The Private Parts of Women (3 page)

My head aches. Perhaps I regret the rectangles. I don't know. I strain to see round the edges of the things I remember, to remember the things outside the frame that I wilfully did not see. Or wilfully did not feel.

I used to photograph sunrises and sunsets. One year, when Robin was a baby, we rented a house on the Isle of Skye. And because I was feeding at funny times I would be awake to see the sky lighten and I'd photograph the rosy or greenish or pearl grey dawn. And late at night – it must have been midsummer to have made it so late – I'd try and capture the sunset, the fantastic rose, gold, lilac, lime, all the incredible colours. I don't develop colour film, so I took them to the studio but when I got them back I was disappointed. I didn't say. Richard liked them. A pile of shiny colours, skies, clouds, vanishing sun, but still, lying on the kitchen table they seemed dead things. Of course they did, because the magic was in the sky itself, in the transience of the light. Impossible to shrink it through a camera lens. Audacity to think you can keep it. You might as well spear a butterfly with a pin.

I'd forgotten until now, but last night, just as I was drifting off to sleep, which I make myself do by drinking hot milk, honey and a good shot of Scotch, I heard singing – hymns. A loud, strong, woman's voice and the thump of a beat, maybe her foot on the floor. It could only have been Trixie, though I would not have thought such a voice could come from her she looks so done in, sort of defeated. ‘Onward Christian Soldiers' she sang, and ‘He Who Would Valiant Be' and I went to sleep trying to remember the words. I used to love singing hymns at school. I wonder if children still sing hymns like that in assembly. I wonder if my children will?

THE DEVIL

If I screw up my eyes and try to picture my mother as she appeared to me as a child, I see fine wriggly scribbles that were the strands of escaped hair. Before she was ill her hair was black and though she pulled it back, coiled it at the nape of her neck and stuck it with long, pearl-headed pins, little fizzes always sprang up around her hairline. I see her hair first, then hear the swish of her skirt, the invisible legs moving inside. When she was well and clean she always smelled of lily-of-the-valley. She had ivory skin and brown eyes. Her eyebrows were clear, straight and black. Her head was neat and oval as a wooden doll's.

Before she was ill she sometimes used to stand on the dining-room table with a tablecloth wrapped round her and recite, ‘The Wreck of the Hesperus'. She would put one hand to her brow, and the other to her heart and sob her way through the last lines:

At daybreak, on the bleak sea-beach a fisherman stood aghast,

To see the form of a maiden fair lashed close to a drifting mast
.

The salt sea was frozen on her breast, the salt tears in her eyes;

And he saw her hair, like the brown sea-weed, on the billows fall and rise
.

But only when Father was out.

Father's skin was always closely shaved and he smelled of his pipe tobacco and Silvikrin hair tonic. I remember the feel of his newly shaved cheek, silk smooth if you stroked one way, cat's tongue rough the other. I must have been very young to have been allowed to, to have wished to, touch his face like that. Although his skin was so well shaved there were bundles of bristles coming out of his nostrils and ears as if he was really stuffed with straw. His eyes were the colour of cloudy ice, frozen with flecks.

I had no brothers or sisters to help bear the burden of my parents.

I don't want to go remembering all that, but somehow I can't seem to help it. The memories are like itches you must try not to scratch but then you forget and you are scratching again and I am remembering and it feels dangerous. I feel like a bad child on a railway track, running through a tunnel just for the risk, haring back down into the darkness of my own past. Back into that big house on a tree-lined road in Holloway, hating that house, sometimes almost blaming it.

I can't blame next door. Inis. But she has set me off. What is it about her? I don't know. What is it about her eyes?

I don't know if the punishment came first. I mean, if the punishments were for the absences or the absences were a result of the punishments.

This was one thing and it doesn't
sound
too bad. I had to stare into a mirror, at my own face. Mother said it was for three hours – it was Mother's punishment. I do not know if it was really three hours. To begin with I had no idea how long an hour was. The end of three hours was as hopelessly distant then as the thought of Christmas in July. I had no control, and no clock. Only the oval mirror in a wooden frame. The mirror was big enough to reflect my face and most of the room behind me, including the locked door. Sometimes Mother would be reflected behind me, standing at my shoulder. In the mirror her face was slightly twisted as if someone had pulled her jaw to one side, narrowed one of her eyes. In the mirror the curly hairs round her forehead looked like stiff wires, though I knew that really they were soft. My own face, too, looked odd. Now I think the glass was warped; then, I was afraid of the odd twist the mirror gave, that made what was familiar so frightening.

‘Look Trixie,' Mother would say, leaning forward so that her face loomed beside my own. ‘Look deep into your eyes. Search your eyes for the truth.' The edge of the glass was bevelled. If I moved my head a little and squinted through my lashes, sometimes I could see rainbows.

‘Don't shut your eyes,' she'd say. ‘Don't blink. I want you to stand there and look inside yourself until you recognise the badness in you. I want you to look until you recognise the Devil, all your badness and lies.'

Then she would leave the room for a long time. There was a window overlooking the street where people passed by, sometimes I heard children shouting. I never shouted. I did not go to the window. I did not leave the mirror. I hardly dared to let my eyes wander from the mirror eyes. I did look at the frame. I think it was mahogany, a deeply polished, warm wood. There were little scratches on the frame and one on the glass made, Father told me, by a diamond; the hardest thing in the physical world.

In the room for oceans of time, there would be only me. I would stand in front of the mirror with my arms folded and stare at the mirror eyes and the longer I stared the less they were my eyes. I cannot explain the dread. It does not
sound
too bad, I think, as a punishment. Not cruel. The mirror eyes were pale. They looked not at me but through me and my face melted away, became a white cloud on the glass, like breath that would condense and run away.

Sometimes I fainted. My face would dissolve around the two dark spots, like frogspawn spots that were the pupils of my eyes. A sick hunger would well up from my bowels and my breath would turn to stone in my lungs and I would swallow as if seized by a dreadful thirst that turned to a thirst for air and I would open my mouth that would turn to a dark gasp in the glass before I fell, seeing through the fizzing sparkle in my head the sinking of my eyes from the glass, their vanishing.

If I did not faint, if my face did not dissolve, I would learn that it was not mine. It lost its meaning as my face or any face. The lips were like two pink worms, fat pink edges of a trap. The cheeks were lumps of meat, the nostrils damp holes. I could stretch it and if I opened the trap I could see teeth and a moving tongue like a snake that the mirror creature had swallowed, that flickered up from inside.

But sometimes even while I was being punished for my absences I would have one. It was all right in the end if I could just be there in the cold room. If I could just remain there for three hours until Mother came back. If I told the lie, ‘Yes Mother, I saw the Devil and I told him to go away.' Then that would be an end of it. We could go and sit by the fire and eat our tea although I did not want it. I was never hungry and had to force the buttered bread and the little cakes down my throat, past the thick snake in my throat. I only wanted to get into my own bed and be alone. I had a rabbit my Auntie Ba had knitted for me when I was a baby, a grey floppy thing, and I liked to curl under the covers in the safe dark and suck his ears.

But sometimes I would not stay. That is why the door was locked, why there were bars on the window, because otherwise, in an absence, my body would not stay in the room. When I came to from an absence in that room I might be bruised where my head had been smashed on the wall, I might have tooth marks on my arm, my clothes might be ripped. I might have nothing on at all. So frightening to find yourself, suddenly, naked and alone in a cold room with a locked door and a prison window and eyes sad and accusing in the mirror, when you looked.

Once I woke in bed with my arms strapped to my sides with soft bandages and dry lint stuffed in my mouth. The doctor was there, solemn with his grey, whiskery face. ‘A fit,' he pronounced. ‘A most hysterical child.' He put his fingers in my mouth and pulled out the lint and it was as if my tongue went with it and I was dumb for a week, afraid to speak, afraid of whose voice was living in my throat.

That was one thing. Mother's punishment. Father's was quite another. And until I knew about the boy, it made no sense.

ADA

Trixie and me and that boy. Why Trixie is the main one I will never understand, not that
he
could ever be. But I saw the opportunities for fun that she did not take. Trixie was a lump and I was her spirit but then I was dumb. I was her good spirit and the boy, oh
he
was her bad.

I watched but then you see I had no strength. I could not move.

I was in Trixie moving slow like underwater. I could not move out till we were a woman.

Being good, being punished when it was not her that did the bad things.

Oh that boy!

Poor Trixie.

But me, being suddenly a young woman.

I could not move till I was a woman in love.

Call me romantic
,

but still I maintain
,

I was born to lo – ove
.

If you could see Trixie's little hands clenched in her lap while my arms wanted to fly in dance, my hair fly, my feet spin …

I was not born to be a child.

But
he
oh some
people
they never grow up.

PARTY

I'm tempted to get a television or a radio at least. I miss noise, chatter. God, how I used to wish it could be quiet. Just for a moment, to coast on a clear smooth wave of silence but there was always something. If it wasn't the children squealing, or the television, Richard's music – lovely music, Handel, Bach, but too persistent – or the radio, and that was my fault, I had the radio on most of the time just to hear a sane, adult, BBC voice, if it wasn't any of those it would be the washing-machine churning, or the kettle rushing up to a boil, taps running, the microwave pinging, Robin's battery robot, Billie's squeaky toys, Richard's bleeper, the alarm-clock, the door-bell, the telephone. Even if it was quiet in the house there was the sound of cars starting up on the road outside, the maddening sound of a car alarm, or sometimes our neighbour's faulty burglar alarm that would go on and on and drive me round the bend, or a siren – somebody else's emergency – and always as a background the grey roar of distant mingled traffic.

If I could just have silence, I used to think or say or sometimes shout, then I would be all right. Now I have silence more or less. I have no TV, radio, no washing-machine. The telephone, like myself, is unconnected and I will leave it that way. No one ever comes to the door. I can hear Trixie's television sometimes, or her singing at night. Cars rarely pass because it's a dead end, and although the main road isn't far away, by some acoustic freak you cannot hear it from here. When I am up in my attic I can hear nothing at all. Funny. We lived in a
nice
suburb, gardens, trees, what you might think of as a quiet place. Now I live in the inner city and it is quieter. What I always wanted. But my mind scrambles quite desperately for distraction.

I want to buy a radio, at least, but I won't. I wonder if I did I'd hear Richard's voice appealing for my return. No, because then he'd be breaking his promise and Richard would never do that.
I
promised, when I phoned that if he leaves me alone, doesn't try to find me, I'll send a postcard every week so they'll know I'm all right. So I do that, cheerful words, pictures that the children will like because of their colours. A red Matisse; a Bonnard with a red checked tablecloth, a woman and a black dog like the dog I used to have. Bonny, that's funny, Bonny, Bonnard. No it's not. I loved that dog. I used to take her to walk along the beach by the golf course in Felixstowe where I grew up, and sometimes right along the beach and across to Bawdsey in a little ferry rowed by an old man. We'd walk on the steep curves of brown shingle, by the sudden plunges of grey water where it was dangerous to swim and then miles across the estuary mud, Bonny's paw prints looping and tangling round the neat twinned line of my footprints that would slowly fill with shining water. Sometimes, she'd roll in a dead fish or sea-gull and have to be bathed when I got home and the whole house would stink of wet dog. She'd follow my dad around, shaking all over him. My mum would grumble about the black hairs that made a wavy ring round the bath and the dog smell. Because I had no brothers or sisters, Bonny was like my sister.

My dad was a doctor. It's funny that I married Richard without even thinking about that. You wouldn't think it was possible to have so little insight. My parents were killed in an aeroplane crash when I was eighteen. I should have been with them. They'd been on holiday in Tuscany. I'd met a boy, my first lover, a fortnight before the holiday and decided I could not go. I could not be parted from him for three weeks – and besides the house would be empty. I pretended I wanted to stay to look after Bonny who had been ill, who would have been miserable in kennels. They were very dubious.