Faith Fox

by Jane Gardam

  I tell you, everyone looked for the crumbled feet of clay on this shining girl and nobody found them. Certainly men never found them. Holly Fox was physically, uninhibitedly warm-blooded and determined on a lot of sexual love—in time. Not yet. What’s more—and this was important to the medical students she usually went about with—she was pretty well-off and well-connected to the top medical mafia. Quite a few were stirred by the heart that beat so strongly beneath the starch that her hospital still insisted upon.

  Oh Holly Fox, Holly Fox—she knew in her genes, as many don’t, that what the sleazy, exhausted, nearly gutted soul of the young male hospital doctor wants is not femininity and softness, and someone who won’t bleat when he’s never at home, so much as self-confidence; an effective, fearless sort of woman, preferably a wielder of some sort of power in the profession, who keeps cool, smiles at him when he comes home, ticks him off, keeps her (and his) love affairs to herself, is silent as the grave about gossip, doesn’t get drunk at parties and has the making of a stupendous medically political hostess of the future.

  Holly Fox, by the way, had not the least intention of going on with any work after marriage, even if she were to choose a penniless houseman. Her mother and grandmother had never worked; why should she? The penniless housemen in her life did not actually know this yet but, even if they had, it would have made little difference, for the choice—just look at that jaw, those blue eyes perhaps a little cold within the sparkle—the choice was going to be entirely hers. When Holly Fox fell matrimonially in love it was going to be with utter success, a full-scale operation.

  ‘Andrew Braithwaite,’ said Thomasina, her mother, to Pammie and Jinny and everyone. ‘Poor lamb, she’s begun to gaze at him. He hasn’t a chance.’

  He hadn’t.

  She got him.

  3

  Thomasina, Holly’s mother, had been a widow for years and years without the slightest intention of remarriage. Her husband, a general surgeon in the home counties, had dropped down dead in the middle of an operation on a heart that somehow kept beating while old Herbert’s refused every sort of jump-start in the book. He had been dying for a cigarette at the time, and indeed did so. A good marriage really, very devoted, although there had always been a look, a world-weary, wary look, in Thomasina’s eye that said she always steered clear of devotion.

  Maybe she was a woman who did not really need a man all that much? Maybe a generation on she would have been a lesbian? Herbert and she had got out of the way of discussing their feelings, if they had ever done so, which is improbable. Herbert had been pretty bluff from the nursery, and not often at home in the evenings. Overworked, of course, and no hobbies except smoking. His adoring hospital entourage (he liked girls for suggestive, sexy conversations, no more) had made him as arrogant as the next man in a sycophantic profession, and in his social life at home he postured about, too proud to talk about his work to laymen, afraid at parties that someone would come and ask for free advice. He was a crashing social snob, very keen on his dead relations. His talkativeness at work and his amiability were the same as his daughter’s and his laugh was famous. He went caroling through life, probably doing more good than harm.

  Thomasina never let on about what had drawn her to him. She had the Surrey way of talking endlessly and objectively about her nearest without the least hint of them being also dear. First meeting, young love, marriage bed and the early years of Thomasina and Herbert Fox were unknown to all, and ‘all’ now included themselves. The world was kept in darkness. There were no photographs on display except for an unyielding bridal study on Thomasina’s dressing table, Herbert blotchy with (perhaps) emotion and in RAMC uniform and Thomasina, twenty-five, looking elderly in a family wedding veil that hung down all round as if there were lead weights in the hem, like a lace tablecloth at a Mrs. Beeton dinner.

  Poor Thomasina. You could see the awful honeymoon ahead. You could see the screwed-up damp handkerchiefs at Victoria Station. You could hear the sad boom of the guns, imagine the bomb-torn plain, the mountainous bandages, the terrible and wonderful heroism and patriotism. At home there would be Thomasina in a ghastly white hat and apron with a big red cross stitched on it, making field dressings, running tea stalls, being brave beneath the zeppelins.

  Wrong. Wrong. Wrong war. Thomasina in that war was not even a child. It was the second war. Herbert only made RAMC officer because he was doing some national service and Thomasina only looked like Edith Cavell because she had absorbed, as her daughter was to do later, so much of her mother’s generation that she looked a generation older than she was. There was a very powerful gene in the female members of this family that held its generations in a vice.

  But Thomasina, unlike Holly Fox, who was not given the opportunity, grew younger. If there had been later photographs of her you would have seen her grow clear of the lace and lilies and honeymoon tweeds of the times. In the coming years, with Herbert so often from home, her voice was to become deeper and more confident. Her golf began to be respectable and her tennis even better. The dark face of Thomasina glaring through the racket strings before a particularly devilish smash showed a depth of aggression you’d never have expected in her at a drinks party in her chintzy sitting room or her garden which overflowed with old-fashioned roses all tangled up with shrubs, sweet-smelling herbs, narcissi, dahlias in season, clouds of bluebells in spring, difficult trilliums and lilies and ‘anything I feel like sticking in.’ Green fingers? Not at all. ‘I just buy and pray.’

  But that was not altogether true, for in the garden—in dungarees, then tight pants, then jeans, then floppy trousers as the years rolled—Thomasina heaved and dug and slashed about by the hour, the day, the week, the season, clearing, sweeping, replenishing soil, feeding with rich black compost, adding most violent tonics (‘chicken shit for choice’), plumping, slapping and puddling everything back in again. She opened for the National Gardens twice a year. It was an almost killing, numbing discipline; introverting, silencing, and bringing great comforts. Thomasina’s garden rewarded her with richness: every leaf looked polished or silken, every rose was spotless, thripless, waiting to be photographed, waiting to be admired.

  Oh, what was really going on inside Thomasina Fox?

  As the marriage waned to a brother-and-sisterish-ness—except for occasional exercisings in the dark, which were forgotten by morning, never commented upon—brother-and-sisterish tracts of private territory were established. Thomasina became capable of cutting her losses as resolutely as she cut down her sweet peas. Her figure improved. The roundedness beneath the lace tablecloth that had threatened haunches turned to slimness and then to leanness and then to a lanky Sackville-Western ranginess that happened to be fashionable at the time. She flattened out above, which was also timely, for it was now the 1960s, when female beauty became anorexic and young girls yearned sometimes until teenage death for a breastless, stomachless torso. Other women of Thomasina’s age responded rebelliously at this time with gathered, bunchy skirts, scooped necklines and beehive hair. Thomasina flaunted her independence by wearing short skirts even in the evening and cutting her hair to near baldness.

  She never discussed it. Never said why, and Herbert never noticed. Her friends said things like, ‘Oh my! Thomasina!’ but she only smiled. To one another they said, ‘She looks rather male. Can’t say I like it,’ or ‘She’s really far too thin. I hope she’s not got something,’ and ‘It’s a bit repulsive really, those hipbones sticking out at the front, like those awful dying cows in the East.’ Men liked it, though. During the Sixties and Seventies Englishmen were learning rather guiltily to like women who could look like boys, who grew thinner and thinner, taller and taller, fiercer and fiercer. Their heels became four inches high, puncturing the wooden floors of Europe, the chateaux of the Loire, the assembly rooms at Bath, the little Surrey hospital where Holly Fox was born and where, twenty-eight years later, she was to die.

  Thomasina became ‘t
hat woman with the marvellous figure’ and even when one day it was noticed that her waistline was rather less defined and then a baggish thing emerged between the coat-hanger hip bones, and word went round, ‘Good gracious—Thomasina, at last!’ she still looked good. Through all the nine months she looked good, indeed wonderful, and felt it. Herbert was delighted and everyone most envious, after Holly was born on Christmas Day, to find Thomasina restored to her flatness and ranginess within days, as if the child had been lifted lightly out from inside some expensively invisible zip fastener. The nuns all thought her a splendid woman and Herbert was so excited he nearly amputated somebody’s good leg. Or said he did. They were being awfully funny and bright and not altogether truthful about this time, the Foxes. They joked and laughed at everything. Even when Herbert died a year or so later Thomasina kept her careful, mocking face in order magnificently. Extraordinary woman. Very brave. Scarcely spoke of him.

  But oh, the difference in her.

  The difference that followed. The difference centred itself in the intensity of her love for Holly.

  From her daughter’s birth Thomasina had been ahead of her time, skipping the feminism and going straight into the backlash. She had been an avid non-smoking, non-drinking breastfeeder. Now she became the impassioned mother, she and the baby inseparable. For years she gave up everything: childless friends (except Pammie), Bridge, golf, tennis. She spent her days at tots’ dancing classes, music lessons, playgroups, junior-school swimming baths, nursery tea parties. She refused to consider employing a nanny or au pair. She refused drinks parties, fork suppers beloved of the region, men, offers of marriage. She never went on holiday. She and Holly lived intensely together in the black-and-white thirties Tudor house in its glossy-mag garden, now rather overgrown. On the telephone (when she couldn’t avoid it: it was before answer-phones) she kept up an occasional contact, in a pleasant, shrieking old lingo, with friends—she had no relations to speak of—and she had people to the house only if they had babies. Babies for Holly. Holly must have her friends from the beginning, this only child. Thomasina read Dr. Spock, Jung, John Bowlby, Fairbairn.

  Yet beneath the ordered, almost ordained, rich, upper-class life of the day, for which everyone about her had fought and which they believed to be a true and gallant way of continuing the country’s old validity (not for the money only—this was pre-Thatcher), Thomasina swam in a deep sea of love for her child, a gobbling love, an inordinate affection that blotted out all else and terrified her whenever she had to come up for a gasp of air. She never put into words, not even to herself, what the gasps of air disclosed: that Holly was her passion, her lover, her life. If ‘anything should happen’ to Holly, Thomasina knew that she would die.

  It was Inexplicable. It was not what anyone was used to in Edgecombe Park, least of all Thomasina. For years, after all, the Foxes had made no secret of the fact that they didn’t want children and with Thomasina growing so masculine and skinny and poor Herbert so glandular and fat—and silly—it had often been said that you only had to look at them to see that the poor things couldn’t do it. Some said they never had, that Herbert was all bombast and smut and schoolboy jokes about sex and all his talk about it in the hospital was just talk. But there it was. Holly Fox arrived into Thomasina’s world and Thomasina wrapped her now celibate elegant frame in ecstasy.

  As Holly’s childhood passed, Thomasina began to cope rather better with this secret life. A perfect mother was not obsessive, must learn to let her child go in order to develop her own relationships, have schoolgirl secrets, go off on school trips. The first of these, no further than the Kensington Science Museum when Holly was eight, marked a vital stage in Thomasina’s journey. She spent the hours alone at home hallucinating the upturned coach, little bodies spilled about the road, the Irish bomb, the false step off the pavement. ‘We’re just going to buy a—’ Screech! The ambulance siren, the police cars. The ring at the bell. The funeral procession.

  Nobody, nobody, knew the immensity of these things, and Holly was greeted on her return by her mother’s cool face and nice food waiting in the fridge. Holly overheard girls at school say, ‘Holly’s mother’s terrific-looking but she’s a bit hard somehow. D’you think she’s horrible to Holly?’ But how could she be, with Holly such an open, happy girl?

  And still open and happy at nine, hugging and hugging her mother goodbye when she went off to boarding school in Kent, excited at all that was to come. Thomasina amazed the school staff that climactic day by her light-hearted adieux. Other mothers sniffled. This one hugged and kissed the child with the greatest good sense and looked understanding and amused as Holly vanished up some stairs, one sock higher than the other, arms full of teddies and a tin of homemade shortbread.

  Thomasina left briskly, but as she turned out of the school gates she began to shake. Later she stopped the car in a lay-by on the Hog’s Back. She did not weep there, but sat, and the landscape eventually became the landscape again and not the narrow beastly bed on which her daughter would at this minute be arranging her toys and photographs or flinging herself down, sucking a handkerchief end, tears spilling. Holly was actually signing herself up for various clubs and had made an inseparable friend called Grizelda who the next day turned into another one called Persephone and then another called Emma.

  That day it took an hour before Thomasina could restart the car and, driving carefully and slowly, somewhere on the road between Guildford and Liss, was able to take the decision that she would now change. She would never shake again, not even in private. At this moment, she thought, Holly is probably signing herself up for various clubs and forming inseparable friendships.

  ‘Hello?’ she cried on the telephone to Pammie—the car still warm outside in the drive, she still in her coat. ‘Hello? Yes. She’s gone! Oh ghastly, thanks. Ridiculous. I feel quite awful. She’s at the South Pole at least. Can’t go upstairs yet and pass the bedroom door. Yes, I’d love to. Six o’clock?’

  She had declared herself, realigned herself. She would be welcomed back.

  And I told the truth, she proudly thought. I told the truth to them. I do feel awful. I don’t want to look in the bedroom. I do think I’m being ridiculous. I’m being very wise and affectionate to them all to be sharing things with them again.

  But she knew that she hadn’t shared them, had not even touched on the depth of her mania, the almost religious fervour of her devotion, the passionate pride in Holly—the Holly, Holly, Holly, that went on in her mind like a love affair that is incurable, that must take its course.

  Sometimes, exhausted by the single train of her thought, the drumbeat rhythm of her love, Thomasina nearly screamed or wept. She knew that she ought ‘to see someone’ about it, yet she hardly knew what this meant. Some psychiatrist, perhaps? But you had to be recommended to one by a GP and her GP was an old friend she and Herbert used to have to dinner and talk hospital politics. They’d even been on holidays with him. You couldn’t possibly talk to him.

  And I don’t scream, she thought. I am always only just on the point of screaming. I certainly never actually weep. I am in full control and I’m probably no different from thousands of others. Rich, idle, no job, one child, no husband. And everyone says that Holly is special. I can’t be all that wrong, or dotty.

  I wish I could get interested in men again, she thought. I’m too old now to stand love. Thank God that sort of pain’s over. Golf and Bridge and the old gang are the answer. And Surrey’s a lovely county to live in. Crazy not to be happy.

  By the time Holly married, Thomasina had become a very differently behaved woman. She seemed most genuinely to welcome Holly’s marriage and believed that Andrew Braithwaite was ‘perfectly all right.’ She laughed publicly and amusingly at Holly’s adoration of him and Holly laughed with her. ‘Ma, he’s wonderful. I knew the very first minute . . . ’

  ‘I can’t say,’ Thomasina had said to Pammie and Co. over the cards, ‘that he exactly caus
es one to fall back in wonder. I mean, of all the ones I’ve caught a glimpse of this one has the least hair. He’s twenty-five, looks forty-three. They say he looked forty-three even at school. Of course, bald men are said to be the sexiest. Bald-headed of course. A lot of bald men are like hearth mats underneath.’

  ‘Is Andrew?’

  ‘My dear, however should I know? I’ve not seen him on a beach. It’s winter. They only met six weeks ago. He has a good figure, I’ll say that for him. He wears his clothes well. Nice long legs, so he can’t be Jewish. The stoop will be useful at the bedside. He qualifies this summer.’

  ‘GP?’

  ‘No, no, he’ll be a hospital doctor. He doesn’t say much about it to me, though he could. I’d like it if he did. He knows I’m used to the vocab. I don’t think he even talks about work to Holly much, though I suppose that’s not surprising, she’s not exactly Alexander Fleming, bless her.’ Thomasina had learned the language of Edgecombe Park and led the field now in sardonic depreciation of all that meant most to her. ‘This bloody dog,’ she would cry (she’d been given a dog by Holly for her birthday). ‘Look at the parquet! I’ll hang you. I’ll string you up!’ To Holly she would say, ‘Your hair is like old hay today. I loathe you, darling.’

  Andrew and Holly came to Spindleberries to announce their engagement and Thomasina made joyful noises and brought forth the champagne she had been putting in and taking out of the fridge for a month. She excelled herself with the wedding arrangements, looking younger and much more chic (apple-green silk) than the bride, and waved them off from the reception with a smiling face; off for a whole year, to California, where Andrew had been awarded a research fellowship. ‘So good for them,’ she thought. ‘Nobody to tell them what to do or watch how things are going. And away from the dominating old mum.’ Andrew’s family were in the North; his parents, peculiarly old, had not come to the wedding. ‘He won’t have to be running up and down there to see them,’ she said, ‘thank goodness. Northern families can be very demanding. And he has a brother living near them, so he needn’t worry. Rather ghastly distance for me, of course. California for a whole year. Boo hoo.’