In Gratitude

by Jenny Diski

  And now the new pills have arrived, delivered mysteriously by a courier in a van because they’ve been passed by Nice for hospital use but not for GPs or pharmacists. It takes three weeks to get up to my full dose while the steroids go down at the same rate. O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall . . . Still, in a few weeks I will be off the steroids, which made me a balloon that the Poet had to hold on to to stop me floating away. Not that I’m in a very floaty form in my present state. Will I get back to a proper weight? I have to eat lunch, so I can have the pills three times a day, which is not my idea of a proper life. I’m a snacker. And no grapefruit. Normally I wouldn’t give grapefruit a second glance, but I feel the desire coming on. I think I’ve done something to my left knee because I can’t put any weight on that leg without wailing, but the nice doctor prodded and pushed, and deduced from the ‘ow’s and ‘aie’s that it was probably just bruised. I’m back to taking the stairs one at a time. Blessed grandson and tiny granddaughter came on Sunday. ‘Granjen, why are you so slow?’ ‘All the better to . . . ’ Oh, I am so sad not to be seeing more of their growing up.

  The harmless quietness of the time after drugs, sex and rock, when I was teaching wayward children, interrupted the narrative. I lived in bedsitters and hospitals for the year or so after my spell in the North Wing. I can’t understand it. Just the thought of some of the places I lived and worked and shivered in makes me tremble with depression, but I was young. Eventually they had a bed for me at the Maudsley, where I settled in nicely for nine months. My best friend (whom I didn’t yet know) was waiting for me (whom she didn’t yet know) with a virgin game of Scrabble, set out on the table between her and the empty chair she was waiting for someone to sit on. I sat on it immediately. We played pathological games of Scrabble. She was mad as a rat, but she says it was me who was mad. Well. She has become a poet and I’ve become me. The Maudsley our alma mater. We were very bad girls, in the very bad girls’ side of the ward. At the other end, the good girls resided. They played Cliff Richard and one actually announced herself cured of an inability to walk without lurching from one side of the street to the other by going to the Billy Graham razzamatazz and his putting his hands on her. Ach, Billy Graham where are you when you’re needed? We took Cliff off the record player and put Hendrix on. It’s funny how things fall out.

  As for heartache, we – S, let’s say, and me – took turns and looked after each other. When there was a hump in the bed under which a poor girl lay, we (she or I) sat at the end of the bed protecting her (or me) from the nurses, shouting: ‘Come on, get out of bed.’ There was a gentle kindness and fierce craziness in Ward 6. I want to write an opera about it, S and I working together (most of our recollections are very similar), but we won’t. The heartache passed, but we knew it was there. We got heartache holidays. When I cut myself, S came with me across the road to King’s College Hospital, to make sure I was being treated properly. Hopeless, as it turned out: as soon as she saw blood dripping from my wrist, she fainted and they thought she was the patient. They put sticks in her mouth to stop her from biting her tongue, while I shouted that she had just fainted and if she woke up strapped to a stretcher, she would really go off her head. I waved my bloody-razored arm at them to show what the situation was. In any other generation this would all have been strange. It wasn’t strange to us. Funny, sometimes, but not strange.

  When Doris met with my consultant he told her that my depression was due to my not being in a real relation with her, and that I felt I couldn’t behave the way most adolescents behaved with their real family, knowing there would always be a reprieve. Doris returned fuming and told me this, finishing: ‘You don’t feel you can’t say anything because you’re not my real daughter, do you?’ The double bind was familiar to me from reading R. D. Laing and others, so I sat on the edge of my bed and said ‘No’, as insincerely as I could manage. ‘Of course not,’ Doris said, ‘the man’s an idiot.’ We – that is, Doris – had reached the end of the ‘psychology is everything’ phase, as Sufism arrived and seemed to her to lock all her former passions together, neat and tight as a Rubik’s Cube.

  The vile mustard-coloured coat, my first ‘grown-up’ item of clothing, hung in the airing cupboard alongside some marijuana that Doris had grown in the garden her first summer in the house and was now drying out; I never wore the coat again, though we did smoke the dope. Being grown up and behaving like a lady were the main words of advice my mother had had for me on the way from Brighton. Not such bad advice from someone for whom every new meeting held the possibility of ‘getting somewhere’. A marriage proposal – for her or me, it didn’t matter. A fairy-like personage would recognise the dreadful way life had treated her, and make recompense with an elegant flat and a fistful of paper money, or a pot of gold. ‘Behaving like a lady’ somehow cleaned the stained glass.

  There was one photo, among the many in the large cardboard box my mother gave to Bill, the boilerman, in the hope that one day, after we’d been evicted and found ourselves in a grand mansion, she’d get it back, one photo that I looked at with wonder. My mother was sitting on some steps down to the sea in Monte Carlo or somewhere in the south of France. Walking down those steps to the sea was a man I’d only heard of from her. It was Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. A playboy who lived in a mansion and played as boys with rich mothers and fathers do. My mother was posing, with one leg pointing downwards to the sea and the other playfully curled beneath her in her white playsuit. Her arms behind her back were keeping her upright, exposing her breasts. Douglas Fairbanks was looking towards her appreciatively. The photo said no more than that a famous man looked at her, as if she were a mirror in which to check he still had it.

  To think, she said, when we were looking at the photo, you wasn’t born then. To think she could have had . . . anyone, but now she hadn’t got anything except the photos (almost certainly burned in the flats’ furnace). It was one of the photos my mother pulled out first when we sat down to review her past. All she had now, penniless and homeless, was for me to marry well somehow. Life lifted by my excellent wedding, she as a much loved mother-in-law. Into literary life? I don’t think that was what she had in mind. It was respectability, swagged curtains and Martinis. But all she had was her frizzy-haired daughter with her nose stuck in a book. It was never going to happen. She must have known that. In the photo at her wedding my mother was as I had never seen her, incredibly beautiful. Getting married, to a handsome young man in the schmatter trade. But under the beauty, her eyes shone steely. She was on her way. It was uncanny. The beauty and the cold eyes.

  This was her last chance, handing me over to a slightly famous writer. There were possibilities, but also the opportunity to get me off her hands. She wrote once or twice later to say that she was going out with a very nice Italian in the restaurant business. The picture told of a tall, dark man in his thirties, smiling at the camera with my mother behind it. In another letter she asked if I’d had any Valentine cards. She’d had ten. No, I said. I hadn’t had any. ‘No? Well. The way you look, like a dirty beatnik.’

  I don’t think she thought it likely there was much room in the house, or the day, for behaving like a lady. Doris was what I’d expected of an independent woman of forty-four, a writer, a person with their own house and a son at boarding school. I don’t know why I expected anything of her, I hadn’t read The Golden Notebook, or any of the other books about women who actually lived lives. I sensed her confidence and sophistication. She exuded calm as we sipped the soup, though it turned out she felt nothing of the sort, as why should she, opening the door to an unmanageable waif and her mad mother who was much more in need of mothering. I keep finding myself on Doris’s side of the door, holding Grey Kitten, my hand rising, touching the lock, but not yet turning it to let the visitors (only one of whom was just a visitor) in. I must have caught something of her panic at what she had done. For me, turning up at a stranger’s house where I was to live for some time had been a pretty regular event.

 
When I was about the same age as Doris was then, with my own flat and daughter and an ex-husband who was my best friend, I had a long hard think about Doris then and what she had done. Her offer was immensely generous. If she had met me a few times, if we’d had coffee somewhere in Brighton, had me to stay for a few days, that would have made sense, but it would have raised expectations that might have been dashed. This was a rush into kindness. Perhaps all acts of generosity are that. Momentary acts. But where was the safety net for either of us?

  I was at least as selfish as Doris. At forty-four I wanted my writer’s time, alone time, and thought my life was quite full enough, although I was never very sociable. I couldn’t think Doris had really thought it through, or if she had, she must have supposed that her command of human psychology was great enough to overcome any obstacles. Great arrogance, then, or in the mood for taking a chance. Or something else. Or nothing. I didn’t think about her taking on a needy adolescent as an act of reparation for leaving her two children. Taking the child with no siblings. I can’t say for sure, but I imagine that taking me in was much more painful for the children left behind. Why not one of them, both of them? Maybe they didn’t want to come. If it was making reparation, it was a reparation of her own choosing: bright, with a capacity to learn, sassy, nobody’s fool. She got that, but perhaps, like one of her characters, she supposed she could handle me. It’s true that she thought I would be going away to boarding school, like Peter. So there would only be the holidays, during which, anyway, she gave up on work to accommodate Peter’s presence. I think she really felt that she could cope with anything, anyone difficult because she wrote about such people every day, and since most of those characters were her, she would know how to manage it, and had already worked out how the relationship with me would be controlled and contained. I really don’t know what she had in mind to make it work except she was still in her phase of believing that everything under the sun could be dealt with if one only understood the psychology of it. Listening, interpreting. I had, and I think she had, a sense that she knew it all. She had been pals with R. D. Laing and lived some crazed years with Clancy Sigal. She had read a bunch of Pelican books on the sociology and psychology of behaviour. We all did then, they sat on bookshop shelves like a university course: Laing, David Stafford-Clark, Erving Goffman, Vance Packard, Michael Argyle, C. J. Adcock, Viktor Frankl. And more and more. They were all over the house, on tables, on the floor. She bought them, I bought them, Peter and his friends bought them. Somehow they were cheap enough for the smallest allowance. All these were read and taken in. How could you not cope with a difficult adolescent with all that under your belt?

  The answer to that was: by never having one actually there all the time, who confronted you all the time, day after day, feeling she was about to be abandoned at any moment. The worst thing in the world; but it had to be tested. Even details. What would happen if I didn’t do the washing-up, what if I wore my black-and-white make-up like war paint, obscuring my face, what if I wore skirts that were the shortest I could find and then hemmed them shorter? What did I have to do, or not do, before I was sent off to . . . the wilderness? Or was I just doing what all but the most placid of children did within families checking the boundaries? Doris thought me older, perfectly able to cope with the world. I was one of those girls, more in control of myself, more a woman. I’d lived through this and that and here I was being given the opportunity to . . . what? She was always using the word ‘needy’, but as a criticism. I was about the neediest person in the world. She may not have known about real psychology, but needy is its Mont Blanc. It must have been awful. As I was reading pretty much the same books, Doris thought I should have learned from them how to behave. It never occurred to her that she hadn’t had any hands-on practice with real-life difficult kids, or that giving them diaphragms and no stated boundaries just upped the ante. She spoke about sex to me as if I were a grown-up friend of hers, as if an experiment of equality with other people was the answer. ‘They’ just aren’t being listened to, the reasons why ‘they’ split, why she’d stopped seeing A or B, what was the attraction of C with whom she was just off for a weekend, why he would do for a while after they returned. She spoke to me as near as possible as if I was her best friend. I don’t think Doris knew at all what was to be done with a sulky adolescent. I understand how difficult it is, I don’t think I would be able to do it, and at that point, I would have tried to find another way to help, or dropped the whole thing, just like many people would. But Doris was sure that she could.

  When Peter came home for the holidays, his friends came round; he was then an alpha male, tallish, good-looking, with a mother who had interesting people round at her house in London. We hung out upstairs, listening to music, talking about our worries, and during supper in the kitchen some of us would continue to talk about them with Doris there. She enjoyed this role, as we see in The Sweetest Dream. The surrogate mother. The adult who understood. There were also too many interesting adolescents (and stray cats, and crazy old women from the North Wing, St Pancras knocking on the door and being given cups of tea until the police came) around for us to notice if Peter in particular was OK. He had learned from a young age how to act like one of the grown-ups. He talked forcefully but he didn’t know that much. And Doris stopped arguments between him and others (often me). ‘Oh that’s enough. You’re so boring. Let’s get on to something else.’ Soon enough Peter found himself a catchphrase: ‘What you don’t understand, Jen, is that we are both saying the same thing, and you are agreeing with me.’ Like three-year-old Jennifer, I wasn’t going to let that go by, and answered: ‘We aren’t talking about the same thing.’ We were irritating teenagers, in my case, sitting around someone else’s mother’s table being miserable. We hated the Bomb, we hated education as it was done at school, we hated apartheid. We hated families. Doris made quantities of food and enjoyed her role as a liberal adult. Then Peter and everyone else would go back to boarding school or their homes, and I remained in Charrington Street. Peter didn’t obviously ‘present’, as they say, as a deeply troubled young man, until a few years later.

  I was there all the time and had no real idea what to do. For all Doris’s talks about sex and politics, I felt there was more to know in a different way. I was on the lookout for older men (not hard to find) to teach me about adult sex, and what they knew about the world. Doris – who never explained why, despite providing me with a diaphragm, I wasn’t supposed to bring men home to have sex with in my bedroom – was not a very reliable source of wisdom. I was moody, which was and always had been my character, as I thought, rather than badly behaved. I couldn’t believe that Doris, who seemed to have had similar moods, wouldn’t understand. But I’m often told by the few people still around from that time that I was terribly ‘difficult’. Some of them also tell me I have got some of the details here wrong, but they are my details, my experience, and I’ve learned to trust my memory rather than theirs. I’ve tried very hard to think about what I actually did wrong: smoking, having sex, using dope, not working hard enough, staying out late at night. But I don’t know anyone who hasn’t had some or all of that from their teenagers. The question remained, the one that had been there since I first arrived: if Doris didn’t like me, what was she going to do with me? And the answer was that I’d get thrown out when I was more than Doris could stand. Doris wanted a young person she could deal with and make better with bowls of soup, and for it to be understood that I’d been taken under the wing of an incredibly insightful woman. But I wasn’t Laing’s sort of patient. I didn’t hallucinate, I just threw myself against the walls and discovered that they weren’t rubber, but shattered fairly easily. I was doing sex, staying out late, spending too much money on things that weren’t sensible, being moody and silent at supper parties. I argued with Peter when he was there. I don’t think it was very much more than that, this shocking behaviour. And all of it could have been fixed by telling me not to.

  At any rate, she raced to get m
e to see a psychologist at the Tavistock Clinic and got one for Peter, too. It seems they didn’t help much with my awfulness and what was to come from Peter. She took us away from the Tavistock when she went to see Peter’s therapist and found he wanted to look into Peter’s childhood parenting. Joan Rodker had letters from Doris around then, which, at Doris’s request, she embargoed until after my death. Almost tragically, this very talented but blocked painter couldn’t get rid of the pain she felt at having been ostracised by Doris after she told Doris that she thought Peter was a catastrophe that wouldn’t have happened had she got him proper treatment. Even near the very end of her life, in her nineties, Joan wept about Peter. She offered to unembargo Doris’s letters for me, so that I could read them. But I knew pretty much what would be in them, and how little I would benefit from it. Joan agreed and said mostly they were complaints about my behaviour, the men, not working hard enough for my A-levels and most of all my ingratitude.