Ordinary Miracles (17 page)

Some of the numerous experts we consulted said I might have something wrong with my tubes. We tried various
treatments. We also thought we might adopt at one stage,
but Katie was ten by then and seemed happy enough on her
own. So we stopped our obsession with fertility. I was getting
extremely tired of rubber gloves and spatulas and scrapings,
and thermometers to check if I was ovulating. It was all a
most messy, undignified business. It quite put me off sex for
a while.

Bruce tried to be understanding. On one of his business
trips abroad he also bought some pornographic magazines.
He secreted them under tax returns and letters in a drawer of the big desk in his study. I found them one day when I
was searching for a telephone number. I’m not sure why I
thought the business card of the carpenter I wanted should be in that drawer, but I checked there anyway.

I couldn’t believe the pictures in those magazines. The gynaecological poses of those women were not unlike my own recent experiences in stirrup chairs. I’d heard about pictures like that and thought I’d be deeply disgusted if I ever saw them, but I wasn’t. I was offended in a way, but there was something fascinating about them too. What were these women offering? Surely it wasn’t just the fantasy of their flesh.

A strange, shadowy thrill went through me as I thought of how my husband might have masturbated to the sight of those open legs. What thoughts were going through his head? What did the territory between those thighs mean? What treasure did he hope to plunder and would it still gleam and sparkle for him as his sperm lay, swimming, on his stomach. I thought not. For in the weeks that followed I sometimes masturbated myself to the images of my husband’s lonely passion.

The thoughts of his excitement excited me. The power and primitiveness of it. The lack of tenderness. The need. But the thrill from those self-pleasurings never lasted long. After the mystery, that moment that takes you somewhere longing cannot name, came the longing itself. The moment when I knew his excitement wasn’t mine. Surrender – dominance – neither felt quite right. I wanted both at the same time, and much more too. Love is what I was looking for, I suppose. It always has been.

It seems to me that though other people can undermine your faith in love, it’s one’s own cynicism that causes the deepest hurt. It’s when you begin to wonder whether you yourself can love that the golden gauze is lifted. When you wonder whether you’re capable of surviving the pain, if it comes. That strange pain that, for prolonged periods, leaves you feeling like you’ve just got off the boat train from Holyhead. Slightly nauseous and in another country. Tired and still swaying from the trip.

‘Be not cynical about love, Jasmine,’ Aunt Bobs used to say, “…For in the face of all aridity and disenchantment it is as perennial as the grass…You are a child of the Universe, no less than the trees and the stars; you have a right to be here.”’

I used to think Aunt Bobs had a marvellous way with words, until I discovered they were other people’s. In fact the ones about love were from Desiderata. ‘You’re just a thief Aunt Bobs!’ I stormed and Mum slapped my wrists.

‘Don’t be rude Jasmine,’ my mother said. ‘Life’s difficult enough without you being rude.’ But Aunt Bobs confronted my wrath with equanimity. ‘“I have drunk water from wells I did not dig,” as I’ve read somewhere,’ she said.

I stayed with Aunts Bobs for two months when I was eleven. The reason for this was never quite explained, but I think my mother may have been going through some crisis. She cried a lot and said things like, ‘Will it ever, ever stop raining?’ Then she went to stay in England with some relatives and I went to Aunt Bobs and Uncle Sammy.

Their four children had left home so I was very pampered. It was the summer holidays and I scampered around the fields
and paddled in the river. I loved the feel of that river. The mud
squelched through my toes and the fish sometimes bumped their noses against my legs. I built small dams and discovered the existence of creatures like water boatmen and caddis-flies. Once I was convinced I’d seen a baby crocodile, but it turned out to be a newt. That summer, running through those fields, was probably the happiest time in my life.

One of my Aunt’s friends was a potter. He taught me how
to use the potter’s wheel and one day I made the blue bowl.
The bowls that preceded it and succeeded it were misshapen,
but that blue bowl was perfect. A gift from somewhere. I
chose the glaze myself. It was the same colour we all wished
the sky would turn, especially my mother.

Before I left Aunt Bobs I offered the blue bowl to her. ‘You
have it Aunt. I want you to,’ I’d said.

‘No, no dear. You keep it. You made it yourself,’ Aunt Bobs replied. ‘A thing of beauty is a joy for ever.’

The last time I visited Aunt Bobs, many years later, the blue bowl was broken. I spent the morning mending it. It had broken into five large pieces. There was a chip or two
missing, but the rest stuck snugly together. It could still hold
water. It could still hold flowers.

I’d thrown the blue bowl at my first, and perhaps only, great
love, Jamie. Well not at him so much, but at the floor. It was a silly thing to do but I was only eighteen. I didn’t know that
water, cathartic but not staining, was what sensible women
threw
in extremis.

The bus to the country seemed to take for ever the after
noon of that last visit. It was quite warm outside, but I still kept on my jumper. I bought some roses from a van beside the graveyard. They were £2 for four. Aunt Bobs grew them better.

The bowl was all right. The chips at the front had showed up a bit until I filled them in with a blue marker. And the
roses, the pink roses Aunt Bobs liked, looked just as I’d hoped
as I placed them on the grave.

I’d only been to the grave once before, with Jamie and my
parents at the funeral. It seemed very strange and still there
that day I stood alone.

‘Jamie’s gone to America.’ I knelt on the ground as I said
the words. The earth was heavy and soft, still settling. I tidied
u
p some soil that had fallen off the grave. Aunt was always
tidy. I wished I’d had a quote prepared. Aunt Bobs would
have liked that. But the only quote that came to mind that
day was ‘Love is the thing with feathers’ and it didn’t seem
quite right. So I just said, ‘I loved you, Aunt Bobs. I loved you
and I always will.’

It was beginning to rain so I stood up and surveyed the
grave for one last time. The funny thing was – when I looked
at it from a distance – I couldn’t tell the blue bowl had ever
been broken at all.

Maybe that’s what happens with some marriages. Great
big cracks form down the middle, only you can’t see them.
Then one day something happens and everything splits open.
It may seem like one big thing has done it – but it’s been a lot of little things as well.

Like Bruce’s pornographic magazines.

I never told Bruce that I’d gazed at those magazines myself,
strangely fascinated. But one day, after a row, I mentioned that I’d discovered them, secreted in his drawer.

‘I really don’t know what you see in those women. They’re
laid out like slabs of meat,’ I said. ‘It really is extremely degrading.’

‘You’re right.’ Bruce looked like a little boy. Guilty. Lost.
Found out.

‘Still, I suppose if they give you pleasure…’ I left the
sentence unfinished as I squeezed and tore the lettuce I was
washing, examining it for slugs and snails.

That afternoon Bruce tidied our garden shed. He gathered
old papers and cardboard boxes into a heap, along with some
twigs and fallen leaves. He came in and got the magazines.
He put them onto the pile and added a firelighter. Then he
stood watching as the bonfire burned.

I wish I’d spoken to him then. I wish I’d gone out and t
old him that my own fantasies were not always politically
correct. I wish I’d seduced him. Maybe even got out those
old suspenders. I wish we’d laughed. I think people should
laugh about sex more, I really do.

I wish I could ask Charlie for advice about my marriage, about all these little snapshots that keep coming back to me. Polaroid pictures that I didn’t know I’d taken but which now
swim in front of me.

They’re not the kind of pictures I’d choose to take. I
take happy pictures. My albums bulge with smiling faces at
birthdays, holidays and weddings. Sunday afternoon ennui,
rows, loneliness and funerals are not in there. Maybe they
should be.

That day I found the hair grip, that day I waited in a daze
for Bruce’s return, I got out my albums and tore up many
of those photos. Not into little pieces – just in two – right
down the middle. Those smiling faces seemed to taunt me.
It was as if it had all been a lie. But if other pictures had been
there too – perhaps of Bruce standing by that bonfire
– then maybe I could have left
them alone. Let them go.

I wish I could let go of things more easily. But it seems to
me now to let go of things you must have them in the first
place. You can’t leave them waiting in your head like film negatives to be processed. You have to accept them all –
even the ones that are blurred and unsmiling. The ones where
the flash didn’t work or Uncle Sammy stumbled and left out
all our heads. That’s the album that would have helped me.
That’s the album I need now.

Charlie and I are growing apart. I miss him, even when
I’m with him. It’s just not the same any more. Ever since that
night we almost made love there’s been a tension between us.
Maybe it’s because I haven’t been able to talk about what happened. Every time it looks like we might discuss it, I just clam up. We don’t hug each other in the comfortable old way either. In fact we avoid touching each other at all.

Maybe Charlie thinks friends can have sex but I’m not sure they can. Not without it changing the friendship anyway. Then again, maybe he wants more than friendship, but I really don’t know if I could cope with that. So, it just seems easier to try and ignore it all. This is probably what’s pissing Charlie off. He likes people to be straight with him. He doesn’t like this beating about the bush at all.

I don’t think Charlie has any idea how much all this brings up for me. I don’t think he knows how frightened I am. It’s
easier for a man to be casual about sex. But if I make love with
Charlie I have a feeling I won’t feel casual about it at all.

The thing is, if I make love with Charlie I have a feeling that would be it – even if neither of us really wanted it. We’d
be stuck together – metaphorically of course – like a habit or
something. And I’ve been stuck with some man or another for most of my adult life.

I never, for example, went into town early and slipped into a cinema on my own. One of the early shows where you don’t pay full price. I never went into a café alone and had a coffee and a chocolate donut and read or looked around. Now I often see women like myself, young and old, scribbling in notepads, dreaming, reading a book that must be good company because it makes them smile. Smiling at me too when they look up and see me.

I like choosing clothes because I like them – not because they’ll suit some business do of Bruce’s. I can’t afford too many clothes these days but I tend to go for something comfortable in colours that I like. Colours are important to me. Bruce patrolled my colours for years – telling me this clashed with that. ‘Simplify your wardrobe, Jasmine,’ he’d s
ay. ‘Don’t try to wear too many colours at once.’ Now I
wear what I please.