Aftermath: On Marriage and Separation

DARK WINDOWS

My daughters and I do not leave home very often: a kind of numbness has settled on our household that any movement can transform into pain. For a while I thought that going elsewhere created possibilities of consolation, even of recovery, but I have discovered that every welcome is also a form of exposure. It is as though, in other people’s houses, we become aware of our own nakedness. At one time I mistook this nakedness for freedom, but I don’t any more.

It is my mother’s seventieth birthday party, a high occasion: everyone is there. The driveway of my brother’s house is crammed with cars. We too came by car, along the motorway and then on smaller roads that took us through countryside and villages, little redbrick places that reminded me of the village where I used to visit my grandmother as a child. We lived in America then, and that English village, so damp and miniature-seeming, so full of twists and turns and cavities, constituted my education in the country of my parents, where soon I would come to live for good. In California I wasn’t quite sure who I was: large pieces of the jigsaw were missing, and it seemed that the missing pieces were here, in this twisting rain-darkened place. I half-recognised them, the antiquity and the expressive weather, the hedgerows with their mysterious convoluted interiors, the sense of a solid provenance that underlay the surface movements of life like wood beneath the burnish: they were part of me and yet they lay outside me. It was difficult to say — to prove — that they were mine. In the gas-smelling kitchen, rain at the windows, my grandmother buttered the cut face of the cottage loaf before she sliced it, and I watched her like a savage observing a missionary, or perhaps it was the other way around. Either way, I was an onlooker, though I didn’t want to be. I wanted to live in the moment instead of always being lifted out of it into awareness, like a child lifted out of its warm bed half-asleep in the thick of night.

But awareness was the consequence and the curse of that divided life. I couldn’t help noticing England more perhaps than the people who lived there, just as now I notice the unbroken home, the unified lives that I see through lit windows. When I lived behind those windows I wondered about what was outside. Now that division has been externalised again, has become actual, like the geographical division of my youth. I am no longer a participant: once more, I am an observer. To observe is not to not feel — in fact it is to put yourself at the mercy of feeling, like the child’s warm skin meeting the cold air of midnight. My own children, too, have been roused from the unconsciousness of childhood; theirs too is the pain and the gift of awareness. ‘I have two homes,’ my daughter said to me one evening, clearly and carefully, ‘and I have no home.’ To suffer and to know what it is that you suffer: how can that be measured against its much-prized opposite, the ability to be happy without knowing why?

A white limousine pulls out of a junction into the road in front of us, a wedding car, as stately as a hearse. Through its darkened windows I see a lattice of white ribbons; I see the empty back seat, all decked with arrangements of waxy pale flowers. I see the driver in cap and uniform, staring straight ahead. His solemnity, his self-importance, are striking. In his role as functionary to the eternal rites, he seems to make no distinction between life and death. I wonder whether he is on his way to discharge his duties, or returning from them. In the back of our own car is an enormous cake. I baked it the day before, in one of those vague states that sometimes descend on me now, where a slight uncoupling from reality occurs: I seem to skate or float down an incline of time, and only realise I can’t steer or stop when something concrete and hazardous appears in my path. There is at first a consumptive glamour to suffering, for suffering is the corollary of health just as drunkenness is of sobriety. It is the move away from normality that is glamorous. A veil is torn down — how delirious it is, how curiously liberating, to tear it! For a while the old state lends its light to the new, like the sun lending light to a whirling dead star, but gradually I have become conscious of a vast cold, a silence, advancing across it like a shadow. I see the magnitude of the suffering in the same instant as I understand that I can no longer avoid it. It is frightening then to be stranded in that delirium, like the drunk for whom sobriety is as inaccessible as a locked house to which the keys have been mislaid. You can try the handle, look in through the dark windows, but you can’t get inside.

The cake is a three-tiered cake, the tiers cemented and then the whole edifice plastered from top to bottom with icing. The children decorated it, with hard little icing rosebuds and silver balls that came from a packet. In different-coloured icing they wrote ‘Happy Birthday’ on the top. The cake is so large that it has to travel in an enormous cardboard box. I keep glimpsing its summit in the rear-view mirror, a gaudy mountain. It seems both cheap and extravagant: from the back of the car it emanates waves of grandiosity and shame. I realise that the cake is a failure. There was something fanciful in my conception of it that was somehow allowed to run riot, unconstrained by a proper recognition of the labour involved in bringing it to life. My vision — three different tiers of lemon, chocolate and vanilla — had become detached from my competence. I remember from childhood how easy it was to imagine, how hard to create: the difference between what I could conceive of and what I could actually do was bewildering. In adulthood I have learned that to envisage is nothing: success is a hard currency, earned by actual excellence. The vision has to be externalised, and in the case of the cake it remains the prisoner of my imaginings. Dimly I recall my hours in the kitchen the day before, mixing and baking the different tiers. I didn’t use a recipe: utterly at the service of my vision, I was operating by blind faith alone. Yet I was neglectful, careless, not measuring things properly, taking shortcuts wherever I could. Was it because the vision was mine that I was so careless with it? I see the same impatience sometimes when my children undertake something they can’t execute, a sort of disregard — almost a contempt — for practicality, perhaps even for reality itself. What they like is what is in their heads — how boring it is, how hard and intransigent, this plane on which their imaginings aren’t recognised, where their visions are translated into shapeless nonsensical things! I too forgot, during those hours, the hard standard of success; forgot that people would be eating this cake, judging it. When the tiers were cooked I removed them from their tins, three rubbery discs whose indeterminate colour and smell I apprehended from a great psychological distance. I buried them in icing, as though burying the product of my shame; and the children decorated the mound with flowers and inscriptions like a freshly dug grave. Children have a knack for the funereal, a certain authority where death is concerned. Unlike their creativity, this is pure competence. It looks nice, Mummy, they both said, as we interred it in its cardboard box.

My family requires several tables laid end to end to accommodate it. In my brother’s house the biggest room has been cleared to make way. The tables have been brought in, amassed from all over: the dining-room table and the kitchen table, the leaf-strewn garden table, desks and side tables from around the house, and lastly a huge piece of chipboard laid across two trestles carried over from the garage. It is autumn, a cold bright Sunday, and the light comes without warmth through the sitting-room windows. The different tables stand in a long line, their ends touching in the hard light. My sister-in-law unfolds an enormous tablecloth: it is two cloths, in fact, of the same material, with a runner laid across the centre to hide the join. As she spreads them out the oddity of different surfaces, the cheap beside the costly, the jigsaw of inadequacy and splendour, is transformed into a vision of wholeness. No one would now guess at the compromise that lies beneath the smart tablecloths; the fact that the underlying structure is both less and more than it seems has been lost to the conformity of the surface.

The youngest person sitting down to lunch is two, the oldest — my grandmother — ninety-two. There has never been a divorce in this clan. Some children are the first in their family history to go to university: mine are the first to experience the public breakdown of their parents’ marriage. Other than myself, of the many assembled adults only my grandmother is without her mate. My grandfather died when my grandmother was in her sixties: for nearly thirty years she has lived without a husband. These three decades begin to rival the decades of her marriage like the outskirts of a town engulfing its historic centre, yet that centre holds, remains the explanation, the cause. Unlike me, my grandmother never ended the story; it goes on, with or without certain of its main characters.

When I was younger I thought she must be relieved to be alone, after all those years. Though I had loved my grandfather I saw it as a disencumbrance, a liberation, like taking off shoes that hurt. Marriage appeared to me as a holding-in, a corseting, and it seemed to my eyes that the force of constraint was male; that it was men who imposed this structure, marriage, in order to make a woman unavailable, and with her the gifts of love and warmth that otherwise might have flowed freely out into the world. But men provided shelter, and money: I understood that a woman could not merely liberate herself, couldn’t just take herself off with her gifts of love and warmth and go elsewhere. What had happened to my grandmother seemed the ideal solution, to be left with the chattels but freed from the male authority that had provided them, though admittedly it had taken an awfully long time to happen. It never occurred to me that she might remarry, might enter again into that bondage, and indeed she never did. And it never occurred to me either that she might have remained alone out of loyalty to the familial enterprise; that she might have been lonely, have sickened for companionship, but continued to play her part for the sake of her children; that she might have understood, as I did not, that the jigsaw is frail, not strong, is a mirage, not a prison. It is not to dismantle but to conserve it that strength is required, for it will come apart in an instant. It will come apart, that image, and what remains is not a new or different image but a pile of pieces that mean nothing at all.

At the end of lunch the enormous cake is brought in, amid exclamations in which I believe I can detect notes of uncertainty. For a moment the threat — or rather the knowledge — of failure is unbearable, the inescapable knowledge that is the essence of this second life, this aftermath. As a child, I read the book of life through the adults I knew, just as now I read it through my children, the second reading perhaps a form of atonement for the first, for I know what it is to be a child. That first reading was savage and revelatory where the second is empathetic and philosophical: eyes strained against the darkness of my own ignorance, I struggled to comprehend the grandeur and violence of the adult world, to grasp its double nature of seeming and being. And in this duplicity, this difference between how things looked and what they were, was something to which I couldn’t be reconciled, just as now I can’t forget that under the pretty tablecloths lies a makeshift structure that has no form or beauty of its own. In much the same way, I saw the romance of marriage as a covering for something unapologetically practical, saw it as the metaphor for woman, the beautiful creature who cooks and cleans. Why couldn’t the outside and the inside be the same? Beneath the surface of my cake is something worse than practical, worse than makeshift: it is the reversal of meaning; it is failure itself. Far better to be practical than to make a foul-tasting cake. Better to go to a shop and buy a cake than to produce this extravagant travesty of love.

The first Christmas after my grandfather died, my grandmother cried at the table, a paper hat from a Christmas cracker on her head. I remember the way the flimsy hat sat jauntily on her greying hair as she wept. It seemed to readmit her to the world of childhood; and indeed I sensed around the table a slight impatience with her conduct to which my own frequent emotional outbursts had long since accustomed me. For some reason her tears were not permitted: the obligation to romanticise marriage had been, somehow, reversed by my grandfather’s absence. The covers were off: why on earth was she trying to put them back on again? My grandmother had been brave in marriage: for more than forty years the surface was maintained. It seemed unfair that she shouldn’t be allowed to sentimentalise now, when it could do no harm. In her jaunty hat, husbandless, she had been returned to the caste and strictures of childhood, to our end of the table, where people were told when they could and couldn’t cry.

There is no crying now, at my mother’s birthday party. I look around at my family as though through a million-splintered pane of glass. The world on my side of the glass is as white and cold and silent as an Arctic plain. A song is sung; the cake is cut and cut, divided and redivided into numberless sections. I feel a certain relief at its dismantling, but a cake is not a jigsaw. Its character survives: no matter how finely you cut it, each section replicates the strata of the whole. A piece is put in front of me, my portion, but the others take their portions too. I watch the plates go around the table. I am inflicting failure on my family, or else they are relieving me of it. We lift our glasses in a toast. My mother tells me to eat: she can see my bones. My father says he thinks my driving has improved since I’ve been on my own. My grandmother pats my hand. Mark my words, she says, you two will make it up. Just you wait and see.

My sister comes to stay and we take our children to the park. It is a grey weeping Sunday afternoon. In the greyness the colours hurt, the red of passing buses, the yellow vests of men drilling in the road nearby, the drab fluorescent pink and blue of children’s bicycles passing on the tarmac paths. The grass is sodden underfoot. I watch the people, the mothers with their buggies, the old men standing while their dogs sniff at the verges, the fathers in sports clothes kicking balls in the drizzle, the children roaming the fenced playground with a kind of stillborn exhilaration, like animals in captivity. We take the children to the swings. I watch my daughters: sometimes, when I look at them, it is as though they are wearing masks. Their faces take on the immobility of representation, like the white masks of antiquity with their downturned mouths, though quite what they are representing — their own unhappiness or mine — I am not sure. Either way, something that should be hidden is suddenly visible. The unselfconsciousness of childhood is reversed: they are children turned inside out.

When it starts to rain we leave the park and walk through the leafy Victorian streets of this neighbourhood, which is not my own. I have been thinking I might move over here, away from the disturbances of the sea; might move away from the strain of ceaseless change, the heaving water always so naked, so abandoned, rolling in darkness and light. I imagine a home here, in this redbrick clamp of streets, imagine it as safe and faintly purgatorial, a continuing sameness in which my sins will not devour me but will be dutifully paid off over a lifetime in small increments, like a mortgage. It is the annual weekend where the city’s artists open their houses to show the public their work, and when we pass one we go inside, out of the rain. On the walls there are framed photographs, watercolours, oil paintings; further in there are racks of handmade postcards, and prints stacked up in cellophane wrappers on a table. Again and again their subject is the sea. Here it is in its stormy mood, and there in its benign; here a sheet of empty glare, there a broken surface releasing light. We see it with and without sailing boats, at dawn and dusk, peopled and deserted, wintry, balmy and dull. There are pictures of seaweed, of driftwood, of the pebbles on the beach. There are pictures of the painted huts that line the esplanade: they remind me of the lined-up saints that surround early Renaissance portraits of the Madonna, for in its devotion and repetition this too is a display of religious iconography, its goddess the ocean. In these streets there is no sight or atmosphere of the sea: this could be a pleasant neighbourhood in any landlocked town. There is something obsessive, something almost fetishistic in these images, preoccupied as they are with what is absent, or rather with what is just out of reach. I mistrust this exposure of that which already exposes itself, the naked sea; the mind feeding off its dramas from the safety of the suburb. Yet I imagine moving here, and hanging a picture of the sea on my wall. It has been my belief that the only way to know something is to experience it, that the truest forms of knowledge are personal. Now I imagine a different kind of knowledge, knowledge without exposure, without risk; the knowledge of the voyeur, watching, assessing, staying hidden.

The children tug at our sleeves: they are bored, and want to go. Outside we continue along the rainy pavements. Water drips from the trees. At the end of the road there is another open house, and the children run ahead and disappear inside. We follow, and find ourselves in a front garden as fanciful as a fairy tale, full of chiming bells and odd little creatures made of clay. Behind it stands a house deep in its gloom of trees. It has stained-glass windows and gables scalloped like the hair of an eccentric milkmaid. The door is open: inside all is sepia, and rich with dust. We pass through the hall and into a large disorderly room that is full of a strange, jewelled light. Though it is sullen and grey outside, the stained-glass windows cast their coloured oblongs inward. A lady stands at a large table, with the windows at her back. She is extremely tall, with long fair plaits. In front of her, on the table, are a number of curious hats or headdresses; and standing at the table are the children, who as we enter turn around. One of my daughters has become a stag, with dark branching antlers; the other a fox, with a long russet nose and a velvety head. My little niece has become a fieldmouse, my nephew a badger with a bushy white crest. They look at us with dark glossy eyes through the tinted light. In the few minutes of our absence they have been transformed: they are creatures startled in a forest glade by the approach of danger. The lady, too, is satisfied by the drama of their appearance. She makes the masks herself, she tells us: they are designed for adults, but they look much more lifelike on children. She herself likes to wear the stag, though it does make her terribly tall.

Presently the children take the masks off, all except the stag, whose fondness for hers has perhaps been intensified by hearing that its owner has a special fondness for it too. Can I have it? she asks me. Will you buy it for me? She says this from within the face of the stag, for I can’t see her mouth. The mask is richly made, beautifully heavy and padded: its transformation of her is complete, yet it seems too to have accommodated her own nature, so that I find I’m already quite used to her looking like that. In a strange way we are both relieved by her metamorphosis. The lady tells me the price. It is high, but not as much as I expected. My stag-daughter watches me, alert, bright-eyed, perfectly still. Please, she says. Please, I love it.

Everyone waits to see what I will do, my niece and nephew, my daughters, my sister, the tall lady with the fair plaits. They sense a vacuum of authority. How is it possible that we set out for a walk in the park and have ended up embroiled in the purchase of a bohemian headdress? The only certainty I can locate in myself is that of my desire to undermine authority itself. Authority would refuse her the mask because of the randomness of her request for it. Authority would not allow itself to be led by a course of events. Yet I myself am now authority. And so although I want to buy her the mask, though I know she would love it and value it, though it is entirely up to me, what I decide to say to her is no. But before I can, she lifts the mask from her head. Her face is revealed again, flushed, a little dishevelled. She sets it carefully back on the table. I don’t need it, she says. Don’t worry. I’ve changed my mind.

Later, at the train station before she leaves, my sister says to me: you have to learn to hide what you feel from the children. They will feel what they think you feel. They are only reflections of you.

I don’t believe that, I say.

If they think you’re happy, they’ll be happy, my sister says.

Their feelings are their own, I say.

What I feel is that I have jumped from a high place, thinking I could fly, and after a few whirling instants have realised I am simply falling. What I feel is the hurtling approach of disaster. And I have believed they were falling with me, my daughters; I have believed I was looking into their hearts, into their souls, and seen terror and despair there. Is it possible that my children are not windows but mirrors? That what I have seen is my own fall, my own terror, not theirs?

I don’t believe that, I say again.

You have to believe it, she says.

On the walk back from the station the rain stops. The sun gushes, metallic and rich, through the rending clouds. A fresh wind comes gusting up the streets after their cleansing. A feeling of freedom grips me and whirls me around, the feeling that I need recognise no authority, need serve no greater structure, that I can do as I like. It will go away again, this feeling, I know, but for now it is here. I pass slumbrous houses, a locked church, a little tattoo parlour whose shopfront is obscured by sinuous images of snakes and flowers. I pass a restaurant and through its big windows see a family sitting at a table, the mother rising and reaching across to give something to the baby in its high chair. I can smell food, hear the clatter of dishes and the sound of people talking in the kitchen. A man in a chef’s apron is standing at a side door, smoking in the sunshine. He is only a few feet away from them but the family can’t see him: they are inside in the dining room, at a table spread with a white cloth. Through the window I can see the remains of their meal, the wreckage of cutlery and crumpled napkins and dirty plates, the broken crusts of bread lying against the white. A few minutes ago, when the rain was pouring down, they must have felt fortunate to be safe and dry inside, inside where everything exists to serve them. The woman holds her reaching stance: I watch her pale transverse form through the glass. She is like a statue, frozen in the moment of her motherhood, reaching across to her child. Her husband sits erect, looking straight ahead, as though something outside has caught his attention. It is as though, in that instant, he has seen the restaurant’s servitude become a trap: he looks across her leaning shape, looks out through the dark windows at the lifting day outside, the gold gushing sunshine, the freedom and freshness of the street. The man in the chef’s apron finishes his cigarette and goes back in. I pass on, thinking about the stag mask with its sweetly farouche expression; about my daughter’s heavy branched head turning on her delicate shoulders, about the strange relief I felt at having her masked and at the animal form she took, innocent of human pain. In that guise she could run as fast and as far as she liked to dodge the hunter’s arrows. She was free.