Faustine (12 page)

– Go in there, Jasmine says.

She takes from me a wedding photo – of my grandmother
and Harry Crane – which I must have missed before. A greenish smudge of damp runs, as it does in all the others, down the side of the face of the handsome man in the black suit, with his hat pulled down low over his eyes. He is staring at the camera, rather than at his bride, but his gaze appears to consist of no more than two black holes punched in the cheap Polaroid paper.

On the fourth finger of the hand of the new Mrs Crane is a new gold and diamond wedding-ring that sends out
splinters
of white light. Next to it, no more than a smoky blur in a modest surround of seed pearls, sits Muriel’s amethyst ring.

 *

The door ahead of me is open. Jasmine has left, walking in house slippers that give off groans and sighs, like a familiar long used to the ways of its master. She has gone to the kitchen, she says, to finish off the dinner – the dinner that will be a reunion of Anna, and her mother Muriel and their lover Harry – and me.

My mother is in a small room, bare and sparsely furnished, that looks out on the flagstones of the unkempt terrace. It would have been the schoolroom once, I suppose, for children left to the attention of governesses and servants, and somehow I know, although I have seen her only on her visits to Australia over the span of my childhood and
growing
up, that Anna would choose a plain, unostentatious place like this, to talk to me in; that the flamboyant tastes of Lisa Crane are anathema to her.

She rises and comes over to embrace me. She’s smaller than I remember and I feel an unexpected pang, but why is difficult to say. Her own vulnerability to the ageing process, perhaps, and therefore mine. I feel, for one moment, as our cheeks brush – hers very dry and papery – the sense of mortality which this house does everything to deny. And I realize fully for the first time how deeply embedded in a
preadolescent
state my enforced and unnatural sojourn with Maureen and her family has caused me to be. My
resentments
against Anna surface once more, as soon as I stand back and take note of her quiet, determined manner. The ‘selfishness’, which all my childhood I believed lay under that wide forehead with its businesslike fringe, manifests itself to me as it used to do on our strained outings to a
tearoom
in Melbourne, when all she wanted, probably, was to
escape to the solace of her work rather than stay with a hostile teenager.

You’ve heard from Jasmine, Anna says simply, when we have sat down, facing each other across a table laid with a paisley cloth that must once have served for lessons; there are ink stains and torn places in the fabric where the pen nibs of children long ago were stuck rebelliously in.

And sure enough, Anna – publisher, writer, editor – shows as little emotion at seeing me as she had in the banished years of my youth, and every desire, as ever, to inform and instruct.

– You see, Anna begins, it took my mother to show me that the consequences of interfering with nature are
potentially
fatal.

Let me explain. After the first shock of your grandmother’s transformation – into a woman, to put it brutally, with a future, when what was expected of her and her
contemporaries
was the acceptance that nothing lay ahead but
memories
of the past – I argued with myself that she had every right to continue enjoying her life. Rather, she had every right to improve the quality of her life after middle age.

After all, women were programmed by nature to become grandmothers as soon as their own childbearing years were finished, and for many, after a life sacrificed to continual pregnancy, childbearing or miscarriage, this enforced old age came as a well-earned rest – a relief after the struggles that had gone before.

But what of a woman of today, who, like my mother, your grandmother, has no experiences of this kind, who wants to go on living, and working and appearing youthful and attractive?

Why should she be exiled to old age and redundancy just because the laws of the Victorian age laid it down?

So, although I was bitterly hurt at the time, I understood. I couldn’t bring myself to see her, of course – but I understood.

 *

As my mother speaks in her quiet, dispassionate tones, I wonder if she really means what she is saying, or whether, for dignity’s sake, she has decided to forget the anguish of a quarter of a century ago. It is she who appears a Victorian, a Jane Eyre figure, as she sits upright at the old schoolroom table, and lectures me on ecology and, as I might have known, mythology, for Anna is leaning forward now, as if trying to pull me out of the indifference and lethargy of my life – and warning me of the other perils that have beset our age. Outside, on the loggia where I earlier heard the laughter of someone I fear to meet, and who must be laughing now, at Anna’s earnest efforts to save the planet before it is too late, a slight wind stirs the fuchsias that droop their gaudy purple and magenta bells into the cracked rims of the urns. Anna is talking … my mind wanders as she tries to lead me back from the shades of her mother’s long indifference.

 *

You see, Ella, you have come searching, like Demeter sought Persephone, but it is the wrong way round. You are the maiden who is bound to go under the earth in the autumn and return in spring, for you are the future bearer of children, the mother-to-be of humanity.

Yet, just as the myth of Demeter and Persephone
represented
the ancient cycles of the year, and the climate and the seasons and the fruits and crops have now been thrown into chaos by the greed of man, so the huge numbers of human beings on earth, and the invention of artificial methods of preventing their future conception, have stopped the natural progression of generations and thrown up
hybrids and freaks – such as Lisa Crane, who returned to youth and then found herself unable to relinquish it.

 *

I squirm in my seat, a restless pupil, thinking I can see an outline of a face at the window, which, like the window in Jasmine’s cottage, is fringed with leaves of creeper and vine. The leaves form, as the light and the breeze run through them, an illusion of a wreath for a pagan head, a circlet of beaten gold for Dionysian curls, prancing over a face with black eyes.

And I wonder too if the presence of my mother, with her store of ancient myth and her Cassandra-like messages to the rapidly self-immolating world, has invited this illusion to come to the garden terrace outside.

– Muriel – my mother, your grandmother – tried to reverse the natural order of things, Anna says. And for these people, who deny the future of the human race, there is only one end.

 *

I turn from the shadow play beyond the window and face my mother again.

– What is the end? I say.

But she doesn’t answer, and so I ask her to tell me what she felt when I was there in the flat with her on the river, when my grandmother was still a real grandmother and I knew nothing of the dramas, other than the impressions gleaned by a three-year-old child, that were in the process of being played out.

 *

– I went to bed early on the night Muriel didn’t come back in time to babysit, Anna says. I was angry, I’ll admit. You see, Harry and I were very much in love. We were going to become formally engaged that evening – he had booked a
table at a riverside restaurant and afterwards we were going to come back to the flat and call our friends, and all the members of the publishing collective, of course, and tell Muriel.

I was looking forward to telling my mother the wonderful news. After all, we had lived together like sisters for so long; I knew she’d be thrilled for me. And I knew Harry would be a wonderful stepfather for you.

Harry had bought some champagne, and we put it in the fridge for when we came home.

But your grandmother never turned up. First, we drank one of the bottles of champagne. That was probably silly of us – of me, anyway. I’ve never had much of a head for drink.

And when it became obvious that we’d lost our reservation at the restaurant and the evening was a write-off, I did behave in a childish way, I admit. I threw a tantrum – no more, no less – it woke you up, which was the worst part of it, and Harry stormed out of the flat to go and drink with pals in the pub.

I remember taking off my new dress. I can remember to this day what it looked like – it was silver and glittered like the scales of a fish.

Anna laughs, and I begin … I just begin … to feel for her, to see her as a human being, as the young woman she once must have been.

– And there were moons and stars and suns all over it, Anna says. It was a real magician’s dress.

 *

I say nothing. In my mind’s eye I see the other woman in the dress and the silver in it gleaming in the reflected lights from the river.

 *

– I don’t know what happened, Anna says. Harry came in. He came to bed very drunk.

The next morning, Muriel had gone to the office before I got up.

But when she came in, that evening …

– Yes, I say. How had she changed? What did you think when you first saw her walk in?

– I had a very strange feeling, Anna says. It was as if my own existence had been negated somehow.

I knew this woman – pulsing with excitement, energy – in clothes I’d never seen on her before, fashion clothes, was my mother. Obviously I did.

But at the same time she wasn’t, I say. And I tell Anna how I felt the same when Muriel picked me up in her arms that night and I stared into a face that I knew and yet was strange to me.

They say that when you die all the lines of your life, made up from worry and strain and the perplexity of living, can fade away and leave you young again, Anna says. And that was what I felt about Muriel, that she had died and her youth had returned to her in this inanimate, disturbing way.

No, my mother goes on when we have been silent a while, hearing Jasmine in the kitchen just down the ugly,
hospital-green
corridor, at work in the kitchen, opening oven doors that release the life-giving smell of baking bread, I can’t tell you much of how I felt about your grandmother and Harry. The shock was too great. The emnity I didn’t know I had in me just rose to the surface, and I knew, if she didn’t move away from us, I might kill my mother.

But why … why did Harry fall for her so easily? I say. And then I regret saying it, for Anna, as any woman would, flinches from answering.

– I’ll tell you, Anna says, after a silence in which we both know we have thought the unthinkable.

I’ll tell you what I thought then, and what I may, just possibly, think now. Then … well, I was sure in my mind there was no such thing as a woman’s sexual power – not
per
se,
I mean.

I saw Marilyn Monroe and the millions of other women who had had to live on their sexuality alone, as victims of an oppressive, patriarchal society. Consumerism and
advertising
hype persuaded men to believe they were attracted more to a ‘sexy’ type of woman than another.

But now I couldn’t say for certain that I believe in that. And I have had to admit that the cruellest thing that can happen to a woman – her lover and the future father of her children taken from her by her own mother – had to be ascribed to something more than the stunning good looks with which Muriel came back from that health farm.

It was as if – and I don’t like using the word – some magic quality now emanated from her. Jasmine saw it too. But neither of us felt it in the way Harry did.

Poor Harry, Anna adds – and by her show of compassion I feel I have misjudged her all my life, and look away at the unprepossessing brown paint of the dado in the plain little room – poor Harry, it was as if she had some kind of
mysterious
hold over him, you know, and he just couldn’t wriggle free.

I tell my mother that I remember the scene in the hospital, where I had meningitis, and she flushes and turns to look out of the window, where the light is dull and flat; cloud has come down and rubbed out the quivering figure made by the leaves and the light outside.

And I tell her, but gently, for I know she has no need of being hurt further, that I know I have been here before –
that I know why the place seems to hold a memory from the youngest years of my childhood.

– She came for you one day when you were at the nursery, Anna says in a sad voice – as if she knows I have blamed her all along for my exile to the far side of the world.

By then she had been on TV a lot – her rise to fame was certainly meteoric – and there had been profiles in the press and all that, and they were thrilled to let you go with her.

The car was a Rolls-Royce, needless to say. Anna smiles, but the smile is wan. She sent me an ultimatum from this house – that she would sue for custody of you and would prove that I was a negligent parent. She had Harry by then. I fought back. What else could I do?

 *

I think of the boat on the river, and the man pushing me down into the water – just for the fun of it, the lady said.

 *

Again, we sit in silence. Then Anna goes compulsively on.

– I don’t know how many times I suffered humiliation at the hands of my mother, she says, glancing at me quickly and catching, I’m sure, my own flash of response, as if the same feelings have to be passed down generations of women, and no mother can ever do right by the woman who is coming up to take her place.

She said at one point that she was sorry, she wanted to change back to the person she had been in the old days. She followed me – she hounded me, really – even to the street where I’d moved to and found me one morning in the corner supermarket.
I
was taken for
her
mother when we were seen there together.

And when Harry, who missed me really – he was under her spell, however much it goes against the grain to say it –
when Harry suggested we meet from time to time, Muriel always seemed to know where we were.

My mother shivers suddenly, as if a cold wind had crept into the house on this hot summer’s day.

– Then, when I began to realize that Harry still loved me, that he had only been bewitched by my mother and I might have a chance of getting him back, she really began to
persecute
him with a vengeance.

They’d been together – married, I have to say it – for some years then, and one of the most sinister things was how young she went on looking, while Harry … well, he aged like everyone else.

It was then, Ella, that I had to admit to myself the
possibility
that … well, something else had taken place when Muriel Twyman changed into Lisa Crane. I couldn’t begin to believe it, at first, but after my meeting with Harry, in a place where such a person as Lisa Crane would never go – wouldn’t be seen dead, perhaps I ought to say – a fast-food joint in the centre of town – it was when Lisa came after us there that I did begin to wonder very seriously, as I say.