The Whole World (22 page)

“Thank you for that,” she said. “Sometimes I think I’m the only lonely person. But I know that’s not true.” Then “No.” As if he’d leaned in to kiss her. “I have to go,” she said. The usual kerfuffle followed: footsteps, coat, where did she put down her bag when she came in?

At the door, he said, “Miranda, today was good. It was good.”

“I don’t think Gretchen would think so—”

“Gretchen doesn’t care,” he said firmly. He said it loudly. “She hasn’t for some time.”

“Oh, I—”

“No, I don’t mean … I don’t make a habit of … This isn’t something I’ve done before. I don’t mean that she would know or approve. I mean she literally doesn’t care. About anyone. Certainly not about me.”

I pictured her hand on the doorknob, ready to flee his change from gallant to vulnerable.

Indistinct murmurs at the door. The bells attached to the door jangled for the open, then for the shut. There was quiet, then his footsteps back across the rug, then up the stairs. Our shower rattles the whole plumbing system. He stayed under the spray for what seemed like a very long time.

I’d been so relieved to get married the first time. The day after university graduation, one of my lecturers asked me out. He said he’d been waiting a long time to be able to do that. I admired his self-control. We dated for a year, then got married. I’d been happy to get that done, as advised in one of my favourite poems, by Adrienne Simms:

What is it that I grieve for when I weep,
when I leave my hair untidy, lank and long,
when my clothes are unrefreshed by wash or brush,
when I thrust the curtains shut though day is young,
when my every former joy before me palls
and I stay inside of doors, inside of walls
where torrid tears escape my eyes in squalls?

What is it that I miss now that you’ve left
no half-remembered hope behind unpacked
now that you’ve taken with you much of me,
which of those things are they which I most lack?
Your company, your touch, your voice, your face?
Or, worse, my trust, my smug protected grace?
The peace that came upon the end of chase?

For when I had you I thought I was done
with girlish wishing-fors inside my mind.
No longer wanting “someone,” some grand “he,”
I had, in you, completed that sad grind
of hoping, longing, yearning from afar
for one to be my match, my prize, my star.
And being done I could, I’d hoped, do more …

I’d been happy to get that done, and then be free to do more. Sex was work: with whom, how far, what it means. Marriage would just be marriage. Marriage would just be.

When Nick discovered that my mother, or aunt, had saved a poem by the same author, I’d caught my breath. That is the synchronicity that drives me, that linkage with my mother, as if I’d been built out of real flesh torn off of her.

Everything had been fine with Dan, until four years in, when he found my birth control pills. He’d wanted children. I didn’t. He’d been assuming we were just unlucky.

I started at Magdalene a year after they started to let women in. I received a research fellowship. I’d not been to Cambridge before. The divorce was final.

Harry, a Cambridge native, had given up his law practice, and spent his savings on a trip to South America, where he’d fallen in love with birds. Then he’d returned and fallen in love with me. Then … Well, here we are.

He went straight out of the house after his shower, despite his wet hair and the cold. He’d duck inside the first chance he’d get. The pub on the corner. They don’t serve food until evening. He hadn’t even had breakfast. He’d be drunk before long.

I let my study door hang open behind me. I walked into a chair that Miranda must have moved to sit in. Harry hadn’t moved it back. He used to be careful about keeping things predictably arranged for me.

I went upstairs. Past the guest room; I didn’t open the door. Past the computer room. I carried on to the attic stairs. Up to the bird room. The noise was stifling: bird shrieks and whistles from all sides. Cold pushed in through the one screened, open window. Mountain songbirds don’t need heat. The room smelled biological: dry, thick, doughy, dirty. I felt caught by it.

I felt for the back of his chair. It’s a straight chair, no cushion. I hefted it up over my shoulder and brought it down against the top of the central aviary, by my hip. The chair bounced against the cage, and sprang back up over my head. Its next time down it bent bars. I pulled it up again, and brought it down again. The metal made a piggish sound, squealing as the bars ruptured. The birds squealed too, suddenly fat, shrieking pigs instead of light, insubstantial twitterers. A sound came out of me too. I was a pig. I groaned from my stomach, groaned like I had a baby coming out of me. My mouth stretched open even as I squeezed the rest of myself together in a crouch on the floor. I was still for so long that two of the creatures alit on me. I’d broken the aviary door. They were free.

I opened the window. Why not? It was windy out. The birds would be swept away as if with a broom.

The still-caged birds on the right-hand wall chattered with increasing volume and their jumping rattled their cages, right next to my head. These weren’t the canaries. These were the fosters.

I felt myself trembling. My fingers wriggled easily between wire bars, grabbing two cages at once. I pulled them down, tumbling the ones above them as well. I was all limbs: kicking in the cages below, waving the two in my fists. The shrieking inside them increased in fear and then died away, one by one.

There’s a pattern in S. M. Madison’s books. She starts with contentment: a heroine in an exotic location, in communion with the place itself. Conflict follows, shoving the heroine up against other people. There’s friendship and sex, but always as action, never as the goal. The end brings equilibrium again; her triumph leads back to the pleasures of her original solitude, enhanced by comfort, or confidence, or money, or safety. But still, alone, and happy. Enchanted by place, not people.

The House of the Dead
begins at the Mena House Hotel overlooking the Giza pyramids:

The walls huddled together. We were all tired, the walls and I. Only the shutters were awake, begging to be opened, energised by the hot daylight on the other side. I hadn’t slept on the plane. It had been impossible, with knees and elbows on both sides, and actors racing across the soundless screen at the front of the cabin. So I slept here: cool sheets, hard mattress, small room. The edges of the fluffed pillow made a high, soft wall around my heavy head. This sleep was delicious, and decadent like an evening feast after Ramadan’s daily fasting. I was fat with this sleep. Outside, camel hoof stomps pounded sand. Outside, the pyramids faded in the strong sun. Outside, flies landed on moist, open eyes. The shutters kept all of them out. The shutters kept me in. I’m grateful to shutters. The door should take lessons. It quivered from pounding fists. Someone was getting in. The shutters held out the whole waking world, but the door couldn’t keep out one man.

It ends in the southern city of Aswan, on the famous terrace of the Old Cataract Hotel:

Yellow and blue make green; it’s true everywhere. The blue Nile and yellow desert make green life between them, a fresh, narrow swath along each side of the river. Servants make coffee. Tourists make crowds. Rolling blinds, thick and patterned like carpets from the marketplace, make the terrace cool in the hot day. The natural shape of a huge stone elephant makes visitors photograph the island across from the hotel. Wind makes dozens of white sails pull feluccas across the water. All of these are true every day.

She follows this pattern over and over. In
Out of the Sea
, her heroine begins in an aisle seat on an airplane, desperate for the window view of the Aegean below. Her fellow passengers, like the one blocking her view, are impediments to her experience. Over and over, this S. M. Madison prizes place over people. Over and over, she finds peace in hotels, not a home.

Her fictional beginnings and endings became a comfort to me. Her abandonment of me hadn’t been personal. Her affair with solitude was the most consuming in her life; that was clear.

There are moments for me too, where the primacy of place, and relationship with the inanimate, is suddenly overwhelmingly satisfying.

I may be like her. I may be meant to be alone.

Harry sometimes asked me for help with crosswords. He’d read the clue and describe how many spaces and any letters he already had. I threw answers at him, but I hated it. I hate crosswords. They seem such a waste of time. I pelted him with words of the correct length, and suggested anagrams and interpretations of the clue fragments. I reasoned that if I could give him the answer it would end. Maybe he couldn’t tell I hated it; he kept asking. He kept talking to me, until I was sick from words, mentally batting them away from my head. The words were like birds flying at me, his birds, always birds. Their noise was constant.

The two in the cages in my hands were dead. I’d beaten the cages against the wall.

I put them down and descended the ladderlike steps. In the den I pulled up the website with taxi numbers and called one. I must always explain that I’m blind, or they won’t bother to push the horn on arrival, no matter that I’ve asked.

I printed directions to Rose Cottage to give the driver.

I brushed my hair in the bathroom. I changed my clothes.

The taxi’s horn was louder than I thought it would be. I jumped, I dropped my bag. It blasted again, twice, hard. My head throbbed. I opened the door.

I knew it was nothing personal. I could see that. She got rid of me because of who she is, because she doesn’t share life with anyone. It wasn’t me, it had nothing to do with me. I comforted myself with that truth, pulled it around me like a smooth sheet, a coarse blanket, and a soft cotton sleeve.

CHAPTER 9

T
he driver offered to walk me to the door of Rose Cottage, but I wanted the transition to myself. I’d brought my cane. Its tip swished through the longish grass until it scraped on hard path for me to follow. I rapped on the front door.

I tried to age the young woman that I carried in my mind: the woman from the Brussels photographs, the woman who wrote about children with fear and disgust. I tried to age her, but I didn’t know what had happened between now and then. So a young woman opened the door to me, wearing the green dress she’d worn to dinner in the Atomium restaurant in Brussels. She spoke with an old voice, but I saw the girl in the green dress. I suddenly remembered her perfume. I don’t know if she still wore it, or if it was another of those sudden memories that had been jumping out in front of me since Nick changed everything.

“What do you want?” said the old-woman voice.

My voice answered, also old. Amazingly old. In my mind I was young too: in my twenties, out of college, not yet married. We looked alike to me. We both looked like the young woman at the Brussels Expo. Then we spoke, and the vision splintered apart. “Why did you have me?” I asked.

This wasn’t the plan. The plan had been to persuade, to defend; to prove who I was and accuse who she was. Then to ask at last: Why did you leave me? But the question asked itself, and it was more important than the one I’d intended.

She didn’t answer, not quickly. She was examining me. Of course she would be; I’d skipped ahead. Then she retreated, leaving the door open. I followed her into a low-ceilinged room; I could feel the pressure of it, and the air smelled like the windows were closed. A fire made scratching noises in the corner. A jungle of furniture grew wild in the dry heat.

Her voice came from near the fire. She was faced away from me, poking it, I think. There were rustling sounds there, like a family of mice had settled into the flames. “Calling you Gretchen wasn’t my idea. A nurse named you. I didn’t have a name ready, so she called you after her dead sister. Her sister had died in a fire.” I’m sure the fire was consuming crumpled newspaper and hunks of wood. I’m sure of it, but I saw mice there. And a little girl. In a purple dress at Christmas.

“I despise waffling,” she said. “I’d come to hate Susan Maud. I hated what in me was like her. Equivocating. I wrote a scene; it was vicious. I had her raped in it. Never mind that there wasn’t even sex in any of the other books. I let it rip in this one. I held her down. I made her grow up. I was sick of her.

“It was unpublishable, of course. Unfinishable too. There wasn’t anything I wanted left to do with her after that.

“When I found out what was inside me,” and here I thought she figuratively meant her viciousness toward Susan Maud, but it became clear that she literally meant me, “I said, all right. I’m not going to pretend. I’m not going to apologise. So I stuck my belly out and everyone knew. I forced myself the way I’d forced Susan Maud: no more chance to go along and get along.”

I rocked.

“You can sit down,” she said abruptly. She waited, then spat: “It’s right behind you.” I stepped back gingerly, until my leg bumped the seat. I sat. She still stood. Her talking came from over me, still near the fire. Still far away.

“What did you come here for?” She sounded exasperated. I was suddenly a teenager, railing against a college rejection letter, or appealing punishment for breaking curfew. She was my mother. She was suddenly my mother. I cried.

Clink-clink
, metal on brick. The fireplace poker. Impatience. I had to get myself together.

“She’s dead. She died,” I said, almost saying “my mother,” but I’d been training myself out of that. I’d been straining them apart in my mind: one slipping through the sieve holes, the other caught. Two mothers.

“I don’t know what you want me to do about it.” She still stood, cornered. My chair was between her and the door.

“I wanted to meet you,” I said. “I remember you.” I wanted her to remember me. Something precious and wriggly; something that looked like her. “You kept me,” I added. “For three years …” Instead of feeling abandoned, I felt chosen. Three years! Almost a thousand days. She could have given me up from the hospital bed.

“I didn’t write for three years,” she said. “Not anything complete. Pieces. I wrote Gloria, if that means anything to you.” The only mother her books had ever had. The children who were sticky, who terrified the protagonist. I was the sticky one. I climbed. I clawed. I consumed. I was the monster: small, agile, full of tricks.

The fire sighed. Wind in the chimney. My face and hands were hot; the backs of my legs were cold. I looked at the fire, which was a jagged-edged blob to me.

Another memory shot up in me like a rocket. The dog. The one she carried on the island trip. What had happened to the dog?

I must have asked out loud. She said, “It ran away.”

It did. I remembered it now. I was only two, but I remembered. She put it down in the garden and opened the gate. It ran away.

“No one could take away the money,” she said. “It was mine. It bypassed my parents. I threw it at you. I buried you in it. I hired that girl. She carried you around. She carried you. But you just kept reaching. Your arms were … so horribly long.” She shivered. “The girl wanted you. It was easy. Keeping you was hard.”

I shot up out of the chair. “What about boarding school? You didn’t need to … to
sever
. Why didn’t you just
stretch?”
Would weekends have been so horrible? Holidays?

“You!” she bellowed, from a deep, echoey space in her chest. “You’ve never had a child, have you.” It was an accusation, not a question. She panted. She snorted.

Men have wanted to put one in me, but I’ve said no. I’ve never wanted one. I didn’t know what she meant. What is there in having a child that makes boarding school not far enough? She must have really loved me, to have required such a vicious severance between us. You wouldn’t use an axe to slice bread.

“Did she steal me away?” This was my last fantasy. That I’d been wanted by both of them, only one had been more clever and more determined.

“I left open the garden gate,” she said, with a high, trickly laugh. That was the dog. Did she think the dog was here?

I shouted back, “I’m not the dog! I’m the baby!”

Suddenly we were old. Brussels was suddenly fifty years ago, Brussels was suddenly another country. I was here, in a cramped, too-warm cottage, in England, sturdy England.

“It was a long time ago.” She exhaled.

“I was born in the summer, wasn’t I?” I said. A Leo.

“It was hot,” she agreed.

“She changed my birthday. December. She celebrated my birthday in December. Was that when she took me?”

I laced my fingers, squeezing rings against knuckles.

“I’ll tell you how it was,” she said at last.

“She was friends with Gin,” she explained. “They double-dated. Gin thought she was all right, a nice girl. Bland, but Gin would like that. She liked being the one to sparkle.

“She was jealous of me. Of both of us, me and Gin, but of me especially, because of the baby.” She meant me. I was the baby. “She fussed over me, and brought me cold drinks that horrible, hot August. She offered to be the nanny. That was fine with me. She liked going fun places; she didn’t have the money herself. She liked being a better mother than I was. She liked that a lot. We were the pretty ones, Gin and I, and I was the brilliant one. And she was the … good one. None of us minded that. We all got to be the best at something.

“There was only one time it got out of hand. In Brussels. She chided me. The stairs multiplied, and you didn’t want to walk. You wanted to be carried. You’d been eating chocolate, and expected to be picked up. I said no. She wanted to lift you, but then what? Go all the way back to the hotel for a change of dress? I said no. She wiped your hands on her slip. She pulled it out from under her skirt and wiped your dirty hands with it, streaking the white linen muddy. It was disgusting. I was embarrassed. I told her I’d said no. She kept going. She even spat on her hand to swab at the most stubborn marks. Then she lifted you and passed in front of me, preceding us up the stairs. You waved your damp palms around as they dried to tackiness.”

I didn’t remember that, none of it. Not chocolate, not sticky hands, not those stairs, nor that time being carried, waving my arms.

“She was smug at the top of those stairs. The hem of her dress had a brown stain, and her slip had gone askew and was showing out the bottom. You put your hands into her hair and ran the fingers through. I looked away. It was …” Her breath shuddered. This was Gloria. This was where Gloria came from.

“I told her to take you back to the hotel and change. She left with you, but I saw her later. She looked the same. She hadn’t changed. She hadn’t even put you down. She was still carrying you, and you had ice cream, and it was falling onto the front of her dress. A white linen dress embroidered with pink and yellow flowers. The ice cream was vanilla, but its white was thick and yellowish and showed on the fabric. It showed as much as if it had been blood. She bore it like stigmata, the sacrifice of motherhood. She even tickled you to make you shake. Drops of melted ice cream festooned her frizzy hair like dew on a spider’s web.

“She was claiming you, as if she’d swollen up around you and squeezed you out. I don’t know why she didn’t have a child if that’s what she wanted so badly. It’s not difficult to get a child. I know that. Anyone can have a child. Even my mother had children, and she despised my father. She fought him off. But there we were, Gin and I.”

I never saw her, the nanny, touch a man. Not my whole life. She never left me with a babysitter for a weekend away, or had a man over for dinner. She worked as a secretary at my school during the day. “What was her name?” I asked suddenly. It had only just occurred to me that I didn’t know.

“What do you mean?”

“She called herself Linda Paul. She pretended to be you. You let her be you. What was her real name?”

“I don’t know,” she said. That answer just popped out of her: no caginess, no shame, no reaching deep into the bag to see if it might be in one of the corners. “I don’t remember. It was a long time ago.”

“She said my father …” I’d never said that phrase before: my father. Compared to my mother, it hadn’t seemed important. “… was her—your—accountant. She had a picture of him, in white tie. At a party.”

“He certainly was not.” She snorted. “Our family accountant was a pig-bellied dirty old man.”

“Who was he, then?” I asked.

“A man in white tie at a party? Any one of thousands, I would imagine. It doesn’t matter, you know. They don’t matter.”

“I just want to know,” I explained carefully, wary of using up her willingness to speak, “in case it turns out to matter.”

She told me. There were two men, both married academics, and she’d had affairs with both of them around that time. I asked their specialities, and was unsurprised that one was an expert in literature. The other was a botanist. Of course the kind of genetic assumption I so quickly leapt to is faulty; the botanist would be the first to chide me that humans are not so predictably determined by their parents as are plants.

“I’m a member of the English Faculty at Cambridge. Magdalene.” I remembered handing my mother picked violets once. But I couldn’t remember which mother it had been.

“You don’t take after me, then,” she said. She snorted. I think she was laughing at me. Had she been bad at school? Had she disliked teachers?

“You must know her name,” I pressed.

“She wanted to be Linda Paul. She wanted it, so I let her have it. Fine with me.”

“Why?” I asked. “Why would anyone want to be you?”

She laughed and laughed. “Thank God. I was getting sick of you. That pleading face. So avid.”

“Why was she so eager to replace her name?” I persisted.

“Why not? So was I. Being a child is such a horrible thing: powerless, stifled. She admired what I’d been able to do with money. Travel and such. She hadn’t, she wanted to. You can’t tell someone that what they want isn’t what they think it must be. You can’t tell them; you can only let them go ahead with it. They’ll find out soon enough. She wanted the name and the baby and the money. I let her have them all. We each thought we got the better deal.”

“What did she give you?”

A satisfied sigh. “Nothing. Nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing.”

Her book
Half Moon
contained a scene in which that word was repeated, just that way: an exultation. It was the comfort of the nothing that comes after something too loud, too close, too much. A good nothing, without a needy daughter and the uncomfortable role of socialite shaping her from the outside. She was water spilled at last out of an uncomfortable jar; that was in her book
Noisy Birds
. Water can’t resist its container’s shape; it’s free only if it leaves the jar entirely. She got out by inviting infill from … the nanny. “You must know her name,” I begged. “To give her the money … there must have been papers….”

“The money was in your name.” Of course it was. It was a trust. It had always been mine. “The trustee was Linda Paul. I gave her my National Insurance number. I didn’t want it. The books … I’d written them. I was done with them. I was sick of them.”