Ghosting (3 page)

Fate had ordained Leonid Pasternak to travel to the Holy Land in 1924. He had been commissioned by a Parisian art journal to produce
a series of paintings of the people and the landscape. He also did a variety of drawings and sketches—figures with long flowing robes and turbaned heads, donkeys with huge loads, street scenes in Jerusalem, caravans in the desert, the Tomb of Rachel, a Palestinian city wall in dark chocolate brown with a gunpowder gate.

In an office in London some sixty years later, the publisher of Pasternak's memoirs held transparencies of these pictures up to the light and wept.

“I must buy them,” he said when he telephoned me out of the blue to ask where he could see the originals.

“They're not for sale,” I said, explaining the background and the firm resolve of the Pasternak sisters.

“You don't understand,” he said. “I
have
to have them. It's imperative. They remind me of my childhood, my homeland. It's all gone now, all destroyed.
I have to have those pictures.”

After some discussion we made an arrangement to go together to Oxford, where he would meet Josephine Pasternak and offer to buy the paintings of Palestine.

“But she won't sell,” I said emphatically.

“She'll sell to me,” he said, and put down the phone.

And she did sell, which was astonishing. The Josephine I had come to know was determined and high-minded. She embodied a rich cross-cultural mix—a kind of enlightened Puritanism and intense aestheticism. She had studied philosophy in Berlin and had written on Aristotle. And though her European intellectual rigour was tempered by a soulfulness recognisably Russian in origin, she was erudite, firm of purpose, strong-minded and disarmingly candid. But in the presence of the publisher's fine plumage and splendid colours, this sensible woman became girlish and coquettish.
The exotic bird, confident of his charm, prepared for his courtly dance, sticking out his glorious chest and flapping his wings, all the while cooing and wooing, warbling and trilling. He eulogised the artist, he emoted over the lost land of Palestine, he flattered and fawned, buttered and oiled. It was a spectacular show, fascinating to watch. After a feeble fight Josephine Pasternak succumbed to the seductive display. She sold him the paintings.

On the way back to London, there was jubilation.

“You see, I told you I would do it,” he puffed.

“Yes, you did,” I said.

“What an amazing woman she is,” he said.
“Formidable”’

“Yes, she is,” I said.

“Pasternak—I like the name. Is it Russian?”

“Yes, it means ‘parsnip.’ “

“Parsnip?
Parsnip? You're
pulling my leg!”

“No.”

“What a shame. Such a nice woman and she's called parsnip.”

During the journey I heard a lot about other successes—business deals, theatrical productions, film ventures, publishing coups. The list was mesmerising and seemingly without end. He talked quickly, with alarming enthusiasm, an unEnglish fanaticism, hardly pausing to breathe, the words tumbling over one another. There was a passion and an urgency in everything he said, and occasionally the suggestion of an intimacy, as if he were sharing a terrible family secret. He constantly touched my arm as he talked, sometimes cuffing it with the back of his hand or patting it gently, sometimes clutching it suddenly as if to prevent a fall, mostly holding it for a few seconds in his strong grip. His voice ranged over two octaves at least, the pitch in perfect equilibrium with the level of emotion. It was another breathtaking performance.

And now it was my turn to be seduced. During the journey I had said very little—there was no need—but as we neared London he started asking about my life and what had led to my translating Pasternak's memoirs. He listened intently and then surprised me by saying that he had always wanted to publish foreign language books and that I must come to work in his publishing company and manage the Russian list. There had to be a catch. If you have three children under five it is possible to believe that you will never work again, that you will never read anything other than bedtime stories. And yet here I was being offered an interesting, brain-alive job, working from home in my own time, as much as I could manage to fit in with the children. There was no catch, at least none I could see. The salary would be £5000 plus expenses—“All my girls start on £5000 a year, isn't it?”—and I was to begin straightaway. I was to travel from Scotland to attend editorial meetings, work for a day or two a month in the London offices, and the rest of the time I could be at home and keep in touch by telephone. It seemed too good to be true. We shook hands on it in the back of the Roller.

He then told the chauffeur to take a detour to his offices where he would show me round.

“You are going to enjoy working for me. I have a good feeling about it. My motto is when we work, we work, and when we play, we play. That way everybody is happy, isn't it?”

As we climbed the stairs to the top of the building I pondered his interesting use of the “isn't it?” tag. There are terrible complications in the English language when it comes to inviting someone to agree with you or to confirm what you've just said. Most languages make do with a one-size-fits-all solution along the lines of
nest-ce pas?
or
¿no verdad?
or
nicht wahr?
But in English there is no single phrase that can be used on all occasions to mean “isn't
that so?” And so the unsuspecting are ensnared by opting for a simple isn't it? When actually what is needed is an
aren't they?
or a
didn't she?
or a
can you?
It hardly seems fair.

We arrived in a spacious penthouse overlooking the heart of Soho. The first thing I noticed were the pictures on the walls—not the gentle landscapes of the Holy Land I might have expected, but an assortment of naked or semi-naked women and several large cats clawing their way out of gilt-edged frames. But the centrepiece, mounted on the wall behind the leather-topped desk, was not a painting at all: it was a huge tiger skin and head. Apart from the fact that it was dead, it seemed very alive, its bold orange and black stripes setting the wall ablaze.

“You like it?” he asked, motioning me to sit down opposite him at the desk. “I call him Kaiser. You know what is Kaiser?” And then, as if it explained everything, he added, “My father fought on the side of the Germans in the First World War.”

“Where did you get it?” I asked, keen to show an interest.

He smiled. It was evidently the right question. With obvious pride and joy, he told me it had been shot after escaping from a German zoo. But originally it had come from South China—the very best tigers lived there and only about thirty of them were left in the wild. Every part of the tiger could be used—skin, claws, liver, bones and blood could all be made into potions and drunk to make you live longer. Even the whiskers could cure toothache. He had had to pay a lot of money for it—“It cost
a fortune!”
—but it was worth every penny. And he launched into a passionate discourse on the tiger's qualities—its nobility, its power, its courage, its strength, its mysterious aura. The tiger was admired and feared at the same time, he said, its claws were sharper than a razor blade, and it could cover ten yards in a single leap. He described its
method of hunting, how it waited patiently and in solitude to catch its prey, biting the throat of animals twice its size.

“I identify with the tiger,” he said, without a hint of abashment. “The tiger eats everything, but
nothing
eats him. He will even eat a crocodile if he wants to! He is King of the Mountain, King of the Forest, King of the World.”

He drew himself up, regally, in his chair. The tiger's head was just above the talking head, its eyes shining brightly, curiously round and manlike. For just a second, in that little corner where fantasy and reality collide, the two heads merged and became one.

“What would you like me to call you?” I asked as we shook hands on parting.

“You can call me what you like,” he said. “I shall call you Beloved—all the girls who work for me are Beloved—but you can call me whatever you want.”

“In that case,” I said, “I shall call you Tiger.”

“I like it,” he said, and kissed my hand.

When people talk about their childhood, everything tends to be lumped together, glossed over, captured in the one word “happy,” or the other “unhappy.” I'm not sure I believe either word. For a start, happiness is a rare blue moon sort of thing. The most anyone gets is a sense of harmony with the world, contentment perhaps, but even that is quite rare. As for unhappiness, well, that is quite hard to sustain through all the new dawns and fresh hopes. Besides, you can get over most wounds inflicted in the early years. Even if they remain as little pinpricks on the surface of your skin, they serve the purpose of “placing” you in the world, giving you an argument with it. Psychologists have told us that bad things are passed down the line—cruelty, ignorance, secrets and lies. The persecuted become persecutors, the abused become abusers. Yes, but the chain can always be broken, provided the last link wants it enough.

All narratives are suspect, unreliable. The stories we tell to make sense of our lives are essentially made up. We tell these stories to protect ourselves from the existential nightmare scenario—the idea that our lives have no pattern, are going nowhere. We grapple
with the notion that ordinary life is absurd, contingent, accidental, full of chance. The concept of randomness is hard to bear, so the mind scampers around to impose a structure on random bits of experience. A humming-bird takes to the air and the tide of human history is altered.

To understand the world is a basic human longing, powerful and urgent. The idea that there is rarely any point to anything is not to be borne. So the child in this story looked back and tried to understand. Here is some of what was understood: that not everything in the literal world can be made sense of, that you sometimes have to leave it behind and enter the poetic world where making sense is optional; that things are often not what they seem; that language is precarious, that sometimes there is not a name for what you feel; that you take love where you find it; that even when everything is concealed you can end up being open to the world.

In the small Fife town where I grew up, no one went abroad much. The minister at our church, the Reverend Musk, claimed to have a son called Chad who was a missionary in Africa. Africa was about as abroad as it was possible to be. Each Sunday, after a sermon about God's mercy and just damnation, we prayed for Chad, insincerely in my case. We had never met Chad Musk, never even seen photographs of him, and with a name like that it was impossible to believe in his existence. The Scots are famed for being explorers, but the pioneering instinct seemed to have passed us by. Mining was the thing in our town. Underground, not overground.

Travel, insofar as anyone did it, seemed to narrow the mind further. The place looked in on itself, suspicious of anyone or anything
that didn't belong. The town's only famous daughter was Jennie Lee and, in our household at any rate, she too was regarded with mistrust. Too radical, too fervent, too much an iconoclast. And to make matters worse she had gone to England and married a Welshman, a fellow socialist who had had the gall to oppose Churchill during the war. “It just goes to show,” said my mother, as she so often did, but quite what it went to show or how or why was never made clear.

Being a child is a job like any other. Some children are good at it, others never quite master it. You understand quite early on that the job consists mainly in trying to please adults, but though I tried to please adults quite a lot, they hardly ever seemed pleased with me. As a child I was vaguely aware of disappointing my parents without ever intending to or understanding quite how it happened. The atmosphere at home was thick with ill-defined threats and admonishments.
You'll get what's coming to you, you're in for your just deserts, you won't know what's hit you.
What on earth did it all mean?
Just deserts
were unfathomable; on the other hand wasn't it obvious that I would get something if it was indeed coming my way, and why would I not
know
what had hit me? It was all very mysterious. Sometimes my father threatened to knock someone
into the middle of next week,
which, despite not being able to imagine what that might involve, I especially dreaded, even though he usually made a point of adding, as if by way of polite afterthought,
if you're not careful.
I was never absolutely sure about what being careful might entail, or how it might be achieved. Nothing was adequately explained. Questions were hardly ever permitted. It felt dangerous sometimes even to think about asking why.

Nowadays children have to be engaged in creative play; they have to be stimulated and nurtured so that they can achieve their full potential. Babies have to be given educational toys in order to increase brain activity, toddlers have to have their cognitive skills sharpened up by special diets and flash cards. But in the fifties and early sixties, provided you didn't bother your parents too much, it was perfectly acceptable to be aimless and unmotivated.

Our front door was painted red and it was opened with a flourish every morning by my mother. The earlier it was opened, the better she appeared to feel. There would be a hint of triumph in her swagger along our hallway. It was not clear to me why opening the door, or more precisely opening the door bright and early with such verve, could in itself lead to a sense of wellbeing. But I remember feeling glad that she was glad. When the sun shone, a curtain was drawn across the shiny tiled vestibule to stop the red paint blistering. Red was my mother's favourite colour—red doors, red garden gate, red carpets, red Formica in the kitchen. I pretended to like red too. Other houses had lobbies where our vestibule was. I wasn't allowed to say
lobby
because lobby was common. I had to remember to say
vestibyhool.
I sometimes practised whispering it to myself again and again. I could make it sound like bullets flying through the air.

Our house was large and smelled of damp and old potatoes. The smell came from the cellar. It seeped through the floorboards and hung in the cold air. Most of the houses in the streets round where we lived did not have cellars. I secretly envied my friends their lack of cellars, and many other things besides. The other houses were in the scheme, which was evidently not a good place to be. There was talk of coal being kept in the bath, furniture being bought on the
never-never. According to my mother, the people from the housing scheme had no
finesse.
Was a finesse like a cellar, I wondered? I decided quite early on that our finesse was probably part of our large bathroom, a place which gave rise to particular perplexity on account of its being strictly out of bounds to members of the family except on Sunday evenings.

The bathroom was my mother's pride and joy. My best friend's house had a lavvy, but we had a bathroom. It was a long narrow room with a very high ceiling and no heating. The red bath mat and towels were neatly folded over a towel rack made of wood and painted red. All the mats and towels had a huge embroidered C denoting our family name, though none of the family was ever permitted to use them. My mother said they were just for show—a potent concept in our family. In addition to the thick red carpet there were two woven rugs, both red, one at the door, the other curved round the toilet bowl. The toilet bowl had a red seat and lid. The lid was kept closed at all times. Like the lounge, and just as cold, the bathroom was reserved for the use of chance visitors. It was therefore also a source of great anxiety to my mother since it had to be kept clean at all times in case someone needed to use it.

In reality, hardly anyone visited us by chance. But in my mother's world, uncertainty was pernicious and had to be guarded against at all times. Only on Sunday evenings, therefore, when it was absolutely certain that no one would call, were we allowed a bath. This was quite a ritual and one attended by my mother's thin-lipped umbrage. She approached it in the spirit appropriate to arranging a hanging—it was something that had to be done but there was no joy to be had in it. As if to set an example, she herself never had a bath. In much the same way as she believed that washing machines didn't wash—at least not
properly
—and electric
mixers didn't mix, so she believed that having a bath didn't get you properly clean.

My brother and I always had the first bath since our father's dirtiness was deemed to be greater than the combined grime of two children. And during our bath the stove in the kitchen could be stoked to provide a top-up of hot water for our father. In winter the air temperature in the bathroom was so cold that getting out of the water required huge mental discipline followed by a mad dash to the kitchen where our pyjamas were warming on a rail by the stove. By then my father would be stripped down to his underpants, ready for his dash in the opposite direction. Waiting for our father to arrive back in the kitchen, goose-pimpled and raging at the world, was a time filled with fear and anticipation, at once sweet and sharp. He would burst through the kitchen door, bent like a question mark, an improbable survivor of some natural disaster, his face seeming to contain all the agony of mankind. The scene that followed, it now seems to me, was something out of the theatre of the absurd: there was an apparent absence of purpose, a lack of harmony with the surroundings, a sadness to the point of anguish, but also a kind of laconic comedy. While my father ranted and raved, fighting all the while with his towel, taming it into submission in an effort to get warm and dry, my mother performed an emotional
pas-de-deux,
alternately pleading and reproaching, her mouth tight and hard, waiting for him to be calm so that she could undertake the radical cleaning of the bathroom.

For the next part of the drama, however, there was absolute quiet. The scene was sombre but curiously edifying, a kind of Victorian death-bed moment. My father, now dry, would go to a corner of the kitchen, turn his back on us, drop his towel and bend down to step into his pyjamas. This was the moment worth waiting
for, the fascination and appallingness of it undiminished by its weekly repetition. For there, hanging down between my father's legs, was a sort of pouch, loose and macerated like an oven-ready bird and, to make matters worse, there was another bit, peeping out from the base of the pouch, a pink dangly thing. When my father raised first one leg, then the other, to enter his pyjamas, the pink dangly thing moved as if it had a life independent of my father's bare body. No one ever said anything. The wrinkled arrangement between his legs was clearly some unspeakable deformity, which my father to his eternal shame had to endure. I felt sorry for him, and sometimes when he was angry with me I made allowances for him because of his misfortune.

Mostly he was not angry with me, however, and much of the time we got on well. I helped him in the garden, and he praised me when I did things exactly right. Everyone else's father was a coalminer but mine was a market gardener. Before I was born, he had been a building contractor, but he never spoke of that time. My mother mentioned it sometimes, but only during the worst rows when she would use it as a taunt. He had had his own business with two lorries, but there had been a fire in the garage and no insurance. Some of the burnt out garage still stood like a rebuke in what had been the builders’ yard and inside its shell there were the charred remains of the lorries with the words
EDWARD CRAWFORD BUILDER
just legible on the sides.

My father taught me many things: how to sow brassicas, how to remove side-shoots from tomato plants without damaging the main stem, how to prick out bedding plants using a wooden template and a dibble, how to write
Mesembryanthemum
so neatly that it fitted onto a wooden label measuring only two and a half inches. The common name for
Mesembryanthemum
is
Livingstone Daisy,
which has exactly the same number of letters and sounds much better, but because the two words had to be separated by a space it was impossible to fit them onto the label. I also learned from my father how to drown baby mice in a rain barrel, crush a clipshear between my thumbnails, and assist in the skinning of a rabbit.