by Michel Faber
To be honest, I rather preferred the mistaken version of the story. I didn’t like to think of myself as a bag of stew, an envelope of pale skin with all sorts of dark, gooey stuff slopping around inside. It was undignified, not to mention alarming. I was an adventurous boy, and had spent my first six years in the wilds of Australia, crawling over stony terrain, falling off logs, rolling around in dirt, and generally taking advantage of my permissive familial circumstances. I knew all about scratches and bruises, but the thought that a chance injury might spill out my entire contents: that was something else.
Looking back now, I can see that the spring of 1908 was not an innocent season like the ones before it, but a conspiracy of alarms, a concerted assault on my childish self-confidence. The news about my soupy ingredients was just one of many intrusions into what had been, until then, a life of serenely self-absorbed play. I suppose the time had come for me to learn that I was not exempt from History, but mixed up in it.
You know, because I was a child in what’s now called the Edwardian era, and because I was born the day Queen Victoria died, I always think of the Edwardians as children. Children who lost their mother, but were too young to realise she was gone, and therefore played on just as before, only gradually noticing, out of the corners of their eyes, the flickering shadows outside their sunny nursery. Shadows of commotion, of unrest. Sounds of argument, of protest, of Mother’s things being tossed into boxes, of fixtures being forcibly unscrewed, of the whole house being dismantled. And the child plays nervously on, humming a familiar little tune.
Was I aware that the English empire was under siege from its own subjects? Was I aware that, while I was fashioning warrior spears out of gum tree twigs in the semi-savage suburbia of the Great Southern Land, all sorts of troublemakers had been rising up in London, like the Labour Party, the suffragettes, Sinn Fein, the Indian Home Rule Society, and trade unions of every stamp? Was I aware that there were strikes, hunger marches, pickets, riots? Of course I wasn’t. Even prime ministers behaved as if none of this was happening. But eventually, the removal men cannot wait any longer; they barge into the nursery, and start ripping the pretty pictures from the walls, and the child covers its eyes, but can’t help peeping through them. That’s what was happening in 1908.
The first things I noticed were strictly personal, of course. For some reason I never understood, my family had decided to return ‘home’. Home for me had always been Australia, so the thought that we had somehow been lost or only on holiday, and must travel twelve thousand miles on a ship to find our proper beds, was shocking. But my mother insisted that home was England, and six weeks of seaborne misery later, that’s where we were. Our new abode was in Calthorpe Street, Bloomsbury, which my mother told me was not very far from where the great Charles Dickens had once lived. I hadn’t a clue who this person was; all I knew was that I was now very, very far from where I had once lived.
To add to my confusion, my first day at school made me doubt the new home address I had memorised so carefully. A sour-faced old lady wrote my name in a ledger and informed me, in a voice dripping with disdain, that Calthorpe Street was not in Bloomsbury but in Clerkenwell. My parents denied this so insistently that I began to think they must be in the wrong, and to this day I hesitate for a moment before claiming that I ever lived in Bloomsbury, even though I’ve since been assured by many experts that Calthorpe Street is most definitely not in Clerkenwell and that the sour-faced old lady was the one at fault. But that’s Britain for you. Within minutes of setting foot inside my new school, I’d learned how much unease can be generated out of bloody nothing.
And what an education I got! For the first time, I had English playmates, rather than a rabble of Antipodeans adrift from the confines of class and decorum. It seemed incredible that children so young should have such a sophisticated and comprehensive knowledge of social subtleties. But they did. Everything, from one’s street address to the positioning of a coat-button, was loaded with meaning, and the meaning was usually a humiliation.
One’s parents, of course, were one’s Achilles heel. One was made to feel that one had chosen them, and chosen badly. In learning what English children considered normal, I got the message that almost everything about my parents was abnormal. At Torrington Infants School, judgement was passed according to an intangible textbook of rules, and my parents were guilty of infringements galore. For instance: my mother had given birth to me, her first child, in her early thirties; this was most bizarre, even Biblically far-fetched. In fact, according to some of my schoolmates, it was simply impossible. Surely she must have been married before, and left behind a brood of strapping children, in order to begin afresh with a new man? I summoned up the courage to ask Mama if Papa was her first husband.
‘Of course he is,’ she said with a grin. ‘And he’ll be the last, I promise you.’
‘But what were you doing before?’
‘Exploring the world.’
‘Like explorers in Africa?’
‘Exactly like explorers in Africa. Except not in Africa.’
‘Where, then?’
‘I’ve told you where, many times.’
‘But why weren’t you married?’
She peered into the distance, as if trying to spot a landmark lost in mist.
‘I wasn’t ready.’
‘All other women get married when they’re young.’
‘That’s not true. Think of Aunt Primrose. She’s never been married at all.’
‘She’s a spinster.’
‘My, my, that’s a word I never taught you. And there was I, thinking they teach you nothing at school except how to sing “Rule Britannia”.’
‘I learned “spinster” from Freddy Harris.’
‘He’s a stupid boy. You’ve got more brain-power in a hair that falls off your head than he has inside his whole skull.’
Which gave me a new conundrum to worry about: did one lose tiny amounts of brain-power every time one’s hairs fell out? Was that why very old, bald people tended to be daft?
‘Why did you stop exploring?’ I asked my mother.
‘I haven’t stopped,’ she said. ‘I’m exploring more than ever. This is the strangest country of all.’
I couldn’t disagree with her there.
* * *
Intimate as we were, I didn’t tell Mama that another boy had taught me a different word for what Aunt Primrose was: unnatural. Aunt Primrose lived with us in our house. She had always lived with us, even in Australia, even before I was born. She was a good five years older than my mother but, looking at photographs of her now, I can appreciate what I had no conception of then: that she was an extraordinarily beautiful woman. More beautiful, certainly, than my mother, who, although she had big blue eyes, also had a slight double chin, a slightly protruding brow, and unruly, fleecy blonde hair. Aunt Primrose was blessed with perfect features, an exquisitely sculptured neck, chocolate brown eyes, a glossy swirl of dark hair that stayed obediently in place. A few decades earlier, she might have been a muse for the Pre-Raphaelites, although they would have insisted she wear a figure-hugging velvet dress with an embroidered bodice. The Edwardian years were not conducive to such things.
It was a bad time for women’s fashions, to be frank. My mother customarily wore what just about every female of her class wore: a plain white blouse, cut wide and shapeless, to accommodate the unsupported bosom which hung low, muffled by undergarments, so that her torso resembled a pigeon’s. Her blouse she tucked into an ankle-length grey skirt reined in tight at the belt. In my toddler years, I remember her looking fantastically impressive in fox furs, but shortly after arriving in England, she came home from a mysterious public meeting (she was always attending mysterious meetings) and declared that killing foxes was wicked. That was the end of the big cuddly pelts I’d adored. Instead, she took to wearing a long black woollen coat that had all the style of a cabhorse’s feedbag. Inside the house, she wore her hair in a continually unravelling bun; out of doors, she wor
e a hat that could have served as a cushion on a piano stool.
Aunt Primrose, by contrast, was always immaculately tailored. So why did my schoolmates regard her as unnatural? Because her tailoring was masculine, that’s why. She favoured formal suit jackets and frock coats, altered slightly to give a subtle feminine puff to the shoulders or a swell to the bosom, but essentially no different from the garb of august parliamentarians. She even wore a fob watch. I never perceived it as mannish at the time. I was too accustomed to seeing Aunt Primrose together with Mama on the divan, laughing and lolling about. In my eyes she was soft and kittenish, a million miles removed from the men who walked stiffly through my daily life, the dour schoolmasters and glum crossing-sweepers and grim policemen. But, looking at a photograph of her at the remove of fifty years, I am startled by the unwomanly directness of her gaze. Who are you to judge me? she seems to be saying to the photographer, as she poses in a dressing-gown, high-collared shirt and cravat.
I always called her Auntie, never Primrose. My mother called her Poss. She called my mother Sophie.
Where did my father fit in this arrangement? Apart, that is, from having made half of me? I am still not sure. He called my mother Dear Heart, always Dear Heart. But he said it somewhat distractedly, the way men talk to themselves when they are busy with an absorbing task. Or he would pronounce it with waggish emphasis, mocking what she was asking of him, and she would respond with an irritable upwards puff from her pouting lip, blowing the loose curls off her brow.
My father, although hairy and deep-voiced, was not very tall, and, like Aunt Primrose, failed to meet the standards of normality set by my English schoolmates. He was an artist, for one thing: a painter. Other people’s houses were full of knick-knacks, china and the smell of potpourri; ours was full of books, half-finished canvases, old rags stiff with dried paint, and the whiff of turpentine. Not that we were any less well-off than the people with the knick-knacks and the china, mind you. We were securely middle-class. But nobody discussed money in those days, so I have very little idea how our comfortable existence was supported, other than that my father would occasionally get a commission to paint someone’s portrait, which would put him into a foul mood and provoke him to impassioned speeches on the sanctity of pure artistic expression. ‘Filthy lucre!’ he would mutter, kicking at any loose object that had the misfortune to be lying on the floor. I guessed that ‘lucre’ must be some sort of dirt traipsed into the house off the mucky London streets.
I think Mama had an inheritance. A sizable amount of money had apparently been left to us by an enigmatic figure called Miss Sugar, who came up in murmured conversation only when I was judged safely out of earshot. Miss Sugar: what a name! Speaking it now, I have to admit it sounds like a figment of fantasy, halfway towards Father Christmas or the Tooth Fairy. Can it have been genuine, I wonder? All I can say is that in the late-night reminiscences I overheard in my childhood, Miss Sugar was discussed as a real person, my mother’s steadfast travelling companion during their exploration of the world.
Ah, but I’ve allowed all these larger-than-life females to distract me from my father, as always. My father … what was my father, apart from a painter? He was … he was a bohemian. Again, this was not a word my mother taught me. I learned it from Mr Dalhousie, a master at my school, who pronounced it as if his tongue had been smeared with aniseed. My father was disqualified from the company of men like Mr Dalhousie, because he slept late in the mornings, and spent much of his day squeezing paint onto palettes, scratching his beard, pacing the floor of his studio absentmindedly tossing a peach from one hand to the other, and taking naps.
When I recall him to mind, I rarely see him in a suit, although he was capable of putting on a suit when he left the house. But he rarely left the house. There was almost nothing he wanted to do out there, beyond visiting a few art galleries or popping into the tobacconist’s. Even his art materials he selected by post from suppliers he trusted, without the bother of traipsing across town. He preferred to wander from room to room in our little house in Calthorpe Street, his eyes perpetually focused at a height which, had there been a person standing before him, would have been crotch-level. He liked to wear crude workman’s trousers and a loose shirt with paint-spattered sleeves. His paintings depicted men dressed similarly informally, reclining against trees in a forest, or on the banks of a river, accompanied by naked women. He never tired of this theme. There must have been dozens of canvases stacked against each other in a corner of the studio, perhaps a hundred or more naked women and clothed men rubbing against each other, some long-dry, others still slightly wet. None of these paintings was ever sold.
My father’s portraits were a different matter. In these, he combined (as a contemporary critic admiringly put it) ‘innovation with exercise of skill, as though a modern master like John Singer Sargent had been touched by Fauvism and was none the worse for it’. I am still not sure what this means, but I do remember my father’s portraits very well. He was careful with the faces, had a flair for skin, and liked to take liberties with the sitters’ clothing. Dresses would blur into impressionistic designs, shoes would be dark smudges. Sometimes, if he was obliged to paint a whole family of daughters, the hands of those he considered less interesting would have ambiguous numbers of fingers. Legs and arms were often longer than anatomically feasible. Most customers were satisfied, though, feeling that they had immortalised themselves in a nobler medium than photography, and that they had patronised a rising star of the avant-garde to boot. But as it turned out, my father’s star rose straight through the smoky sky above Bloomsbury, into oblivion.
We weren’t to know that, then. My father was the head of our household. He had a job. My mother and Aunt Primrose didn’t have jobs, unless working for suffragette organisations was a job. I suppose it was. You know, I grew up awfully confused about work and what it was and who was supposed to do it and who wasn’t. Some of the children at Torrington Infants were of the opinion that gentlemen and ladies didn’t work: not working was what made them gentlemen and ladies. The more prevalent view, by 1908, as far as I could determine, was that men ought to be gainfully employed, but that ladies should not be paid for anything they did, or at least shouldn’t need paying. The legions of women who laboured in factories and shops were seen as unfortunates; their only claim to dignity was that they hadn’t descended into beggary or prostitution. As for domestic servants, I just couldn’t figure out what they were about at all. Our family employed a maid-of-all-work, even though Mama and Aunt Primrose thought servants were an offence to socialism. Rachel, her name was, I think. She rarely spoke.
But, getting back to my father … Mama and Aunt Primrose always treated him with affectionate condescension, as if he were a dog. An occasionally infuriating, improperly house-trained, but always amusing dog. He played up to them, as a dog might. He had a way of adjusting his big brown eyes that made them glisten imploringly when he was hungry. He slept wherever he chose. Indeed, he slept in so many locations throughout the house that I never developed any conception of ‘the bed’ as a shrine of marital intimacy. That’s why I’m wary of telling people that Mama and Aunt Primrose shared a bed, and that my mother and father slept together only occasionally. Sex: that’s all people think about nowadays, and the more deviant, the better. It wasn’t like that in our household. At a certain time of night, when Mama and Auntie Poss had grown tired of talking about female suffrage and the evils of the government, they would shuffle off to bed, and perhaps find my father snoring there like a Great Dane. In which case, they would simply make the best of things. There is no need to see hanky-panky everywhere. It’s true that my mother and Aunt Primrose often kissed and hugged, but not as often as Mama cuddled me, and you would be surprised how many women in that era were all over each other. It was quite normal. And as for the state of my parents’ marriage, well, I exist, don’t I? It took two to make me.
Oh, and I may have misrepresented my father by comparing him to a dog. I don’t mean
to imply that he was without authority. He was a male, after all, and in that era it was a man’s world. There were almost daily circumstances in which females were reminded that they did not, and would never, hold the reins of power. Official letters concerning our family, our house, our expenditures, my schooling, new opening hours for Camden Public Library, and every other imaginable thing, were invariably addressed to my father. Bureaucrats, tradesmen, doctors, postmen, parsons, waiters, porters, the whole pack of them: they ignored my mother and Aunt Primrose, and directed their remarks to my father.
Oddly, my mother and Aunt Primrose didn’t seem to mind. ‘Time to unsheathe your mighty sabre, Gilbert,’ they would say, if there was an irritating man at the door who obstinately refused to speak to them. Or they would set Papa against the vile minions of bureaucracy. I have a vivid memory of my mother sitting on the parlour floor, using Aunt Primrose’s legs as a support for her back, while the two of them perused the day’s post. ‘Here’s one from that horrid little gargoyle at the public library,’ my mother said, resting her head in the lap of Aunt Primrose’s skirt, the better to display the important-looking letter she held above her face. She recited the words with mocking pomposity, in the same voice she used for Humpty Dumpty when reading me Through The Looking Glass. ‘“It pains me to have to point out what I assure you I should never make so bold as to allege, had I not confirmed the truth of it beyond doubt, for each book borrowed from this library is checked rigorously upon its return, and any damage immediately noted. Thus, with great regret and no small embarrassment, I am obliged to alert you to the fact that your wife has defaced the book she borrowed from us on the 21st, viz, Female Education and the Health of the Nation, by Dr Lucius Hogg, inscribing all manner of disparaging and, frankly, indecent glosses in the margins.”’ Here the two women dissolved in fits of giggles. ‘Well, there’s another job for Gilbert,’ said my mother, tossing the letter into the air. The following week, a written apology arrived from the library, and the women squirmed and squealed in delight.