| london volume 4 part 1 - 1972 january-march | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
[journal] London, January 1972 Landlocked, the scene of Mrs Quest's dream: a young, dead mother who had been beautiful, she realizes only when she is late middle-aged. Beautiful and cruel. She's a nurse and the three roses turn into a medicine bottle. Doris Lessing: I think about her to compare myself, and in this book I remember that her calm and plain prim middle-aged body spent thirty years knowing its own perfection and admiring itself. And that's why she can lean forward in her chair to concentrate on Roy's beauty (for me so painful) without any obvious consciousness that she is fifty two - this beautiful man could and might lay her; what aging has taken away (not much anyway) fame and integrity have given back. But how did she know her mother's anguish about that? When Roy longs for me bodily, what's that? It's true. When Thomas, in the loft, looks at her upper arm. "Martha, do you see this line here?" He ran a finger up the inside of her upper arm: the flesh shrank, then waited. "Do you understand? No you don't understand. But I tell you Matty, when I see that line, that curve, I want to cut my throat, I couldn't ever be that, don't you see?" - Monday On Saturday I struggled to remember dreams, and couldn't reach any of them, until, lying locked into Roy under the covers, I remembered: sitting crouched with someone, Roy? in the porch of a house, the entry hall, tiny as a doghouse, minutely detailed with triangular windows, mouldings, cornices, like a Welsh chapel, gleaming white, something Scandinavian, or northern, about it. Last week I dreamed Roy and I were making love, and when I looked, I had a long straight penis exactly like his: we were penetrating each other. I'll soon have a place, and a garden. I feel a good time is coming. [Chris and Debbie Day were moving, leaving me their whole flat, an upstairs double room as well as the basement kitchen and bedroom, and a small garden] Years ago I dreamed that I looked down and saw growing between my legs a little finger. When I realized it was a penis I was disgusted. - Colin: there's really nothing to it except for the long solemn gaze we exchange sometimes, that maybe I force onto him, when I see: flat brown eyes netted in that white, soft and perfect skin, stiff soft bleached hair growing flat like a dog's fur, thin mean lower lip. I see an old man, somebody so limited, so uninteresting except for that watchful almost blank presence - what does he see? We chatter, I provoke him, sweetly mock him and goad him, to entertain myself and hoping to make him squeak. And then there's something I like in that. He's quite still, solemn, takes me seriously and on every level - I've just realized - won't flirt with me. Difficult to say what he means for me: it's as if he's ordinary, and yet intelligent enough (just) not to be irritating, so that his boringness/conventionality and intelligence cancel each other out and leave me with just that exchanged stare - no love, no enchantment, no contempt, only a kind of formal contempt that's the outside skin of my self protective vanity. So I've defined it anyway. "It isn't your niceness I like. It's hard to explain. It isn't what you're afraid I'll find you out about. It's what you give away, it's things you can't know about yourself. I'm presumptuous, I'm always telling you things about yourself." "I had a dream in which you called me an emotional cripple." When Roy was here on Saturday night I asked him to try something with me. I wanted to lie locked together with him for hours, hardly moving, breathing and listening, fused all along my soft inside. And we did lie that way for a while; I began to feel my abdomen radiate up to my chest, like the wavy lines in diagrams. [sketch] I was full of rising joy because I thought maybe we'd learned something so that sex could become for me what it seems to be for him, and then I could stop resenting it and we could meet - but then he was angry and distressed, he didn't know why, although he muttered about feeling he'd turned into an object for my gratification; that I was taking it too seriously, being too solemn; that although it was 'nice' my way, he liked to move too. We came together again and he moved as he liked but I was disappointed and resentful. We made up and slept, but I'm still annoyed. What was that about? Really a liberation-potency issue? I realized then that he wasn't saying and didn't know what he meant, and why he was disturbed by my experiment and so, for once, I didn't argue. But at that moment I wondered whether all my sexual reluctance with him isn't based on something real between us and not just my 'frigidity.' Meeting - yes, but when he puts his hands on me it's often a violation of my mood, my privacy, a real separation between us. So - does he aggress, trespass? And does he use his untactful unwelcome moments of seduction to camouflage and retreat, impress, browbeat? And his randiness is so 'right,' 'good,' and life affirming while my reluctance and resentment are 'stiff' and 'neurotic'? He knows how to hurt me: 'stiff' is the word that always stabs. Control. He's becoming angry with me for controlling him, but what it comes to is that by living here I can say come, go home, I want to be alone, will you stay with me, I want to read, I want to sleep, I want to wake alone, you irritate me, you're in my way, you shouldn't depend on me so much, I want to make a home, I want to make a space, I need to think. One morning last week, in tears, he said "You've stolen my best and most cherished dream" and he went home. What's that dream? To be one. And last winter it was me accusing, you've stolen my best dream. That. But here he is wanting someone to be mad with; ten different letters, one saying "I'm really so afraid of withdrawing completely from you (and Luke)." But now I don't believe we can ever love each other - because we've danced this pattern so many times. Ah Roy. Who've I got to offer? Something wanting to make dreams, experiments, plans, ceremonies, babies, happiness and excitement, breakthroughs, gardens, phrases, moments. Actually to share more and more, all along the frontiers. - Work: something desperately needing doing, something I'm really interested in. Something for many hours a day, so wonderful I haven't dared imagine it. Questions: 1. What are all, some of, the things so wonderful we (I) daren't imagine them? 2. Some kind of memory of what electrifies me - try to share it; what electrifies a group, what's exciting, where are the frontiers? Various excitements, colored with pleasure, aggression or pain, energize the organism to make contacts and creative adjustments in its environment. It is by feeling and contact that the organism grows and expands its boundaries. Every neurotic mechanism is an interruption of some kind of excitement ... anxiety is the consequence ... withdraws into contactless (unaware) confluence with his 'safe' habitual functioning.
Muscles - listen to aches, look for tensions, mistakes, habits, examine, accept, own, wait for development while concentrating on it. - Eventually I understand: Roy has found another father. [Later note: Actually this was Sheila Robinson] For days he's irritable with me, doesn't call, doesn't come, makes excuses; evening, afternoon, I walk quickly and almost blindly down to Prince of Wales Crescent and knock on the door, or find him in the pub. He's solicitous and kindly when I come, but he's lost his passion toward me. I feel it in my gut; I panic, I demand to know whether he's having an affair. As always it's all there but I'm slow. He says he isn't, but he's away; he claims he loves me "more than ever," sympathizes with my troubles with Luke, says I'm courageous, says he thinks about me and Luke all day. When I came into the pub and sat next to him he could hardly speak to me. Kevin [Sullivan] sat across the table looking at us, smiling, kindly and sharp eyes that provoke; thick short reddish beard and short hair, intelligent experienced face and a threatening reserve. When he leaned forward to speak to Dee, Roy leaned forward as well, with a smiling wan expression, a silly attentiveness. That was the moment I remembered when, lying in bed with the light out, I understood the parallel with David. An absence, a passionate attendance elsewhere, a deflection of his interests, new foreign attitudes. With it an impatience of me, something evasive that misconstrues what I say and then quarrels with me on the basis of things I haven't said, pretending anger to excuse himself from my company. Guilt and falsity, secretiveness that protests its innocence. It isn't his guilty secret - it's half-secret, half unconscious. When he finds and loses his father, throws himself into the contact with the father-twin, talks until six, follows Kevin's words reverently across the pub table, and guiltily phones me at one o'clock with an excuse he's made up, says he has to work early and is very tired but will come if I want him to. When I say that I am not his courageous old mother he's angry, or pretends to be angry to excuse himself from the conversation and from having to come around. Good, I don't want him at this moment, I'm confused and resentful but not as much as I was, he can pursue his father-twin with a clear conscience, if only he could - if he could, but I suppose he feels it betrays me. I don't know what to expect while he works out his new love - he's going to live with him - I suppose I must expect simply loneliness and some kind of rupture because of his guilt and absence. I'm trying to catch last night's dream - it seemed to tell me this. Mafalda is having a baby in June. I sent her a hug from me and Luke. - Luke without noticing took his first step Sunday 16 January, just before his 13 month birthday. On Monday, Judy writes and has a new little boy. - What to remember: Friday at the zoo [with Colin], Luke crawling, climbing onto his feet, shouting in the darkness of the aquarium. Steak and kidney and mushroom pie with delicious crust. The hornbill, Guy, sitting staring with fierce crazy intelligence at each of us individually. Saturday: dinner at Mokaris, we drink Plaka, play with the other customers; when we walk out I offend Roy by saying we're tired of each other, he spins around and says "Okay you go one way and I'll go the other okay?" I stare at him and he goes without looking back. When I get home he phones, I go round to his place, we lie in Cathy's room with the candle, his anemones and some heather in the soapstone mug, water condensation turning the grey-pink sky into picture on the window glass. Sunday, when I come back from the pub with Colin there are three knocks on the door and I'm petrified, I go stiff and fly out of myself, he simply holds me, doesn't say anything, I'm disoriented, can't remember who he is and what I'm doing with him. He wants to make love but I'm shocked out of contact with him, knocking heart, thick silence jellied in all my cavities. Finally he stops and just holds tight. I say, "Colin, come up here and talk to me, because I don't know where I am." So he does, and warmth comes back into my body cavity. I'm amazed at the power of the old taboo, even during the day, today, my hand shook and I couldn't eat. The moment in the pub when I told him that Roy understands me and that it is possible to have moments when we're perfectly at rest, without loneliness, with each other. My pint of lager and his three of Guiness - he said "What a thing to say to me! Perfection is possible, but not for me, I'm so far from it!" with wet eyes, so that I dived for his neck, embarrassing him. He'll remember a lot that he doesn't like, because I'm voracious and hard on him, but he's liking me: he doesn't know how much he has to do with the moments of tenderness, like when we collapsed together sideways on the pillow like two soft young birds, craning with our mouths. I always forget and remember how true he is. Early morning we talked about both wanting to be a new race. Discovering his adolescence, because he's glad to remember it again, brought us close. [undated letter - January] Did you get my Christmas letter? Luke has a new thick snowsuit the colour and wooliness of a (dirty) polar bear. I have a wide long skirt, blue, purple, black and white plaid; Greg gave me £2 for books; Colin gave me a plant that Luke killed by breaking a mirror over it; Roy's mother gave me lots of soap! Luke got two trains and lots of other things he isn't interested in. In the end Roy and Luke and I spent Christmas morning on our own and then went to Dee's to eat duck - Luke sat fearlessly on a little stool stuffing with both fists, helping himself directly from the saucepans, a very joyful sight. On Boxing Day Roy and I were invited to lunch by friends [Sheila Robinson and her husband George] who had also invited Doris Lessing, who's probably the best living woman novelist - she was very taken by Luke and I was taken with her: fifty two year old smiling woman who's lived hard and seems to have kept growing fast ever since her adolescence. I was encouraged to see her face so gentled and unexhausted and pretty, made me hopeful: because she hasn't stayed young by avoiding pain or thought. [Here I do not tell the story of how Roy got drunk on the way and lay down on the sidewalk, had to be fetched in by George and me, and lay sleeping it off in a back room while we had lunch. I was shy with Lessing but she admired my purple peasant shirt. She was slender in a black pencil skirt, flirted with George, and was surprisingly good on bongos.] Luke is slowly learning to walk. When he forgets himself he plunges ahead very well for five or six steps, then sits down and crawls. He's good at climbing stairs and can crawl on and off quite tall things successfully. Doesn't say anything in English but talks constantly, sings with me, sometimes dances if we sing something exciting like Dry Bones. He's pretty, lots of hair now and his eyes are still that candid green-brown. He's big for his age, fat and short-legged. He likes pulling things out of cupboards - had to have his stomach pumped after nibbling mothballs. His moods are very distinct; sometimes he tears around shouting, other times he wants to sit thinking on my lap. He loves Roy (who's living in St Alban's Road again with a man called Kevin and can keep him sometimes), his grandma, and Kevin, but thinks harder about new people than he used to. [undated journal] Twenty four hours in the Children's Ward [Whittington Hospital] - notes in my mother's handwriting. In the bathroom, the white tiled walls, each tile is covered with grey lines fine as hairs, running in patterns that continue from one tile to the ones around it in swirls, eddies, diagramming - what? Currents of temperature in the wall? Many of the individual squares are beautiful, fine-line drawings. I sit staring at them wondering what it can be that they chart so exactly, following a current from one tile through the white frame of cement [grout] into the next. It's a map, like a weather-map, with isobars. The sound of the ward at night, a level buzz, a hum, makes me imagine the walls stuffed with pipes like veins and arteries full of steam, running water, electricity (which might have a buzz like overhead wires, but almost inaudible), oxygen, telephone tones; it's like the hospital in my childhood. Cathy talking about Simon: "There's one child I can't take to. He comes into the kitchen and asks for a glass of milk, playing with his privates. And I can't help it, he makes me think of a dirty old man." "Sleeps with his mother" says her good-looking Turkish Cypriot Cockney husband. Marissa: eleven month old princess, she's sleeping pink-soled feet up, long brown legs, white nightgown open across the back, little regal head on a flattened pink teddybear, tiny gold earrings, eyelashes tightly curled, pickanniny tufts on her head. Her eyes aren't black, they're almost silver, flat water-silver rings around large black pupils. Her mother is like her, tall, long-necked beautiful girl sitting bored holding her daughter, she's pregnant in a hard curve stalking above her long soft boots. William (Michael) seven month old with a round little adult head, propped up day and night in a baby chair, straining at his straps, screaming to get out, instantly quiet when we picked him up. Monkey-face Lisa, bandaged legs and arms with eczema scabs showing dark through them, scaly head and lined black neck. Her mother sat reading newspapers, half an hour every afternoon. "The boy's nice looking." (Bratty Rodney; but monkey-agile Lisa with her wiry intelligence isn't pretty - I disliked that Rodney.) Julie, little Greek with a beautiful bushy haired mother - all these mothers! Most are so young. But Maria's heavy Italian mother, thick and stiff with broken veins in her face and frizzy short hair; her husband, also thick and stiff in his black suit and white shirt, without tie, wider at the collar than at the top of his head; the two of them, and at least two other couples almost identical to them (so that it takes me two days to distinguish her actual parents). Dr [Ian] MacIntosh. Thin, tumble of hair, large intelligent eyes, rubbery thin-cheeked smile. "So good with the children." The first twenty four hours I was on the edge of tears at every moment, watching the children, listening, sitting beside Luke's bed and then lying awake when the ward was dark with only a spotlight above the entire table. Luke's temperature climbed to 103, I jumped up when they took it, every hour, to see whether it was down. He lay naked with a fan on him, sleeping uneasily, and I resented the swaggering male nurses, their banging assurance and Luke's discomfort. Roy didn't know where I was, I felt alone in my fear for Luke and my adventure with him. Lisa, little William, Maria held limp in her pink pyjamas surrounded by six Italians arguing with the doctors, then the pale little boy. Why's that Dr MacIntosh doing night duty on the wards tonight? Coming in in an anorak, standing there with his hands in his pockets watching a figure skater on television, going out, goodnight, and leaving me a long look down the length of the ward. Earlier when he came in I was embarrassed to be playing the doctor-worshipping little girl - BUT it's not that, it's an amazing presence, the way he sat at a child's bed two afternoons ago returning my curiosity, and the way, when I came in out of the rain this morning from the Whittington I rushed into his look and then smile, and felt my hair falling out of its bun down my neck as I passed him. Why does he bother to see me - there he is again! - what's more charming than that shy hunger I perhaps imagine? Or maybe it's my shy hunger he finds charming. Writing this with Roy watching from behind my eyes I realize it's a "fairly limited" way of talking to myself, yet it comforts me to slowly carefully retaste and form what's given me pleasure. The first day here was a pleasure like that, but I had nothing to write my happy tearful short story with, and now it comes out falsely because I don't remember it very well. Then every word embarrasses me because it's false, as many of my contacts in the ward are false and almost unbearable now. I don't want to go home, I love the arrivals here, the babies crying and comforted, the bizarre mixings of parents, the easy anarchy in which our food and clean sheets and orange medicine arrive when we need them and we do as we like, the babies sleeping diagonally across their beds on their knees with their plastic pants and their ducks' bums up. Or Del, with her white net elf's cap tucked under sheets up to her chin. The creature in the end bed, white pointed head covered with straight black hair, sleeps all day covered with a white sheet; sometimes, very rarely, he cries, not a real cry, more like a door creaking slowly open. He's two and can't sit by himself, hardly moves.
[loose pages] Babysitting at Angela's. Three babies sleeping next door. Photographs - that smiling child. Letters to her dead mother, the mother as smiling child, then Angela as a smiling model holding an ice cream cone and lightly with her left hand touching a large machine - Angela as a smiling bride, then one photograph where the smile has stopped and instead she's tired, lined, eyes saying stop, still, hold, wait. School pictures, the little girl's head swiveling, smiling; the light runs so beautifully along those perfect strong features - do I imagine that this could only be the face of someone living in those old houses holding such vast lawns out in front of them, governess, nanny, Mummy, Daddy, money face? (My own school pictures, embarrassed smile falling sideways stiffened up by a traveling photographer?) Remembering how long I felt and feel my Cinderella circumstances - myself blazing and true without anything to dress me as myself and there I still am with Roy, both of us so illegitimate. Thought of Luke, of course - his radiance like Angela and her radiant child-mother (cartwheels, dogs, picnics on thorny moors, groups in tweeds and plaids, Churchills, Alexanders, and something French and noble) - how he loves to play and be played with, how I seem to lose him at Roy's. Roy, escaped to Sheila Robinson's party like a guilty husband, I was burning angry in the pit of my stomach and let it die down, thinking of Colin and my own duplicities on behalf of freedom, my guilt in pretence and absence. But I always let myself feel guilty and use that guilt to lose my anger. In fact I am wronged and shouldn't buy forgiveness by forgiving. Now I'm less angry but more excited, want to go back and fight. In fact I hardly noticed his dimness and coolness the past few days, because of my own: Dr MacIntosh, Colin, and hours of pots - Those photographs with anger in my stomach meant children smiling with dogs, Luke on the stairs, radiance, Angela's face tired, my own hollow eyes, the mother dead of a heart attack, Luke and myself and Roy dying. Lying. Promises. Can we be different with the promises we make to Luke, actually keep them? Dreamed last night that my father died. Relieved, we put our table scraps and dirty dishes into the coffin with him. Next day, wondered if Mother'd got them out before they came with the flowers. Began to feel sorry, wonder who he was, think of his stubborn hunger for holiness, think of his bitter angry lower jaw, all of himself unknown to anyone and quite lost, wished him alive again so I could find him. Never forgive him for neglecting and disdaining me, for not finding me sexy, so that's who I see in Roy, true; and I'm the mother he's flouting. Yet this morning I danced a chorus line for him stumbling over my feet but happy and delighted with myself. He said "You should be a chorus girl with that smile and ..." It was for him; can he dance for me? For anyone. Well. that's not the same. Sad seesaw. But I have my own house now. Epp, you're so easily conned into giving it all up, guilt and that old social envy. When I told him my fantasy about Dr MacIntosh he said "That makes me very lonely." [undated journal] Colin's sad self-mistrustful adulthood, his effort to be responsible; Roy's easy self-occupied quick contempt, he eats and spits out, satisfies himself that everything's empty while pretending to himself to believe that he's some kind of world-lover who fills everything he touches with life: the unconscious selfprotective cynicism of the con-artist - I wonder how it ages? * - Wednesday I have an art now! I think and think about pots, and when I go back to old pictures, I've changed in what I like. Yesterday just before going home I threw an exquisite bottle. My wrists even now feel the tension of a neck beginning to wobble; I'm learning a little every day, have to pay closer and better attention to what to do. Correspondences: real but irrational associations between objects. Moore: I have always paid great attention to natural forms, such as bones, shells, and pebbles etc. Sometimes for several years running I have been to the same part of the sea-shore - but each year a new shape of pebble has caught my eye, which the year before, though it was there in hundreds, I never saw. Out of the millions of pebbles passed in walking along the shore, I choose to see with excitement only those which fit in with my existing form-interest at the time. A different thing happens if I sit down and examine a handful one by one. I may then extend my form-experience more, by giving my mind time to become conditioned to a new shape. Moore Sculptures and Drawings vol 1, xxxiv. Also in The Listener 18 Aug 1937. Read talks about sculpture interested in vitality not beauty: Early Greek, Etruscan, Ancient Mexican, Mesopotamian, 4th and 12th Dynasty Egyptian, Romanesque and Early Gothic, African and Polynesian. Hans Richter: On this battlefield, the canvas, I have to deal with both sides: the irrational of my inspiration and the rational of the forms and colors which dictate their own life. This conflict is so real and so substantial to me that it is the subject of practically all my late paintings, collages, reliefs, sculptures, films: to bring organic form - the expression of nature, chaos, the unconscious, the emotional - into a relationship with inorganic form - the human, the planned, the consciousness, the intellectual. On making the first abstract film: So it's not only the discovery of a new technique or a new aesthetic law for a new technique that counts, but also a new kind of correspondence with the outer world, with the universe, with the earth, with our environment, with ourselves . Or is the universe the ultimate in chaos? We don't know. Our position as human beings, however, is simply that we cannot live without fixing point by point a place where we can stand. So in this way I tried to get for myself in painting some points where I can stand. On other points where I don't need to stand, I can fly. - After calling the cops Friday night to get Roy out because he was drunk and wouldn't leave, this dream: In some country place, a camp. Roy's in my cabin, drunk I think, and I drag him out the door and shut it. Later we all look for him, search parties on the river and all. As I come around a bend in what seems like a racetrack with an older woman, I'm told that the dyke-like banks on the other side of the road are still mined since the war. There's an explosion just below our line of vision on the far side of the bank. I know instantly that it's Roy. Then I see him stagger back, in his tight black pants and red lumber jacket, with a red bleeding wound opening his chest. He's gone in an ambulance before I reach him. I'm outside the door waiting for him to come out of surgery. He comes out on a stretcher, feet first - as it wheels round I see that his face is covered with the rubbery sheet that, as he's taken away and I incredulously realize that he's dead, blooms up into a rubbery (rubber glove texture) mushroom rather pot-shaped where his head and shoulders are. In my dream I reflect that this is a convenient solution: I can live in memories of my beautiful young man who died in all his young glory, and dead and unquarrelsome I can afford to let go and love him. - So much that I forget. At pottery today, Alan Caiger-Smith talking about his lustred bowls, standing pink faced and mincing his English but streaming with happiness in his work and setting us all alight so that I came in after lunch and threw a solid beautiful little classical bottle. Mafalda is so thin that her chin is a straight line across her neck and her eyes are huge and brilliant - lying falling asleep the little veins in her eyelids stand out and her skin wrinkles with fatigue and cold. She's fragile and pretty, and I feel like Margaret saying "It makes you somehow special" - the baby wears her out and gives her an edge, she doesn't look ill, only feverish and sharpened. Luke's smile when I came to Mrs Hickey's to get him; Roy's face when he came downstairs this morning and we sat in silence while he made and we drank cups of coffee - sitting there in silence made my anger leave and I came to touch his face, study his hurt lower lip, marvel how young he is. He's cross and stiff because I'm being outrageous, but in this kind of tension we don't sag together falsely and I'm free from my guilt and can be loving with him. Kevin coming downstairs red-faced and sleepy; when I say hello he says hello there, it's self-conscious now but I want to protest that I don't resent or fear him, on the contrary find myself feeling very close to him. "Why don't you stay it out?" said of my embarrassment with Sheila; reflects on him, he's very upright and adventurous and I like to think of him loving Roy - too. Although I wish someone would love me. Ian [Brown], thinner and older, anxious when he speaks, but eyes and hands rapping out such playful invitation. When he stroked my hair once and said "I know you, baby," I felt he'd recovered from our fights and is back strong. Colin: standing on the steps looking back down into my room, talking to Debbie, I see him standing stiff with his back to me, his wide bottom and his legs pointing down in those ugly blue pants. He came this weekend with his hair cut, dressed for his father and very doubtful about me - and has decided to take his father to Portugal - what's this? When I woke I was in a cold empty fury, like the WL weekend, rolled stiffly away and wouldn't speak, and he couldn't either. I dressed Luke. "Where are you going?" "Out," stiff smile. On the sidewalk, "Can I drop you somewhere?" I park Luke and go to stiffly hug him, without a word, he pulls away and I just see the end of his red nose before he turns and I go to Roy's for breakfast - I carry a dumb knot in my stomach most of the day, the two images: his legs below the door frame grieving so privately, his crying nose, squeezing my stomach when I remember them. It's as if we're closer again, even closer than after the easy affection of last time, ah. How to untangle his confusion about guilt, "When I think about it afterwards my face involuntarily makes a grimace." "Does it still, when you think of me? Say; I don't mind." Silence. - Finding myself sweating while I took pictures of Mrs Hattori's Bizen pots on a bit of deep orange material. The round back of Parliament Hill with trees like a mane and the sky in winter always seeming whiter and lighter above it. - Something new with Roy, on Friday, because the sun shone, I walked downhill through the park with him and to St Alban's Road. In the afternoon we lay together in the big bed with our arms around each other, our hands and all our fingers closed around each other's shoulders and heads. I could just see the top of St Joseph's looking white as a tower of a strange white city; the sky was so vast and clear blue, we lay warm and at the same time sank into dreams and then, at the same time swiftly rose out of them, when we heard the window clatter and had to start for Luke and the bank. All weekend Luke in his red jumpsuit tottered across the rush mats toward doors he'd noticed were slightly open or toward our knees or teacups, toes pointed like a dancer but rickety as a puppet, sways, collapses on his bum, darts forward again on his knees, all mouth and eyebrows exclaiming how happy he is. We watch him and laugh toward each other, he fills us with joy, we bend ourselves toward him and he smiles, laughs, shouts, chatters, dances his head, bounces on the cushions, scrambles upstairs. When we try to sleep he comes alongside the bed and pokes our eyes and nostrils. Grey Sunday morning I woke to find him pouring Carnation on my head - he'd poured the rest on himself and the bed. (He has his bed in the corner behind the chest of drawers now, a nest made of old cushions, a real lumpy nest that seems better for the way he likes to sleep now, curled around a bump with the cell blanket somewhere near and the bottle chucked down empty.) He could climb onto the bed and then would let himself down off the end, one leg first, just swing himself skillfully off the edge. He can pile cartridges on the tape recorder to try to make music; he can wreck the record player by seizing the record through a crack. [letter] Tuesday night, 1st of March Lots of news. Luke is walking well, always very fast, legs hurrying to keep up with the momentum he's given himself throwing himself forward to whatever he wants so badly. He falls constantly, on his head and his bum, bohmps, but doesn't cry much. He's talking, or at least we think he's talking. His first real word is what we thought it would be: huh-LA, hello; or maybe his take-off of Roy saying hel-LO Luke. He says da when we give him something nice or when he gives us something nice, and he says dadada in a reasonable friendly tone more or less all the time. He can wave goodbye, although I never meant to teach him that because it seemed such a universal baby-monkey trick. He can beat a piece of paper with a pencil but he uses the beautiful crayons I bought him mainly to eat. Everyday he eats half a pint of dirt from my pot plants, and he's slowly enlarging a hole in the plaster wall under the window. He's taller and much slimmer and his hair is past his shoulders in the back. Everyone says "What a gorgeous little face she has," and it's true that he's wonderfully good-looking ("E'll break some hearts, 'e will" says the check-out girl at the Dairy). And everyone says he looks just like Roy. But sometimes I catch a sudden glimpse of someone else, maybe it's you, maybe me, maybe Paul. Lots of funny things happen: for instance, I've always dated you by adding twenty one to my age; but now I date myself by adding twenty five to his age. (I thought of you the other day too, when I found myself in exactly the absent-minded fuddle I used to laugh at you for. A girl on the street stopped me to ask "Have you got the right time?" and I said "I haven't got any at all, thank you.") The main news about Luke is that he has started school. He now goes to nursery school {Konstamm, across the road from Highgate Cemetery], where he paints, eats two helpings of everything, sleeps, eats chalk and sand, pulls little girls' hair, cries. It is a remarkably good place, at least I hope it is, and he seemed to be independent and curious enough for it now. The first day I left him there on his own, he wanted to sit on my lap for about an hour when I brought him home, but now he runs straight to the potted plant when he gets home, and that seems to be a good sign. I am a little uncertain because he is so little, but then I don't believe any woman should give her whole day to her children, and I think part time nursery care must be nice for babies too, especially babies as hungry for new things as Luke is. Other good news is that he and I are no longer living in just one cold room - we now have the long, light, pretty room upstairs too, inherited from Chris and Debbie who've moved away. The whole flat is relatively shabby, nothing like the comfortable North American elegance of St Alban's Road, but it is very very cheap and means that I can be independent!!!! Very good for me and actually very good for Roy too, because it means that he can be as naughty, or free, as he likes without my having to suffer for it, and vice versa, and we can visit each other in our-own-shaped territories. It's a bit anti-communal, but it works, I hope, I hope. Roy's fine, going through one of his generous, loving, trusting, truthful, relatively honest, calm and reasonable times, still, as always, looking for a project. Luke shouts for joy when he arrives, and it looks as though he'll be a daddy's boy, which pleases me and makes me jealous. Roy's almost more a mother than I am, and I'm almost more a father, which is nice, except for my very old terror of being like my father. I am making some good pots and the alligator-teacher says I'm her best beginner. It's hard to explain the pleasure of form and texture, but when I do pottery it's a bit like having a new lover, an exciting secret preoccupation, a nice tension at the pit of the stomach, stray thoughts that make me really feel quite unfaithful to Roy. He says "Where are you, what are you thinking about?" and I feel silly when I have to say " pots.") Making my new upstairs space is a bit like that too - and the garden. I go out to houses that are being torn down and dig up plants, bluebells, daffodils, grape hyacinths, and strange plants that will surprise me when they grow up. And then I pick through the half-demolished ruins that look like bomb-sites in movies about the Blitz and find treasures like old rusty bits of bedspring, pipe, tincan, hinge, which make beautiful sculptures for our house. Sometimes there are other people who've also crawled through the hoardings and are dragging away old boards (timber is very 'dear' here), and we greet each other like children finding marvels in the dump. I get such joy out of scavengering, and have completely gotten over wanting to be well off. It seems ironical doesn't it - there's Father still trying so hard to make it into the middle class, and here are Judy and me and possibly Paul finding joy and strength in your way of calmly and ingeniously making do. Well, as long as making do extends to jet flights and movie cameras and not having to work much. I was going to stop after that page and go back to the typing I'm doing to help pay the electricity bill, but all the lights have gone out and the candle light is too dim for working but not too dim for writing you. There are regular power cuts these days because the miners have been on strike and the power stations hadn't any coal. People go without light and heat for hours every day, but everyone I meet supports the miners. There's a nice anti-middle-class feeling in this country that seems very British to me - it's a good country. Cousin Alfred arrived here with his wife one night for supper. It felt strange to be so much more radical than someone so much younger than I am - he went on exactly like Uncle Pete - cheerful, arrogant, opinionated, practical, shrewd, materialistic as a bank and about as boring. He was quite shocked at my living conditions and tactfully half-offered to send me a ticket back to Canada. Don't let Father keep you away from seeing Judy if you want to. He simply doesn't want to let you near that fiendish Michael and his corrupting ways. And as for that Chrysler! I hope you realize that you'll have to go back to university for another two years in order to raise your salary to the point where you can give him status toys. And hey, don't forget that you're saving money to be able to come to see Luke and me. There's a room waiting for you. You could stay for months, how about July? You could trade him his ticket into the big time for a ticket to London? This is a serious invitation. (But it doesn't include him.) Come if you can. Can you? Mafalda has been staying with me on her way to Portugal. She's getting round and excited; the creature's name is Kaliel. I've written almost nothing, because there's nothing here about the all-day every-day struggle to find new ways, all the failures, collapses into boredom and mechanism, convention, absences of mind or feeling. And the little flares of illumination, like the moment when Roy came home from a meeting late at night and we put our arms around each other and I felt something, or a flash of something, that was like "Here's my man." All the time I spend looking at him and rejoicing in his arms and legs and back and chin and all. All the times we sit and laugh together about Luke, and all the moments of such intense love for that little body full of feelings. Luke sits on the green carpet with six blood oranges between his overalled legs. He throws the oranges to me and wraps his arms around himself in an ecstasy of self-delight when I catch them, one by one. He sits with his mouth open watching Roy juggle the oranges very expertly. For that Saturday morning on the green carpet in my new room we're a loving family. Then we separate again, but I can't help finding out how dear that triangle is to me, and eventually I even begin to discover how dear I am to Roy. At St Alban's Road, when we arrive at Heath Lodge, I stand back and Roy holds Luke out at waist level, on his stomach like a child learning to swim, and RUNS all the way up the stairs to flat 7 with Luke out front like a jet plane, shrieking with excitement. When Luke comes back from nursery school he greets the front hall with a little cry. Then we sit on the basket beside the window and he lies back against me for a moment before he's off. When he's tired and wants to go to bed he comes and lays his face against my knee. In the morning he complains until I get up, and then, when I bring him to my (our) bed he's such a smiling bundle of furry blue sleepsuit, so happy to see us, that it is not so hard to get up, even so horribly early. Luke gives my days a shape that's nice. He's such a glowing little person. Surely babies aren't all so wonderful? Do go to see Akasha - I want to know about him, he and Luke should be good friends, they'll both be wild as crows. So there, dear M, now I'm too tired to write more and you'll get a letter. (But I do NOT KNOW what day Mother's Day cum National Spend-some-guilt-money Day is). - Appendix Can I tell you about my new garden? My very small triangle of earthwormy London soil full of old glass, bits of brick, splinters of roofing slate, wood, dog-buried bones, several centuries of rubble and many cycles of care and neglect: plants there from who-knows how long ago, like the long-armed rambling rose that's thrown two branches almost across to the brick wall on the opposite side - high old brick walls with clay rotting a bit and growing a beautiful patina. A clump of hyacinth? I found pushing up very yellow and feeble under the rubble. Clumps of daffodils with buds. Two big strong forsythia shrubs with warty diseased lumps among the yellow buds that will be open by next week. At the back, the apex of the triangle, is a tall woody mushrooming philadelphus - ie a scented mock orange that will bloom sometime later, but that now blooms with birds who prefer it to every other tree in the neighbourhood's back-garden mosaic. (Three streets come together like this [sketch] and all the back gardens are fitted together somehow in the space in the middle - a secret space all enclosed in brick buildings, some of it left to weeds, some articulated inch-by-inch with sidewalks, flowerbeds, garden gnomes each in its never-to-be-altered place.) A low wrinkled plant that began to come up in January and that now suddenly broke out into two tiny purple flowers with bright yellow eyes, blooming next to the two fragile little purple English crocuses in their grassy stems that came up along with it (did you know that your hairy Alberta crocus is really an anemone?). [journal] Merton: humility consists precisely in being the person
you actually are before God takes whatever there is in the world that helps
him to find God and leaves the rest aside brings with it a deep refinement
of spirit, a peacefulness, a tact and a common sense work out your own salvation
in a darkness where you are absolutely alone
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