Marian and the other mistakes were taken into “care.” A terrible technical word, and this was the most terrible part of Marian’s childhood. It was a story of beatings and sexual abuse and repeated hopeless running away. Later Marian realised that other horrors might have befallen a young child on her own in the streets. Somehow the child endured and went through the government mill. She went to various correction schools. At one of them she learned to swim. It became the greatest thing in her life. And all this while there were days when Marian saw her mother driving by, living out her other life.
When that life of her mother’s came to an end, her mother reappeared, and there was then something like a family life again, in another council house. As part of that life Marian and the others sometimes were taken by their mother on shoplifting excursions to supermarkets and local stores. They did very well. Sometimes they were caught, but then Marian and the other mistakes did what they had been told to do: they screamed the store down, and they were always let go. In time these excursions stopped.
Everyone Marian knew on the estate had a life that was like a version of her own.
Learning about this early life of Marian’s, I began to understand her dark and withdrawn bedroom mood: the dead eyes, the shuttered mind. And then I wished I didn’t know what I had got to know. I associated it with an awful and pathetic episode I came upon in Munby. A little paragraph, which I wished I hadn’t read. Munby one day, either in a private house to which he had been admitted, or in a hotel, entered a room and saw a chambermaid standing with her back to him. He spoke to her and she turned. She was young and had a sweet face, with manners to match. She was holding a chamber pot with one hand and stirring the contents with her other uncovered hand: suggesting that there were solids in the chamber pot.
Something of this sorrow and disgust came to me when I thought of Marian’s past. It came upon me at our most intimate moments.
I knew the council estate where the bad drama of her childhood had been played out. To her, at the time, that drama would have seemed unending. I had passed many times the very ordinary place where she had been taken into care and from which she had tried to run away. It was as though, for her, but not for me, who drove by unseeing, unknowing, unthinking, existing almost in a separate age, an exact moral parallel of the Dickens world still existed. That parallel was concealed from the rest of us by the bright paint of the council houses, the parked motorcars, and our too easy ideas of social change.
Once, very slowly, over the period of a year or two, the council houses were refurbished. I had noticed it only with a quarter of my mind, wondering, with a little anxiety about builders, about the work that had to be done in the St. John’s Wood house.
One Friday evening a taxi-driver from the station rank said to me as we drove by, “You can change the houses. You can’t change the people.”
What he said was witty, but I was sure he had got it from somebody else. He was a council-estate man. He had told me that, and I knew that in his semi-criminal way he was speaking to me as to an outsider, telling me what he thought I wanted to hear.
Yet I feel, taking the taxi-driver’s point now, as I am talking to you, that our ideas of doing good to other people, regardless of their need, are out of period, a foolish vanity in a changed world. And I have grown to feel, making that point much larger, that the nicer sides of our civilisation, the compassion, the law, may have been used to overthrow that civilisation.
But it may be that these oppressive thoughts have come only from my grief at the end of my affair with Marian, and the end of the optimism she brought me.
THESE THINGS HAVE to end, I suppose. Even Perdita’s affair with the man with the big London house will end one day. But through a foolish remnant of social vanity I hastened the end of my affair with Marian. It happened like this.
Jo, Marian’s friend, decided that she wanted to have a proper wedding with the cook she had been living with for some years, and by whom she had already had a profitable mistake or two. She wanted the works. Church, decorated big car, white ribbons running from roof to radiator, top hat and morning coats, shiny white wedding dress, bouquet, photographer, reception at the local pub where they do these council-estate receptions. The works. And Jo wanted me to come. She had looked after my father and his house while he lived, and he had left her a few thousand pounds. It was this relationship with my father, rather than her friendship with Marian, that she claimed as the stronger bond between us. It could be said that in the pettiest way she was a family retainer. It pleased her to make the point, and out of a most foolish kind of vanity and with every kind of misgiving — no one knows better than I that most class ideas are now out of period — I went.
It was as ghastly a parody as could be expected: Jo’s brutish consort in top hat and all the rest, Jo’s face glistening with makeup, eyelashes twinkling with glitter-dust. And yet the woman below all of that was trembling with real emotion.
I kept myself to myself, pretended not to see Marian and, more particularly, not to see who was with her. It was part of the deal with Marian and Jo. I got away as soon as I could, before the speeches and the full merriment of the reception.
When I got to the car, some distance away, I found it dreadfully scratched up. On the front seats, in white paint or some sticky white pigment from a thick marker, there was, in a careful childish hand: Piss off and stop scrooing my mother, and Piss off or else.
It was a bad moment. That childish hand: I thought of the maid with the chamber pot in Munby.
I learned later from Marian that the child’s father had been watching for me. Jo had told some people that I was coming to the wedding, never dreaming of the consequences.
The white paint the child had used had a special clinging quality. It was almost impossible to wipe away; it might have been devised for graffiti artists who wished to protect their work against smoke and weather and erasure. The white stuff filled every minute depression in the imitation leather of the car seats; on the smoother surface, even after it had been scrubbed off, it left a clear trace, like the drag of a snail, glinting when the light fell on it at a certain angle. It enabled Perdita, getting into the car soon after that wedding, to make one of her rare jokes. She said, “Are those messages for me?”
The persecution that began that Saturday grew weekend by weekend. I was known; my car was known. I was followed. I was telephoned, and when I answered I was abused by the child. The feebleness of the man in the background, the father of the child, hiding behind the child, became more and more sinister to me.
I decided in the end to put a stop to our country weekends and to buy a flat for Marian in London. The idea delighted her, delighted her so much, the persecution could have been part of a plan: she had always wanted to live in London, to be near the shops instead of having to travel up to them.
But London is an enormous city. I had no idea where I might buy a modest but suitable flat. That was when I opened myself to one of the younger partners in our firm. I told him of my need, and told him a little more than I should. He lived in west London, in one of the smart Norman Shaw or Arts and Crafts houses near Turnham Green. He was friendly, even conspiratorial. He did not look down on me because of my relationship with Marian. He told me that Turnham Green was the place to look. Most of the Victorian or Edwardian houses in that area were being turned into flats; they were a quarter or a third of the price of flats nearer the centre.