Marnie (36 page)

‘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 wrong 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.’

‘You argue like Mark.’

‘Your husband?’

‘My husband.’

‘Tell me about him.’

‘He’s no longer important.’

‘Sometimes, Marnie, I feel very guilty, going off to sea the way I did, first letting Edie take the brunt of Dad and then letting you take the brunt of Edie. Somehow I’ve got to stay
now and help you – try to help you – to see things right.’

We turned up Belgrave Road. I said: ‘I know you helped years ago. I think in a way you’ve helped now. But there isn’t any carry on from here – between us, I mean.
Tomorrow or the next day you’ll go back to Liverpool, and I shall go – wherever I decide to go. If we talked this over to the end of our lives there wouldn’t be an easy answer,
because an easy answer – or an answer of any sort – I mean, it probably doesn’t exist. You’ve told me your side of the story. Lucy’s told me hers. But the one who
could really tell me everything, from the inside, can’t any longer. All my life she fed me with lies and she’s gone to the grave never saying a word. That’s a fact. There’s
no getting round it, and I have to live with it – if I want to live at all. And the only way I can live with it is fighting it out myself alone. So will you leave me now? I’ll come home
later. I can’t face that house yet. I expect I’ll be back some time tonight.’

He put his hand on my arm, and we stopped. ‘Marnie, will you promise to come back?’

‘Yes. I promise.’

‘I’d rather stay with you.’

‘I’d rather be alone.’

When he had gone, I turned back down Belgrave Road and began to walk back along the promenade. The wind was behind me now and it kept whipping at my skirt and thumping me in
the back as if I ought to hurry.

The sun had just set, and there was a smear like a blood-stain in the sky over to the west, and the sea kept tumbling against the wall and then sucking itself away again. Two nuns were coming
along the promenade and the wind was making ugly wings of their habits. They struggled past me, not looking up, their heads bent against the wind.

Well, I suppose I could go and be a nun. That would be one solution, getting rid of my sickness on God. If I took the veil I was at least out of harm’s way. Or I could go to the opposite
end of the seesaw and try some top-pressure whoring. I wondered if there were any professional whores in Torquay. I wondered how you went about it.

Or were the stones the best way out? Over these railings, and the sea would soon take away all the remains. That was easiest. In order to live, there had to be a reason for living, even if that
reason was only staying alive. I hadn’t any. The can was empty.

Funny, I thought, I’m free. Free for the first time in my life. I’ve told myself this twice before today, and it should have given me a thrill. Well, it hasn’t.

What was the difference? Mother was dead, and she’d left a poisonous smear behind like a snail that’s gone underground. But my sickness lay deep, deep, deeper than that.

I stood by the rails and got hold of them hard and then I went one by one over the things that had made life pleasant enough during those long months working in Birmingham and in Manchester and
in Barnet. I counted them and not one of them helped me. I’d a mainspring gone. My life had been turned inside out like some gigantic awful conjuring trick, and I was like an animal turned
physically, disgustingly inside out, walking the wrong way, looking cross-eyed, split down the middle of my soul.

I got moving again. I went past the Pavilion and then turned away from the sea towards the town. It was quieter and less blustery here, and there were quite a lot of people about. But it
wasn’t like Plymouth.

I walked up the main street. I turned into the pub on the corner and ordered a brandy. Although it wasn’t long after opening time the place was nearly full. The man next to me had a mouth
like the back of a lorry that falls down to let the gravel out. He was talking about the football match he’d been to last week. ‘We was playing twelve men,’ he kept saying.
‘Twelve men. The ref. ought to’ve been strung up. Little runt. Twelve men we was playing. If it’s the same tomorrow I’ll do for him.’

The man next to him started eyeing me. He was a little type in a check cap, and his eyes were all over. You could see what he was thinking; I didn’t need to be Edie’s daughter for
that.

It was getting as smoky as an opium den in here already. The bar was wet and the barmaid, a fat black-haired girl, wiped it over with a cloth. I only had to smile at check-cap, just the one
smile. He’d do the rest. I thought, what are you scared of? Coming to have a child and murdering it and living with that all the rest of your life? Wanting sex and telling yourself you hate
it and it’s dirty? Is that what you’ll come to?

Well, what was stealing but lies? Why did I blame mother more than myself?

I turned away from check-cap and took my drink to a table. There was this one woman sitting at it. She was about forty and she was floppy, with big eyes and big lips and big comfortable breasts.
She was wearing the sort of dress and coat I’d have worn five years ago before I began to learn. She said: ‘Hullo, dear. Hot, ain’t it?’ One of those brown ale voices.