Well, that is where she got it from, naturally. She was reflexive.
My mother, were the thought not transgressive, I think is the fashionable term, might have been a good wife to such a man as my first husband. I was awfully aware, when we married, that she would have been jealous of me, marrying a handsome man who understood horses, shared many of her inborn traits such as instinctive conservatism and innate faith, and who would have sheltered her gifts with pride. She would have adorned his world and been a good charity committee person, painting and gardening and sitting on the bench, mixing her magical attributes with her commonsensical ones, enjoying his authoritative capacities. My father would not exert authority unless he was forced to. His socialism and his classicism were each so pure that he simply could not allow for human weakness; he thought that in an ideal world people were likely to behave well, which meant modestly, unselfishly, according to principle and proportion. My mother’s humours did not accord with this conviction, requiring attention and explanation, in for which he did not go. It was his fortune later on to marry someone whose own disciplined upbringing supported him. I can offer to my mother’s shade the certainty that in his older daughter my first husband shelters aspects of her grandmother, my mother. Her way of being is in part in harbour now.
It comes to me that amid the stuttering mental pain of her last months, she did go frequently to organise things for the Scottish Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children. I was baffled by this because she would dash to her friend Kitty’s house, where the meetings took place, or to Mrs Ross-Skinner, and I would catch the drift of her errand as her basket and her scarf and her scent flew ahead of me down the windy street — that she was on her way to do ‘cruelty to children’.
I could have believed it, with the bit of me that she slapped and shouted at, but I didn’t, since, though I did fear her temper, I far more feared my father’s, that held in it distaste. And I knew that I was an abnormally fearful child and that this was not a popular way to be and made me suspect among certain of my friends’ parents.
I can’t remember whether I approached death with the same sidling fascination as I approached the sexual. My own relationship with death was almost consoling. It was part of me, not something against which I made myself. That is, I was afraid of it, but I was used to being afraid of it, and when it came it was in each case not welcome, not a relief, but a thing that in that particular instance could never quite be repeated, each death being congruent in nothing but its nothingness — but peremptorily different in shape of loss.
The two events of the rainy night in Colonsay are as follows. I dined with my not-brother Alexander and his family, his wife and son of fourteen, daughter of twelve. The willowy young people sat at the table, as some of the adults present wrangled noisily about the pre-existence of mind. The twelve-year-old retired to bed. The fourteen-year-old sat quietly, listened, took the shouty opinions, considered them, analysed them, cut them down to size and presented them back to us all, well groomed, but not thornless. He held his own soberly over the happily vinous table for about ten pleasurable minutes in the candlelight. It is particularly happy to watch the face of someone whom you have seen since babyhood and of whose parents you are fond. I held my forehead right up throughout the evening in order to watch the two children and their mother and father.
At four o’clock this morning, a helicopter took that boy to a cardiac unit on the Scottish mainland, where he presently is with his mother, while his father and sister are here on the island in the stair-rod rain. Nobody is over-reacting. The mode of this family in crisis is decidedly calm. But, while this had been going on, I was lying in bed thinking about all our ends, almost conversationally, while my cheap pink CD player relayed in the hush the speaking voice of a friend, reading his most recent book, that is, among other things a disquisition upon mortality.
‘Whenever the moon and stars are set,
Whenever the wind is high,
All night long in the dark and wet,
A man goes riding by’
the rain was saying, completely reassuringly.
‘Late in the night when the fires are out,
Why does he gallop and gallop about,
Whenever the trees are crying aloud,
And ships are tossed at sea’,
said the rain and the wind against my bedroom shutters, while I listened to my friend’s voice and was for a good part of the night less afraid than I have been for weeks, on account of the reassuring family supper; two of whose protagonists were during those same hours in another part of the house, praying for regularity to return to a beloved, faltering, human heart.
The last lines of Robert Louis Stevenson’s poem, which has been one of my lifelong sleep-charms, read first to me by a parent, brings something more frightening into focus. The lovely hoofed clatter of the lines returns insistently as a firmer knock altogether. Is the night rider someone more threatening than a highwayman?
By, on the highway, low and loud,
By at the gallop goes he.
By at the gallop he goes, and then,
By he comes back at the gallop again.
Deacon Brodie was the famous Edinburgh highwayman, a minister by day and a robber by night, robbing the rich to succour his poor. He died on a gibbet of his own devising. Miss Jean Brodie is, as she explains, his descendant. Each of them is meting out a certain sort of justice and living out that famous Scottish doubledness, in order to shake things up. The pub named for the Deacon, on the Royal Mile in Edinburgh, had a sign that used to haunt me when I was small, and that has supplied one face of my fears to this day. The deacon is masked, up close, his eyes seen through holes in a tight band of cloth.
With one of the earliest book tokens I was given aged about six, I bought, on my own, operating under some compulsion to look at what struck fear into me, an American paperback of A Journal of the Plague Year by Daniel Defoe, precisely because its cover bore a depiction of a face looking through a white mask of cloth. It was a good read for the child I was too, as it happens, full of herbs and philtres against death.
Aged ten, I read both Aldous Huxley’s The Devils of Loudun and a sort of shocker called The Nun of Monza, because they had covers that featured burning eyes staring through holes in otherwise anonymous masks of cloth. I cannot suppress fear at such spirit-extinguishing masks and my dreams employ extras in the tall pointed headwear of Ku Klux Klan or of Inquisition, hoods down over faces like snuffers over candle flames. I cannot bear large groups, in film or in life, of undifferentiated beings without faces. Orcs are perhaps are the worst, but wasps are bad, though I was ashamed to learn from the diaries of Simon Gray that wasps have specific jobs and roles in the wasp world and establish committed domestic loyalties. He learned this when he and his wife called in the pest control officer, who was a fond amateur of the creatures he was paid to exterminate, a relationship gamekeepers will find familiar.
Nothing more undoing to the tender heart than a glimpse of the exterminee’s home life.