Aftermath: On Marriage and Separation

AREN’T YOU HAVING ANY?

I have a friend I’m too frightened to see. We used to be close, but when she calls during the smashed days of late summer I shrink from the sound of her voice. I read a story about a woman whose dead grandmother keeps calling the house, leaving long messages on the answering machine in which she bewails her purgatorial loneliness. The woman was fond of her grandmother but eventually she becomes angry, pitiless, shouting down the phone at the dead woman to go away. The calls are making her feel guilty.

My friend lives with her two daughters in a town about an hour from here, in a house an estate agent would describe as ‘deceptive’. From the outside it appears tiny: the deception lies in the fact that once the scale of the street has been removed, everything inside is at least in proportion to everything else. My friend is tiny herself, with child-sized hands whose bitten nails she hides in the long sleeves of her too-big jumpers. Once she lived in London with her husband, in a grand establishment where dinner parties were held from which one would come away feeling lacerated, as though the evening had contained a hidden blade that nicked the skin unnoticed. That blade, I suppose, was the animosity between man and wife that later dismembered their household and whole way of life so brutally. The husband met another woman, had new children, bought another grand house to replace the first; and my friend and her daughters were cut away, like the excess cloth fallen from a seamstress’s table that the pattern doesn’t require.

She moved to this cheaper, less fashionable location, got a job that fitted round her children’s school day, gave up drinking, took up yoga. She sees different people, has new opinions, a new haircut. Everything in her doll’s house is dainty and white and fresh. It is as though, in the absence of man, woman seizes the opportunity to recover her innocence, to make her world virginal again, to cleanse herself of the gore of sexuality and perfect her femininity. For a while I cleaned my own house incessantly, a maternal Lady Macbeth seeing bloodstains everywhere. The messy cupboards and cluttered shelves were like an actual subconscious I could purge of its guilt and pain. In those cupboards our family still existed, man and woman still mingled, children were still interleaved with their parents, intimacy survived. One day I took everything out and threw it away.

So I’m frightened of my friend. I don’t return her calls. Her existence is virtuous, honourable, yet the thought of it paralyses me with terror.

My daughter comes back from a school trip with a long face. I ask her how it was. It was all right, she says.

All evening she is quiet, but once she’s in bed, the covers pulled up to her chin, she begins to speak. The trip was to a local nature reserve, a place I know, the broad estuary banked by desolate wetlands and marshes. They were there all day. They were asked to choose partners, and each pair was given maps and information packs and questionnaires with which to negotiate their own way around. They were asked to make a note of birds and animals they saw, and to sketch the different wildflowers and grasses. It sounds like fun, I say. Well it was, she says, I mean it would have been. That’s what makes it so hard, she says, the fact that it would have been fun.

When the class chose their partners, standing in the car park beside the coach that had brought them there, the group was an odd number and my daughter found herself left out. I ask why she wasn’t in a pair with H, her longtime best friend. H chose someone else, she says. It seems that she and H are no longer friends, and that my daughter has been slower than H to make new alliances. I don’t blame her, she says. It’s not her fault. I’d probably have done exactly the same thing. But all day I had to go around on my own. And it was such a long day, she says, and so much walking and so many things we had to do. The teacher was meant to be her partner but it didn’t really work out like that. She kept having to go and help other people, and my daughter kept finding herself alone again.

I didn’t realise, I say, about you and H. You didn’t tell me.

It’s just as much my fault as hers, my daughter says.

What happened? I say.

My daughter shrugs.

She didn’t like it when I talked to other people, she says. I wanted to be her friend but I wanted to have other friends too. And she wanted it to be just us.

In the mirror my daughters and I look at ourselves. They are growing, getting bigger, and I am shrinking. I can’t eat, like a lovesick girl. But I am not a girl and this is grief. It is the opposite of excitement.

In the mirror their faces are young and strong and richly coloured, yet blunt and half-formed, full of the unknown, of sentences not yet uttered. Their heads reach my shoulder. I stand between them, recessed, shadowy, a creature concealed in the foliage of their girlish vigour. I feel I could stay hidden like this forever, hidden in this virginal life with my daughters, but then the image breaks apart; time resumes; they vanish from the mirror to do other things and I am left there, as though holding the long and close-typed book of myself in my hands.

Grief is not love but it is like love. This is romance’s estranged cousin, a cruel character, all sleeplessness and adrenalin unsweetened by hope. I have cousins I have rarely seen, for our families did not get on: they were like us but they were not us. A few years ago I saw them at a funeral, grown up now, a group of white-faced strangers clad in black. We spoke, politely, and it was unnerving to see in these strangers the lineaments of my siblings’ faces; to see coolness in their expressions instead of warmth, indifference where usually there was interest, to feel the lack of meaning and connection in what looked, nonetheless, like intimacy. And grief is somehow the same, resembling what it negates, each cousinly attribute a denial instead of a reinforcement.

I can’t eat, and soon my clothes are too big for me, all gaping sleeves and sagging waistbands, everything seeming to be on a different scale from myself, just as my mother’s clothes were when long ago I opened her wardrobe and curiously tried them on. In a way I enjoy the feeling of becoming a child again. It seems to acquit me of men and marriage, this loss of substance; to pair me with my daughters, as though I were rejoining them on the other side of what created them. I feel safer this way. I look at people eating, at restaurant tables, in cafes and on park benches, and compared to them I feel protected, as though what they are ingesting in all its richness and density is compromise. To need is to be compromised. They seem almost vulnerable while they eat.

As a family we would eat around the kitchen table, but now I carry my daughters their supper on a tray. The table is covered in papers and books and electricity bills. I try to remember what our family meals were like, and though the detail escapes me I remember it as a kind of tree, nourishment, with all of us fastened to its branches, as indistinguishable as fruit. Ours was a communal body: there was no individual drama of growing or shrinking. That same tree existed in my childhood, its cycles by turns reassuring and tyrannical. One could break away from it but the tree still stood. As a teenager trying to escape family mealtimes, I remember my mother’s disapproval — almost, her fear — of such absences. There was something she wanted us to believe, something she feared we might find out the truth of if we went elsewhere. That there were other places we could eat, perhaps; that this tree, family, was not the only source of life. To reject her food was to reject her; perhaps she thought food was the only thing we really needed from her, or the only thing she could provide. Mealtimes had the religiosity and infallibility of an institution, until we stopped believing in them and they were revealed to be just my mother, providing or needing, it wasn’t clear which.

Aren’t you having any? my daughters ask me. They are anxious, just like my mother was, but for the opposite reason. As a teenager I felt lumpish and slow, weighted down: I was in no danger of starving. When I left home I lost weight, as though the weight were the weight of these family relationships themselves. I succumbed to the ascetic purity of that alternative religion, hunger. And now I have left home again, am in that white light again; the tree has been cut down and the light comes pouring through.

My daughter makes a new friend, S. She and S don’t have much in common, as far as I can see. In fact, I don’t like S much. She has a great collection of electronic gadgets and devices she stares at, the morbid blue light of the screen on her face. She is forever drawing my daughter aside to show her what she’s looking at; the two of them stare together. Once, I go to collect my daughter from S’s house and through the windows see them sitting on a large beige sofa. On the wall in front of them is a huge screen with a film playing on it. As I get closer I see that S is holding another, smaller screen in her hands: the two of them are watching that, heads together, the blue light on their faces, like incidental figures in a religious canvas, absorbed in their own corner of life while at the painting’s centre Jesus is declaiming the Sermon on the Mount.

My daughter would like S to stay the night. She arrives with her overnight bag, her nail varnish collection, her gadgets. From elsewhere in the house I can hear them talking, but whenever I come in they fall silent. Over supper S replies to my questions in squeaking monosyllables. Her silence is portentous, smooth and sealed. She eats almost nothing. Later she produces packets of sweets and crisps from her overnight bag. I go in to say goodnight to them and find them lying side by side, looking at one of S’s devices under the covers, the blue light of the screen on their faces. They are quiet, almost inert, but later when I go to bed I hear them murmuring and giggling. I tell them to go to sleep but as soon as I leave the murmuring starts again. Several times in the night I wake and hear it, a sound like the sound of running water or a door banging in the wind, something I know I should get up and fix but don’t.

I go to London to meet my brother. At the sight of me his face slackens. My God, he says.

He takes me to an expensive restaurant for lunch and I eat everything on the table, eat the contents of the bread basket and the sugar lumps that come with the coffee. Afterwards he hugs me. Come and stay, he says. Bring the girls and stay for as long as you like.

My daughters worry that they are getting fat. They stand in front of the mirror, frowning. They prod their own flesh. It is as though some rigour has gone from our household, the rigour of the male; as though we have lost something rodlike and firm at our centre, our female bodies waxing and waning like pale moons.

A friend invites us for dinner. The children don’t want to go — do we have to? they say. They seem genuinely unhappy at the prospect. When we arrive they stand right next to me; they hold on to my clothes. They seem to fear losing me in the maze of someone else’s house, someone else’s family. Every few minutes they yank at my sleeve. Can we go now? they say, though we’ve only just arrived. It strikes me that they don’t like adults very much any more. When they are addressed they barely speak. Their faces are anguished.

My friend and his wife are good cooks. Theirs is a happy marriage, a joint creation of great delicacy and skill; I have always admired it, have liked to look at it and be in its presence. The food they make is expressive of themselves, healthy, moderate, and the opposite of punitive or dull. I have admired them, but things are different for me now. My admiration has become a kind of voyeurism, the broken perception of the vagabond roaming at lit windows. My children hover, tugging at my sleeve. I don’t want to put people to the test: it has struck me that along with all the other losses, I might lose friendship too. I’m not equal any more with the people I know, and what is friendship but a celebration of equality?

My friend sets the table. I watch him bring out the clean plates and glasses, the gleaming cutlery. I watch him lay the places. I watch him bring out fish and bread and bowls of greenery. The kitchen is warm and comfortable. To be at this ceremony of the table again is almost painful; my daughters hover, not wanting to sit down. Can we go now? they say. My friend pulls out chairs for them, fills their plates. If you don’t like it I can make you something else, he tells them. I’ve got other things, or maybe you just feel like eating bread. He offers the bread, and they take some. Then they eat what’s in front of them, all of it. When we leave my friend gives me a loaf of his good bread. He and his wife suggest meeting again in a few days’ time; they offer to take my daughters swimming with their son. My daughters don’t say very much but later, when we go home, they admit that they enjoyed themselves.

I meet my oldest friend — J — for a drink. The children are with their father: I have begun to think that in these periods alone I ought to socialise. I see it as a kind of duty arising out of a vast and possibly terminal neglect, for I have no sense of a future: when I go out to see my friends it is in the service of an illusion. I am trying to pretend that nothing has happened, that nothing has changed, like the orchestra still playing while the Titanic sinks.

But it’s a bad day, the day on which I meet J. Things are difficult; it’s hard to talk about anything else. I can talk to J without anxiety. She knows my life and I know hers: our talk is the talk of episodes; the story itself never needs to be explained. All the same I feel guilty. The drama of my life dominates, uses up the fuel of conversation like an ugly army tank guzzling petrol. This is not equality. I’m sorry, I say, I’m sorry. I’m just so tired. I admit to J that I find it almost intolerable when the children are away. I admit that the night before I lay awake until it was light again and I could get up. I admit that I often spend these vigils in tears.

J leans across the table, grips my hand. Don’t ever do that again, she says. Call me. I don’t care what time of night it is, but don’t ever cry on your own again. Call me instead.

My daughter’s friendship with S has been augmented by her friendship with P. The three of them make a little giggling murmuring organism, their heads together. S’s gadgets are sidelined to a degree in this more complex social structure. The blue light can’t encompass three: there’s always one who’s out of it, who can’t quite see. The entrancing properties of the screen fail to mesmerise them. It strikes me that it is like love, a trance of two that is broken by a third.

Yet the new structure of three is more boisterous, noisier, happier on the surface. I quite like P. She has some of the traits of S — crisps and nail varnish — but shares similarities with my daughter too. She is more loquacious than either of them; she chatters away, her face bright and smiling. The three of them are always together. When one goes to another’s house, the third has to come along too. I am pleased for my daughter, pleased that she’s found friends, though in my heart I’m disappointed. Privately I feel they’re not good enough for her. Her distinct qualities, the things I know her by, don’t feature much in this new social world. Who is she without those qualities? I’m not quite sure. She has taken on the interests and opinions of S and P but she doesn’t seem to have rubbed off on them in quite the same way. Her old friendship with H was a relationship of greater equality, of mutual influence, of qualities shared. They were mingled together, my daughter and H, in a way that reflected well on both of them. Yet that friendship has mysteriously come to an end.

Not long after the arrival of P, another girl, D, joins the group. Now they are four, a family. D is much more to my tastes. She is observant, polite, interesting. She has a discipline about her that I like, an outward-looking beady kind of attentiveness that seems respectful of life. D does not gaze at screens. Her fingernails are unvarnished. I tell my daughter that I like her. I want to show my approval, and D has given me the opportunity.

Yes, my daughter says coolly, she’s nice.

I ask my children what their father feeds them. Takeaways, they say. Pizza. Chicken curry from the supermarket. The tree is dead for him too, then. He was once an extravagant cook, a person who made pastry and boeuf bourguignon, who made his own mincemeat at Christmas, who made little parcels of ravioli and crimped them all around the edges. Where has it gone, that food? And where did it come from, if not from him?

I go to bed hungry and when I wake I feel a degree safer. The hunted creature, hiding, tries to make itself small. The less of me there is, the less likely it is that the arrow will find me. I cook my daughters their supper but I can’t eat with them: I fear that if I do I’ll forget, come out of my hiding place, expose myself to danger. I fear something terrible will happen. Increasingly, to eat seems to be to open the body: the fight-or-flight responses are disabled. It is impossible to eat and stay vigilant. Sometimes, over supper, my daughters argue and upset themselves. If I, too, were eating I might get angry with them. As it is, I spring to their aid. One Sunday evening, when I am expecting them back, the phone rings. I have made a chocolate cake for their return: it stands on a plate in the kitchen, beautifully iced. The phone call is to tell me that my daughter has had an accident at her grandparents’ house, where they were staying the weekend: she is on her way to casualty, has a gash in her leg that will need stitches, so they won’t be back until late. There is nothing I can do and so I stand in the kitchen, waiting. I look at the cake on its plate. It strikes me that while I was making it, my daughter was slipping on the wet path at the back of her grandparents’ house and opening her knee from one side to the other on an edging stone. She returns with six stitches, and a scar that makes my heart jump into my mouth. I saw my own bone, she says. She eats a piece of cake, a small one: the shock has taken away her appetite. It’s nice, she says, resting her head against my arm. Aren’t you having any?

Days and nights of hunger, white and abstract, hunger and the feeling of excitement that is in fact its opposite, dread: I wonder whether the dying get caught up in something of this black romance, whether the courtship of death likewise feels for an instant like thrilling life. Sometimes, looking at my daughters, I remember that once I was pregnant with them, and the memory is too strange to tolerate for long. My body is far away now from that thickening, motionless state, is drifting and fading toward a blank vision of its own autonomy.

I sit and watch a war documentary with my daughters. We watch the old black-and-white footage of men coming across the Channel waters in their strange snub-nosed boats. We see them discharged on the beaches, watch them running up the sands like scuttling crabs. They are conveyed in squat trucks to a village just inland from the French coast, where the British are holding the line. The men huddle in ditches, their hands resting on the flanks of big guns all webbed in camouflage. Their faces are besmirched with mud, their tin hats strewn with leaves: they crouch like savages, grinning at the camera. The village can be seen in the near distance, a pretty place with the spire of the village church rising up through the summer trees. Back in the ditches the guns are being loaded with rounds of mortar: we watch as they fire, the men holding the kicking flanks like the thighs of a lusty woman. We watch the rounds begin to fall, puncturing the sides of buildings, shearing the tiles from the roofs, smashing street signs and windows, opening up great ragged cavities in the walls. We watch, finally, the church spire in its last moments of tranquillity: the camera lingers there on its stillness amid the treetops for what seems like an eternity, until at last the mortar strikes; and though we are expecting it, it is still shocking, still surprising to see something so blameless be destroyed. A hole is blown through its centre and its slender top bows gracefully and then topples to the earth.

A friend comes to visit, someone I’ve known for a while though not well. But lately she has come forward. She has stepped out from the background and come towards me. She brings not food but a lavender plant, a scented girlish delicate-coloured thing whose smell reminds me of childhood.

I say to her, all my memories are being taken away. Nothing belongs to me any more. I have become an exile from my own history. I say to her, I no longer have a life. It’s an afterlife; it’s all aftermath.

My friend has a history of her own. She too was once married; she too experienced the breaking up of that image, saw it become a pile of broken-edged pieces like the ones I carry everywhere in my hands. For a long time she lived the virginal life with her young daughter that I am living now. She was so thin you could have threaded a needle with her, had coffee flowing in her veins instead of blood, never slept because it was only when her daughter was asleep that she could live and breathe. Yet she would spend her evenings brooding and weeping instead of living. Friendship, she says, was what sustained her in that time. In Greek drama, the community shares the pain of war with the returning warriors. They come out, out into the streets to offer their love and their solicitude to those who have suffered the pain of battle. Marriage keeps other people outside, my friend says. In marriage you go away from other people, but at the end of marriage they come out to welcome you back. This is civilisation, she says. The worst thing that happened to you has brought out the best in them.

My daughters like this friend of mine. Whenever I say she’s coming to visit, their faces show pleasure instead of apprehension. They don’t fear her as they fear other people. When they look at her and her daughter, I suppose, they see the new reflection of themselves. Recently she got married again: my daughters and I went to her wedding and sat in the front row. My friend admits that she cried when she left the little house she shared with her daughter. She had recreated her own innocence there, washed away the bloodshed of relationship, rewound herself, spat out the fruit of the tree of knowledge. She clung, a little, to that recovered innocence; she stood at the altar for the second time in her wedding dress, trembling like a girl. I want to ask her whether it feels like real life yet, whether the feeling of aftermath can encompass even events of whose nature it is the consequence, but I don’t.

My daughter’s friend D has a birthday party. S and P, of course, are there. But when I turn up at the appointed time to collect her, it becomes clear that my daughter is the only one being sent home. S and P are staying the night at D’s house: the three of them are discussing the film that has been rented for their entertainment, and that will be put on as soon as my daughter leaves.

On the way home my daughter is rigid, white, silent, but eventually she can bear it no longer and I pull the car over while she sobs against my shoulder.

Why weren’t you asked to stay too? I ask her.

I don’t know, she wails. I think it was D — she only wanted the others to stay, not me. They got different invitations from mine. They were talking about it all week at school.

So you knew? I said.

She nods miserably. I am so angry, with D and the parents of D, with myself, with the world for its cruelty, that I am seized by the desire to take things into my own hands. I want justice, and I want it most of all from D, because I had liked her more than the others.

Let’s go back, I say. I want to talk to D’s parents.

Don’t, my daughter says, half-smiling though her face is still wet.

If you’d told me, I said, I would never have let you go. I would never have let that happen to you.

I suspect a calculated cruelty somewhere in my daughter’s social misfortunes. It is as though she has been ostracised, cast out; as though her parents’ separation is a mark of shame that has led others to spurn her. Is this civilisation too? People have come out to comfort me, the warrior; but to her, the victim, they show a carelessness that borders on contempt.

They probably didn’t even realise, she sighs, looking out of the window into the darkness. They probably didn’t even think about it. That’s just what people are like.

Around the corner from my house there is a florist’s. I have walked past it many times. When it is open, a green canopy is out and the pavement beneath it is like a little scented garden filled with plants and flowers, with containers overflowing with colour, with frothing drifts of blooms that sway and ripple brilliantly in the grey high-street breezes. I appreciate flowers these days. Flowers are not food. When it is closed the canopy is retracted and the garden vanishes; the shutters are tightly sealed across the shopfront. The facade is so blank it is difficult even to find it amongst the other shops.

Though I am familiar with it, something about the change from one state to the other has attracted my notice anew. I find that I recognise its rhythms and the transformation they bring, one day so blank and shuttered, the next so full of life. They remind me of the way my own house now opens and closes, is either welcoming or withdrawn, depending on the whereabouts of the children; of my new feelings of impermanence, this gypsy life that has no past or future, only a fragile itinerant present. The big supermarket down the road is always open: all day its electric doors slide stolidly back and forth, admitting and discharging streams of people. Its neon-lit space is so impersonal and so eternal that it emanates both comfort and alienation. Inside you can forget that you’re not alone, or that you are. Sometimes I buy flowers there and put them in my daughters’ bedrooms. They come in plastic sheaths, a handful of deracinated blooms, a mass-produced representation of beauty like a postcard of the Mona Lisa. They look pretty enough; after a few days I throw them away.

One day, walking past the florist’s with a friend, we stop. The canopy is out; the pavement is in its scented glory. My friend wants to buy me some flowers. Come on, she says. Let’s go in. For a moment I am frightened, as I have learned to be now of beautiful things, frightened they will contain lacerating shards of nostalgia. I don’t go near the photograph album any more, don’t look at the art books I once loved, don’t listen to the music or read the poetry that have been my life’s companions; don’t walk on the hills I walked with my husband, don’t contemplate foreign trips or visits to interesting places. And I don’t eat, for fear that nourishment will hurt me with its inferences of pleasure. Standing outside the florist’s I feel, suddenly, the completeness of my impoverishment. I feel transparent with bereavement: there is nothing, any more, I can look on and feel safe.

The plate-glass window is dark with foliage, in whose recesses the pale, waxy forms of indoor lilies and white roses stand like virginal icons. Inside there is a clean, leafy smell, and suddenly silence, tranquillity. We wander around the cool, lofty space with its fronds and ferns. At the end, behind a wooden counter, three women in green aprons are working. The counter is heaped with flowers: in their hands they hold scissors and twine. I watch for a while as they pluck the stems from the pile, deftly combining and recombining, binding the stalks with quick fingers, like classical maidens preparing their festal tributes. The bouquets grow and become splendid in their pale hands. It strikes me that they might be for a wedding, but all the same I feel a certain relief in here. There is no chromosomal presence of the male: this cool and scented place is a grove of femininity, its fecundity somehow pure, as though no conflict, no struggle of opposites needed to occur to bring these smells and shapes to completeness. I look at the different flowers in their sheaves: their pretty moulded heads, each so articulated and distinct, remind me of my daughters. I will buy some, and put them in their rooms. Perhaps I’ll also buy a fern: the soft shape and something ancient about the scroll-like leaves appeals to me. Ferns are old, older than civilisation, older than man and woman, older than right and wrong. They are sexless, having neither seeds nor flowers. They are vascular plants, conductors, sensitive to contamination. They furl and unfurl, depending on the conditions. I don’t know how I know these things, for I’ve never owned one, though I’ve always wanted to. I’ll buy a fern, and I’ll keep it alive.

At the counter the women are absorbed in their task. They haven’t realised, perhaps, that we are here. We could leave and they would never know that we had come. My friend goes to the counter. Excuse me, she says, and all three of them look up.