Giving Up the Ghost

  After this event, I am always more or less ashamed and afraid. At nine, I find myself blushing violently, and my head turning away as if my neck had become subject to a torsion, a nervous estrangement from the soldierly business of eyes front. I have ceased to confide in my grandfather. It is my brothers who sit on his knees and hear the tale of Giant Gazonka, and of how their ancestor became a sanitary inspector: how the villain Murphy led the mob, wielding his wire whip. Myself I have shiny black shoes with the heels raised a fraction, as if a woman’s shoes have pupped. I have lipstick put on, if my mother is in the mood for it, and a pink X of lipstick on my cheeks; the X rubbed in with her fingertips, so that I wear a consumptive’s flush. Just playing! she says. You can’t have makeup every time you go out! By now a puffy swelling has begun around my nipples, and I experience a queasiness, the ghost of the nausea that beset me in the secret garden. Sometimes without warning a pain grips around my navel, like the apprentice studding of a claw. When I feel it I double over, protecting the soft parts of me. Jack says, she’s got colic, Mum, I can tell, I used to have colic something chronic. His voice is boyish, a London voice which breaks sometimes, partway through a sentence. Let her stay home, Mum, he says.

  I stay home (“At home,” I say carefully to myself. I won’t be changing my syntax for Jack). I read to the little boys and make string harnesses for imaginary horses. Girls at school are mad on horses now but I could ride before I could walk. They are mad on ballet even though it’s not Catholic. I find somewhere a catechism that is even older than the ones we use in school. The school ones have a blue paper cover but this one is fatter and covered in paper the color of a ginger biscuit. It has extra sections at the back describing advanced sins. The sins against the Holy Ghost are presumption and despair. I read it at night when I am in bed, until the summer daylight fails, and dies back over the moorland and the fields. In the dark I hold it, and sometimes write in it, very faintly in pencil, my comments and queries. Its back is falling off, owing to the advanced piety of the person who handled it before me.

  Picture me now, more than thirty years later, sitting in a doctor’s public waiting room: a place which, to me by then, approximates an antechamber of hell. My hands are clasped; I am not praying, I am wringing them. I stare about me at my fellow patients, slouching or fidgeting on hard molded chairs ranged around the room. They are pawing the public magazines left out for their diversion, disintegrating rags about celebrity weddings, engagements, divorces; they cough wetly over the full-color picture spreads of the happy or unhappy pair. How can they read, I think, or even flick through, scuffling and rifling through the pages? How can they goggle at those pictures, are they not sick with fright, do they not apprehend what sort of place this is?

  Good God, says my new doctor, is that your pulse? Ah well, I say, I’ve just run up your stairs. He waves me to a seat, lets me be, tries it again. It’s, you know, shall we say, perhaps, an artefact, I say, because I’m here in this situation, I’m not my usual self—but the more I smile and flutter and try to divert him, the more my heart’s pounding. Then I tell him, by way of charming him, how when we learned First Aid as girls of fifteen I never learned any, because I was always the patient. I was the lightest to carry, always the one stretchered and bandaged, always the one whose fast pulse was hard to count. But it’s just me, I plead. It’s my constitution. Heart races, breathing shallow. Does it do any harm? He looks at me, he makes a note. He says gravely, book a double appointment, as soon as you feel able. I shall begin to examine you. I shall only begin. I will stop if you feel afraid.

  I had thought, the heart’s a muscle. It’s Friday’s child: Friday’s child works hard for a living. Its speed I took for granted, its speed made me run; fear ran in my bloodstream, a seething soup in which my rational thoughts bobbed like dumplings. I thought it was a precondition of living; since the time of the secret garden I had thought that you were obliged to go on and on pitching yourself into battle and working up your level of panic, and that the moment when you stopped being frightened was the moment you knew you were dead. I was frightened to leave my grandfather—what young soldier would not be? I was frightened of Jack, with his brown masculine body always on show, lifting weights in the Glass Place: his pumped-up biceps and his fuzz of chest hair and the androgenic whiff that escaped from the clotted pillow of hair under his arms. I was afraid for my father, Henry, with his humble body so white, his Aertex vest drooping from his shoulders as he quickly and modestly undressed, turning away from me—his daughter and roommate—so that I could not see his male organ. I thought I had seen it; but I imagined it to be like the coy, pointed organs of my little brothers, which the elder of them prettily indicated and called “my tail.” I was afraid for my mother, who did not go out of the house much; but this did not save her, for one day the woman next door came berating her, hurtling from her kitchen and flying at the fence.

  The sun was shining; it was a rare thing, but I remember some dazzling summers as the 1960s came in. Jack walked around in swimming trunks; he tanned easily. He did exercises and lifted weights; the muscles that strapped his ribs and belly were like ropes pulled tight beneath his skin. You did not need to be in sight of him to know he was weight lifting; you could hear the rattle as the big discs bumped into the small. He lifted in the yard, when the sun shone; in the kitchen, if the weather was inclement, laying down his wooden bench between the sink and the table. He wiped the sweat off his hands, to get (he explained) a good grip on the bar. He lay on his back and I heard his work-up pant, ah-a, ah-a: then the deep preparatory breath, his fingers locking on the metal, oof-oo, oof-oo, aaaagh! He straightens his brown arms: the bar is in the air. Oh, look, look! says my mum; are you looking, boys? Ah, ah, his breath comes short: he blinks, sweat jumps from his brow, his breath lengthens, wheef-ah, wheef-ah; the trembling of the muscles: then aha, aha, the collapse of the weights, whoof! He drops them so hard that when they hit the floor they bounce; again you hear that flat metallic chink, like temple bells.

  I preferred to be somewhere else when he lifted weights; in another room or, failing that, with my back turned. I used to think the bar might collapse and crush his voice box; that would stop his shouting. Jack’s skull looked frail, as if his intelligence were bulging out of the skin at his temples. A pulse flickered there and beat; his brown eyelids rippled with thin gray-blue veins. Weights could kill him, I thought, but I did not hope for this because my mother said Jack put the bread in our mouths. When he rose from his bench his chest was thrust out, the sun catching its hair and making it into a nest of writhing wire; he turned away, and his thin yellow bottom shrank away from the edge of his trunks. Jack wrote articles for a magazine on physical culture. The magazine’s name was Health & Strength. My mother said they paid up to a guinea for suitable material. One article was accepted! The editor sent him a congratulatory letter. “Yours, Oscar,” it said.

  So on this day of the neighbor attack, my mother lay on the grass, her sun-colored hair flickering as if she made, by herself, the temperature shoot up. Without warning, our neighbor was upon us, her jaw wide open and emitting shrieks and her tiny biceps jumping, as she gripped the fence, beneath the chicken skin of her dead-white arms: you there with your fancy man in the garden in the bright light of day and this a Saturday, canoodling with him you in nothing but your floral swimming costume and showing your very thighs, showing your skin and your very children, your children, my children, that my children should have to see the spectacle—my mother cut her short.

  She rose from where she was basking, blinked, then turned and dawdled indoors, moving with indolent slowness, as if, slightly annoyed by a fly, she was going for the insect spray. Her floral shape flickered and darkened behind the panes of the Glass Place, till she passed through the kitchen door, which was standing open, and was swallowed by the darkness of the house itself. The woman rocking on the fence continued to spit and gibber, because she had primed herself, she had primed herself to her full tirade, she did not
know how to abort it. Even as my mother was vanishing, she turned her head back over her shoulder, and saw me; as her green almond-shaped eyes flicked like darting fish, she saw me standing four-square, my hands on my hips, planted and staring at this object, this scrawny disgrace, this apology for a woman, this Protestant, whose tonguelashing was as feeble as the lashing of the tail of a well-stamped scorpion.

  When I came inside, dusting off my hands—literally I am sure, and not metaphorically—my mother said, thoughtfully, “You did that very well.” I had developed my shield against Hadfield, the human shield of my flesh; I had developed the requisite indifference to public opinion, but—what was even more important—the snarling willingness for a public brawl. Was it that day, there and then, that my mother made up her mind to get us out? So that I didn’t have to use those weapons, didn’t have to waste my youthful ingenuity working up insults for the next standoff? I thought of the men who went out to fight, Saturday night, tottering into the gutter punctured and drunk, and of the sisters and wives who wiped the vomit off their chins and hauled them home, pocketing their smashed teeth for souvenirs.

  Your life can go by in brooding; or your mind swerve violently, onto some other course. I did not need to think every day of what had happened in the garden, of the neighbor attack or the day of the devil; the buzz was in my bones. I thought of the Satan I’d seen, caught unprepared, caught napping, waking and stretching in his rank grassy bed before noon; sitting up slowly and looking about him, rubbing his eyes with his hairy forepaws so that the spores of anthrax fell out. How the devil did I get here? the devil says, yawning, blinking, scratching his belly. Is this Hadfield? More than likely. Have I been here before? Certainly yes. Oh me, oh my. Is this where I’m dancing tonight? Devil stretches, devil flexes, devil hums a tune; and caught, transfixed, I listen, sickness rising inside me. He’s stepping out to breathe an atmosphere that simply reeks of class. His ebony cane in his claw, he’s going to hot-hoof over the ridge tiles of Bankbottom and up to Brosscroft, tippy-tap on the slates. He takes in his stride the sects, our similar houses, some with a picture of the pope and some not; some with pianos, all with their humble puffing chimney and shack for coal, their worn linoleum and threadbare towels hanging on a nail by the kitchen sink. He sees us washing, he sees us eating, he sees us lacing our shoes; he envies us our pink cake of soap, our dish of tripe, our heels, and our soles. He envies the stationmaster blowing his whistle, the green electric train on its track; he envies that track. Over the roofs of our rival churches he flies, downhill to St. Andrews and uphill to St. Charles; he hovers over their downspouts and guttering, and strips their lead with his passing teeth.

  When I think of it, that casual yet purposive buzz of Satan waking up, I see again his clothes brush clutched in his anticipatory hand, and his tarry shoe polish compounded of livers and spleens, and his patent pumps that hide his evil trotters. I see him buffing his fore claws, studding his collar with calcined eyeballs; for he’s putting on his top hat, putting on his white tie, putting on his tails.

  In the years ahead I was always cold when I woke up, and (because my mother regulated the household by her own fierce need to keep thin) I was often vaguely hungry. I decided to ignore the signals the body sends; when I listened to my mind, there was only an echo chamber that sent back a feeble reiteration of the world at work around me. At eleven, twelve, I took long walks, meaning to notice nature; nature noticed me. I seemed to have small capacity for abstract reasoning. I could find the area of a field or calculate compound interest, and I could perform feats of trigonometry provided I didn’t read the tables of logarithms backward, provided I didn’t have to think about the meaning of what I was doing. But when Jack tried to teach me algebra I would shrink away, trying to melt my spine into the chair back, trying to buckle into the wood. My eyes blurred. My hunger would turn to a sharp pain, then sickness. You hate me, I would be thinking, looking at the tired, harassed man beside me. Why pretend you don’t? You don’t want to teach me algebra. You want to erase me. You want to start again with my mother and the pliant little boys who stagger after you, calling, “Jack … Jack … oh, Jack, can we screwdriver, can we hammer, pie-ease can we lift your weights?”

  “You see,” he would say, “Ilary …”: tiny pearls of sweat would dance on his forehead. He’d have ended his working day snarling and sweating through the evening traffic. I myself, worn out from the day’s enforced sociability, from the perils of friends and enemies, from hauling my leather bag of books home through the autumn fogs, would want nothing more than a moment in which to recollect myself, to study an irregular verb or two and learn a verse. But my mother knew it was Wednesday, black Wednesday, algebra night. I could hear her voice carrying down the hall (this was another house, not Brosscroft): “I never had the opportunity of algebra. Let alone anyone who could teach it to me.”

  An hour would pass, Jack’s breathing becoming more and more like that of a man who is lifting weights; my hands would be shaking. Jack and my mother—the couple who had endured, to be together, so much adverse public opinion—had run away to live in shady coupledom, pretending to be married but without the due certification. They were living a life as puzzling to me as—let Mrs. Malaprop say it—an allegory on the banks of the Nile. Jack had been in the army, in Egypt like my grandad. He never told of the zoo at Cairo, or of startling meetings with future world leaders; aggressively, he denied history, personal or collective. I agree with Henry Ford, he said: history is bunk. He wielded his proverb against me, when history drew me in, history with its weighty aggregations of fact. Before we left Hadfield my mother had made an effort, out of her small budget, to buy me a child’s periodical called Look and Learn. I was nine and a half, I was ten, I looked, I learned; sometimes I found inconsistencies in what I read. Which to believe, my library book, or Look and Learn? Who invented the telephone: Alexander or Graham Bell? Sometimes I captured the smaller Margaret, the blushing one, Margaret also known as Walter. I asked her angrily what she believed, the first thing she was told or the second? I took her by the wrist, by the cuff of her white school blouse, and harangued her; what was her policy in the matter? For what did these letters stand, USSR? My mother said it was the United States of Soviet Russia. Later evidence suggested different. Could she give me her most recent take on these initials?

  Margaret stretched her eyes, she pulled away, her cheeks flamed scarlet; she looked as if she might be sick. I felt for her. Nothing is more shameful than avoidable error.

  All that was preserved of Jack’s life in Egypt was preserved in a handful of scrappy photographs. Group poses were unkind to the English men of the 1950s; stand a few of them together, and they look like a welfare line. In uniform or out, they are malnourished scraps, their hair sheared with clippers and their ears sticking out, their expressions anxious, temporary: they seem always on their way from somewhere to somewhere, carrying their old dad’s kit bag and wearing his trousers.

  The photographs are small, white-edged, blurred. Jack’s mates, off duty, pose outside a military hut of some kind, a temporary building in a waste of light. They have taken their shirts off; the white racks of their ribs like those of animals disdained at market. Their mouths are open in snaggle-toothed smiles, and they hold between them a life-size cutout photo of Marilyn Monroe. She looks twice their bulk, dead-eyed and puffy, her bottom lip shining like a peeled snake. They wear a group expression of simulated lechery; their wrists and bony phalanges wrap about her thighs.

  Does this photo come in the post, courtesy of some nostalgia freak? It’s too much for my mother, though Jack’s own hands are well away from the cardboard date with her lofted breasts. When my mother sees Marilyn she tosses her chin up, narrows her eyes; she makes a sound of disgust, tongue against hard palate; she walks out of the room. She is beautiful; therefore no one else can be.

  Sergeant Foster, my grandfather, had been photographed in Cairo in 1919. It was a studio shot, uniformed; he had taken off his cap and rested it behi
nd him on a tall stand placed for the purpose, his Machine Gun Corps badge aligned for the camera. He was seated on a cane chair, his eyes bright and his mouth unsmiling beneath his small, sleek mustache. Many years later, in some railway bivouac, some late-night crossover point where crews waited to retrain, he heard a man his own age talking about his war; of how one day, the worst day of his life, he had been trapped, pinned down along with his troop, of how he had thought in his desperation that they were all dead meat. But then some shrewd sergeant saw their plight, gave them covering fire, gave them a slit of opportunity to swarm through, and they took it. “It is thanks to that man I’m alive,” he said. “I have been told he was known as Judd Foster: that he came home alive also, and is employed on the railways now. And it is my ambition to shake that man’s hand.”

  It is strange that, though this story awed me, I don’t know the end of it. Did my grandfather lean across the room—the room half-lit, half-heated, by a flickering paraffin stove—did he lean out of the shadows, offering his hand? If so, why did nothing ensue, no exchange of mementos, letters? Why is there no picture of the salvaged comrade, his name traced on the back in spidery copperplate, and why is there no family story to go with him? I imagine this night, the huddle of men, the railwaymen, their faces turned to the storyteller, their different badges of authority and rank, their silver buttons gleaming against the coarse near-black of their uniforms; some with their lives before them, some with their best years gone. Had he seen too much, the sergeant-instructor, was the time for shake-hands lost? He rose, I believe, from his bench at the back, and walked out unremarked onto the platform, looking up and down the track for the distant wink from the signals, red or green. England was dark in those days, its acres unpopulated, its nights full of the breathing of animals and the eyes of its dead shining from hedgerows and copses. He fumbled for a cigarette and lit it, holding it close in crooked finger-joints, turned into the cup of his hand as the men of his generation did; the soldier after dusk does not show a light. Crisscrossing the points the trains run of themselves, unmonitored by the eye of God, the junctions and the marshaling yards, the crossings and the unmanned halts, their dull tracks the veins and arteries of the nation. The time for war stories has passed; years have gone by and we have dwindled into civilians. Men who war had broken were all around him, Annie Connor’s husband coming back with his leg lost, his fierce temper alternating with silences, silences prolonged for weeks; Joe O’Shea, his wife’s brother, health broken in the military prison, his babies dead of pneumonia, that cold viral wind that blows down the years. Dead Englishmen and Irishmen, called to the service of king and country; is this not the country, this mesh flung over the uplands and river valleys, this net of metal which holds it safe, marked out in points of light? I see him raise his head, look down the track, narrow his eyes, and exhale; his breath drifts out to join the night, the long blue night of the obscure.