Private Papers

by Margaret Forster

  On this particular night, Oliver was even more morose than usual and I was even more exhausted. All that we had to say to each other, it seemed, was that we were so tired. Then Oliver began to talk about his day. A young girl, not more than eighteen, had been admitted the night before and he had been detailed to attend to her. She had come to the Salvation Army Hostel near King’s Cross, where she had collapsed. They sent for an ambulance and she was brought into U C H. She was heavily pregnant and very ill – not with the pregnancy but for all sorts of other reasons. Oliver had quickly established that she was suffering from a number of serious conditions, all of which had been aggravated by becoming pregnant. She refused to give her name or age or to say where she was from or what had happened. She appeared absolutely passive, accepting whatever was done to her, neither resisting nor helping. Yet she obviously exerted some kind of fascination, or Oliver would not have bothered telling me about her. He quickly regretted doing so, for of course I identified immediately with this girl. My old fantasies about my unknown mother returned to plague me. I imagined her, like this poor girl, ill and distressed, lying friendless in some ward, disapproved of by everyone, too miserable and weak to defend herself. Every day after that I made it my business to find out about Mrs Victoria as she was known – every expectant mother was Mrs in those days, married or not, and the Victoria part was taken from the name of the ward. Oliver reported that she was holding her own. Her main problem was that she only had one kidney and that the other was infected. For such a young girl, she was a ruin. And yet, as some strength returned to her, she began to win over everyone who looked after her. She still did not talk much, but she smiled and was grateful, and all the staff were impressed by her stoicism and by her determination to keep her baby. About that she was adamant.

  I would like to have visited her. I wanted to be her friend, to help her, but Oliver would not allow it. He said if I visited I might be starting a relationship I could not maintain, and I would do his patient more harm than good. And he said my desire to go to see her was not healthy. I was not prompted by genuinely altruistic motives but by morbid ones. We quarrelled and I became upset, but he would not relent. I suppose I suspected he was right. I never did see her. Oliver himself delivered her baby by Caesarean section on June 21st 1940. It was a girl, a fine healthy girl weighing seven pounds two ounces. Mrs Victoria died three days later. She had seemed to stand the delivery so well, but then her one defective kidney packed up and there was very little they could do. The hospital staff were sad, inured though they were to such tragedies. But I was distraught with grief. What would happen to the baby? Oliver was impatient with my anxiety. The child would be well looked after. By whom, by whom, I demanded? He did not know, he said it was not his job to know, by some orphanage he supposed, and at that word I burst into tears. I wanted Mrs Victoria’s baby, passionately. I begged and pleaded with Oliver to adopt her straight away, to bring her home at once. My passion scared him. He tried to calm me, suggested we should discuss it rationally like the two sensible adults we were but I was incapable of logical reasoning. I did not feel in the least sensible. There was a baby, its mother dead, nobody else wanting it and I wanted it: that was the only argument I could understand. Oliver made the fatal mistake of saying we knew nothing about Mrs Victoria, we could not know what we were taking on, we did not even know if others had a claim on this child. I said he knew nothing about me, it was exactly the same and yet he had taken me for myself alone. He said that was different: I was a mature person and – oh, it went on and on. Oliver grew weary of my persistence. He said he was worn out, too drained to battle with me. He added bitterly that it seemed as if I cared more for this child of a girl I had never known, than I did for my own children. What kind of state did I think I would be in if I took on yet another baby? As it was, I could hardly cope with the house, it was the worst time in our lives to be thinking of increasing our problems, I must be mad to contemplate adopting Mrs Victoria’s baby even if we could. And he said it would be unethical, which started off another dispute.

  I won in the end. Oliver was never convinced, but he gave in. Perhaps he had himself been more moved by the child he had delivered than he cared to admit. He said it was against his better judgement, but he would make inquiries. Maybe it would be our little extra war effort, he said. Duty swung Oliver over, but it had no part in my decision. I craved for that baby, for Jess. Jess came to us at two weeks, straight from the hospital, and I was indescribably moved by the sight of her. She was exquisite. Next to Celia, who was by then a plump six months, Jess looked fragile and delicate, though in fact she was exceptionally robust. She was fair skinned, with downy blonde fuzz all over her head and funny little wisps of longer hair growing on the nape of her neck. Her head was beautifully shaped, small and neat, and her features tiny. Naming her had been a solemn business. Oliver suggested Victoria but I did not like the idea of naming her after a public ward. If only we had known her mother’s name, but we did not. When I went to collect Jess I talked to the two young nurses who had had most to do with Mrs Victoria and asked them if she had ever mentioned names for her baby. They said no, but that, when she heard one of their names was Jessica, she had said how pretty it was and that her grandmother had been called that. So we called her Jessica, after her great-grandmother, and I was consoled by this connection. Jessica would be told she had a family name.

  One of the things I made sure of was that everything that had belonged to Mrs Victoria came home with Jess. Everything, every last rag and her things were mostly rags. I carefully washed and ironed them and put them away in a box. There was a brown dress, a red cardigan, a pair of thick fawn woollen stockings, a black cape and a Paisley-patterned fringed shawl. The shoes, broken down at the heel and with holes in the soles, I did throw out as too dreadful to keep. There was also a cheap, black plastic handbag containing a lace-bordered handkerchief embroidered with the initial M – perhaps her name was Mary? – and a tin of sweets, boiled sweets. The hospital gave me, in an envelope, the gold chain that had been round Mrs Victoria’s neck and a ring, a gaudy thing, bright blue stones in a cluster with a ‘diamond’ in the centre. When Jess was old enough I would have some tangible proof that her mother had existed. I would show her the clothes —

  *

  Those ghastly clothes. That was so awful for Jess. I wasn’t there when Mother produced them but Jess described it all so clearly that I could touch her pain. We weren’t poor, that was the point, never had been except perhaps for a brief interval I was too young to remember. As far back as I can remember, we were always comfortable, and that was at a time when a lot of people round us were not. So what shocked poor Jess was the poverty those clothes symbolized. It wouldn’t be the same today – even Vanessa, Emily’s daughter, went through a phase of wearing rags all the time, deliberately, smelling and stinking, all holes, straight from the jumble. But young girls didn’t, then, not on purpose. I saw them myself later and saw what Jess had meant. The dress was the worst, an old woman’s dress, horrible, scratchy sort of material, absolutely shapeless but then, as she was pregnant, Jess’s mother I mean, that was useful. It was the ugliest dress in the world. It had a square neck with rows of black ric-rac round it and two bobbles hanging from the button at the top. You would’ve thought at least she could’ve cut the bobbles off. It was patched under the arms, presumably to cover up the place the previous owner had worn away with sweating. You couldn’t imagine any young, beautiful girl putting it on. None of the other things were as upsetting, except the tawdry jewellery. Mother had kept the chain and ring carefully, but they’d both gone black, not being real gold. They looked worse than Christmas cracker rubbish. Jess wouldn’t touch them, of course. She said she wanted everything burned, they gave her the creeps. Mother made a little speech about how she had always wished she had had something, anything, of her mother’s and that was why she had kept them.

  That was always the trouble – Mother always expected Jess to identify with her. Always. T
hat one fact, that they were both orphans from birth, was supposed to bind them together automatically. And it didn’t. It wasn’t even the same, Jess once said to me, not really the same. She had not been given away, her mother had died but if she had not died she would have kept her. She resented my mother equating their circumstances. And she had been chosen, by us, by a family. Mother never had, she knew nothing about what it was like living in a family yet not being really of it. Jess hated the family. We all did, all four of us, but Jess hated it the most. Mother’s hunger to have her revolted her. She would rather have been someone’s special adopted child, someone who had no children of her own. She thought Mother had been greedy and that there was something suspicious about her desire to take on another child.

  And she wasn’t beautiful. Perhaps she was as a baby. I only know the photographs and it seems to me you can make all babies look beautiful, if you try hard enough. But by the time she was four, which was when my father died and all my memories suddenly become very sharp, she certainly wasn’t beautiful. The much lauded ash-blonde hair and the fair skin made her look as colourless as an albino and, as she grew up, she became distinctly whey-faced and scrawny. Being miserable most of the time didn’t help, of course. Poor Jess – the most common remark made to her was always ‘whatever is the matter with you?’ There was never anything specific the matter, just everything. I think the root of it all was that she wasn’t clever. We were, all of us, not necessarily academically clever but intelligent. Mother was clever too. Jess was slow. Then there was the overwhelming proximity of Celia. As my mother says, Celia was about six months older than Jess, and she was an amazingly ‘good’ baby. Celia’s also the cleverest of all of us, and the most talented – she plays the piano and oboe and was brilliant at sports. Jess was naturally shoved up against Celia all the time. People assumed they were twins, because of their ages, though they looked nothing like each other.

  Mother couldn’t have known how things would turn out – she couldn’t have looked into the future and seen how Celia would outshine Jess at every turn – but she ought to have seen how bloody stupid it was to take a baby into the family, when you’ve already got one. I don’t know how she did it, technically, I mean. Perhaps it was because of the war, perhaps the adoption procedure was slacker or perhaps my father’s position had something to do with it. But I do know something Mother doesn’t mention which is that Jess could have gone to several other homes. My godfather told me. He was Dad’s closest friend, Simon Birch, also a doctor, an anaesthetist. He was in the same team as Dad and had been the anaesthetist for Jess’s delivery. Once, when Jess was in real trouble, he took me to the theatre for a birthday treat and I blurted out all about Jess and what she had been doing and so on. He said maybe it was unfortunate she hadn’t been adopted by any of the other people anxious to have her. I was too young to press him on this, but it was a pity he didn’t offer more information. I suppose he remembered I was only fourteen and he ought to be discreet. This was the first time I queried my mother’s version of events. I had always believed she rescued Jess from a terrible fate. Frequently I’d envisaged Jess in some dreadful Dickensian institution, down on her knees scrubbing stone floors and crying into her metal bucket. I’d never thought of her cosily installed in some other loving home, actually better off.

  So my mother was a fool. She ought never to have adopted Jess. It was not an act of mercy and kindness, it was an act of self-indulgent folly. Especially, since there was a war on and everything was in a state of turmoil. I’m surprised at my father allowing it. Why did he? Was he weak, always persuaded by my much more forceful mother? It doesn’t sound like it from everything else I know about him, but then what I do know is all from her. Was she going to bring us up on a diet of hearing our father was a vacillating, pliable character? Was she hell. He was a War Hero and war heroes, once dead, were Brave and Strong and Masterful. Where, one wonders, are his private papers? Those are the ones I’d like to find. I don’t think they ever existed – he wasn’t a writing man. What a relief. Mother would probably have framed his Letters from the Front to his Darling Children and hung them on the walls as texts. Instead, all I am left with is a memory of him as big and blond and slow. Slow moving, I mean. He was a calming presence, I think. And shy.

  My father never died as far as my mother was concerned. Unfortunately. She had a mother she wouldn’t allow not to exist for her, and she then added a husband she could never admit was dead. Throughout our childhood he was ‘missing’, just missing. She expected him to reappear at any minute and I suppose, on the one hand, that was her strength and, on the other, her undoing. It meant she endured those early post-war years better than most, endlessly buoyed up by hope, but also prevented by it from starting again. When my father was killed – sorry, posted eternally missing – my mother was not quite twenty-nine. At twenty-eight she was much too young to withdraw herself from other men. But that is what she did. Other men were anathema to her. She was determined to bury herself even more securely within her precious family. She tried to be a father as well as a mother to us, and to fulfil both roles perfectly. Her family was to be enough. But it doesn’t matter what she is going to go on to say: a family is not enough. She committed a kind of emotional suicide, for which I blame her severely. It’s irrelevant whether she owns up to ‘wrong choices’ like Jess. What she ought to be owning up to is the strangling of her own ambitions.

  I can hear her in the kitchen, clatter of the metal coffee machine she bought specially to make the kind of coffee I like. She hates coffee, likes delicate teas herself, rose-hip and lemon and camomile. But now she’s making that strong Black Stuff Rosemary Likes (but-I-am-sure-is-bad-for-her). Celia has gone, I heard the door shut, heard her shout goodbye to me. Soon the coffee will hiss and bubble and Mother will call me. There will be a piece of Celia’s famous chocolate cake. Every time I say I like it, Celia offers me the recipe and tells me the secret of her cake’s success is using ground almonds instead of flour – as if I’d mess around baking any kind of cake. Mother, all excited at my promising to do this painting of us all, will say, ‘Did you find what you wanted, dear?’ And I will say – what will I say? Yes, thanks, and a lot more besides? Look what was in the bottom drawer, behind the last box of photographs? No, I won’t. I need to think. I might want to read on, without her knowing. If I decide not to, no harm is done. ‘Keep your options open, children,’ Mother used to say, at her most hatefully prim. There we are, the summons. Deep breath. Out I shall go, carrying only a few snaps. I’ll say I got side-tracked looking at the ones that were useless. I’ll say I need to look again. Then I shall drink the coffee, scoff the cake, listen to her telling me the latest Good Deed Celia has done, and leave.

  January 1st 1984

  WASN’T GOING TO keep a diary this year, not when I’m trying to write this – whatever this other thing is, whatever it is I am trying to set down, sort out. But I can’t survive without a diary too, it’s a habit, maybe a bad one, but a lifetime’s habit. I need it. Can’t survive without it. It is for me, not them. No need to imagine the judge-like figure, no need to fret over the fairness and truth of what I am saying. This is for me and I am friendly to myself and understanding, can say anything. Can say how upset I’ve felt today without despising myself. Upset because it is Celia’s forty-fourth birthday – awful, awful. No husband, lover, children, home, I mean real home. Awful. Can’t bear it, can’t and yet have to. Find myself thinking stupid thoughts, like at least she is healthy, not poor, likes her job. Can’t keep out of my head memories of her birth – boring, sentimental nonsense, Rosemary would say, but letting them run, the memories, gives me intense pleasure. Can’t always run my memories as I wish, can’t always choose, so annoying. Silly memories, painful memories, frightening memories — they pop up unselected. But births, they are choosable, like records. Just take them out and put them on. They never change, they are made to order, I made them myself and put them carefully away. Forty-four years ago tonight, there I lay
, cocooned in care, Oliver at my side, myself at the centre of a great tangle of warm flesh, baby, husband, small child, all of us together in one room, a family complete, such joy. Today, all I’ve felt is grief, suppressed grief, grieving because Celia’s life is so bleak. Rosemary says I am stupid, Celia has the life she wants, why do I fuss. Has she the life she wants? Wherein lies her happiness? Show me, I tell myself. I rang her, wished her happy birthday, was glad she liked her present, glad, glad but miserable, too. Started to weep as soon as I put the telephone receiver down. Asked her what she was going to do on her birthday. She said just relax. Just relax. Stoical Celia, her life static. No development, no progress, no change. Rosemary says it is her life. It doesn’t feel it, it feels like mine. Why? Why to lots of things. What a dreadful day. Done nothing, been nowhere. Hurry on tomorrow.

  *

  I’m like a burglar, even though I have my own key. I move like a burglar, on tip-toe, yet this flat is empty. I feel like a burglar, my hands clammy, in spite of my right to be here. Mother knows. She’s out, but she knows. I told her I would pop in and look through some more photographs. She offered to look herself, but I said she wouldn’t like what I like. Slide open the bottom drawer, feel at the back and of course it’s still there, this file of papers, these notes of my own. Undisturbed. What did I expect? Though Mother would be cunning. If she realized I had found the file and was reading its contents, she wouldn’t necessarily say so. What I should’ve done was to paste a hair over the opening of the file, or some equally ludicrous trick from a crappy detective story, but being me I’d have forgotten I’d done it anyway. I’m sure nothing’s been touched. But where did I stop? Never thought to mark the place. At a different colour and type of paper, I think. Now that’s helpful. About half an inch in, at the first pale pink sheet. And what in hell’s name was it? Some totally boring diary entry for last year. It makes my head ache even to consider its significance. She was up to adopting Jess and then the war. Yup, the jolly old war.