Authors: Margaret Drabble
It was, of course, unrecognizable. It had become a junk room, in effect: there was a bed, which had been made up, and clean thick towels had been put out, in the adjoining bathroom, but the bathroom was almost inaccessible, so full was the room of odd bits of furniture, bookcases, chests bulging open with old curtains, little occasional tables, pictures standing on the floor with their faces to the wall. One of Mrs Bryanston’s nightdresses had been laid out upon the bed, an act of gentility which looked out of place amidst so much disorder. Seeing it, Rose was almost waylaid into speculation about why her mother had married her father – family pressure, apathy, greed? – as she sat down on the bed by the empty nylon gown, its stiff arms folded across its empty heart in a pious, neat gesture of prayer, but she could feel this as a false trail, she hesitated at the turning and went on down the corridor of memory, finding a clue in those crossed arms and angled elbows, praying, was it, yes, she used to pray, Noreen had taught her to say her prayers, Our Father which art in heaven, and she still prayed, occasionally, not incessantly as she had done through childhood, but every now and then a natural or man-made calamity would push her imperiously to her knees, a massacre, an earthquake, a drowning, and she would implore justice, mercy, intercession, explanation, not praying any more for herself, as she had once so futilely done, not even aware that she had ceased to do so, wondering even as she knelt whether there were any use in such genuflections, and yet pushed down as
certainly as if a hand had descended on her head to thrust her from above, crushing her hair and weighing on her skull. And what it came to was this: did God, despite the fact that Noreen had believed him to exist, exist in fact, or not? Ha, she said to herself, that’s it, I’ve got it: she was nearly there, and yes, she was there, the memory of standing in Noreen’s room, a wicked intruder, silently observing empty clothes and full drawers, had brought back to her yet another act of disobedience, earlier in time than those silent visits, but similar in nature, it had been a day in winter, a wet rainy day, she could not have been more than six at the time, though it is hard to date events, but she remembered the dress she was wearing, a dark blue and red woollen check with a sash sewn into the dress, she had worn it on her sixth birthday. It had been raining all day, wet gusts of rain, squalls and sudden silences, and she had grown tired of watching the rooks rise and swirl from the bare trees in their huge wet eddies; the acute boredom of her childhood had seized her so passionately that she had ached in every bone, and had set off, desperate, to find some act so desperate that it would distract her mind from the dullness of total despair. The thought of going into Noreen’s bedroom had not at that age occurred to her – perhaps Noreen had not yet moved into the house, perhaps she was still living in the village, visiting daily, she could not remember – but she was as strongly tempted by her parents’ rooms, also forbidden ground. They were away from home, her parents: her mother abroad for the winter, her father in London, so there would be nobody to see her, if she crept in quietly. So up she went, and shut herself in, and proceeded to inspect the objects on her mother’s dressing-table – cut-glass powder bowls, silver brushes with bristles too soft and yellow to brush, little pots and jars with silver gilt tops. There was no jewellery about except a broken string of pearls: everything else had been locked away. Rose put the pearls on and pulled a few faces at herself in the glass. She also powdered her nose with a large pink musty-smelling powder puff. Then, feeling boredom creep up behind her again like a wolf in a story, she leapt up with a pretence of eagerness that was really fear (a pretence for herself alone, there being no other spectators) – and
made off into the bathroom. There she fiddled with the shower and fingered the face flannels and drank some water out of a tooth mug, and finally drew, mesmerized, closer and closer to her father’s box of razor blades.
She knew about razor blades. Mrs Amery in the kitchen had a razor blade with which she sharpened pencils to write shopping lists. Rose had often watched the soft curved shavings fall. And she had wanted to have a go herself, but Mrs Amery would never let her: in fact Noreen and Mrs Amery had had words about that razor blade, Noreen contending that it was not a suitable object to leave lying about, even out of reach on the top shelf of the dresser, whereupon Rose had asked why razor blades were so dangerous, and Noreen had replied that such a blade would cut you as soon as look at you. This curious phrase had given the razor blade, to Rose, a peculiarly active potentiality, and she had spent much time gazing up to the shelf where she knew it to lie concealed, hoping it might take it into its head to look at her and leap down. She could not help feeling that Noreen had maligned it, that it could not possibly be as dangerous as Noreen implied – for so many things were not, wet grass was not, for instance, nor fresh bread, nor fruit cake, nor wet socks, nor cold milk, nor reading with a torch under the bedclothes. Being as yet neither blind, rheumatic, nor choked with permanent indigestion, Rose had decided, at the age of six, that Noreen consistently overestimated the dangers of the natural world. And now, finding herself alone with a packet of blades, she decided that she would put Noreen to the test. Carefully, nervously (for after all Noreen might have been right), she opened the box, and took out a single blade wrapped in an envelope of paper. Slowly she unwrapped the paper: it was greasy, the blade inside was covered with the thinnest film of grease, ready for action, delicately preserved. She held it between the flat of her finger and thumb, naked. She watched it. It did not move, it did not tremble. She was, in a way, disappointed: she had half-expected blood to flow as soon as she had unwrapped it, from some unspecified part of her body. She expected it to leap from her hand and attack her, like a magic sword which needs no master.
Cut, cut, Noreen would say, rubbing her magic lamp in her cottage in the village, and the blade would fly from between Rose’s small fingers and attack her, at the distant command.
Instead, it remained disappointingly, reassuringly inert. Rose stared at it. I’m a fool, she thought (which she wasn’t, not nearly as foolish as her fears suggested), of course it can’t cut me if the edge isn’t touching me.
And so, carefully, she took hold of the blade in a firm grip, and applied it to the ball of the thumb on her left hand. At first she expected blood to leap to meet the blade, as fire leaps from the smokey wick of a candle to meet a lighted match, but what happened was in a way even more startling. The blade touched the thumb, barely touched it, simply rested on it, she could feel nothing, no cut, nothing (and perhaps at this point she pressed a little harder, she could not remember) – and then, suddenly, quite suddenly, blood was flowing, oozing, pouring, dripping from her thumb. She dropped the blade in terror. It was true, it would cut as soon as look. The blood poured. There was no pain, no sensation. She calmly turned on the tap and put her thumb under it, for the wound was nothing in the scale of childhood, which spends most of its time bleeding, bruising, falling, thumping, grazing: and as she stood there, her thumb growing colder and colder, it went thump thump in her head, the pulse of her dying thumb with its little whorls turning whiter, and she knew that it was all true, everything that Noreen said, rheumatism, rotten teeth, blindness, hell fire, devils, torments, betrayals, endless burning, the rack, the wheel and the screw, and oh help, even remembering it now, years later, it all came pumping back, horror after horror, the flaying of Marsyas hanging in the drawing-room, all that bleeding flesh and sinew and Apollo’s grinning face, dead rabbits, a child with its hand caught in its butcher father’s mincing machine, decapitations, My Lai, horror and bleeding and damnation, she had seen nothing on that tour of Europe but horrors, Saint Ursula and her virgins all dying on the shore, blood spouting from their necks, the loving detail of their severed carotid arteries, crucifixions with Christ bleeding and green, twisted on a flaming hillside in the blackness of man’s unutterable wickedness,
and worst of all that piece in the Grunig Museum called the
Judgement of Cambyses
, where a corrupt judge was being flayed alive before Cambyses and his impassive court, mesmerized she had stared at it, the open flesh, how could he have brought himself to paint it, day after day, week after week, the painter, from what model could he have taken such a subject? In the same room had hung David’s
Baptism
, calm, delightful: in the foreground grew violets and spring flowers, perfect, fragile, hopeful. Christ’s feet in the water, with the gentle water and the yellow flags, but they had crucified him, they had driven nails through those feet.
So, it had all seemed true. Razors cut, Christ was crucified, man was wicked, Hell was open. It is even true, thought Rose, ruefully, sitting quietly on the bed, it is even true that wet grass gives one rheumatism. She had suffered from rheumatism all her life, a legacy from disobedience, aggravated by the damp of the semi-basement at Middle Road, but surely initiated here, on the damp lawns, in the sodden undergrowth. It had all come about as Noreen had predicted: there had been no appeal from her darker pronouncements. And it being so, thought Rose, sitting there, thinking a thought that had come to her a million times, it being so, what can I do, what can I do to be saved? She smiled even, visibly, as the words came into her head, they were such old familiars, and she had so long abandoned hope of salvation through faith or through works, they had appeared in so many guises, the words, desperate, anguished, weeping, mocking, flippant, or as now rather sad and worn and ghostly: and yet, suddenly, it came back to her, perhaps through the influence of the room, or perhaps through a book in the bookshelf opposite her, on which her eyes must have been vaguely focused, and which now, in a fusion of attention and memory, revealed itself to be the old nursery copy of
Pilgrim’s Progress
, that fierce companion, that bitter solace. What shall I do to be saved, Pilgrim had said. It had been her favourite book. The journeys, the hazards, the faith-created mirage of a heavenly city. Frightened, a little, she got up off the bed, and went over to the shelf, and took it out: crouching, unwilling to commit herself to sitting down with it, she turned the pages. There they all were, Apollyon, Faithful beheaded, the Slough of Despond, the
river, and all the trumpets sounding for him on the other side. Next to the book, stood
Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners:
she got that down and looked at it. That too she had read too often, and there it still was, that dreadful account of neurosis and woe. She had marked passages, as a child, as an adolescent: there were the pencil marks. Bunyan grieving for his sin, praying for grace, worrying old scriptures as a dog worries a bone, worrying whether he could be one of the elect, worrying about the birthright of Esau. She had marked heavily one paragraph: it said:
‘Now I blessed the condition of the dog and toad, and counted the estate of everything that God had made far better than this dreadful state of mine and such as my companions was: yea, gladly would I have been in the condition of a dog or horse, for I knew they had no soul to perish under the everlasting weights of hell for sin, as mine was like to do … I saw this, felt this, and was broken to pieces with it …’ and she had written,
see
page 59
, and looking, obeying her past self, she saw that she had underlined
‘… and after long musing, I lifted up my head, but methought I saw as if the sun that shineth in the very heavens did grudge to give light, and as if the very stones in the street, and tiles upon the houses, did bend themselves against me; methought they all combined together to banish me out of the world; I was unfit to dwell among them. Oh, how happy now, was every creature over what I was; for they stood fast and kept their station, but I was gone and lost.’
Gone and lost, gone and lost. Yes, that was the way it had been. How easy it was to underestimate what had been endured. Oh, how happy now was every creature. For years of my life, Rose thought, I remember it now, I would have changed place with any living thing. One forgets the dreadful pain, the conviction that one is marked. I used to wake in the mornings, at the age of what – nine, ten? – and pray to fall asleep, pray to die in my sleep, pray to be utterly deprived of consciousness. The very stones I envied, for they were innocent, and could neither do nor suffer wrong. How slowly I learned to live, to make myself forget.
Grace Abounding.
She stared at it. It still frightened her, there was something in it still, some power for pain, even though she had confronted
the words that Bunyan wrote – suppressed words, no doubt about it, she had suppressed them, wisely enough, because seeing them again now she knew that she knew them by heart. But had not thought of them for years. The mind, as well as its own torments, has its own remissions. She turned the pages again: and there it was, the final blow, the lurking horror, as disagreeable as the caterpillar she had once pressed by accident in her flower book. But this was no caterpillar, it looked innocent enough, it was a birthday card, used, one might think, as a bookmark, marking the lines, I was bound, but he was free: if God come not in, thought I, I will leap off the ladder even blindfold into eternity, sink or swim, come heaven come hell, Lord Jesus, if thou will catch me, do, if not, I will venture for thy name – a statement of heroic neurotic nonchalance that expressed more or less Rose’s present theological position. The card, in marked contrast to the text, was cheerful and floral: it showed a bowl of flowers in a cottage window. Rose, seeing it, blushed. She felt the blood in her face, her hair gently rising. It was a card she had bought for herself, to send to herself, on her fifteenth birthday, when she was away at school for the first time. The misery, the humiliation. Birthdays had been a big thing at her boarding school: there was a special tea, for each birthday child, and the whole school would sing ‘Happy Birthday’. The child was allowed to put her cards on her dressing-table (usually denied ornament) and to open her gifts in the morning, after breakfast, instead of going straight to class. This system, agreeable enough in some ways, had produced a ferocious atmosphere of competition: girls boasted of the quantity of post, the lavishness of gifts, the warmth of ovation from the school. Rose dreaded the approach of her birthday from the first week there. Impossible to conceal the date, as she had once thought of doing: birthdays, in the dearth of other interesting topics, were a subject for endless discussion, and were easily discovered from the school register. She dreaded it. Even the least conspicuous, least friended girls received a respectable pile of post on their birthdays, from family, from friends at home. Rose knew that she would receive nothing. For weeks she lay awake at night, wondering how she could endure the humiliation, the surprised glances, the tactful enquiries, the
sadistic sympathy. She lost her appetite, she could neither eat nor sleep, and her hair began to drop out. She developed a huge bald patch in the middle of her head: Sister said it was alopecia and asked Rose if anything was worrying her. No, said Rose, and brushed her hair over the patch so that it did not show. One night, lying awake, she thought, I could buy myself a card, and write in it a false name, and post it, and that would make sure that I had at least one card on my birthday. The idea had seemed brilliant and corrupt. I can’t do a thing like that, she told herself, I can’t, I really can’t: and when, on their weekly visit to the shops, she found herself secretly buying the floral card, she told herself that it was not for herself but for a friend. As the days passed before her birthday, she struggled with temptation: she felt it behind her, as Bunyan did, pulling at her clothes. It would be so simple, to send the card, to claim a friend in the town, to be mysterious and discreet about her: it was surely an act morally neutral, a legitimate act of self-protection, a reasonable compensation for a sin in no way her own? Who would blame her, who would not pity her, if they knew the truth? Why should she suffer, needlessly? It was not as though one card would rescue her: she would still, receiving one card only be an object of contempt, she would have achieved no dramatic success by fraud, she would have deceived nobody.