March 5th
JUST THE SORT of Monday morning I’ve been waiting for, cold, bitterly cold, cheerless, dreary, perfect for going to the Royal Academy to catch the Genius of Venice exhibition before it closes. Pleased me just to think of going, didn’t put me off a bit that Rosemary said it was a boring exhibition, pleased me to be there while others trudged to work, pleases me now to think back upon. Thinking about Arrigo Licinio and his seven children. The mother in the picture flanked on both sides by dark-clothed children. She was separate but part of them, gold silk to their black velvets. Substantial in size and presence. Calm. Paint us, her husband Arrigo had said in 1535, paint us as we are, a family. Put on your best dress, he had said to her. None of them smiled, even the baby was grim-faced. It was the importance which made them severe, the presentation of their joint, enclosed family world to the painter. Not a fidget anywhere, not a joker. What effort went into organizing the sittings? What threats and cajoling? Never did I manage it, the posed family group, though I tried. Plenty of individual photographs of us all but no group photo, except one taken at Emily’s wedding, and even there we’re not just on our own. But that was another era, another life, family sacrosanct, free will within it unheard of. Nothing to prize really, those brooding Italian groups. Bought a plate, olive covered. I shall eat very white fish from it or arrange goat cheese and figs upon it and admire the colours before I eat. How nice to be in London, within reach of exhibitions and distractions. Move to the country, my children said when I was sixty, move to somewhere beautiful and calm and peaceful, move to a place where you can walk as you love to walk, in real countryside or along seashores, you love the country, love the sea. No. How far sighted I was. I need London more now I am getting old, not less. Oliver and I could have lived happily in the depths of the country, arrogant in our love, smugly self-sufficient, then. Swiss Family Butler. But not now. London’s bad parts I can take. The traffic, dirt, crowds. Small price to pay for its compensations. No need, in London, to fear bleak days, to shudder at grey, leaden mornings. Out. I can always go out, somewhere, there is always a treat available.
*
I didn’t get as far as I wanted last time because Celia arrived long before Mother got back. She was bringing Mother some smoked mackerel pâté she’d been making and dropping some shopping in. There was I, all hot-cheeked with guilt I expect, tripping out of this room clutching a photograph of Emily’s wedding as an alibi. Celia wasn’t even interested, she couldn’t have cared less what I was doing. She has so little curiosity, it’s extraordinary to think we’re sisters. I stood watching her as she unloaded all the goodies she’d brought. Her pride was amusing. She set the pâté down with such care and affection, sort of stroking the cloth that covered the dish it was in. ‘Mother will enjoy it,’ she said. I didn’t dare speak. Then she turned to me. ‘Would you like some, Rosemary? It would be no trouble.’ I said no thanks, I wasn’t really into eating much. She was offended. Oh Christ – she was offended. I wonder what Mother has to say about Celia? I don’t think I can stand the boredóm of reading it. Celia’s illness as a child, bound to be yards on that. The mere thought . . . but perhaps it might be fun, a useful test, for me to get in first here for a change. Now what do I remember about dear Celia?
Well, for a start, Celia was a surrogate father to us all. If Mother went through a phase, before I became bolshie, of imagining I could replace her dead husband so far as companionship went, she certainly went through a much more prolonged one of thinking Celia could stand in for him as a father. It was not fair that my sister should have had to spend her adolescence bolstering up Mother’s idea of a family but she didn’t seem to mind. I rejected my role, but Celia loved hers. She was five years younger than I but seemed much older by the time she was twelve. Partly, it was her appearance. Whereas I was like Mother, Celia was like the Butler women: short, heavy and with something Slavonic about them. I’d only seen Grandmother Butler when she was old but I’d seen photographs of her when she was young, and of her mother too, and they were exactly like Celia. Weight and girth always make young girls look older, but Celia’s nature also aged her prematurely. She was (is) phlegmatic. Her expression is deadpan. Her great, moon-like face with its large pale eyes rarely has much expression in it. She looked like a middle-aged frump, even when she was young, and it never seemed surprising to find her acting like one. The only surprising thing about Celia was how sporty she was – a demon at any game, especially tennis. She had a walk like a duck-billed platypus but she moved with amazing speed on a tennis court. She and Mother played together. I always laughed when I saw them going off side by side.
Mother, who had wonderfully long and shapely legs, always wore a decorous tennis dress very nearly covering her knees, whereas Celia, who had terrible legs, terrible, fat, red, wobbly thighs, wore shorts. They looked so funny, like Laurel and Hardy. They started playing when Celia was about ten, soon after Celia’s convalescence. She had rheumatic fever, or was it glandular fever – oh, I can’t remember, I’ve never been interested in illness – some long-drawn-out, debilitating thing, anyway, which took ages to diagnose, never mind cure. I recall Celia collapsing all over the place and being very white. None of us could believe it, big, strong Celia going down like a ninepin and then weak as a kitten. If it had been Jess or Emily, both frail and delicate-looking in their different ways, then it would’ve made more sense.
Mother moved Celia into her bedroom. It became their special sanctum. Celia’s bed was placed by the window, where Mother lined up all sorts of plant pots for her to look at while she had to lie down so much. They grew all kinds of things in them and had endless boring conversations about the health of each sodding plant. I could hear them droning on when I went to bed next door. I can’t say I was jealous of all the attention Celia got, but Jess and Emily were – they were furious. They hated hearing Mother and Celia talking, hated hearing them laugh on the other side of the closed door. Later, when Celia was up to going out, she and Mother gardened. Celia had her own little patch and spent hours planting things and hoeing away and generally grovelling about in the earth. Mother encouraged her. Every time a flower bloomed in Celia’s patch you’d have thought it was a bloody miracle. Best time of Celia’s life, I should think. The only time she ever felt close to Mother in the way she wanted. It’s pathetic, really. Celia and Mother want to be more than absolutely devoted to each other, but they can’t be. They are incompatible and it’s not a bit of good them pretending that, because they are mother and daughter, that does not matter. It does. Mother has always been able to argue and shout with Emily and me but she’s never been able to do so with Celia. She’s afraid to: it would be too dangerous because Celia might, indeed would, take her seriously.
*
— when they were small people often mistook Celia and Jess for twins even though Celia was very much bigger and older looking. They were both fair, both had large blue eyes, and Jess was simply thought the ‘weak’ twin from whom Celia had greedily taken a double share of strength. And of course I exaggerated their closeness because they were so much of an age, I treated them the same. They always shared a room (and a pram before that) and no distinction was made over bedtimes and so forth. But by the time they were five I knew how very different they were and that it was no good treating them the same. Celia was clever and Jess slow, Celia solid and dependable and Jess scatty. But I still thought that they were close and that such difference of temperament and personality, far from separating them, might actually draw them even closer. I did see that Celia took the lead and that Jess depended on her, but there seemed nothing abnormal in that. I saw that, without Celia, Jess was unhappy, that she needed her, but that seemed to me natural. I thought it quite touching –
*
If only Mother would cut this out. None of us dared tell her the truth about Jess because she was so besotted with her. Jess was some kind of atonement for Mother, her way of placating the gods. I don’t pretend to understand Mother’s complicated rati
onale but I am absolutely certain that she invested Jess with some kind of mystical significance. It may even be that she thought of Jess as herself.
Mother thought that Jess’s adoption should be formally broken to Jess and to Celia when they were seven. She didn’t see how Jess could be brought up successfully as her own, if, right from the beginning, the word adopted was used. But at seven they would be old enough to understand and yet Jess would have had time to become a secure part of our life. Mother had some muddled ideas derived from the famous Jesuit saying about the first seven years being the most formative. She thought the habits and beliefs of those years were fixed forever. I had it formally explained to me first – God knows what kind of garbled version I’d been fobbed off with at five. Mother used all the predictable patter. Jess was special, she had been chosen, she was every bit as much my sister as Celia and Emily. I was dumbfounded. The sole bit of information I took in was that Jess was not really my sister. Again and again I said to Mother, ‘You mean, you aren’t Jess’s mummy? She didn’t come out of your tummy?’, stuff like that. I wonder if, when Celia and Jess reached the magical age of seven, she told them together?
*
— told them together. It seemed the natural thing to do, but perhaps I was also hiding behind Celia, who, when I had finished telling them, pleased me by taking Jess’s hand and holding it tightly. The subject was never mentioned again, not for years. I suppose I congratulated myself on how well I had managed the whole business.
I have looked at Celia and listened to her and thought about her and wondered how she could be the daughter of Oliver and me. In temperament and personality she is not like us. Because Rosemary and Emily are in different ways like me, I used to let Celia think she was like Oliver. I think she liked me to do so. But I knew she was not. She was more like Grandmother Butler, after whom she was named. And so I knew, always, that even children who are indisputably the offspring of two particular people can often appear not to be. Celia was just as much a cuckoo in my nest as Jess and, yet, the difference was crucial. Where Jess was concerned there was a different kind of blame attached, a different kind of agonizing worry to trouble me. However different Celia was from me, from us, from the rest of the family, there was nothing that could have been done about it. But where Jess was concerned, there was. I could not bear to think that Jess might have been happier in another family if I had not so greedily claimed her for my own.
When I told Jess that she was adopted, and why, I had stressed again and again how precious she was to me, how desperate I had been to have her. Not for a second can she have thought her adoption was done reluctantly, or grudgingly, or even as a kindness. She had no curiosity about her mother, she positively detested any mention of her. I thought I had painted such a wonderful portrait of her – young, beautiful, sweet-natured and brave. Jess would have none of it. ‘Don’t tell me,’ she would say and that mulish, closed look came into her face. ‘I don’t want to know, I don’t want to know anything.’ It was not because she wanted to think I was her real mother, I am sure of that. The whole subject of adoption was simply taboo. There was nothing I could do but leave it untouched, hoping all the time that as she grew older Jess would be reconciled. At least, I comforted myself, she had Celia to support her —
*
She had Celia. Unfortunately. Celia was like Mr Plod the policeman (how appropriate in view of Andrew Bayliss later). She never appeared in need of help or support herself, except when she was ill as a child, that was the maddening thing. She irritated me totally, I always longed for her to crack up. And I loathed her self-righteous attitude towards Jess. I didn’t give a damn for Jess, but on the other hand I vaguely sympathized with her position.
I find it hard to describe Jess. As a child I have said how whey-faced and colourless she was and what a pest, always moaning. She didn’t figure much in my life. But later I became more aware of her as she herself became more troublesome. She was Mother’s cross. This joyous babe Mother had taken to her bosom, and upon whom she had spent so much care and lavished so much love, became her cross. She didn’t know how to make Jess happy and, even if she didn’t realize, as she says, the full extent of her misery, she knew she was a misfit. The simple truth was that, as Mother now has the courage to acknowledge, Jess would have been better off absolutely anywhere but in our family. In one way which Mother never appreciated, Jess being an outsider, even though brought up from birth by Mother, proved that there was indeed a family identity which was rejecting a non-family member. It proved heredity was quite clearly stronger than environment in our case. That was Mother’s bad luck, and Jess’s too. But of course nobody could acknowledge that, nobody could possibly admit that the whole adoption was a ghastly failure and, quick, let’s get this wretched child into another more congenial family or else into a Home. I’m not saying that would have been the solution, or advocating that it should have been. I’m just stating the facts as Mother seems unable to do. After she was ten years old Jess was in torment in our house, most of it internalized but manifesting itself in scores of well-known ways – well known, that is, to those who do know them.
She started truanting early, certainly before the end of her first year at secondary school. In that, as in so many other ways, she was stupid, entirely lacking the cunning needed to get away with it. She never thought of getting her registration mark first, she just didn’t go in at all and so it was extremely easy for the school to discover she was bunking off. Celia told Mother, even before the school did, and Mother went into a complete spin worrying over where Jess had gone, just as much as why she’d gone in the first place. It seems Jess just went to the nearest playground and sat there until four o’clock. Later, once she had met up with two other truants, whose names I forget, the pattern changed. No more innocent sitting in the playground, which was about Jess’s real level. She moved on to shop-lifting. She got caught, inevitably, whereas the others didn’t, and I’m not just echoing my mother when I say Jess was definitely set up by them. Then it was a policewoman and a social worker and Mother making herself ill with worry. I hated seeing my mother so upset. It was disgusting – yes, I do mean disgusting not heartbreaking. Her immense distress disgusted me. Her face seemed to cave in and wobble, and there was panic in every frenzied gesture. I didn’t help by saying in my best world-weary sixth-form way what the hell did it matter, for God’s sake, it was only a bloody pencil, don’t make such a fuss. It certainly wouldn’t help Jess, I pointed out, to carry on as if she was a mass murderer. Get some sense of proportion, I told my mother. I heard Mother go in to Jess that evening – she’d been sent to bed after all the officials had gone and Celia had, for once, been told to stay out – and I knew Mother would be attempting one of her famous heart-to-hearts, and I felt for Jess. I knew how infuriating it was to have Mother telling you how much she loved you and how ready she was to understand, and all that shit. I could deal with it. Jess certainly couldn’t. What she needed was psychiatric treatment but that was the last thing she was going to get, with Mother acting already as the ultimate amateur shrink. It was a test of the family, Mother told the rest of us. We must all close in and help Jess. That is what families were for and what they meant: the world might reject and condemn you but not your family, not ever. They understood, they supported you through thick and thin. This didn’t mean condoning whatever form your misbehaviour had taken, oh no, but it did mean going on loving you in spite of it, quite uncritically and unconditionally. That was the nub — family love was unconditional. Nobody bargained in a family, nobody said they would love you if you stopped truanting or shop-lifting or whatever, they just loved you.
Well, Mother may have believed that load of crap. None of the rest of us did, not even Emily, who was at that time only about seven or so. But we all kept quiet and didn’t voice our heresy, because Mother’s state was pitiful. We didn’t really care about Jess but we did care about Mother.
*
— perhaps unwise. Jess was so very weak. When al
l the trouble began it drove me, once more, to wonder about Jess’s mother. Had that been her trouble? Had she, too, been a drifter, someone always pushed along and shaped by others? Jess ought to have been luckier. She had us, a close and loving family. In particular, she had Celia. But, once the outside world started to intrude, she was terribly unfortunate. She was picked up by girls much smarter than herself at school and went along with them, hardly knowing what she was doing. The policewoman, who brought her home the first time she shop-lifted, smiled wearily when I said that, but it was true. Jess had already started sleep-walking through life.
I tried so hard to get through to her. There she was, lying on her bed, hands behind her head, just staring at the ceiling. No tears, absolute stillness. I did not ask her why she had taken the pencil, but how — how it had happened. She shrugged, not defiantly, just helplessly. I made a conscious effort to take her in my arms and hug her, but she kept her hands behind her head and her body was unyielding. I said to her that all she needed to know was that I loved her and always would. She did not say anything or move a muscle. As I left the room, defeated, she said, ‘Can I have the radio on?’ Going downstairs I could hear Radio Luxembourg blaring away. It struck me that pop music was Jess’s sole interest. She did not read or play any games or musical instrument or draw. She did not belong to any clubs or societies. When I had tried to talk to her not very helpful teacher about this, she seemed to think this inactivity quite normal. Lots of young girls were like that, she said, there was nothing unusual about it. But in our house it was unusual. Nobody else just sat. I began to suspect there must be something wrong physically with Jess to account for her ennui, and took her to the doctor, half dreading he would diagnose pernicious anaemia or worse. He said Jess was a little on the thin side and small for her age, but perfectly healthy. Fatten her up, he said, but that was impossible. She hardly ate anything.
Private Papers Page 9
