I Sing of a Maiden
I SING of a maiden
That is Makeless:*
King of all kinges
To her son, she ches.†
He came all so stille
There his mother was
As dew in Aprille
That falleth on the grass.
He came all so stille
To his mother’s bower
As dew in Aprille
That falleth on the flower.
He came all so stille
There his mother lay
As dew in Aprille
That falleth on the spray.
Mother and maiden
Was never none but she
Well may such a lady
Goddes mother be.’
This was Marion Smith, a childhood friend:
‘… When we did the school play The Crucible, I don’t know if any of you remember that — Lucy was Abigail and I was Mary Warren — and we had to scream. So we had to spend hours rehearsing screaming in a field. Lucy was just wonderful at it and the rest of us just stood around to boggle at it. Next term in the sixth form we did Middlemarch and Lucy was the enthusiast and the scholar … I was going to read something from Middlemarch and have been going back through it. Poor Dorothea wasn’t up to Lucy you know. Dorothea had this long life at the end and she was very nice and people thought she was wonderful and she didn’t really affect anyone very much. Even in the short life that Lucy had — I think as everyone has said here today — she affected an awful lot of people and goodness knows what she would have done — You know, Dorothea stand back — Lucy had it all.’
This was Elizabeth Webster, a teacher at the Arts Centre:
‘… She came to see me when she was at Exeter, just before the last year, and I said to her, “Now that you are grown up what are you going to do?” and she said, “I don’t mind what I do as long as I do it absolutely to the hilt.” — and then I said, “Yes that’s fine but where are you going?” and she thought awfully hard, then she said, “Towards the light … Towards the light.” ’
And this was Marian Partington:
‘… Four months after Lucy died I had a dream. And in the dream she came back and I said, “Where have you been?” and she said, “I’ve been sitting in a water meadow near Grantham,” and she said, “If you sit very still you can hear the sun move.” And in the dream I was filled with a great sense of peace …’
Very soon it was clear to me that something extraordinary was happening. As I wept I glanced at my weeping brother and thought: How badly we need this. How very badly my body needs this, as it needs food and sleep and air. Thoughts and feelings that had been trapped for twenty years were now being released. They were very ready. I have known literary catharsis and dramatic catharsis, and I have mourned and I have been comforted; but I had never experienced misery and inspiration so purely combined. My body consisted only of my heart — that was my sense of it. Formulaically, perhaps, but without mysticism, I can assert that I felt bathed in her presence (and felt unrecognisably the better for it). This is where we really go when we die: into the hearts of those who remember us. And all our hearts were bursting with her.
The Onion, Memory
— Are you going back to Oxford now? asked my mother as I dropped her off at the house.
— No, Mum, I’m not going to Oxford. What a wonderful afternoon.
— Yes. It was. Give my love to Isabel.
On the day I told her and my father that I was leaving home, my mother shed silent tears, unemphatically, unwillingly. That made three out of three. (Or three out of four: Jaime was twenty then, and is still single.) But then she wiped her cheeks with the back of her hand and accepted me in my new reality.
I didn’t go back to Oxford. I went back to my flat in West London — the work studio that now served as home. The place was comfortable enough under normal circumstances, but it had had the boys in it on Saturday night: their camp beds thus commanded most of the sitting-room floorspace, and the entire apartment was strewn with comics, empty crisp packets, video-game cartridges, yoghurt cartons and various effigies of various ghouls and goblins and boglins, of buffed-up superheroes, of predators, terminators, robocops …
With an ice-bag pressed against my cheek I sat among all the detritus, my heart still raw and swollen as I communed with my murdered cousin.
More than a hundred had been there that day. Their differing degrees of pain went back twenty years and would continue for another twenty, forty, sixty. And that hundred each knew another hundred who sympathised, who worried and winced. And my cousin was not the only victim but one of eleven, or perhaps thirteen, or perhaps more … The murderer, in a sense, presides over this little universe, with all its points and circles, but of course there is no place for him within it. He caused it, but he is not of it.
So I hadn’t intended to say very much about Frederick West. Earlier on I conceived of a short chapter that would describe an average domestic day at 25 Cromwell Street, ending after a scarcely credible inventory of troglodytic squalor, including theft, violence, incest, rape, sexual torture, whoredom, pimpdom, peeping-tomdom (daughter: ‘My bedroom was like a sieve’), pornography, child prostitution and paedophilia — ending, as I say, with West’s oft-repeated goodnight to his large and various brood: ‘When you go to sleep, my life begins’ … My family cannot understand the extraordinary collision that allowed him to touch our lives, and I have no wish to prolong the contact. But he is here now, in my head; I want him exorcised. And Frederick West is uncontrollable: he is uncontrollable. For now he will get from me a one-sentence verdict and I will get from him a single detail. Here is the sentence. West was a sordid inadequate who was trained by his childhood to addict himself to the moment when impotence became prepotence.
And here is the detail. West had Quilpian eating habits. He would take the hind end off a loaf of bread and top it with a brick of cheese. He would stroll around the house eating an onion like you’d eat an apple.
An onion? When she first met him, at the bus stop (a different bus stop), Rose thought Fred’s teeth were ‘all green and manky’. A determined enemy of the washbasin and the bathtub, West, we can be sure, was no friend of the Water Pick or the dental floss. Still, he could chew his way unconcernedly through an onion. His teeth were strong enough.
But what about his eyes?
Learning of this detail, my mind went back to an evening in the late 1970s when I was lounging around with my brother Philip, and I drew his attention to a new book of poems I was reading: the first collection of my mentor and protégé and friend (and ex-tutor), Craig Raine, The Onion, Memory. We talked about the title: how the onion, like memory, is arranged in folds with a common nub. And I said,
— What else have they got in common?
— They make you cry, said my brother.
In May 1994 Marian Partington had travelled to Cardiff with two close friends. She went to bless her sister’s bones:
I lifted her skull with great care and tenderness. I marvelled at the sense of recognition in its curves and proportion. I wrapped it, like I have wrapped my babies, in Lucy’s ‘soft brown blanket’, her snuggler. I pressed her to my heart.
And when, late in 1995, Frederick West’s interrogation tapes were played, and his version of events appeared, unchallenged, in the press, Marian campaigned, and won a public rebuttal. This is a rebuttal, I think, that I must confirm, solidify and perpetuate. Because otherwise these things are lost, lost in the daily smudge of newsprint; and I never again want to hear anyone ask me how Lucy Partington got ‘drawn into’ the orbit of the Wests.
West said he killed my cousin because she wanted him to go and meet her parents.* He and Lucy were having an affair (‘purely sex, end of story’), and Lucy, now pregnant, had ‘come the loving racket’ and ‘said I wanna come and live with you and all this crap, and I just grabbed her by the throat’. ‘[H]er wanted me to see her parents, her wanted me to do bloody everything.’
That is what it said, in the press, unchallenged. I rebut it. This book rebuts it.
At the end of that day — 10 July 1994 — I went over to Isabel’s. We talked about my cousin and about Isabel’s brother, Bruno, himself a family prodigy of charm and innocence, who had died a month and a half earlier at the age of thirty-six. I chewed experimentally on my dinner, using about 8 per cent of my mouth, which was all that was available. At one point Isabel said: You’ve got to go to a dentist. At least go and see a dentist … I hadn’t been to a dentist for five years. I had been writing the novel for five years. I said: If I get into the dentist’s chair I’ll never get out. I’ll finish the novel. Then I’ll get into the chair.
* This was Kingsley, at thirty-five (in a letter to Larkin): ‘… by christ, I have just heard an air-raid siren & feel so scared I could faint … Only testing the siren I expect, to make sure it’s in working order when they need it. I prefer not to think about all that.’ His sons were eight and nine at the time. What were they thinking, and feeling, about all that?
* David was twelve and I had just turned thirteen when Kennedy blockaded Cuba: 22 October 1962.
* I had run into Philip the previous day. He was passing me in a supermarket, and I was impressed by the sureness with which my peripheral vision identified him, by his shape and volume, as if there was a template of him in my mind which he alone could occupy.
* It goes on: ‘He threw himself into the attitude of a lunging fencer, to reach after his oilskin coat; and afterwards he staggered all over the confined space while he jerked himself into it.’ That lunge. Conrad was the kind of writer who kept his eyes open when most of us would prefer to keep them shut.
* ‘Salvaging the Sacred’, published in the Guardian, 18 May 1996.
* (1) matchless, peerless; (2) mateless, husbandless.
† chose.
* Roger Partington, Lucy’s father, was at this time living on Teesside.
Letter from School
55 Marine Parade,
Brighton
Sussex
Dear Jane, and Dad:
Thanks for the very cheering + very fair letter. I’ve spoken to the goblin who agrees as long as Mrs Gibbs agrees. However, Rottingdean will probably only require me on a part-time basis because the chap they thought was leaving might have decided to stay instead. Mrs Gibbs and that grand-high-arch-hobgoblin are emphatic that Rotting. is so easily the best prep-school in S. England that I should accept this. This means that I wouldn’t get a living wage (only £6 or £7 per week) but, on the other hand, I might well be teaching the scholarship boys who, I am assured, are as bright as buttons. What do you think? I’m rather pleased because I don’t want to spend much time teaching 7 yr olds how to divide decimals etc. But the question is whether this should effect [sic] my bid for a flat. I shall leave this entirely up to you, and if you think it O.K., then adjust away at will.
I have just learnt that Durham are pestering me for an interview, which was to have been on Monday (21st). But Col* was so tardy in forwarding it that I will not be able to go. It arrived today (Sat) and I would have to have gone tomorrow — but owing to Bruce’s negligence it may not now be. It’s bloody boring because I expressly told him to be very careful because offers must be answered within a week or else they are withdrawn. It’s not all that serious because they might accept my apology and postpone the interview — but they could easily not. (Let us not forget that there are 37 people entered for every Eng. Lit. place). I shall have to write him a biting letter — otherwise I’m sure to find an unconditional offer from Bristol in a tattered, 3 week old envelope, which Col thought was ‘not worth forwarding’. Anyway, not a real disaster.
Anyway let me know the verdict,
Lots of Love, Mart X X X X X
* My then step-uncle, Colin Howard; a.k.a. Bruce and Monkey.
The Hands of Mike Szabatura
It is now a bright Monday morning in the autumn of 1994. I am sitting in a coffee shop on Madison Avenue. The novel is finished (though there is still some tweaking to be done); and I am here for the chair. I said that it was five years since I went to a dentist. This is no longer the case. In the new reality, it is five days since I went to a dentist. And now I’m back again. In twenty minutes something very terrible is going to happen to me.
Courage was needed for the first visit: I could, in theory, still walk away. For the second visit all that was asked of me was stoicism. Because I no longer had a choice.
When I was a child, and the whole thing was beginning, I used to look forward to being older. By virtue of being older I would be brave — unavoidably, automatically. Courage would just come upon me: I wouldn’t be able to get out of the way. Look at the adults, I said. Adults didn’t refuse to get out of bed in the morning because they had a dental appointment later in the day; they didn’t spend their lunch hours snivelling in the toilet; they didn’t come home and tell their mothers that, yes, they had been to the dentist when in fact they hadn’t — when in fact they had wandered the streets, helpless, tranced by a mysterious failure of will, failure of courage. Courage would be conferred by age. The two words seemed to me to be connected: age would give me coeur. Age would give me heart. Anyway it didn’t happen. When I was forty I just stopped going. And now I was forty-five.
The first visit to Mike Szabatura took place at eight in the morning on the previous Wednesday. My name was called and I went on through. The handshake of Mike Szabatura: masonically medical. Dentists’ hands: their warmth, their strength, their godly cleanliness. Two beautiful young women, luminously brown-skinned in pink worksuits, swayed around us. I needed no second invitation to lie down. The words formed easily. For many years I had been writing them in my head.
— I’m in for a bad time. But then so are you. You’ve got to look inside my mouth. My lower teeth are merely very poor. But my upper teeth … I have a bridge that runs from ear to ear. All that’s keeping it in, as far as I can tell, is habit. The whole trouble is hereditary, together with inadequate care early on. My mother had okay teeth and bad gums. My father had okay gums and bad teeth. I’ve got bad teeth and bad gums.
— Let’s take a look.
— Steel yourself, I said, and opened wide.
Half an hour later Millie helped me out of the lead vest I had donned for a fusillade of X-rays. I always think of my cousin Lucy when I am being X-rayed, when I am being restrained; and I always think of her whenever I find myself in church … I waited in the waiting-room. It was not yet nine in the morning and other tooth-sufferers were gathering. For what? Local tremors and disturbances, probably, and not tectonic shift. Millie beckoned. I was shown — most ominously, it seemed to me — into another room, a darker and quieter room, a room that might as well have been called the Bad News Room, where Mike Szabatura stood bent over an X-ray chart. Mike is a large solid man with a fleshy, mobile, almost cartoonishly expressive face. As he talks he wags his head and tubes his lips and pops his eyes. It is a face that has been trained over many years to dramatise positives and negatives — trained to say, On the one hand, this, on the other hand, that. But my case would not test his repertoire. Today there was no other hand.
— The uppers are shot. The lowers are no good either. And look.
We stared at the moonscape of the X-ray. There was ‘pathology’ in the lower jaw: a ridge of darkness just above the chin. This, I learned, could be one of three things: a cancerous growth; a growth with a long name that would keep coming back; a growth, but something manageable and unexotic. Anyway it would have to come out. For months, months, I had felt something new and strange down there: pressure, activity, occupancy …
— The uppers are shot. At any meal you could be sitting there with your teeth in your hand. They go Monday. You don’t have a choice.
We spent the intervening weekend at Isabel’s family spread in Long Island, with her brother, the painter Caio Fonseca. There used to be another brother, and another painter: Bruno. But Bruno died, here, in June. Hi
s mother Elizabeth said to me: ‘I still don’t think of him as dead. I think: He’s back in Barcelona. I never see him anyway,’ she added with a shrug. ‘He’s in Barcelona!’ Bruno was the dreamboat who always danced with the wallflower; and now his ashes flowed with the ocean. The last time I saw him he was, like Eliot’s Christ, an infinitely gentle, infinitely suffering thing. In the dark groundfloor room, surrounded by the dully glowing machinery of home care, I sat and read to him. He liked the sound of my voice and would sometimes put in requests for a session; but every paragraph that left my lips seemed to be a sinisterly poetic commentary on his condition. From Borges’s ‘The Circular Ruins’:*
No one saw him disembark in the unanimous night, no one saw the bamboo canoe sinking into the sacred mud, but within a few days no one was unaware that the silent man came from the South and that his home was one of the infinite villages upstream … The purpose which guided him was not impossible, though it was supernatural. He wanted to dream a man: he wanted to dream him with minute integrity and insert him into reality … For a moment, he thought of taking refuge in the river, but then he knew that death was coming to crown his old age and absolve him of his labors. He walked into the shreds of flame. But they did not bite into his flesh, they caressed him and engulfed him without heat or combustion. With relief, with humiliation, with terror, he understood that he too was a mere appearance, dreamt by another.
From Kafka’s ‘A Fasting-Artist’* (Ein Hungerkünstler):
Those were his last words, but his shattered gaze retained the firm if no longer proud conviction that he was fasting yet.