Private Papers Read online

  Mother is having her hair done. I don’t think I want to think about her hair, not after thinking all week about that Alopecia episode. It’s the way she wrote about it that really fucks me up – so succinct and tidy. I know it was centuries ago, but I can’t imagine myself sitting down in the future and making such a neat, sweet little story out of any of the unbearable troubles I’ve had myself. But, for Mother, it’s no problem. It’s as though she was glad to be giving this painless account. It’s bizarre, and false. I’m sure it’s false. This is where her diary for that time might be more helpful. I realize that I get angry, worked up to a ridiculous degree, whenever I think Mother is not telling the truth, and that’s what makes me anxious to get to the point where I know I can remember better than she can. I can’t possibly stop ferreting around in these papers until I’ve come to. the important parts of my own life, read everything that comes in between. I can’t be bothered with our early childhood any more – I want to get on.

  February 15th

  FIRST STRAIGHT, GREEN shoots thrusting out of the damp black earth, first rounding of buds on the pear tree, such excitement, such happiness at the thought of spring. Every year I forget the exact sequence nature follows, every year I am amazed. Makes me cheerful and optimistic, regardless. Thoughts turn to meals outside and children shrieking in paddling pools and slow sunsets. Warmth and beauty. Wish Emily felt the same. But no, says spring means nothing to her, how corny. She says I cannot know what real grief means if spring makes me happy. She hates spring, hates new life. Life is an evil monster feeding on the dead and she wants only the dead. Being with her is an ordeal, I suffer, suffer humbly, feeling I must be her whipping boy. But slyly, my head lowered in the face of her continuing ugly resentment, I see the blue sky and feel the sun’s warmth and hear the birds and I am comforted. Rosemary found me still in the garden. She’d been sketching, in Epping Forest, showed me some drawings of trees. I asked if I could have one. Chose one. She sighed, said it was the worst, she would be tearing it up. She thinks my taste deplorable. I fear her censure, almost forget what I do like in my effort to avoid it. And I no longer know what she likes. Her oils of nudes I suppose, large and blue. She kissed me, asked me how I was. Such a shock to realize she has almost no interest in me. I am her mother and I am not interesting. But what is there for Rosemary to be interested in? My thoughts on spring? My two hours sitting in the garden? We chat with such apparent ease, polite give and take. She wants reassurance that I am not a poor forlorn widow. I give her what she wants. That way, I keep her. I will make any terms to do that. Just keep them, keep them coming. Offer a refuge, uncritical, supportive, though they have all found a line beyond which I cannot go. Some mothers can. Mothers of murderers, of rapists. I stand by him, mothers say, and he will always be the same to me. Cannot go that far. None of them are the same to me, now. Don’t get dragged down by this, no point. Firmly concentrate on the loveliness of the day, of this first real spring evening. Keep such reflections for my, for whatever it is I am struggling with. Keep this for happy notes, please, or not at all.

  *

  —‘The children of lovers are orphans,’ wrote Robert Louis Stevenson. His own parents loved each other so passionately that he felt their love excluded him. That is my first point: my daughters made the death of their father the tragedy of their childhoods. But they chose to make it so later, when they were adults. In fact, not only was Oliver’s death remarkably untragic for them, it actually brought them advantages they cannot seem to recognize.

  Oliver and I were lovers. We were as close as two people ever can be. Already, before he left for the war, I had been given an inkling of how our much loved children might suffer from our intense preoccupation with each other. We fought to be alone, we —

  *

  Oh, God, not again. Next she’ll be on to quoting from her treasured Collected Poems of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, his engagement present to her, if you please. Which will it be? ‘When we met first and loved I did not build upon thee even with marble’, or ‘How do I love thee?’ Either one is a real turn-off. I can, and will, do without it.

  *

  — created the ritual of Rosemary and me having a little meal together, sitting formally at the kitchen table with all the baby clutter cleared away. Rosemary would tell me her day and I would tell her mine and we would discuss the things that had happened. I took Rosemary’s advice on all sorts of matters from what colour to paint the kitchen to what we should have for supper. She was a strong child, always, strong in her views and opinions, and quick and sharp. She never hesitated. Out would come her answers, very definite and immediate. She was bold and clear-sighted, cutting through many a tangle I had got myself into. Then, when we had eaten our private little supper, we would both read for an hour before she went to bed. She was an avid reader and so was I. It gave me such pleasure watching her read all my own childhood favourites and hearing what she had to say. Often, she would surprise me by her reaction. Uncle Tom’s Cabin she dismissed as sentimental and dull, and it annoyed her to be told how I had cried and cried over it, but she liked Jane Eyre. It was a bond I never had with my other children. Whatever happened later to us, it is an undeniable fact that there existed between Rosemary and me a wonderful closeness —

  *

  A myth. Typical of my mother, endless romanticizing to shape the past as she wishes to. I am on surer ground now. This is where I wanted to get to. Those evenings I clearly recall, and what I recall is that I always wanted to go out. Other children went out and played in the street or the park. I don’t suppose it was more than hanging about, but I wanted to hang about with the rest. But no. Mother said I was tired and needed ‘a quiet time’. She would sit at the kitchen table saying, ‘Isn’t it nice, just the two of us,’ and I would squirm. I didn’t want to be just the two of us, I have never wanted it, it was what I dreaded most. I much preferred the others to be about. When it was just the two of us I felt unbearably restless – I’d literally fidget about on the chair, desperate to escape. And the endless deferring to my opinion didn’t flatter me, it drove me crazy. What did I care what colour the kitchen was, and, anyway, it always ended up the colour she wanted and had decided on before she ever opened her mouth. What she tried to do was persuade me that I actually wanted what she wanted. And as for the reading, I hated the books she gave me, even Jane Eyre. She liked melodramatic, sad stories. I like funny books, or comics. It was the same with the wireless, upon which we were heavily dependent. She liked me to like plays and stories but I liked all the light comedy shows and the serials like Dick Barton.

  She is right about the closeness but not about it being wonderful. We could not help being close, thrown so much together, but I always resisted it, I didn’t want it. It wasn’t that I didn’t love her or like her – I did. I was proud of her, I always liked identifying her as my mother at the school gate, but I didn’t want to acknowledge any closeness. It was too intimate, I couldn’t bear her need. It never struck me that she was using me as a substitute for my dead father, just that she needed from me what I didn’t want to give. I wanted distance. The gain she talks about was no gain, except for her. I didn’t ‘choose’ to make my father’s death a tragedy – that was how it genuinely seemed to me and still does.

  *

  — that I allowed them to think we were hard up. They talk of growing up worrying about money, which they never did. They forget that in that post-war period, with rationing still in operation, everyone lived frugally. They say they would have chosen to spend their inheritances, saving themselves from the ‘endless penny-pinching’, as they describe the slight and entirely commonplace economizing from which they argue they ‘suffered’. It was unnecessary, they claim. What they mean is that, after Grandmother Butler died, they were technically rich and yet I kept their wealth from them and denied them new tennis racquets and dresses and a pony and all manner of other luxuries. I deliberately made their life ‘hard’.

  That is nonsense. They have no concept
ion of what ‘hard’ means. It is tempting to sketch in my own truly hard childhood but I shall resist it – it is what they bait me to do. And it is a weak argument, not one I care to use. It is better to stick to the facts and the facts are that we lived very comfortably and that I could not have used their money even if I had thought it right to do so. I never resented or contested Grandmother Butler’s will. She died in the severe winter of 1947. She left her house and money in trust for her grandchildren, specifically excluding ‘those who are not true blood relatives’, which meant Jess, of course. I was appointed a trustee together with her solicitor and Simon Birch, Rosemary’s godfather. To me she left her jewellery and clothes. The solicitor was embarrassed about it, but I was not upset. It seemed to me right and proper that my children should benefit and not I. I did think, briefly, of selling our London house and moving permanently to Brighton, but I decided not to. The children were settled at school and I could not face the upheaval. So the Bedford Square house, lovely though it was, was sold and the money invested. This left me in the strange position of being rather hard-up while being the trustee for children who would be rather well off when they became twenty-one. The solicitor was eager to start considering ways in which some of the trust could be released for expenses, but I took a pride in refusing to countenance this. In any case, to someone like myself, brought up as I had been, I never thought of myself as poor. Oliver had left me five thousand pounds and a house: a fortune, or so I thought. And by taking in lodgers I gave myself an income.

  What I had wanted was a male lodger. We were a house of women and we needed that. I did not want my girls to grow up as I had grown up, so devoid of the presence of men that they seemed weird and fearful creatures. There were no uncles, brothers, or boy cousins to console them for the loss of their father. What I wanted was a man, or two men, going in and out of the house, joining us occasionally for meals, generally around to become part of the pattern I was intent on creating. They did not need to be friends, just familiars. The two large rooms at the top of the house made excellent bed-sitting rooms and a box room on the half landing was converted into a bathroom for the young gentlemen’s exclusive use. No kitchen, however. I thought a gas ring and a kettle in each room enough. I would undertake to provide meals by arrangement but I thought most of their eating would be done at the hospital. At the hospital, because of course I imagined medical students would fit the bill. Quite why I don’t know. It seemed obvious. Something to do with Oliver being a doctor I suppose.

  I asked Simon Birch if he would be so kind as to select for me two of his quieter students who needed accommodation. He sent round an extremely earnest pair, both bespectacled and anxious looking, both from Somerset. I truly forget their names but they were very nice, caused no trouble. They had lunch with us on Sundays and usually two other meals at some time in the week. They were obliging about carrying heavy things upstairs and stoking the boiler for me and, in the summer, they tackled the garden enthusiastically. Both worked hard and were untypical of medical students in that they were not boisterous. I don’t think they ever had any friends round and certainly never gave a party. They paid their rent promptly. When they left, they bequeathed the rooms to two of their acquaintances who were equally pleasant, and so it went on, until in 1950, when Rosemary was fifteen, two students of a different kind took up residence. I don’t know how the system broke down. The two who preceded them were like all the others had been and I trusted their recommendation implicitly. I don’t remember their names but I could never forget the names of the two they gave their rooms to. They were called Trevor Maxwell and Michael Pearson. And it was when they entered our life that Rosemary began to rebel, although she —

  *

  Before we get on to Trev and Mike, which I’m looking forward to, even if I have a very good idea of what she’s going to make of that little episode without needing to read a word of it, let me interrupt and quickly point out that in fact she’s strayed from her own point. The lodgers had nothing to do with us thinking she deprived us of the standard of living we would like to have had. Those lodgers were the good part of our Reduced Circumstances. We wouldn’t have wanted not to have them, however rich we were. And Mother knows this perfectly well. What we objected to was her attitude to money, to all expenditure, however trivial. Everything got written down. There was an account book for the household expenses and another for personal expenses. Every penny spent had to be entered in one or the other. When we were each thirteen, Mother gave us our own account books, and made a big thing of showing us how to do a credit column and a debit one, and how to balance the two. I hated it. All those stupid figures – icecream 6d, fare to school 3d – it drove me insane. At the end of each week, we had to present our accounts and what a carry-on there was if we hadn’t entered everything or if we were in the red. I really couldn’t stand it. Mother called it instilling financial sense into us, but it did no such thing. It made me cheat. I just wrote down the first thing that came into my head to explain where my miserable five shillings a week had gone. Usually I just wrote down exactly the same each week. It made me detest money, that awful solemn emphasis on accounting and budgeting. If you had it, you had it, and if it had gone, it had gone.

  Mother used the words ‘I’m afraid we can’t afford’ a lot. What we couldn’t afford was just about everything that made life worth living. I was fiercely jealous of what other girls at school had (by this time I was at Camden High School, which is a State school, but there were lots of very well-off pupils left over from its recent private days and it went on attracting that type all the time I was there). Possessions were important then. I wanted a decent pen, a Conway Stewart, and not an awful Woolworth’s fountain pen. I wanted new hockey boots that fitted me properly and not hardly worn second-hand ones. And I wanted to do all the things they did that cost money: I wanted to go ice-skating and to the cinema and up the Thames on boats. I wanted a gramophone of my own and a transistor radio, the thing, and a flash wristwatch. I’m ashamed to remember how much I wanted all this. But I never got them. Mother, quite rightly you will say and I myself now say, despised material things. She couldn’t take seriously my wanting to have them, so she said she couldn’t afford them. I didn’t swallow bravely and come out with a touching spiel about never-mind-Mummy-I-don’t-care. I raged at the injustice of it. And all the time Mother was saying money couldn’t buy the things that really mattered – love, family, health – and we were rich in those. Dear God. What would one little wristwatch have mattered? I know she could have got money from our trust for all those things and more. But she didn’t think it would be good for us. Self-denial was the order of the day for her and it was damn well going to be for us. Everything we had was threadbare – carpets, curtains, the lot. Our rather grand house, in an increasingly grand area, was furnished in the most spartan manner imaginable. I used to love going into Linda’s next door, all jammed full of settees and leather chairs (her mother’s pride and joy) and china cabinets with flowered cups shining in rows. I loved Linda’s room, with its new, fluffy, white rug (nylon, Mother pointed out) and her posh kidney-shaped dressing table with the flounced surround. In Linda’s house they bought things all the time, a constant stream of merchandise, and yet her father was only a jobbing builder. It was all on the never-never but that meant nothing to me then. I didn’t care where the hell it all came from, I just wanted things then. More than clothes, which is strange, I suppose. Clothes never bothered me. They bothered Mother. She was obsessed with appearances. We were the sort of little girls who wore dresses with very white Peter Pan collars and always had matching knickers, matching knickers, and those hideous patent leather black shoes with ankle straps. When I think of the energy that went into all that.

  How stupid she was. A thousand or so wouldn’t have made much of a hole in the trust fund and it would have made all the difference to greedy little me. It would have brought some innocent frivolity into our serious lives, and that was what we needed. She didn’t have to
be so bloody boringly worthy.

  *

  — had nothing to rebel against. I was never a domineering, overstrict mother. I deny it absolutely. Ours was a freethinking household, in which everyone was always encouraged to say what they thought. Yet Rosemary, at fifteen, acted as though she had been constrained all her life and must at all costs burst out of the bonds so unfairly restricting her. The effect on her sisters was disastrous. Celia and Jess were ten, Emily only six, when Rosemary entered this phase. Everything she did was admired and applauded by them. I tried so hard to keep a sense of proportion and humour about how Rosemary was behaving, but the sheer triviality of her attacks – because they were attacks, sustained ones – wore me down. Everything was why should I, I don’t have to, will if I feel like it, don’t care. She sulked and scowled and snapped so much I forgot what a smile had looked like on her face. She could hardly warm a chair for two minutes and only stayed in the house if she had a friend with her. For them, she was witty, amusing, good fun. We heard endless shrieks of laughter from her room all weekend. She seemed to hate us. Yet, at the same time as she made me angry and miserable, she also made me desperately sorry for her. She caused me endless distress, but time after time I held back from remonstrating because I pitied her. On the surface, there was little to pity. She was pretty, clever, talented, popular. But she was also unbearably restless, frustrated and tormented by discontent with her lot. The future, any future, was where she wanted to be. I longed to soothe and console her, but she was unapproachable. It was so difficult finding —

  *

  This is too much. I want you to see my mother when I was fifteen and so ‘unapproachable’. Even though Emily was far too old for such babying she never seemed to have her out of her arms or off her knee for one minute. They were quite inseparable and invincible. Every time I came into a room that kid was being cuddled, literally from the minute she woke up to the minute she went to bed. Coming home from school I’d find Emily, whom I loathed for her winsome ways, clutched to her bosom and Celia and Jess demanding her attention. ‘What sort of day did you have?’ she’d say and instantly, instantly, Emily would start asking some inane question, and my mother would become utterly absorbed in answering her. Sometimes I’d start telling her about my day and she’d make some comment above the noise and Emily would actually put her hand over Mother’s mouth and stop her speaking. It was a bloody farce. I wasn’t the one who was ‘unapproachable’, she was. She could surely have organized things better with her wonderful talents in that direction. If she’d cared about me she could have made sure Linda or someone was there at four o’clock to take over the other three for half an hour. It was too late by the time we got to our useless suppers. I’d forgotten everything about the sodding day. But then she was always obsessed with Emily, physically I mean, always caressing and stroking and holding her. It drove me crazy. She was always saying I’d never liked being cuddled, as a sort of reprimand. She said that, even as a baby, I’d fight off embraces. Well, she’s the only one who knows, but I doubt it and anyway babies change. I know damn well that, every time I saw Emily being gooed over, I wished I was her (I don’t now, of course). ‘You are lovely, Em,’ my mother would say and give Emily an enormous hug. ‘No, you are, Mummy,’ Emily would lisp and they’d hug again. Christ, ‘unapproachable’. If she thought I was so pathetic, if she pitied me with all her tender heart, why didn’t she find some way of expressing it? Was it really so hard? Not that I concede I was pathetic – bloody patronizing thing to say, a well-known ploy when you can’t handle someone, the ultimate insult. I’ve done it myself when I want to get at somebody, just looked disdainful and said they were pathetic. She never just got on with her own life and let me get on with mine. Never laughed either, saw no humour in the situation. It was all tension and anxiety because she was so law-abiding and virtuous herself, she couldn’t bear the thought of her own reputation being sullied by my breaking potty rules at school or something. She was always saying my behaviour would be seen as a reflection on her, on the family. I used to ask her what family – this goaded her the most. I’d jeer and say we weren’t a family, just a house of women, silly things like that. I’d go further and say I had no family feeling whatsoever, that I didn’t understand it, that it must be a sense, like smell or taste, that I had been born without. Then her stupid eyes would fill with tears and I would know that, although it might be the truth, I had gone too far.