Inglorious

by Joanna Kavenna

  For many years after, grandmother Lily was preserved in a few tattered photograph albums. She had been young in the 1930s, and there were bleached black and white shots of her on day trips to Windermere, smiling at the camera, wearing her smartest clothes. Grandfather Tom stood by her, in a group of young couples, soon to be married. There were photos of her laughing at an outrageous friend, hovering at the edges of a dozen groups, petite, her hair carefully curled. Sitting astride a donkey on the beach, waving at the camera; singing on stage, dressed in stage finery, feathers and furs; bent double at the sight of a vast turkey, which her husband had just won in a Christmas tombola. Her parents, Rosa’s great-grandparents, whose names she didn’t know, lived in a small cottage in the village of Cartmel, which Rosa always remembered as a verdant garden bathed in a rosy dusk. If she went, she thought, what would she find? Nothing changed like the landscapes of childhood; it was scale that changed, the simple fact of individual growth. Former vistas, vast plains, were compressed into simple playing fields and modest gardens. The aspect shifted but there was much in the mind that changed.

  As they passed through Preston station she was thinking of grey-stained streets, and the old grey slate of her grandparents’ house. She was remembering the excitement she felt as a child on these trips north. For no real reason at all, Rosa had once had a vivid childhood dream that her grandfather Tom had turned into a camel. Worse still, because he died when she was six this camel version of the man became entwined with her early memories of him setting her on his back and crawling on all fours around the room. She had a few other fading visual memories of her grandfather: a large man, she thought, though all adults were large to a child, with ears that moved when he chewed. A man with a shining pate and a long pointed nose. To her his features were gargantuan, outlandish, though in photographs she saw he had been handsome enough.

  The arrival was a series of snatched kisses, embarrassed expressions of affection, with grandmother Lily supreme in the kitchen, rattling cutlery, telling her mother – who pulled faces – what to do. Her father was feted, given a cigar. Grandfather Tom took Rosa into the living room, where there was an ornamental brass dog with a poker resting on its back, superfluous by the electric fire. He dressed her in his braces. He took her out and sat her on swings and there was a photograph of Rosa at four, her eyes glassy from the flash, clutching a terrified tiger cub, with her grandfather smiling beside her. It had been taken at a circus, under a Big Top when, after all the people juggling plates and women in leotards hurling themselves from high platforms, the ringmaster had taken the tiger cub into the crowd. You could hold the cub and pose for a photo. Grandfather Tom thought it seemed like a good idea, and called the ringmaster over. But when the ringmaster arrived, a fat man sweating under his greasepaint, Rosa had shrunk more from him than from the frightened animal, which looked like a soft toy, compressed into the fat man’s armpit. The ringmaster had been dismissed, but as the cub disappeared across the other side of the ring, Rosa had begun to cry. It was an early sense of a moment in time forever lost, demoted from memory to mere possibility. Of course she thought nothing like that at all, she just saw the tiger cub vanishing away from her and wailed. Her grandfather asked her what was the matter, reassured her that the cub had gone, that it wouldn’t bite her anyway, offered her ice creams and other small bribes, but she held her head in her hands and sobbed. He knew anyway, and just as the cub was about to disappear backstage he leapt from his seat and ran across the sawdust, to ask the trainer to bring the cub back to Rosa’s seat. So they took a photo of her and her grandfather bought it. Now the trainer, the cub and her grandfather were all dead, thought Rosa. Perhaps not the trainer. He might still be clinging on. But definitely the cub! The cub had been dead for years.

  Grandfather Tom wrote comical verse in his spare time, after he had injured his knee, which ended his career in amateur football. He never published anything, but Rosa’s mother’s desk at home was crammed with folders of his writings, immaculately drafted and redrafted, poems for friends. He had written until the end, making neat copies of even his swiftest doggerel, storing them away. For years, Rosa thought he might have been an unsung genius of modern letters, and had prepared to campaign for his reputation, but after her mother died she read all his poems again. They made her cry, but she understood they would never be published. They were loving, funny poems, but nothing more. To my dearest Rosa/ Whose mother really chos-a/ tricky name to rhyme/ I’ve tried it time and time/ but can’t get my old brain/ To find a good refrain./ It’s hard to tell your daughter/ She really didn’t oughta/ Call her daughter Rosa/ Because the name would pos-a/ Such a rich conundrum/ To Rosa’s old and humdrum/ Very adoring grandpapa/ When he tried to write to her!! That was one she remembered. It was definitely not Swift. But it wasn’t bad for a man who left school at fourteen. His collected poems, his life’s work neatly copied into a school notebook, was inscribed Thomas Marswick, Barrow, 1975.

  She had been lucky with her family. They had been kind and loving, these long-dead people. It was odd she thought about her grandparents so seldom. Only as the train ran north did she really consider them. It took a jolt, a change of location, for her brain to grind backwards. Of course she had hardly known them at all. It was just a dim sense of familial recognition, a twitch of the genes, but it made her shift sadly in her seat. They would have been appalled by her, she understood. They would certainly have told her to calm herself. Grandfather Tom had been a clever man, but he was pragmatic. He had a wife and a daughter, a group of good friends, he played sport at the weekends. He divided up his time – work and play, everything in its place, a time for fooling around and a time for getting your head down, earning some money. His daughter had done well, and he expected things to progress from there. Rosa’s parents expected her to better them, as they had bettered their parents. That was how they thought it went, they assumed – onwards and upwards with every generation. And if not upwards, then at least an effort, in honour of those who had tried before you. They were all trying to tell her this, her father and the ghosts of her family. You had to live. You had to try your best. There was nothing else for it. But at this she felt rebellious again and kicked them all off, these kind-eyed ancestors of hers.

  And now Rosa watched the sun sink towards the hills. The day was drawing on. The closeness of the evening made her tired, and she closed her eyes. When she opened them again she had gripped her pen, and she wrote:

  God exists eternally, as pure thought, happiness, completeness. The sensible world, on the contrary, is imperfect but it has life, desire, imperfect thought. All things are in a greater or lesser degree aware of God, and are moved to admiration and love of God. So the sensible world aspires towards the perfection which is God. God is the cause of all activity.

  Now she stopped. If you understood God as an ideal, as something thought, part of the human longing for perfection, perfection unattainable but possible to imagine, to feel a sense of, then perhaps she understood. The mind was impersonal and therefore divine. The body was personal and therefore mortal. Dream the dream the dream the dream … Yet she – like the rest of the race – possessed a mind that felt its finitude as unnatural, though really it was the most natural thing of all. That was the problem. Her mind felt the disappearance of her mother to be incomprehensible, whereas in reality it was inevitable. It seemed a crazy way for a species to think. It didn’t help with morale. Why, she wondered, had the species not evolved with an inbuilt acceptance of death – not the sort of acceptance that would cause people to die without a struggle, but a sort of inbuilt sense of death as the natural end of life? Why did the mind – the mind, or your mind, she thought? – return constantly to the very element of life which made it so unhappy? Especially when it sapped your will, stopped you from achieving anything? If you were so preoccupied with this immutable fact, so very concerned about it you could hardly participate, then what was the good of that?

  Had she been more self-disciplined, altogether
more Zen, she might have understood that age was an arbitrary marker, that growing old hardly mattered, because one could die any day. Would she not have apprehended the absurdity of human time? What about durée, she tried to remember, what about inner time? She could only perceive this relentless linear motion, this surging wave that was carrying her ever onwards. She should become more magnanimous, she thought. It was impractical to think so keenly about herself. Her hands were sweating, and there was a strong smell of coffee around her. It made her think about buying a cup, but she stayed in her seat, holding onto the table. For ten years, she had a simple means of self-definition. She was a journalist. It lent a confident ring to her voice. ‘Rosa Lane, calling from the Daily Rag, could you give me a few moments of your time.’ Through the years, Rosa’s voice had dropped, becoming more deep and jovial, trustworthy and efficient. ‘Hi, I’m Rosa, this is my partner, Liam. Yes, I’m a journalist. Liam is a political lobbyist.’ Subtext: We’re a pretty savvy couple, and you’d better know it. If something failed, if something went briefly awry, they could bask in the regard of the other – until the last stages at least, when there was no basking and mutual regard had been extinguished. Prior to that, she had delivered her lines well, with assurance, self-importance coursing from her larynx. ‘Hi, Rosa Lane here, I’m a veritable goddess of the media. Hey, listen to me! And I have a fine relationship as well, no doubt I’m on the way to something called a happy life.’ I hardly thought about this stuff at all, she thought. It was true she was sounding more hesitant. She had become afraid of striking up casual conversation with her neighbours. What do you do? they might say. Well, that was a question! What did you say? I do nothing, or nothing worth revealing anyway. I bow before the unrevealed secrets of TEMP. I am, professionally speaking, a despairing toad. Yet there are many things I intend to do! Even today, I fully intend to find a place to stay. Then I will phone Liam and ask about the furniture. I will call the bank and beg them for an extension – that’s Mr Sharkbreath, you see, he’s been quite cruel recently and I’m not very pleased with him. I assure you, it’s quite terrible what he did. He loaned me a load of money, and then he asked for it back, the callous varmint. I fully intend, after dealing with Sharkbreath, telling him exactly what I think, to read the comedies of Shakespeare, distinguish the various philosophies of the way, read History of Western Philosophy, Proust, Cervantes, Racine, the Ancient philosophers and the works of the major religions and a few more peripheral and the rest, find the TEMP – my own personal TEMP, you’ll have to find yours yourself – whatever that is, I don’t suppose you know either.

  So she kept her head down.

  Outside the sun was fading. The conductor appeared, a large gruff man, and she handed over her ticket. She saw people cycling along a path set back from the train tracks, a family out for an evening ride. It was cold and the children were wearing hats and scarves, smiling brightly. The whole family was smiling, frozen in happiness. She thought of a song; she was trying to remember the words, some eternal pop: Video killed the radio star … In my mind and in my car … Something she remembered singing when she was a child, picked up from her parents’ radio. That betrayed them – in those days, her parents were young and they even listened to the charts. The song struck her as funny and she longed to mouth the words. She noticed her hands were still sweating; they had created a sticky film on the table. Anyway the table was covered with empty crisp packets, grains of salt, an apple core, a few plastic cups full of cold dregs. The carriage had been converted, over a few hours, into a place of dust and debris. But she liked the refractions of light, the elegiac end of the day. She saw sheep grazing in fields, and a motorway receding out of view. There were deep red ferns on the hills, and the dwindling sun had stained the sky. When she arrived she would send her father a postcard. Loving, low-key. Daddy, gone to the Lakes. Remember, we went there all the time when I was child. Of course you remember. The stone cottage with the thatched roof and the wheelbarrow and the water barrel. At dusk bats flew from the rafters, zig-zagging across the garden. Thanks for taking me swimming in the lake in the mornings. I never appreciated it at the time, but there you were, on holiday, a couple of weeks off work, dragging your middleaged bones out of bed at dawn to take your small daughter to swim. Love Rosa.

  Then she saw a series of hills emerging to the west, deep curves of rock and moss. She saw a cold pink band on the horizon. The train was nearly at Lancaster. There were steep slopes and small grey cottages scattered across them. A road winding through the fields. Tribes of sheep and cows, standing in the sketchy grass. She settled against the window, staring at the broad shanks of the hills. Now she slapped her pen down and thought of the view and the sky and the wandering flecks of cloud and the low light of the evening. The country was shadowed in dusk.

  At a small country station she stepped down from the train. The air was clear and she could see the shadows of hills, silhouetted against the lights of distant towns. She found a taxi which drove her to Ulpha, through the rugged valleys of the southern Lake District. The roads wound over the backs of the hills, and the traffic streamed past on the other side. In the last light she saw a lake glittering between the mountains. That must be Coniston, she thought, as the road twisted up the gradient. There was a grey ferry moving slowly across the water. The car rounded the corners, picking up speed, and at the edges of the roads were dry stone walls, fields stretching beyond them. A few weeks ago, the driver had said, the fields had been covered with frost, but recently there had been a thaw. Rosa saw a quiet row of houses by the road, and in the distance she saw lights on blackening water.

  The driver seemed like a friendly man, though after a few rounds of quick fire question and answer they fell into silence. In the seeping darkness the trees on the slopes were purple, their branches bare. And then there were rows of evergreens, leaves fluttering in the wind. She wound down the window though the air was cold, because she wanted to look at the trees. They drove through moorland, moss ground covered with dark hillocks. There were sheep lying on the rocks. Now the car went over a cattle grid and started to move slowly up a slope. There was a large slate building to the left, set back from the road. Ulpha was barely a village at all, a few houses with smoke pouring from their chimneys and a church. It seemed deserted when Rosa arrived; everything was so quiet. There was a light drizzle falling.

  As she left the taxi, she wasn’t angry with anyone. She walked to a drive which looked promising, and as if it led to Will and Judy’s house. The ground was wet; mud coated her shoes as she walked. At the end of the drive she stood for a moment, breathing the cold air and listening to the sound of the River Duddon flowing swiftly. Her family had never stayed in this part of the Lakes. But her grandparents had lived nearby, and the air was thick with memories, as she glanced over at a cluster of slate cottages, set against russet fells. Already she was quite cold. Still she lingered in the evening air, puffing on her hands. On the muddy drive, the trees formed a canopy above her. The sky between the trees was serene, dotted with stars. She saw a bank of cloud hanging over the valley. She could hear a Land Rover in the distance, moving slowly over the cattle grid. Its lights swung around a corner, shining through a hedge. Then the sound of the engine receded.

  Judy and Will’s house was a large farmhouse made of slate. Ivy creeping around the windows. When Rosa had walked up the drive she found a sign by a gate, saying ‘ULF’S FARM’. There was a low hedge, and over the hedge Rosa saw a garden, a large tree, a swing dangling from a branch. The gate creaked loudly as she pushed it open, and the curtains twitched in a first-floor window. She waded through the puddles on the path, and knocked briskly on the door. There was a scramble of children and dogs and adults and the door opened. Among the array of images, features, hands coming towards her, she distinguished Will, beaming broadly, half of his face covered in a ginger beard and his hair, also ginger, standing up in patchy clumps. Judy was looming behind, plumper than before, ruddy-cheeked. Still the same long blonde hair, gath
ered today in a wide plait. A big radiant face. Both were wearing mud-stained trousers, vast woolly jumpers and dirty wellington boots. There were dogs barking and jumping up, drooling on Rosa’s hands as she tried to pat them.

  Judy grappled through the dogs and seized Rosa in a hug. Then she thrust her dramatically away and said: ‘My God, Rosa, you look so thin.’

  Will, who was kissing Rosa on each cheek, rustling his beard against her skin, stood back too and eyed her silently. There was a slight pause, then Rosa shrugged.

  ‘Yes yes, I lost some weight, by accident rather than hunger strike,’ she said, trying to make a joke of it. She was suddenly aware how tired she was. Now she felt dizzy, and put a hand on the wall. She had forgotten to eat on the train. She had forgotten even to drink; she had sat in the carriage sniffing the smell of coffee and hadn’t drunk a drop. This abstinence was clearly having an impact on her hosts. Judy was staring at Rosa as if something awful had just happened, as if Rosa was actually naked, or covered in dung. Well, of course spiritually I am, thought Rosa, but is it now so obvious? Judy looked at Will. Will looked back at Judy. All you’ve heard is true, Rosa wanted to say. It’s me! The one they call crazy and sad. I’ve come here precisely for those reasons. Would I really lug myself all the way up here, in the middle of October, having failed to come and see you in the years you’ve been up here, if I was anything else? A crise, evidently! A minor crise! What were they expecting of her anyway, she wondered? They all stood around, and while they stood Rosa glanced up the hall. There were coats and hats hanging on pegs. There was a dog bouncing around by Rosa’s knees, a small yappy dog, Rosa couldn’t think what breed it was. And there were two larger dogs, something like collies with pointed faces, barking by the door. The animals were all fine, shaking their coats, while the humans were standing stock still, poised on the brink of gaucheness.