On Chesil Beach (5 page)

His tone was lighthearted and mocking, but she decided to take him seriously. The anxieties she would face were still far off, though occasionally she wondered what it was she was heading toward. A month ago they had told each other they were in love, and that was both a thrill and afterward, for her, a cause of one night of half waking, of vague dread that she had been impetuous and let go of something important, given something away that was not really hers to give. But it was too interesting, too new, too flattering, too deeply comforting to resist, it was a liberation to be in love and say so, and she could only let herself go deeper. Now, on the riverbank in the soporific heat of one of the last days of this summer, she concentrated on that moment when he had paused at the entrance to the meeting room, and on what she had seen and felt when she looked in his direction.

To aid her memory she pulled away and straightened and looked from his face toward the slow muddy green river. Suddenly it was no longer peaceful. Just upstream, drifting their way, was a familiar scene, a ramming battle between two overladen punts locked together at right angles as they rounded a bend at a slew, with the usual shrieks, piratical shouts and splashing. University students being self-consciously wacky, a reminder of how much she longed to be away from this place. Even as schoolgirls, she and her friends had regarded the students as an embarrassment, puerile invaders of their hometown.

She tried to concentrate harder. His clothes had been unusual, but what she noted was the face—a thoughtful, delicate oval, a high forehead, dark eyebrows widely arched, and the stillness of his gaze as it roamed across the gathering and settled on her, as if he were not in the room at all but imagining it, dreaming her up. Memory unhelpfully inserted what she could not yet have heard—the faint country twang in his voice, close to the local Oxford accent, with its hint of West Country.

She turned back to him. “I was curious about you.”

But it was even more abstract than that. At the time it did not even occur to her to satisfy her curiosity. She did not think they were about to meet, or that there was anything she should do to make that possible. It was as if her own curiosity had nothing to do with her—she was really the one who was missing from the room. Falling in love was revealing to her just how odd she was, how habitually sealed off in her everyday thoughts. Whenever Edward asked, How do you feel? or, What are you thinking? she always made an awkward answer. Had it taken her this long to discover that she lacked some simple mental trick that everyone else had, a mechanism so ordinary that no one ever mentioned it, an immediate sensual connection to people and events, and to her own needs and desires? All these years she had lived in isolation within herself and, strangely, from herself, never wanting or daring to look back. In the stone-floored echoing hall with the heavy low beams, her problems with Edward were already present in those first few seconds, in their first exchange of looks.

H
e was born in July 1940, in the week the Battle of Britain began. His father, Lionel, would tell him later that for two months of that summer history held its breath while it decided whether or not German would be Edward’s first language. By his tenth birthday he discovered that this was only a manner of speaking—all over occupied France, for example, children had continued to speak French. Turville Heath was less than a hamlet, more a thin scattering of cottages around the woods and common land on a broad ridge above Turville village. By the end of the thirties, the northeastern end of the Chilterns, the London end, thirty miles away, had been in-vaded by urban sprawl and was already a suburban paradise. But at the southwestern tip, south of Beacon Hill, where one day a motorway torrent of cars and trucks would surge down through a cut in the chalk toward Birmingham, the land was more or less unchanged.

Just near the Mayhews’ cottage, down a rutted, steeply banked track through a beech wood, past Spinney Farm, lay the Wormsley Valley, a backwater beauty, a passing author had written, which had been in the hands of one farming family, the Fanes, for centuries. In 1940 the cottage still took its water from a well, from where it was carried to the attic and poured into a tank. It was part of family lore that as the country prepared to face Hitler’s invasion, Edward’s birth was considered by the local authority to be an emergency, a crisis in hygiene. Men with picks and shovels came, rather elderly men, and mains water was channeled to the house from the Northend road in September of that year, just as the London Blitz was beginning.

Lionel Mayhew was the headmaster of a primary school in Henley. In the early mornings he cycled the five miles to work, and at the end of the day he walked his bike back up the long steep hill to the heath, with homework and papers piled up in a wicker basket on the front handlebars. In 1945, the year the twin girls were born, he bought a secondhand car for eleven pounds in Christmas Common, from the widow of a naval officer lost on the Atlantic convoys. It was still a rare sight along those narrow chalk lanes then, a motor squeezing past the plow horses and carts. But there were many days when petrol rationing forced Lionel back on his bike.

In the early nineteen fifties, his homecoming routines were hardly typical of a professional man. He would take his papers straightaway into the tiny parlor by the front door that he used as his office and set them out carefully. This was the only tidy room in the house, and it was important for him to protect his working life from his domestic environment. Then he checked on the children—in time, Edward, Anne and Harriet all attended the village school in Northend and walked back on their own. He would spend a few minutes alone with Marjorie, and then he would be in the kitchen, preparing the tea and clearing up breakfast.

It was only in this hour, while supper was cooked, that housework was ever achieved. As soon as the children were old enough, they helped out, but ineffectually. Only the exposed parts of the floors not covered in junk were ever swept, and only items needed for the next day—mostly clothes and books—were tidied. The beds were never made, the sheets rarely changed, the hand-basin in the cramped, icy bathroom was never cleaned—it was possible to carve your name in the hard gray scum with a fingernail. It was difficult enough to keep up with immediate needs—the coal to be brought in for the kitchen stove, the sitting-room fire to keep going in winter, semi-clean school clothes to be found for the children. Laundry was done on Sunday afternoons, and that required lighting a fire under the copper tub. On rainy days, drying clothes were spread over the furniture throughout the house. Ironing was beyond Lionel—everything was smoothed out with a hand and folded. There were interludes when one of the neighbors acted as home help, but no one stayed for long. The scale of the task was too great, and these local ladies had their own families to organize.

The Mayhews ate their supper at a folding pine table, hemmed in by the close chaos of the kitchen. Washing up was always left for later. After Marjorie had been thanked by everyone for the meal, she wandered off to one of her projects while the children cleared away and then brought their books to the table for homework. Lionel went to his study to mark exercise books, do administration and listen to the wireless news while he smoked a pipe. An hour and a half or so later he would come out to check on their work and get them ready for bed. He always read to them, separate stories for Edward and the girls. They often fell asleep to the sound of him washing the dishes downstairs.

He was a mild man, chunkily built, like a farm laborer, with milky blue eyes and sandy hair and a short military mustache. He was too old to be called up—he was already thirty-eight when Edward was born. Lionel rarely raised his voice or smacked or belted his children the way most fathers did. He expected to be obeyed, and the children, perhaps sensing the burden of his responsibilities, complied. Naturally they took their circumstances for granted, even though they saw often enough the homes of their friends—those kindly, aproned mothers in their fiercely ordered domains. It was never obvious to Edward, Anne and Harriet that they were less fortunate than any of their friends. It was Lionel alone who bore the weight.

Not until he was fourteen did Edward fully understand that there was something wrong with his mother, and he could not remember the time, around his fifth birthday, when she had abruptly changed. Like his sisters, he grew up into the un-remarkable fact of her derangement. She was a ghostly figure, a gaunt and gentle sprite with tousled brown hair, who drifted about the house as she drifted through their childhoods, sometimes communicative and even affectionate, at others remote, absorbed in her hobbies and projects. She could be heard at any hour of the day, and even in the middle of the night, fumbling her way through the same simple piano pieces, always faltering in the same places. She was often in the garden pottering about the shapeless bed she had made right in the center of the narrow lawn. Painting, especially watercolors—scenes of distant hills and church spire, framed by foreground trees—contributed much to the general disorder. She never washed a brush, or emptied the greenish water from the jam jars, or put away the paints and rags, or gathered up her various attempts—none of which were ever finished. She would wear her painting smock for days on end, long after a painting bout had subsided. Another activity—it may have been suggested once as a form of occupational therapy—was cutting pictures out of magazines and gluing them into scrapbooks. She liked to move around the house as she worked, and discarded paper clippings were everywhere underfoot, trodden into the dirt of the bare floor-boards. Paste brushes hardened in the opened pots where she left them on chairs and window ledges.

Among Marjorie’s other interests were bird watching from the sitting-room window, knitting and embroidery, and flower arranging, all pursued with the same dreamy, chaotic intensity. She was mostly silent, though sometimes they heard her murmuring to herself as she carried through a difficult task, “There…there…there.”

It never occurred to Edward to ask himself if she was happy. She certainly had her moments of anxiety, panicky attacks when her breathing came in snatches and her thin arms would rise and fall at her sides and all her attention was suddenly on her children, on a specific need she knew she must immediately address. Edward’s fingernails were too long, she must mend a tear in a frock, the twins needed a bath. She would descend among them, fussing ineffectually, scolding, or hugging them to her, kissing their faces or doing all at once, making up for lost time. It almost felt like love, and they yielded to her happily enough. But they knew from experience that the realities of the household were forbidding—the nail scissors and matching thread would not be found, and to heat water for a bath needed hours of preparation. Soon their mother would drift away, back to her own world.

These fits may have been caused by some fragment of her former self trying to assert control, half recognizing the nature of her own condition, dimly recalling a previous existence and suddenly, terrifyingly, glimpsing the scale of her loss. But for most of the time Marjorie kept herself content with the notion, an elaborate fairy tale in fact, that she was a devoted wife and mother, that the house ran smoothly thanks to all her work and that she deserved a little time to herself when her duties were done. And in order to keep the bad moments to a minimum and not alarm that scrap of her former consciousness, Lionel and the children colluded in the make-believe. At the beginning of meals, she might lift her face from contemplating her husband’s efforts and say sweetly as she brushed the straggly hair from her face, “I do hope you enjoy this. It’s something new I wanted to try.”

It was always something old, for Lionel’s repertoire was narrow, but no one contradicted her, and ritually, at the end of every meal, the children and their father would thank her. It was a form of make-believe that was comforting for them all. When Marjorie announced that she was making a shopping list for Watlington market, or that she had more sheets to iron than she could begin to count, a parallel world of bright normality appeared within reach of the whole family. But the fantasy could be sustained only if it was not discussed. They grew up inside it, neutrally inhabiting its absurdities because they were never defined.

Somehow they protected her from the friends they brought home, just as they protected their friends from her. The accepted view locally—or this was all they ever heard—was that Mrs. Mayhew was artistic, eccentric and charming, probably a genius. It did not embarrass the children to hear their mother tell them things they knew could not be true. She did not have a busy day ahead, she had not really spent the entire afternoon making blackberry jam. These were not falsehoods, they were expressions of what their mother truly was, and they were bound to protect her—in silence.

It was a memorable few minutes, then, when Edward at the age of fourteen found himself alone with his father in the garden and heard for the first time that his mother was brain-damaged. The term was an insult, a blasphemous invitation to disloyalty.
Brain-damaged
. Something wrong with her head. If anyone else had said that about his mother, Edward would have been obliged to get in a fight and deliver a thrashing. But even as he listened in hostile silence to this calumny, he felt a burden lifting. Of course it was true, and he could not fight the truth. Straightaway, he could begin to persuade himself that he had always known.

He and his father were standing under the big elm on a hot, moist day in late May. After days of rain, the air was thick with the abundance of early summer—the din of birds and insects, the scent of mown grass lying in rows on the green in front of the cottage, the thrusting, yearning tangle of the garden, almost inseparable from the woodland fringe beyond the picket fence, pollen bringing father and son the season’s first taste of hay fever, and on the lawn at their feet, tiles of sunlight and shade rocking together in a light breeze. In these surroundings, Edward was listening to his father, and trying to conjure for himself a bitter winter’s day in December 1944, the busy railway platform at Wycombe, and his mother bundled up in her greatcoat, carrying a shopping bag of meager wartime Christmas presents. She was stepping forward to meet the train from Marylebone station that would take her to Princes Risborough, and on to Watlington, where she would be met by Lionel. At home, Edward was being looked after by a neighbor’s teenage daughter.