight away in a small plane – and said nothing of the kiap on the radio phone, or the long wait for the plane to arrive, or blood trickling down to my sandals, or the pilot finding a blanket for me to wrap myself in when we arrived in Hagen and then driving me to the hospital. Whenever we were on the station after that I’d go down to the strip to see him when he brought in the mail, which meant that some months later the kiap and I were the last people to speak to him when the clouds had massed as they can in the afternoons and he took off late for his return to Hagen, entered the wrong valley and crashed into a cliff.
In another letter, from Moresby this time, I tell Patrick a long story about driving to a beach out of town with another couple, friends, young like us. It was late afternoon, the worst of the heat over, a swim, a walk along the beach, round the headland, a rucksack with the food we’d brought to cook over a fire on the beach, a flagon of wine, a camera, our clothes, all left in the shade of a windbreak we’d built to mark out the spot. Gone, of course, on our return an hour later. What were we doing, assuming we could set up on a beach as if it were ours? Did we not know, of course we knew, there was a settlement nearby of people from the Gulf of Papua, which was way to the west; people who had only the smallest toe hold of rights to camp on that land, no room for gardens, slim pickings for jobs in town, walking the road where cars, including ours, blew dust around them. And what did we do when we saw that our belongings were gone? We drove to the nearest village and found the pastor, and while three of us sat on the porch of his house, given food and water by his wife, Nick drove the pastor to the settlement, where he took the matter in hand. The food had been eaten, but the rest came back – camera, clothes, everything. And there I was congratulating us in my letter to Patrick for not calling the police, all the while saying nothing, not a whisper, of my betraying heart and the glances of the other man on that picnic, the one who was not Nick, the husband of the woman we both called a friend.
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