Now she used her mother’s rolling pin to roll out her pastry; she kept Keith’s mother’s recipes for Welsh cakes and bara brith. In her tasks around the flat — polishing furniture, bleaching dishcloths, vacuuming, taking cuttings from her geraniums, ironing towels and putting them away in the airing cupboard — she was aware that her mother and grandmother had done these same things before her, working alone in quiet rooms, or with the radio for company. In truth she had had a stormy relationship with her parents, and used to think of her mother’s domesticated life as thwarted and wasted. But she had learned to love the invisible work, the life that fell away and left no traces. This was how change happened, always obliquely to the plans you laid for it, leaving behind as dead husks all the preparations that you nonetheless had to make in order to bring it about.
THE SURROGATE
WHEN I WAS twenty, not all that long ago, I fell in love with one of my lecturers at college. I know this is a very ordinary thing to do. And I know now that the lecturers sigh and feel anxious at the news of yet another smitten girl-child traipsing round moonily after them. They feel anxious and all those other things you would expect, too: flattered and confirmed and a bit stimulated.
His name was Patrick Hammett, and he taught Shakespeare and seventeenth-century poetry and critical theory. I chose all his courses; I made him my interpreter of the whole world. Patrick was tall, with rather bowed shoulders; he was hollowly thin except for a small beer belly nestled in the stretched cloth of his T-shirt above his belt. He wore his thick black hair down to his shoulders, tucked behind his ears. He used gold-rimmed glasses to read but took them off when he was talking and swung them in his fingers, and sometimes dropped them; his eyes without the glasses were deep-set and squinted slightly. In a crowd, in a club, you wouldn’t have picked him out as particularly good-looking. But in the lecture room, sitting with us in the democratic circle of chairs that he insisted upon, his looks were a power, a force that I felt physically, like velvet against my skin. I loved the whitened pressure points that his glasses left on the bridge of his thin nose. I loved the big nervous hands he was always waving in the air, gesturing uncontrollably in accompaniment to his words.
Of course I didn’t have a chance with him. Who was I? I wasn’t anybody. I wasn’t even one of the cleverest in the classes. I wasn’t an absolutely average student either; I was aware that I had a quirky way of looking at things, which sometimes came out as insight and sometimes just left everyone looking blank. Patrick encouraged me. Once, he reminded all of them of something I’d said. — You remember the point that Carla made in last week’s seminar? Another time, after I’d made some remark about freedom of choice in Much Ado About Nothing, he said, — That’s very well expressed, Carla. I couldn’t have put that more eloquently myself. This made me very happy. But I didn’t delude myself. I wasn’t the kind of student who would get a first-class mark. When I tried to put my thoughts down in writing, the dart of intuition that was clear and sharp when it flew into my mind got tangled in something muffling and clumsy. And Patrick’s being surprised sometimes by my penetration didn’t really mean he had singled me out. I didn’t really exist for him, outside that circle of chairs in the lecture room.
In the seventeenth-century poetry seminar he read us ‘An Exequy’, by Henry King.
Dear loss! Since thy untimely fate
My task hath been to meditate
On thee, on thee: thou art the book,
The library whereon I look
Though almost blind.
’Tis true, with shame and grief I yield,
Thou like the Van first took’st the field,
And gotten hast the victory
In thus adventuring to dy
Before me, whose more years might crave
A just precedence in the grave.
But heark! My Pulse like a soft Drum
Beats my approach, tells Thee I come;
And slow howere my marches be,
I shall at last sit down by Thee.
I can’t adequately express the effect this poem had on me then. I don’t remember now what season of the year it was, but I do remember that we had the strip lights on in the lecture room in the middle of the day because the sky was so dark outside, navy-blue clouds pressing close to the earth like an artificial ceiling. Little gouts of rain were spitting against the window, and in the gently sloping field outside (the campus was built up around an eighteenth-century house in the middle of an estate farmed by the Duchy of Cornwall) the bullocks, instead of lying down as they should have done with rain coming, were jostling uneasily and heaving up against the fence and clambering on to one another’s backs.
When I look at the poem now, I see that it is the lament of a much older man for a young wife snatched away by death, and that it depends upon a confidence in the resurrection of the body on Judgement Day. I don’t know anything about those things. But at the time I felt that the words of the poem were so immediate and relevant that they spoke to me not just through my mind but through my body. I could hear that Drum; its beating came right up out of the floor of the classroom and shook me through the soles of my feet. I made one of those remarks that didn’t come out well, and nobody took much notice of it. — He longs for her and she isn’t there, I said. It sounded too obvious to need stating. I’d wanted to use the word ‘sexual’ (we were trained to see sexual implications everywhere, and surely in this case I would have been right), but I couldn’t bring myself to be the first to say it. Patrick wanted us to talk about the metaphor of the beloved object as text (‘thou art the book, / The library whereon I look’). For me the poem was Patrick. All its passion, its concentration, I attributed to him. The poem became my intimation of the pulse of his life, from which I was shut out.
He was only seven or eight years older than we were, but we thought his life must be made out of different stuff to the lives we knew. As far as we could tell he wasn’t married or living with anyone. Someone said he had once had a relationship with a student (although they’re not supposed to). That didn’t make me any more hopeful. She had probably been one of the clever ones who got firsts. She had probably been beautiful. I didn’t think I was. My looks (I’m small and blonde with eyes that used to make the kids at school call me frogface) were like the quirky things I said in class. Good on a good day.
I dreamed about him all the time. I don’t mean sleeping dreams, although sometimes he was in those as well. Too many of my waking hours were spent fantasising scenes in which Patrick and I somehow met outside the classroom and our relationship was changed out of distant acquaintance into passionate amour. I was very exacting as the author and director of these scenes in my mind. Nothing must happen in them that was absurdly improbable or out of character. Patrick wasn’t ever allowed, for example, to tell me that he had always loved me, that he had been fascinated by me from the moment I first walked into the lecture room. The scene could begin with no more than a friendly appreciation of an interested student, a teacherly investment in my intellectual development. He might at most be allowed a little stir of vanity at the depth and earnestness of my response to him.