9
OF COURSE I REGRETTED IT, MARRYING Mac Beresford. Often I regretted it. Oh, the violence of those early years! I don’t mean physical violence. (Mac would never, ever hit me – and I’ve only hit him a few times, not all that hard – though once I threw a hardback book which grazed his temple and drew blood.) I can remember cleaning my teeth in the en suite bathroom of the house he took me to when we first lived together – the same house where he’d lived with Barbara, at Sea Mills with fifteen acres (it’s not where we live now) – and spitting into the sink and saying to myself over and over between spits that I cursed the day I met him. Cursed the day! For that moment it was quite true. What was I doing there in that bathroom – which was not to my taste at all, with its pastel luxury, concealed strip lighting, seashells stencilled on the walls, fish-shaped stone soap dishes, painted seaweed climbing up the shower tiles? This was Barbara’s taste, we were haunted by Barbara. (What pangs of longing, for my plain old attic at Jude’s.) I couldn’t meet my own eyes in the mirror over the sink, for rage at myself, at what I’d let myself in for. How could we two, Mac and I – with our infinite complexities, and our so-divergent experiences, which had hardened into our natures – be forced to fit inside this shared circle of a marriage, curled up as tightly together as yin and yang? That’s what marriage is like, I think – this squeezing of two natures into one space which doesn’t fit either of them. At least, that’s how mine was for a long time – now, it’s settled down into tranquillity (which brings its own complications).
One night I ran away from Mac in my nightdress. This was only a few months after I’d moved in with him – before he was even divorced, before we were married in the Registry Office. Usually we quarrelled about the boys, but they were away: Luke was staying with friends (he was sixteen), Rowan was at my mother’s. For Mac’s sake, I tried to set up these occasions when he had me to himself. Our quarrel that night wasn’t about any subject in particular; it was about the way Mac talked at me. I’d cooked something special and we’d been drinking Mac’s good wine (he knows his wine). Mac loved to tell me about his ideas. All day long at the factory, in the intervals between all the practical things he had to plan and decide, he was working out his theories of everything. He said, for instance, that he needed to believe that our experiences weren’t lost in time but were all held somewhere, coexisting simultaneously – in God’s mind, or in an alternative dimension where time was a kind of perpetual present. But if that were so, he puzzled, then everything terrible must also be held for ever as it happened: suffering would have no end, there’d be no relief in oblivion.
I knew he’d never talked about these things to anyone before. He had chosen me as the necessary listener, the one person on earth to whom he wanted – needed – to explain himself. He thought that no one else understood him as I could. (Barbara hadn’t ever wanted him to talk like this to her, she’d feared it. She had believed superstitiously, Mac said to me once, that talking about suffering could bring it on.) But when I tried to answer him and put in my part of the argument, it seemed to me that he waited kindly for me to finish then carried on regardless, uncoiling the tight-wound spool of his own thoughts. It might have been like this, I thought, if I’d been the wife of a great philosopher or a poet in the past; I would have sat at his feet and written down his ideas devotedly, then consoled him for them in the dark. Only Mac wasn’t a great philosopher, he was a factory owner, and it was me who had a humanities degree; I had read as much philosophy as he had (though he did remember more of what he read than I did, and was better at logical argument). Yet if I stopped speaking altogether – sat with my expression closed to him, rage in my heart – he didn’t even notice. (Perhaps it was a small thing to get mad about. Nowadays, when I love him steadily, I don’t want him to know my inmost thoughts.) Undressing in the bedroom that evening I felt I was smothering, because of the central heating and the fitted carpets everywhere. We didn’t bother to close the curtains in that room because the windows only looked towards the Portway and the river gorge, over the scrubland in front of the house where the horses grazed (these belonged to Lauren and Toni, Mac’s daughters). The windows were black and cold with night; I could see our lamps and our room reflected in the glass as if I was looking in from outside, and I saw myself moving around, putting away my clothes. Of course Mac wanted to end the evening with love-making.
— Don’t touch me! I snapped, pushing him away. I complained that he wasn’t interested in my opinions, he never asked me what I thought and only wanted me as his audience.
— It isn’t small talk, you know, Mac said, hurt, his forehead wrinkled and reddening with feeling. When I hated him I saw how his head was round and dense like a cannonball or a hard nut. — I’m telling you what’s really in my heart, things I’ve never shared with anyone. I’m talking to you freely: I thought you appreciated what that was worth. Would you rather I was polite, and paid you compliments and asked after your knitting?
I couldn’t believe he’d said that about knitting: martyred, exulting, I said I’d got a first-class mark for an essay on Bergson and T. S. Eliot. — Why would I want to talk about knitting? I can’t even knit! You don’t even know that about me.
Mac said I must be drunk (and probably I was – we often finished two bottles between us, sometimes we started on a third). He got into the shower and I ran downstairs, escaping outside. On my way out I picked up the keys to the little Peugeot he’d bought me for work and for running around in. I might have driven off, just as I was, barefoot in my 1940s vintage nightdress – and if I had, who knows whether I’d ever have come back again. But I saw in the light from the windows that the horses had come up to stand against the fence, and I went across to talk to them. Because I was cold, though the adrenaline from our fight was still surging in me, I nuzzled into their peppery smell and greasy, dusty heat – a secret life, rich with its own purposes, out there in the dark which had looked empty from inside the house. Misty was Lauren’s jaunty chestnut mare and my favourite; she jabbed at me with her nose, snorting and hoping for treats. (I cherished those horses partly as my way of making up to Lauren and Toni, who wouldn’t have anything to do with me at first.) Mac came out of the house behind me, calling my name, his towelling bathrobe tied over his pyjamas. He didn’t like the horses; he was afraid of them.
I climbed up over the gate and on to Misty, clinging to the tufts of her mane with both hands; then I set off riding across the field bareback. It was stupidly dangerous, I probably was drunker than I knew. (And on the way I lost the keys to the Peugeot, the only set: Mac was out early the next morning, eyes down, hunting for them everywhere. We never found them, and had to buy replacements.)
— Follow me, I yelled back over my shoulder. — If you want to keep me, follow me.
— You’re an idiot, Stella.
— I don’t care what you think. Follow me.
And he did follow – though not just obediently trotting after the horse, as I’d rather pictured it. (Misty shucked me off anyway, halfway across the field, not too roughly.) Mac went back inside first for a torch and wellingtons, and put one of the old picnic blankets over his shoulders, then set out to where I was waiting for him under the beeches. By the time he arrived all the anger had drained out of me. It was marvellous out there under the huge old trees soughing and groaning in the wind, dragging at their roots in the dark. Mac turned off his torch and on the blanket I clung to him passionately. — We could be in our comfortable bed, he said, bemused.
(I told him later that I believed there was a solution to the problem of time and suffering he’d proposed. It was only intractable if you came at it head on, wanting a single story; instead, you could try imagining that two time dimensions coexisted. In one, still moments were all held objectively for ever; in the other, time as experienced subjectively was always a flow, bringing the relief of endings. Nothing was added, in that model, to anyone’s suffering; on the other hand suffering – like happiness – wasn’t oblitera
ted in the total sum of things, which it shouldn’t be if the sum of things is justice. I thought my idea was something like Bergson’s durée, but a proper philosopher explained to me years afterwards that I’d got this wrong.)
Mac was made to be the father of daughters. There’s a photograph of him holding Toni minutes after she was born: he looks astonished as a bear with a princess in a fairy tale, afraid of his own strength, dreading already the boyfriends she’ll bring home. The girls brought out a patriarchal, sentimental streak in him and in return he fostered in them an inward-turning femininity. Self-important with their father’s adoration, they were bruised and scandalised by his betrayal. Toni, rounded and blonde like her mother, was a teacher in a primary school, and married by the time Mac and I moved in together (though she’d had a wilder phase, and before I knew him Mac had fought off a succession of unsuitable boys). Lauren was moody, a talented clarinet player, a changeling who didn’t look like either parent – very white-skinned, tiny, gamine with black hair and glasses and a sharp little muzzle like a fox. Mac and Barbara had worried together – and out of all proportion, I thought – through the various phases of Lauren’s giftedness and restless dissatisfaction. Later, when Toni got pregnant (by which time the sisters were more or less reconciled to the idea of me) I was ready to be supportive through the difficulty of her young maternity – only she didn’t find it difficult, she loved it uncomplicatedly.
It seemed to me that I worked hard at building relations with Mac’s family, while he hardly tried with mine. This was our longest-lasting and worst fight. (Then in his mid-sixties he capitulated all at once, genially making friends with everyone.) Mac said that it was different because the boys were living with us and of course that was true; but he couldn’t see that there was an imbalance in the settled hostility between him and them – he was an adult, so ought to hold back the whole force of his scowling intolerance of their mess and mistakes and ignorance. He claimed he was protecting me from how they took advantage of me. It was obvious, though, that he was jealous of how I loved them, and I told him so – in front of the boys, which wasn’t a good idea. But I think Mac would have fought with his own sons too, if he’d had any. His was that touchy, growling kind of masculinity which can’t resist tussling with other males and testing them. (Yet he was tenderly solicitous towards the craftsmen who worked for him at the factory.)
So we had some awful confrontations. Mac had never had to deal with anything like Rowan’s scenes before; Lauren had only ever slammed doors and sulked. He thought each row with Rowan was terminal – which was what Rowan thought too; in his tantrums he was desperate with self-destruction, provoking you to say the worst thing possible to hurt him, reaching as a simplification for the last unforgivable gesture which would pull down the whole edifice of his life. I can remember Mac holding Rowan at arm’s length by the shoulders, bellowing (‘How dare you speak to me like that?’), while Rowan kicked at Mac’s knees and Luke tried to intervene physically between them; or Rowan punching through a door panel; or Mac locking Rowan outside one night and Rowan appearing ghoul-like at the downstairs windows with his face flattened against the glass, smearing the panes with tears and snot. It all seems fairly absurd, in retrospect. What I can’t recover is what the rows were actually about, what small seeds of daily cause gave rise to those hurricane effects.
Mac managed to pick quarrels with Luke too – for smoking weed, for sleeping late, for missing school – though he was such an easy teenager and only ever did these things in moderation. Mac went berserk when he found that Luke had taken the Mercedes out one night while we were away (without a licence or insurance or driving lessons: like me, Luke was a natural driver). I had the dream-sensation sometimes that I was closeted again with the stepfather I’d spent my life getting away from. (‘Do you think the world owes you a living?’) When Rowan and Luke developed a comic parody of Mac’s outrage, I didn’t know if I was relieved or disappointed: was he ridiculous? Perhaps that was the mistake I’d made, I’d married a fool: not the more interesting one, of marrying a monster. I knew Mac blamed Rowan’s behaviour on the way I’d brought him up. And no doubt it partly was because of the way I’d brought him up, but I wasn’t going to concede that. The trouble was that Mac took him on as an equal, refusing to see the suffering child with his white face and inchoate despair. (Though in the long run it may be that Mac’s refusal was better for Rowan than my sympathetic penetration. When Rowan came home at seventeen after living for a year with his grandmother in Glasgow, he and Mac were suddenly close, conspiring in glum distaste against my interrogations: ‘How are you feeling now? Are you happy?’)
I used to console myself, when things were at their worst, by spending Mac’s money. He didn’t mind me doing this, in fact he liked it; I suppose he thought my shopping expeditions were a sign that I acquiesced in the outward conditions of our life together. But I came closest to leaving him when I was using my credit card; I defied his logic, that his money was a power over me. I’d never had money in my life before. All through my twenties and early thirties I’d bought my jeans and shirts from charity shops and vintage stalls; it was strange to be in a position to choose whatever I liked – it was almost inhibiting, I didn’t know where to start. Mac joked that although some of the clothes I bought cost a fortune, they looked as if I might have picked them up at a jumble sale after all: silky slinky scraps, faded prints, torn bits of net and lace with velvet trimmings. That waif look was fashionable and it suited me – I even adapted it for work with plain black cashmere jumpers and flat shoes. I had my hair cut off short and spiky at Vidal Sassoon’s; I was still very thin. (Some of the women I worked with in my first job as an occupational therapist, attached to the adolescent unit in a psychiatric hospital, couldn’t forgive me for the cashmere and the thinness. But they didn’t like me anyway, they thought I was arrogant and aloof because I didn’t join in their gossip. I was out of my depth all the time I was at that unit – and I identified too sympathetically with the teenagers who were our patients.)
I think what I felt about my appearance at that time in my mid-thirties was elegiac. It seems comical, looking back from the age I am now: but I believed then that I was at the end of my youth, on the brink of leaving certain experiences behind, losing my old freedoms inside the substantial middle-aged categories of a career and marriage. The clothes and the hair and the way I still painted my eyes, that whole look with its sexy bitter twist – I entered into it as though it was a last flare of possibility, before youth vanished for ever.
In the early nineties, when Mac and I had been living together for about four years – and before Rowan went to Glasgow – I had a visit from my old friend, Sheila. I hadn’t seen her since the break-up of our commune; the last I’d heard of her was that she was settled in Brazil and teaching English. She arrived one Bank Holiday weekend when we were all at home. Everyone who called at our Sea Mills house came to the side door into the kitchen, but she turned up in a taxi without warning at the front and used the heavy knocker – which seemed significant when I thought about it later, because her entry into the house brought a momentous change. I struggled to drag back the bolts in the dusty porch, which depressed me because it was heaped with cast-off coats and boots (I wasn’t tidy like Barbara), and by the time I got the door open the taxi was just driving off. For a moment I didn’t recognise who was standing there. When she was twenty-four, Sheila had looked like a saint in a medieval painting: austerely stately, pale with long auburn hair which was wiry and burnished like threads in an old embroidery. Now, her hair was cut short and bleached dry by the sun, her skin was tanned and roughened: she looked rakish and unsettled, challenging. She was wearing some kind of long bedraggled print skirt, and hoop earrings. In those first moments I hardly took in that she had a baby slung in a tie-dyed vermilion cloth against her breast – a little girl, asleep, with a tiny closed perfect face and thick black hair.
— Is it yours? I exclaimed.
— Of course it’s m
ine. Did you think I’d borrowed it?
We were awkward together at first – or perhaps it was just that she’d always been angular and abrupt. She seemed to find it funny that our house from outside looked like a child’s drawing: rectangular and red-brick with a chimney at each end, planted bang in the middle of its flat garden which was really just the same scrubby field as outside the garden walls (Barbara had grown things but I’d neglected them). Mac wandered across the hall, pretending to be preoccupied, taking flight from introductions behind his air of being a hundred years older than any of my friends. Inside the house, Sheila went around touching everything, exclaiming that she couldn’t believe I owned all this. I thought she was criticising me – because of the world of poverty she’d come from, or out of the returned traveller’s disdain for everything they’d left behind and forgotten – and I felt weighed down by the settled, responsible life I’d taken on. It was mid-autumn and a gloomy light, muddled with damp from the river, seemed to have got everywhere indoors; we had all our lamps switched on in the middle of the day, and the wind was tugging round the house, teasing it.
In the kitchen, Sheila wouldn’t take off her coat; she really wasn’t dressed for the English climate. She snuggled with a groan of relief close to the Aga, unwrapping the sleeping baby on her lap. I bent over to make a fuss of it: it was the most satisfying, perfect creature, clear-skinned, the eyelids closed in straight black lines, the brows tiny upward brush strokes, purplish lips pressed shut as if in repudiation. Her name was Ester, Sheila said, pronouncing it the Brazilian way, as Esh-tair. She was three months old, born in Recife. Sheila talked about motherhood with a stiffly comical air, avoiding my eyes. No one had told her that you couldn’t send the baby back if you weren’t enjoying it. The Indian women seemed to have a completely different kind of baby; they slept all day, you could take them to work in the fields. She’d wanted one of those. I suggested that Ester looked like an Indian baby anyway, but Sheila wouldn’t give anything away about the father. She explained that she had six months’ unpaid leave from the language school where she worked, and that she’d come home to show the baby to her family, then after a week couldn’t bear being at home – she was hoping I would let her stay for a few days. When Ester began to stir on her lap, she seemed immediately strained and anxious. There was a bottle of formula mixed up in her bag; would I warm it up in a pan of water?— I suppose you think it’s awful that I’m not breastfeeding, she said accusingly.
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