What to Look for in Winter (4 page)

T
he sort of unpopularity that I enjoyed during my first period of schooling was regrettable mainly for the sort of popularity it set up later. I was unpopular because I was odd and then popular for the same reason. This made an unsound base for the dreadful glamour that visited later, attendant upon my mother's death and the passive allure of my widowed father.

 

Today, when I am writing this, is a Monday. Monday is washing day; I do the big wash on Monday, which is right. I know this because

My godfather Francis Gordon of Cairness gave me for my first birthday, 1 July 1956, the book from which this jingle comes, an airily laid out nursery rhyme collection called
Lavender's Blue
, compiled by Kathleen Lines and pictured by (these are the terms used) Harold Jones. I enjoyed that crossed wire of nomenclature, as soon as I could read
the poems for myself, that it was actually Harold Jones who did the lines. His is a line-led relaxed style, not fussy but full of detail and shading. He makes the human figure architectural, though not massive, as in a frieze, and architectural detail, such as that of London Bridge as it falls down, dances along the page. The rhymes, proverbs and nostrums are placed handsomely within each page. Print and its layout drew me very soon; I loved lettering, but I remember being churlishly resistant to my godfather's encouragements to learn calligraphy, the exercise sheets, the nibs, the black Indian ink that shone coppery if you spilled it on anything hard and non-absorbent. I had an ugly hand till I was about eleven, and after that a self-forced Italic that was over-decorative and built, thanks to that early shirking, on an insufficiently Roman armature.

Fram writes a good Italic hand. His was inherited from Wilfrid Blunt, brother of Anthony, who had taught that hand to many generations of boys at his school. I taught myself mine in order to have an accomplishment with which to win book tokens. I used regularly to win a handwriting prize sponsored by Brooke Bond tea.

 

Much of my childhood was to do with line and the materials used for making, drawing, following, understanding lines–pens, pencils, crayons, T-squares, protractors, chisels. My parents drew lines but hardly ever drew the line, save in matters of moral taste. After one outing with another family, I used an expression to which my father objected. If I think of it now I taste earth in my mouth. It was ‘little Jew'. I copied it from a father who was describing another father. My own daddy took me out of our house and walked me through the old streets. He sat me down with a book, with those photographs, the heaps of legs and deep-shadowed eyes, the shoes, the spectacles. I do not know where the book was kept in our house as I had found every other book that might be mined for prurience or
horror by the time I was eight. I felt none of the sense that this was a world to come, that I felt when I poked about in
Gray's Anatomy
or
Fanny Hill
.

I felt that this was it. This was the world from which the destroyed worlds of my night-time fears had come, that people could do this to other people. It was not a nightmare; it was the truth. It was not a private horror but a filthy fact. The next time we visited friends, the man of whom had been in Auschwitz, he got me to look at the number on his arm and to sit and listen. He gave me a maths tutorial immediately after the talk of how it had been in the camp, which no doubt he watered down. Never had mathematics been so welcome, so consolatory. I counted the white hairs in his beard with delight as though they were shoots coming through. Time looked valuable suddenly.

My father had that certainty, that racial or religious discrimination of any sort was evil. He had been raised in a household where everyone, including the servants, attended–Anglican–family prayers every morning. He hated that and was mortified though seldom mentioned it since the source of the piety was his mother and he was never in my hearing disrespectful of her, very likely never was so in his life. He was a choral scholar at the Pilgrims' School, which supplies the choir for Winchester Cathedral, as were his brothers, Ormiston and Clement. Clement went on to become the organist at St George's Chapel in Windsor Castle, then at Winchester Cathedral. My father loved the liturgy all his life, attended church, and sang, but I'm not sure what he believed. He loathed the Pilgrims' School and its School Hymn, into which he would insert the word ‘not', as in

It was a hymn at my first wedding, an occasion it is too late now to ask my father about. Was he wretched or relieved that another man gave me away? What had happened to make this possible?

At the time of taking me out into the streets to tell me about the Holocaust, to shake me out of my sleep of reason, my careless imitation and failure to listen or hear, I think that he may already have lost any faith he had, and that he was an intelligent sceptic with anarcho-Anglican leanings, and knew he was lucky to live in a country that allowed all these contradictions to be lived by, lived through, lived out even. He was idealistic about line, and the Labour Party, which embodied, then, post-war socialism. It is hard to explain to my children the simplicity of his belief, when he was so complicated. Labour was for the working man and was the natural party for making good the ruin of the war. Men like my father, classically educated modernists who believed in conserving what was good and beautiful about the past, thought that all this was possible. They thought, because so many they loved had died in war, as had my McWilliam grandfather, that there had to be a reason for all that loss, that things could be made good, that something new and fair was possible. It is extraordinary that these thoughts have come in three generations to sound so naïve as to be alien, swivelled and uprooted and shaken aside by the advance of consumption, save where, perhaps, they are subjecting themselves to smart repackaging.

By the end of his life I think he felt the public world was all chaos. For a subtle man he enjoyed hating rather much. I think that he felt such rage about Mrs Thatcher, whose virtues he was incapable of seeing, although his wife was not, that his outrage really did all but kill him.

When I was going through a holy stage, after my mother's death, I
asked my father to listen to my prayers at night. He reasonably replied that he could not offer me that certainty. He was deeply thoroughly self-subvertingly principled. He could not bear the appearance of emotion for fear that it be inauthentic.

Nonetheless it is clear to me as I live that he felt it, hid it, and suffered from its burial.

 

I have come back just now from a trip into the centre of Oxford, the town in which I don't feel I live but where actually I have for twenty years. I took my white stick and held my head up in the way that makes it possible to see the crevice through which I negotiate myself. I was going to collect a prescription. I get so many of these at the moment that the surgery calls to say, ‘Your script is ready.' ‘Script' is the junkie word, not the straight-world word. There are elaborate courtesies extended at the rear of the old-fashioned department store where I collect my drugs and the methadone-dependent collect theirs. The pharmacists are bilingual. They are as charming and responsive and chatty to those of us who say, ‘Mustn't grumble' when asked how we are as to those of us who reply, ‘In fucking bits, mate, kicking off all over the place.'

The drugs I'm collecting at the moment constitute a sort of capitulation, but I'm trying to think of them as a contribution to a process that collaborates with hope and with my writing all this stuff I swore I would not write, ever. They are antidepressants, which I fought off for a good while, since I don't think that I am depressed at all; I am sad.

Many things combine to induce that sadness and it seems a rational state in which to find myself at this point of my bewildering life. Indeed I think that to be not sad would be to be dim, or to use a similarly sight-suggesting word, unenlightened. But I agreed to take chemical help because something needed to change even if its terminus was not,
quite, sight, or not the sort of sight that I had so greedily enjoyed. So, I caved in to these drugs and asked for their, as I saw it, only fair counterparts, which was something to close me down at night against the racing thoughts in the double dark, though we blepharospastics often see better at night, I am told; I haven't yet met another ‘functionally blind' person, as I feel that attending Alcoholics Anonymous is already a great enough adventure in fellow feeling, and I can't face more, but must conserve it in order to invent characters in fiction, and put them through suffering. I have not written a novel for thirteen years, though short stories have come out of me like sprits from a forgotten potato.

I was in town on my drug run just now and I garnered two ribald jeers and a couple of flinches from people I recognised and who, in their shyness at what they registered as my catastrophic change, twisted their eyebeams away and moved swiftly on. One brave acquaintance spoke to me. The consolatory hyper-observant me was absent from this tame safari into Oxford. Even at my shyest and most reclusive, I've been visually fed by people in the street. By fascination with how they present themselves, how they sound, when that is compared with, or added to, how they appear; all those things. Because I couldn't garner any human interaction and haven't been able to for a while, I went into the clothes shop Zara, which I find can top me up. It's something to do with its being Spanish, perhaps. The girls don't snip at a blind woman holding up the garments to feast off their detail, and the smell is good, which is extra important. The cottons smell like cotton, the lurex has a foily taint. The wool is sheepish and soft. I harvested Zara and came home, passing a woman who smelt of lily of the valley and a group of people who smelt like synthetic bananas; is that the smell of poppers?

There are a number of medical people who have given advice on my present blindness, which does feel as though some dreadful thing, a sight-burglar, maybe, or another childhood terror from the dark, such as one of the Cauliflowers, the monsters who lived in my brocade nursery wallpaper, were sitting on my own head, my own
deep brain's poor florets. These expert eye doctors are of the firm, committed and explicit opinion that to seek relief from my affliction by any means other than sternly physiological would be deluded and even self-indulgent. Two other medical people believe that there are certainly psychological causes–they maintain that it's hard for me to face life as it is at the moment conformed, with the result that I have taken refuge in my blindness.

I am not sure which is the case, but suspect a category error in any hard and fast distinction. All I know is that I am falling through the dark and that utterance feels like the only available light. I'm entirely unsure what stone, even what sort of stone, it is that I am looking for, as I sieve and pan the past, in order to lift the blinding weight off the seeing part of my brain.

In town groups of boys or girls catcalled. I look odd and slow and vulnerable. I creep along and hold my eyes up in their itching sockets as people hold spilling glasses of drink above a throng–as though the drinks with their precious realised meniscuses are threatened, and must be protected with an exaggerated care. I have also started to make involuntary noises and pre-emptive twitches and sallies with my head, which aches even by the end of a morning as if weighted with lead beans at the back as I hold it up as though trying to read the world with my chin. I saw (actually saw: she was sitting for some reason on the ground and I can at the moment see the pavement) a child with a rucksack in the shape of a teddy. He had sewn-on felt crosses on the blanks of his eyes and I knew how he felt.

Fram's girlfriend, Claudia, very reasonably suggested that maybe I had seen enough in my life. I have for sure been lucky in what, and in how and with whom I have seen.

E
legance of posture was a great thing for my Henderson grandmother, my mother's mother, the opera singer. She held up her noble head right till the end in her nineties. Her silver hair streamed down her back. She could sit on her hair, as could my mother and I once, and my daughter. Each of us has had it chopped at some point. My grandmother shingled hers in the twenties to irk her ferocious pa. My mother did it to manage her hair and I suppose her life just before she died; women change their style at important moments in their lives, we are told.

My stepmother did the only sensible thing after Mummy died and had mine cut off. It was a weighty reminder of my mother, a great pest to maintain, a personality in its own right and attached to one already disobliging; it also encouraged nits. For years after I had my long heavy striped brown plait (the Scots word is pleat) in a box; then I lost it after I went away to school in England. My daughter has lovelier hair than mine; it is fine and silver and grey-gold, and thick as fairytale hair. It weighed down her small head dreadfully I now sometimes guiltily think. She made a practical teenaged choice to have a lot of it cut off. It was the right thing to do. People had asked her about it before asking her about herself, as though she were a unicorn or a mermaid and it, the massive silky rope, her horn or her tail; it was a natural feature too much emphasised. Her hair is so thick that it has to be thinned in summer. It is miraculous stuff, glistening and falling with a kind of lunge of health. Mine I cannot bear to cut. I'm getting like my grandmother Clara Nella Henderson, the tines of whose silver plait fell to nearly her waist on the last day of her life, when she told me a great white bird was at her window and I thought in relief, ‘Oh, she
has
got some faith at last in her bitter life and at the bitter end.' It wasn't an angel. It wasn't the Holy
Spirit. It was a herring gull driven inland to eat from the refuse bins of Reading General Hospital by that Christmas weather. She died in the night before Boxing Day. I want to think that we were reconciled. She thought that last day that I was her daughter, my mother, Margaret, whom she hadn't found easy either.

I am growing increasingly like my grandmother. When she was getting infirm and failing to eat (I believe that she starved herself to death), I looked at ‘places' for her to go. She fought against it. I took her to one. Most I had visited had been too upsetting to contemplate for her, but this one seemed ‘nice', whatever such hell can be. There was a real room, and a real view; the nurses were, seemed to be, kind countrywomen. I smelled no fear nor piss nor shit.

My grandmother, whom I called Nana, was at over ninety still as tall as I and had been taller. She was very thin. Her lovely legs were sticking out of a garment taken from a hospital pool of such shapeless clothes. At home in her bungalow on the estate in Reading hung and lay her immaculately cared for frocks and cardigans, her evening gowns, her treed shoes, her gloves. She was, as the dying often are, terrified of disgracing herself, of having an ‘accident'. She did what any sensible child would have done in these circumstances. Terrified, about to be alone, as she felt it, maybe about to be abandoned by her own flesh and blood, she made herself, although she had little in her stomach, violently sick. The nurses were not kind, not understanding. We left, my imperious beautiful grandmother holding a grey cardboard kidney bowl aswim with bile and mucus. My grandmother carried the day, all her own teeth in her head, her gracious smile of triumph and relief as we left transforming her proud stony sad face for close to the last time.

I am growing more like her now, afraid of the powerlessness my body is forcing me towards, scared stiff of being disposed of, tidied away, thinking I maybe should do it for myself. I'm just over half the age she was when she gave in, and even then she forced herself to do so by refusing food and water. She was a far stronger character than
I and I do not actually want to die. I find notes that I have written to myself and they remind me of my grandmother's diaries that I dare not read. They're engagement diaries, only, but it is enough.

She had been alone from the night when her husband, my grandfather, tried to murder us both in the drawing room of the house he himself had built, The Folly, West Drive, Sonning-on-Thames, Berkshire. He was a strong old man, older than his beauty wife. He was doing the right thing by trying to kill us, because he had long ceased to ‘know' us. He was protecting his property, as he saw it, from strangers.

It was my first half-term out from my English boarding school. I had a major scholarship, but it was effectively my grandfather's money that was paying the rest of the fees. The wheel of separation of child from antecedents by self-made money had begun. I could see that my grandparents were more conventional and right-wing than my father and mother had been. My Henderson grandparents didn't like my father; my father's family looked down on the Hendersons. Their separate, profound, kinds of musicality were incompatible. Professional musicians on both sides, on one the Church, the other the stage. I was the oil and water shake-up. My mother had been dead for four years when Grandpapa tried to kill his wife and his granddaughter, thinking us intruders, in his folly.

Grandpapa went for Nana with the hardwood truncheon he had used in the Army in Jaffa in the war; she yelled to me in her deep grand stagey voice, that never slipped, even as he thumped her (she was Scots-Irish cockney with the loveliest and most gold-rolled speaking voice of my whole background, including those backgrounds that were yet to arrive), ‘Candia, call the police.'

I did, but I couldn't tell them how to find us, and my grandmother, holding down her spouse, himself strong with fear and insanity, gave me calm, self-possessed instructions to relay down the telephone to the police.

She had spine. It must have been worse, I think now, because I'm
sure that she loved him, and she had a long widowhood to endure alone after who knows how long of concealing his decreasing stability. She did it all with poise. Her happiness in her widowhood lay in producing opera and operetta. I cannot think that I contributed to any happiness at all. I was a nuisance and a let-down, plain, brainy, a lefty and a snob.

Her engagement diaries are lists of small sums and presents she has given. She was generous and well-regulated. She was more hospitable than greedy and had no appetites but cigarettes and music and like-minded company, which I was not to become for her. She watched, it is clear from my inheritance from her, those little frightening diaries, my marriages and my giving birth and my small success as an author as perceptible through the press and ‘kind' neighbours (she took the
Daily Express
), with increasing disgust. She would ask herself in her diary whom I had paid to get all this attention. Even reviews that I wrote she noted carefully in her diaries, not from familial pride but because she felt that they were bids for attention, that I had somehow paid to appear in the paper. She regarded my defection to the toff-class as a betrayal of decency. I didn't know my place. Yet she was the grandest woman in her manner, as she smoked, or took out the wrapped sandwiches from her refrigerator before an after-rehearsal impromptu around her piano, or as she hailed the bus from Caversham into Reading, and stepped out to take coffee at a department store with a kind of film-star duchessly hyper-demeanour.

How odd England showed itself to me, a Scots child through and through, and how late I have been to grasp how I must have hurt my grandmother and let her down, by making what some few souls thought was a marriage advantageous in worldly terms. My mother failed her parents by marrying a man far more educated than she was, a man educated, toxically, as her parents saw it–socialistically–to place value on things other than money and respectability. And when I married a man who was many things superb beside his station, my educated father briefly–for he came to love my first husband
with a deep affection–felt, momentarily only, a stab of something surely analogous to my grandparents' sense of class betrayal when he had married Mummy. My father blamed me; he mistrusted my appearance, I think, and thought of it as a spangled meretricious lasso. I suspect my father pitied anyone who was going to marry me; I do not know this. I didn't know I had the lasso to throw; we scarcely ever had a personal conversation, though all our exchanges were elliptically personal in their encryption; we shared matters of the eye.

Nana vowed upon my first marriage never to speak to me again. She was hurt. I married a toff and then a Pakistani. I did not have a respectable job. I was horribly visible. My grandmother never knew the odd congruence–starting from so different a place–of her own emotions and those of my Parsi in-laws, who so disliked all the publicity I received, reflecting, entirely reasonably, that one pair of ridiculous fashion tights, credited as costing some shocking sum, might water a village in India, and that no proper wife, no proper person, no proper writer, appears in evening clothes not her own in order to help publicise a book that is in literary terms respectable.

My grandmother thought that the education she had effectively paid for had separated me from her and made me pretentious; she was fed in this apprehension by friends who passed her all the disobliging cuttings they could. An equivalent drip-feeding went on to my poor parents-in-law. Neither of these things–the separation, the pretension–was precisely the case, but it helps worsen the hurt to coarsen the terms, naturally, and my grandmother and my mother-in-law were each attached to private suffering, a plot laid out for one by starting to earn her living aged five on the stage and caring for a blind sister, and for the other, perhaps, by the Partition of India and Pakistan in the year of her marriage, for she was from Bombay and her husband, her first cousin, from Karachi.

That my grandmother and I did speak again is due to telephone calls, made by each of my husbands, and each call concerning the
arrival of a child, her three great-grandchildren, separated from her, as she understood it, on account of the bitter prejudices that rack this country still, by class in three cases and colour and creed in one, and yet–when at last she met them in her final year of life–she felt them entirely hers, her great-grandchildren, the older of whom have her posture and her gamut of social smiles and the youngest of whom has her appetite for libretti.

I have at last started to let go of the dear stone, that cherished discomfiting notion that my grandmother did not love me or my mother.

She loved us too possessively, too angrily, too silently, in the way of the day. It was her stone, a stone axe, beautiful and held behind her lovely face like obsidian, never letting her yield. I won't feed my own stone by rereading her hard, withheld diaries, but must instead recall that at the end she let me hold her hand day after day, whichever one she thought I was, my mother or me, and that she left me in her will an envelope of mica windowpanes for a solid-fuel stove, each the size of half a playing card, little slips of crackly pearl for feeling heat through and for looking through, into the fire in our pasts.

My mother very occasionally brought home from her trips to the grocer Young and Saunders, or from Rankin's the fruiterers at the West End, a pomegranate, in tissue paper. She would give me a pin and two plates. (Is this the sort of thing to which people refer when they say, ‘We made our own fun'?)

Mummy would cut the pomegranate into four, put on my apron, which was modelled on a French child's smock and sewn by her, in her constant search for rational and appealing clothes for children, and let me take the chambered, compressed, treasure apart, with one plate for the leathery but blushful skin and the membrane that you could look through, and the other for the pressed red jewels, which I was allowed to eat with the pin. So long did this task take–a whole after
noon–and so magical a treat was the process that I was not surprised, when I read in my anthology of myths,
The Tanglewood Tales
, about Persephone–to learn that she had tumbled to a pomegranate's charms in Hades, and that the seeds were measures of time spent with or without a mother.