Repeat It Today With Tears

by Anne Peile

  ‘I mean it, Jack,’ I said.

  He turned on the pillow to look at me. It was only the third time that I had been to bed with him. As he comprehended the strength of my conviction his eyes were for a moment troubled and he frowned a little but I stared him out until he softly spoke my name and drew me into his arms again.

  I wondered whether I could make something up for Trevor so that he felt his questions were worthwhile but I was too tired.

  ‘Nothing,’ I said, ‘nothing at all. Can I go back to bed, please?’

  Whereas clogged hair Derrick asks interminably, ‘How long are you going to keep this up?’

  ‘Until the end.’

  ‘What do you mean by that?’

  What do you think I mean, stupid. Don’t you know that passion always ends in death?

  ‘It’s like talking to a religious fanatic sometimes, talking to you, Susanna.’

  I treat him to an adolescent look of scornful exasperation; an expression which my sister Lin used to dispense to great effect. Privately, however, I conceded that he had made a cogent observation. Probably it is the closest anyone has ever come to understanding. It was the first and only time that I felt respect for Derrick Hearn.

  * * * * *

  In another year it is September again. Olive arrives with the holdall and because it is full of things and I sense she is keen to make gifts of its contents to me I suspect that she will not be coming any more.

  Lying on top is a bunch of dahlias, the spiky sort and the ones with petals resembling the paper Christmas decorations which can be concertina’d out; bells, often. ‘From the garden,’ she says, ‘picked this morning.’

  When you picked them, could you see the fine raked tilth of the asparagus bed that Jack once worked on, weekend after weekend, so that the skin of his cheeks and the back of his neck were tanned by the sun and the wind. Or is that all long overgrown?

  The Pre-Raphaelites are first out of the bag, followed by a sheaf of exhibition catalogues. Then there is a hand-thrown mug with a Tudor rose design worked up in the clay which a potter friend has made. The same friend will provide the wares for the gallery café, apparently. Olive seems fulsomely happy, she radiates warmth like a kitchen range.

  Next there is a cake, wrapped in a napkin of some folkweave cloth. She has never said whether the friend with whom she is embarking upon the gallery venture is male or female. Perhaps if it is a male she feels she must observe some nicety towards my father, God help her. Bonnie Jean, asked if she might possibly be able to find a vase for the flowers, returns to praise the baked aroma and is told that it is apple and sultana cake.

  A long time afterwards I might be able to acknowledge the irony of the next part of the September afternoon. You see, when my father’s wife first walked into this room I, unable to escape, was filled with fear. I cowered inside my head as I anticipated what she would say and do. Shout, accuse, perhaps strike physical blows, a slap to my deviant, once-painted harlot’s cheeks. Perhaps pelt me with my old clothes, all patterned with that repeat motif of passion spent, and now rags merely. ‘Rag and bone’ the old man with the horse and cart used to cry through the South London mornings. ‘Rag and bone’.

  I came to wish that she had done all or any of these things, nothing there to fear. But Olive did none of them; there in the golden perfidious kindness of the September sunshine, what she did do was infinitely worse. My penance was to prove far more subtle.

  ‘There are some old apple trees in the garden,’ Tisiphone explains to Bonnie Jean, who will doubtless miss their little chats.

  ‘Marvellous croppers and we always had so many windfalls… so I got into the habit of putting them into a cake, it was my husband’s favourite… ’

  No, it wasn’t, you kindly stupid stupidly kind bovine woman who never had children so managed broken adults instead. And even if it was his favourite that was only because he had not yet visited the baker’s on the corner of Bywater Street and shared the sweet sandy curranty Nelson cakes with his sweet-mouthed sticky love in the early morning sheets of faraway mist-shrouded Chelsea.

  She has cut me a slice but my hand is dead on the cover and so she offers some to Bonnie Jean. All the auxiliaries love to eat whenever they can, always pleased to share in the chocolate box or the toffee tin or whatever is brought in. I think it is the crushing nature of their work and the tedium of it; after all, even madness is boring if you have to see it day in, day out.

  And then from the holdall a lumpy carrier bag is taken.

  ‘I’m warning you,’ my mother used to say, once, twice or three times before delivering some retributive blow.

  ‘I’ll put these in the bowl for you, Susie… they ripen up very well… I’m not sure what the variety is, your father did find out, once upon a time, but I forget… ’

  Lord Lambourne. And the sun through the glass will ripen them up says Jack while he tries to persuade me that I should leave him and I imagine how it would feel if I did and there is a hole right through the centre of my chest as though someone sculpted my form and cast me in cold bronze for the Chiltern winds to pass through the place where my heart should be.

  ‘Anyway, as it will be the last year I thought I ought to make the most of the old trees. I really think it’s the best season we’ve had… Do try it, Susie… ’

  Bonnie Jean has declared the cake scrumptious and Olive is telling her that she thinks muscovado rather than caster is the key.

  And ‘Aren’t you going to eat yours?’ they ask me. ‘Go on, give it a try… ’

  ‘I’m warning you,’ my mother said before she laid about her.

  And it seems that there is no end to the bounteous harvest from Olive’s holdall for she has bobbed down to it yet again.

  ‘Oh, and Susie,’ she says, ‘I don’t suppose you ever remember seeing your father at all and so I thought… ’ and pauses breathless, ‘… this I think is my favourite one of him… ’

  I shut my eyes just in time. If they want to make me look they will have to gouge them open.

  ‘Well, I’ll just leave it on the side here then… ’

  ‘Take it back. Get it gone. I don’t want to see.’

  They cluck and whisper at the edge of the room beyond the cinnamon incense of the broken cake. Confetti was little bits of cake thrown by the Romans for nuptial celebrations. I hear a small bump as a stray apple drops from the bowl, one of them replaces it.

  ‘Susie, I can see that you’re tired and I have to go soon anyway, but there is one other thing I need to tell you. I’ve written down the details of the grave, in case you should ever want to go and see… It’s in the town where he was born, in Wales.’

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about. He’s not dead. I don’t know anyone that’s dead.’

  My eyes are still shut tight.

  ‘Susie, try and listen, it’s important to me. Jack, John, your father, was always troubled that because he was away at the war he could not carry out some special wishes his mother had, for her own funeral. He had a little sister, you see, but she died. Her name was Ora. His mother wanted to be buried with Ora but because Jack was away at sea and it was wartime he could not make the arrangements.’

  I think this woman is raving mad. My father’s body, his long bony el Greco legs cannot be buried in a grave in the ground, wrapped round in a shroud rag. They cannot be weighted down under the dank crow-black earth, those long and energetic legs. And between them his thing, and so often it seemed done and finished like an old flower stalk discarded from the vase. She says Ystradyfwog but I have been to the churchyard in Whit-stable where my grandmother was laid; I know that there was a heap where the dead flowers from the graves and the urns were thrown. This heap was beside the place you drew water to fill the urns and in the next field there was the wooden scout hut and grass where insects buzzed and flicked in the midday heat. Discarded there in their own death mound, petals gone brown and stalks white and limp and fallen over. And yet so easily restored I think, a pin
ch of sugar in the water, and my father ready once more to beat my sin not out of me but sweetly in again. He cannot be weighted down under dark good night; she makes no sense. Non sense in the things she says.

  Mad woman, I am warning you.

  ‘The headstone is rather special. I found an elderly man working locally who had trained with Eric Gill at Capel-y-ffin.’

  John ap Rhys Owen lies beside Ora, beloved infant sister.

  She is mad. She is trying to make me believe outlandish land of my fathers’ nonsense. Only non sense can be made out of her District of Ystradyfwog nonsense, sans serif sans sense to say that my father love is in the oblivion of the earth, sans senses, sans eyes, sans taste of me, sans flesh.

  I have warned you. What must I do to make you listen, any of you with your sans serif sans sense Gill sans everything nonsense. And before they can make me see or listen to anymore of their outlandish non senses I have howled so that the lost mind of the old prize fighter in the next wing will hear and understand and I have hurled the cake at the wall across the room and it hits with the sound of a wet rubber ball thrown in the playground and I have jumped and run from the high bed. In moments I am in the bathroom and I have locked the door and although I know that they will simply unlock it from the other side it will not be before I have sought that third tile up which is three in on the middle row. Such negligence in buildings and works is the beginning of the end at the Springfield Hospital; it signals the new order when us inmates will find the doors unlocked but the world outside cold and only the red plastic warmth of Woolworth’s cafeteria in which to huddle away our days.

  I take down my cracked tile and its white vitreous edge is as efficient on thirsting flesh as any broken glass or blade.

  Olive has gone. She has been installed in Cornwall for some time now, I think. She sent a postcard showing the street in which her gallery is sited. In the foreground was a large gull with yellow stilt legs. After that I did not hear from her again.

  Sister Anna Maria says that it is a pity I am unable to come out and attend a Mass. She would take me and accept full responsibility, she says, but Herne the Hunter says no. The next best thing she can do, she feels, is to bring me a copy of the roneod Mass sheet from each Sunday. I can read it at my leisure and I am to be sure to ask her about anything that I do not understand. I thank her most sincerely but in private in my head I must admit that I know enough of the disciplines of Sister Anna Maria’s church to feel guilty that I let her befriend me, even though I know what I have done and what one day I will be about to do. There is one sin that I have yet to commit; it follows with a certain niceness on the other ones. And plenty of torment I have endured in between times; but no more than I deserved. In any case, I do not think that Sister Anna Maria is the sort of person who would wish to rescind her kindness, even when she discovers how truly bad I am.

  How shocking I would be to other people if I ever did tell them the whole truth. I do not shock myself though, I never have. You see, when my father had me in his embrace, arms and legs and hair all wound around, I used to cling on for dear life in my rapture, thinking only, ‘This is what I was made for. This is why I was born.’ And everything outside the act of possession was disengaged from me and my clasped love, as the rest of the fairground seems when the merry go round is turning.

  In the Mass sheets, sometimes smudged, brought by Sister Anna Maria, I liked particularly the passage included in the sheet for the second Sunday of Lent, from St Paul’s letter to the Philippians. I think he may have been somewhat weary at the time of writing; he says: ‘I have told you often, and I repeat it today with tears, there are many who are behaving as the enemies of Christ. They are destined to be lost.’

  I asked her whether it was the Rembrandt St Paul and she said that she was not too sure but probably because early on there had been just the one Paul; though subsequently, she adds, you had the Passionist and St Paul Aurelian and so on. Rembrandt’s St Paul looks old and weary and ascetic; his head is a bone dome and he seems to be working indefatigably to finish the task in front of him before death claims his entire haggard bag of bones old self and stops him. On the death of William Morris the doctor said that the deceased, so unfailingly driven and engaged, died simply of being William Morris. Rembrandt’s St Paul looks as though he will go the same way.

  Considering that I am deemed insane the volume of facts that I have retained in parts of my memory is quite remarkable. For instance, as well as the major speeches from Richard II I still have the streets of Chelsea, squares 5C–5D, 6C–6D, page 76 of the A–Z of London, off by heart. I have begun, in finely sharpened fine pencil, to draw myself a map on the end papers of Jack’s book on Chagall. Like a maiden lady planning a long journey I pore over my map for hours on end. I have put a cross for the Church of Our Most Holy Redeemer and St Thomas More. If I can get hold of a blue pencil I am going to indicate the plaques for Captain Scott at number 56 and poor Christina Rossetti round the corner on Cheyne Walk.

  The river, you know, is not kind. It never has been really. It is a bit of a serpent, winding its wide way.

  It is my task to close quite soon. We are back to letter writing again, are we not? Must stop now because… and then I, the writer, might make some cheery cheerio reference to what I am off to do. We know what I am going to do, you and I. I hope that you have understood enough to understand. Jack promised me that it would all be all right but sometimes, I must confess, I have thought that he, slipping easy into his old philanderer’s honeyed ways, had lied to me. Now I see that it will be all right, after all. ‘Nearly home,’ he said to me as arm in arm we retraced hushed Oakley Street on the night that he comforted me on Albert Bridge.

  Nearly home. Sometimes these days he is so close to me that I feel the gentle alteration in the air as he leans over my shoulder and tells me to describe what I see in the painting on the page and involuntarily I smile and Bonnie Jean, coming in with the water jug, says she always knew that I would get better.

  Last month I was allowed to attend my mother’s funeral. It was at the crematorium at Streatham Vale. The chapel there is built of engineering bricks, their surface hard and shiny so that they are never absorbing or softened by the autumn sunlight. I noted that Ron looked much cleaner, now that his hair had turned quite white. My sister’s husband and her two meaty boys were attendant upon her in her wheelchair. She had some malfunction of the heart and so they gave her someone else’s; she is grotesquely puffed up by steroid treatments.

  Before too long Ron and Lin will both be dead. The silent husband, unreconstructed by his expensive suits, will betake himself to Spain. Then, all connections will be cast away. I can return, revenant, to walk through the Chelsea streets on an evening of spring. In Margaretta Terrace the child with the rocking horse curtains will be long grown and gone to make its fortune. But the camellia may still be there, blooming and dropping its waxy pink petals over the wall to the pavement beneath.

  I will carry on until I am outside the Phene Arms. Then I will look up at the room in Oakley Street and I shall see the outline of my father’s figure against the window; tall, and the shoulders slightly stooped.