It was mid-August, and some weeks had passed since the anguish that had so crushed her had taken itself off. As she had predicted, she could not remember its intensity, proving that Nature (or whatever) does not need its children to remember pain, unproductive for its purposes, whatever they are. She was finding herself in moments of quiet enjoyment, drawing vitality as she had all her life from small physical pleasures, like the feel of a naked sole on wood, the warmth of sunlight on bare skin, the smell of coffee or of earth, the faint scent of frost on a stone. She had returned to being a woman who never wept, though the idea of a good cry for the sake of it was certainly inviting: she had forgotten how to cry, it seemed. Other people’s excesses of emotion tempted her to judge them as immature. She had actually caught on her face the smile that goes with, Really, how silly—on hearing of someone foolishly in love. (Did that mean then that she had learned nothing at all?) She monitored sadness which was steadily retreating, losing strength, and kept her attention on it as if it were a dangerous animal that might attack from an unexpected place. It might worsen, might drag her back: in old people’s faces, in their eyes, she often saw the dry sorrow that now she understood. Oh no, she didn’t want that, she refused it! And the way to keep it off, that vulture that fed on the heart, was never to relax vigilance.
She still could not listen to Julie’s music, or to the old trouvère and troubadour music. Pain, to be ‘sweet’ must be mild. The anguish that threatened her at even a few notes from Julie Vairon, or even the vulgar torch song from The Lucky Piece, or Julie—no, absolutely not. Sounds could still seem too loud, too much, and there seemed no safe place anywhere for her. As for that sentimental shepherd boy from long ago, in his silent landscape these days a small wind blew, the dry whine that has set humankind’s nerves on edge with apprehension for thousands of years, and the sound held almost audible voices, while the high scream of a hawk was the first note of Julie’s third act music. Worse, one day some sheets of paper had blown up the hill towards the boy half asleep under his tree, and he stared at them, thinking he was dreaming, and the black signs on the paper, the words grief, heart, pain, seemed to him some kind of frightful magic-making, so that he woke up completely, but by then the wind had blown the sheets away down the hill and into the grass, and he believed he had imagined an apparition. And where was the silent haven she craved? Down in the oceans, fishes clicked and squeaked, and whales sang. Up in space, debris collided and meteors rumbled. At the bottom of mine shafts or deep caves? The silence of the grave? A likely story. There would be a roar of worms and of excavating roots.
Yet fear or, if you like, caution did not prevent that process familiar to everyone submerged in the why of something. Clues accumulate and fall into place. You pick up a book apparently at random, and it falls open on a page where what you are thinking about is explored. You overhear a conversation: they are talking about what preoccupies you. You switch on the radio—there it is. Sarah’s dreams were full of information, and she felt as if she were on the verge of…Know yourself, says the old admonition, but it is not easy to decide what it is you ought to be trying to know at any given moment.
Sarah sat on a park bench, looking at an empty bench almost opposite hers, across a wide path that led out of the park.
Along a path from the gate came a young woman pushing a pram, holding one side of the handle, while a little girl pushed too, using both hands. When they reached the bench nearly opposite Sarah, the young woman hauled the pram onto the grass behind the bench, lifted out a baby of about ten months, and sat down on the bench. She held the baby on her knees. The little girl, who was about four, sat very close to her mother. She was a pretty little girl, and dressed in a crisp pink cotton frock, pink socks, pink shoes, and her straight thin black hair was held with a pink plastic barrette. All this pinkness did not suit her small thin anxious face, nor eyes that seemed too knowledgeable, like a sad woman’s.
The mother was well turned out too. She had tight white trousers and a white singlet that showed carefully tanned shoulders and arms. Her hair was dyed bronze and stood out in a fashionable frizz. She was hugging and kissing the infant, who laughed and tried to grab her hair. Then he reached for her nose, while she laughed and flirtatiously averted her face. She began singing the nursery rhyme, ‘Rock-a-bye Baby’, and when she reached ‘and down falls baby and cradle and all’, she pretended to let the baby fall. He shrieked in delicious false terror: they had often played this game before. The child was trying to join in, singing ‘Rock-a-bye Baby’, but her voice was lost in the loud full singing of the mother and the baby’s gurgles of pleasure.
The little girl was sitting right against her mother, and now she put up her hand to tug her elbow down, to get her attention.
‘Oh, leave me alone,’ snapped the mother, in a voice so irritable and full of dislike it was hard to believe this was the same voice she used to love the baby. And now she used this voice again, rich, full, and sexual, and she kissed the baby’s neck with an open mouth. ‘Darling, darling, darling,’ murmured the mother. ‘Little Ned, my darling, darling Ned.’ And then, removing her mouth from the baby’s neck for this purpose, she snapped at her daughter, ‘I told you, stop it, stop bothering me, don’t crowd me like that.’ And she went on loving the baby as if the child did not exist.
The little girl wriggled a short way from her mother, and sat watching the love scene. When the woman began another rhyme, this time ‘To market, to market, to buy a fat pig’, she again tried to join in, but her mother smacked her hard and said, ‘Oh, do shut up, Claudine.’
The child sat frozen, a few inches from her mother, looking sombrely in front of her—looking, in fact, at Sarah, at that dull old woman there on the bench. Unable to stand the loving going on that excluded her, she carefully turned to her mother, expecting a slap, and said, ‘Mummy, Mummy, Mummy,’ in a desperate voice.
‘Now what is it?’ snapped the young woman.
‘I want my orange juice, I want my orange juice.’
‘You’ve just had orange juice.’
‘I want it again,’ the child said, trying to smile, looking up at the woman’s angry face, hoping to make her mother see her, see her misery.
But the mother did not look at her. She leaned her arm back over the bench into the pram, took out a carton of juice, and handed it carelessly to the child, who took it with the caution that governed every movement she made, even the smallest. She tried to get the straw off the side of the carton. The mother watched her fumbling over the top of the baby’s head, which was lying on her breasts, or to be precise, in the hollow under her left shoulder, his cheek on her breast. She was watching with a practised irritation that waited for an excuse to pounce. ‘There,’ she snapped, as the straw fell to the tarmac of the path. ‘Look what you’ve done. You’ll have to drink it through the hole, that’s all.’ And she laid her cheek on her baby’s head and crooned, ‘Neddy is my darling, my darling, my darling,’ and then, ‘Baby is my darling…’
The little girl was not drinking her juice but sat with the carton in her hand staring at Sarah, who saw in those dark and most unchildlike eyes a desolation of unhappiness, a world of grief.
The mother: ‘Why did you nag at me for orange juice if you didn’t want it? Give it here—I’ll put it in the bottle for Baby.’
She impatiently took the carton from her daughter, again reached over the bench back, fetched out the bottle, poured the orange juice in the bottle, and then, having taken a little swig herself, fed the juice to the baby.
The child gave a sob, and as if this was exactly what the mother had been waiting for, she screeched, ‘Now what is it?’ and in a transport of dislike she slapped the little girl on the forearm. The child sat absolutely still, watching the ugly red come up on her skin. Then she let out a single loud hopeless wail and at once clamped her lips shut—she had been unable to prevent that cry.
‘If you don’t behave yourself,’ said the mother to the child, in a voice full of hate, ‘I
’ll…’
The child sat rigid, silent.
The mother reached back, took out cigarettes and matches, and tried to light a cigarette over the baby’s head. ‘Oh shit, you take him, then,’ said she, depositing the baby on the little girl’s lap. ‘Now, you hold him nicely, don’t jump about, just sit.’
On the child’s face came a trembling smile. Tears stood in her eyes. She held the happy baby and clasped him tight to her body and kissed him. The little girl had her lips on the baby’s head, on the soft hair just above the ear. Her eyes were shut. As she sat there in a bliss of love, her mother stared straight ahead, gasping lungfuls of smoke in and out.
The little girl was singing, ‘Darling, darling, darling, I love you, I love you my Ned, my darling Ned,’ eyes shut, thin arms squeezing the baby, who was suddenly woeful and might cry. And all at once, in a single movement, the mother flicked her cigarette on the path, stamped on it, and reached for the baby. ‘Don’t paw him like that, stop it, stop it at once.’ And she lifted the baby onto her own lap. And now the baby sat with a trembling down-turned mouth, and it was touch and go whether he would let out a wail.
‘It’s your fault,’ said the mother in the disliking voice she used for her daughter. And she hastily bounced the baby and sang and kissed him into good humour. Then, when the baby was happy, up got mother, who wanted to put him back in the pram, but he wasn’t having that, he clung to her neck and laughed.
Her mouth tight and angry, the mother said to the child, ‘You can push the pram.’
She went off cuddling the baby, not looking to see if the little girl was following with the heavy pram, which she had to manoeuvre off the grass and onto the path. When she had accomplished this task, the child stood for a moment, getting her breath back.
Sarah was silently telling the child, ‘Hold on, hold on. Quite soon a door will slam shut inside you because what you are feeling is unendurable. The door will stand there shut all your life: if you are lucky it will never open, and you’ll not ever know about the landscape you inhabited—for how long? But child time is not adult time. You are living in an eternity of loneliness and grief, and it is truly a hell, because the point of hell is that there is no hope. You don’t know that the door will slam shut, you believe that this is what life is and must be: you will always be disliked, and you will have to watch her love that little creature you love so much because you think that if you love what she loves, she will love you. But one day you’ll know it doesn’t matter what you do and how hard you try, it is no use. And at that moment the door will slam and you will be free.’
She watched the child carefully set off, reaching up with both hands to the handle of the heavy pram, pushing it along the path after the mother. Over the woman’s shoulder could be seen the baby’s smiling face. The mother made no attempt to slow her pace, although the child was so far behind. At the gate she stopped and turned, and she shouted, ‘Oh, do come on.’ The child, trying hard, slipped and fell to her knees, and got up crying, and again pushed the pram. Then the baby was put into the pram and propped against cushions, and the three left the park as they had entered it, the mother with one hand on her side of the handle, the little girl reaching up with both hands.
Did Sarah believe that her mother, the admirable Mrs Milgreen, could ever have been like that young woman with her two little children? Certainly not; Sarah had been witnessing an extreme of unkindness. But wait—how could she, or anyone, know? The talk of old people can only be deciphered by contemporaries. A pause in the run of a reminiscence can stand for some monstrous quarrel. Half a dozen words as ordinary as ‘We never got on, you know’ mark implacable and decades-long hostilities. ‘I’ll always remember that summer’ or ‘We always did fancy each other’ (and a laugh) remembers the most intense passion of a lifetime. An old man sighs, once, for a long season of mourning, an old woman stumbles over a word or a phrase, because she was on the verge of self-betrayal. That young woman on the bench: when she was old would there be anything left of her dislike for her little daughter? Perhaps only ‘Boys are so much easier than girls.’
Much more likely, though—Sarah was remembering certain brisk and practical tones of her mother’s voice—that the scene from last summer was more to the point, when the three boys had come to say good night to their mother in their short red dressing gowns, with their brushed fair hair, their washed faces, and then had rushed off up the stairs, but James had come back, twice, and stood at the door.
‘What is it, James?’
‘Nothing.’
‘Then run along.’
As the boy turned to go out of the room his eyes had met Sarah’s. No, it was not that bleak desolation, it was not grief, but rather…patience. Yes, it was stoicism. He was not four years old, or six years old; he was twelve. That door had slammed shut for him long ago, and he had forgotten it was there. With luck he would never know the door was there, never be forced to remember what lay behind it.
When Sarah’s grandmother was dying in hospital—this was a good twenty years ago—Sarah sat with her through the afternoons and evenings of a dark autumn, sometimes with her mother, the dying woman’s daughter. In the next bed was an old woman as small and light as a leaf, who called out hour after hour, ‘Help, help, help,’ in a soft little voice, like the call of a bird. Sometimes she called ‘Help, Mother’—the word Mother on two notes: ‘Help, Mother?’ the second note rising. ‘Help’—while she waited and listened for a reply that never came. ‘Help…Mo-ther?’
Sarah’s grandmother did not seem to hear. She did not comment or complain. She lay conscious, eyes open, parts drugged, taking no notice of her surroundings or, much, of her daughter and granddaughter. The hours, then the days, went past, and Sarah sat on, noting with approval how stoically her grandmother died, but listening to the calls from behind the white curtains. ‘Help…help, Mo-ther?’
When it was over, Sarah’s mother said, ‘I hope I do it as well as she did, when my time comes.’
Months have passed. Sarah is looking into her mirror, just as on the evening when we first saw her. At first glance she has not much changed, but a closer look says otherwise. She has aged by ten years. For one thing, her hair, which for so long remained like a smooth dulled metal, now has grey bands across the front. She has acquired that slow cautious look of the elderly, as if afraid of what they will see around the next corner. Sarah has changed, and so have the rooms she lives in. When her daughter telephoned to say she was bringing the children for Christmas, she saw her flat through the eyes of sunny and unproblematical California. What had seemed so difficult for years became easy. In came the painters, and soon her walls blazed white. She cleared out all the junk, and window sills stood clean and empty, and so did tables and the tops of bookshelves. She felt as if a weight had been lifted away out of her rooms, leaving her lighter and freer too. The Cézanne reproduction she did not discard, though if she had it would not have made any difference, so much was it part of her emotional history. Nor did she discard the little photograph of Julie. These did not have pride of place near her desk but were part of a wall of photographs and posters in the spare room. There her grandchildren had lived for a couple of weeks. They scribbled a moustache on the touch-me-not young Harlequin and put spectacles on the thoughtful Pierrot.
She was still travelling a good deal for The Green Bird, because both Julie Vairon and Julie were doing well in various parts of the world. In between she was living at a slower pace than she had. She would sit for hours, looking into her past, trying to shine light into the dark places, even though the past had become a much less productive territory, because of her mother’s death. The old woman had had her wish, for she had fallen dead one morning when she was out shopping. Was Sarah grieving for her? She believed not. She believed she had used up her allowance of grief for her lifetime. What troubled her was that she had not questioned her mother when she could have done, and at the right time, when she was much younger than when Sarah had reached the point of as
king herself questions about her childhood. But perhaps Kate Millgreen would not have been able to answer. She had never been a woman much given to self-examination. Well, Sarah hadn’t been either, until what she now privately thought of as The Calamity had overwhelmed her: but could anything be absolutely bad that had led to so much new understanding?
One day the thought had popped whole and fully fledged into her head, as if it had been waiting there for her to recognize it: Am I really to believe that the awful, crushing anguish, the longing so terrible it seems one’s heart is being squeezed by cruel fingers—all that is only what a baby feels when it is hungry and wants its mother? Is a baby, even if not much larger than a cat, only an empty bag waiting to be filled with milk and then cuddles? That baby is wanting more: It is longing for something just out of its memory; it is longing for where it came from, and when need starts up in its stomach for milk, that need revives another, grander need, just as a small girl may pause in her play, look up, see a sky aflame with sunset and sadness, and find herself stretching up her arms to that lost magnificence and sobbing because she is so utterly exiled.
To fall in love is to remember one is an exile, and that is why the sufferer does not want to be cured, even while crying, ‘I can’t endure this non-life, I can’t endure this desert.’
Another thought, perhaps of a more practical kind: When Cupid aims arrows (not flowers or kisses) at the elderly and old, and brings them to grief, is this one way of hustling people who are in danger of living too long off the stage, to make way for the new?
And whom did she share these thoughts with? With Stephen, though she knew that the sense of him, making him feel so close, like a presence, or another self, was only the projection of her need. And what she was remembering of him was the sweetness of their friendship, a lightness, even the gaiety, of those weeks before he had become hag-ridden, before the murderous black dog had landed with all its weight so finally on his shoulders.