Sugar and Other Stories (31 page)

My mother’s accounts of my grandmother’s selflessness were like pearls, or sugar-coated pills, grit and bitterness polished into roundness by comedy and my mother’s worked-upon understanding of my grandmother’s real meaning. Whilst I cannot remember any quoted instance of my grandfather’s speech I can remember various sayings of my grandmother, including her welcome of my infant self, on my first visit. There she stood on the doorstep, my mother said, rigid and doubtful — I imagine it for some reason taking place on a snowy evening, in the early dark. She did not say, how lovely to see you, or let me see the baby, or come in and get warm, but “It hardly seems worth the trouble of all that packing just to come here. Babies are always best in their own house, I think.” My mother would always add a long explanation of this ungraciousness — my grandmother was genuinely self-deprecating, she was very well aware of the real trouble of transporting a baby with all her equipment, she was thanking my mother for having made the effort. The grit inside the pearly sugar-coating was a fear of rejection by both women, perhaps. “I nearly just turned round and went home,” my mother always said, and always added, “but it was just her manner, she meant very well, really.” And “she was really very fond of me, she came to see me as a daughter, I was a favourite.” The famous teapot story is another such instance. It took place, I think, in the war, during petrol-rationing. My grandmother was driven over by the chauffeur, from Conisboro’ to Sheffield, to take tea with my mother and to see another baby. She sat briefly, talking to my mother. But when offered tea, she stood up abruptly and said no, no thank you, she had stayed too long, she must get back to pour my grandfather’s tea for him, he expected it. My mother’s emphasis in this story was on the childish helplessness of my grandfather, who, with a houseful of servants, could not stretch out a hand and lift his own teapot. My grandmother’s formidable manner and her excessive dutifulness were part of each other, in my mother’s vision, a kind of folly of decorum in which the result was the rejection of my own mother’s carefully prepared tea and
cakes. “All that way, and the petrol, and the chauffeur’s time, wasted just to pour a cup of tea,” my mother would say scornfully and yet with fear. This story runs into the story of my grandmother’s death. Even in her last illness, my mother would say, when she was weak and in great pain, my grandfather would not allow her to sleep alone in a spare bedroom. She gave the impression, my mother, of the elderly man howling like a lost child, “creating” on landings until my grandmother wearily “dragged herself” downstairs again, to his side. “He couldn’t sleep without her,” my mother said. And “he had no consideration.” This inarticulate crying out is the only image of his speech I have. I see him pacing in an improbable nightshirt, beside himself. My mother’s contempt for male helplessness was edged with savagery. This operated even during my father’s last illness, which she persisted in seeing as a fantasy and a betrayal, which could have been better handled. Her original announcement of his collapse included the authoritative and unfounded assertion that he’d be perfectly all right in a day or two, there was no need for anyone to bother. Her account of my grandmother’s death is riddled with doubt, but I have nothing else certain to hold, or imagine, my father never got round to telling his version of that story, so the enraged and frantically obtuse old man persists in my memory.

I had almost forgotten what was perhaps her favourite tale, the perfect example of the fecklessness and neglect to which my father, before he found her, had been subject. Two of the sisters — she was never quite sure which — Gladys and Sylvia, Sylvia and Lucy — had gone out into the fields to play, taking with them the baby, my father, whom they had put, for safety, into a horsetrough and had wholly forgotten, returning without him, remembering his whereabouts only when, many hours later, my grandmother asked where he was. The child had been discovered, my mother said, by searchers, lying half in and half out of the water in the stone trough, as the dark fell, quite abandoned. She always affected to find this story amusing, and always instilled
into it a very understandable note of bitter indignation against everyone, the girls, the mother, the father, the state of affairs that could allow this to happen. When my father returned to it in Amsterdam it was with a kind of Arcadian pleasure. “We ran wild,” he said with retrospective delight, “we had so few restrictions, we had each other and the fields and the stables — we had an amazingly free childhood, we ran wild.” His little room in the Dutch hospital was warmly lit, for a hospital room. He had bad days when he huddled under the blankets and shivered with final cold. He had good days when he sat up and talked about the world of his childhood, the pony and trap, the taste of real fresh bread, the journeys they made in the ponytrap to the races and came back in the dusk singing all together, the poems they wrote, the amazing variety of wild flowers there then were. “I grew up before the motor-car,” he said. “You won’t really be able to imagine. It was a world of horses. Everything smelled, rather pleasantly, of horses. The milk was fresh and tasty. There were real apples and plums.”

During those weeks, during that unaccustomed talking, which despite everything was pleasant and civilized, as he meant it to be, he did try to construct a tale, a myth, a satisfactory narrative of his life. He talked about what it was like to be part of a generation twice disrupted by world war; he talked about his own ambitions, and more generally about how he had noticed that it was harder for those who felt they had achieved nothing to die. He talked above all about his childhood and particularly, perhaps, though not illuminatingly, about his father. He talked of how his Aunt Flora’s coffin had been refused houseroom, even for a night, by relatives who disapproved of her religious views. He knew he was dying. He had set out because he sensed he was very ill. But we were told before him, and more specifically, how fast and of what he was dying. He was surprised about the cancer. “I had no idea,” he said to me, with a kind of grave amusement at having been caught out in ignorance, ignoring evidence. “It never occurred to me that that was what they were worried about.”
And, on another occasion, casually, but with a certain natural rhetorical dignity that was part of him, “You mustn’t think I mind. I’ve nothing to regret and I feel I’ve come to the end. Don’t misunderstand me — no doubt in the near future there will be moments of panic and terror. But you mustn’t think I mind.” He said that for my sake, but he was a truthful man. He was already steeling himself against the panic and terror, which were in the event much briefer and more cramped than we then supposed.

He had often said before, though he didn’t repeat it, at least to me, during those weeks, that a man’s children are his true and only immortality. As a girl I had been made uncomfortable by that idea. I craved separation. “Each man is an island” was my version of a delightful if melancholy truth. I was like Auden’s version of Prospero’s rejecting brother, Antonio, “By choice myself alone”. But during those extreme weeks in Amsterdam I thought about origins. I thought about my grandfather. I thought also about certain myths of origin which I had pieced together in childhood, to explain things that were important, my sense of northernness, my fear of art, the promised end. By a series of elaborate coincidences two of these had become inextricably involved in what was happening. The first was the Norse Ragnarök, and the second was Vincent Van Gogh.

We went to see the
Götterdämmerung
, in Covent Garden, on the last night of my father’s doomed Rhine-journey. I had a bad cough, which embarrassed me. Now whenever I cough I see Gunter and Gutrune like proto-Nazis in their heavy palace beside the broad and glittering artificial water, and think as I thought then, as I always think, when I think of the 1930s, of my father in those first years of my life knowing and fearing what was coming, appalled by appeasement, volunteering for the RAF. When I was clearing his things I found a copy of the “Speech Delivered in the Reichstag, April 28th 1939, by Adolf Hitler, Führer and Chancellor”. It was stored in a box of family photographs, the only thing in there that was not a photograph, as though it was an intimate
part of our family history. At the time, because I was thinking about islands, I remember very clearly thinking about the similarities and dissimilarities between Prospero and Wotan. I thought, in the red dark, that the nineteenth-century Allfather, compared to the Renaissance rough magician, was enclosed in Victorian family claustrophobia, was essentially, by extension, a social being, though both had broken rods. When Fricka berated Wotan, I thought with pleasure of my father, proceeding slowly and freely along the great river.

My favourite book, the book which set my imagination working, as a small child in Pontefract in the early years of the war, was
Asgard and the Gods. Tales and Traditions of our Northern Ancestors.
1880. It was illustrated with steel engravings, of Wodan’s Wild Hunt, of Odin tied between two fires, his face threatening and beautiful, of Ragnarök, the Last Battle, with Surtur with his flaming head, come out of Muspelheim, the gaping Fenris Wolf about to destroy Odin himself, Thor thrusting his shield-arm into the maw of the risen sea-serpent Jörmungander. I remember the shock of reading about the Last Battle in which all the heroes, all the gods, were destroyed forever. It had not until then occurred to me that a story could end like that. Though I had suspected that real life might, my expectations were gloomy. I found it exciting. I knew
Asgard
backwards before my mother told me about Sylvia, that is certain. I remember sitting in church, listening to the story of Joseph and his coat of many colours and thinking that this story was no different from the stories in
Asgard
and less moving than they were. I remember going on to think that Ragnarök seemed “truer” than the Resurrection. After Ragnarök, a very tentative, new, vegetable world began a new cycle, washed clean of blood and fire and gold. I may, I see now, rereading the book as I still do, have been influenced in these childish steps in literary theory and the Higher Criticism by the tone of the authors of
Asgard
, who rationalize Balder and Hodur into summer and winter, who turn giants into mountain ranges and Odin’s wrath to wild weather,
and who talk about the superior truths illustrated by the beautiful Christian stories. They are not Frazer, equating all gods gleefully with trees, but they set you on course for him. I identified Our Northern Ancestors in my mind with my father’s family, wild, extravagant, stony, large and frightening. They were something of which I was part. They were serious gods, as the Greeks, with their love-affairs and capriciousness, were not. The book was, however, not my father’s, but my mother’s, bought as a crib for the Ancient Icelandic and Old Norse which formed an obligatory part of her degree course. I can’t remember if she gave it to me to read, or if I found it. I do remember that she fed the hunger for reading, there was always a book and another book and another. She never underestimated what we could take. She was not kind to her children as social beings, she screamed at invited friends, she felt and communicated extremes of nervous terror. But to readers she was generous and resourceful. I knew she had been the kind of child I was, speechless and a reader. I knew.

It was with my mother, on the other hand, that the Van Gogh myth originated. Her family name had a Dutch shape and sound to it. Her family came, in part, from the Potteries, from the Five Towns, and a myth had grown up with no foundation in evidence, that they were descended from Dutch Huguenots, who came here in the time of William the Silent, practical, warm, Protestant, hardworking craftsmen, with a buried and secret artistic strain. This Dutch quality was a kind of
Gemütlichkeit
, the quality with which my mother had hoped to warm and mitigate the wuthering and chill of my father’s upbringing. In Sheffield, after the war, we had various reproductions of paintings by Vincent Van Gogh around our sitting room wall. There was one of the bridges at Arles, one of the sunnier ones, where the water is aquamarine and women are peacefully spreading washing. There were the boats on the beach at Les Saintes-Maries de la Mer, which I recognized with shock when I went there eight years later. There was a young man in a hat and yellow jacket whom I now know to have been the son of Roulin, the postman, and there
was a Zouave in full oriental trousers and red fez, sitting on a bench on a floor whose perspective rose dizzily and improperly towards him. There were also two Japanese prints and what I think now must have been a print of Vermeer’s Little Street in the Rijksmuseum, a housefront of great peace and steadiness, with a bending woman in a passageway on the left. I always, from the very earliest, associated these working women in Dutch streets with my mother. I associated the secret inwardness of the houses, de Hooch’s houses even more than Vermeer’s, with my mother’s domestic myth, necessary tasks carried out in clear light, in their own confined but meaningful spaces. In my memory, I have superimposed a de Hooch on the Vermeer, for I remember in the picture a small blonde Dutch child, with a cap and serious expression, close to the woman’s skirts, who is my small blonde self, gravely paying attention, as my mother would have liked. The Sheffield house, in whose sitting-room these images were deployed, was one of a pair of semi-detached houses purchased as a wedding present for my father by his father, who could never, clearly, do things by halves, who thought, rightly, it would be an investment. We left one of these houses for Pontefract, during the war, for fear of bombs, and came back to the other. At the period when I most clearly remember the Van Goghs and the Vermeer/de Hooch the second house was in a state of renovation and redecoration. My grandfather had died, various large and dignified pieces of furniture had come to be fitted in, and there was money to spend on wallpapers and curtains. I remember one very domestic one, a kind of blush pink with regular cream dots on it, a sugar-sweet paper that my parents repeatedly expressed themselves surprised to like, and about which I was never sure. In my memory, the Van Goghs hang tamed on this delicately suburban ground, but in fact they cannot have done so. I am almost sure that paper was in the dining-room, where my Aunt Gladys was flustered by my enraged and aproned mother. In any case my earliest acquaintance with the paintings was as pleasantly light decoration round a three-piece suite. This was part of what he
meant his work to be, sensuous pleasure for everyone. When did I discover differently? Certainly before I myself went to Arles, before Cambridge, in the 1950s, and saw that tortured and aspiring cypresses were exact truths, of their kind. When my father collapsed at Schiphol I was writing a novel in which the idea of Van Gogh stalked in and out of a text about puritanical northern domesticity. There was nowhere I would rather have found myself than the Van Gogh museum in Amsterdam. I was reading and rereading his letters. He wrote about the Dutch painters and their capacity to paint darkness, to paint the brightness of black. He wrote about the hunger for light, and about how his “northern brains” in that clear, heavy, sulphur yellow southern light were oppressed by its power. He was not cautious, he lived dangerously. He felt his brains were electric and his vision too much for his body. Yet he remained steadily intelligent and analytic, mixing his colours,
thinking
about the nature of light, of one man’s energy, of one man’s death. He painted the oppression of his fellow-inmates in the hospital in St Rémy. He was a decorous and melancholic northerner turned absolute and wild. He observed and reobserved his own grim red-headed skull and muscles without gentleness, without self-love, without evasion. He was truthful and mad. In the mornings I went and looked at his paintings, and in the afternoons I took the tram out to my father’s echoing hospital, carrying little parcels of delicacies, smoked fish, fruits, chocolates. In the afternoons and the evenings he talked. He talked, among other things, about the Van Gogh prints, which were obviously his own, his choice, nothing to do with my “Dutch” mother. He talked particularly about the portrait of the Zouave. That was on one of his good days. I had bought him some freesias and some dahlias. I had not realized, in all those years, that he was one of the rare people who cannot smell freesias. He claimed that on this occasion he could. “Just a ghost of a smell, just a hint, I
think
I can smell it …” he said. He helped me to mend one of the dahlias with sellotape, where I had bent its stem. “You can keep them alive,” he said, “if you keep the
water-channels open. I’ve often kept things alive successfully for surprisingly long periods, that way.” He talked about Van Gogh’s Zouave, the one of the family prints I had liked least, as a child, because the floor made me giddy and because the man was alien, both his clothes and his face. It was, said my father precisely, “a very powerful image of pure male sexuality. Absolutely straightforward and simple. It was always my favourite.”