Authors: Margaret Drabble
The tracks are wide and deep like a chasm. I remember seeing pictures of the crash on Finnish television and CNN. I rang my mother that week and we spoke about it. She said the whole area was at a standstill, with ambulances and police cars and television crews. She said she could smell burning.
It’s quite untrue and unfair of her to say that I never rang her. I did, from time to time, but she never sounded very pleased to hear from me. And I’m sure I didn’t forget her fiftieth birthday. I bet it was Isobel that forgot. I’m sure I sent a card and rang, and I think I also sent her some flowers. I suppose I could check my bank statements. But what would be the point in that, at this stage in the game?
I can see it must have been quite a pleasant walk, in its way. There’s a broad mown-grass verge, and some fancy brick and stone work, and there are quite a lot of brightly painted longboats moored along there, with geraniums and dogs and so on. They have names like
Hero
and
Virgo
and
Andromeda
. Mother was right, the classics are not quite dead. There are moorhens and herons, just as she said. People fishing, solitary, patient, hopeless. But it’s also true that as soon as you leave the immediate vicinity of Sainsbury’s, almost everybody, even the fishermen, looks mad or furtive. Nobody looks normal. I probably didn’t look very normal myself. For one thing, I’m still limping. I’m a member of the walking-wounded brigade.
The watery field attracts despair.
You can hear the whine of the trains.
It was easy to identify the place where she fell in. It is marked – though not, of course, on her account – by a post, about three feet high. This post bears the label ‘Canal Gasworks Conservation Area’. Near it there is a black metal bench, on which I sat for a few minutes, thinking of Anna Karenina. I think the whine of the trains had brought her to mind.
I laid my flowers at the foot of the municipal post. Maybe they will attract others, and the place will turn into a shrine. Stranger things have happened.
It’s supposed to be a picnic area, I think. But you’d have to be brave to linger there. Some have. You can see their leavings. Cans, polystyrene boxes, cigarette ends, Kentucky Fried Chicken cartons. I sat there for a while, contemplating. It was neither pleasant nor unpleasant.
I don’t understand why no witnesses have come forward. I don’t understand how she managed to lie in the water for so long. It wasn’t very long, but it was long enough for somebody to have seen her. Somebody must have seen her fall in. The towpath was full of people when I walked along it. Did they all pass by on the other side? I know people don’t like reporting incidents these days, for fear of getting into trouble, or for fear of having to fill in endless forms at police stations, or of wasting time appearing at inquests, but this is ridiculous. A grown woman, floating in the water like Ophelia, by a public towpath, and nobody noticed? Is it likely?
Mrs Jerrold, Cynthia Barclay and Anaïs Al-Sayyab assured me that they thought my mother had been happy, in Africa, in Italy. She hadn’t been making it up, to cheer herself up. I didn’t tell them about her diaries, though I suppose I may, one day. Those three all come out very well from them, after all. It’s Sally who gets the stick. And I’m not sure if Julia would like her appearance much, though she does end up better than she begins, and not many of us manage that.
Here’s a bit of the story that I really don’t understand. According to Mrs Jerrold, my mother never went to Cumae. She never walked
alone up the Via Sacra and heard the immemorial bees. As Mrs Jerrold remembers it, Cynthia did indeed fly back on that Eagle flight at 8.50 a.m. or whenever, having been driven to Naples airport by Valeria. (Valeria’s van broke down on the way back, but that’s another story.) And my mother, according to Mrs Jerrold, sat around with the rest of them in downtown Pozzuoli, drinking coffee and killing time and gossiping about Mr and Mrs Barclay. None of them went to Cumae. None of them ever reached the Sibyl. Why should she invent a trip to Cumae?
I don’t think I’ve made a very good job of trying to impersonate my own daughter, or of trying to fake my own death. It’s humiliating, but I’ll have to admit that here I am, still alive. Here I still am, still sitting up here on the third floor back, locked in the same body, the same words, the same syntax, the same habits, the same mannerisms, the same old self. Looking through the same flaw in the same glass at the same constellations. I can’t get out. I try, but I can’t escape. There was no death, no inquest, no shrine. I’m back in the same old story. I had thought I could get out, but I don’t think I can. I had thought £120,000 from Northam Provident could release me, but it can’t. I had thought the soft sun of the south could melt the frozen patterning, but it couldn’t.
Of course I won’t end up in the canal. I won’t even teeter on the brink. Did you believe, did I believe, even for a moment, that I might? I am condemned to life, to wearing out my life. All I can produce from my gaping mouth is a little tiny cry.
It’s vanity, to think I could escape in that heroic manner. I haven’t the courage. I cannot rise to the tragic mode. I must be humble and submit. I am just one of those small, insignificant, unfinished people. I respect those who can make an ending.
I suppose that we all have fantasies of our own death. Adolescents, even quite normal, happy adolescents, can spend a good deal of time dreaming of death as revenge.
‘You’ll be sorry when I’m gone.’ ‘You’ll wish you never said that.’
Parents weeping with remorse, teachers shocked, friends grief-stricken and sorrowing. That kind of scenario. The irony is that as we near death, there are fewer people left to be sorry, fewer left to miss us. Nobody would care, nobody
would mind. So the self-pitying gesture goes unnoticed. And then we die, as quietly as we can, and people are merely relieved. So it will be when my mother dies, at last.
Our little, pitiful, feeble struggles. Sparrows and farthings, farthings and sparrows. Oh, we are the small change, and we know that.
But it was in its way a useful exercise, my effort to impersonate Ellen. It was only when I started to try to see things from Ellen’s point of view that it struck me that Jane Richards probably did drown herself because of Andrew. I think the pseudo-Ellen is trying to hint that Andrew made a pass at Jane, maybe even that he seduced her, and I admit that that’s a possibility, though I don’t think it’s very likely. I don’t think that interpretation would have occurred to me on my own, without the help of an imagined Ellen. Andrew was quite scrupulous about not getting too involved with pupils. He liked them to admire him, but I’d be very surprised if he really overstepped the mark with anything other than a smile or a pat on the back or an innuendo. He’d have thought it too risky. No, I now think it’s much more likely that Jane had
suspected
something was going on between Andrew and Anthea, and that she drowned herself because she couldn’t bear to think about it, because she didn’t know what to do about it. Maybe she saw something she shouldn’t have seen, out of the corner of one of those ill-aligned eyes. Something nasty in the potting shed, as we used to say. But I’ll never know the truth about that, will I? I’ll never know what the poor girl was thinking about when she filled her pockets with stones. All I know is that she was braver than I am.
Her death was an act, not a gesture.
Maybe Andrew was carrying on with both mother and daughter. Such things have happened, I believe. That would explain a lot. I’ve only just thought of it, just now, at this instant, but now I’ve thought of it, the idea won’t go away.
I wonder what the real Ellen really thinks. I wonder if I will dare to ask her, one day.
How impossible it is, to enter the consciousness of another person. How impossible, to escape from one’s own.
Since I got back from my Italian Journey, I have been trying to mend the gap that had opened up between myself and Ellen. It is
hard, so hard, and so humiliating. These have been painful months, more painful than I can say. I eat humble pie. I try to teach myself a new language, as she tries to teach language to those who cannot utter, but I am a late learner, and I cannot find the words. I make myself telephone her, and I hear myself mumbling banalities at her. ‘How’s your leg today?’ ‘I’ve been to the Club.’ ‘I’ve been to the library.’ ‘I’m having a cheese omelette for my supper.’ Well, it’s a start. It’s an effort. She does answer the phone. She doesn’t put the phone down on me, or pretend she isn’t at home when she is.
Shall I dare to try to describe what happened on that evening by the Grand Union Canal? No, I do not think I have the courage. My tears were dried on my face and on my throat. Not hot, like tea or blood, but dried, like dried semen. Stiff, dried, papery. A thin encrustation of tears.
Ellen is right, I have always been afraid of the male organ. It has never seemed to me an attractive object, in any of its states, erect or dormant. Female genitalia do not attract me much either, although to me the female body is beautiful. My Health Club is full of beautiful naked women. But as I grow older, I find that some aspects of the womanly condition also disgust me. I used to be able to deal with my own bodily effusions: I do not think I was particularly squeamish, though I was always fastidious, and proud of being so. But now, the cloying dead smell of menstrual waste in the unemptied bins of a public lavatory repels me. The apparatus of menstruation fills me with a mild nausea. I am glad to have finished with the leaking and the blood. I now understand the nature of the taboo against menstruating women. The red stain in the pan or on the sheet is not pleasant.
Sexuality is omnipresent, these days. One can’t get away from it. It has leaked and spread into everything. People now use the word ‘sexy’ as a synonym for ‘fashionable’ or merely ‘interesting’. It has lost its secrecy and its power. And women are supposed to go on looking sexy when they are into their sixties. That’s all very well for people like Julia, who like that kind of thing, but it’s not very good for the rest of us, is it? For some of us, it means nothing but a sense of unending failure and everlasting exclusion.
I have been forcing myself to think about the failure of my ‘sex
life’ with Andrew. (I don’t like that phrase, it’s vulgar and it sounds as though it comes from the Personal Advice Column of a ’50s women’s magazine, but I can’t think of any other way of putting it, and at least we all know what it means.) My sex life with Andrew was never satisfactory. When we were first married, we made love quite regularly, but I did not enjoy it much. I never had an orgasm. I began to expect and to fear failure and dissatisfaction. My body was lonely, and it never found company. At first, I hoped, but slowly hope faded, and then it seemed better not to begin to hope. It seemed better to lie quietly, and then to lie. I did not refuse, because I was a good wife, but I avoided. It did not cross my mind to blame Andrew for my dissatisfaction. I blamed myself. I was unhappy, and I felt guilty for being unhappy, because Andrew had given me no cause for complaint.
It did not cross my mind to think that I might be happier with another man. I was very backward in that respect. There I was, reading the racy novels of my friend Julia Jordan, and other sexually adventurous works of the ’60s, but I did not think that anything in them could apply to me, because I was married to a good man. I had made my bed and I would lie in it. Infidelity would have been an impossibility to me. I wonder if there are any women in England left like that – younger women, I mean. I am sure there are a lot of women of my age who have lived monogamous lives, though I suppose we will die out eventually.
Andrew grew bored with me and his attentions became very infrequent. This, of course, was a relief to me. I now realize – and I mean
now
, as I write these words – that there must have been some extramarital explanation of the temporary renewal of his sexual interest in me during that holiday in the Dordogne. This renewal of interest resulted in the birth of Martha, which neither of us had expected, and a certain rapprochement between us. For a while, he became kind and tender towards me. There was a truce. But I now think that he had begun to make love to me again because he had been making love to some other woman, and that he was kind to me for a while because of his guilt. I wonder who the other woman was? I don’t suppose I shall ever know. What does it matter, anyway? It is all over, all in the past.
If this speculation is correct, and I feel it must be, then that would
explain why I was less than responsive to his apparent interest. I must have smelt deceit without recognizing it. After Martha’s birth, I became stubborn. At the time I blamed the shock of this fairly late pregnancy for my lasting revulsion from any sexual activity, but in truth it was his duplicity that finally alienated me. It took Andrew a long time to reveal himself for what he was and is. And I have been lying to myself, at quite a deep level, for most of my life.
It wasn’t Martha’s fault. She was an innocent victim. But I was a guilty party. I connived.
It is only in writing about these things that I discover what may have happened. That is odd.
She abandons reconstruction and returns to her narrative
Nothing much had changed, when I got back from Italy. Nobody at the Health Club noticed I had been away, but I suppose I wasn’t away for very long, was I? I’ve been to see my man in the Scrubs. He’s about to be moved to the Isle of Wight. He didn’t seem to care about this one way or the other, though from what I hear and read in the press anywhere must be an improvement on the Scrubs. I think my going to visit him has been a complete and utter waste of time, from his point of view. It’s given me a bit of exercise and introduced me to some new bits of rather disagreeable scenery. But getting myself a dog to walk would have done that for me just as well, if not better. I suppose talking to him merely added to my rather unhealthy obsession with the canal bank. He tells me I’m mad to walk there alone. There are people there looking for trouble, he says. He says I haven’t got the sense I was born with. Miss, he says, you deserve what’s coming your way. Don’t say I didn’t warn you, he says.