‘Marnie, dear . . .’
‘What got her off?’
‘Well, ’twas the doctor really. Dr Gascoigne. And then—’
‘She told me it was all his fault for not coming when he was sent for!’
‘Yes, well, dear, that was only ’er way of seeing it later on. It done him no ’arm because ’e was dead. It just made it seem better to ’er to tell it to you that way. If I—’
‘Why should he try to get her off?’
‘Well, ’twasn’t quite like that, but he said in the box she was suffering from something – something like purple—’
‘Puerperal.’
‘Yes, puerperal. Puerperal insanity, caused by worry and distress and what not. It was true more’n likely . . . Women do get that way sometimes after childbirth. They go off their ’eads temporary like. A few days or so and they’re good as new. ’Tis a sort of fever that takes ’em.’
I finished wiping my hands. I put the towel on the table. I put my fingers through my wet hair, threading it back from my face and eyes. I said: ‘I still don’t know why she did it. You’ve told me nothing. And I don’t know why she fed me those lies. Why all that story, all that lying story about the doctor not coming and . . . Why did you let her lie?’
Lucy’s eye was watering. ‘You was all we got, Marnie.’
‘That doesn’t answer anything.’
‘Well, dear, you was all we got.’
I said: ‘I mean, if she didn’t want to tell me the truth couldn’t she at least have just kept her mouth shut? Couldn’t she? Why couldn’t she?’
‘I believe ’twas comforting to her to feel you was on her side . . .’
There were real footsteps on the stairs this time and Doreen came in. She said: ‘I had nasty dreams. My, Marnie you look as white as a sheet!’
CHAPTER NINETEEN
The funeral was at two. Uncle Stephen came about half past twelve. We hadn’t seen each other for four years. He didn’t look as good-looking as I remembered him, but he still had the same smile and the same grey eyes that saw through you. I went through that funeral like a sleepwalker, I really did.
There were seven of us and six wreaths. Doreen had ordered one for me. ln fact she’d fixed everything. The only thing she hadn’t fixed was the narrow turn out of the stairs into the hall. They had to get the coffin down by sliding it through the kitchen door but then, it wouldn’t turn, so they took it up two steps and tried the other way. But it still wouldn’t go so they had to stand the coffin on its end like a mummy-case and get it round that way. I wondered if the tiny thin corpse inside had slipped down and was going to be buried in a heap for all eternity.
I thought I ought to be buried too. Or I thought I’ll go on the streets to celebrate. But I wouldn’t be as discreet as mother. What the hell. No soldiers tapping on my window. The door would be open wide.
Just before we left the house I was sick again, but after that I was all right. I nearly burst out laughing in church, but it’s just as well I didn’t as I should never have been able to stop. And it wasn’t at anything funny either. It was the church on the hill. I forget the name, but from the churchyard you could see over the roofs of the houses to Torbay. The sea was like a blue plate with bits chipped out of the edges. Over to the west I fancied I could see the roofs of the new Plymouth, the Guildhall and the shopping centre, where the buildings had grown up out of the rubble and dust that I remembered as a kid.
It was bright but perishing cold; the wind whistled through the trees from the north and made my coat feel like rice paper.
I thought, I wonder what Mark’s doing. It was the first time I’d thought of him since I came last night. I thought, well, no one will be after me in all that much of a hurry now because I didn’t steal anything yesterday. I shan’t be missed till tomorrow probably or the next day. By then I can still be in France.
But was it any longer all that urgent to run to France? For the first time now with this death I was really, truly free.
Uncle Stephen’s hair was blowing in the wind. He’d gone quite white, though he was a good bit younger than Mam, five or six years. He wasn’t like Mother at all, except that maybe they’d both got a good shape to the bones of the face. Christ, I thought, I’ve been living – what have I been living? Why didn’t he tell me?
I remembered now that girl at school, Shirley Jameson, what she’d said. That had begun the fight; I’d gone at her with waving fists. She’d said: ‘Garn, putting on airs ! Your mother done a murder!’
Well, so Shirley was right after all. Come to think of it, that often does happen – that the thing somebody tells you when you’re a kid that makes you the most indignant at the time – sooner or later you find it’s true. It’s one of the things you learn . . . And me afraid to tell Mother I’d pinched a few pounds to keep her comfortable! I did laugh then, but somehow it must have sounded like a cough because no one turned round.
‘Ashes to ashes,’ said the vicar, ‘dust to dust. If God won’t take her the devil must.’
No, he couldn’t have said that, I must have misheard him, I was going crazy. But of course I was crazy. That was obviously what had been wrong with Edie Elmer. I was her daughter, I took after her. Except that instead of going with soldiers I ran away from them. I couldn’t stand them touching me. Perhaps that was just the other side of the penny.
All her life had been a lie. How much of mine had been? Bloody near all of it. I’d started from scratch and built up a beautiful life of lies – three or four beautiful lives all as phoney and untrue as Mother’s. I wasn’t even content with one.
I felt I wanted to break the top of my head off. What a fool she’d made of me! What a fool I’d made of myself.
The others were moving away now but I didn’t move. The shiny brown box with the brass plate and the brass handles had gone into the red earth, the sexton or whatever he was was leaning on his spade. I didn’t feel any grief. In a few weeks I’d changed from feeling too little to feeling too much – like a skin rubbed raw – but now I’d passed out of that into numbness again. I just stood and stared at the hole in the ground. It was like a slit trench. The wind blew a cloud over the sun. There was an oak tree about my height standing beside the next grave; it was covered with brown withered leaves that rustled in the wind; the leaves should have fallen long ago. They were like lies that had long since forgotten what they were told for but lingered on and on. You told a child about Father Christmas until he was ten and then you told him the truth. But some people fixed their children up in such a paper chain of make believe and sham that they never got free.
Well, now I was free, free as I hadn’t ever been before. Free of Mark and free of Mother and free of Forio. They were all gone and as good as dead. I ruled a line under them. Now I started afresh.
Uncle Stephen touched my elbow. ‘Marnie . . .’
‘Go to hell,’ I said.
‘The others have left. I’ve sent them on. Anyway Doreen has a train to catch. Lucy can fend for herself . . .’
‘So can I.’
‘Presently yes. You’ll have to. But before we do any more I want a talk with you. Lucy tells me you know about your mother.’
‘Go to hell,’ I said.
‘Marnie, dear, we have to talk. I’ve a taxi here. Let’s drive somewhere.’
‘I’ll walk, thanks.’
‘Come on.’ He got hold of my arm.
Suddenly I hadn’t any more fight left in me. I turned away from him and went down to the waiting taxi.
We drove down and had tea somewhere; it was one of the posh hotels, and I thought afterwards he took me into a public place because there I couldn’t give way or blow off altogether – that’s while I still had some feeling for appearances. He was taking a hell of a risk. I felt like kicking the table over. But it wasn’t temper, I swear it wasn’t that, it was just the most awful despairing deathly empty desolation, which was more than any human being could stand.
He said: ‘Marnie, take a hol
d of yourself.’
‘What bloody right have you got to say what I shall do?’
‘Marnie, stop swearing and try to see this thing straight. I know it’s been a terrible shock, losing your mother and then learning all this about her so suddenly just afterwards. But see it in its proper proportion. If you’ll let me talk about her – perhaps it’ll help.’
‘If you’d talked about her ten years ago you might have some right to talk now.’
‘What, told you this when you were thirteen? In any case I hadn’t any right to: you were her child, not mine. But if I had, are you saying you would have understood what I’m going to tell you now?’
I stared across six white tablecloths at a bowl of flowers; narcissus, iris, tulips. I realized for the first time that his voice had a west-country burr.
‘Edie was older than me,’ he said, ‘but I was always very fond of her and I think in a way I understood her. It’s all the rage now to blame one’s failings on one’s mother and father; but if you blame any of yours on her, then you ought to blame some of hers on our father. Your grandfather was a local preacher; you knew that, I suppose?’
‘She said so.’
‘He was a local preacher but he was a plasterer by trade, and in the twenties he was out of work for more than eight years. It turned him sour, narrowed him in a funny way. He got more religious but it was religion gone wrong. When your grandmother, my mother, died Dad went more and more into his shell, and Edie took the brunt. Did you ever think of your mother, Marnie, as a woman? I mean apart from her being your mother. She was what you might call a highly sexed woman.’
‘So I should think!’
‘Yes, but don’t get it wrong. She was always attractive to men – she always had a boyfriend but she was too strictly brought up to kick over the traces with them. I was her kid brother; I know. She stuck with Dad till he died. She was thirty-three then. Thirty-three. Does that mean anything to you? Heaven knows what sort of struggle went on in her. She took the brunt with Dad; he was terrible at times; he’d got tremendous authority too, like an Old Testament prophet. She got to be a bit like him these last few years, only not half as bad. I used to duck out. As soon as I could I went to sea.’
He offered me tea but I shook my head. He said: ‘Two months after he died she married your Dad. I think they were happy. As far as I could tell they were happy. I think for the first time she began to lead a normal life. I think she – well, let’s be blunt, I think she discovered what she’d been missing. I think Frank found he’d wakened something in his wife he’d hardly expected. Not that it mattered so long as he was at home . . .’
This hotel had a veranda overlooking the sea. The only people sitting on it were three tottering old ladies. They were like mother sitting there, like flies in the last sun.
Uncle Stephen said: ‘When you were evacuated to Sangerford, she was alone, far more alone than she’d ever been before she married. Life had wakened her up – and wakened her late. Now it told her to go to sleep again. That’s not so easy. She began to see soldiers.’
‘Yes, it was plural, wasn’t it?’
‘I’m not defending what she did. I’m only trying to explain it, to try to see why it happened. With another woman, differently brought up, differently made, it might never have happened. The end, the business of the child, that certainly wouldn’t have happened.’
‘Are you trying to tell me that the way she was brought up made her murder her own son?’
He stopped at that and began to light his pipe. ‘Marnie, your mother was a strange woman, I’m not pretending anything else. She was capable, especially in later years, of enormous self-deception. The way she swallowed your story of this wealthy employer – Pemberton – who showered money on you—’
‘You didn’t believe it?’
He took the pipe out of his mouth to shake his head. ‘I don’t know how you came by your money and I’m not going to ask, but I don’t believe in Pemberton. Neither would she if she hadn’t wanted to and been capable of willing herself to. Well, somehow during that fantastic period in Sangerford she succeeded in living in a world of make-believe. I know why she slept with soldiers – because she wanted to and had a consuming desire for love – but I don’t know how she got it past her conscience. Have you ever thought what it’s like to lead a double life?’
I winced. ‘Well?’
‘Perhaps she thought – and I don’t mean this as a dirty crack – perhaps she thought she was helping the war effort by giving the soldiers her love. Somehow she went on through each day as if the nights never happened. She was still Abel Treville’s respectable, carefully dressed, good-mannered daughter. She was still Frank Elmer’s faithful wife. She was still your devoted mother.’
I made some noise, but it wasn’t words he could answer.
He looked at me with his grey eyes. ‘When the new child started coming it must have blown her make-believe world to shreds. God knows what she thought or how she reasoned then. But somehow she got herself into a frame of mind in which she could deny the child’s existence even to herself. Of course the doctor was right. At the end her mind was temporarily deranged and she did what she did . . .’
We sat there then for a very long time. The waiter came and Stephen paid the bill and we sat there. And the old ladies began to feel chilly in the veranda and moved out into the lounge. A page-boy came past with the evening papers from London. Nobody bought one.
I said: ‘If I’d been the judge and they told me a woman like that was mad I should have said, why did she make no preparation for the baby? Was she mad for nine months before?’
We got up and started to walk back to Cuthbert Avenue. We walked, and the cold wind was still blowing through the town. By the harbour a few boats bobbed and lurched, and over beyond it the palm trees rustled like raffia skirts.
I said: ‘Did you know I was married?’
‘Married? No. I’m very glad to hear it. Who is he?’
‘Glad,’ I said, and laughed.
‘Shouldn’t I be? Aren’t you happy? Where are you living?’
I said: ‘It never had a chance. It was queer from the beginning. I was queer. I don’t like men. I can’t bear them touching me. It disgusts me and turns me cold. I got pushed into it – into getting married. I didn’t want to. The man – Mark’s his name – tries to love me but it’s hopeless. He means well but he hasn’t a clue what’s wrong with me. I went to a doctor, a psychiatrist. He began to pry around. But he hadn’t unearthed in three months a quarter of what I’ve dug up in a night by finding that newspaper cutting. I remember it all now. But it doesn’t help.’
‘It must help. Any psychiatrist would say so, Marnie. The business of remembering is half the battle.’
‘It depends what you remember. I’m queer – out of the ordinary, see – I’ve been different from other people ever since I was ten . . . I’m queer and I’ll stay queer. These last months I’ve learned about psychiatry. This doctor – Roman – has told me—’
‘My dear Marnie, I can imagine the sort of shock you got that night; that by itself is enough to explain anything that has happened to you since—’
‘But it’s too easy,’ I said. ‘You don’t explain people as X and Y. It doesn’t work out. Maybe I had a shock. Maybe I’ve had another shock now. But it isn’t all. Ever heard of heredity? What goes on when people are born? You take after your parents. You’ve just told me that mother was getting like her father. Well, I’m like my mother. What was she, I ask you? She was one of two things. She was either a murderess or a lunatic. You don’t need psycho doctors to tot up what’s wrong with me. I take after my mother, that’s all. I’ve had proof of it more than ever these last weeks.’
His pipe had gone out. He stopped to knock it against a stone post on the promenade. I waited impatiently. He put the pipe in his pocket.
‘There’s always two to a marriage, Marnie. Frank, your father, was as normal as I am. And I’m her brother; is there anything specially wro
ng with me? You don’t have to take after her. But even if you did, you wouldn’t necessarily act as she did. You still don’t understand her.’
‘I don’t want to understand her! What’s there to understand anyway? Let’s change the subject.’
‘No. You’re forcing me to defend your mother, so I will. You see – you see, my dear, she was a very passionate woman and a very inhibited woman – and also rather an innocent woman. Oh, I know you think that’s fanciful, but imagine what an experienced woman would have done in her case. First she’d have taken good care not to have a child. Then, if that had gone wrong, she would have quickly seen to it that she lost it. My dear, anyone can if they know the ropes. She didn’t. Perhaps she tried a few old wives’ brews, I don’t know. But nothing more. She went to her full time under the pressure of ignorance, her fantastic conscience ground into her by her father, and her own desperate make-believe. Under these pressures she became temporarily insane. There’s no reason on God’s earth why she should have passed on to you a character that would act in the same way even given those circumstances. Quarrel with your peculiarities if you like, but don’t think they have to be incurable!’
We walked on. I wanted to be rid of him then; I just wanted to be on my own, to walk away somewhere completely solitary and think.
I said: ‘Have you ever heard her talk about sex, about love? All her life she’s tried to poison me against it. Can you beat that? Can you beat it really?’
‘People come to hate the things they suppress. The man who loathes cruelty is often the man who’s suppressed the streak of cruelty in himself. When your mother recovered from her illness and found sex was no longer for her – as she did – wasn’t it natural, with her upbringing, to look on sex as the cause of all the evil that had come to her and want to warn you about it?’
‘Well, it was the cause of all the evil, wasn’t it?’
‘Only because it was at first wrongly denied and then later wrongly used.’