We agree that green and white, and blue and purple, if she can find any, should form the mass of flowers that she will leave at the church for the ladies of the family bereaved to set about it as they wish. Bluebells are the right colour, we decide, but they are not sufficiently respectful. They are the juicy flowers of childhood, abundant, scented, profligate and wild. They do not look like trouble taken when they are massed, and they are at their massed best when left alone to smoke up a wood with their heavy blue.
There is a jar of bluebells on my dressing table, put there by Katie’s son and his Iranian fiancée. He is a boy and doesn’t read the language of flowers. She, being Persian, like my younger son and his father, well understands some languages beyond the spoken, of which she has English, Arabic and a little Farsi. She knows the good luck in a mango, the transportable nourishment in a coconut, the relation of sugar to good words.
The men on Colonsay leave a funeral halfway through for the committal of the body to the earth. A dram of whisky for each man is passed around, and a bit of cheese.
The women remain in the kirk and weep.
Chapter 3: Milk Money
A book containing some of Chekhov’s plays arrived here on the boat last night. It came from a dealer in New South Wales. I hadn’t seen when I was buying it online that it was on the other side of the world. I was interested by the translation and the edition. Reassuringly, the edition at least is a properly Chekhovian disappointment. How can I have missed that the reason for the rock-bottom price was that the publisher is something called The Franklin Library, at the Franklin Center, Pennsylvania? The translation is by Elisaveta Fen, and copyrighted to her in 1951 and 1954. The edition is copyrighted to the Franklin Mint Corporation.
Do you remember the Franklin Mint? Do they still exist? I think that I once actually did write advertising copy for them, or have I invented that? Certainly I have not invented that they specialised in ‘Collectables’, ranging from themed thimbles with an ornamental display unit to show them off to best advantage, and poseable figurines of the late Diana Spencer in occasionwear with fully styleable ‘natural’ hair. In the early days of Sunday colour supplements, I enjoyed playing with the sorts of advertisement the slippy magazines carried on their back page. It was only in these ads that I ever did read the actual word ‘Skivertex’.
My father and I would ask one another, in a special advertising voice, ‘Have you ever longed to caress a book?’ This was the headline of a certain ad that offered classics of world literature for now and for all time in luxurious gold-tooled Skiblon, duchess green or cardinal red. I was absorbed by parallel idioms and by what you could do with words, and how words caught you out and showed you up, tickled you and took you in or left you out.
This not merely indoor but interior habit was not interpretable as much other than showing-off and time-wasting by my poor stepmother, who preferred her jokes less silly and whose ratio of meaning to word is a clear one-to-one. She was right to be suspicious of me. She thought I was a liar but actually I was something less direct: an ambiguity obsessive.
She was right that I was having a stab at making a shared world with my father, in the language we both spoke, but, to his matrimonial credit, he soon ceased to meet me on those borders and one sort of atmosphere lifted. While I love Greek and Latin, he never thought me much good at them and couldn’t understand why I had not a grip on Greek accents. In the ‘girls’ Greek’ taught at that time, accents were not included.
My stepmother to this day speaks a pure English that delighted him. English is a corrupt old tongue but in her words, spoken and written, it says what it means like a tread of precise hemming settling a margin of cloth. I listen to her talk with pleasure, and, freed from hot adolescence and respectful of her long widowhood, I realise that her speech must have been to him both a relief from his own subtlety and a line to clarity at an obscure time.
There is a line of thought that maintains that all writers of fiction are liars because they make things up. This coincides frequently with the other line of thought, which also thinks itself interestingly robust, that it is women who read fiction. And, moreover, that they do so to escape.
Proper fiction tells the truth by a means that, far from producing pain as untruth does, gives pleasure; this doesn’t mean that it fails to reproduce or convey pain. The transformative element is not lies but art. Human truth is caught in translation, such that we may briefly be as close to not being ourselves while we read as we shall ever be. It’s not a promise, but there is always the promise of a promise.
As for women reading escapist fiction, why would women wish to escape, if not from a nonsense world of material fact and of drudgery that is there, often, to free men?
And here I am in the autumn of my days, privileged at last to caress a book, gold-tooled for my handling pleasure, though the hide-type spine is not duchess green nor cardinal red but buckram brown.
Still, the book, whatever the cover, held its transmissible voltage. I am, of course, in a flat that has been made from the nursery bedrooms of a beloved old house in which a number of generations have lived. I’ve never known a time when things were at all fat on the estate. Twice at least in my time of being almost in the family it has been put on the market. Most of the children’s lives are formed by the place. William, who was an art dealer, makes his living from chopping down trees, carrying coal and emptying dustbins. The sound of an axe is rarely far off from the house. He walks around with an axe as easily as with a book.
It is May. In the walled garden lies a cold dew between the fruit trees.
I held open my eyes on this chilly early morning in May where outside the many greens under the cold wind are shivery with blossom and read the opening of The Cherry Orchard:
ACT ONE
A room, which used to be the children’s bedroom and is still referred to as the nursery. There are several doors: one of them leads into Anya’s room. It is early morning: the sun is just coming up. The windows of the room are shut, but through them the cherry trees can be seen in blossom. It is May, but in the orchard there is morning frost.
The last play I saw in the company of my mother was The Cherry Orchard. I had forgotten this till now, or so I think. I must I suppose have remembered it every time I’ve read the play since then, or when it’s been mentioned. I’ve not seen it again, which is a bit peculiar. At that first, that only, visit, I was painfully bored until the end, when I couldn’t bear it to stop in the way it did. Perhaps that’s what they mean when they say Chekhov is like life? Unbearably boring, then you don’t want it over with. Or, please, not like that. Boring isn’t the word, is it? The word is…like life.
Not ‘lifelike’. Which is for inanimate things that imitate life. The plays of Chekhov breathe. They summon life. They are…like life.
After she died the first play I was taken to was the Alcestis of Euripides. It was in English. Alcestis, Queen of Thessaly, vows to die in the place of her king, Admetus. Admetus, aghast with grief, nevertheless proves a noble and generous host to the man-god Heracles when he visits. In acknowledgement of this, Heracles descends to Hades, wrestles Death, and returns with a veiled woman whom the King will entertain in his halls only as a courtesy to his guest. Heracles persuades Admetus entirely against his will and protesting to lead the woman to his own chambers — and the woman turns out to be his dead queen, whose absence had made the palace a grave, restored to him.