Nature and Necessity

by Tariq Goddard

  ‘Does he really? I’m… I suppose I am a bit, why? He doesn’t seem that sort of person in his films. You know, looking at his roles you wouldn’t automatically think that of him! Christ Tim, you don’t ’alf represent some fruitcakes…’

  Later Petula would wonder whether there wasn’t something to these frenzied outbursts, even allowing for their inconsistencies and contradictions, lapses of cohesion and confused chronology. The thought that her children were far too like her, given to the odd infelicity or lapse into unspecified exaggeration, and therefore not to be trusted, was weighed against other emerging concerns. Their behaviour, always curious, was simply too deranged, once they entered adolescence, to not be laid at the door of a trauma. The last place she wanted the finger of suspicion to fall was at her door; after all, what had she done wrong? And it was no use blaming Anycock, useful as he was for that purpose, as the exhibitionism her children excelled in owed nothing to his brand of self-harming, but essentially private, madness.

  Petula suspected that an ‘incident’ at school, cubs or brownies, that Jazzy and Evita had conferred over and decided to ‘share’, pooling both their experiences into a single fabricated narrative, may have actually taken place. This ‘incident’, however coloured by fantasy, might even have contained aspects of the hysterical excreta aired during their recriminatory fits. Crucially, in the light of her theory, Petula’s genes could not be held to account for Jazzy’s lousy taste in girls or for why Evita blinded a lad who tried to peck her cheek. Satisfied that this mysterious ‘incident’ offered the explanatory potential to the riddle posed by their socio-sexual absurdity, Petula made the mistake of ground-testing her speculative discovery on Jazzy one evening. His response, a descent into tears and a sobbed request for her to leave Tianta immediately by the nearest exit was not what she had expected. Later still, in the years after Noah had delivered his killing blow, Petula decided that the true identity of the ‘abuser’ was her enigmatic former husband, claiming to have known all along, her only crime blind loyalty to a secretive predator. By then those who would have benefitted from this belated admission had moved on to new torments, as indeed had she, Tinwood having tired of her for reasons she struggled to come to terms with or understand.

  ‘I still haven’t decided which table I’ll sit at or who I’ll be next to… What? No, I mean me of course, who I’ll be sat next to, yes of course I need to sit next to someone, what do you think I’m going to be doing, dancing on the tables?’

  Petula’s pride recoiled slightly as she wondered what exactly she was trying to sell here; not herself, that much was becoming clear, but an aspect of herself, or to be cruelly specific, what she was capable of delivering. Never in her years of social haggling, playing off one circle against another, a person’s pride off another’s vanity, had it been made as clear to her that the guests in question would come because of what she could offer, not for who she was, an illusion she would have liked to cling to for at least a little while longer. She was not that old yet.

  ‘Yes, well I’m afraid he will have to sit next to me; yes, I know, of course I can’t speak French but nor can bloody she! No I don’t want to sit next to Margy, I’ll sit next to whoever I should so bloody please to sit next to. And I don’t give a toss if he’s never heard of me, the pleasure will not be all mine, that I assure you. What do you mean you want something in return? What, you’re back to that bedroom again; for God’s sake, I’ve already told you, there’s at least room for three in there and we’ve problems enough with space as it is; have you any idea how many people we’re going to be trying sleep in this house? Honestly! The whole thing is turning into a perfect nightmare.’

  This conversation was the beginning, Petula would reflect, of the slow erosion of hope, followed by her confidence, that would end with her strafing the county with repeat invites and endless summons. Yet the mania to be at the centre of things did not allow her to pause as she breathlessly promised Tinwood the ground-floor bedroom she intended to put the girls in, adding that yes, he could jolly well share it with them if he was that desperate for company! All so she could be at the right hand of a promising young television actor who would never, to everyone else’s surprise, rise further than Mr Darcy in a forgettable adaption of Pride and Prejudice that was eclipsed by the one posterity remembered, shot a couple of months later. It would take another fifteen years, and a handful of men and women to come forward with stories of how Tim Tinwood stole their childhoods, followed by a lengthening queue that extended into the hundreds, for Petula to say she had honestly never cared for the man, and despite general scepticism, mean it.

  ‘What, you really think they might use this house to film? No, I mean that would be wonderful, of course it would. How could I have any objections? I’d be thrilled, but, no, it’s just that I could imagine, and I know this is obvious, I could imagine this place working better for the Brontës than Austen. No, of course I’m not going shopping but weren’t her books set in Hampshire? I mean, would that matter? Splendid. Oh, you’ll never guess who else might be coming…’

  Regan heard all this in a mood of puzzled incomprehension. Did her mother love this man? Why did she think he would like her any more by mentioning that Diamanda’s parents knew the Jaggers and by putting on a silly pleading voice that made her sound like Widow Twanky in pantomime? The multitude of people her mother was capable of becoming, often within a moment of one another, while remaining resolutely herself when called to, was a way of being in the world that struck her as daringly pointless. Regan did not ponder the puzzle for long, the ways of Petula often eluded her, and her own concerns were a circle she must square. Mingus was still inside her, her mother had to get off the phone fast so she could ring Diamanda and find out about morning-after-potions and the other ways of holding off pregnancy.

  ‘Perfect, perfecto, absolutely, ring in an hour, I’ll have had a chance to have talked to them by then. This is going to be a good one isn’t it? Yes, I feel it in my bones too! And about time, there have been too many damp squibs and half-chances, time for an event with some real welly, I couldn’t agree more. Excellent, speak in a bit.’

  Petula could hear the tell-tale creaking on the landing, her daughter had risen. The sisters swapped places, passing each other on the staircase in an affected hurry, with a cursory ‘good morning’ disguising Petula’s interest as much as it faithfully conveyed Regan’s lack of.

  ‘I just need to use the phone for a bit Mum,’ Regan called once she was a safe distance away, ‘I’m getting Diamanda to bring some clothes over and need to discuss sizes,’ she added, hurrying into ground-floor study.

  ‘Feel free, it’s your house too. Your telephone too, come to that.’

  Petula waited to hear the heavy oak door slam; her daughter had yet to learn the art of closing anything quietly, be it a car boot or biscuit lid. Not wasting any time, she proceeded as quickly as she could to Regan’s bedroom and allowed herself in for a brief snoop. There had never been a point in her life where she considered her daughter’s property or affairs separate from her own (though hers were certainly separate from her daughter’s), or that covert access to them constituted an invasion of privacy. The principle reason she waited until Regan was out of the room before prying, aside from paying lip service to another societal norm, the cult of the teenager and their tiresome insistence on needing their own ‘space’, was that to ask permission would be too much like taking an inventory. The truth was, rooting round in other people’s things without their knowing gave Petula a thrill she was too generous to herself to deny; especially when those things could nearly be her own, the differences between her and Regan’s taste intriguing and, where too great, troubling.

  Petula knew she was holding Regan to a severe standard, and wanted very much to be kind in her judgements. Sadly such reservations went out of the window when confronted with the full horror of Regan’s bedroom floor. At her feet were a pair of knickers stuffed into one cup of a bra, a trainer lodged artlessly
in the other. The craze for wearing ‘training shoes’ outside of a school sports day, or marathon, dismayed her, but that could at least be put down to the madness that lay behind generational shifts; it was Regan’s underwear that was the deeper worry. Regan’s panties were altogether too plain, minimal and utilitarian to qualify as instruments of seduction or even of use. Petula understood comparisons were lazy yet felt compelled to draw them anyway; what she wore next to her skin was lacy, expensive and intricately detailed, the product of a different kind of civilisation, one dedicated to seduction and not brute function. Regan’s choice was alright if you expected to be experimented on by space creatures or mounted by the Russian Army but there was nothing in the thin black strips of elastic to attract a repeat booking from an English male with an ounce of discernment.

  Stepping over a pile of what-she-knew-not, Petula pulled open a drawer. As she feared, the panties on the floor were not a one-off, there were handfuls of the tiny terrors stuffed orderlessly amidst socks, chewing gum and wristbands. It seemed conceivable that Regan was developing what was usually known as an interior life, or at least one Petula could not see, with its own reasons and motivations that weren’t hers; what did these tiny panties mean: lesbianism or a desire to pursue a career in gymnastics? In the past Petula could read Regan easily, she was a girl for whom whatever happened occurred on the surface, visibly and without the need for interpretation. Petula had hollowed out that inner space that constituted Regan’s centre so nothing in there should surprise her. How could it when she also provided the filling, creating a more compact, predictable and passionless version of herself in her daughter’s deepest recesses? But the lycra monstrosity Regan jogged in, punky yoga tubes, and miscellany of books (if Regan read there was never any sign of it in her conversation), told an alternative story. How did all this stuff get here and when, Petula wondered, did the psychic growth spurt that mothered it occur?

  Diaries or letters might have provided a clue. Petula had searched in vain for these on previous occasions, Regan’s one holiday journal of their trip to Austria a summer ago an embarrassing synthesis of guidebook wisdom and adult malapropisms, though not so worrying as finding evidence of an independent mind. Such written correspondence as there was pertained to the utterly trivial, postcards and thank-you letters, no doubt replying to equally innocuous examples of the same genre. If Regan was taking herself seriously she lacked the confidence to leave an account of her achievement, the dissimilarities Petula feared real, yet petty, expressions of outward differences she could easily tolerate.

  As she was about to leave Petula noticed the stack of novels on Regan’s bedside table. Lying on top was the new Wrath, If I Should Fall from Grace with God, sent to Petula earlier that year with a barely eligible scrawl in the cover hoping that she would find time to read it ‘in her museum without walls’. In sending her each of his new titles Wrath had sought to keep a memory alive, rather than offer the spectre of romance, much to Petula’s dismay. She dearly wished the package the book had come in had contained something else, a note on headed paper detailing his flight times into Heathrow, a hotel address or a postcard of a Scottish Loch he intended to meet her at. Having pulled the jiffy-bag apart and checked each page hoping a letter would fall out, Petula was left with another volume of poetry that did not rhyme and a canonical memory she had returned to far too often. Angrily she vowed to not play the game of trying to read between the lines of the poems or hope they were addressed to her. Anyone could buy and read these words, deluding themselves into pretending they were the latest muse – what she wanted was handwritten confirmation that she was the one he saw when he closed his eyes and thought of England. Petula was worn out by the detective work required to live on scraps of comfort already in the public domain. It had ruined her enjoyment of his last four volumes and she vowed to leave the next unread. Unfortunately, having Wrath’s words so close to hand was more than she could manage. With the desperation of a student who has just a night to revise for an exam, Petula tore into the volume in search of northern sirens, Shatby beauties, mythological earth mothers and even brief encounters in Chinese restaurants, anything for evidence that she had scraped along the sides of an artist’s consciousness. Instead she saw page after page of ungainly and incomprehensible prose, essays of a kind, masquerading as poems, scaling the heights of neither. Though she would not have swapped Wrath’s remembering her for the world, Petula was too much alive to hope pleasant recollections of what did not happen were a reasonable substitute for what she hoped still could. Casting the book deep into a pile of unread litter, Petula resolved once more to steer clear of Wrath’s poetic offerings, until such a time as her name appeared in print as the dedicatee, at which point the quality of the work could go hang; she’d defend each turgid word to the death. But until then…

  Credit to Regan though! Back for a day and a night the little reprobate had already been through her study and pilfered a book. Regan was a chip off the old block all right, her sneaky ingenuity nearly making up for the theft. Petula delighted in her own inconsistency. There was something rather sweet in picturing the scene, Regan’s determined little frown as she checked to see if the coast was clear before making off with her trophy. Still, it was puzzling that she should actually have tried to make a fist of reading the thing. Petula opened it on the page Regan had marked, and to her disconcertion, found a long passage underlined faintly in pencil. Had Wrath done that or was it Regan’s work? Petula had grown so disenchanted with the rolling, aimless, drone of words, that she could not remember noticing any annotations in the text Wrath might have left for her. Nonetheless that had to be the more likely explanation for the highlighting than Regan making a connection of her own. Briefly Petula considered taking a rest from herself and simply putting the book down; all this over-stimulation would result in exhaustion before luncheon…

  ‘The unhappy few who want order in their lives and a sense of growing and progression suffer terribly,’ Petula whispered, hoping that the sound of her voice would tease out whatever sanity slept in the text, ‘there is always the shape of the individual day to remind you. It is a microcosm of man’s life as it gently wanes, its long morning shadows getting shorter with the approach of noon, the high point of the day, which could be likened to that sudden tremendous moment of intuition that comes only once in a lifetime, and then the fuller, more rounded shapes of early afternoon as the sun imperceptibly sinks in the sky and the shadows start to lengthen, until all are blotted in the stealthy coming of twilight, merciful in one sense that it hides the differences, blemishes as well as beauty marks, that gave the day its character and in doing so caused it to be another day in our limited span of days, the reminder that time is moving on and we’re getting older, not older enough to make any difference on this particular occasion, but older all the same.’ Petula blinked to ward off a hovering migraine; she was already struggling. She considered tackling the sentence again, before deciding that it was better to plough on to the end lest she give up altogether. ‘Even now the sun is dropping below the horizon; a few moments ago it was still light enough to read but now it is no more, the printed characters swarm across the page to create an impressionistic blur. Soon the page itself will be invisible.’ I wish, thought Petula. ‘Yet no one has the urge to get up and put on a light; it is enough to be sitting here, grateful for the reminder that yet another day has come and gone and you have done nothing about it. What about the morning resolutions to convert all the confused details in the air about you into a column of intelligible figures? To draw up a balance sheet? This naturally went undone, and you are also perhaps grateful for your laziness, glad that it has brought you to this pass where you must now face up to the day’s inexorable end as indeed we must all face up to death someday, and put our faith in some superior power which will carry us beyond into a region of light and timelessness. Even if we had done the things we ought to have done, it probably wouldn’t have mattered anyway, as everyone always leaves something und
one, and this can be just as ruinous as a whole life of crime or dissipation. Yes, in the long run there is something to be said for these shiftless days, each distilling its drop of poison until the cup is full; there is something to be said for them because there is no escaping them. Our belief in them is what will not go away, even after what we believe in, ceases.’

  Fuck a flock of ducks, what pish! It was all Petula could manage to not shout ‘Off with his head!’ at the top of her lungs. Wrath had really gone off the boil, off the boil and mad and dull all at once, like a hideous cocktail with the wrong ingredients drunk lukewarm from a test-tube. Talk about trading on your reputation; clearly the world of poetry was as manipulable as a seating plan at Ascot. Congratulations of a kind were grudgingly due. Wrath must have succeeded in making a lot of intelligent people feel very scared to pull off publishing this kind of discursive flannel. Petula put the book back as she found it, feeling slightly queasy.

  The negative reaction was consoling, easing Regan’s defection to the world of words and the very slight possibility that her daughter saw something in the long-winded dross that she did not. It would also soothe, for the rest of the day, the sting of not having Wrath in her life and the absurdity that she had any grounds for thinking she ever would. Delicacy forbade her making any mention of her curious, yet hopefully meaningless discovery to Regan, interesting as it would be to probe. Better to think of the theft as a harmless gesture of independence, a cheap way of acquiring depth no more serious than pinching pennies from her purse. Regan’s intellectual development would, when it finally ceased to evade Petula, come as a shock, for in all her years of foment, Petula assumed her daughter was simply reading to pass the time. And so did Regan, who understood her own interests through her mother’s perceptions of what they were. Rarely had so much text moved from page to person without that individual noticing its accumulation. Regan’s reading had metamorphosed from a weak pose struck for reasons her mother more or less suspected, to expressing an unspoken, and unthought, tendency towards local truths and universal freedom, a private consolation that would eventually announce itself in public ways no one had associated with Petula’s pliable doppelgänger.