She had spine. It must have been worse, I think now, because I’m sure that she loved him, and she had a long widowhood to endure alone after who knows how long of concealing his decreasing stability. She did it all with poise. Her happiness in her widowhood lay in producing opera and operetta. I cannot think that I contributed to any happiness at all. I was a nuisance and a let-down, plain, brainy, a lefty and a snob.
Her engagement diaries are lists of small sums and presents she has given. She was generous and well-regulated. She was more hospitable than greedy and had no appetites but cigarettes and music and like-minded company, which I was not to become for her. She watched, it is clear from my inheritance from her, those little frightening diaries, my marriages and my giving birth and my small success as an author as perceptible through the press and ‘kind’ neighbours (she took the Daily Express), with increasing disgust. She would ask herself in her diary whom I had paid to get all this attention. Even reviews that I wrote she noted carefully in her diaries, not from familial pride but because she felt that they were bids for attention, that I had somehow paid to appear in the paper. She regarded my defection to the toff-class as a betrayal of decency. I didn’t know my place. Yet she was the grandest woman in her manner, as she smoked, or took out the wrapped sandwiches from her refrigerator before an after-rehearsal impromptu around her piano, or as she hailed the bus from Caversham into Reading, and stepped out to take coffee at a department store with a kind of film-star duchessly hyper-demeanour.
How odd England showed itself to me, a Scots child through and through, and how late I have been to grasp how I must have hurt my grandmother and let her down, by making what some few souls thought was a marriage advantageous in worldly terms. My mother failed her parents by marrying a man far more educated than she was, a man educated, toxically, as her parents saw it — socialistically — to place value on things other than money and respectability. And when I married a man who was many things superb beside his station, my educated father briefly — for he came to love my first husband with a deep affection — felt, momentarily only, a stab of something surely analogous to my grandparents’ sense of class betrayal when he had married Mummy. My father blamed me; he mistrusted my appearance, I think, and thought of it as a spangled meretricious lasso. I suspect my father pitied anyone who was going to marry me; I do not know this. I didn’t know I had the lasso to throw; we scarcely ever had a personal conversation, though all our exchanges were elliptically personal in their encryption; we shared matters of the eye.
Nana vowed upon my first marriage never to speak to me again. She was hurt. I married a toff and then a Pakistani. I did not have a respectable job. I was horribly visible. My grandmother never knew the odd congruence — starting from so different a place — of her own emotions and those of my Parsi in-laws, who so disliked all the publicity I received, reflecting, entirely reasonably, that one pair of ridiculous fashion tights, credited as costing some shocking sum, might water a village in India, and that no proper wife, no proper person, no proper writer, appears in evening clothes not her own in order to help publicise a book that is in literary terms respectable.
My grandmother thought that the education she had effectively paid for had separated me from her and made me pretentious; she was fed in this apprehension by friends who passed her all the disobliging cuttings they could. An equivalent drip-feeding went on to my poor parents-in-law. Neither of these things — the separation, the pretension — was precisely the case, but it helps worsen the hurt to coarsen the terms, naturally, and my grandmother and my mother-in-law were each attached to private suffering, a plot laid out for one by starting to earn her living aged five on the stage and caring for a blind sister, and for the other, perhaps, by the Partition of India and Pakistan in the year of her marriage, for she was from Bombay and her husband, her first cousin, from Karachi.
That my grandmother and I did speak again is due to telephone calls, made by each of my husbands, and each call concerning the arrival of a child, her three great-grandchildren, separated from her, as she understood it, on account of the bitter prejudices that rack this country still, by class in three cases and colour and creed in one, and yet — when at last she met them in her final year of life — she felt them entirely hers, her great-grandchildren, the older of whom have her posture and her gamut of social smiles and the youngest of whom has her appetite for libretti.
I have at last started to let go of the dear stone, that cherished discomfiting notion that my grandmother did not love me or my mother.
She loved us too possessively, too angrily, too silently, in the way of the day. It was her stone, a stone axe, beautiful and held behind her lovely face like obsidian, never letting her yield. I won’t feed my own stone by rereading her hard, withheld diaries, but must instead recall that at the end she let me hold her hand day after day, whichever one she thought I was, my mother or me, and that she left me in her will an envelope of mica windowpanes for a solid-fuel stove, each the size of half a playing card, little slips of crackly pearl for feeling heat through and for looking through, into the fire in our pasts.
My mother very occasionally brought home from her trips to the grocer Young and Saunders, or from Rankin’s the fruiterers at the West End, a pomegranate, in tissue paper. She would give me a pin and two plates. (Is this the sort of thing to which people refer when they say, ‘We made our own fun’?)
Mummy would cut the pomegranate into four, put on my apron, which was modelled on a French child’s smock and sewn by her, in her constant search for rational and appealing clothes for children, and let me take the chambered, compressed, treasure apart, with one plate for the leathery but blushful skin and the membrane that you could look through, and the other for the pressed red jewels, which I was allowed to eat with the pin. So long did this task take — a whole afternoon — and so magical a treat was the process that I was not surprised, when I read in my anthology of myths, The Tanglewood Tales, about Persephone — to learn that she had tumbled to a pomegranate’s charms in Hades, and that the seeds were measures of time spent with or without a mother.
LENS I: Chapter 7
Painstaking effortlessness, curiosa felicitas, was my father’s, apparently idling, actually supercharged, gear. There may have been something irresistible to him about my mother’s lavish appearance and her extremer way. But it was also, time showed, at some level repulsive. The quick term for this is, I suppose, a fatal attraction. They were stuck under the net of convention and another net of passion that had charred to distaste on his side I think. All this is speculation.
In marriage, and this is less speculative, since I have twice failed to understand, to implement and to reverse the disintegration of this, we are, or I was, trying to answer the loss and absence that the other has felt. One hopes the other’s gaps will be filled by something that one carries within. But somehow instead we may create what we most have feared because it is familiar. Perhaps everyone but me knows this.
I saw my mother be craven to my father. Cravenness has no place between any two people. Craven is the claw of the mode most repulsive to me of any, that of ingratiation. I hate full frontal flattery and its oils the more, the longer I live. My father lived perhaps a little too sternly by the exigencies of understatement; my mother’s overstatement I know, because I am like it too, was authentic, was intensity of feeling, terribly banked down. I’m like them both, dry and pyrotechnic; but you need to keep powder dry. I don’t like slobber. It is the slaver kills and not the bite.