Faustine (5 page)

The first shock is over, of finding you here. And I will tell you, only be patient and I will tell you all I can.

We are walking through more arches of yew, so long untrimmed that tall offshoots, like hair from an unruly head, rise to the sky or dip down and lash us as we go. I stare into the face of the woman who tells me she knows who I am, that I was right to come here, but that she isn’t Muriel, she’s not the grandmother I have come across the world to see.

I will explain, she promises. And we push through the last arch, with a battalion of nettles closing behind us after we have gone. Now, lying out in front of us, is the lawn – dotted with molehills, but still beautiful – trodden by the years, by the feet of people who have been young and grown old in this sheltered, hidden place; finer than the grass of the disused village green where I saw this woman wander, and thought she was the answer to my prayers.

At the base of the lawn, once a crippled cedar leaning sideways on its iron crutch had been circled, and clumps of bamboo have been left behind, lies the river. And there we went, Jasmine Barr and I, arm in arm as if we had always known each other; as if her proximity, through so many years, to Muriel had given her rights that no one else could claim.

The river lies glittering in the light of sunrise from the high ground up behind us, and its silver scales are echoed
in the long, flat water-meadows beyond, where runnels of bright water gleam and trees stand bowed by each rivulet. The buttercups and kingcups make a gold blur, as if another kind of sun rises from the earth here, in a glow; a summer incandescence that will smoulder long after day has gone.

Tell me, tell me, I say, as we pause to stare out at the river (we have crossed a rickety wooden bridge, and now we are on a path that might have been laid down for the elegant eighteenth-century tourist to stand on and admire a chalk stream at its most magnificent: trout darting; water clear and unpolluted, as if we had indeed been returned to another age; wild water-lily weed, pretty as a garland, floating in necklaces that could knot themselves around the throat of an unwary child and pull it down).

I stand, staring at all this. And then we walk on, arm in arm on the narrow towpath, and we come to the boathouse, half-fallen, red-tile roof with gaping holes, leaning at an angle over the water, like the houses of the East little
children
would try to draw.

And we stop. And I begin to remember.

Yes, you came here once, says Jasmine Barr. You were nearly three years old, and you fell in the water. Just here, where you were trying to climb into the boat.

And we look down at a boat almost submerged, shored up against the black water like a body found in a peat bog – once alive, once straining against an evening wind on the river as it raced down to the weir at Slape; now murdered, garrotted, with oars broken and hull smashed into
foundations
of mud and brick.

I bend down to reach the boat – the young boat, freshly painted green and waiting for me, to take me out into the current – a man is at the oars. The man in the trilby hat that is pulled down over his eyes, and he’s laughing; then there’s
a silvery laugh behind me, but to whom does it belong? And is it he who pushes me in, just for fun, so I scream and clutch at the weed that drifts by, weed that seems to have lain in wait for a slippery little victim like me?

Was I here with Muriel? I say. Where is she now?

And we walk back over the rotting bridge, through dead bulrushes white as old man’s beard, then through a swamp of flag iris, yellow and brazen in the gaining strength of the sun. We reach a bench – by the line of bamboo that marks off the end of the garden from the bog the river land has sunk back into, and we sit on a line that rules the end of the demesne of the manor – a kind of no man’s land. For up beyond the house again is the thin line of bright sky that demarcates the bare downs, with their straggling windbelt of larches and spruce. Pagan monuments and bleak sweeps of land and sky divide it from the valley with its little church, its ancient harvest of souls, and the medieval fields and meadows with their legends of good, evil and salvation through repentance for the damned.

 *

Your grandmother was a happy woman when I first got to know her. At least, she thought she was happy. You see, she had grown used to her life, and maybe that’s what happiness is.

Jasmine Barr looks ahead of her, and I see, in the lines of her face, an impossible enigma. Is she the person she was, before she grew old? Has her age made her what she is? Is she now interchangeable with Muriel, as anonymous in the disintegration of personality that comes with old age as she? I feel afraid, looking into the abyss of the old. I want to run, even from the possibility of seeing my own grandma, for I had never accepted that she might resemble this.

Yet there’s nothing unusual about Jasmine Barr, and she’s
human still, certainly, for, seeming to read my mind, she touches me lightly on the arm and says she will give me the facts as briefly and as clearly as she can, and I can make up my mind about what I want to do with them.

Muriel and my mother had lived together since I was born – or, at least, since my father, a man my mother never got round to marrying, was killed in a car crash and she was left with her living to earn and a tiny baby on her hands.

As for Muriel, she had parted so long ago from her
husband
, Anna’s father, that she thought of him very seldom; sometimes, as she told Jasmine, she thought of him when she was loading the washing-machine in the flat she and Anna shared, with its long, gloomy passage and a utility room where spiders hung from the corners and the light from the street behind never managed to get in.

She thought of him then, Muriel said, because the
low-wattage
light from the overhead bulb always caught the amethyst ring on her finger – it had been her engagement ring from Bert – as she shoved the baby’s clothes, and Anna’s cheap cotton skirts, and her own baggy shapeless dresses into the washing-machine. And she thought that the next time her ring came off would have to be if it was sawn off after she was dead – and she wouldn’t be there to see it. Her fingers had swollen up so, Muriel said.

And she used to sigh and say, ‘Like the rest of me.’

 *

Your grandmother worked in an office. It was the
copywriting
office of a big magazine that was itself part of a big corporation, and every day Muriel had to write the sentences that describe the glossy models in the fashion pages, and their lovely clothes. (She told me, later, that she thought all the lies she had to concoct to persuade women to spend their money, and to lure men into buying clothes and jewels
for the women, was in some measure the reason why she took the path she did.)

Yes, your grandmother worked … but she would hurry back to you in the evenings. And then she and I, as often as not, would sip at a bottle of wine together and watch TV or reminisce about old days until it was time to go to bed. She’d walk me to the bus stop – I didn’t live far away.

And where was my mother all that time? I say.

Your mother worked too, Jasmine Barr says. And I look up, suddenly returned to childhood again, to try and catch some reassurance from her – as once I had done at the knee of Muriel. But why should this old woman be able to reassure me now? And anyway, I’ve grown up and it’s far too late.

Anna was hardly ever there, I remember that. When she did come in, it was with women – always women – and they met in the front room, while Muriel read me a story and then another, until I was too tired to keep awake.

The women, Maureen Fisher told me years later, were the beginnings of the collective that was formed to start the publishing company your mother now runs.

You are very lucky to have such a mother. And Maureen would always point at the parcels of books, still wrapped and unread, at the far end of the pine table in the kitchen in Melbourne. I didn’t want to see the books on the
sufferings
and triumphs of women that Anna sent to Maureen Fisher and to me. I wanted the pink celluloid dolls Muriel sent, with hair so impossibly blonde it made ordinary hair seem as dull as ditchwater – or as my mother’s hair, as I remembered it, dull and short and brown.

What a contrast there was between Muriel’s work and my mother’s!

Muriel worked, I knew this even so young, so as to be
able to buy special presents and treats for me. I was all she had, and she was everything to me.

Anna worked for dear life. She worked to find herself, to create a career, to matter in the world. And I knew, as small children always do, that the person she loved wasn’t me. It was something frightening and far away from me: it was theory, and endeavour, and, as I bitterly felt then (for with the cruelty of the very young I knew nothing of the meaning of ideals and wanted only love), she had learned to love herself.

To my mind, Anna loved anything that wasn’t me.

 *

One day, Jasmine Barr says, the phone rings and it’s Muriel’s ex-husband, Bert, calling from the airport and saying he’s just flown in and’d like to come round tonight for supper with Anna – and to see you, his little granddaughter, too.

Now this kind of thing always threw Muriel. For one thing, it meant keeping you up late, and you’d had a long enough day by the time you were collected from the
all-day
nursery – where was it? Somewhere near Knightsbridge Barracks, I think – to make you very tired by six o’clock; and then off to bed with you.

For another, Muriel always went a little bit funny when Bert turned up. I won’t say that she got exactly edgy, but, as these things will, his arrival jolted her into remembering the past – when she’d been happy with him, how she’d become unhappy, all that sort of thing.

I may say – and here I’m not doing your grandmother down – that Muriel was one of the moodiest people I ever knew. Maybe that was what I liked about her – who knows? She’d be up one day and down the next, and she was very funny – we used to laugh about life together – when she was down. When I first met her, in one of those Community
Centres that were springing up then (I’d been roped in as emergency sub-editor on an underground magazine), Muriel was, typically enough, there to get some copies of one of Anna’s friends’ unreadable autobiographical
consciousness-raising
pieces. Let me see, it must have been 1967; she made me laugh and laugh with her send-up of how a middle-aged woman is expected to spend her day.

– I mean, she said. Here I am, getting duplicates of a manifesto by these young women which is about how their mothers didn’t give them the right kind of love and didn’t bring them up to respect themselves. I ask you! They’re trying to find it in their hearts to forgive us.

And Muriel laughed, throwing back her head – I could see she must have been a very attractive woman, once. Well, of course, she still was.

 *

Jasmine Barr smiles when she says this, showing discoloured teeth. I stare at the ground, where a mole has thrown up a rich hill of bright-brown earth. I want to tunnel down, into the passages under the grass where the mole runs trapped, and then throws itself up to the surface in a last, foolhardy bid for escape.

 *

Muriel pointed to a group of girls walking past the Centre. Where were we? Oh my poor child, we were in Chelsea, of course. Chelsea before the flotsam and jetsam of the sixties really brought it to its knees … when there were still
greengrocers
, and ironmongers, and a shop or two that sold the new clothes.

The girls were wearing the shortest miniskirts you’re ever likely to see. Muriel looked at them and then straight at the reflection of the two of us in the mirror by the IBM machines.

– Why should they all worry so much? she said – meaning
Anna and her friends – Why should they complain, when they have youth?

And she made a face. It was such a funny face; it had a sort of rueful acceptance in it, and a certain anger at our predicament, mixed in with a bit of self-disgust as well that growing old, which was probably the worst thing that could happen to a woman in a free, consumerist society, should even be considered an unpleasant fate, when compared with death and early senility in the poor countries of the world.

Oh yes, Muriel was like that. That’s what drew her to me, really. She was so … understanding of every single damn thing going on. And, as she took and paid for the sheaves of paper that decried the feebleness of her generation, she made just that face again, and said, Well, let’s look at it like this – in the Middle Ages we wouldn’t very likely have made it to middle age at all!

That’s how our friendship began, you could say.

 *

Anyway, when Bert Twyman came over that time, Muriel rang me and asked me to come to supper as well. We’d been friends quite a time and I’d met him before. Well, how can I describe your grandfather? Maybe by saying that that’s the last thing he wanted to be called. He was one of the men who stay attractive by sheer willpower, as far as one can make out; and by hitching up with and dropping women as fast as he can, as if speed could outwit time, there always being a new beauty to take the place of the last one. He was a roving tele-journalist – Muriel used to say he had a wife in every hospitality room. No, he wanted you to call him Bertie. As it happened, you refused to call him anything at all.

Muriel said she was asking Greg and Sammy Chen from the office too. (I know this sounds like she was afraid of
being alone with Bert in some way still – afraid of him hurting her, I mean – but I honestly didn’t believe that was the case.) He irritated her like hell. I mean, when he came to the flat – oh yes, the flat where you were born, my dear, was near the river in Chelsea, in one of those redbrick blocks … dark and dingy, but when the light came off the water, the sitting-room had quite a magical air about it, as if all the sun flashes on the walls were silver fish swimming round and round.