| london volume 2 part 1 - 1970 april-may | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
[This journal a Challenge 8x10 duplicate book with a watercolor pasted on the front cover and this postcard inside labeled Gifts] [undated letter] This needs a new page - I've met the man I'd marry if I believed in marrying. He's what I look for more than anyone I've ever known, he is my other half who fits my jagged edges, he's kindred, he's a wonder; we want to become the same thing, we want to know in the same way. Everything with him is easy: my ambivalences are gone, my whole experience is new for being shared with him. I can learn from him, and I want to - he's stopped me in my tracks. It's all new - I'm full of confidence and certainty. I keep thinking of Donne's Valedictory: Forbidding Mourning. That's it. We are hoping to have a child, I don't know when but soon. I don't think we'll marry. I don't know what will happen, I don't think we want to agree the sorts of things that marriage pretends to promise. So nothing will be contracted - we're still feeling our way in this, going sometimes fast and sometimes slow, to see how we can live and grow best - it may turn out to be alone. At the moment I find it impossible to be afraid of that - everything's new and good because I've discovered someone who talks my language. So the enclosed photograph is a kind of wedding picture, if you like, or a confirmation picture: Roy Chisholm and me. There we are. [undated loose sheet of journal]
[journal] - a cutting, a slip - in the sense of a houseplant how easy it is too a sidestep and the world's changed, put into focus I know something and I know I know it Madeleine like the patron saint justification - making the ends come out even fever-green wickedness Don and Olivia's new bedroom with anemones and yellow curtains, my lamp. Chris's "But you could be more marvelous than you are." Someone invades your world like a scent, as an elusive but powerful addition. Updike's woman? Or like a light of a particular wavelength, or solarization. Like the back window of taxicabs (fever clear, bleached). An uneasy slippery look, a politeness, something flattering. Freedom is a question of language, of having symbols understood, of having your acts your own because neither they nor your symbols need to be paraphrased, clarity. It's what Ian wanted. Catalogue? Uneasy to be reified - if I'm something which can be ransacked for a key I'm not enough, there's no corner where I'm hidden to be found, Ian's right, to be real to him or to anyone, to Roy, I have to be process, the pull of a magnetic field on another field, a rearrangement of the world. I have to catch up, catch on; that I can do easily then maybe work can begin. What a wonder, someone actually being able to teach me something. - "She's hard as nails, hard as steel, that kind of tension, that kind of temper." The sense of doubling, my gestures repeating themselves, with different meaning and different feelings, confusing me at the same time as being right and certain - it's the former gestures that are out of focus, slightly behind? Not always, something's the present. We dug our trenches quite deep and they're still there; it's uneasy to disown the manoeuvres we needed three weeks ago; at the same time as I rediscover and reown my childhood I'm having to disown my recent past, some at least, Greg especially - and that feels right, because I'd already disowned Greg last fall. But Ian's harder - "What was that about, you and Ian?" What's this about, you and Roy? Except that isn't a question now. - Burger Maple's Maple Leaf Garage, parked outside in the pickup, Father joking with Burger, Burger smiling and teasing me, us, from his height, broad bald face, good-natured, narrow-eyed, Father looking on benevolently, his public tolerance and friendliness uneasy on his face, my gratitude to Burger, ice cream cones from the café, sun on the dirt beside the gasoline pumps, smell of gasoline, purple gas foaming the color of cool-aid in the glass porthole on the pump, the air curling and quivering above the tank. Burger in grey coveralls, big strong hairy forearms, bending forward a little and looking kindly from under his tanned bald forehead and white eyebrows; the schoolbus parked inside; Father's grain truck, blue box, green cab with E.Epp La Glace on the doors in yellow. The roar when Father opened his side door to lean out and listen to it, the roar growing when we listened to the truck coming home at night, recognizing it from the bridge. Olson and Son's garage across the road, cleaner and more orderly, bigger, newer. Burger's office in the front, equally grimy, packed with khaki colored metal-cornered spare parts boxes on board shelves, dirty service manuals, spare tires on a high rack, concrete walls, bits of greasy engine, a little light through greasy small windows, tractors, harrows stood up against the wooden front doors, the high false front with a peaked roof behind, tall grass and weeds alongside, the wooden sidewalk, gravel road going north to Torgerson's, the gully and the hills full of moose, the saddleback, blue forest seeming very far away, flat fields on either side of the road, directly across, the community hall white, porch on the front, green roof, inside cold big space, deep windows boarded over, the barrel stove at the back, unexplored stairs going to the projection booth, sense of glamorous territory belonging to the other people, the Norwegians - wooden benches in rows, the platform in front with squared proscenium arch, steps up either side for entrances of groups, small anteroom in which to wait for cues, red, burgundy curtains at the single windows, a walkway behind the stage, sets with wallpaper, curtained windows, white frames, the ends visible from front benches. - Going to sleep back to back, having turned and having said goodnight, I press my head back into the bend of his neck, he presses his head back against the top of mine; from that pivot we rotate slowly toward each other and slide into making love. Gesture. The job of knowing what I feel, time to take it seriously although I've always pretended to, or rather I've lately pretended to, and before that knew but couldn't show. Reading as obvious way of dismissing people, Greengage Summer at O's reception, school, did they realize what it meant? [Roy reading, me reading] Repetition - I hadn't thought of it but I think I can begin to see it, maybe it has something to do with boredom, long thorough boredom, like last year, attempted repetition of the year in Sexsmith, didn't work. The sense of echo doubling - which is the copy? Repetition, learned repertoire, either live simply or live in constant invention. Sense of faithfulness demands new gestures and new words for new people. No problem when I'm living out from the centre of myself, everything is original, like a child, is the equally shared production of both. Peter talking of repertoire, serious when your work is yourself, important not to get bored. Last night's dreams: Roy dreamt of protecting me from Olivia, I dreamt of threshing with her boringly and exhaustingly, like yesterdays vacant nervousness and irritation. I don't like her. I'm angry with her, bored with her, feel that I want to look for another kind of friendship (I'm not), snap at her, disparage her, undermine her, ignore her, move from room to room away from her, toward nothing but only irritably away. Don saying I seemed both in retreat and in withdrawal, something to do with having other more important things to do or not. Yesterday morning's relief when I went out to shop by myself, everything lighter, sunshine and cold wind brushing me clear. All this banal writing. R's definition of sainthood as knowing what you want, dogmatism - why not? At least you can find your own friends. At seventeen, reading Streetcar Named Desire and swearing to learn what I needed to escape sordid human limitations, ie Father's. I need to swear that again and be really myself - quarrelsome, private, stiff, playing at gracefulness, what does O have to do with that? Feeling that she can't teach me anything. Irritation at her unstoicism, old complaint. Perhaps violation of privacy that doesn't produce real freedom. Resentment at being enlisted to help cuddle and reassure, resentment for Don's sake too. Crossness that someone I disapprove of should captivate both Don and Roy, not to mention Greg - someone so unlike me! I begrudge her that - don't feel she earns it legitimately. (Who does?) Doesn't work hard enough, is too fundamentally irresponsible, frivolous, trivial. I do hate her, and am guilty enough to have trouble writing it without qualifications. [undated journal] Paris - wake up, I think Sunday morning, from a dream about a baby, mine, lying still looking at me, wise and serene, the most perfectly beautiful baby I'd ever seen. The dream left me very quiet. Roy said "Before you woke I was thinking about that, your baby." We're both uncertain, after having been certain. But I'm uncertain only of Roy's being uncertain - things cross my mind: getting up at night, the long trip into middle age that accompanies a child's trip to my age (I'd be fifty), the constant presences of another person asking and accusing. None of them really seem problems - faith in my child's resilience, faith in my ingenuity, some faith in life, a strong faith in possibility, having a baby is saying yes. The child appears - here's my affirmation, but that's not an accomplishment which finishes me, like a spawned salmon - it occurred to me that people have children when they feel themselves worn out, to produce a new generation of joy - but that isn't good enough. I'm becalmed, uneasy, guilty about my inertia, boring, invisible, unoriginal, hungry and gassy like a grub, very short of words, impervious; I'm guilty with Roy because I'm not in a state of grace. This morning I was guilty with Buddy Hardy - when I left I actually said to her "Thank you so much for the lovely lunch!" I walk downtown in the cowboy hat knowing I'm a half-fashionable monkey untidy Cockney girls laugh at. Paris, London, the Slade, theses, I'm not doing anything! There's nothing to do! But when I'm centred, there's everything to do. Where am I? Sliding uneasily at my periphery, connections wobbly; how do they become tight again? I'm restless, I want to get on with something - and I want to be delightful. I am scared by how acutely I need to be delightful for Roy. I turn myself into him and understand exactly this: "Surprise me, delight me, teach me something, or you aren't worth my time." It's myself and it is also him; it's right, but it's precarious. Is that what's stilling me? What I understood at first and what I want is: "I recognize you, be still if you want, your stillness delights me and teaches me because it opens onto my own, I'm sure of you." That's possible too. Sometimes it exists. When we talk I'm completely certain. More certain than he is, I think. I'm not afraid - maybe I am. There is nothing to be afraid of, only this becalming that leaves me without innovation, that's genuinely frightening. - Being silenced. The excitement of Canyon Lake, a field of fourteen-foot grass, gourds dried on the vine, the missionaries' son, hanging over the back of the truck singing My Bucket's Got a Hole in It with the Indian girls and being reprimanded by the missionary, feeling heathen with the heathen. Want to tell it, make it into a story, share that 13 year old self who was lonely. I'm hurt when he doesn't listen. 28 April, morning The sister yesterday looked serious when I came in, and she told me to sit down. "The test was positive. That means you're pregnant." "Am I really?" and her puzzled look, "Yes you really are." "I'm so glad." "I'm glad you're glad. You're the first person here who has been." Out the door. Being glad, being apprehensive about Roy's reaction, feeling myself alone in the event, my gladness a little thin from wanting complete mutual happiness, the picture of the young couple both radiant daydreaming about their child, wanting unambivalence. I bought two orange roses from a dwarfish red-headed old woman on Mayfair who told me their names and said how sweet they'd smell when they opened. To celebrate we walked on the Heath in the rain - I ran away to sit in the pine knoll, to vanish, heard Roy calling, listened to rain on the needles overhead, cried, thought of camping with children, looked at the soft black shapes of pine branches, smelled wet grass. I am in my event alone, more than I want to be. I can nag but don't want to; it occurs to me that if I want it to be my own, not drained by my sidelong looks at Roy, I'll have to be more and more private. But? "I don't announce it because I don't want to scare you ... don't want you to leave ... think about all the time is whether I want to stay with you or not ... I have to think of it for two ... we'll always think about it." It makes me understand what marriage is for, to let people feel they've done something to make themselves safe, said where they're going. Our first impulses were to talk about marrying. I wanted to do it immediately, next day, as we decided to have a child, immediately. Now we've stopped talking about it. Kath is a ghost - "I realized I'd stopped loving her." In some sense, maybe in every sense, he's stopped loving me already. That's what I began to be shrill about in Munich and what I'm sadder and more certain of here. It makes me wonder what the child means. In a sense he doesn't mean anything aside from his own existence - hers, I think, her own existence. I tried to tell Ian that when the child is born it's irrelevant who the parents are. Visit to Margaret [Price], up the hill, Swain's Lane daffodils among the tombs, primroses in Waterloo Park, a bundle of knotted rope hanging from a branch high in an elm tree, Shoshanna fat and triangular on the floor, Margaret embarrassed at first, beautiful with her bony face and big eyes, laughing, saying "You don't seem the same now that I know, you seem - precious." And my stories rushing out, the woman at University College Hospital walking with her hand on her belly, catching my half-smile and smiling back; the tall slim young girl in Kentish Town walking lightly and quickly in her short skirt with her big belly high ahead of her. [undated letter] It's confirmed: I'm, we're, having a baby in December. It seems a good omen that we've germinated this baby so miraculously soon after we began to plant it. I've rushed to tell my friends: I even tell people I hardly know. At the Student Health Centre they told me "You're the first person in this clinic who has ever been happy to know - usually they burst into tears." And the National Health Service has wrapped itself around me and booked me a maternity bed for December. I drink my pint of milk a day and get a lot of rest - that's on instruction - and do all sorts of things that aren't instructed, like devour books on the new childbirth and study embryos in the anthropological museum. I'm going to be the most happy and healthy pregnant lady in all of London, and I'm going to have the most perfect baby! And as for you Mother, if you aren't very careful you're going to end up an anxious fussing grandmother like Grandma Konrad. You'll have to trust me. I know what I'm doing, even if you don't understand it and can only see it as immature and selfish. Let go and trust me! You can't change my mind; I'm certain and I'm determined. The only thing you can do is rejoice and share my adventure and my event. And you're welcome to share Roy, I'm sure you'd be in love with him after ten minutes. Silly woman, he is a part of your family now - all you have to do is invite him and love him and not criticize him for doing what he believes and being what he is. Your letter made me angry but your pain is so obvious in it that I must try to answer it in terms of your sadness and confusion and not my crossness. I don't know how to comfort you. For one panicky moment last week, when I thought of the fact that Father will probably not allow us to bring our child to visit you, and that I will probably never again be invited home, and when I thought of the grandparents' and your pain and confusion, I decided that I would lie to you and tell you that we were married, which although treacherous would be less of a compromise than actually marrying against our beliefs and only for your sake. But when I talked to Roy about it, he was very clear and brought me back to my senses in a hurry. And of course I will not lie to you. You don't need to be protected, I'm not ashamed of my choices, there's nothing to be afraid of. I can reassure you on several points - the child will be a Chisholm and will have a home. There is no problem about support. And the child will have a community and will be loved. The rest is adventure and unknown. Life is much too mysterious for you to be able to say "What a child needs is this and this and this." Roy has problems because he didn't have a father; I have problems because I did. We don't know what children need at all precisely. We don't even know what we want them to become. But we are responsible to them to try to find our and their way as honestly and imaginatively as we can so that they are not stuck with the same problems we have and the same false solutions. And don't you call this selfish and small Mother, because it is not. If you cannot understand me you can be understood for not understanding because it is difficult and new and it goes against what you yourself have chosen and are committed to. But you must respect me and trust us and try not to be fearful. I'm not going to argue and explain any more because that seems to do no good. Wait and see, rejoice if you can, and leave us alone because you cannot change us - here's my anger coming out, because you seem to understand only what pleases you and not what frightens you. I am sorry to add new anxieties to your life when you seem so tired and anxious because of school: you seem a little overwrought and it will be good when your holidays begin. Maybe we can talk more then. Take a deep breath, there's nothing to worry about. Love me right, without fear. Problems about what to say to people like the Sieburts are not so serious. [journal] Friday 1 May Woke up early this morning, stiff with fear, Roy beside me asleep, my stiff thoughts trying to prod him; what is he really feeling, is he hostile in his sleep? Is he frightened? Does he feel trapped? I miss Ian's ability to play, invent games, improvise, move around, trust himself - do things badly. I miss Ian - I don't want him back, but I remember him. Roy saying "It's not what happens, it's what doesn't happen" - all we avoid; mainly we avoid each other. I've all my arts to learn and so does he. Yet there's nothing to be afraid of, many things to do, always ways to recover ourselves. Images from yesterday's dream - the stage coach horses rearing above me just before they circle around my back have bony eye sockets without eyes, then as they come down I see that they have very brown shining eyes set low in the sockets. Fur traders galloping past covered with shining furs, horse and rider looking like one animal. A long faced tired old man with a row of green disks in his mouth instead of teeth. A modern glass building in an old frontier town, filled with surgical instruments and dummies, looking like a shop or museum but really a hospital. The sea below, myself on the edge of a high icy cliff, eskimos corralling seals, black shapes swimming under water - a baby seal, green like a soapstone carving leaping high out of the water and somersaulting over the corrall fence, a fish the same green flipping onto a bank to be instantly nabbed by a bear. [undated letter] I'm sorry that Grandma Suzanna is dead. I've written Grandpa to say so. I'm glad he's alive and hope he is alive for a long time. I'd like to tell Grandpa Epp about the new life that has crossed Grandma's as it ended - I have a feeling that if I could put it right, he'd understand us better than anyone of the family, you included. He's a very private person, I think very resourceful and very courageous. It's still he who along with Greatgrandma Marie is my spiritual ancestor - if I have a choice! What a sad letter you wrote. I'm sorry for Walter - he seems to be pinched between generations. Herman too. (What's the story about Candy; why was she so unsuitable?) Half of me is furiously angry as I write this. What a hideous society you live in! People who "would automatically despise Grandpa as well as Herman" because Herman intended to marry someone whom that community of dying hypocrites considers unsuitable! Does no one have any courage or even good sense, let alone intelligent Christian charity? And I'm to live my one irretrievable irreplaceable life in terms of that society, and in doing it destroy whatever contribution I might be able to make toward improving my own generation's chances? It's not the happy and whole people who'll condemn you or them for my choices; it is the sick and unhappy people who have failed with their own lives and can't admit that perhaps they should have chosen differently. And you have to live in fear of them, because you're related to someone who has chosen to try to do better than they have? It is ironical that what makes me a scandal to your community and your generation makes me a heroine and a leader in my own. People are not living by good enough standards if they can enforce their values only by ostracizing those who deviate - can't you remember enough of your sociology to know that social change is inevitable even if it is painful to people caught in the changes? Don't you see that if I married against my beliefs my own children would be likely, rightly, to be ashamed of me? I refuse to be sacrificed to the generation gap - and altho' you think it blasphemous, I'm constantly reminded of Jesus' hard words about "unless you hate mother and father, sister and brother, you won't enter the kingdom." - But there isn't any point in being angry: "Di Sach' es di, must mo' ve'stonhe." I should know by now that explaining and reasoning is no use - for you I suppose it has to be simply a question of how people will think about you - what a pity that it is so. "How often will the hurt be brought to the surface and refelt?" - poor Mother, probably quite often. Extended family - people seem to volunteer to be extended family - it seems that real family will become the people who offer their love, interest, and support. The creature is well, growing very fast now. I thought I felt a movement day before yesterday, but may be mistaken because I don't know what to listen for. I'm well, very energetic and healthy, mechanically in perfect order. It seems that I probably won't have to have a caesarian after all. (There's a film about all this, very beautiful, called Riverrun, about two unmarried ex-college people in California who go to live on a farm, and have a baby, and about what happens when the father comes to stay with them. The most moving parts of it were the birth of a lamb on cold spring ground, with steam rising around it, and then the birth of the girl's baby at home - I cried with delight about that funny bloody mucky skinny creature.) Guess what, you worried people, you won't believe it now, but you'll end up being proud of me again, I'm really very responsible, intelligent, sensitive, resourceful, courageous, etc etc! And you'll have a grandchild far more wonderful than any grandchild you've ever seen, Roy and me concentrated in one tiny person will be genetically powerful as anyone can imagine, even better than you and Ed Epp concentrated into tiny me! Don't worry - take it easy and don't anticipate trouble, let me tell people you don't want to tell, have faith; haven't I told you Roy is a Christian? (True - a believing one.) Write and tell me when you're sad, even if it does make me angry. (I feel much better for having yelled.) I'll tell the grandparents myself and they'll have the whole clan to commiserate with them. I love them too, believe it or not. I'll send you a few slides from Ireland when we get them back. Greg sends love and regards. - Good news for you - my good dear friend Don Carmichael is to be lecturing in political philosophy next year, and guess where - University of Alberta, Edmonton. They - Olivia will be there too it seems - are keen to visit you and will, if you invite them. Olivia I'm not such good dear friends with at the moment. I should warn you that Father is likely to find O rather scandalous (if charming) - smokes and swears too much; but Carmichael's wit and presence should delight both you and him - and they are church married! I'm hoping I can send you some books with them - the impulse to educate (and comfort) you is strong as ever. Read Buber if you haven't, and Rilke's prose. [undated journal] May Ian on the telephone, embarrassed, forthright, "I don't want to tell you about that." He's good. Greg talking about how he acted for them the styles of walking from Larkin's film; I'm touched, remembering his slightness and his gracefulness. I'm glad all that hasn't vanished, I'm glad to find the solid deposit of him in me. I feel a rather forlorn tenderness for him which doesn't know what to do with itself. - Wednesday night - came home from the couple downstairs out of fear of Roy's strangeness - he was talking to Ant about being ambitious, wanting it all now, the one question of what it's about - accent becoming more South African - Ant holding up his empiricist leap as a shield, and Dee posing tactful general questions - the straight line of shadow from his chin directly across his neck, feet squirming, new blue cord Levi's, all the blunt stubbornness of his profile - we aren't one mind or one flesh! I couldn't understand why he was telling Ant about himself, except that Ant's imagination had been pricked. I wobbled through random conversation myself, completely uncentred and unuseful, preoccupied with my confusion about Roy - we're neither strange enough or close enough. I come in and am hurt to find him talking to Mafalda when we can't talk ourselves - I feel as tho' Mafalda has become the me who engaged him in the exciting public living room space where private conversation is a special gift timidly and thrillingly offered. We're sad. Last week he was very clear - he doesn't want the baby; he wanted to abort it. That reinterprets and deforms completely our weekend in Oxford - "I want to marry you, I want to have a child with you," his faith or courage and mine, transformed into foolishness so that my certainty becomes a wild leap into a new experiment, an exploitation of his impulse. He doesn't want the child - and already I'm given a secret to keep from the child so that everything cannot be clear - "We thought of aborting you" - is it possible to tell anyone that? It scares me; it's like original sin seeping into a child as it lies there barely formed into the shape of a broad-bean. It makes me superstitious, as I have been from the beginning with this child - I feel as tho' the embryo has soured since the evening in the pub when Alexander advised Roy to be rid of it if he didn't want it. I want to celebrate it with rituals and symbols all the time but Roy's not wanting it makes our sharing celebration false; and I can't celebrate privately the secret event in my growing belly because I want to share it. I think of abortion too, in this confusion and loneliness; but I can't consider it, because this is Poppy Chisholm who's begun to live and must continue to live, invited and named, irrevocable. Not an accidental and anonymous growth. Something to do with respecting the joyfulness and beauty I was when we chose her, the state of grace - even that superstitious and perhaps sentimental - but true, I think. There's such trouble between us now. Physically, for me, it's a slight grey nausea. I'm restless and furious, but unspecifically. It's logical that it should be the baby, but it isn't overt or evident - it feels like congestion and distraction both at once, heavy constipated blind rage without subject or object. Lying on the Slade lawn this afternoon, inert with my preoccupation with this trouble, I began to write the few inarticulate things that were in my mind - nausea, silence, sadness - and then the rest of the page turned into a plan, for a film about this green waiting summer, my green film given a structure, turning happier and more energetic on its own impetus. When I got home I told Roy about it so apologetically that it vanished, "I was planning a film ... you'll see ... Agnès Varda made a film when she was pregnant " and embarrassment. The strangeness is very hard. I want to be one, a big mirrored hall for his memories and wonders and I want to feel as welcomed and recognized as I did. But we're troubled and uneasy; he's looking around and I'm longing for real privacy, our escape hatches just ajar in case we need them. [postcard addressed from Paris to Roy in Munich] Thursday morning - without you here to intimidate them the cleaning ladies seem likely to throw me out of the Maison du Canada. Hello dear man, the food at Chez Yvette is not as good without you, and the blonde South African girl who's appeared in Tom's room is hardly a replacement, but it is a pleasure thinking of you - I spent yesterday in the Musée de l'Homme looking at beautiful things - the buses, the children in sandpiles, the pot I've bought to make us soup in, the women who fry our eggs, all have a bit of the glamorous Proustian patina on them - oh, here's a lady judge in a black gown with a white bib tucked in at the neck. Stay well, find a van, love, E. [postcard from Roy addressed to me in London] [ Roy was in Munich selling a motorbike he'd already collected theft insurance on] München Hullo, love, I hope you are well and cheerful, ecstatically! I think of you, miss you, perennially! It's peaceful and lovely here, but today I descend into Schwabing to sell! It's spring, the river's flooded, wood's full of pretty little unknown flowers and shrubs! I look forward so much to spending an ecstatically happy summer all over in our VW - am confident of selling! See you soon! Fondest love, Roy Thanks for your wonderful card! [undated letter to my mother] I'm sitting in a café in the cool, thinking that the letter I sent you this morning was too short and too matter-of-fact flat to be of much pleasure to you. If you were here I would be talking to you voraciously, I'm so hungry for talk about babies. Sheila and Dee who lives in the flat downstairs, are my partial appeasers - they always want to know about my creature and are happy to tell me about theirs. While Roy was still in Germany selling a bike, last week, I began to think about Christmases we had at home with you, and that made me wonder how you lived before I was born. I thought about the white and green house you lived in, and the picket fence all around it. It was the picket fence that made my imagination begin to search - why did Father build it? Was it for something or was it mainly to be beautiful? It touched me when I thought of it - it made it seem as tho' he was carefully making a rather romantic cottage for Marichen and for himself. - And that was when he had a pin-stripe suit with a vest. (You would kiss him goodbye at the door and say "Komm' bald wieder, Eddie.") What did he think about your first pregnancy? Would he talk about it? When I woke this morning I had my hand on my stomach, feeling to see whether it was still there. I had dreamed that when I was being examined by Dr McCrum he had accidentally pulled out the baby - he said "Oops!" and there it was, in a plastic bag. I was dismayed and shouted "But it's the most beautiful baby I ever saw!" I knew that it was only three months old, but it was perfectly formed. I knew it couldn't possibly live, but it was alive. I took it out of the plastic bag and looked. It was wearing a kind of breech cloth but I felt it and there was a little knob - a boy baby. Roy's angelic mouth, his little bottom, his long legs - very obviously his baby. But I knew it couldn't live, so I sadly put it back into the plastic bag and left thinking how long it would take to bring another creature to this age. Then I woke, felt for my stomach and found it round and hard as ever. I'd expected to be flat-stomached for much longer, but already I've got a little mound that wasn't there before. I can feel it especially in the mornings when the fat is smoothed away. My breasts are nice too! Bigger and very firm - at the clinic they say "small and firm, that's best - you'll have no trouble nursing because you've got dark hair." Nurse Crosley should know. Only blondes and ginger-haired women get inverted nipples. Sometimes I hardly believe it's there. It grows so quietly, I'm glad three months are gone, I needn't worry about miscarriage so much now. When I thought of the picture of myself as a solid two year old, and when I thought of you as a solid two year old before that, I felt like one of those Russian wooden dolls, if you open one little girl you find another little girl inside. When you open that little girl, there's another, still smaller, inside her. If it is a girl, my baby already has a womb, and its heart is beating. It is almost transparent - if you looked at it you could see through to the bones. It has long arms and legs. Maybe it's already dreaming. (Maybe while I'm dreaming about it, it is dreaming me - since it doesn't know anything else. I'm going to knit! Not little sweaters, because they are not so practical as cotton sleepers - something for me, instead - but it's still knitting, the old ritual. Maybe it worked as meditation on the coming child. Roy's very good to me, even through all my storming and crying and depressions. He loves me - at the moment without having any good reason I think. I'm unusually humble with him and often fear that I don't deserve him, especially at the times when I can't match his exuberance, beauty, ingenuity, patience, life - he says that he thinks most of my trouble with him is really trouble with Father, and I think that's true. Also I'm tired of being educated and want to work, want to do something important, that I really believe in. (The six year old in me that wants to be a missionary and the twenty six year old who doesn't believe in converting people.) We both need privacy and need to have adventures that are uniquely our own - that's going to be our toughest problem. I wish you could see him. If you could, would you come flying to England for your Christmas holidays next year? (Have you renewed your contract? How much do you earn, by the way?) I hope you'll have time for a talking letter soon. I hope you're not oppressed by this, on top of your school difficulties. You mustn't be, because all's well and even Father will get used to the idea. Write when you can. [notebook] University College Hospital What a baby factory! I'm doing my monthly visit to the antenatal clinic, where there are forty of us sizing each other up - that one's sitting low, she must be due any minute now - she must be carrying hers in her bottom - what an embarrassed little husband! - nobody's knitting - hers is sticking straight out, must be lying on its back inside, with its legs stretched out and its arms folded behind its head, must be a boy - look at her with her hands folded on top of it, nice - what's happening to her, she's all creases - pretty little girl, I could make mine a sunsuit like that - this dress is fun, the men on the street look at me as though I were Bardot, and I pull my shoulder blades back so they almost touch, 38 [inches], but belly almost the same - ha, they're calling me Mrs here although I asked them not to, for the sake of the feminist crusader in me - flirtatious little boy, nice of people to bring their children, makes the whole business more real - does everyone's navel stick out so peculiarly? [journal] 26 May Greg large and comforting in his red skin shirt, hairy chest, beads, blue denims - good reassuring plain talk about the unexciting things that bother me now; I feel a little less gnawed-at. Ian on the telephone; his voice surprised me by being so attractive. Roy on the telephone from Belfast calling about the dentist - about the dentist! I was hurt and silent, stupid as I am - he's still there haunting me. Anna going to sleep on my shoulder, Olivia calling to say Don's disappeared. Wednesday Long silence across the table at Jimmy's, I say "It is good to see you," silence; he [Ian] says "It's too soon," and begins to cry. I'm holding his hand and want to put my arms around him, but the waiter reaches across me for my plate and stands tactlessly asking if we want a sweet, or coffee - finally understands and goes away. Ian draws back, says he wants me to be happy, knows I'm happy and is glad, confusedly, doesn't know why he cried - I just want to hold him, because I'm full of tenderness for him, his voice, his truthfulness, his freckles, his loyalty, his enthusiasm, his new shoes. He's washed his hair and is wearing cufflinks with his new blue shirt - he has a new green army surplus jacket and he looks good. When I was going to Jimmy's I suddenly saw him just in front of me, reading as he walked toward me. I had to stop and block his path before he saw me - my feeling was something like, "Do I really know this lovely man?" He was finishing Steppenwolf in order to give it back to me. I have such a lazy imagination - it didn't occur to me that he might really miss me and long for me, because I wasn't missing him. I'm touched that he does, and I'm still touched by the feel of his back under my arms. Rereading and rereading Roy's postcard seems part of the same emotion. June 1 Last night in a dream Grandma and Grandpa Konrad and Roy and I prepared to go to bed by having tea together in the old kitchen. I took Grandma to her bed, patted the blanket over her hot water bottle, gently banged her piles of pillows, tucked her in and went back to the kitchen, where Grandpa was deciding to have a talk with Roy. Grandma came back out, not to miss anything! In the yellow light, around the kitchen table, the two men talked, in a heat of tenderness like the kitchen light - I felt that although it was Roy making Grandpa come alive, their tenderness was generated by their tenderness for me. That was after waking to brilliant new light at 5:30, and when I woke again there were letters from Paul and Judy, very warm. My family is in my own generation. [undated letter] What a good letter to have before breakfast Mother - we especially liked the paragraph about being terribly young, Roy is composing you a letter but it isn't going very quickly because the most and best of it happened in the asides to me - "Shall I quote her Corinthians?" "If I say 'Hail Mary' will she think that's blasphemous?" His own mother is still around, although she's going back to South Africa at the end of the month - she is over sixty, but very bright, pretty, independent and practical - she has never been married either so we don't upset her, although she makes it her duty to tell us what a hard time she had. She's been good to me recently and has begun to treat me like a daughter-in-law: I think she finds me a quite nice girl, 'natural' I think she said; and almost responsible. Roy had his birthday yesterday, was 25. I baked him a huge pyramid-shaped (breast-shaped, he says) chocolate cake with chocolate icing, jam in the centre, and money wrapped in wax paper. I think you'll recognize the pattern. I was thinking as I made it and put the twenty four candles on, with a big white one in the centre to make up the extra one, that I had really quite a solid sense of womanly role, something learned from you, M. Do you like that? I do - it helps make me sure of myself about the coming child. Funnily enough, another thing that has stayed with me is a feeling for family devotions - I haven't worked out just what an unchurched secular family devotion would be like but it seems right and possible. Luckily Roy has got the same sort of instinct and we might work out something very original - everything possible. - Hello - this scrap is what's been sitting on the typewriter for weeks;
since then we've been to France again and by the time you get this we'll
have gone to Luxembourg to see off Mrs Chisholm - it's hot, beautiful; I'm
turning the corner out of depressed three months into euphoric four months,
all's well, strange dreams, how are you? Haven't heard from you in a long
time. While planting my two square yards of sunflowers in this weedy back
yard I thought of you in your garden.
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