I was nominally attached to a good woman who lived in a rundown house between the hill and the strand; who washed my clothes, fed me and let me go — perhaps because of some old debt she owed my father, perhaps for a small fee. As far as I can remember, I was a brave child. (It is not the loss of innocence that I regret, but the loss of that courage.) I swam in the deep, underwater world of childhood, my limbs playing in the shattered light of the sea. I loved the cold shock, diving off the cliffs, my body growing numb as I prised free the starfish that hid in the crevices, or teased the nervous mouths of translucent sea anemones. I chatted easily and dangerously with the visitors to the town, with a friendliness that came as second nature to the daughter of a publican. Old men with whiskey breath would lift me on to the bar counter, tip the wink to my father for a bag of crisps and call me ‘princess.’
It was the summer of my eleventh year. I was grown wild — more reckless in the sea, more brash with the locals and coy with the tourists, who filled the town with their white, bared flesh. My father picked on a young boy called Diarmuid to help behind the bar, some distant relative from Galway with (I can’t continue this for much longer) … with the black hair and fine, blunt cheekbones of a Connemara man. Daddy gave over the storeroom to house the boy and slept again in his old room, treading carefully and with a sense of unfamiliarity over the wooden boards. His presence there was light, but unsettling. He brought back the ghost of my mother with him.
I must stop. ‘Ghost,’ ‘flesh,’ ‘fine, blunt cheekbones,’ these words are all strangers to me. I am trying to construct a childhood, so I can pick my way through it for dues. ‘Felix came because’ … because in the summer of my eleventh year, my father hired a boy called Diarmuid. Any other boy would have done, any other childhood. The secret must be in the style. If I must choose some way of lying to myself, I thought, this might be the most appropriate. Take on the cadences of an old roué in a velvet smoking jacket, cashmere socks, and a degree of barefaced and thoughtful dignity that is not permitted to the rest of mankind. But look at me. I am a woman of fifty-one years of age, in a suburb of Dublin; not exactly sitting with rollers in my hair, but certainly subject to the daily humiliation of coffee-morning conversation and the grocer’s indifference. I buy winter coats in Clery’s sale. I have a husband. Every year we drive to the same guesthouse in Miltown Malbay. There has been no tragedy in my life, you might say, apart from the ordinary tragedies of life and death that Ireland absorbs, respects and buries, without altering its stride. In my clean, semi-detached house there are only a few sordid clues; my daughter’s empty bedroom, a doll without a head, one broken arrow from a boy’s bow, that sits like so much junk at the back of the coal house. Where is the poetry in that?
I have always been struck by the incongruous picture of an old woman with a pen in her hand. Is it not slightly obscene, Ms Lessing, to show your life around like that? Of course your neighbours are rich, they respect you, they are proud to have you living nearby. They don’t watch you in the street and say, ‘Why write about orgasms, when you look like that?’
Middle-aged women write notes to the milkman, not suicide notes. When they die, they do so quietly, out of consideration for their relatives and friends. And then there is the subject of perversion. Old women are never perverts. They may be ‘dotty’ or ‘strange’, poor things, they may, and often do, ‘suffer from depression’, but they emphatically do not feel up boys in public parks. Their lust is a form of maimed vanity, if it exists at all. It is not the great sweeping torment of the poet. It is not love. The only thing we suffer from is the menopause (‘Let me tell you something, Iris dear, the change of life is a blessing … when he stops … you know, wanting things in the middle of the night.’ I want I want I want). I want I want I want. I am not an hysteric. I am a woman of ten and a half stone with a very superior brain. I do not know what the word ‘maternal’ was ever supposed to mean.
So it is back to the smoking jacket and the man with refined hands who translates Baudelaire for a hobby; the man with a bubble of hot poison in his loins and a super-voluptuous flame permanently aglow in his subtle spine, poor fella, may he rest in peace, God bless him. It is back to the summer I fell asleep (in fact a bout of glandular fever) and Diarmuid, who is no lamia, but a man I met in the street the other day, short, fat, his ‘Connemara bones’ laced with a filigree of hot purple veins. Incidentally, I too have read my Poe and Proust, my Keats and Thomas Mann. Who cares? None of them chased things that were real. My boy-child was real — does that mean that I am not a poet? Oh, but I am. I am a poet not quite in curlers, because I make the poets’ claim that ‘Form … ja wesentlich bestrebt ist, das Moralische unter ihr stolzes und unumschranktes Szepter zu beugen.’ You see. In a woman who dresses from Clery’s sale, such tactics can only be childish.
* * *
The summer when I was eleven was hot, salty and golden. I would come out of the sharp light of the street and into the pub, lean my cheek against the worn dark wood of the bar, and watch Diarmuid. The wood was soaked with the smell of every old hand that had worn it smooth, and Diarmuid smelt of old men too, his clothes saturated with smoke and spilt porter. But under the clothes he smelt alive. My father did not object to my proximity to the boy — he was too busy scrutinizing him for signs of another kind of fall and with it, the excuse to put him back on the train, back to the rocky fields and sour crop of the family farm. But Diarmuid kept his small hands clean. He spoke like an old man to the customers, neither overly familiar nor reserved. He wiped the counter constantly in wide, smooth circles and he rinsed the cloth out every hour. His small body was steady and sure, with the singular grace of a young boy whose limbs have not yet betrayed him into awkwardness. But he knew that he was being watched, and when my father turned away from him, disgusted by his virtue, I would catch the flicking eye and the wild incomprehension of a horse at the start. We never spoke.
It seems to me now, with plenty of adult, if somewhat perfunctory sex behind me, that I did not know what I was feeling then, or even that I was feeling at all. I now know what it is to ache, and how to free that ache by some mechanical means — I am speaking, I suppose, of my husband, of whom it must be said, I became very fond. And you will excuse my tone, I remain prissy about mere sex, though I would go from the coffee-morning euphemism that was conjugation with my husband, straight to the mordant touch and cool, shy eyes of Felix, who recreates in me, and refines beyond endurance, that first passion. Perhaps passion is the wrong word. The sight of Diarmuid made my limbs feel large, as though I were sick. My whole body emptied itself out of my eyes when I looked at him. Objects became strange, and made me clumsy. At night the sheets felt as though they were touching me, and not the other way around.