By Her.
The Other Woman. In our ménage a trois. Margaret Thatcher. Replacing Mabel.
Right from her winning the leadership of the Conservative party.
And, because she brought him back to the table, I almost liked her.
He’d been in his armchair, sunk in depression. He even said it, ‘I’m depressed, Enid.’
When I asked why, thinking it must be memories of Mum and that it might be good for us both to talk about her, he rose from his chair, lifted the cushion and showed me the newspaper, and the photo of the smiling, dead, bearded Che, surrounded by soldiers. He sat back down, and I don’t remember his next – what – seven years until she got elected Tory leader. Until she galvanised him.
As a middle-aged woman some part of me was touched by her ascendancy.
I kept that quiet. In his house.
‘Just wait while that cow gets her hands on real power. And she will. Like dawn comes, she will.’
And I, O irony, I defended her. Which drove us apart and was exactly what he needed.
I was the rock-face, he the pick.
I asked him once exactly how had he formed such a poor opinion of her, and so very quickly. His slow look told me he knew when he was being patronised. ‘There’s no art to find the mind’s construction in the face,’ he said. There was me put in my place.
In my defence of her I said I was pleased a woman had achieved so highly. My father said, unpleasantly, ‘I married a woman. That’s not female.’
Do I ever remember thinking I should leave him? No, I don’t believe I did.
More likely I might have thought I couldn’t. And resented that.
And buried it?
And here I am tonight, mining myself…
That folded paper with the news of Che is still there, under his cushion.
And yes, I do remember what filled those years till Maggie. Vietnam. That must have triggered memories of far-eastern horrors and now, nightly, television war indeed. It felt like permanent rain on the roof.
And I did not deal well with him.
He swore more, talked less and in what was – must have been – a retreat from him and a search for the route back to him, I began my book about a man who went off to war and came back someone else and the music that saved his ravaged soul, and all too aware of the irony I might never finish it until he did. And, like my other books, my secret me, I never told him. He didn’t share, why should I?
That is truly pathetic. I was. I am. I can be.
So could he. Mabel’s birthday or their anniversaries he would cut me out completely. Wanted all that sadness for himself. Mean. Understandable when I feel charitable. Tonight, in drizzly endless Paris, plain mean. Bad parenting.
He is angry with me, ashamed of me, I can hear him through the night.
Running away. ‘You put your shoulder to the wheel…’
And I’m running from that Other Woman, from her destruction of my profession, for her ideology. That Dad saw years before I did, was repellent. Like Napoleon she believes we are a nation of shopkeepers and everything can be sold. And Education, too.
Oh God, but this is all self self self. When he gave gave gave.
I’m betraying all the thought and all he taught or tried to teach this teacher.
Yes, and lying here making a martyr of him is a waste of life, too.
Honour thy father and mother – and I do – but they can’t live your life, Enid.
I resent the hold you have on my soul Dadda. Let me be. Open your claw.
Some clock church tolled enough numbers to be close to midnight.
Orange neon and passing car headlights. If only they would stop…
What will I find in this room? In this night? What might kill me? Nothing.
What am I doing?
Where am I going?
To never-never land you sad foolish creature. Over the French rainbow.
Face this.
Face it.
Listen—
Nothing in your life has worked.
No love.
No children.
I never even left home. Why should it change now?
Billy Liar’s mother said, ‘You put your troubles in your suitcase with you…’
She’s right. All here in this cell.
Enid rolled off the bed, opened her suitcase and took out every single item. Laid them out on the carpet and laid herself back on the bed.
Go back? Fight the good fight that killed him? Honour him?
Why?
I have had my life with him. And the silences. The secrets. The shames.
‘She can’t see the consequences of her thinking. Makes her inhuman.’
There was a sense of some incoherent rage transferred from somewhere – Mother’s passing? – into an implacable cold hatred of this successful Tory woman. I’d see it in my face one day.
A Sun journalist, if that isn’t an oxymoron, coined Prime Minister Callaghan saying, ‘Crisis, what crisis?’ as rubbish bags and Shakespeare’s phrase, ‘The Winter of Discontent’ dominated the news and he, Father, saw the future clear as could be. ‘She’s in. She’s coming. Need only play a straight bat. And she fucking will.’
She did.
She stood on the steps of Downing Street quoting scripture and all he said was, ‘We’re fucked now.’
I loved him. I loved you.
When Michael Foot became leader of the Labour party how he hummed with admiration and respect for the man.
And. And he dressed and went out of a Sunday morning. For me, that was so thrilling.
To see him polish his shoes again was thrilling.
He went not to Church but to buy ‘a proper Sunday paper.’ He would return and read Everything.
‘Telly news – Tory propaganda, Enid.’
I chose not to point out almost daily government rhetoric about a ‘left-wing bias’ at the BBC. Because I was happier that he was energised. That he was my dad. Not a shell in a chair.
She, ‘The Bitch’, appointed Mark Carlisle as her education secretary. Who said he had ‘No experience of the state system, either as student or parent.’
Giving him my Christian benefit of the doubt, I thought, well, you’re in the right place to learn, then. Or at least ask. If you’ve the mind to.
Mark Carlisle. The cause of the worst of us. Ever.
Face this then too, my lady.
For want of conversation I mentioned his, Mark Carlisle’s, creation of an Assisted Places scheme which allowed bright working-class children to gain a free place at a top public school. The silence that followed should have warned me, but ought I to have known what else would rise?
‘Good idea to let clever proles mix with the upper-classes, is it?’
‘What could be wrong with that?’
‘The evil bloody notion of a better education for Money!’ Like I was an idiot.
‘But then, you would defend it – you had that privilege. Of a kind.’ I said nothing only watched his eye-balls darkening to bullets. ‘Didn’t you?’
‘You mean Nottingham University?’ And he pounced, it all erupting from him.
‘You’re a fucking snob Enid, and you always were. If we’d had to scrimp for your precious fucking Oxford you’d have killed your mother a fucking sight sooner.’
I didn’t fight back. I never fought back. I wish I had. O but I do.
I could only hear the both of us breathing and nothing else.
For ages.
Years it felt.
It was at least a week in a silent house before he offered, ‘You weren’t to know. As she was weak.’
Two more days and, ‘And I didn’t know how weak. Physically.’
I read some American philosophy of how one must scream ‘I hate my mother’ to ‘move forward’.
Are they all insane? No, because sometimes I did hate my father. I did. But I don’t want to remember that. Why should I? To what end?
Another toll of a church bell. Shorter, by
far. Come quick Dawn, and release me.
O God. Selling off council houses, creating a ‘property owning democracy.’ Thatcher.
‘The whore.’
‘I’m trying to eat my tea, Daddy…’
‘She’s bribing the working-class.’ He threw the paper across the table at me, folded at a photo of her smiling, handing over the deeds of a house in Essex to a grateful nuclear family.
‘That’s bribery, Enid.’
I put my cutlery down.
‘Isn’t it an old Labour Party policy?’
‘Course it bloody is, and quite right, too – but do you not have the eyes to see what she’s doing with it?’
Another mistake, I said, ‘She might be rewarding those who voted for her. In big numbers.’
He gave me a bad look, pushed his food away and said, ‘I am ashamed of the working-classes.’ And as he fell back into his chair, added, ‘And whose fucking side are you on?’
A question to which there was no healthy answer.
He said, again as to a child, ‘She’s invoking Envy. That’s a deadly sin, Enid.’
And there was, must have been a realisation for him I was never going to produce an heir; and his piteous attempts to discuss it as he tried to be both mother and father and bless both their hearts he couldn’t ever be. And how angry the expending of that effort made him. Angry because he failed. He and I, we didn’t have a language to discuss ‘things like that.’ Shame on us and shame for us.
He threw satsumas at the television. At a Labour politician criticising Michael Foot for wearing a donkey jacket – ‘it’s a fucking working man’s coat you shite-hawk…’ at the commemoration ‘of the working-class dead you execrable man,’ at The Cenotaph. Almost the very last burst of anger he physicalised and me thinking, ‘I didn’t know you knew the word ‘execrable’ – and I would have thought – bet, even – that you didn’t.’
What a cow.
I hugged him and he had no idea why and he shrugged me off and I hated him in that moment, too. For my own failure to speak.
A cold tear welled and waited.
More bells. Less cars. Be no sleep now.
Galtieri invading the Malvinas.
‘O fuck me, here’s her fucken rabbit. Get her out of her three million unemployed hat. And he, he is MAD. Mad to pick a fight with the English’, he said. ‘The English love fighting, we’re good at it.’ This from a man raped by the steadfastness of his combative courage. ‘And scoundrel’s last refuge here we come. In red, white and blue spades.’
A woman on a televised phone-in pinned Mrs. Thatcher on the direction the Belgrano was sailing when she was sunk.
‘She is a fucking lying cunt, Enid.’
I wanted to say he had finally bought Lawrence’s language into the house. I didn’t. Just sat there as he, shocked and sad, said, ‘She just bare-faced lied in our front room.’ I heard his sorrow that a leader should. They did, all the time and he knew that, and she was a sworn enemy, yet somehow, somewhere she wounded my father deep. His concept of public morality shattered. He sat in his armchair like a sculpture. Grey Rubble of a Decent Life.
It took years off him, that tiny incident.
When she began re-structuring my wages and my profession and my profession took strike action my father and I, we began to tread a path back towards one another.
He went out campaigning for Foot. He shouldn’t have. I shouldn’t have let him. I wouldn’t have dared try stopping him. Daily, knocking doors, leafletting. It weakened him further and her vast triumph was a nightmare, and he lost Politics. And without that… what was he? He used to joke, ‘It’s only class hatred as gets me out of bed in the morning…’ Longer and longer he sat in his saddening chair.
Until The Miner’s strike.
‘Damn their strike…’
He supported Arthur. As a coalminers daughter, so did I. Less emotionally, less informed and with less of a sense of the Apocalypse he, father, promised. Hoped for. His whole life, his being, his beliefs, his soul, ‘on the line’. ‘Where they should be.’ An enemy as worthy of conquering as Hitler. His regret at his age and his history preventing his being active tangible.
News film of Orgreave. We watched a brick open the head of a policeman. Miners beaten by club-wielding horse-riding police. He said, ‘Orwell were right.’
And, all the time, daily, horrible, their voices. Hers heartless ice, his that of an hysteric. I was sick of both of them. They deserved each other and there we were all paying the price. My dad more than most.
When she survived the IRA bombing of her Brighton hotel he only said, ‘She’s killed Christ in me, Enid. I wanted her dead.’
His eyes sank into hollows of despair, and what dug deepest was the Miners’ defeat. He had struggled for a belief in something all his life, his concept of ‘socialist principles’ and now here he was, his time and energy reduced to a journey between his bed and his leather arm-chair and a looking at a waste of his life’s efforts. My heart went out to him and stayed there, with him, helpless as he faded.
One day near the end he handed me one end of an envelope, holding the other in his veined claw.
‘I know we’ve had secrets. And. I don’t want to know yours now.
Too late for me. But this one’s mine, so I’ll share it.’
And he talked about the War. He told me how five years after he got home there had been a campaign to get men like him compensated by the Japanese and they had been and he had put it all in an account and it had grown enough. Then he let the envelope go. I thought it must be a cheque as it clearly wasn’t cash.
It wasn’t either.
It was the deeds of our council house, which he had bought. It was an earth-quake.
‘You sold your soul Daddy? You took her bribe?’
‘I did my duty, Enid. To you. You can sell this now and you could get a place in Oxford, I’d like to send you there.’
Less than a week later and I was alone.
But I am not.
Duty.
What is my duty now?
To who? Whom? Now I’ve reneged on the children?
To write your romances from a glade, bee-loud, in France?
That’s a duty? What did he die for, then?
He died for his. His sense of duty. And I am not him, nor no longer his. He is no longer my responsibility, dead these three long years, at peace with Mabel; being eaten the pair of them by indifferent time and worms. The cycle. Complete. My duty is – please – if I may – to complete mine. And in the most banal of all thoughts, to try to be happy. Finally. Before it runs away. The time.
Bloody hell. ‘To be or not to be’ – that is the question. ‘We put our shoulders to the wheel…’
O but the comfort of quotations. ‘Rest rest perturbed sprit…’
And still her breath came in gasps – her chest rising and falling too quickly. Something final to resolve?
In the morning over the coffee and croissant and the concierge’s sympathy, ‘Strikes, eh? I wish we had your Mrs Thatcher…’
And Enid said, ‘Yes, I do, too.’
When what she thought was, ‘You’re fucking welcome to her.’ And left her father’s spirit there to argue with this man.
84
O GOD – that book. It’s, it’s mine. That’s mine. The book. The book on the metal spinning thing – it must have a name – metal-book-holder-spinning-thing – it’s mine.
Of course, it had been translated. She had a copy, but there it was, on sale, in the Gare d’Austerlitz.
Which meant someone had ordered it, and ordered more than a single copy, in expectation of sales.
How thrilling.
How heart-lifting. Like that beautiful woman on the 21 bus. Her smile almost hurt.
She looked round and no-one at all in the whole teeming station seemed to be aware of the beam-of-light connection between the metal spinning book holder thing and the middle-aged grinning English woman. Self-conscious, she turned the grin off and it spran
g back into place. Her brogued feet wanted to dance.
Enid didn’t believe in omens, but she did believe in books. There was hers. There might be more – there must be – at other stations, at the end of her journey. In her future.
She composted her ticket, picked up her bag and felt like Marie Von Trapp singing, ‘I have confidence…’ in that treacly film.
She had watched only the three times in one week.
She went back to the metal spinning thing, bought a copy, had the young lady wrap it as a gift and posted it, with her fondest love, to Val.
In the note she wrote, ‘The next one of these will be authored by your proud, dear and hopeless friend, Enid Makin.’
Then she got on the train.
Pulling out of the Gare d’Austerlitz, the concrete grey suburbs of South Paris slid by and you would have to be a maniacal romantic to find that inspiring, she owned. And she also owned – I feel a little free. Free-er.
I don’t think that would be allowable at Scrabble. I don’t think that matters, my dear.
A new start deserves a clear-out. Needs it. Bon courage.
‘Voulez-vous quelque chose du chariot?’
‘Non, merci.’
Look at France, dad.
Leave dad in peace, at peace.
‘We don’t need no education.’ O.
O I hated that song. ‘Blame the teachers.’
O, thank you so much, Pink – I nearly used that worst gros mot – Floyd. Making their glib millions.
I was angry, properly angry but once in my whole thirty years of teaching. ‘Lost it’, as the idiom has it, perfectly accurately.
Somebody hummed that tune in my class.
In my class!
If it had been Hamblin, the ex-army Biology teacher who had taken two ‘bad’ boys – Foster and Bevan – to the gym after school, laid out some mats, had them tie one of his hands behind his back and invited them on and beat them up easily and painfully – if it had been him I could understand it – but I!
The Solider's Home: a moving war-time drama Page 18
