Country Girl: A Memoir (19 page)

Eventually, the impediments to marriage were overcome, since Ernest had been baptized a Catholic and his first marriage, in a registry office, was not recognized by the Catholic Church. I got my own wedding ring in a pawnshop and wondered, would it be lucky? I was twenty-three. My marriage dress, which was fawn and drab, was also my maternity dress, with a panel along the front that could be narrowed or widened depending on the bulge of the belly. It was in a Catholic church in Blanchardstown, a rainy morning in July, and two workmen were called down from the scaffolding to serve as witnesses. Afterward there was a lunch in the Bailey restaurant, with my sister Eileen and the poet Val Iremonger and his wife. It was here that I had my first taste of champagne, and I took an undue liking to it.

Four weeks later I was in the nursing home in Hatch Street about to give birth. I felt safe there, the nurses were attentive, coming in and out, timing the length between the pains and telling me to breathe, to breathe. Though woozy from the drugs they had given me, I could feel the last stabbing bouts of pain, as the head started to butt out, and great tears of joy and emotion gushed out of me. Ernest was overjoyed to have a son, and it was as if he himself had given birth to it.

In the days that followed, I would get out of bed and look in at the cot. In repose, the baby, christened Karl Ernest, was pale as a snowdrop, then scarlet when he cried, the little fingers flicking, with the temper in them. The morning he was circumcized
a bright berry of blood showed in the bag of his diaper. I could not keep myself from looking at him, at the little tuft of black hair and, underneath it, the gap in the crown of his skull, the two halves opening and shutting, like a hatch, all the while hesitating to pick him up, because I felt so unprepared as a mother.

It was in London that I would find both the freedom and the incentive to write. We moved there in November 1958. I had two children now, Carlo and Sasha, who like the sheepdogs in their grandmother’s house, whom they adored, would spar endlessly and yet remained allies against a baffling grown-up world.

After I brought them to school, I would race home in order to write, sitting at the wide windowsill in their bedroom, which was quite deep, and I wrote in jotters I had brought from Ireland which were called “Aisling,” meaning dream or vision. Once, an insect, a little gnat, crawled out of the center-page binding, and I jumped in terror, so carried back was I to Drewsboro and its environs. The wash of memory, and something stronger than memory, was so pervasive that I forgot I was in a semi-detached house in London, with a small back garden that looked out onto another small back garden and an identical row of houses with red tiled roofs. Bleak suburbia.

The words tumbled out, like the oats on threshing day that tumble down the shaft, the hard pellets of oats funneled into bags and the chaff flying everywhere, getting into the men’s eyes and their having to shout to be heard above the noise of the machine.

In my first month in London I had gone to a university to hear a lecture by Arthur Mizener on Hemingway. When he read the opening paragraph of
A Farewell to Arms,
of soldiers going down a road, the dust their boots raised and leaves that
had already fallen, I saw in a marvelous instance how Hemingway had separated the oats from the chaff.

Carlo and Sasha Gébler in the back garden of Cannon Hill Lane, 1959.

I cried a lot while writing
The Country Girls,
but scarcely noticed the tears. Anyhow, they were good tears. They touched on feelings that I did not know I had. Before my eyes, infinitely clear, came that former world in which I believed that our fields and hollows had some old music slumbering in them, centuries old. I would ask myself to dream of Drewsboro at night, to refresh my memory. Once, it was newborn calves butting one another to drink from the bucket of separated milk, another time it was of goslings, their feathers with the softness of
flowers, and, fixed in my memory forever, is one in which I am holding my father’s shins on a tongs, about to consign them to a fire in a little grate in an upstairs room where a fire had never been lit. Mother, father, field, and fort, makeshift fences, corn lodged in the rain, and bread rising in the oven. Indoors and outdoors. In the month of May the hedges a carnival of pink and white, hawthorn petals blowing about like confetti.

I saw again a dog lick the afterbirth of a calf in a hollow, lap it up, and the dark fort where Lady Drew was seen in her nightgown and where, one summer Sunday, a girl with ringlets lured me in for an “op,” short for operation. It was quite dark, and we were hidden by the low-lying branches as we took off our knickers, then pulled up the stalks of the wild iris that grew in a swamp and stuffed the wet smeared roots into one another, begging for mercy. Our cries flowed together and were muffled by the drones of bees and wasps that swarmed in and out as we swore eternal secrecy. Then afterward, when we came into the daylight, her eyes were a queer, shiny black, the light making yellow slashes in her pupils, and she said that she would “tell” unless I gave her my most prized possession, which was a georgette handkerchief with a pink powder puff stitched into it. And so I did.

The novel’s opening paragraph centered on the fear of my father—
I wakened quickly and sat up in bed abruptly. It is only when I am anxious that I waken easily and for a minute I could not remember what it was. Then I remembered, the old reason, my father, he had not come home.

But it was my mother who filled the canvas and who infused that first book. Even as I was writing it, I guessed she would disapprove, as she was suspicious of the written word. “Paper never refused ink” was one of her more sarcastic sayings. I recalled seeing her as she was beating hot stirabout with a pounder, and I read her lines I had copied from a calendar:

When icicles hang by the wall,

And Dick the Shepherd blows his nail,

And Tom bears logs into the hall

She had looked up at me, her face wreathed in steam, and said if that was writing, “they got their money easy.”

In London twenty years later, the words poured out of me, and the pen above the paper was not moving fast enough, so that I sometimes feared they would be lost forever.

I had received fifty pounds to write a novel. The advance was paid jointly by Knopf in New York and Hutchinson in London. Flushed with wealth, I splashed out, for my husband a pullover, for the household a sewing machine (sewing was not my strong point), for my children some plastic weaponry and tin drums, which their father objected to. For myself, a tiny bottle of perfume with an orange rubber stopper in the nozzle. It smelled almost religious. Sometimes of an evening I would dab a little behind my ears to cheer myself up, and seeing this, Carlo and Sasha would fret, believing that I was going out. But there was nowhere to go and we had made no friends. Sometimes, after they had gone to bed, I would walk as far as Morden and read the handwritten cards in newsagents’ windows—
Black Cat Found… Piano Tuner Wanted… Cane Chairs Refurbished.
It was there that I got the idea for my first television play, called
The Wedding Dress.
The message read, “Widower wishes to dispose of recently deceased wife’s clothing, as good as new, call evenings.” That play, fifty years later, would mutate into the stage play
Haunted,
in which a Mr. and Mrs. Berry, in isolated Blackheath, lived in the marital crucible.

I had betrayed my husband, though not in deed. He had heard my future publisher, Iain Hamilton, and I exchange some words on the telephone that were decidedly tender. Iain, the one who had commissioned the novel, was fond of me and
believed in me as a writer. But I was not in love with him. The truth is, I wanted to be rescued—a tall order for a man with a wife and children and a publishing house to oversee. We arranged to meet for lunch “up London,” as I called it. First I went to a hairdresser’s in Wimbledon, which was unfortunate, as the stylist insisted on putting small rollers in, so that the result was a frizzy old-fashioned hairdo.

Still, it was a day out, the very first since we had arrived, three months ago, at Waterloo station, which I found to be grimy and sooted, the waddle of the pigeons so ungainly, not supple like birds at home. It was November, and seeing the wreaths of paper poppies around the several monuments as we went in a taxi from Waterloo station to SW20, I thought England so dolorous.

Yet now I was seeing Piccadilly Circus: its teeming life, newspaper vendors at street corners shouting out the catchy headlines, and already early editions of an evening paper were being thrown from vans that stopped, regardless of other traffic. This was the hub of things. In Bond Street I inquired the price of a bronze horse, which I suppose was by Giacometti, and got, from a smartly dressed male assistant with beautiful lapis cufflinks, a supercilious reply. In a shop in Regent Street I tried on different pairs of high-heeled suede court shoes, such as the dancing teacher used to wear. Oh, the protocol, my stockinged feet placed on a sloping dais to be measured and a stout woman, no longer young, remarking on the fact that my feet were two different sizes, which made her job harder. I chose black suede ones which laced over the instep. It was not the narrow corded laces that I was used to but a ribbon of black taffeta, which she tied in a bow. Walking around on that carpet, I thought I would levitate. As I saw myself in the long mirror, the stout woman complimenting my calves, I was already
wearing these shoes to literary soirees. Hearing the price, I almost fainted.

“Twenty pounds!” I repeated.

“Guineas, madam,” she said tartly, and realizing that there was to be no sale, she unlaced them hurriedly and put them in the white box, with tissue paper that was the color of clean gray ash. I have never forgotten those shoes.

The lunch was in El Vino’s in Fleet Street, which I took to be the last word in literary sophistication. It was very crowded, and we sat at a small table near the window. He ordered a bottle of red wine, along with steak-and-kidney pie. I was terrified that we would be caught out. He did not take to my new hairdo, and from time to time ran his hand over it to smooth it out and in that way to affirm his attraction. I had to tell him that my husband had heard our conversation, because of listening in on the extension in his bedroom, which I had not at first realized. I found out only because of one of the entries in his logbook, which he kept in a yellow strongbox that was always locked. I had found the key to it in the well at the top of his bookcase and read the many entries that had grown rancorous with the years: his lifting me from behind a shop counter, launching me into a world of literature and refinement, bringing me against his better wishes to live in London. Though void of intellect or cognitive powers, I was already passing myself off as a writer. I told my publisher only of the bit that concerned him, in which my husband asserted that he would publish any nonsense of mine solely because of his infatuation. He looked flustered, filled both our glasses, then held my hand gravely, realizing it was too dangerous for the friendship to go on. I would finish the novel, and that would be the link between us, and I thought of the picture of that pair of outstretched hands, destined to be divided, that was on willow-pattern plates.

At a quarter to two each day, when it was time to bring my husband his tray of Earl Grey tea and two slices of slightly burned toast sprinkled with olive oil, I put the jotter aside, hoping that the next day’s chapter was safe inside me. Then after the children got back in, I made bread and sponge cakes, knowing that the smell cheered things up, but also knowing that I could not live forever in that mock-Tudor house that looked out on a common, mired in fog.

There were no rows and no scenes; the friction was mounting just beneath the surface. Sensing this at dinnertime, the children would do daft things, laugh uncontrollably, or tell tall tales from school; a fight that had developed into a bloodbath, big boys “milking” smaller boys, and the luring of a girl, called Janice Budding, into the shade. Their father read, usually from
the
New Scientist,
which he subscribed to. As he became more and more concerned about the poisons in the atmosphere and the poisons in food, our diets were strictly monitored. A favorite book of his was
The Culture of the Abdomen
by Mr. F. A. Hornibrook, from which he would read passages at random: