So, treat yourself as you would an employee. That’s what shrinks say, because they know that I can’t imagine treating another person as I treat myself, which is with automatic torrents of abuse that Fram thinks come from having experienced their like too early on. He also says they are part of a longing to have someone silence them by saying nice things.
The row over ransomed milk was so bad that I thought that was that. I had seen how exasperated they were by my incapacity to be helped and just to accept that this was now; they were there; I was here; and that life is not fair.
Gestures are often insincere and lead almost always to regret. The two pounds for the milk was a gesture. Gestures may be staged for the notional watcher, who is the spirit of Punch and Judy, and, worse, of the Colosseum. Gestures may be lies, waiting for their big fat bluff to be called.
I will not forget the one time I slapped a young man for kissing me, in the dark after a dance here on Colonsay. The slap was pure gesture as the kiss was not. I was showing off to whoever was watching the film of my romantic life; that is no one at all. Or, at most, just me. Unforgivable. I apologised to this young man’s grave this week (he never grew old but lost his life to a knife in a city), but I did not say so to Katie. That would have been gestural. Whether or not it’s gestural to mention it here, I am attempting to discern as I write. Writing about private things can be gestural, and it can not be. The reader will have to decide.
I arrived at their house in Oxford from the North and, not meaning to but not knowing how else to be, set about being as tiresome as possible almost before I was through the door. I could see very little, and just wanted to hide. I went to Minoo’s room, which is my room when I am there, and although I couldn’t see, I scraped my bruised newly stitched eyes open so as to ingest anything new that might hurt about the room, packed as it is with memories of our marriage and of Minoo’s childhood, photographs of the other children, the cats, the poem written for our wedding by Peter Levi, framed, the sparmannia cuttings from our drawing room, the pink Roberts radio, Minoo’s soft tiger Siberia and his wife and son, Blanche and Albert, the various sketches of the house in Italy Fram’s mother made, Minoo’s clothes, many of which are clothes I bought for his father, my father’s furniture, my own, the painting of a Roman street vendor with buck teeth that once belonged to Henry James. So what? It is all Minoo’s life.
He is the wholeness that emerges and it is fitting that his life should be whole around him and his home also.
To fuss about things at all is symptom of nothing more than the awful ‘meum — tuum’ of bourgeois marriage. That is almost the whole truth. Occasionally, Fram gives me an offering he has come across from my past: my christening mug or my leaflet of Cardinal Newman’s Dream of Gerontius that I bought for six old pennies at McNaughtan’s second-hand bookshop in Leith Walk in Edinburgh before I went away to school in England. I carry it in my handbag. He can’t give me big things because where would they go now I’m a mobile mother? And do I actually want the things themselves? I want the continuity, the unbrokenness, the dream not woken from.
Which is like the burglar crying aloud for the uneased, unbroken window. Worse, like the roiling thug weeping over the grief and bodily harm he has inflicted. The things tell a more whole story under that happy roof than under any I might offer them.
After about one night and a bad morning when I even broke my own artificial taboo and went up on to the floor of the house where Fram and Claudia’s bedroom is and where you can see the crowns of trees and be among the church bells even higher, I decided to face the fact that I could either shut up and keep all this to myself or just move my suitcase to another pitch and get on with moaning, and I was running out of places to be. The reason I tell Fram and Claudia about the sadness’s shape is because they understand the metaphorical terms I, unconsciously but thoroughly, use, and that is more important to me than practically any other intimacy, the sense of swift mutual understanding. Even I could see that it was unjust to punish them for their pre-eminence among my loved ones.
So, there was a morning of me racing around trying ever more closely to define my understanding of the lostness which was of course like sewing hems with smoke. Then I settled down to their life, her taking him breakfast, and bringing it to me too, which seemed like far too much kindness, their trips to London for meetings, libraries, theatre, her book plans, her reviewing, her columns, her cousins and siblings and their babies, his going to college and returning exhausted and then working till three or four in the morning, her seeing friends, dealing with the animals, with family, the coming and going of Joanna the ironing lady who had been for ten years a steady soothant in the children’s lives under our roof, and whom somewhere along the way I loosed my bond with, like so much else that had been treasured and familiar.
Who would grudge anyone that? Anyone whom they love?
And I do not.
I have, however, and it’s quite an achievement, managed to empty my own life to the extent where I have made it a cell. Not St Jerome’s calm study, but a prison. I haven’t made a charming minimalist environment for the contemplation of the good, I have fixed up a metal cave. I think I did it with drink first and with a good disinfecting blast of high-pressure shame after that. Then I went blind.
It is easy to forget how to live. I did it. Getting back up is not easy. Getting back on, I am trying now, but the laps are faster and faster that the carousel is making, and those who are thrown off it or throw themselves or fall off it — why hadn’t I noticed this at the Dutch amusement park I so hated as a child, the Bedriegertjes? — never get back on if they are tentative. You have to leap and then be rock steady. You have to leap into the centre of the awful spinning thing to find any stillness; the edge will throw you off.
.
Chapter 9: Two Instances of Spring
The darkness brought down by my closed eyes is a new way of being shut out. Since that darkness is my circumstance, unless this operation which I am awaiting works, it is surely the right thing to turn that darkness into a new way to be alone.
The stay with Fram and Claudia over Minoo’s birthday was full of things that worked, as long as I kept the past from my mind. If I ceased thinking of my own life, that I had no job, no home and no systems within which to do more than exist as an organism from day to day, beyond the sketchy membranes of prayer and washing, then it was pleasant to be part of this busy house with the comings and goings of young people, conversation, and the tenor of wit and shared myth that lies at the heart of full lives.
Fram said, I am sure truthfully and I know welcomingly, that it was a matter of indifference to him whether I stayed for two hours or two years with them, they would carry on as they do with their lives, to which I might be as much of an addition as I wished. Claudia finds me easier. I second-guess his boredom and in doing so bring it into being.
Clementine and Rose came for Minoo’s birthday lunch, and Olly in the evening. At lunch, there was prosecco and a roast made by the twins’ father, Toby, and Clem and Rose brought presents wrapped in sparkly paper that left granular silver dust on our hands. Both girls had silvered their eyes like fish scales. Claudia’s son Xavier was there, and they shared a cake sent by Cousin Audrey in Edinburgh. The garden was sunny and early flowers were through in Fram’s newly made garden, scented paperwhites and wintersweet with its strong scent of milky Earl Grey tea. Clem likes Fram’s gardening and enjoyed the thin squeaky-stemmed fragrant narcissi. I was glad for her that the vase and the cutlery, the napery and some of the plates were familiar to her.