Possession

by Celia Fremlin

  Thus Ralph and I reasoned on that damp, sunny autumn morning when we thought that what had happened to us was a wonderful stroke of luck. We reflected on the long procession of long-haired, despondent art students, big with complexes, who had hitherto sought out our pretty daughter to talk to her about suicide and the cultivation of the Real Self; and as it slowly dawned on us that the whole grisly bunch of them would now be vanishing from our lives for ever, we turned and hugged each other, right there by the abandoned breakfast table with its crumbs, and cornflakes, and smears of marmalade, all golden and glittering in the November sun. At last, we said to one another, Sarah has outgrown her tendency to take on the lame ducks of the world, to lavish on neurotic no-goods the bounteous overflow of her gay normality. At last, we thought, Sarah has found herself a real man, a man she can look up to. It’s all to the good, we said, that he should be twelve years older than she is: this is right for her, we said, it’s what she needs. And all that morning, after Ralph had gone to the office, I went singing about my work, thanking God that my beautiful, vulnerable, kind-hearted Sarah, about whom I had worried intermittently ever since she had left school, was after all to live happily ever after.

  And that was why Peggy’s reception of the news was so disconcerting. It had all seemed so perfect, right up to the moment when I had mentioned our prospective son-in-law’s name, and she had said, in that startled, taken-aback sort of voice: “Mervyn Redmayne, did you say? And he lives in Bayswater? But, darling, I know his mother, and she’s frightful! She really is, Clare, I promise you: she’s ghastly! Listen, we must talk about this seriously. Put the kettle on.”

  So I did; and we made a pot of tea; and now here we still were, staring unhappily into the fire. All this morning’s joy was draining out of me, and I felt defrauded and dull.

  “You’ve spoilt it all for me,” I complained, childishly. “Why did you have to tell me? It’s nothing to do with me. is it, what his mother’s like. And nothing to do with Sarah, either. She doesn’t have to like her mother-in-law, does she? Nobody does! It’s unnatural!”

  “O.K., O.K. I’m sorry, Clare.” Peggy saw that I was truly upset, and set herself to make amends. “I could be wrong, of course I could. I only met her the once, and you know what a cat I am. It’s just—I don’t know. She seemed such an odd, tenacious little thing, all eaten up with nerves—it made me feel quite jittery just to watch her. Still, never mind; perhaps it was her bad day. And, as you say, it’s Sarah’s business, and no one else’s. Anyway, Pat will be thrilled; I’ll tell her the minute she comes in from school. I’ll tell her she’s invited to the wedding, shall I?”

  “Of course!” I said eagerly, my spirits rising as they always do when someone talks encouragingly to me, even when I know they don’t mean it, as I knew Peggy didn’t mean it now. I could see that her real opinion was still unchanged. “Of course Pat must come to the wedding. She must be a bridesmaid; she and Janice must be the bridesmaids; we must think of a colour that suits them both. Do you think yellow—a rather dull, goldy sort of yellow….?”

  Peggy is a kind person. At the base of her gossippy, cheerfully censorious nature there lies a bedrock of solid, unfailing kindness; and when she finds that her incautious tongue has hurt somebody, she spares no pains to repair the damage. So now, when she saw that I was trying to talk my fears to a standstill, she came loyally to my assistance.

  “Marvellous!” she agreed, with an enthusiasm disproportionate to the importance of the issue. “Or what about a soft sort of old-rose colour? It would suit Janice splendidly, with all that mass of dark hair, especially if she piles it on top of her head the way she had it for the concert. That sort of colour would be all right for Pat, too; I suppose you’d call her a vague sort of brunette. How lucky you are having two such definite-coloured daughters. It’s always been my ambition to have children who are either definitely dark or definitely fair, and just look what I’ve got! Not that it matters, when one of them never looks in a mirror at all, and the other spends the whole of her ample allowance on making herself look like the cheapest little tart that ever crawled out from under a hairdryer….”

  I laughed. I knew that Peggy was only trying to atone for having upset me; to cheer me up by the time-honoured method of praising my children and belittling her own; and it did cheer me up. Not that Sarah is definitely fair; not really. She has grey eyes, and lots of long, straight, beigey-coloured hair, with occasional golden lights in it when she stands in bright sunshine or under a lamp. I suppose the sheer quantity of it might make one inclined to say ‘There goes a blonde’ as she passes; but really and truly it is mouse, and Peggy knows it. Peggy is a true friend.

  CHAPTER II

  BY THE TIME Janice came home from school I was feeling positively cheerful again; and Janice, too, seemed to have recovered from the morning’s shock. We began to speculate—cautiously, because the subject was still raw for us both, and fraught with unimagined pitfalls of emotion—about what Mervyn would be like. Sarah was bringing him home with her on Friday night, she’d said, and he was to stay till Sunday teatime. “Sunday teatime”—this in itself was a new note in our hitherto haphazard lives. When had any of the girls’ friends ever proposed themselves for so definite a length of time as this? Usually they came to tea, and either stayed for supper, or for six weeks, or until Ralph kicked them out of the house; or else they walked in and borrowed a record and went away without speaking. There was no telling. But “Sunday teatime”! There was a Victorian touch about it which appealed to both of us.

  “Well, he’ll be different, anyway,” Janice conceded warily. “He might have some manners, or something. Just imagine! And at least he won’t be young! That’s something!”

  “That’s what I’m looking forward to, too,” I agreed. “A proper grown-up man at last! Why, even Daddy mightn’t hate him!”

  “Oh, Mummy! Of course Daddy will hate him! I just can’t imagine Daddy actually talking to one of Sarah’s boy friends, can you? It would be unnatural. Weird. Oh no!”

  Janice shook her long dark hair decisively, and reached for another doughnut. Janice is always bringing home bags of doughnuts after school and usually she sits moaning about her weight as she munches her way gloomily through them, but today her mind was on other things. I put the bag surreptitiously out of her reach, because she really is too fat; it’s not just one of those teenage phobias.

  “Well, personally, I hope Daddy will like him,” I reproved her gently. “After all, this time it’s not just one more of Sarah’s boy friends, it’s her fiancé; she’s really going to marry him.”

  “She’s not!” Janice’s voice was sharp, almost panicky; and as I looked up, startled, her eyes slid away from mine.

  “Well, I don’t think she is, anyway,” she muttered, in a light, strained voice. “It’s just my opinion. That’s all.”

  “But, Janice—” I was at a loss. She was sitting there, still munching her doughnut, but suddenly remote, in the disconcerting way she sometimes has. I struggled feebly against the intensity and power of her non-communication.

  “You shouldn’t talk like that, Janice,” I said ineptly. “It’s not kind to Sarah. This is the happiest thing that’s ever happened to her, and….”

  Janice’s dark, cold, calculated look reduced my words to a jumble of phoney platitudes; my voice petered out into twittering silence. Since when has Janice been able to wield this look? Since when has she discovered its power? A year ago? Six months? Does it come from deep within her—the first, terrifying sign of the harder, colder, adult woman who is one day going to oust my warm-hearted, passionate little girl from the body which I have created, fed and reared? Or is it just a trick she has discovered for getting her own way, for putting her mother down a peg or two? There is no way of knowing.

  “Have another doughnut?” I said weakly, relinquishing all authority, and fishing the requisitioned bag from under my chair.

  “Thank you,” she said with dignity; and together, without further
words, we skated away from the dangerous subject. Soon she was spread out full-length on the carpet in her usual working posture, with her homework all around her, spreading like the tide further and further across the carpet. At intervals she sighed, noisily. She always wants her labours to be noticed, but will snap at anyone who seems to notice them. Normality had returned.

  I spent the rest of that evening ringing everyone up. Grandma, Cissie, the Hardwicks, and all the mothers of all Sarah’s old school friends. It was rather like telling them about her A-level results two years ago; the same sense of having pulled a bit ahead in that unspoken race that we mothers are all running, all the time. The Cat-Race, Peggy calls it, and it begins with our babies’ births and goes on—as far as I can see—for ever. The biggest birth-weight—the rosiest cheeks—the largest circle of playmates—the highest marks—the lowest rate of pocket money—the most venturesome holidays—we would be hard put to it, most of us, to say exactly what the race is about, whither it is directed, and what the prize. But we all know, instantly and without any doubt, who is winning at any given moment, and we know how the points are allotted. When someone’s children go off youth-hostelling at an earlier age than the rest; when they put on a play all by themselves; when they read old-fashioned children’s books, or come top in Maths, or play games that cover them in mud and tear their jeans—all these are point-scoring phenomena for the mother concerned, though it would be hard indeed to say on what scale these very diverse activities can possibly be measured. But that doesn’t matter. We don’t need to know what the scale is; we merely know that it is, and we can assess our own and each other’s position on it with unerring accuracy. Thus I knew without any doubt that Sarah’s getting engaged at nineteen, before Pat, or Rosemary, or Linda, or any of them—I knew at once that this had pushed me almost to the top. At a single stroke it cancelled out entirely the fact that she hadn’t got into university, enjoyed watching television, and had never hitch-hiked across Europe with insufficient money.

  So I was very happy as I sat there dialling numbers, and hearing my triumph played back to me by so many various voices. Everyone was very kind and congratulatory, even Granny, who usually dislikes happenings of any kind. One thing leads to another, she says darkly: and after eighty-one years I suppose she ought to know. Still, on this occasion she declared herself well-pleased, and so did all my friends, with just that proper tinge of envy in their voices which is a congratulation in itself. Only once was a jarring note struck, and that, surprisingly enough, came from my old school friend, Cissie. I say surprisingly, because Cissie adores our family, she thinks we are perfect in every way and that everything that happens to us is marvellous. I have noticed that one’s unmarried contemporaries tend to go to extremes in this respect; either they develop an uncritical worship of family life, and believe that your existence is one of unimaginable fulfilment and success in the company of an ideal husband and perfect children, or else they grow an armour of censorious scorn towards the whole business; they watch you letting yourself go, they remember the career you might have had, and they wait complacently for your husband to leave you and for your children to become drug-addicts. Whichever category they belong to, these unmarried friends give one the slightly uneasy sense of performing before an audience; in the case of the admiring ones you are consumed by anxiety to prove them right; in the case of the censorious, to prove them wrong.

  Cissie, bless her, belongs to the first category, and in spite of the strain involved in living up to her vision of us, she is still a great asset. The girls dote on her—with her beautiful clothes, her exciting job, and her aura of jet-planes and up-to-the-minute sophistication, she has always been their favourite visitor, and her reverence for our humdrum household has been highly flattering. So it was all the more dismaying that it should be she, of all people, who should have said, with a note of shocked surprise in her voice: “Do you mean you haven’t even seen him, Clare? Then why are you sounding so pleased? I mean, how do you know you are going to like him?”

  “Of course I shall like him—” I began: and it was only as I said the words that I realised how devastatingly true they were. I knew then that I was already determined—utterly and blindly determined—to like Mervyn no matter what he was like. There was something terrifying about such a determination, arrived at with so little data, so little conscious deliberation. But there was no time to analyse it now, for Cissie was speaking again:

  “I mean, Clare, don’t think I’m not delighted for you—of course I shall be, if it’s all as nice as you say. It’s just that Sarah is such a lovely girl, I couldn’t bear to think that she was going to get anything but the very, very best.”

  There it was again—this putting of my family on a pedestal which they may or may not be able to live up to. Sarah is a lovely girl, certainly, but she has her failings; and plenty of lovely girls have missed out on marriage by being too choosy during the few short years when choice is at its peak. Besides….

  “I just know I shall like him,” I said; and proceeded to explain to Cissie the reasons for my confidence. That I could trust Sarah’s judgement; that she was old enough to make her own decisions; that her letter had sounded so happy and confident. How could I not be going to like him?

  But what, exactly, did I mean by “like”? Looking back, I have to conclude that it was simple cupboard-love: here was a young man who was going to provide us with an escape from all our current worries about Sarah. At a single blow he was going to rid us of all those long-haired, soul-obsessed students who had hitherto sucked like starving leeches at our daughter’s warm-hearted and generous nature, trying to drain it away into the arid deserts of their threadbare “creativity”, and coming back for more. Who has ever worried about whether she is going to like St George, as he gallops up on his white charger?

  And then, too, there was my position in the Cat-Race to be considered. I imagined ringing up all these people, all over again, to tell them that it was all off; and I felt physically sick.

  “I can trust Sarah’s judgement absolutely,” was how I summed all this up aloud; and Cissie seemed pacified. She even praised the closeness of the mother-daughter relationship which rendered such certainty possible; and after a few more remarks equally soothing to my maternal spirit she rang off.

  I had been aware for some time that Janice was hovering about, listening to it all; now, at the “ping” of the replaced receiver, she hurled herself into the situation.

  “I agree with Cissie!” she challenged me. “I think it’s awful, the way you’re telling everyone how marvellous Mervyn is when you’ve never seen him, you don’t know anything about him!”

  “I know that Sarah loves him, and that’s enough!” I snapped at her. “And so it should be for you! For Sarah’s sake we ought to be prepared to accept him whatever he’s like!”

  “Even if he’s a dwarf?” said Janice viciously. “Or humpbacked? Something you can’t show off to your precious friends?”

  “Janice!” I did not attempt to delve into the intensity of pain, or dread, which must lie behind such an outburst. Janice had already annoyed me past endurance by her generally wet-blanketing attitude to her sister’s joyful news. If she was jealous or upset, she would just have to get over it; one can’t be coddling teenage feelings all the time.

  “Janice! That’s a horrible thing to say! Your own sister! Why should you suppose….”

  I stopped. Ridiculous though Janice’s suggestion had been, it had nevertheless touched into life in me some deep level of superstition which I am not normally aware of. I dared not finish the sentence for fear of tempting Providence. For, truly, it was not impossible to suppose that Sarah might, in a spirit of protective pity, choose a partner with some grave defect. That same quality of unstinted generosity that had drawn towards her all those starveling neurotics, might now be leading her to….

  “Ridiculous!” I stormed at Janice. “How can you say such things? If you ever dare speak to me like that again….!”
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  “Oh, Mummy! Come off it! I didn’t mean it seriously.” Janice seemed half-scared herself by now, anxious to quell the storm she had so deliberately raised. “I’m sorry, Mummy, it’s just that it annoys me so, the way you talk to each other, all you mothers. You sound so childish, all of you….” At the lordly age of seventeen, Janice was very free with such rebukes, and like most mothers of my acquaintance, I usually take them lying down. I don’t know whether this supineness is good or bad for our children; in the hopes that it is good, we call it freedom, and extol the closer, more genuine relationships that such rudeness—free speech to us—is supposed to engender within the family. I’m not sure that it does, really. Personally, I am much more reluctant to confide my real feelings to Janice than I would be if she were conditioned to listening politely; and much less willing to sympathise with hers than I would be if she felt constrained to put them in some non-hurtful form. But there it is. We have sold our authority for this thing called freedom, and we do not know, yet, whether it is a good buy, or even whether the goods are to be delivered at all.

  Janice did not interrupt any more, and my remaining few phone calls, all evoking enthusiastic and uncritical congratulations, quite restored my morale. By the end of the evening, my only anxiety stemmed from the realisation that I seemed to have a party on my hands that was going to last from Friday evening till Sunday afternoon, non-stop. You see, without really thinking about it, I had ended each of my phone calls with the words: “And you must come at the weekend and meet him,” and almost everyone, motivated by a natural enough mixture of goodwill and inquisitive glee, had accepted with alacrity. Thus plans about meals, and drinks, and camp beds for the ones who wouldn’t go away, began to supersede all else in my mind; and it wasn’t until the Friday evening, when a motley collection of ill-assorted guests were already beginning to assemble in our front room, that I found myself really getting cold feet about it all. In fifteen minutes, or thereabouts, Sarah would be leading her Mervyn in at the door. Under the eyes of all these people I would have to react, or refrain from reacting, to whatever impression he first made on me. Nervous as any leading lady on a first night, I took a hurried, surreptitious peep at my assembled audience. Peggy was there, of course; dear, inquisitive Peggy, always ready to enjoy a crisis and to give moral support as well. Just behind her cowered Harold, her little, distinguished scientist husband, who had only come, I felt sure, because he was frightened of being left at home with his teenage children without Peggy to protect him. The poor man never knew how much noise Pat and Adrian should be allowed to make, how many long-haired strangers should be allowed to pour into the kitchen, and how much food they should be allowed to fall upon and devour. As a scientist, he had naturally tried to study Peggy’s system, but had found it baffling, and devoid of rules in the scientific sense. Sometimes she shouted at the gang; sometimes she shrugged her shoulders and let things rip; the amazing thing was that she always seemed to know which to do. Harold recognised expertise when he saw it; in this highly specialised field of Pat-and-Adrian-control he accepted Peggy as the expert and himself as a non-starter, and concentrated on personal survival in the form of strategic withdrawal; even when withdrawal involved—as now—going to some ghastly party given by the people next door.