What she means about my life not turning out as it should have done – as she would have ordered it – is that I never met what she would have regarded as ‘the right man’. She has not, for a long time now, been so stupid as to envisage me floating down an aisle in white tulle, or even prancing up register office steps, but she is puzzled that I have been unable to make a deep and lasting relationship. She thinks it’s my fault, just as she thinks Emily’s misery her fault. She won’t have it that it is just bad luck and nothing can be done about it. Nothing. Mother secretly believes I haven’t tried hard enough, or that there is some fatal flaw in my make-up, to which I haven’t been sufficiently attentive. But she’s wrong. There isn’t. There’s no flaw, and I’ve tried as hard as I could. Mother saying this simply shows how empty her admiration for my very wonderful career is. She doesn’t admire it at all. She sees me as ‘unfulfilled’, like Emily and Celia. We’ve all let her down.
If I had had children I wouldn’t have been like Mother. Well, of course I wouldn’t have, everything is different, I am, so are the times I live in, everything is – it doesn’t need a genius to see that. But I wouldn’t have been so determined to understand, I am sure. I think I would have accepted the inevitability of not understanding a very great deal. Mother has crucified herself in her efforts to understand us. There’s been something quite manic about her desperation to know all. This information she boasts about possessing is in reality quite insubstantial. She knows very little. Here I am, at the end, so far as I can see, of her ramblings, and they’ve added sweet fuck all of any real value to my existing knowledge. I don’t believe that if I had read them properly, every word instead of selected bits, I would be more enlightened. There is no enlightenment. Memories, accounts of things past, hardly illuminate the present at all. A stranger could take in any of us from the street and learn as much about us from meeting us in the here-and-now as Mother has done in all her solemn summaries. With my children, there would have been no charting of courses. I would have known I was flinging them into the sea by giving birth to them, and that where they were carried to could never be my concern. If you don’t realize that, then you shouldn’t have children. It isn’t as simplistic as saying parents have to let go – they won’t have much choice about that in the long run – it’s that they have no hold in the first place, they only seem to have. If I were a parent that would be such a relief to me.
It’s odd that she chose to file these ‘private papers’. Odd, too, that she should call them Private Papers. She’s always had an obsession with scribbling. One of my earliest memories is of her sitting, writing away, and, when I’d ask what she was doing, she would say, ‘Just getting organized.’ What a funny thing to say to a child. She’s always kept a diary, of course, we all knew that. Once I asked if I could read what she had written on one particular day, and she let me. I was so embarrassed at how crashingly boring it was, I never asked to read it again. Her diaries are all in books, thick hardbacked diaries, terribly important-looking, and then there are her scrapbooks and commonplace books, stacks of them. But these papers are in a file, one of those box files, quite large and solid. They’re unnumbered. They are not even in the correct order and the diary entries for this six months, the six months or so she was writing all this, are copied from her actual diary and put in the file. What do I make of that? Maybe Mother thinks that in the future her precious descendants – and Vanessa had better come up trumps soon, or there won’t be any – will want to know what humdrum things she was doing while engaged on her magnum opus. All those pathetic accounts of trailing off to art exhibitions – God. She knows fuck all about art, not that I want to patronize her, or think you should only go and look at paintings if you’re qualified to – I certainly don’t think that – but I’ve always been deeply suspicious of her ‘love’ of exhibitions. It’s always seemed false, to me. All these dreary accounts of trotting off to gaze at the Pre-Raphaelites, or whatever. Why? She doesn’t really look at the paintings. She uses them as mirrors. What she wants to see is a reflection of herself, of her thoughts and life. Every damned exhibition is scrutinized for mothers and daughters, every painted portrait anxiously examined for fancied likenesses. It’s pathetic. So is this ending. No more papers after those about Florence. She must’ve stopped writing about the end of last July. How bloody feeble. I feel cheated, frustrated. It isn’t fucking fair of her to end with a whimper.
It occurs to me, all the same, that maybe she didn’t see it that way, I mean, didn’t stop because she was trailing off with nothing left to write. Maybe she came to some sort of conclusion (I must try to think this out coldly and calmly, to think instead of just reacting all the time). What Mother was doing, in the year 1984, was attempting to write an official family history. In the process, she was shredding everyone’s evidence but her own. Her purpose, the one she began with, was to show what a very wonderful family life we Butler girls had had, yet we had failed to take advantage of it. She began to feel indignant, bitter and disappointed. Her teachings had gone wrong: she had taught us that anything said against the Family is obscene. Life, she taught us, has no meaning, no joy, if human beings do not nurture each other, with tenderness and care, and the Family is where they should and must start. That was how she began. I don’t think it’s how she ended.
I think that she stopped writing after Florence, because on that holiday she realized she’d got it wrong. According to her own definition we, the Butler family, are a striking example of that institution as a failure. We are not close or intimate. We stand alone, each of us, without that vast network of relationships she craved for us. We are three strong, assertive people to whom the Family is not sacrosanct. But what Mother came to appreciate was that perhaps this does not amount to failure on her or our part. We’ve only ‘failed’ according to her original image, the image I shall paint, to please her, when I tackle this painting I’ve promised her. Looked at from another point of view, we are successes, surely. So Mother became unsure of her own ground and wisely stopped. Her last lines were ‘It should not have turned out as it has. But I am not sure why I think so.’ Exactly.
Oh, fuck it. What the hell does it matter? Maybe she hasn’t finished, anyway. Any day she could be resuming her narrative for all I know. Now what do I do? Tear it all up? All these papers, plus my contribution? Wipe out everything and, when the time comes, destroy the famous diaries, scrapbooks and so forth? But if I did that, I’d be as domineering as Mother, I’d be attempting to dictate history, too, I’d be acknowledging the power of the past, and I refuse to do so. And, if I did tear everything up, nothing’s been gained. I want some profit, I want there to have been some point to all this. Really, I have no alternative. A confrontation with Mother would do no good, it would be simply too ridiculous. I’ll leave her precious papers where I found them, but I’ll leave my own too – it’s only right that my perspective should count for as much as hers. Her papers are no longer private. I have made them my property, I have walked all over her memories, opinions and judgements, I have been a trespasser without mercy. And I have absolutely no regrets. In the unlikely event of Mother discovering and objecting to what I have done, I shall defend myself with pride. I shall say ‘Mother, I am your daughter.’ Then we’d see what the fuck she makes of that.
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Epub ISBN: 9781446443651
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Published by Vintage 2004
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Copyright © Margaret Forster 1986
Margaret
Forster has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988 to be identified as the author of this work
First published in Great Britain in 1986 by
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ISBN 9780099455622
Private Papers Page 27
