She knew that she herself was not a frustrated artist, despite the occasional insinuations of disaffected practitioners, who tended to resent the hand that steered them. You had to put up with that, in this role of manager, patron, and chaperone. She had not the least desire to be any of these people whom she dispatched around the country, though some of them she admired and respected; rather, she enjoyed the idea of making something happen, the creativity in pulling off an event, the venture of exposing provocative wares. Success and failure ran in tandem; you could find yourself with a platform of three writers and an audience of five in a church hall in Carlisle, or an exhibition in Ipswich would suddenly become the talk of the day. Either way, you moved on; some other project filled the horizon. There was no place either for chagrin or for routine, but a constant onward thrust that satisfied Molly’s need for change. A different rush of ideas; new faces, new places.
But what had happened to youth? She was forty-three—not old, oh dear me no, not even edging into middle age, but she had forged beyond that invisible, undefined barrier. No longer young. Youth had whisked by while she sold books and made books and changed nappies and wheeled Ruth in a pushchair on the last leg of an Aldermarston march and wore miniskirts and took the pill, which had arrived just too late to scupper Ruth’s conception, thank God. From time to time, looking at Ruth, the thought would come: you so easily might not have been. And then Ruth’s emphatic presence seemed to make nonsense of chance, of happenstance.
Ruth shared her father’s dark good looks, and was a vigorous, outgoing child, but had also a conflicting tendency to lapse into abstraction—sudden withdrawals into some private reverie. When small, she would commune with herself for hours, quietly crooning nonsense narratives; as she grew she did well enough at school but teachers uttered warnings about lack of concentration, daydreaming. “What do you think about?” Molly would ask, looking for clues, and Ruth would stare: “It isn’t really thinking. It’s going somewhere else.”
Occasionally, Molly had contemplated being with a man. A young woman on her own with a child was in an ambivalent situation—both available and yet conspicuously fettered. To go out in the evening, she would require a precarious infrastructure of babysitters; a lover who stayed overnight must run the gauntlet of toys strewn about the place, and Ruth’s assessing gaze in the morning. Any man who survived this test of character was to be taken seriously. There was a divorced publisher, with a son of Ruth’s age, who looked for a while to be a real option. Some time later, a sculptor whose work she had promoted seemed to be becoming a fixture, until she realized to what extent she was starting also to support him. A professional commitment to art did not mean that one had also to subsidize it out of one’s own pocket, which was not so very deep. Besides, and most importantly, she knew that her feelings for him, though fond, were not much more than that.
You do not want to admit that you have never been in love, at forty-three. That the most compelling experience going has somehow passed you by, that you are a kind of emotional virgin, that when you read great literature, one of its central themes is mysterious to you. When Ruth was born, Molly had had an instant and awesome clap of understanding: she knew now what it was that drove the world, what it was that people felt for children. But, at the same time, she remained significantly ignorant. All right, she thought, so be it—I am disqualified, for some reason.
Youth was gone, then, which was occasionally dismaying but a truth that could be confronted, and faced down. More provocative was the erratic process whereby you went in one direction rather than another, did this, not that, lived here, not there, found yourself with this person and not someone else quite unknown, quite inconceivable. How did this come about? Oh, you made choices, but in a way that was sometimes almost subliminal, at others so confused that, in recollection, the area of choice is obscured entirely: what was it that was not chosen? And, sometimes, choice is not an option.
The television sits menacingly in the corner of the room. She does not want to switch it on, but she must; one o’clock, six o’clock, nine o’clock—each news bulletin. There come the pulsating concentric rings that announce the BBC news, and each time she watches them, she goes cold again. She holds Ruth, and the rings give way to the newsreader, to aerial photographs of the Soviet missile sites in Cuba, to the faces of Kennedy and Khrushchev, to film of the Soviet ships forging toward Cuba. If she opens a newspaper, she reads of families who have fled to the west of Ireland, to the depths of Wales or Scotland.
Each day creeps onward, subsumed into what is happening. The world is intense; the autumn leaves are fiery, children’s voices in the school playground are so loud and clear, London buses are brilliant, paint-box red. Molly pushes Ruth through all this in her pram and thinks: she may never be a child, a person.
Ruth has been to France with James and Claudia. There is this converted mill, with a swimming pool. She is rather quiet, on her return. Has she not enjoyed herself?
“Yeah. It was fine. Mum?”
“Yes?”
“Why didn’t you marry Dad?”
Ah. This was bound to come. Molly flounders. “Because…” She searches for what might be acceptable.
“He says you didn’t want to live like he does.”
So it has been discussed. Molly nods, overtaken. “That was…well, that certainly came into it.”
Ruth’s long straggly dark hair curtains her face. She is staring into it. What is she thinking? I might have had a swimming pool. I might have gone to a posh school. I might have a wardrobe full of trendy gear.
Ruth peers out of her hair. “Did you sort of toss a coin, or what?”
Eh? “Certainly not. I thought about it very carefully…”—did I?—“We talked it over…”—is that what we did?—“It was a question of what would be best for everyone in the long run.” Was it?
Ruth sighs. She is squinting at a piece of hair. “You know—I do have split ends.” She looks at Molly. “I don’t mind that you didn’t marry him. If you didn’t want to.”
Molly stands in a rank of women outside the school gates, waiting for Ruth. She thinks: I am older than my mother was when she died. I am older than my mother ever was. For most people, the mother that they remember is middle aged, or old. That is a mother figure. For me, a mother is a person younger than myself.
She has hardly any photographs of her parents. There is a snap that Lucas had taken of Matt outside the Fulham house: a young man—a very young man—in rather baggy trousers and an open-necked shirt, squinting into the sun. Thick, darkish hair that fell forward over his forehead, strong features. Handsome. And there was one of Matt and Lorna together, sitting on a pebbly beach, also taken by Lucas; Matt is laughing, Lorna looks more serious, she has an apple in her hand and was perhaps about to take a bite, she looks up at the camera—at Lucas—a small face framed in short, dark hair. It is not Molly’s face. Molly used to study this photo with detachment and think: she was prettier than I am, much prettier. I am not bad, but there is a more solid look to me—I have his features, and perhaps they are less suited to a girl.
No wedding photographs. Nothing of the commemorative cargo carried by most couples. There is Matt’s portrait of Lorna, which Molly now has: she looks straight at you—at him, as he painted—rather serious, that face, the dark straight hair, a blue dress, and her hands folded on her lap. And there is just one more snap of Lorna, now with a toddler, Molly, on her lap—Lucas again, no doubt. Small Molly is looking to one side, distracted by something; Lorna is smiling, her hair is rather longer, she looks—well, she looks, quite simply, happy. This is 1938. Before everything.
The sculptor’s studio is a section of a disused warehouse in Rotherhithe. At first glance, you would think workshop rather than studio, since the sculptor’s raw materials are wire netting, sheets of aluminium, lengths of iron pipe, chunks of scrap metal. There is an anvil and a blast furnace. Molly’s relationship with the sculptor has now gone beyond professional contact, but she has not ye
t allowed him into her bed.
The sculptor stands in the light of a grimy window, showing her a drawing. He is a skinny man—it seems surprising that he can move all this metal around. He is explaining a new project to her. It involves old railway sleepers and chain-link fencing, in a way that she does not quite follow, and is making a statement about freedom. The Vietnam War is in full swing, and this work has some connection with that but is more a general celebration of (or comment on, or meditation about) the human spirit and its triumph over circumstances.
The sculptor is holding forth rather, and perhaps at this very moment their eventual parting is heralded, before ever they have come together, the end implied at the start, as Molly listens and feels some instinctive resistance to what seems to be a paean of self-determination. In the last resort, he is saying, we all do what we are going to do, come what may, whatever cards are dealt, whichever way the cookie crumbles. We are free souls.
“No,” says Molly.
The sculptor looks at her, quizzically.
“Unless you’re talking religion,” she says. “Life after death. That sort of thing.”
The sculptor shrugs. He is an atheist, it seems.
Molly stares at the chain-link fencing, the tangled metal. This is one of those moments when art loses its appeal—temporarily, one trusts. She does not as yet know the sculptor all that well, but well enough to protest.
“Don’t tell me that people direct their own lives. My father was killed in 1941—not at his direction. My mother died having a baby. She wanted the baby—she didn’t plan to die.”
The sculptor seems to find this outburst sympathetic. He places a placatory arm around her shoulder. “You’ll come around to it—you’ll see. You’ll get what I’m at when the piece is further along the road.”
“Actually,” says Ruth. “I don’t mind having a peculiar family. I mean, I suppose it’s just that I’m used to it, but actually Lucas is rather fantastic, as a sort of grandfather person. And Simon’s okay, too.”
Molly eyes her. Such truths come out, from time to time, and can be reassuring, like this one. “All the same, you have been somewhat short-changed where relatives are concerned. A bit thin on the ground.”
“There’s Aunt Bryony.”
“There is indeed.”
They reflect on Bryony, who is a headmistress, and occasionally visits when she is in London, attending some professional gathering.
Ruth giggles. “I always feel as though she might be going to give me a conduct mark.”
“Don’t worry—she’s retiring next year. She wouldn’t be able to then.”
In fact, Bryony is amiable enough, but her calling is manifest. And there is little common ground—none of the “Do you remember…?” and “How is…?” with which relatives paper over an awkward session. Just that mystic blood link; the communal genes. And the shadow of a person whom neither Molly nor Bryony knew for very long.
Bryony’s parents have died. As for the Bradleys…
“Did I ever see your other grandparents?” says Ruth.
“Oh, you did, you did. It wasn’t a huge success.”
Marian Bradley has elegantly waved and silvered hair. Gerald is large, genial, compressed into immaculate tailoring. Molly has not been to Brunswick Gardens for several years. Contact was always tenuous; the occasional card from Marian suggesting lunch or tea, a little gift at Christmas. Ruth appears awed by her surroundings, and sits tranquily on Molly’s lap.
“And here is Ruth,” says Molly.
Marian’s smile is effusive. “Well, this is such a surprise. We didn’t even know about your marriage. You should have told us.”
“I am not married,” says Molly.
The Bradleys go quite still. Gerald ceases to tamp his pipe and stares over Molly’s head, no longer genial. Marian smiles no more. At last she speaks: “Oh, my dear…” She looks away, then toward her husband. “How most unfortunate,” she murmurs.
“You were considered unfortunate,” says Molly. “Not a term I cared for. So that was that.”
The winter of discontent gave way to the spring and summer of A levels, cultural endeavor and Mrs. Thatcher. Ruth worried about Wordsworth, the Tudors and Stuarts, and the roll of puppy fat around her midriff; Molly fielded a touring opera company in Orkney and the Shetlands, and a craft exhibition in Manchester, and fine-tuned the arrangements for the poetry festival. In the background, a woman with an iron coiffeur and awesome insistence began her long dominion of the nation’s affairs.
Molly voted Labour, naturally. Always; regardless. So did everyone she knew. It seemed surprising that there could be Conservative electoral victories when you yourself had barely ever heard of anyone voting Tory, and even more so in that, when you thought about it, you realized that there must be millions of working-class people who voted Tory, which seemed somehow like shooting yourself in the foot. Why ever did they do it? And now, just when you should be rejoicing at the first woman Prime Minister, she came in the form of this dogmatic harridan with her handbags and her pussy-cat bows.
But if you looked beyond these shores, complaint seemed churlish. In the course of work, Molly had come across artists exiled from their homelands—people who had fled, or whose parents had fled, because circumstances were beyond tolerance, smoked out of Russia or Hungary or Czechoslovakia or wherever. Beside such histories, some local carping about the power of the trade unions or Mrs. Thatcher’s bossy persona became positively obscene. No secret policemen would be stalking the writers Molly dispatched around the country, there would be no midnight knock on the door for strident playwrights or political satirists. You could blaspheme Mrs. Thatcher around the globe, if you so wished, and there would be no tap on the shoulder when you arrived back at Heathrow. Those who live out their lives in a politically stable country, in peacetime, have not had history snapping at their heels.
Except that I have, thought Molly. My father. And who knows what is in store. But in the meantime, the only sensible and expedient thing was to get on with private life, while governments came and went, a cacophonous backdrop to the real business of existence.
The organization of the poetry festival had taxed her to the limits. The chosen venue was a market town and former spa, satellite to a university, which should serve up audiences both of the young and the culturally minded middle aged who were inclined to sample the unfamiliar and might even buy a book or two. There were historic inns on hand, and elegant eighteenth-century pump rooms in which the poetic events could be held. It had not been easy to drum up sponsorship. Molly had spent many hours cajoling skeptical supermarket managers and garage proprietors. It had been an altogether simpler matter to line up the poets.
This was to be a weekend in which a range of literary talents would be on display, a sample of today’s state of the art, which would include one distinguished name that even some of those who never read poetry might recognize, alongside a swath of others—known, obscure, fecund, costive, impenetrable, accessible, good, bad, indifferent. Molly was even handed, keen to give exposure to those who needed it as much as to those who could be relied upon to keep an audience nicely engaged for an hour, and who might even persuade a few doubters that they could from time to time get hold of a collection of poetry and enjoy it. Poets are as assorted as any other occupational group—indeed, probably rather more so than most. They come in many forms—combative, reticent, responsible family men; feisty single mothers, stylish, uncouth, occasionally inaudible. Never mind, this was literature, or at least some of it was, and the discerning public had a right to inspection of what the nation had to offer, right now. So Molly had studied her reference list, blackballed a few names (he who brought seven friends and family on another occasion and put them on expenses; she who forgot the date; they who got pissed out of their minds, trashed the White Hart, and lost her a major sponsor) and had selected a lineup that should be both eclectic and representative. Poets seldom said no, unless they were paranoically retiring, or of such eminenc
e that neither exposure nor adulation were of any interest to them. Your standard poet—if there was such a thing—was only too happy with a free outing and the chance to socialize (or quarrel) with his or her peers. Forget the hackneyed image—soulful, solitary, unworldly—the twentieth-century poet was a social animal, often nicely disguised in some alternative occupation and emerging in true colors when it suited. This is what Molly had learned over time: never take them at face value, feed and water them well, make sure they’ve got their train ticket and are bringing one spouse or lover and one only.
The welcome party in the pump rooms on Friday evening: poets, sponsors, festival staff, and volunteers. These elements are not mixing very well; poet tends to cleave unto poet (they all know each other anyway), while the sponsors group together, trying to look at ease in this company, and the staff make much of the local volunteers, who are an essential component—they tout programs, provide transport, and, in some cases, hospitality. Molly is trying to stir all these people up. She tows over to the sponsors a poet whom she knows to be amiably gregarious, and serves him up to the manager of Barclays Bank and the owner of the high street wine bar. She selects an engaging young woman poet for the proprietor of the local garden center. She greets and thanks all of the volunteers. She checks over the poets; she has already had dealings with most of them, but there are a few strange faces. She moves from group to group, making sure to identify those she does not know.