Mother, impervious, entered for both the Floribunda and Hybrid Tea classes of the Royal Horticultural Society’s southwest summer show and won a Reserve.
I didn’t, of course, at thirteen, know the mechanics of sex. Mother, poor thing, was putting off the evil day of explanation. All I knew was that clearly there was something very underhand that went on or it would not be so shrouded in mystery. I had my suspicions, too; not for nothing had I studied Gordon’s anatomy over the years, whenever I got the chance. And the feelings aroused in me by Malcolm’s chunky, golden, male-smelling body compounded my curiosity.
The summer ended, Malcolm left. I went back to Miss Lavenham’s and Gordon to Winchester where his housemaster, delicately approached by Mother with murmurings about his fatherless condition, had him into his study one evening for a chat.
He has hugged to himself, for the whole of the first week of the Christmas holidays, his superiority. And eventually, as he has always known he would, he can resist gloating no longer and out it comes, at a point where he is fed up with her, when she has been swanking insufferably.
‘Anyway,’ he says, ‘I know how babies are made.’
‘So do I,’ Claudia says. But there has been an infinitesimal, a fatally betraying pause.
‘Bet you don’t.’
‘Bet I do.’
‘How, then?’
‘I’m not going to say,’ says Claudia.
‘Because you don’t know.’
She hesitates, trapped. He watches her. Which way will she jump? She shrugs, at last, wonderfully casual. ‘It’s obvious. The man puts his – thing – into the lady’s tummy button and the baby goes inside her tummy until it’s big enough.’
Gordon collapses in glee. He rolls about on the sofa, howling. ‘In her tummy button! What an absolute ass you are, Claudia! In her tummy button…!’
She stands over him, scarlet not with embarrassment but with chagrin and rage. ‘He does! I know he does!’
Gordon stops laughing. He sits up. ‘Don’t be such a cretin. You don’t know anything. He puts his thing – and it’s called a penis, you didn’t know that either, did you? – there…’ And he stabs with a finger at Claudia’s crotch, pushing the stuff of her dress between her thighs. Her eyes widen – in surprise? In outrage? They stare at each other. Somewhere downstairs, out of sight, in her own world, they can hear the tranquil hum of their mother’s sewing-machine.
‘I’m not going to tell you,’ she says.
‘Because you don’t know.’
She could gladly hit him, lolling there complacent on the sofa. And anyway she does know – she’s almost sure she does. She says defiantly, ‘I do know. He puts his thing in the lady’s tummy button.’ She does not add that the inadequacy of her own navel for such a performance bothers her – she assumes that it must be going to expand when she is older.
He hurls himself around in laughter. He is speechless. Then he leans forward. ‘I knew you didn’t know,’ he says. ‘Listen. He puts his penis – it’s called a penis incidentally – there…’ And he stabs with his finger against her dress, between her legs.
And her anger, strangely, evaporates; eclipsed by something different, equally forceful, baffling. Something mysterious is present, something she cannot nail or name. She stares in wonder at her grey-flannelled brother.
3
The cast is assembling; the plot thickens. Mother, Gordon, Sylvia. Jasper. Lisa. Mother will drop out before long, retiring gracefully and with minimum fuss after an illness in 1962. Others, as yet unnamed, will come and go. Some more than others; one above all. In life as in history the unexpected lies waiting, grinning from around corners. Only with hindsight are we wise about cause and effect.
For a moment we are still concerned with structures, with the setting of the stage. I have always been interested in beginnings. We all scrutinise our childhoods, go about the interesting business of apportioning blame. I am addicted to arrivals, to those innocent dawn moments from which history accelerates. I like to contemplate their unknowing inhabitants, busy with prosaic matters of hunger, thirst, tides, keeping the ship on course, quarrels and wet feet, their minds on anything but destiny. Those quaint figures of the Bayeux tapestry, far from quaint within their proper context, rough tough efficient fellows wrestling with ropes and sails and frenzied horses and the bawling of ill-tempered superiors. Caesar, contemplating the Sussex coast. Marco Polo, Vasco da Gama, Captain Cook… all those mundane travellers preoccupied with personal gain or seized by congenital restlessness, studying compasses and dealing with the natives while they make themselves immortal.
And that most interesting arrival of all, a creaking top-heavy vessel named from an English hedgerow, crammed with pots and pans, fish-hooks, muskets, butter, meal and pig-headed, idealistic, ambitious, foolhardy people nosing its way into the embracing arm of Cape Cod. Little did you know what you were setting in motion – William Bradford, Edward Winslow, William Brewster, Myles Standish, Steven Hopkins, Elizabeth his wife and all the rest of you. How could you envisage slavery and secession, the Gold Rush, the Alamo, Transcendentalism, Hollywood, the Model T Ford, Sacco and Vanzetti, Joe McCarthy? Vietnam. Ronald Reagan, for heaven’s sake. You were worried about God, the climate, the Indians, and those querulous speculators back in London. But I like to think about you all the same, searching out a place for habitation, chopping, building, planting, praying. Marrying and dying. Stomping around the wilderness noting sorrel, yarrow, liverwort, watercresses and an excellent strong kind of flax and hemp. Unimaginative folk, probably, and just as well. The sixteen-twenties in Massachusetts were no time for airy exercise of the imagination – that’s a luxury for the likes of me, thinking of you.
You are public property – the received past. But you are also private; my view of you is my own, your relevance to me is personal. I like to reflect on the wavering tenuous line that runs from you to me, that leads from your shacks at Plymouth Plantation to me, Claudia, hopping the Atlantic courtesy of PanAm and TWA and BA to visit my brother in Harvard. This, you see, is the point of all this. Egocentric Claudia is once again subordinating history to her own puny existence. Well – don’t we all? And in any case what I am doing is to slot myself into the historical process, hitch myself to its coat-tails, see where I come in. The axes and muskets of Plymouth in 1620 reverberate dimly in my own slice of time; they have conditioned my life, in general and in particular.
I like to pick out the shards of opinion that link your minds to mine – a few sturdy views about the rule of law, distribution of property, decent behaviour and regard for one’s fellow men. But the shards are few; I am peering for the most part into a mysterious impenetrable fog in which what I would call intolerance is sanctified as belief, in which you can cheerfully spike the head of a slaughtered Indian outside your fort, in which you endure privations that would kill me off in a week or so but in which also you believe in witchcraft, in which you do not merely believe but know that there is a life hereafter.
In one sense, of course, you were right, though not in the way you had in mind. I am the life hereafter. I, Claudia. Squinting backwards; recording and assessing. Not that you would care for me at all – ungodly foulmouthed old woman with a bloodcurdling record of adultery and blasphemy. No, you wouldn’t like me one little bit; I’d confirm all your worst fears of the way things might go.
But you deserve and shall have a considerable space in my history of the world. I shall wander among you, indulgently, pointing out your orderliness, your sense of justice, your capacity for hard work. Your courage. The Indians, you had been told, ‘delight to torment men in the most bloody manner that may be, flaying men alive with the shells of fishes, cutting off the joints and members of others by piecemeals, and broiling them on the coals, and causing men to eat the collops of their flesh in their sight whilst they live…’ And still you set sail. It is the Indians, of course, who bite the dust in the end, poor sods. And you might equally well have had your ears or noses sliced off
in the home counties, given the prevailing climate of opinion. In a raw world maybe courage has to be differently assessed. Nevertheless, you command respect.
It seems like a fantasy world, yours. A malevolent Garden of Eden with oaks, pines, walnuts and beech among which howl wolves and lions. You never even mention the poison ivy, which did for me once on a picnic in Connecticut. The environment dominates: no nonsense then about conserving it; the all-important question is whether it will be so kind as to conserve you. Indirectly, it picks off a good many of you from malnutrition and disease. Those who struggle through that fearful first winter do their best to interfere with nature. You fell trees by the thousand; you manure your fields with herrings, improbably, arranging them heads up in little mounds of earth like Cornish stargazy pies; you are as historically calamitous for the beaver and the otter as for the Wampanaug and the Narragansett. You affected the lives of the periwinkle and the quahaug, quiet clean-living sea-creatures who found themselves turned into money, polished and drilled to become wampum, Indian hard currency in the fur trade. The price of beaver on the London market determined the value of wampum; an agreeably bizarre economic circumstance – that a hat worn under a rainy Middlesex sky should be a matter of life and death for sea-shells creeping in the shallows of Cape Cod.
There was a spaniel on board the Mayflower. This little dog, once, was chased by wolves not far from the plantation and ran to crouch between its master’s legs ‘for succour’. Smart dog – it knew that muskets are sharper than teeth. What I find remarkable about this animal is that I should know of its existence at all, that its unimportant passage through time should be recorded. It becomes one of those vital inessentials that convince one that history is true.
I know about the little spaniel. I know what the weather was like in Massachusetts on Wednesday March 7th 1620 (cold but fair, with the wind in the east). I know the names of those who died that winter and of those who did not. I know what you ate and drank, how you furnished your houses, which of you were men of conscience and application and which were not. And I know, also, nothing. Because I cannot shed my skin and put on yours, cannot strip my mind of its knowledge and its prejudices, cannot look cleanly at the world with the eyes of a child, am as imprisoned by my time as you were by yours.
Well, that can’t be helped. Even so, I get a frisson from contemplating you, innocents at large in that Garden of Eden (well, as innocent as any product of seventeenth-century Europe). It doesn’t do, though, to push the analogy much further. What I relish is to set you against what is to come, against the unthinkable, against the teeming continent I know marriage of all that is admirable with all that is appalling.
I like America. Gordon likes America. Sylvia does not like America. Poor Sylvia. She floundered there, flapping and lumbering like a turtle out of its element. She never learned the language, the style, the customs. There are those who have chameleon qualities (I have them, so does Gordon, so – naturally – does Jasper) and there are those who were set hard sometime in youth. Sylvia’s response to circumstances froze when she was about sixteen; she aspired to a nice time, children, a nice home, nice friends. She achieved all those things and expected then to live happily ever after. She had not reckoned with external factors. Gordon’s career prospered. In middle age Sylvia found herself living for half of every year on the other side of the Atlantic while Gordon carried out his Harvard duties.
Sylvia, of course, is consigned to the back of the car. She brings it upon herself, laying her hand on the door and saying ‘I’ll get in back, Claudia’, the Americanism rising to her lips and rapidly corrected – faucet and apartment and sidewalk and so forth one has come to willy-nilly but there are limits. Only sometimes, when she is flustered, as of course she is flustered now, she no longer it seems can control her speech and what slithers out is some horrid hybrid, neither the language that is hers nor the language of America. She has become disoriented, and knows it. Neither her feet nor her tongue are any longer firmly anywhere. She never gets things right over here – is always out of kilter, shaking hands when she should have embraced, embracing when she should have shaken hands, saying too much or too little, unable to gauge status, relationships, implications. Unlike Gordon, who slides from Oxford to Harvard without modification of speech, dress or approach and is equally at home in either, equally welcomed, equally regarded.
Claudia does not say ‘Oh no – I will, Sylvia.’ She simply gets in the front with Gordon while Sylvia, puffing a little, squeezes herself into the back of the compact, wishing you still had those lovely big squashy cars in the States.
She settles, resignedly, for the long drive. ‘Don’t come, you don’t have to,’ Gordon has said, but of course she must, even on this appalling steaming midsummer Massachusetts day, the temperature sign beside the freeway flashing 98°, her dress sticking to her, sweat trickling between her shoulder-blades. If she had not come she would have sat in the cool house all day feeling left out, unwanted, thinking of them laughing and enjoying without her, feeling them walking away from her, disregarding her. And already she is compelled to make her presence felt, leaning uncomfortably forward to ask Gordon if they can’t have the windows shut and put the air-conditioning on, trying to hear what it is Claudia is saying.
‘Shut?’ says Claudia. ‘We need some fresh air, for heaven’s sake!’
So the fresh hot air roars through the car and green scorching Massachusetts flows past and Sylvia presently gives up and slumps back. Claudia’s hair, she notes, is now three colours – grey and white and swatches of the old dark red. It is clipped short and carelessly combed but contrives to look (of course) smart. Sylvia’s own, skilfully set and highlighted every month, is still ash-blonde and is currently taking wicked punishment from the howling gale of freeway wind. She rummages for a scarf. Claudia is wearing denim trousers and matching jacket with a skimpy French-looking striped top. How, at her age, she can get away with this Sylvia cannot imagine – it looks (of course) not mutton dressed as lamb but merely dashing.
‘All right?’ says Gordon, over his shoulder.
‘It’s frightfully windy,’ says Sylvia. Gordon winds up his window a foot and Claudia hers two inches.
Sylvia thinks about food. At least there will be a lovely air-conditioned restaurant at this place and she will have, um, well she will sort of half stick to her diet and resist ice-cream or club sandwiches but she will definitely have an absolutely enormous tuna salad with loads of dressing. One thing about America is the food. That has been one compensation in the ten years of their schizophrenic life, to and fro, six months at Oxford and six months at Cambridge, Mass. Always packing up and putting away and unpacking and readjusting. What a marvellous way to live! people say and Sylvia gamely agrees. She resolutely contemplates her two nice houses and thinks what lots of interesting and well-known people she knows, on either side of the Atlantic, though somehow not a lot of them are her close friends, not people you sit down and have a natter with, just people who come to dinner or drinks or invite you to dinner or drinks, always greeting Gordon first and then saying hello Sylvia afterwards. Gordon, she has been told, is one of the highest paid academics in the business. The size of her housekeeping account still startles her; she can no longer think of anything more to spend it on. Gordon, of course, is frequently away; that is the price of fame. She sometimes wonders, in the watches of the night, if he still has, from time to time, other women. Possibly. Probably. But if he does she does not want to know. He will not, now, leave her for them because it would be a nuisance and interfere with his work. And she learned, long ago, at the time of the Indian woman statistician, that to make a fuss was not expedient. If you sat it out it would pass.
‘How much longer?’ she enquires, plaintively. Claudia, glancing at the road-map, says another half hour or so. She flings this over her shoulder, a mite impatiently. She is arguing (of course) with Gordon and then suddenly the argument ends and they both explode in laughter. ‘What’s the joke?’ cries Sylvia.
‘Tell you later,’ says Gordon, still laughing.
And, at last, they arrive. They park the car. Sylvia stares around. ‘I can’t see any log cabins,’ she says. ‘Or all these people in fancy dress.’ She doesn’t see either why Claudia has insisted on this trip – a place where people dress up and pretend to be living in history sounds too silly for words and not Claudia’s sort of thing at all. Or Gordon’s. Claudia and Gordon are already heading across the tarmac of the car park to something called the Orientation Center; Sylvia gratefully plunges into the air-conditioned cool and makes for the Ladies’. She does her hair and her face and glances at the information sheet she has been given. Plimoth Plantation, she reads, is a re-creation of the Pilgrim Village in 1627. You are about to leave your own time and step back into the seventh year of colonial settlement. The people you will meet portray through dress, speech, manner and attitudes known residents of the colony. They are always eager for conversation. Feel free to ask questions; and remember, the answers you receive will reflect each individual’s seventeenth-century identity.
Sylvia giggles. She feels a bit better now, powdered and relieved. She rejoins the others. ‘This place sounds quite mad,’ she says.
‘Another half hour,’ says Claudia. Sylvia, throughout the drive, has been wanting windows put up or put down, interrupting and asking how much further. Like a child, for God’s sake, thinks Claudia, just like having Lisa or one of Gordon’s brats in the back. But Sylvia is best dealt with by ignoring her, as one usually has. And it is months since she and Gordon have seen one another. She disposes of Sylvia and goes on talking to Gordon. They are disagreeing, vehemently and enjoyably, about the politics of Malawi, where Gordon has recently been. Gordon advises the ministers of such places on how to manage their economies. ‘Rubbish, Claudia,’ he says. ‘You don’t know what you’re talking about. You’ve never been to the damn place.’ ‘Since when,’ says Claudia, ‘did I depend on personal experience for an informed opinion?’ And they both laugh. Sylvia, behind, is bleating away.