A large and floppy-eared rabbit, the poor thing had been bought by the tenant of the top flat in our building as part of his pet python’s supper. The RSPCA visited in due course and found quite a selection of reptiles, including, tear-jerkingly predictably, a crocodile, diappointingly not resident in the lavatory.
Even at six, though, I had come to see that birthdays were the teeth of time and that things were not improving between my parents. My own high-summer birthday was celebrated with strawberries and cream. I was allowed a friend over. I chose a girl at random because I didn’t have a best friend yet. She was called Gillian. I thought her very dainty and pretty. When the time came for cake and strawberries and cream she cried and cried because she did not like what she called ‘real cream’. She was scared of my parents’ English accents and had met cream only once before, when it had been nice, between two pieces of meringue. It was ‘shop cream’. Real cream, she said, was dirty because it came from cow-juice and gave you an illness that made you cough up blood.
In embarrassment made worse by the need for festivity, my parents said goodbye to our poor little guest with her white socks and angora bolero. Later, the childish part of the day was over and the dinner table was full of adults, the blue and white plates, hot food. In the sky were both the sun and the moon. There was one more, and most beautiful present, a dress made of the best velvety cotton, cut exactly to my dimensions and embroidered inside its neck with lavender silk thread spelling out my full name Candia Frances Juliet in beautiful clear handwriting made with a needle. This gift was to go deeper with my mother than any tattoo on skin and I was one year closer to becoming a fat little liar.
A vacancy had been filled in our family, no larger than a needle’s eye.
LENS II: Chapter 2
In the life of the present I am reading, that is listening to, Paradise Lost. It is read by Anton Lesser, whose intelligent doubt-filled voice somehow emphasises the clouded giants and rivers of pearl he speaks of through the mind of Milton. So far in my blindness only my accountant has been sufficiently innocent and jolly to mention Milton to me, over the receipts.
How consoling and terrifying it was to hear the words: ‘the mind is its own place; and in itself / can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven’. When first I became blind, Fram, who lives sixty miles away, suggested that I would never be quite alone because I have ‘my art’. I felt at once consigned to live off something that I was not talented or morally courageous enough to address. It was like telling a deer to build its future around raw meat. I’m doing my best and I’m quite aware that whatever my ‘art’ was, it will have been changed by my blindness. It remains to be seen, if I may use that word, how. I was never alone when I could read.
My parents and I visited England only for very specific familial reasons. I was always carsick and usually moving between anxiety and terror, relieved by daydreams, at this period all about being a doctor of great bravery during a selection of historical scenarios; I suspect I was usually disguised as a boy in these roles. My father had never passed a driving test, braked on corners and both parents smoked in the fuggy leather cupboard that was our car within. It wasn’t our car, really, but the National Trust for Scotland’s. This non-ownership was significant to my sense of our hardly holding on to our ledge in life.
Our reasons for visiting England included my parents’ bookseller friend Ben Weinreb and his family. Ben gave me the dummy of a book called London 2000 to draw in. Both date and city seemed lifetimes distant from me and my life; now we are years beyond it and Ben is dead. We visited other friends, a couple called Myrtle and Bear; he was known as Bear, since, as a diabetic, he couldn’t have sweet things. He too was a book dealer. Myrtle was a potter. There were some rather glamorous friends in Hampstead, he perhaps a sculptor, she certainly a sexpot. She struck me as the best sort of sexpot because her warmth went out in all directions, not merely to men.
The main reason that we ever went as a family to England was to visit grandparents. This was never comfortable. My widowed paternal grandmother lived at Windsor Castle in a tiny house in the cloister that nonetheless had a speaking tube to call long-departed servants. She had been a nurse at Great Ormond Street Hospital and bore the loss of her husband with a daily exercised Christian faith and ingrained modest fortitude. My grandfather, Ormiston Galloway Edgar McWilliam, a man whose temperament was made for peace and the arts of peace, fought as a teenager in the trenches in the Great War and was killed at the end of the Second World War while laying a smokescreen in the tail end of an aeroplane that was shot down, I believe, by our own side. Among his close friends was the painter Henry Lamb, and the letters between them show a relish for family life and a sensitivity to preposterousness both at war and in the smaller frays of family life. Lamb’s letters are often illustrated with quick sketches of his children being dried after a bath, paddling and so on. In one of his letters my grandfather describes tucking my six-year-old father back into bed after the child had been awoken by the flare and crackings of the Crystal Palace burning down, of which my grandfather gives an eyewitness account. My grandfather wrote and illustrated a published book before he was twenty. It is about the battle at Suvla. He must have known he was going to die then.
But he didn’t, or not in that war. I have the photographs of him as the captain of both rugby and cricket teams at Charterhouse. On the back of each photograph he has written in almost every case the date and place where each smiling young man in the fading picture had fallen in war.
His widow, my grandmother’s was not a false piety; she was a deeply believing Anglican whose daily notebooks used to shock me with their probity when I was ten and thought I knew a lot. Clearly I knew nothing. What decent child goes through the notebooks of her grandmother? Each day she recorded the church services she had attended, to whom she had written, and from whom she had received, letters, and how much money she had spent. The amounts were very small. She had an expressed quality of humility that enraged my mother and there is no doubt at all that my humble grandmother looked very far down upon her tall, ostensibly worldly daughter-in-law. The word, though it was never used, would have been ‘vulgar’. Certainly my paternal grandmother regarded my maternal grand parents as being ‘not quite…’ or, that damning deprecation, ‘too grand for us’.
My mother teased my father unkindly about his attachment to his mother and referred to her mother-in-law, also unkindly, as ‘Navy Blue Throughout’. These had been the words that my grandmother had replied with when my mother’s mother asked her what she would be wearing to the wedding that would conjoin their ill-matched families.
I called my paternal grandmother ‘Grand’mère’. I suspect this was to get over some difficulty about my own mother refusing to address her as ‘Mother’, as convention might then have asked. In due time, my stepmother would address her thus.
My mother’s own mother wasn’t that fond of Mummy either. My grandmother Clara was from theatre people; her own mother and grandmother, with their long beautiful legs, had been male impersonators on the stage. My maternal great-grandmother was a friend of Vesta Tilley. There are lost photographs of my transvestite ancestresses looking wonderful in tails and tights. How I wish I had them now. I packed them away in a trunk before I moved into my first marital home. The trunk was stored by a friend. The friend died sadly, surprisingly, dreadfully, young. How could I even mention my trunk of keepsakes to a family that had lost its head? As it is, the trunk of travesties sounds like the framing device for one of those dull novels that are meant to show us some flat tale of parallel lives separated only by time, whose moral is that we are all sisters under the skin. I worry, too, that my long-lost trunk may contain things of which I might be ashamed, satin trousers, proposals of marriage, lists of things to do that will resemble in every way those lists I write thirty-five years on.