The Lemon Table

  “When I was a gambler,” he said finally, “people disapproved. They judged it a vice. I never thought so. To me it seemed the application of logical scrutiny to human behaviour. When I was a gourmand, people judged it an indulgence. I never thought so. To me it seemed a rational approach to human pleasure.”

  He looked at her. She seemed to have no idea what he was talking about. Well, that was his own fault. “Jeanne,” he said, taking her hand, “you need have no fear for your child. No fear of the kind your mother had. It is not necessary.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  At supper he listened to his grown-up son’s prattle and declined to correct numerous idiocies. He chewed on a sliver of tree bark, but without appetite. Later, his cup of milk tasted as if it had come from a copper pan, his stewed lettuce stank of the dunghill, his rennet apple had the texture of a horsehair pillow. In the morning, when they found him, his linen nightcap was grasped in a rigid hand, though whether he had been about to put it on, or whether for some reason he had just chosen to remove it, no one could tell.

  Knowing French

  Pilcher House

  18 February 1986

  Dear Dr. Barnes (Me, old woman, rising eighty-one),

  Well, so I read serious WORKS, but for light reading in the evenings, what does one do for fiction in an Old Folkery? (You will understand that I have not been here long.) Plenty enough “Fiction” provided by the Red Cross. What about? Why! the doctor with the crinkled hair “greying at the temples,” probably misunderstood by his wife, or better still a widower, and the attractive nurse who hands him the saw in the theatre. Even at an age when I might have been susceptible to such an implausible view of life, I preferred Darwin’s “Vegetable Mould and Earthworms.”

  So: I thought, why not go to the public library and go through all the fiction beginning with A? (A little girl once asked me: “I understand about the Stag Brewery but what’s the Lie Brewery?”) Thus I find I have read many entertaining descriptions of pubs, and much voyeurism on women’s breasts, so I pass on. You see where I am going? The next lot I come to is Barnes: “Flaubert’s Parrot.” Ah, that must be Loulou. I flatter myself that I know “Un Coeur simple” by heart. But I have few books as my room here is trop petite.

  You will be glad to know that I am bilingual and pronounce a treat. Last week in the street I heard a schoolmaster say to a tourist, “A gauche puis à droite.” The subtlety of the pronunciation of GAUCHE made my day, and I keep saying it to myself in the bath. As good as French bread-and-butter. Would you believe that my father, who would now be 130, was taught French (as Latin then was) pronounced as English: “lee tchatt.” No, you wouldn’t: not sure myself. But there has been some progress: the R is frequently rolled in the right direction nowadays by students.

  But revenons à nos perroquets, which is my main reason for writing. I am not taking you up on what you say in your book about coincidence. Well, yes I am. You say that you do not believe in coincidence. You cannot mean this. You mean that you do not believe in intentional or purposeful coincidence. You cannot deny the existence of coincidence, since it happens with some frequency. You refuse, however, to attribute any significance to it. I am less certain than you, being on the whole agnostic in such matters. Anyway, I am in the habit, most mornings, of walking down Church Street (no church remaining) towards Market Green (no market either). Yesterday I had just laid down your book and was walking along, when what do I see, caged behind a high window, but a large grey parrot in its cage? Coincidence? Of course. Meaning? The beast looks miserable, feathers all fluffed up, coughing, a drip from its beak, and no toys in its cage. So I write a (polite) postcard to its (unknown) owner saying that this situation wrings my heart, and I hope when they get back in the evenings they are kind to the bird. Hardly am I back in my room when a furious old woman storms in, introduces herself, brandishes my postcard and says she will take me to court. “Good,” I reply. “You will find it very expensive.” She tells me that “Dominic” fluffs up his feathers because he is a show-off. He has no toys in his cage because he is not a budgerigar and wd. destroy them if he had. And that parrots’ beaks cannot drip because they have no mucous membrane. “You are an ignorant, interfering old woman,” she flings at me as she marches away.

  Now, this dissertation on parrots has impressed me. Mrs. Audrey Penn is an educated woman, clearly. Having no other reference book to hand but my old college register, I idly look her up. There she is: Lady Margaret Hall, eight years junior to me, exhibitioner where I was top scholar, and reading French. (Not veterinary science.)

  I had to write this to you as nobody else would understand the oddity of the synchronicity. But whether all this constitutes a coincidence in the fullest sense, I am not equipped to say. My fellow incarcerees here are either mad or deaf. I, like Félicité, am deaf. Unfortunately the mad ones are not deaf, but who am I to say that the deaf ones are not mad? In fact, though the youngest, I am Head Girl, because, through comparative youth, I am comparatively competent.

  Croyez, cher Monsieur, à l’assurance de mes

  sentiments distingués.

  Sylvia Winstanley

  4 March 1986

  Dear Mr. Barnes,

  So why did you say you were a doctor? As for me, I am a spinster, though you are ungenerous to offer me the choice of only Miss, Mrs. or Ms. Why not Lady Sylvia? I am Upper Clarce after all, “senior county family” and all that. My great aunt told me that when she was a little girl Cardinal New-man brought her an orange back from Spain. One for her and one for each of her sisters. The fruit was then unfamiliar in England. N. was grandmother’s godfather.

  The warden tells me that Dominic’s owner is “well thought of in the district,” so obviously gossip is going the rounds and I had better keep my mouth shut. I wrote a conciliatory letter (no reply), and noticed when next I passed by that Dominic had been taken out of the window. Perhaps he is sick. After all, if parrots have no mucous membrane, why was his beak dripping? But if I go on asking such questions publicly, I shall have my day in court. Well, I am not afeared of the magistrates.

  I have taught a lot of Gide. Proust bores me, and I do not understand Giraudoux, having a funny kind of brain that is brilliant in some areas and bone-stupid in others. I was supposed to be a dead cert for a First, the Principal said she would eat her hat if I didn’t get one. I didn’t (II, with Distinction in Spoken Language) and she took it up with the authorities; answer came that the number of Alphas was balanced by the number of Gammas; no Betas at all. See what I mean? I didn’t go to propah school, and being a “lady” didn’t learn orthodox subjects, so at the Entrance Examination my essay on the maternal habits of the earwig did me more good than the “educated” ones of the girls from Sherborne. I was a top scholar as I think I told you.

  Now why did you say you were a doctor in your sixties when you obviously can’t be more than forty? Come, now! In youth I discovered that men were deceivers ever, and decided not to take up Flirting until I came onto the Old Age Pension at sixty—but this has led me to a further twenty years of being—my psychologist tells me—an outrageous flirt.

  Having done Barnes, I move on to Brookner, Anita, and blessed if she didn’t appear on the Box that very day. I don’t know, I don’t know. THEY are certainly doing things to me. E.G. I say, “If that is a right decision, let me see a stag,” choosing the most unlikely creature for that place. Stag appears. Ditto kingfisher and spotted woodpecker on other occasions. I can’t accept that this is imagination, or that my subconscious was aware that these creatures were lurking in the wings. There would seem to be as it were a High Self that, for instance, tells an ignorant red cell to go and make a clot over a knife-cut. But then what is in charge of your high self and my high self teaching our blood to go and mend the cuts? On “Hospital Watch” I noticed that they just rammed all the raw meat back into the hole and left it to remake itself into muscles on its own, and I had a very major operation three months ago, but all the bits seem to have come toget
her in the right shape and done the right thing. Who showed them how?

  Have I room on page for some parrot feathers? The Principal, Miss Thurston, was a rather graceless, horse-faced woman, twenty-four years my senior, “assoiffée de beauté,” and wore unsuitable picture hats in which she bicycled (Cambridge-style, basket behind). At one time we were very close, and planned to share a house, but she discovered, just in time, how nasty I am. One night I dreamed of Miss Thurston: she was dancing with joy; she had on an enormous hat with parrot feathers flying from it. She said, “All is now well between us” (or something of the sort). I said to myself, “But this woman was never PLAIN.” At breakfast I told my cousin, “I am sure Miss Thurston is dead.” We look in the Telegraph—no obituary, as there would have been. The post comes—on back of envelope, “As-tu vu que Miss Thurston est morte?” We visit other cousin; obituary and photograph in the Times newspaper. I have to add that I am not in the least “psychic.”

  I won’t say I didn’t mean to preach as I did. I am Head Girl here as the YOUNGEST and the most competent. Have car, can drive. As most of them are stone-deaf, there is little whispering in corners. Can I make a grand word for immense letter-writing (epistolomania?). I do apologize.

  Best wishes, good fortune with your writing, Sylvia Winstanley

  18 April 1986

  Dear Julian,

  I call you so with permission, and having been granted leave to Flirt; although Flirting with only a dust-jacket to go on is a new experience as you may imagine. As for why I chose to incarcerate myself in an Old Folkery when I can walk and drive and be cheered by the threat of law courts, it was a matter of jumping before pushed, or sauter pour mieux reculer. My dear cousin died, I was threatened with a major operation, and found the prospect of being House-keeper to Myself until I conked out unappealing. And then there was, as they put it, an Unexpected Vacancy. I am a Maverick as you may have deduced and find the common wisdom just that. The C. W. states that we are all expected to remain independent for as long as possible and then succumb to an Old Folkery when our family can no longer endure us or we start leaving gas-taps on and scalding ourselves with our Ovaltine. But in these circs the O. F. is likely to come as a severe jolt, causing us to lose our marbles, mutate into cabbages, giving swift rise to another Unexpected Vacancy. So I resolved to transport myself here while still largely functioning. Well, I have no children and my psychologist agreed.

  Now, dear Barnes, alas! The only book of yours you told me not to read was the only one available at the library. “Before She Met Me” has been taken out eleven times since January, you will be fascinated to know, and one reader has heavily scored through the word “fuck” whenever it occurs. However, he has condescended to read it all the way to the last “fuck” on p. 178. I have not got so far yet. I tried a spot of raconterie at supper to the other deafs, but without success. “I suppose,” I said, “this book is about the Pleasures of the Bed.” “Wot? Wot? Poddon? Poddon?” “Plezzers! You know! nice comfy pillow, soft mattress, sleepy-byes.” So nobody thought this raconte-worthy. Well, I shall read it and no doubt learn a lot.

  I am very cross, sore, etc., owing to excessive barrack-room rudeness from Warden’s husband, ex-sergeant-major, whom I would fain have pushed backwards downstairs, but realized he was likely to be stronger. Let me preach some more to you, this time on the subject of Old Folkeries. When Nanny finally started going gaga, I investigated a number of such établissements. It does not raise the spirits to see, time after time, the same crescent of obedient bid-dies sitting in cheap armchairs while the Box blares at them like Mussolini. At one place I said to the Warden, “What sort of activities do you provide?” She looked at me incredulously, for wasn’t it clear the old deafs were already having as thrilling a time as mind and spirit could bear? Eventually she replied, “They have a man who comes for games once a week.” “Games?” I asked, seeing not many takers for the Olympics. “Yes,” she replied condescendingly. “He gets them into a circle and throws a beach-ball at them and they have to throw it back.” Well: I made a remark about beach-balls to the Sgt-Major this morning but not surprisingly it was lost on him. The deafs and the mads here are constantly afraid of Being a Nuisance. The only way of making sure you are not Being a Nuisance is to be in your coffin, so I intend to go on Being a Nuisance as a way of keeping alive. Whether I shall succeed or not, I don’t know. This Old Folkery is working out exactly like something from Balzac. We disburse our lifetime’s savings in order to hand over control of our lives. I imagined a system of enlightened dictatorship as approved by Voltaire, but wonder if such a government has or could ever exist. The wardens, whether by design or unconscious habit, are gradually eroding more and more of our spirits. The governing body are supposed to be our allies.

  I was half-heartedly collecting “sottises” for you; the one that annoys me most is the notion that in England we have something called “the Summer” and that sooner or later “it comes.” And then we all sit out in the garden after dinner being bitten by gnats. Granted ’tis about 10 degrees warmer and you can go out after tea. The middle-aged all tell me that when they were young summers were red-hot and you wassailed on hay-wains etc. but I tell them that as I am quite thirty years older I remember perfectly well that May was a lousy month in their youth, and they have forgotten all that. Have you come across “Les trois saints de glace”—I forget who they are, but they have to be past before you can have a proper—Latin—summer. I spent one May in the Dordogne and it rained all the time and they were beastly to the dog and showed me their operations and bread was only made once a fortnight so sucks to Aquitaine! I love the Drôme, though.

  Books I haven’t read:

  All Dickens

  All Scott

  All Thackeray

  All Shakespeare except “Macbeth”

  All J Austen but one

  I do hope you find a lovely gîte; I adore the Pyrenees; the flowers; and the little “gaves.”

  You see, I went round the world in 1935, before everything was spoilt. Also in a lot of boats, not avions.

  You say, re coincidence, why not ask to see an armadillo or a snowy owl, that would test the power of intentional coincidence. I shall not rise to this, but will tell you that we lived in Putney back in XVI. Putney is next to Barnes.

  Well, thanks a lot for writing. Now I’m feeling better, & the moon has come round the corner behind the pines.

  Sylvia W.

  Parrot D. back in window.

  16 September 1986

  Dear Julian,

  Your novel has proved educational, not on sex lines, but because your character, Barbara, has exactly the same slippery methods of discussion as our Warden here. Her husband is the acme of insolence to me, yet I know that if the word “bloody” slips out I am totally sunk with the Gov. Bod., which approves of me so far. Yesterday I was on the way to the letter-box when the Sgt-Major accosted me and suggested it was an unnecessary journey. All the deafs and mads here give him their letters to post for them. I said, “I may no longer be driving my car but I shall continue taking the bus into town and am well capable of tottering to the letter-box.” He looked at me impertinently and I imagined him steaming open all the letters at night and tearing up any which contained complaints about the Old Folkery. If my letters suddenly cease you may conclude that either I am dead or else under the full control of the Authorities.

  Are you musical? Well, I suppose I am a bit, but, only because being clever and starting the piano at age six, I very soon got good at sight-reading, playing also the double bass & flute (more or less) so constantly asked to play church organs. Liked making terrific roarings on these instruments. (Not church myself. Think own thoughts.) I like going into town—always badinage in the bus or morris dancing in the shopping precincts with Brandenburg Concertos on a machine and proper persons playing violins with them.

  I have read some more As and Bs. One of these days I shall tot up the number of drinks consumed or cigarettes lit, for padding p
urposes in novels. Also “vignettes” of waiters, taxi-drivers, vendeuses and others, who play no further part in the story. Novelists either go in for padding or else for philosophizing, what we were told to regard as “generalizations,” chez Balzac. Whom is the Novel for, I ask myself. In my own case for someone of an undemanding nature who requires to lose herself between about 10 p.m. and bedtime. This may be unsatisfac. for you, I can see. Also, to be able to do this, it is essential that there be a character sufficiently like myself to identify with and, Maverick that I am, there isn’t often.

  Still, the As and Bs remain a cut above the monthly supply from the Red Cross. They seem to be written by Night Nurses in the long hours when they have nothing else to do. And the sole theme is desire for marriage. What happens after marriage doesn’t seem to have struck them, though to me that is really the crux.

  A Famous Person in the art world wrote in his autobiography a few years ago that he first grew to love women by falling in love with a little girl at his prep school dance. He was eleven at the time, and she was nine. There is no doubt at all that I was that little girl: he describes my dress, and it was my brother’s prep school, dates right, etc. Nobody else has fallen for me since, but I was a pretty child. If I had deigned to look at him, he says, he would have followed me to the end of his days. Instead he chased after women all his life and made his wife so unhappy that she became an alcoholic, whereas I never married. What do you deduce from this, Mr. Novelist Barnes? Was this a missed opportunity seventy years ago? Or was it a fortunate escape on both our parts? Little did he know that I was to become a bluestocking and not at all up his street. Perhaps he would have driven me to drink and I would have driven him to philandering, nobody would have been better off except the wife he thereby wouldn’t have had, and in his autobiography he would have said that he wished he’d never set eyes upon me. You are too young for this kind of question, but it is the sort you increasingly ask yourself as you become deaf and mad. Where would I be now if two years before the Great War I had glanced in a different direction?