Second Half First
Page 14
Harder to read than the absences in these letters were those in which I was also responding to the drama of Patrick and Poppy’s separation, being acted out through an argument about where my youngest sister should go to school. Poppy said later she wanted Patrick to pay in school fees if nothing else. She wanted my sister to stay at her very expensive boarding school. Patrick was suggesting an arrangement at another school, or crammer, where she could do two years in one. What I didn’t know until much later was that, though not yet married to Betsy, Patrick was paying the school fees of her youngest son. Would it have made a difference had I known that? In the letters I aligned myself with Patrick against Poppy – even sending love to Betsy, whom I’d known since childhood, though, in the English way, sending love does not actually mean love. My antagonism to Poppy, my lack of compassion for her position, strike me now as shocking. Was I warding off the evil possibility? Was I, as we said in the consciousness-raising groups I discovered after the demise of my own short marriage, that male-identified? Or was it simply the arrogance of a young woman in the full bloom of her sexuality who knew she had it over pretty much any male; a casual power that accepted the kindnesses of a husband and relayed them to a father without a whisper or a glimpse of her betraying heart, the subterranean move she had already begun away from marriage towards the flicker of some other kind of desire, an eddy of different air in a familiar room. I had tumbled, I suppose, into the dilemma Christina Stead gives to Teresa in For Love Alone when she crosses the world for love, and finds it – though not in the shape of the man in whom she expected to find it – and promptly feels the world closing around her, life stretching ahead with nothing but this. What if we live to be sixty-four, I’d said on our honeymoon. Poor, kind Nick. Still, and still, it was a real question. What if we did live all those years, our whole lives? Was that what we’d signed up for? I apologised to him many years later, after Patrick had died and I no longer made my weekly visits to the house above the Lane Cove River, many too many years later, as if it took all that time to square up to what I had done, what I’d brought on him, and on myself. Squaring up didn’t mean the union between us would have been any more viable had I behaved better. These days it’d be a first relationship without the weight of marriage; as that it was good. And the connection that has remained through his daughter, Obelia, has been wholly good.
Kind husband, good father. Why was there a problem? Poppy said the problem was more to do with my unresolved anger with her than with the father with whom I’d aligned myself since childhood. Among the photos she gave me as we sorted through the albums in the months before she died was one of Patrick leaning on a fence and me standing on a stool beside him, my arms crossed and leaning, just as he was. Blow it up, she said, and put it on the wall. I didn’t, though I still might. Poppy’s family was Welsh. They were classier than the Medds, had once had money, wore stylish clothes and drank cocktails from long-stemmed glasses. Her father, my grandfather, came to rely on Patrick, this once-unwelcome son-in-law from a clever but plain family – which was not what he’d had in mind for his beautiful daughter. But when things in that family spun into disarray of one sort or another, it was to Patrick, man of letters and the law, that he turned. Rather than the quiet surface offered by the Medds – Betty once told me that when she confided in Patrick about troubles in her marriage, he told her that in these situations he found a long walk helpful – in Poppy’s family there were dramas and scenes, flying bottles and midnight phone calls. I hated it, and when we went on holidays to Wales in the halcyon years before my breasts grew and Poppy went into the hospital, I am said to have declared I wanted to drain every drop of Welsh blood from my body. Yes, I was the child of the father. Clever girls often are; the daughters of educated men, we once were called.
Vanessa Bell remembers an incident when, as children, Virginia asked her to choose a parent. ‘Such a question seemed to me rather terrible … However, being asked, one had to reply and I found I had little doubt as to my answer. “Mother,” I said, and she went on to explain why she, on the whole, preferred Father.’33 For Virginia Woolf the father was a clear line in the wash of feeling, rather like the line through Lily Briscoe’s painting ‘there, in the centre’, and she could never decide if he was a good father or not; his rectitude, his self-obsession, his emotional distance, his ambition with its vulnerable underside of failure are all there in To the Lighthouse – which she had initially, and briefly, thought of calling The Old Man. ‘Virginia wrote and rewrote her father all her life,’ her biographer Hermione Lee writes. ‘She was in love with him, she was furious with him, she was like him, she never stopped arguing with him, and when she finally read Freud in 1939 she recognised exactly what he meant by “ambivalence”.’34
It shouldn’t have shocked me to encounter the dark shadow of those long-ago letters siding with the paternal, order against the demanding, enveloping maternal. It shouldn’t have surprised me, reading them this year for this book – because the slow uncovering of anger battened down since childhood, buried beneath the silt of grief and remorse, had been a discovery of that room in the stone house. When anger showed itself, it was with Poppy, not with Patrick. I wasn’t even angry with Ross. It might have been better if I had been. I wept over him, no doubt, and railed as I hadn’t even with Sophie, as if I knew that once I started I’d have to face what it meant, falling in love – if that’s what it was – with a man who could not have been other than dangerous to the grief-stricken, wounded creature I was. Why is it that we choose dangerous men? Because they mesmerise us? And why do they mesmerise us at certain times, and at others not at all? Louise Bourgeois thought it has to do with fear: the greater the fear, the more we’re mesmerised; like a bird with a snake, we’re not afraid, we’re thrilled; the fear is short-circuited.35 Our attention, our whole being, is removed from whatever it is we’re escaping, or avoiding – so deep down, often enough, so concealed, that we don’t know that’s what we’re doing. It didn’t take long in that room for it to become apparent that the loss of Ross, like the choice in the first place, was a screen for the greater loss of Poppy, and that behind the hard fact of her death was the wound of her leaving us for that long stay in the hospital and my exile to a cold and distant school. Beneath that was the outrage of a five-year-old at having to share her mother with small sisters. Even when I knew there was nothing I could not say in that room, no thought I could not have, the anger I could muster against men came in the form of plots for novels, revenge fantasies I’d never write: men in dark cellars, or in the bright light of public downfall, or me in a sparkling crown: ridiculous plots, I wouldn’t even read them if they were on sale in the shops: another screen, another form of protection concealing the shape of the anger goddess, who showed herself not in a presence that swept into the room so I could take a good look, but in a terrifying absence. It was the mother’s absence which I felt as anger – and more than the anger of men, it was her anger, and my own, I feared. I don’t remember hers directed at me or my sisters, only at Patrick when she demanded that he listen and understand. Don’t you see? she’d shout, and I’d stand with him, silenced by the raging words spilling over. She was powerful in her fury, powerful in her grief; a force I turned my back against. When the door slammed behind her, I took my book and sat beside my father.
Maybe it was necessary to let all this history flow over the listening mind of a man; maybe I chose that austere room to save a woman from an anger that all the time was an entangled form of love, the great love affair we have with our mother when we look in the mirror and see the reflection, hers and ours. Poppy said my problem with men wasn’t that I was ambivalent about husbands, or not only; what I was demanding was a mother, or someone to stand in for her, a fantasy mother, a prop; a wife perhaps. If anyone behaved as if they were Greenwich Mean Time, she said, it was me. Even though it was close to the end of her life and she was very ill, I was furious. Me! Like a man! She said it was a bad analogy anyway as men might think they hold th
e world steady but, on the contrary, if there is steadiness, it comes from us, not from them. Their posturing and performing was a defence, she said, against the mothers they turn from in order to become men; it’s them, not us, she said, who find the one they need to stand in for her, a replacement in another form.
The prettiest girl in all of England, Patrick would say, raising his glass to her, and we children would raise our shoulders and clap. He’d written poems to her, England and Poppy merged together in the small black notebook he carried with him all through the war. Was she to remain that prettiest girl? In the early photos you can see that Poppy was happy with us at her feet, and happy beside Patrick in the garden, secateurs in hand. She loved us, that wasn’t in doubt; but motherhood is not the sweet dream a pretty girl might expect; the bearing of children, their dependence and their needs, gives rise to complex emotions that can be exacerbated by the gap that exists between the ideal and the reality. Yes, Poppy loved us, she was a good mother, ‘good enough’ in the sense of holding us safe in our early years; not perfect, that cruel impossibility, just an ‘ordinary mother’ in ‘the ordinary loving care’ of her children. She was also more than a mother, and whatever it was that she could be, she didn’t know, and there was no one to help her know, when she was taken to hospital in 1959. Little wonder she had sunk into despair and depression; it’s a common story, I’ve heard it many times of that generation of 1950s mothers which, after a whiff of freedom during the war, was returned to the home and motherhood, as Jacqueline Rose puts it, ‘under the harshest obligation to be happy and fulfilled in that role’.36 ‘We’ll have her home again in no time, the lovely wife and mother she’s always been,’ the doctor wrote of the weeping woman, just thirty-five years old, who came into what was called his care. The social cure. It’d be another decade before Poppy found her way not to a ‘cure’, but to the room in South London that would allow her to find a way of living and return her to the world.
How psychotherapy works, that shedding of tears, that talking cure in a room with a closed door is as mysterious to me as how a book gets written: some small accrual of understanding, maybe, an expanding of a personal repertoire, a plunge into the darkness we harbour inside ourselves. Maybe shedding the history of our tears isn’t so much about rewriting, or righting, a narrative that has gone awry, getting over obstacles, as about changing the angle of vision, rearranging the shapes, the fragments, into other patterns. Which is why diaries can be so unreliable, and also memoirs, as a source of information about this thing that we call life; the ambivalence of the moment can appear very solid on the page. And why Victoria Glendinning’s biography of Rebecca West annoyed me so, catching West out in a contradiction, everything hammered into place, as if there should be one story, one history, one attitude to something as difficult and contradictory as marriage – especially in the case of a young, bruised, talented woman left literally holding the baby. Move the pieces around, change the assumptions, and things look rather different. Like Louise Bourgeois’ Personages, those tall, separate beings she made on the rooftop of her apartment when she was first in New York, moving them around to look at each other from different angles as she found a way to live in the city spread beneath her.
So was Poppy the vulnerable one as she railed against Patrick? Was he the powerful one when he left? Or was his turned back also born of the vulnerability that exists in the hearts of so many men, that refusal of the dark regions? We might stand beside the father, the line they draw through the wash of paint, but the brush strokes remain – for them, and for us. When it came time for Patrick to die, an erudite Catholic friend of his said that the reason it was so hard for men who’ve lived in logos to die was that death requires that we surrender. Death calls forth the feminine, he’d said, when he came downstairs and found Jane and me desolate in the kitchen. Strength and weakness; thought and feeling; public and private. Do we let the coin spin and watch only the two heads, or do we try for the solid metal in between? To live with ambivalence, to live with uncertainty, is that the challenge, and the achievement? Do we attach ourselves to one pole or the other, inner or outer, solid or fluid, or do we step into the ground between? Even the lighthouse isn’t ‘simply one thing’ in that novel of shapes that change and vary, depending on how they are viewed, and by whom, and when. It’s there on its rock, ‘stark and straight’ with the lighthouse keeper’s washing laid out on the rocks to dry, ‘hardly to be seen across the bay’; at night it’s ‘a yellow eye that opened suddenly and softly’. It’s the line Lily Briscoe drew in the centre of her painting, and she never even went there; it was the line that gave shape not only to Lily’s canvas, but to her ambivalence, her uncertainties. ‘So much depends, she thought, upon distance.’37 Writing To the Lighthouse was as close as Virginia Woolf came, Hermione Lee writes, to psychoanalysis. It was there, not with her doctors, or her husband, or her sister Vanessa, that she got down to the depths that had first enveloped her at the age of thirteen, when Julia Stephen died, the mother whose laugh ended in ‘little drops’, and who many years later would be transformed into Mrs Ramsay. Virginia Woolf was forty-four when she finished the novel, the age Lily Briscoe is at its end. After that, she said, she ‘ceased to be obsessed’ by her mother. ‘I no longer hear her voice; I do not see her.’38
Poppy was forty-four when Patrick left her, and I was forty-four when Poppy was published in 1990. I’d like to be able to say that afterwards I, too, ceased to be obsessed, or haunted, by my mother. I had got some way down into the depths, and shapes had begun to square up. I could raise my head to the sky and see that it was bountiful; but something remained, I didn’t know what, that could wake me at night and return me to that dark moment before dawn. Whatever that something was – I now can name it as buried anger, the subsoil of grief, or the paradox of an exile that started long before Australia was an idea in my mind – took me to the stone house. What I found there wasn’t a cure – there is no cure – and if the shapes haven’t always squared up in the years since, they have changed and moved, and when they slip back towards their old positions, I know that’s what they are doing, and I need not be captive to them. There was no ‘closure’: the abyss didn’t fill, obstacles didn’t vanish, subterranean regions could still stir at night. But the dread that had risen in me with Poppy’s death and the debacle of Ross abated; it was not gone, not entirely – but even a breast cancer diagnosis didn’t return me there. There was dread, of course; a diagnosis of cancer, even an early, treatable cancer (as mine turned out to be), comes with a reminder of mortality. It was not a good time, but there was not that dark and terrible dread as if a summons to be executed. Isn’t Freud said to have told a patient that all he could offer was a return to ordinary human unhappiness? Ordinary, human dread. Not normal; ordinary.
And also ordinary human happiness. That, too, yes.
Sometime during those years of therapy, between finishing Poppy – that act of contrition and reparation – and hearing the news that Patrick was soon to die, I was down at the beach house on the coast with friends. I woke at dawn one morning, and while the house slept I walked to the end of the beach and climbed the steep path that leads over to the next cove, beyond which we’d never ventured after that climb with Garry. I stopped on the highest point of the path, where I could see across the bay and out to sea. The sun was a low orange orb, there was no one on the beach, and I was calm, not thinking anything in particular, when there was a rush of air strong enough to make me hold onto the rock where I sat. It wasn’t a wind, the trees on the headland were still, there were no white caps on the ocean; there was a tremendous sense of Poppy, as if she were swirling around me, her spirit and essence. This essence didn’t speak, and I saw nothing, no ghost, no apparition. I wasn’t stoned, and wasn’t in an altered state of mind. Poppy was leaving me, or I was leaving her, a final farewell. I was on my own, and it was okay.
Inner or outer? That stone house, or the hours at my desk? The life of friends, those little boats sailing along
side, keeping us from capsizing, or a life of reading and writing? Or simply the passing of time? I didn’t know then, and I don’t know now, only that she was leaving, yes, and what remained with me was alive in that air.
9
After Patrick died, I lived for several years with a title in my head: The Death of a Good Father. I wrote part of a book to go with it, some of which has found its way in here; the rest has gone out with the recycling. Not because it was no good, or even for reasons of family divisions and splits, though they are a consideration, as is the inheritance we leave the next generation. The years passed and the memory of that time faded, leaving in its place a strong sense of his bewilderment rather than ours; Betsy died and my vengeful thoughts died with her. I lost the urge to add another personal story to the many being written as our generation’s fathers died: Blake Morrison, Martin Amis, Graham Swift, Craig Raine: the list goes on. Grief and disappointment. Reparation and revenge. And as I read them, and the next generation of sons, the thought expressed in the title changed from ‘The death of a good father’ to ‘The death of the good father’.
On the long flight back to Sydney after Patrick’s death, I read Philip Roth’s Patrimony: A True Story, which he wrote after the death of the irascible father, the eternal nag he’d battled with in book after book, writing him out even as he drank him in. In a scene as brilliant as any Roth has written, he finds his visiting father on the verge of tears in the bathroom. He’s ‘beshat’ himself. Roth the son attends to him with the solicitude of a mother, and then he gets down on the floor and scrubs the shit from the cracks between the tiles. He does this without resentment, even without disgust. He does it because it is required of him as a son to a father, as one man to another, and when he puts the bag of stinking laundry in the car, he knows it is right. ‘So that was the patrimony,’ he writes. ‘And not because cleaning it up was symbolic of something else but because it wasn’t, because it was nothing more or less than the lived reality that it was.’ But, of course, the father doesn’t die just because you’ve cleaned up your father’s shit. On the night before his father’s second MRI, Roth dreams a long, complicated Rothian dream. In it, he is a child standing on a pier with a group of ‘unescorted children who may or may not have been waiting to be evacuated’. They are watching for a boat. But the boat that comes is old, a stripped and disabled American warship. The waiting child, the dreamer, expects his father to be on board, among the crew, but as the boat floats towards them, he sees that it is empty, ‘dead-silent … frightening and eerie: a ghostly hulk’. The mood of this dream, Roth writes, was ‘heartbreaking’ in exactly the way it had been when FDR died of a cerebral haemorrhage. Roth was twelve then, when an entire nation had been ‘stunned and bereft’ and his father had taken him to stand in the crowd beside the tracks as the train with its black bunting passed through Newark.39