| london volume 2 part 3 - 1970 september-december | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
[journal] September 11th Resentment and anger condensing as I tear fringes onto my shawl. Paris Sept 13th Excitement, projects and terror. What I see in shop windows - myself as a little pregnant Charlie Chaplin, round hat, long plaid shirttail, pant legs flopping over little sneakers, and an expression of self reliant apprehension in the turn of my neck and the shape of my back. Pathetic little feet, clothes all too big, shaming those neat silly little feet in their black and white sneakers. A little person, completely desexed and shapeless - even my big belly gets lost in the lumber shirt. The worry lines on the forehead, intelligent eyes and mouth, disapproving, appraising. I used to tell Peter "I'll be that when I'm old," looking at old woman tramps, eccentrics, crazy Janes - he scolded me for false modesty, not understanding that I meant it hopefully - I'll be a crazy Jane, because I won't be Mrs Chisholm, Mrs Epp or even Buddy Hardy (Georgia O'Keefe is Crazy Jane with a guaranteed income?). And not Joan Harcourt or Flora MacDonald either, or are they on their way to that? I can't tell at this stage - Mad Murray's the only one I'm sure of. "To Mad Murray and Crazy Jane." Monday A dream about Norma Bakstaad come back to her old house, telling how she met her husband through the penpal letter she wrote and we found a draft of on an old calendar back - she was lovely, serene and pretty, and happy. The sulky little old medical student from Dakar (where is it?) whose feelings were hurt when I didn't credit his story about a sister and wouldn't stay to dance. Men are so stupid about their game of 'draguer'. The other two much more real and intelligent with me because I wasn't their game - the 'dancer' rocked backwards with laughter when I boasted that I was six months pregnant, and the medical student looking dismayed. "Je vous ai joué un tour!" Telling me about "natural vitamines" (fucking) I need for the baby - I said I had them circulating already, from being happy - that it calms the child - "Je lui calme en lui parlant - je lui dis que je l'aime." A wonderful fluency that comes with wine - not nearly so wonderful as the fluency that came with Roland's intelligence and questions. Rain - a sound outside the window, steady, made of separate streaks (do I imagine that?), could be wind or a stream, but must be rain, little separate pings or clankings in it. Quartier Latin tonight curing my cafard, Vietnamese restaurant with its window onto the street, big tarnished streaky moon suddenly seen through a gap in the cliff-houses that lean inwards supporting each other in block-masses like slabs of cake left on a plate. Those pathetic Africans, silly as French bourgeois, no contact with anything, angry and foolish constructions made out of devalued language. - Suddenly, while I'm reading about dreams, I think about Roy and Maria and I'm stricken - my body clamps itself onto a protest: "Tell me what it meant. I don't understand it. Why did you betray me. Why didn't you tell me. What did it mean?" That was my first protest - "Why didn't you tell me?" - I understand that you don't want to commit yourself to this experience yet, you don't know what it means, you don't want to choose. His reply - that I'm good and that he doesn't want to hurt me - insults me, doesn't convince me. You don't want to confuse your adventure with my protests. He moved to sit halfway along the table, in order to be partial to neither of us, or rather to confuse his identification with me and let Maria in. We drove home - he'd tried to leave her with Harry, to spite himself? What kind of current was I conducting sitting between them? I begin to cry, my head hurts with the effort to be quiet. "Why did you do it? Why did you do it? Why did you do it?" Because of it we seem impossible. He seems the enemy ready to deceive me, baffle me, make me ridiculous, suck away my substance and sneer at what's left. I grasp at the necessity of losing him in order to be safe. I'm full of grief. I confuse myself, we're confused. We're far from a marriage. Was I such an idiot? What is this marriage I claim to have made? For months it was an abstraction: the reality was Roy's indifference and my terrorization. For three weeks it was Roy's terrorization and my doubtful comfort and comforting. When I get back it will be something new. I can never trust him; he won't live by rules. I wonder about the child. I imagine myself suggesting adoption to him - to test ourselves. Today I'm afraid. I can't have 'a child' to myself because it is ours; it is his too, although I can't imagine how or whether he wants it - I imagine him afraid of shaming himself to his mother and being afraid to be ashamed on his own account. I feel as if I could take responsibility and let him fly. He isn't centred on it, he doesn't know what it means to him, he scatters himself looking for his role. He's pinched by moral blackmail and I could let him out of it, I could be the bitch. (What does it mean to him when I am absorbed into family trivialities and actually enjoy it?) But I'm not his mother and I can't take responsibility for him (can't I?), it isn't me who blackmails him. We're quite stranded. We can't get married because we've lost confidence and we can't let each other go. Either we're allied or we're not. (What would happen if we lost the child?)(What do you think of in your treacherous secret head?) Could we make each other free by a commitment? What kind of commitment? Can't you see that we must be loyal to the extent of being truthful? Consequences - you don't believe in them. And there you are, sleeping boy. You slide around so constantly for me. We tell a lot of lies. (Olivia said she hadn't the energy to go on - when she woke and went on with Don - I made a moral judgment about laziness. What's it all for, all her ripeness and irony.) There must be something simpler. Little baby what'll we have learned to teach you? Harmony and excitement? How is it possible for me to be in harmony with someone whose food is other people? Wow, little baby, have a relationship with things, don't be too hungry. (Olivia saying jealously of Roy, "He's like me too in some ways.") Being in Paris is like incubation for me, sleeping uneasily in the temple in order to have good dreams and be cured. (Where do we get this hunger for our own, permanent, inevitable mate?) Or are the terrors and daydreams, the arrogance and grief, like dung beetles dragging old preoccupations back and forth to impact them? Some satisfaction in knowing that I'm in real trouble with as confused and real a person as I am. And he touches me: I want no one else, ie him or nobody. Nobody? Sometimes. Wonderword prince - "Bow then and be then, and pass / for I will be / silently / stitching a border ...." I'm not a magus, not even an oracle; do you have love for anyone besides your father? Is your only alternative the pity and rebellion, guilt, subterfuge, you give your mother? Tuesday Only possibilities for people to "leave each other alone" is for them not to set themselves up as other - to judge or analyze. In order genuinely to avoid judgment and analysis they must feel safe with each other. Most of what we feel as love entangles judgment ("seeing me," "recognizing me") and fear ("You're important to me, I must please you"). What kind of passion can leave the other alone? So being in relation makes leaving one another impossible and we have to think about how to interfere with each other least destructively, most joyfully - ie feminine arts, kindness, sincerity? Skill - manipulation. Or else, finding ourselves in the same world, by miracle, we neither manipulate nor judge - we play with things that exist in the world - that's the garden of Eden, before Adam and Eve confronted each other. To begin with - almost no one is ever in the same world. Then by all economies of love, we give a value and have to defend it, confront; Eden's lost. What I mean is that R is lonely. Or? Furthermore - mood: "being in the same world" even for people who roughly inhabit the same territory is an unlikely accident of coincident moods? 23 September We walked into Epping Forest and lay down to sleep on a drier ridge among the beeches, on a slope with sun. I looked at a fern holding itself against the light, at a rose-and-brown fuzzy toadstool, tiny leaping insects, beech leaves that were dirty brown scraps until I held them against the light and found green, gold, tea-coloured radiant mosaics with holes to show through to Roy's blue jacket. Fell asleep, woke to find I'd been stroked peaceful by the place, sunlight warm and cool at the same time, leaves dropping singly and occasionally with a slight crackle when they land, grass in a brilliant tuft along Roy's thigh, planes of beech leaves green and turning stretching high and then far away, a momentary revelation of how unlikely and how wonderful it was to exist. I thought, "I must let the child know about this." And Roy's warm self to roll up against - even if it's out of love with me again. Remember. October 6th In bed looking after each other's colds, we look at the cold October sky through the window, snuggle and are full of joy. I'm thankful and bursting with tenderness for him. Monday [letter] Hello, much later, from this feathery warm big new bed the downstairs neighbours gave us, I'm getting rid of a cold, R brings me hot lemonade with honey, the sky's grey and windy, the trees are thrashing outside the window, I'm breathing through my mouth like a fish, it's October. We're reading three good anthologies of poems for high school students and thinking of you at school. Frozen ground, poplars getting bare, cold mornings like ours, is how I imagine your country now - I've a few good photographs, one of Grandpa's log house. So Roy wrote before I did: since we've come back we've been very close and happy. I hold my breath and daren't expect it to last, but maybe it will last for a while. I like him more than ever, and feel myself dangerously lucky. The child has grown just in the last two weeks - now I "wear my apron high" and have begun to alarm shopkeepers in Kentish Town by continuing to ride the bicycle (with boxes, for shelves, strapped onto the back) - it is a big, real bumpy baby now, has begun to flail in protest if I work too hard. The nesting we've done is making the flat beautiful - brilliant deep gleaming dark blue on the kitchen walls, red pots and green plants shining along them - egg yolk yellow on the stairs, blue, green and yellow walls in the bathroom and best of all a moss green carpet for the living room, my favorite color, a hillside, a creek bank, a marsh we live above like stilt-house dwellers upstairs in the bedroom. We forayed out to a carpet warehouse one afternoon, pulled through piles of second-hand carpeting, at last found a stained strip just the right size (although marked the wrong size!) that they sold us with several kinds of reductions - we took it home, cut it to fit, stomped it flat, borrowed the downstairs vacuum cleaner, sucked the nap up, brushed and patted, admired, got leaves and flowers to echo its color along the windowsills - and it looked like velvet, the room's new, all our furniture (even the chair I found in the alley last week) looks richer. And a yellow pepper plant, some tall sunflowers transplanted into pots. And pottery lessons, I'm making funny irregular things and delighting in the way my fingers learn about clay quite on their own, invent new shapes, work really instinctively. Term hasn't started yet. Thank you and Father for your hospitality to us when we visited you, in what was difficult circumstances for you. It was nice, and important, for Roy to meet you, and it was important for me to see you with him. We weren't there long enough or lively enough or generously enough, but it was a good time even as confusing as it was. Having tea with you on Father's invitation, the night before we left, was a good ceremony. This will never be a proper letter, so love from us almost-three, I'll reform, I will. [journal] October Sometimes I realize how completely I may be deceived, being vain, hopeful and usually truthful. The woman conceives. As a mother she is another person than the woman without child. She carries the print of that night nine months long in her body. Something grows. Something grows into her life that never again departs from it. She is a mother. She is and remains a mother even though her child die .... And this the man does not know; he knows nothing. He does not know the difference before love and after love, before motherhood and after motherhood. He can know nothing .... That is why we won't be told what to do by our husbands. A woman can only do one thing. She can respect herself. She can keep herself decent. She must always be as her nature is. She must always be maiden and always be mother. Before every love she is a maiden, after every love she is a mother. In this you can see whether she is a good woman or not. Abyssinian woman quoted by Campbell Saturday [undated letter] Fat letter in the morning's post, two cups of coffee taken upstairs with it, Roy in his nightshirt and me in my granny gown (found in the Petticoat Lane Sunday market), snuggled together under the featherbed. We took some pictures to show you. Our October with leaves still green but drying and strange and stiff, your October with snow and classrooms, your September, our Kootenays to tell you about; you sound good, M, more spacious and gracious than you did last year. I was pleased to hear about Grandparents Konrads' visit, can't imagine how they can be too busy to stay more than four days, was delighted with the sound of their voices in the scrap of conversation you reported (Grandpa Konrad was right of course, but bless Grandma for always having been fond of Frank). And I'm touched - though not really surprised - that they aren't outraged by our baby; it seems to vindicate my faith in telling people even things that are likely to hurt them. I think Liesbeth and (I know) Anne must have done some good spadework. No, the kidney infection went away completely and never came back - I'm healthy and energetic, more than usual, and have worked hard at painting and thing-making - although I'm beginning to be quite big and can feel the weight in my belly when I'm tired - there's a lot of pushing-me-around going on in there, Roy says that even while I was asleep last night 'it' was moving. December's not far, the girl downstairs has given me some old baby clothes, Sheila has promised me a crib, Roy's mother reports on her knitting; now I need mainly practical things like sheets and diapers, which are not expensive. Little Anna from downstairs isn't quite a year old yet but she seems suddenly to be long-legged and full of problems - she'll be only a little more than a year older than our creature but she's learned so much in that year that she's already in a quite different category. There have been some funny shy and surprised faces at the Slade now that I'm back there! Have you gotten the telephone bill yet? I'll send you a check from my Canadian account when you do, and I'll include the lab bill then. Roy is working three nights a week in the service station down the road; he doesn't mind, it's quiet and lonesome. As a result we spent most of last week in bed - I stayed there to get rid of a cold and he came in at 8 a.m. to sleep so we had a wonderful lot of days together under the eiderdown, with hot lemon drinks and classical music on the radio, feeling very close. Dee warns me gleefully that this is the last time I'll ever be able to spend the day in bed with a cold, but we reckon that we can just take the creature to bed with us and all spend our days there. It's seemingly very good for the soul; it's made us feel very close and harmonious. Several Mondays later Roy's gone to work and I've seen him to the door and hugged him goodbye and said my own form of "Komm' bald wieder." We woke up to bright sunshine this morning and decided, before we'd stirred from under the feather quilt, to go to the country today. So we went to Hatfield House, through country roads with massed trees turning color subtly and slowly as they do in England - they look like ripe pears - we had cheese and bread for lunch in a very old country pub on the little street just next to the back entrance to Hatfield palace, charmed our way through the gates, struck across the fields, and found all sorts of wonders as the sun came and went dramatically through a low dark cloud barrier - huge warty oak trees with massive trunks and amputated branches, most of them already there when Elizabeth I walked the fields - red berries on the dog rose and hawthorn - blue wood smoke from burning leaves - shiny acorns fallen on the path - chestnuts hidden under wet leaves and betrayed by the empty burr-nests they escaped from - maple, and elm and beech trees each with their separate kinds of crunch and color - a row of pale yellow poplars smelling like your creek in September - a squirrel - willows beside the river, their trailing black shadows catching at all the gold and orange reflections from trees on the other bank - a swan, four white-breasted ducks in a row on a fallen branch - another kind of poplar completely bare except for the large single leaves still holding onto only the tops of the highest branches - grass still very wet and juicy, a herd of determined plodding dairy cows - new tamarack fenced in - gulls catching and flashing sun against the black clouds - Roy in his blue Canadian lumber jacket striding ahead while I meditate along behind, thinking about what a good mother I'll be. (I'm getting very big and look ridiculous.) Roy takes pictures of my swelling fruity shape among the autumn leaves, everything ripe - it's dangerous to climb hills ahead of him because he threatens to take pictures, from close, of my big bottom too. We feel very free and fortunate, very happy, very lucky about each other. Now the red berries and the shiny nuts are in the living room, the house is beautiful and I'm falling asleep wishing you as much joy, although it's too late to wish you such an autumn. Tuesday
That's a poem we say to each other when we look at the three lime trees outside our window - black branches are reappearing, the few leaves on the tips of the branches are fluttering like prayer flags, Roy brought hawthorn berries from work with him this morning. October 24 [journal] Through a Glass Darkly, late show with Roy. It crackled for me; gestures, the camera's movements, the shore, the house, objects, all were full of electricity. Minus the seventeen year old jumping, standing on his head, hair stiff as pinfeathers; gaily, gracefully he tries to hurt his father, but he hides from him like Adam behind a wall, when his father calls to tell him he knows; and he's touched, he's elated, when his father talks to him about love. "Anything is possible, Papa, anything (al ting). I can't live like that." "You can." "May I go for a run." Martin's eyes when he takes off his glasses, soft, wincing in the tender white creases of skin around them. He falls to his knees and hides his face on her shoulder, she pushes him away, that's not right, he must wait for god with her, not lean on her. "I am moving away from Martin, I can't live in two worlds, I must decide, I have sacrificed Martin." Going into the evening in a cardigan, swinging her hands like a young girl, striding in her big boots. And it's Minus who knows her, how to half-follow her into her room behind the wallpaper ("the wall parts like leaves"), how to find her coat and put her bag into her lap, wrap her in blankets, leave her sleeping on the floor and come back just as she has come to the door; throws a stone into the sea as he runs to follow her, because she has talked to him and is taking him to see something. Through the film I can remember his excitement as he discovers the size, vastness, of life, sheer physical tension, elation, no matter how frightened he is - and he isn't really frightened (as I remember it) because he's sure of himself. He's very intelligent, gullible, ambitious; he'll be like his father, but maybe not. Never like Martin. She is loved, they swing around her, she strains away from Martin's cowardice and tries to be kind to him, she pursues her father and is kind to him; Minus she isn't kind to, Minus is too important, no need to protect him anyway. Their two faces in the boat, wrapped in the blanket, wet, newborn, calm, sitting together waiting for the others to come back. The house silent and cluttered, sunlight on the stairs, the unused rooms upstairs - David has a study, Martin a bed, Karin her room; Minus just disappears around the corner, sits on the rocks painting a rocking chair, eats and works outside. Clouds reflected on still water, more water and clouds, clouds broken by small flat waves, Bach's cello, four bodies in a line coming out of the sea, shouting. Milk spilled on the rocks, the lighthouse turning. They're kind to each other over the supper; David runs to his room to cry. She puts on sunglasses and high heeled shoes to leave; her face is much older. David's is younger, Minus' is younger. Martin lecturing David in the boat. "All that comes through is your ingenuity. Why don't you do something decent?" David so modest, even about his failed suicide, even about his hopes - he's fragile, guilty, really very strong and thin, of course Minus loves him, he's strong in his selfishness as Minus may be. Oh, but David - everything should be different for him, he shouldn't have to bring presents from Stockholm, except that he wants to do right and be loving, because he loves and really struggles. Karin really struggles but, funnily, she doesn't really love - what is it about her dreams of waiting to meet god that is so mistaken? God is a spider trying to get into her, stony faced, mainly Martin, stony-faced clumsy mate; she wants to mate with God when he comes through the door - is that something about women? Is that her mistake? She chooses her world, and then discovers the spider-god in it waiting for her to decide so that he can show himself to her. No wonder she is afraid. She wants to worship, not act; adore, woman-like. Not fight with Martin, or even her father, and flirt with Minus. Mating with god and mating with our brother, our twin - two versions of our one waiting worshipping illusion, one of the most wonderful and potent (Lessing's short story, The Other One) - the father is like her, he wants to mate with himself, another version of the same. Martin is really lost - "My life is clear and human," he's abandoned it. Minus knows about mating with death, eternity, integrity, or god - he won't fall for them, if he sees them. What his father tells him about love is important, because it's "any kind of love," the crude sorts they're all full of, Minus especially. So it's a movie about longing for love, transcendental and pitiful kinds of love, and about ways of missing and losing love, finding and recognizing - the conviction that there are secrets we may dimly discover - not clearly, not face to face; that's for hope, writing novels, making films, working out how to live with Roy; David says, "I have a hope ;" Minus says "Papa talked to me," bursting with what he knows - something not so dim there, that's something I feel I almost grasp, that energy of elation is a seeing "even as I am known." Or am I not learning anything and just leaning on an old superstition of my own? I do know the peace and elation, and certainty that arrive, come, collect in me when fear and anguish have been very hard on me: it's like love too. Love has nothing to do with kindness - yes, something. Sunday, 1 November We fall asleep with the child between us, kicking against Roy's back. [undated letter] I am very lethargic and lazy these days. We're living more soberly than usual, because Roy has been sick and I'm heavy although well. (Went to the clinic this morning - they're estimating me at minus three weeks. I think it's probably a little further away than that. The baby's head hasn't slid down into the pelvis yet ('engaged') but it is lying head first, its back forward, the way it's supposed to. It has less room to move by now. I go to antenatal classes every week, breathing exercises, relaxation practice and physiological labour-day gossip, preparation for a hard time - I like it, eight big round women sitting on their big spread-out luxurious thighs with one slender animated sparkling girl of a physiotherapist telling us all about it, leaping up gracefully to show us pictures, feeling wonderfully light herself. Roy has a father's class to go to in December, if he wants to come into the labour room with me. I know all about first stage and second stage, dilating, engaging, crowning, presenting, episiotomies, analgesics, everything except how to recognize a labour pain when I have one. Poor little baby, it seems such a tiny passage for it to find its way out of. Later in November, Saturday night [journal] Rain, the sound of wet cars sooshing through the water on the street, rain rattling on the window like sleet, wind, the screech of a bus turning at Swain's Lane, lights on Highgate Hill seen through the drops and running scribbles of rain on the window pane. Lauderic downstairs playing with electrical testing equipment, watching television. Roy - We drove through the rain to the Paris Pullman to see Une ou deux choses que je sais d'elle. Although it was only a little after three it was almost dark, and the lights had begun to shine on the pavement. Shots of the whirling galaxies and bubbling black outer space of café and Coke; Marina Vlady looking sideways at a man in the bar while Godard's voice whispers that since we can neither rise to being nor sink into nothing, we must pay even more attention to where we are, to the world, to our semblables, our frères. His film full of the curiosity, interferences, nagging, boredom, poise, of city consciousness. Jimmy's warm and dry underground, good warm food, convincingly healthy-looking, warm full stomachs with stuffed vine leaves, cabbage salad, bread and butter, wine, ghosts. Roy striding in his high boots and tight pants and elephant coat, hair washed. Friendly presence, putting off explosions until someday. Rain rattles even harder, cold air from somewhere. I'd like to take notes on our life these days, but don't and don't really want to. I'm waiting, not only for the child. I'm big, heavy on the stairs, healthy, almost serene. I look forward. I have trouble thinking of work although I know I must find a way to support myself and use myself. Roy is a mystery and a wonder, I don't know what to do with him. I still don't know exactly why women and men live together. He's my best friend, my best other. I feel that he's some part of my life come to a peak, filled out, filled in, fulfilled, a climax, a meeting. Maybe he's swallowing a part of me that I'll never need again, or maybe he's lending me something I'll never stop needing and never find again. Monday [undated letter, don't know if it goes here] From Charlotte Painter's book about having her first baby, Who Made the Lamb (describing her mother): One Christmas morning I found in the living room a thorn tree four feet high. Its bare branches, with a natural polish like silver, tapered slim to sharp, prickly ends. Its distorted shape and odd centre of gravity delighted her. She decorated it with ribbons and tiny gifts. The thorn tree lived on long after the holidays for like these dry flowers it seemed to tap the air for sustenance. Feeling my own shortcomings sometimes makes me angry or cynical, and therefore at least partly blind. When that happens I should bear in mind my mother's thorn tree. She is a woman who has declined to grow hardened or dismayed by what she finds, but chooses instead to love the thing that makes her wonder, that stirs some differentness she feels within herself. What could ever destroy a woman who can embrace a thorn tree? Not the tree itself. Hers is not quite the nightingale's sacrifice: she asked no miracle flowering of it but merely adored it herself, and survived. They led their separate lives, she and the tree in its own corner. I think that I am like her tree, and that she could give me no better defense than it merited. "See this," she might say, "my child, different and a little wild, perhaps grotesque: but festooned with ribbons and tiny gifts, she suits me. I can take pride in her. I have faith in her, whatever she is, whatever she means. And here's this letter from Bill. (I'm sending things to cheer you up.) We're surrounded by people who're happy with us and who want to be uncles and godparents and babysitters. Several weeks ago Roy came home from the motorcycle repair shop delighted with a man he'd discovered in the yard, Lauderic Caton, a black Trinidadian. A few days later I came home to find Lauderic with Roy in the living room, playing old records and telling stories about his long life. At first he reminded me of Uncle Willie, merry and opinionated in the same way. He loves to talk and chokes with laughter at everything any of us say. He's been a famous classical guitarist and has played and arranged for jazz bands in the 40s. He's written a symphony. He's invented a new kind of guitar. He studies Latin for his own pleasure, has a set of primers that he gets through once every couple of years before beginning again. He was in Paris during the 30s, in London during the war. Now he works part time making packages for St John's Ambulance, drives about on an immaculate white Honda, studies electronics in his attic flat at King's Cross, professes to love solitude but finds excuses to come see us. He looks thirty but is really sixty, wears a light grey suit suspendered up under his armpits, a bow tie, a black beret to cover the little distance his fuzzy hairline has receded. One of the records he brought over was the Caton Brothers singing Ezekiel Saw a Wheel ("We're all black, man, so they think we brothers") - Lauderic's complicated 40s arrangement and Lauderic singing a bass that would make Father shiver with delight. When I told him about the baby he said "Oh that's good, that's good!", offered to babysit, advised me to hold onto the rail when I go down stairs, demanded to know whether we'd chosen names and ordered us to find something unusual, "Jus' take some consonants and some vowels and make something up." Gave Roy some advice on being a good father: "If it's a girl you got to be her first lover, that's what she want, subconsciously, you know. If you don't do that she hate you, she don' know why, but she hate you." I don't know whether I've told you about Buddy Hardy, the old woman who lives up the hill from here. She's seventy and very nearly blind, but smart, wise, adventurous and all alive. I picked her up on the subway one night just after Christmas. She came in looking so radiant and so intelligent with her thin frail strong body and her wrinkled old face and her opaque eyes that I had to know her. And then to discover, at the bus stop, that her name is Buddy Hardy! She was a South African like Roy, became a midwife, worked in Malaya and East Africa, took all sorts of courses, was a labour organizer in South Africa and was honoured with a one way exit permit because of it (ie expelled from the country). I took her up the hill one day to show her a beautiful empty house in its vast overgrown secret garden. Yesterday on the telephone she told me she had gone back to pick some bluebells on her own. Two dogs had come snarling at her from next door, "I couldn' see them of course but from the sound of them they were as big as great Danes. Just by chance I began to sing, and that held them until I could feel my way to the fence, but I couldn't find the gate, so I climbed on top of the fence, but then I couldn't see how far it was down to the pavement" (she can't even see how far it is from the curb to the street), "so I hung on until two children came by. I handed them the bluebells and said 'Take these and help me down!' And then I came home." November 25, evening I lie beside Roy in his bed until he falls asleep, talking and touching - he's been sick so long. I worry about him, feel a little cheated by his being unavailable just as my adventure becomes more urgent. [Roy had got hep B from one of his women.] After the seminar this afternoon, striding (as I feel it) up Hampstead Road to see Dee [in the hospital after a suicide attempt], proud and funny in my yellow velvet bell bottom jeans, Roy's long grey sweater, blue long scarf, fuzzy hair bushing out behind, the amber lump on a leather thong - I'd felt completely superior to all the flat stomachs at the seminar. A foot (?) moves across the top of my stomach, curves back, and moves across again - Roy and I can see a pointed bump moving under the skin. At the clinic I listened to its heart, very fast and strong, amplified by a metal box, k-thump, k-thump, k-thump, k-thump. At night I have twinges in unnamed areas of my lower pelvis, I sleep restlessly and wake aching, like Roy. If I walk too fast I get an acute stitch in my side. Days like today I'm full of energy; yesterday I faded out early in the morning. Good things: the shiny face of the black painter who called after me, "Don't pay him no mind, miss!" The little green-eyed student who stopped me on the street to tell me about her group family who believe in perfect marriage and would like to tell me about it at their meetings in Morden, 7:45 weekday nights - Unified Family. Dee's indignation when I told her, sitting thin and pretty in her bed, protesting all sorts of things, wanting to run away but longing to see Anna. Buddy Hardy last night shy with me because of my baby; everyone at the seminar not looking at it, but some of them a little tender to me (as I felt it). It's soon. I should write more, to keep these days. And back to Roy lying asleep next door, worried, loving, cross, impatient and patient, true and real, my extraordinary Roy whom I cherish and could not possibly cherish enough. - And I must just remember to note that stone pinched pot I made on Monday, grogged, with excited care of all its planes and meetings, delicate edges and surfaces. Nov 27th [journal] Roy is so sick. He feels close to death and I also feel the fragility of life in his thin sore body. I'm confused, want to lend him myself to be whatever he unpredictably needs, am afraid for him, am angry when he seems not to want me, bring him all my old nonsense of fear and pride, am ineffectually warm and ineffectually cold, want to be left in peace to pay sentimental attention to these last few weeks; he's impatient with me, solitary, hard to please, loving, courteous, distracted. I miss him. Tonight we wrestled coldly upstairs - he because 'It's a fuck-up" and I because I feel so irrelevant to him now. He said, "Sometimes I think that if I were to beat you, you would just go away, angry and - beaten." "Do you really think of me as so passive?" "Yes it's better to beat me back, or forgive me. You are like a little girl with your father ... impotent ... your pride, one part of you I don't like, I don't find it interesting at all." Downstairs in the dark living room, talking about Maria, my hurt that's still there, why I can't talk to him about it, harping on that old nonsense again, silence and monologue, "... don't know what it means, confirmed the fact that if I'm not beautiful and interesting enough enough of the time there are other people who are; made me second choice, that's very hard to forgive." More and more tears, I don't seem to forgive it. But when I'd said my declaration I felt lighter and wanted to do something else. He came back from the kitchen, knelt on the floor, put his head down and said, "That isn't quite how it was. You were never second choice for me." I began to cry again, came down to the floor and put my shaking forehead against his fist. Confluence, at last we'd floated to some boulder where we could hang on together briefly before drifting separately somewhere else. I came out feeling soft as an oyster, little, loving, vulnerable: "my little weak-strong Ellie." I thought of Don's one early morning gesture, and asked Roy if he ever feels he wants somebody to really, really, really, really love him, just at that moment. "I really really really really love you." "Why don't I believe you?" "Probably because the television is on and I'm sucking a Sour Lemon." November 28th, Saturday afternoon [letter] I've got fresh bread and butter for supper, in remembrance of you and your old Saturday afternoons with fresh baking, hateful chairs to dust, lemon tea and boiled eggs, and the smell of washed floors in the kitchen and wax in the living room. As if by happy miracle, the French station is playing old pop songs I used to be in love with, when I could sneak a couple of hours of the top one hundred from CFGP while supposedly cleaning in the living room - Poor Chisholm is sick in bed upstairs - he has been sick for over a month, nauseated, getting skinny, full of pains, and grumpy, something wrong with his liver, they're slow to diagnose it - it's scary, for me and especially for him, because he hasn't ever been sick before - we hope he's better by the time we have this baby, because he doesn't want to miss the birth. And he isn't allowed to eat any fat - we're Jack Spratt and his big round woman - so hard to feed him. I give him canned raspberries - because you did when we were sick, M - and he likes them. When I went downstairs to visit my neighbour Dee, her little Anna was tired and cross, and she curled herself around my big belly in the rocking chair and went to sleep. I think Roy needs a very big mama in a rocking chair too. Now we're into winter, although it's often warm and there's been no snow. Pigeons and gulls come to sit in our bare lime trees, and the sky is full of windy clouds from the north, as it was last winter when we had our silent courtship sitting across the living room from each other, on the floor, drinking coffee and staring out the windows. In the mornings Highgate Hill is blue with mist, and in the evenings it's smothered in London's orange luminous November fog. I go around, to classes and to clinic, in yellow velvet bell bottom jeans (held up with suspenders!) and a long grey turtleneck of Roy's with a trailing blue knitted scarf and sometimes a cap; enjoying the game of playing tomboy while swelled into a most womanish pumpkin shape - I've 'lightened,' ie the baby's head has gone down into the pelvis, and I do in fact feel lighter at the middle although a little squashed in those nameless areas the English call "down below". The creature is apparently right way around, head first and all. At the clinic last week I asked to listen to its heartbeat through a stethoscope, but instead they produced a little metal box like a car radio that amplified the sound so I could hear it loud as a drum beat, very fast, twice as fast as my own heartbeat. Everything else seems alright too; I have a good report card with A's in blood pressure, hemoglobin, urinalysis etc! 'They' think I'm due in just over a week; I think it's longer, but it will be well before Christmas, and all my midwife friends (Sheila and Buddy Hardy) say I look almost 'ready'. I both want to hurry it up, in my excitement, and slow it down, because being pregnant is special but being a mother is pretty ordinary. We got a warm and friendly letter from Grandma Konrad last week. "Grussen dich, liebe Ellie und deinen Mann mit den 23. Psl" and "Du bist und bleibst unsere liebe Ellie." I was happy enough to write her a long letter back, on the spot. And thank you for your letter M - I don't know why I write so little - I'm lethargic, write nobody, very little even in my journal, and nothing for the Slade. My writing seems to depend on loneliness for its impulse - sooner or later I'll be lonesome again, so you can comfort yourself with that if you like. My extra-Chisholm social energy goes into a little friendship with the girl downstairs, Dee, who is intelligent, witty, sad, perceptive, and a little desperate because she's stuck at home with her one year old and she's unhopeful about her marriage - she has no money of her own and no career and feels herself getting older and more vulnerable, woman's lot of troubles all unsolved. I like her better and better, and am sorry there are so few ways to help her other than borrowing Anna from time to time and putting flowers through her mail slot. - Last Saturday we both got very high on plans, or dreams. Roy suddenly said "Let's go live in BC, in the Kootenays." I was delighted, because the Kootenays have been my promised land for years - but I haven't been talking to Roy about it; I had a feeling he'd get the idea on his own and like it better just because it was his own. Anyway, we got out all the maps we had collected during the summer and talked about what we want. Mainly it's a home base in the country. Partly for our kid, because it's good to have a local geography that belongs to one from all the way back to the beginning of memory. Partly for me, because I want a corner of lush BC of my own, and always have. And Roy says he's sick of traffic jams and crowds of people and bad air. But at the same time I know very well that neither of us are the sort of people who can live on soya flour and rice in a hippy community - we both are too addicted to privacy, good food and intellectual excitement. And we haven't any money to buy land, and we certainly don't want to be serious farmers, and I don't like the idea of washing diapers by hand or of scrubbing wood floors for that matter. So first we need an independent income. I can be a university professor, but what kind of universities are there in the Kootenays? Roy says he can be a local schoolmaster, but I don't quite see it working. Still, there are ways and we're resourceful. The problem is that if we don't hurry there'll be no land left, but at the same time I haven't had enough of Europe and besides, this welfare state is the perfect place for having babies and getting them through their first two years - it's full of day nurseries and free clinics and wonderful kindergartens. As you'll see when you come. Will you really? I don't know what we'll be doing (in July?) but it's hard to imagine not having time to see you and show you some Europe, as if you weren't able to discover it for yourselves. The only problem would be money, as I'll have licked up the last of this scholarship and who knows how long Roy's sugar daddy will hold out. Amsterdam, the Rhine Valley, Paris, the Mediterranean, Italy, Yugoslavia - how much time do you have? Your description of Michael and Judy's visit was quite funny. It's true that Michael can be an ideological bully and it's true that Judy is a good cook. - There's poor Chisholm mournfully reading cookbooks contemplating all the wonderful things he can't eat. He sends love and says to tell you that London no longer is "grimy and sooty," "according to Dickens etc," because there have been laws passed forbidding coal fires altogether - it's all gas and electricity, so the snow is almost clean, whenever it comes for a few days, and the killing smog no longer comes. If you do go to Edmonton, please try to find Don Carmichael, because we haven't heard from them at all. I'm still going to pottery a lot and have made one good pot and a few almost good ones - it's a good pleasure, real thing-making and a little friend making. The whole silly lot at my college pretend not to notice that I'm pregnant, English embarrassment, I think. I'll take the kid to their Christmas party and watch their faces! Do you think Father's likely to write me one of these days, or haven't I been good enough? Sunday [undated journal] I'm cross, the stupid rice pudding has burned dry and still the rice isn't cooked, Roy complains about not having anything to eat and yet wants almost nothing I can suggest. When I'm with him he wants to be alone, when he's left alone he wants to know where I am. He's bored and crotchety but tries not to be and succeeds only in being unreal. I can't please him for longer than a minute at a time. I'm as full of complaints as he is, and could only get free of them while I was walking outside tonight and gradually noticed that the twigs were glistening like webs around the streetlights on Highgate West Hill - remembered what walking can be, thought how long it is since I've had a good daydream. Walked as far as Merton Road and onto the Heath (silence, ducks, silhouettes of trees on the round horizon toward Hampstead), rose like warm air - thought of projects and plans and felt myself half into possibilities, came back to Roy's sore belly, irritated loneliness, self-absorption - television and burned rice pudding. My own nearly bursting belly, my 'time', stays uncelebrated. Roy's comforted by reading about death and can't bring his mind to the procedures of birth I try to educate him in. I suppose it's just as well to let it be mysterious to him, but I'm peevish and I wonder whether we can do anything together if we can't do this together. We certainly can't talk about theology, although he's more patient with me than I am with him. His life is very scattered at the moment - Cooper is melancholic, he's sick, there's no adventure threatening, and his style is under heavy strain from me. - Sometimes, uncomfortably, I feel my mother's face taking over mine; I look at my hands and see hers. I don't want to become her. A riddle close to the riddle of why I was so impatient of her. My physical repulsion from her - it's been there a long time. This summer I felt about her as about Olivia - contemptuous, misogynous. December 2, Wednesday At three this morning, Dee pushing her sleeve up to show me forty red slashes up her arm like a railway track. Ant leaning back in the chair looking at the ceiling and complaining that she treats him like a mother, not a man. Ian sitting silent opposite me ready to give up and go home, constantly asking to know what I think of him and making me preach ridiculously at him when he really just wants to be praised and comforted. Mafalda lying over Roy's legs crying yesterday morning. Roy has really got infectious hepatitis and will be in bed at least four weeks and will miss the birthday. But today he's humorous and philosophical; I'm pretty and he tolerates my rare gabbling mood affectionately; we sit together under the eiderdown in his room, he writing Hube and I sewing hems on the green velvet hospital skirt in preparation for any-day-now, talking about his women and my men, about Ian, about Dee and Ant and Anna; playing, expounding, thinking, living well in the same world for that while, happy and fortunate, smug, grateful. Having said goodnight once, I go back to say it again, thinking of some gimmicky excuse, or not; the flat lying so spaciously and beautifully around us. I hold my breath. He's already fallen asleep and when I come in, thinks it's the middle of the night. December 9 [letter] Yes, still all in one piece, and I may be for another week or more, M, so if you've been feeling my labour pains they've been imaginary - perhaps the ones I imagine from time to time when I'm in a hurry to test myself out on that unimaginable adventure that's so immanent. We both live in a state of immanence these days, Roy impatient to get better - our superstitious friends all say knowingly that Roy's aching belly is just sympathy for me - but yellow eyes? And he is better this week, not quite the sad sore little boy he was last week, but still not well - he may make it in time for the birthday says old Doctor Barber, the little kindly GP whose office is around the corner, and who is like Dr Foster went to Glouchester. Not long ago, maybe just at the right time, it suddenly occurred to me: why don't we tape the birthday and send it to M. So now it will depend on whether we'll be allowed to bring the tape in, and whether Roy feels like tackling something technical just when immediate things are so compelling - he may not want to fool with machinery at holy moments, and if that's so he may be right. It's funny to think of you guiltily assigning stories and drawings to put your kids off your trail while you read my letter - like sneaking into the outhouse to read - I can see you, with the face you wore with us when you were reading a book and we came wanting attention, with something to show you or demand from you - guilty, harried, distracted and trying hard to be nice! And I liked your story about the inspector - we always thought it was we who were being inspected, and so I never realized what I could have done to that awful Miss [Yukola] Boyd in grade five. The inspector himself sounds bone-dry, from the style of his report; nothing there about how you stand on tiptoes when you teach. Roy has just come in with a four foot Christmas tree that he wants to plant in the living room - it still has some of its roots and he thinks it may grow, so we can take it with us to BC! It's a good thick fine-needled bushy one, and right now the living room is cold enough to be a wintry forest. When your letter came this morning I was stretched out naked on a mattress in Roy's sunny room being photographed by Mafalda, who was all excited about abstracts she was getting of my big round middle - it is huge now, tight (but no stretch marks!) so the belly button bulges. The creature is lying curved around with its spine on the left side - I can feel the hard head shape if I poke. All this uncertainty about dates exists because according to official from-the-first-day-of-last-period calculations, I was due last week, as you were writing, but calculations in this case are worthless because I stopped taking pills in the middle of a cycle - I reckon it's due no sooner than the 14th, ie beginning of next week; the clinic doctor said he reckoned I was right, "the patient usually is". And in the meantime, one of the big bodies from my antenatal classes has had hers a week early and spoiled my certainty of being the first. Yesterday when we were sitting in bed drinking tea the mailman rang with a package - a jolly jumper from the Dycks in Toronto. The kid's drawer is full of things, and friends call to ask what to give it as greeting gifts - I'm the first of my Queen's and post-Queen's group of people to have a baby and they are all curious and excited - it makes me feel special to have a stack of proud announcement postcards ready to mail. When we visit them I strut - We were thinking of asking you to plant a tree - in Poland, Marytka told me, parents plant a chestnut tree when their child is born, so the tree grows with it and they can say "This is your tree." We wanted to plant a chestnut here but can't think of anywhere the authorities won't find it or sheep won't eat it - your farm would be a good place if you weren't feet under snow - I suppose it could wait until spring - do you have any ideas? I have a feeling Roy's Christmas tree won't make it, and anyway the living room's not a permanent enough place. The creature is stretching and pushing, now that I've gone to bed, and jabbing me inside, so I must turn off the light and try to put it to sleep. Roy sends sleepy regards - he reads your letters as often as I do, ever since he knows you. It's winter now, no snow, but the wonderful swift heavy winter north skies full of wind and mist. We've had electrical strikes in the last few days, thrilling stretches when there were no yellow streetlights, no traffic lights, no shop lights, no heating, no cooking, no TV, just candles flickering under stars for a change, R and I gleeful under the featherbed listening to carols on the transistor by lamplight and imagining all the supermarkets with their frozen food turning into puddles, chaos at every intersection, factories shut down, thousands of people sitting down to cornflakes for supper. [journal] 11 December Inky blue evening sky, lamplight downstairs, Christmas soon in the red candles on the windowsill; excitement because soon I have a journey and a birth; I feel as though no disaster can touch me; I wish for a snowfall and a night birth by candlelight.
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