| london volume 4 part 3 - 1972 june-july | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
[undated letter] "The Pooh side of my character is disgracefully disturbing my attempt at living at a more spiritualized level where I imagine the 'lighter' people to live who do not yearn for a good piece of cheese when they ought to be totally absorbed in a philosophical task that's ever so relevant. Oh ..." - From - guess who? Katrin after she was here at Easter, in a blue and yellow costume she'd made, full of giggles and whimsies. The night before she left she was bursting with adventure - couldn't bear to go to a movie, as we'd planned. So we went to a strip club, a very posh and lugubrious show that was too self conscious to be sexy. The girls themselves kept breaking up, and when the audience began to laugh in sympathy the girls had to whisper to them to hush so the manager wouldn't fire them. All my trees are green - yesterday very sad and lonely, I went into the garden and was instantly cheered up by finding ten pale shy nasturtiums come up overnight and already two inches high. I've planted so many nasturtiums and so many beans (which haven't shaken the soil off their little blind heads yet), the beans not to eat, especially, but because the kind they grow here climb five feet tall and have red flowers on them, and I want them to cover the brick walls. And morning glories - and sweetpeas; they're up, wrinkled little stalks. Every morning when I get up I go out to see what's grown and every evening when I get home, and sometimes in between. And as for Luke - he's grown every morning too. Now he has pink eyes, some kind of infection, and looks like a poor weepy little waif whose mother beats him and who's cried until his eyes swoll' up. Roy's moving into a commune a couple of miles from here in Islington [Random Association, 51 Buckingham Rd N1], Sue and Pooh and Mossy and Isabel (Bun) and Dave and Nadine and Kevin and Margaret (Pooh's mother and Mossy and Bun's grandmother) and Judd etc - I'm an outpost of it and Luke's a member. They have three tall houses in a row, connected by gardens. At the moment they're working hard - even Roy! - making it nice. I think it's good for Roy, gives him the lots of people that he needs, to play with. And at last it's begun, after they spent the winter having preliminary meetings. He's happy. They all like him. Luke's been home all this week with his infectious infection, it's been nice seeing so much of him. In the morning when he gets up, and gets me up, I take off his wet cold diapers and he comes to sit on my bare legs with his bare bum, settling into the lap space where I sit crosslegged as if it were an armchair, to warm himself on me - and that's nice. Catherine's been helping me some afternoons, Roy's mum. Tonight after she went home I was remembering my mother in law problems and feeling how well they've come up - she's so bright and kind and honest and pretty an old lady that I've nothing against her any more, and I feel that's mutual; she still feels I could be more conventional, but she helps with Luke and is grateful to be able to, so she can think what she likes of me. Initially I suppose she was jealous and resentful but now she's begun to tell me about her childhood; and besides she needs me to share her delight with Luke. So she buys me with food, just as she does Luke (and Roy), always brings something for me as well as Luke - often funny things I don't like! Luke's often got a Konrad look to him these days - that rosy healthy Alexander look. - Much later - I have your letter and Mother's Day card - Luke thinks the card is a book, and therefore a present for him. You saw Don and Olivia and Michael! My hackles rose when you said that some of O's theories made me more understandable to you cos I've always disliked her theories about me! I loved hearing about your day by the stream bank across the road from the school - I remember one ecstatic spring day we went there to play softball on the first bit of dry ground in that grassy pasture. Here our spring has turned cold and grey, I'm longing for some real heat, Luke and I are both choked with colds and we're scheming to get to Portugal for Mafalda's baby's birthday. I think I will make it! Roy's going to Greece. [undated journal] The Tuesday meeting: not the temperature of last week, the slow spoken girl was missing, as well as the Swedish woman. But: Gail, Hilary (strong alert excited profile!), Maggie, the girl with three children, Maeve, the so ugly Australian? married girl with her little baby, Leslie so elegant. The room not quite full enough, and lacking that pale Australian who sat in the tall chair and made a focus of herself. Boring discussion of Food Co-op and next week's meeting. And lacking that slow-voiced intelligent girl. Maggie talking about her man - "quarrels so exhausting that in the end you just have a kind of horror of each other." - Then, after the tired waste at the photography class, coming out to see treetips against a pink evening, over the brick arcades of the railway bridge, I thought of Roy and told him: it will be a while before I stop feeling cheated by you, because I wanted to share everything with you. Then I thought of the choir of angels in the forest outside Munich, shared. - Coming home tired, Luke gives a glad cry and claims me; when I go to the kitchen he brings Catherine after him, she says "Here's a baba looking for you," I come to hug him and am flattered by them both. I think C's beginning to like me; at least adopt me. We sit and drink tea (coffee) when Luke goes down with his bottle, we're laughing and chattering, he gets up to look at us and she says "Any minute now we'll hear 'huh-luh,'" and just that instant he says - "Huh-luh" and we both laugh; I realize that she's looking at me while she laughs and depends on me to share her pleasure. - Polly's house [Loxton] - still life in the window, parsley, something weedy in a milk bottle, three artichokes, half a gourd-shell, orange, turned inside out to make an ashtray, the Dutch blue shutters, the window sill touched with sun, the garden behind. My camera magnifying it. Her baby, green and blue, in the London pride shadows, an 'eskimo' marble glowing out of a matt black background. A group of Negro workers and an old man in a hat, I fell in love with them. Aaron's Rod, Lilly - Lawrence: Why can't they submit to a bit of healthy individual authority .... She does nothing really but resist me: my authority, or my influence, or just me .... They only grin and feel triumphant when they've insulted one and punched one in the wind .... A man should pivot himself on his own pride. Men have got to stand up to the fact that manhood is more than childhood - and then force women to admit it .... And can you find two men to stick together without feeling criminal and without cringing, and without betraying one another .... One is sure to go fawning round some female, then they both enjoy giving each other away, and doing a new grovel before a woman again. somewhere beyond it all, one understands, and possesses one's soul in patience and in peace .... It's what you get after a lot of fighting and a lot of sensual fulfillment. .... We'll never get anywhere until we stand up man to man and face everything out, and break the old forms, and never let our own pride and courage of life be broken. Love was a battle in which each party strove for the mastery of the other's soul. It was an instinct in her that her man must yield to her .... How maddeningly she was in love with him. A certain unseizable beauty was his ... he withheld everything from her. He withheld the very centre of himself. For a long time she never realized. She was dazed and maddened only .... Cheated, foiled, betrayed, forced to love him, or to hate him, never able to be at peace near him or away from him ... all her instinct, all her impulse, all her desire, and above all, all her will, was to possess her man in very fullness once: just once: and once and for all .... She made his life a hell for him. She bit him to the bone with her frenzy of rage, chagrin and agony. She drove him mad too: mad, so that he beat her .... And neither of them understood what was happening. How should they? They were both dazed, horrified, and mortified. He, the man, the weak, the false, the treacherous, the half-hearted, it was he who must yield . Terrible was, that she found even his smile of insolent indifference half-beautiful . She fought against his fascination . And then, suddenly, horror and agony of it, up it would rush again, her unbearable desire for him, the longing for his contact, his quality of beauty. The completion of the process of love is the arrival at a state of simple, pure self-possession, for man and woman .... Perhaps never accomplished. But it moves in great stages, and at the end of each stage a true goal, where the soul possesses itself in simple and generous singleness. Without this, love is a disease .... The long fight with Lottie had driven him at last to himself, so that he was quiet as a thing which has its roots deep in life, and has lost its anxiety. He's in touch with his fantasy-solutions anyway. It used to be that desire started in the man and the woman answered .... I hate her when she will make of me that which serves her desire. She may love me, she may be soft and kind to me, she may give her life for me .... Only because I am hers. the balance lies in that, that when one goes up, the other goes down. One acts, the other takes. Most men want only that a woman shall want them. Most men want only this: that a woman shall choose one man out, to be her man, and he shall worship her and come up when she shall provoke him. Otherwise he is to keep still. And the woman, she is quite sure of her part. She must be loved and adored, and above all, obeyed: particularly in her sex desire. There she must not be thwarted, or she becomes a devil. And if she is obeyed, she becomes a misunderstood woman with nerves, looking round for the next man whom she can bring under. The Marchese's speech. The way out is that it should change; that the man should be the asker and the woman the answerer. So he seeks young girls, who know nothing, and so cannot force him. Aaron felt that Lilly was there, existing in life, yet neither asking for connection nor preventing any connection. He was present, he was the real centre of the group. When he plays for the Marchesa and she comes and sings, For a long time his desire for women had kept itself back, fast back .... And now came his desire back .... He had got it back, the male godliness, the male godhead ... his male superpower, and his thunderbolt desire ... he felt her looking at his limbs ... And this went against him .... Not powerful, as he imagined her ... almost small and childish, whilst in daily life she looked a full, womanly woman .... In some strange incomprehensible way, as a girl-child blindly obstinate in her deepest nature, she was against him ... he knew quite well he was only in possession of a tithe of his natural faculties. And in his male spirit he felt himself hating her .... A husband cannot be a lover, and a lover cannot be a husband ... I am a husband to a woman who wants a lover .... And I can't be it any more. I don't want to. I have finished that. The only goal is the fulfilling of your own soul's active desire and suggestion .... The urge of power does not seek for happiness any more than for any other state. It urges from within, darkly, for the displacing of the old leaves, the inception of the new ... the woman must submit, but deeply, deeply submit .... To the soul in its dark motion of power and pride .... A deep unfathomable free submission .... Whatever else happens, somewhere, sometime, the deep power-urge in a man will have to issue forth again, and woman will submit, livingly, not subjectedly ... once man disengages himself from the love mode and stands clear the woman won't be able to resist. Her own soul will wish to yield itself ... every woman must be herself, herself only, not some man's instrument .... But the mode of our being is such that we can only live and have our being whilst we are implicit in one of the great dynamic modes. We must either love, or rule. And once the love-mode changes, as change it must, for we are worn out and becoming evil in its persistence, then the other mode will take place in us. And there will be profound, profound obedience in place of this love-crying, obedience to the incalculable power-urge. And men must submit to the greater soul in a man, for their guidance; and women must submit to the positive power-soul in man, for their being. Body of Darkness a man's body as a kind of flame upright and yet flowing: and the intellect is just the light that is shed on to the things around I think the only re-sourcing of art, revivifying it, is to make it more the joint work of man and woman. On his repetitive style: every natural crisis in emotion or passion or understanding comes from this pulsing frictional to-and-fro, which works up to culmination. Peace is the state of fulfilling the deepest desire of the soul. It is the condition of flying within the greatest impulse that enters from the unknown. Morality and the Novel: The business of art is to reveal the relation between man and his universe, at the living moment. As mankind is always struggling in the toils of old relationships, art is always ahead of the 'times,' which themselves are always far in the rear of the living moment. We can be in ourselves spontaneous and flexible as flame . [page missing here?] I won't be made, my face, even my face clenches with determination not to be made. His mouth smells alcoholic, his body feels willful and aggressive, and I won't be made. I want to lie next to him and sleep. I say "I thought we could just lie together," at which he gets up, gets dressed, mutters about being made a fool of, and goes straight home. And I'm glad to have escaped that willful body trying to clamp me hard, poke me, and call it love for my "bee-oo-tiful body." Grief - so much grief when I read Jud's love letter and remember Polly talking about her husband, and saying "But you'll need another adult around." Contempt - at his confused willful seduction litany, and anger because he says so easily what at the bone of me I want to hear truthfully. ("I need to be respected too.") Affection, my spine going soft to sit against him and be glad of his crowned chimneys and my dipping birds in the garden, such a need to share with him. So much refusal of him ("If neither of us needed to be in control, we could have a relationship. We could come and go and leave, and we could still be annoyed but -") - relief that he'd gone and I'd escaped that pushing body wanting to put its pin through me. Ha - I'm willful too, real willful refusal - it feels important. ("I'll be your lover any time you like," he said. "It's not the same, it's not the same," I wept.) Today he ordered his mother home, so that she cried; he sulked, complained; and his eyes shone wolfish silver. "I'm getting my grace back, a little." Enough of him. Cathartic drama. - Note - at the Institute on Wednesday, the judo class in their white pyjamas, black boys very black sleek heads above the white clothes that hide everything but their black feet, pink soled, and their hands. Picture: a curly white man (Irish? that rough face) showing a black boy some moves. They do it in slow motion: catch the other by his coat lapel just below his collarbone, lay your head against his chin, touch his arm with the other hand light as a kitten, press, light, roll - they did it so elegantly it was perfectly loving - thrilled me to watch it, their obscure game on a corner of the mats, behind the row of white backs watching a match. - "Why don't you ever tell me you love me anymore?" - Another bit of our skeleton: that the nastiest thing a woman can do is to arouse a man she has no intention of letting into her: and affectionate or needy touching is included. I'm not going to keep that rule anymore. - In Polly's sculpture the sense of research embodied. In my drawings and John McLaren's class, the sense of research embodied in me - ie I know more than I think.
"A man," humanity - - And then, Saturday, next day, we and Luke go driving in the car, go onto the Heath in the rain to see the inflatables and all the pretty people, clowns, kids, an Amazing Band with a pink cheeked smiling drummer and a girl clown, little white face, stealing a kiss from a delighted baby, her hairy red cold legs in too-big boots, lots of pretty men; Roy's high, we drive and sing, go to see Henry, he brings me home, happy afternoon in affection and exhilaration. Luke drags around the red toy telephone saying "Huh-luh." I put him to bed at five, because he was so tired. At eight I went down and heard him chuckling. He was sitting pink-faced in his bed, getting his pleasure out of tucking and untucking his blanket, big soft featherbed, over his legs. I worked all this evening to make my front room beautiful - I'm so pleased to come down the stairs and see the chest of drawers where I've moved it side by side with the red cupboard, brown and red, with my pots in it, along the orange and white stairway. Upstairs, the corner under the phonograph has a soft pile of mattresses covered with a pale blue blanket, and my sleeping bag in the flowered curtain material for a pillow. Sunday Good dreams. Traveling in a strange country near 'home,' hilly, a house built over a creek ('Mr Friesen's') with many rooms. Roy had one there, I was traveling sometimes with two girls, sometimes with Paul, sometimes with two men and another woman, there was a cinema, but the best part, near waking: a girl traveler and I are met by two men, boys, young, and we're young - we've met them before and they've come to intercept us, after having made a great effort to find us. The one who's coming for me is small, thin, wears glasses and has curly dark hair; he doesn't look like much, a studious body. We lie down in the sun, on a hillside I think, warming our faces. He reaches across the other boy to touch me - this boy, fat and red headed, gets up to lie next to my girl friend. The thin boy turns to lie over me; he puts one hand on my clitoris and begins to kiss me. I warm and lie soft, feeling that I'm in good hands. Wake up relaxed and glad, with sun coming in the window. Journey, house over a stream, wagon, somebody's death? and the happy surprise of an unlikely lover - remember the novelist - perhaps it's my serene future. At Roy's community, people turning remarks and posing them between each other with that particularly tense declared sound. I don't like it, when I'm there I sound like that too. But: Gary, ten years old? in a pink shirt, rough, naughty; I sat in the garden and called Luke to come, but he didn't. Gary jumped up behind me to grab my neck muscles and pinch them - one of his tricks. I reached my arm around and pulled him onto my lap and wrapped my arms very tight around him and held him, rocking very slightly. He stayed completely still and let me hold him. I said, "You're very hard aren't you? Very strong." Above his head I saw Kevin in Margaret's bathroom, shaving in front of the window and we looked at each other thinking of when he was drunk and I held him. But this Gary - I loved holding him, I felt a blaze of tenderness for him; it was a blazing happy moment. Then Pooh came through, saying something, and I thought Gary would disappear in embarrassment. But he only looked up, and then I folded him tight again, hard and isolate but very willing body. Isobel came to ask him to set up her ladder for her, and he ran off. Sue later said "Actually, I've never seen that before." Trying awkwardly to explain it to Roy I said "I was so proud. I felt that I'd read something right, and that doesn't often happen to me." Felt so queer with Roy, his disaffection - yet, we're peaceful and fond with each other. He gets horny and feels me up, and that's nice, but I feel good not letting him into me. His nice room, yellow blistered scabby (bad plaster) walls, black skirting boards, white ceiling, white window, herb pots on the sill and the immense poplar tree soughing like the ocean in the next garden - his bed and his matting - his red and black Japanese happiness lantern, his back garden; his nest for Luke under the lantern, at the foot of his bed. Luke trying to stuff the 45 into the record player for Oh Happy Day that we put on loud as a train. - Drawing class - the music from downstairs that comes whirling up like fairground music makes me want to waltz, tango, the old fashioned springy tense dances you do with somebody (want to sing too: at the Tottenham Court Road tube station a blond longhair singing You've Got a Friend in an especially echoey bit of underground, loud steel guitar, he rang out - I wanted to stand and sing next to him - was too shy, and stood around the corner listening - a black boy in an overall stood outright listening to him, and when he passed me he said "He's got a beautiful voice hasn't he" to me - pleased me. I had a fantasy about taking the singer home, because he was good - maybe not that good - but I could busk) - I sat on the table looking sideways out the window, thinking about dancing. John exclaimed to the two new girls about Stanislavski and how you should pretend that every drawing was the last before the bomb went off in five minutes, "otherwise it's just dilettante" (rhymes with pantie) - the two girls came in late - I was annoyed, they seemed unshapely and ugly and VULGAR - because they came in strange and there I was sitting to be stared at - both drew a thin little stickey leg, one especially was like a ham bone hung from a meaty thigh - then the little dark girl's face took on a happy animation, she was excited about drawing, and the other girl in her thick rude face had massive strong eyes. Moustache, with his slouched thin body hung with jeans and a sweater. That elderly man with his nice and gentle face standing erect beside his easel doing fine precise oily paintings of me. The stout mother to whom the class is so important, lonely as she is, stupid thick as she is. John short legged and long bodied, with his toes turned up at the ends of his funny oxfords, and his heavy big head - "Don't waste your time preparing." - Women's Interchange at the Hole in the Wall - looking around to see the special faces from my group: Maggie with her head held still and alert across the room, Gail, sharp face frowning concentration, Claire, and, then, for me, the two - embarrassing - the friends, Hilary, Angela, whose presence makes me both shy and proud - they're the aristocrats, they have the style, they're the focus - and am I with them? When I looked at those women I felt pride and tenderness, loved them, and was shy of it. Physically present and powerful, especially Hilary with her smiling big rubbery mouth and face that flickers between fine and large, like mine I suppose; I'm kind of in love with her. Angela lisping modestly, her big-nosed French-ugly face, such reserves, they're graceful with each other. Hilary and the Street Theatre girl, leaning against each other, I was jealous to think they might be lovers - here I am, with secrets again. - Because of research writing: that Soho nervy-hungry lonely excitement of ideas - oh Roy, you lend yourself to lovely illusions - Friday night, shifting between fantasies of brilliant manlessness, and a dizzy little fear of poverty, raw poverty, rawness of my rooms, my stairs, my cave kitchen, and their silence, privacy. Should I have been thankful for what I had? Never! And I was. Eleanor Bron and her husband in a television skit: Euston Station, he taps women on the shoulder, he's refused, he goes to her, she takes off her kerchief, smiles, stands up, and they begin to waltz - I want to learn to waltz. Luke slung onto my hip bone, into the curve of my waist, fits his legs around me. Saturday On ITV, what was that? Scientists talking - a long-haired man laughing with delight and excitement in his world - asked by an interviewer whether it's easier for him to talk to a playwright, say, or another scientist, replies, eventually, that what's important is that the man have taken his subject as far as it can go, "he's not dilettante at all, he's on the frontiers, with mystery all around, mystery and wonder." The two men walking along a ridge in a woods talking about discoveries, laughing with simple delight in their conversation. Sunday The train from Gospel Oak - dancing on the platform, pushing Luke in his pushchair, through mysterious backyard London (I said "I think about going back on my bicycle and trying to find those places," and Francis lit up when she said "You never would! You could never find them again!") Luke and I happy and close (from this sunny morning's toast and eggs and mushrooms and flirtation, tickles, chases - he's learning to stare at his foot and say "shoe-oe). What a happy day it has been, coming to 51 Buckingham Road by noon, Dave smiling to let us in, Francis and Margaret and Roy eating onions at the kitchen table, my high animation - the children's room and Roy's shapely hug around my waist - Luke jumping from the kitchen table onto his lap - I felt lapped in affection - and then on the street, the lovely Cockney girls in their red and yellow clogs and brilliant gear sitting on a step by the bus stop, and the black kids scruffing home from Sunday school - the train back, garden patches flashing by and Hampstead Heath, a military band, kites, sun, grass, grass . Sunday crowds with more Cockney teenagers, clouds running, shadows running. Dreary office collective meeting: so this is where the drones of the movement feel powerful, in very small politics. So shriveling I had to try to call Roy; and instead of talking to him watch an hour of television. Dreamed last night of a tall thin dark-haired man; I was lost in a kind of erotic swoon with him, we went to his room, but it was all stopped when his roommate and a girl appeared; then I looked at him, and although his thin shanks in their bluejeans were still there - his face had a pinched and debauched look, a bit like Michael? - Monday drawing class - sitting looking out the window at the chestnut tree with its tower of flowers - walking the bicycle home to be able to smell the wallflowers and look at the inky evening sky, I miss the windows of St Alban's Road so much! I miss Roy to celebrate that towering chestnut - oh, to see and smell things with - he celebrates all that - he's very awake. I'm where I was before, longing for somebody to share my sensual world. Catherine with two black eyes, face marked like a possum. A chocolate ice cream cone eaten weary, on the floor, at the gallery. On Saturday, at Moditis with Roy, Francis, Margaret; and sweet Christie talking about Auden and Vézeley - and the Plaka! The taramosalata! Andre the waiter, his handsome father; his beautiful sister. And I think of Colin. And I like the warm water bottle between my knees, the scent of the yellow wallflowers - Mafalda somewhere round with her child. Friday Balance toppled, Roy's come out swinging, and I'm miserable, isolated, stuck, grief choked back, feeling how vulnerable I am completely without friends in London - not a single person who loves me. Luke. Wednesday WL meeting at Maeve's, we drink wine and so talk about sex. A new girl, Sarah; Claire gets brighter and warmer; Leslie wears less makeup and is letting her husband go to Saskatchewan alone! Maggie hides the crisps behind my ankle, friendly complicity, I'm happy. We hang around to leave together, and walk out in some warm relation to each other. We're physically tender with each other - and that has only begun. Claire's long thighs, Hilary's breadth, Maggie's white skin. Leslie's hair like a lioness, Sarah's broad battered alert beauty - and Marilyn said of me, "But - she's so lovely." Got home and went to bed; read a little Rieff and turned the light off, and then remembered our supper table configuration at home: Mother and Rudy facing the wall, Judy and Paul across from them; myself and Father facing each other from the two ends. - On Man Alive a film called Eastern Promise, the Krishna people, an 18 year old upper class girl, her mother answering the question "Do you think she'll find real peace and happiness?" said "But she has found peace and happiness. She's so changed. Now, when she leaves, something goes out of the house, something goes with her that's really very beautiful. That was never true before. It's something I find very moving." Tears in my eyes. Remembered another television program one weekend when I was staying with Roy at St Alban's Road: gypsies in some Communist country, a little girl, maybe four years old, in a smiling circle dancing seriously, fluently. Roy came downstairs from the toilet and found me sitting on the cushions beside the radiator with my eyes full of tears, said "What's the matter?" and understood when I told him. Bless him, somewhere in Greece by now. I sat in the empty rooms at St Alban's Road feeling what sacramental times and changes I have shared with that loving man riding himself like a surfer. Feeling how much more generous I could have been if I hadn't needed to hold so hard to my rights and privacies - wondering whether Jud can let him be and continue to laugh, as she does now. I was so stiff with fear of betrayal, I am stiff with fear of betrayal; won't I ever soften? Fly, float, skate, dance. Maggie's dream: she's being chased and suddenly flaps her elbows like chicken's wings and goes up - flies, over the roofs. Another dream - she's being chased, runs up some stairs into a room, and there's always a smell like ---, dream has recurred ever since she was very young. - Nice the way flat 7 is emptying itself slowly, the rooms becoming more beautiful as they become light on their colored walls, the green outside the windows closing them in like a new, other, wall. Roy coming yesterday in his Joseph's coat to try to con some things out of me: his velvet shirt and the photographs of Luke. Took Luke to the Adventure Playground at the foot of Parliament Hill, saw the sweep of grass, trees, pigeon-colored sky, Luke ran far away and came back - but not quite, stared at trains. Children and mothers, Luke with a fat nappy like a bulb almost to his knees; I was happy. - Catherine said how Roy came to say goodbye to her - "He had a new white teeshirt Kevin had lent him, and a rather smart orange floral shirt, and orange trousers Tony gave him" - stabbed me sharp. [At this point, late May or early June, I take Luke on the train to Estoril in Portugal where Mafalda is living in her family summerhouse waiting to have her baby.] [travel notebook] 52 Avenida Portugal, Estoril, June 6 Came with Catherine to the station in a taxi, gay to be leaving, Luke just brought sleepy upstairs and falling asleep again in the taxi, the driver taking that familiar route to Victoria, the 'bishop's erection' that made me miss Roy; arrived to find the boat train cancelled due to the general strike in France, but was informed we could sleep in the train on track #2 - found a compartment and got rid of Catherine, who was making up disasters, waved her pretty self off thru' the window and turned back to put Luke to bed on the floor, not easy because he was happy to peer out under the curtain and find trains, banging rattling flashing as trains came in and went out on the track alongside. I left him with the bottle and sat on the stoop feeling nicely at home, watching passengers coming past to the commuter train, lay down eventually, Luke still babbling, an official came along and took out the light bulbs for me, then I went down a few compartments and took them out for a sweet looking French woman, went back and lay wrapped around my sleeping bag, in a nice private space, the journey really begun - I missed Roy and wanted him to share and celebrate this adventure, but sore as I was, I remembered how he doesn't delight in discomfort, and was glad to have Luke to love, and to have the adventure to myself. Slept through the night, Luke covered with my leather jacket, until someone burst in early in the morning and I had to bundle everything onto the platform, Luke too, scooped up and his bottle stuck quickly into his mouth. The 5p Ladies where two good souls looked after my packsack, the teddybear tied onto it, and the blue laundry bag full of disposable nappies while we went and had a disturbed breakfast, Luke struggling to get out of his chair. The ten o'clock train, a compartment with Luke and me next to the window, oh countryside - daisies, a few poppies, clumps of natural forsythia, yellow buttercups, sun, hops climbing their long strings, oasthouses, sheep, a beautiful herd of fat brown cows, a white horse deep in a meadow far below and away, Luke flirting with three American musicians, Rita, Sam, dancing to the wheels' clatter, singing ch-ch-ch-ch-ch, struggling to climb up the window, running from door to window and back, digging in Rita's bag for presents, his smiling dirty prettiest. The sea! Bands of blue and grey sea, sun and clouds, all sparkling, the boat, and Luke sleeping on the floor below the window where the sea sparkled empty to all distance, his first encounter with a seagull big as a chicken staring down from the railing, he - and I - found and ate a crumbled piece of fruitcake left on the rail for gulls - I fed him an egg sandwich on the run - he had a lemonade in his bottle that spit at the back of his throat. At Calais, pressed into a three-carriage commuter train, six people's feet, and their luggage, and Luke trying to climb out of it, up the windows, kicking the virginal fat Englishwoman's knees; the young French girl with her blazing private eyes, looking at his nursery rhyme book with him, and when we had to change at an obscure station just past Amiens, helping me with the laundry bag when it began to pour down rain, everyone crowding down the quai into the subway, and as we stood and waited to get out, feeling like war victims in a bomb shelter, there was a comical shout from someone trying to get down out of it: "Ahley veet seel voo play, il ploo duhhorz" and a plump raincoated loveable American came down with three wet suitcases. A much longer train, and way struggles at the 'tête' of the train, a compartment with two men, one a chic meticulous student, frowning at Luke and underlining things in his meticulous notes. The sweet Frenchwoman helping with Luke. Wonderful gold-orange tiled roofs and a gold-orange post-rain light that I was irritated not to have peace for - Luke so pesty I gave him a most vindictive secret pinch - ruins and farms, new velvety grain fields, elegant seed rows of new plants or furrows of brown soil. Paris. Luke in the pushchair, the laundry bag hung over his handlebars, this blue quilt in a stringbag hung from one of the handlebars too, my Greek bag full of bottles, empty and for water and for evaporated milk, squashed hard-boiled eggs, to the Douane to get my packsack - the baggage from Calais hasn't come - where is it? - in Calais, there's a strike you know - quel malheur - "I can't help it, if I had it I'd give it to you." A Hôtesse de Paris calls a convent and the Armée de Salut to see if they'll shelter me; they won't. Now Luke's asleep on the floor in a corner of the second class waiting room, Spaniards, Blacks, Americans sit waiting for trains - I wish I had my sleeping bag and some of those nuts and dried apricots in my bag. A kind of stubborn pleasure in being so far out on a limb. [We slept on the floor in a little anteroom. When I woke the change purse with all my French money, that I'd had under my pillow, was gone.] - Another waiting room [in Spain], big darkening foyer opening onto the platform my train will leave from in another three hours. Luke's asleep in his chair, bottle and blanket on his lap, his quilt pinned around him. We're next to the door, I'm sitting crosslegged on the cold stone floor, with a dizzy sleepy swaying in my head. A bottle of sweet cold water, Spanish water from the Cantina, Spaniards sitting in little groups talking. - Portugal The train stops at the border town, opposite the station is a street market, on the corner a fruit stall under an awning, piles of oranges shining out of the shadow thrown by the awning. A girl and her brother come from the market with a kilo of cherries in a clear plastic bag; they hold the bag under a tap that rises on a pipe out of the street, wash the cherries, pour the water out, and get onto the train. Another small girl comes and goes during the hour we're in the station. She has on socks with holes - a dirty dress - she's pretty and very alert; when she goes up to someone to beg she wraps a shawl around her shoulders, graceful and dignified, and stands very straight. In between she throws the shawl onto a baggage cart. On the opposite side of the train a path rises into the fields and gardens. Women in black come down to the train with bundles. Hot bright sun, a completely clear intensely blue sky. At the end of the platform a baroque little house in white plaster and blue and white tiles; Homens and Senoras. The train leaves at last. Luke goes to sleep on the floor of the compartment we have to ourselves. I stand in the corridor like everybody else, looking out the long windows at the wide dry landscape we're passing through, high hilly country, a few dirt roads, small fields scraped out of the rocks, small gardens with tall gangly cabbages, beans and potatoes. Sometimes forests of pine and eucalyptus, no underbrush; I open the windows for the smell. The eucalyptus trees have long leaves like peach trees, some of them red, some green; they make me think of parrots, maybe because of the dangling individual leaves are like feathers; I love these forests with their oily pine and eucalyptus smell. Flowers: big purple thistles, bushes a bit like mesquite with yellow clover-smelling flowers, a few poppies, blue larkspur or something like it, wild geraniums on long, jointed stalks, roses growing freely over peasants' houses, wild carrot, crawling dangling profuse pink [probably bougainvillea?] - Kaliel born Saturday June 17 1972. [Luke in Portugal, Mafalda's garden] [Mafalda the week before Kaliel was born] [washing her hair] [when they were home from the hospital] [ enclosure] 3 July England, this dark London where living is so difficult, cramped cold dirty house, my garden full of diseases, the plaster peeling off my walls, my place shabbier and more shapeless than it was when I left. No space, no light. I want to paint everything white, simplify, throw out even more furniture. But. A bran muffin from the Co-op, the mock orange in scented flowers, the grass grown long enough like wiry green hair and the smell of it as I cut it, Roy taller and thinner, longer haired, petulant, but his body springing - shocked me when he came with his mother yesterday, I'd forgotten that I love his body, and how tender I am toward it; don't want that disadvantage with him. "Ah Manuel [Mafalda's brother], do you exist? Is Portugal still there? Here's London so grey, cold, pressed flat under this heavy dark English sky - and here I am with my bills and worries trying to remember how weightless I felt in Portugal. The train went very slowly through those miles of pine trees and eucalyptus trees, hills, green green rice fields, people cutting their grain by hand. Luke jumped on and off the seats and left me to sit and look sadly and lovingly at the country I was leaving too soon, and think about your Byzantine face, and feel the erotic little echo of your body humming in my stomach and make up silly conversations with you in your very bad English. "I'm better than you think," you said. I wonder. Maybe you are. How will I ever know? Do you remember me? Hmmm? Will you please give me back that yellow sheet of writing? I need it. Somewhere on the journey I lost our drawings - mine of you and yours of me - and my painting of the nasturtium. I'm sad. I wore your camisola to sleep. Now I smell much better. You're nice, you're like eating figs. [sketch*] Put this somewhere Maria can't find it - yes? Or else your family will read it at the dinner table." July 4 Now my house is better, beginning to have sharp outlines, feels clean. New inventions, combinations, filing cabinet in the kitchen for ugly things. My Portuguese rugs. Roy on the telephone fighting with me; he's without a woman again. WL meeting: I feel a little sour after it; I expand too much, make funny jokes and egotize. Become very spontaneous in our atmosphere of respect. Feel badly because I listen too little. Sarah [Black] and I agree and understand; tonight I didn't like that much although I feel loyalty - she mirrors me and I throw things out to her that strand me in the group. Expand too far - is that what bothers me? Leslie's profile with a silvery line of light following it down the smooth nose and mouth - Clare's pointed toes whipping up as she crosses her ankles while making an abrupt point - Sarah agonizing with her feet, as I do, tired face - Maeve, don't like her, she's not even half-born - Maggie's big bum wrapped tight in her pants, lying on the floor, country wench - me - what picture there? - At the clinic Luke sits on my knee in front of the clinic doctor, small ironic woman with grey curly hair and glasses, and does the form boards: a single form with a circle - he puts it in without a pause; single form with a square - he offers it to her, to me, she insists, he puts it directly in; the double form with two circles - no trouble; square, circle and triangle - he puts in the circle, chews on the square, looks around, she insists, he puts in the square halfway, "Come on, do it properly," she says, he pushes it all the way in; she points to the triangle, he takes it and puts it in; I'm sitting enraptured watching him perform, he's disobedient and casual, but when he moves he's quick and accurate; she rotates the board, tells him to begin with the circle, he puts it in, he tries to put the square into the triangle, tries again with the circle, then easily puts it into the square hole, tries to get the circle back, she forbids him, insists on the triangle, he puts it in; she says, or cries, "He's not supposed to do that until he's two and a half!" and I cry "Really?" But he won't make a tower of three bricks although we both think he could - he brings me the bricks, chatters, takes the bricks out of her bag, wanders off. As I leave she says "That's why he's so bright, you allow him reasonable access to deadly poisons." How many words? I underestimate at four or five - wuf (dog), dhot (hot), shoe, no, yes, more, 'bye, ta, gone and bappie (bottle) and others I can't be sure of because they're sporadic. (And he says - daddy, mummy mummy mummina). Oh and babby, baby. I think that now he's ready to talk. Got him from the nursery this afternoon, he was the only one asleep, in the cot wrapped in his blanket in the middle of the room, pink and brown in his undershirt. When I sat him on the pot he cried and thumped me hard. - Dream - under the floor boards of a house I live in I find piles of things buried at one end of the floor - dresses, tiles, unlaid (tiled) hinged panels with and without sewing machines, handfuls of jewelry, some of it heavy silver in the MacIntosh style. There's a young man's romantic journals, I read disordered writing on the last page which says "We must stop her," desperation, despair, the writing staggers. There are two cupboards standing upright which I look into with my sister. We ponder the ethics of keeping the jewelry and reading the diary as we excitedly snatch things. Shopping lists. A list labeled "A woman's passions" with "Gooseberry" at the top. All these things are covered with nettle and water but undamaged. I go into the next room and walk into an Edwardian drama, two tall women with their hair up, who warn me that I'll be punished in the next life. I hide the jewelry behind me, the handful I have with me, and sit down in a chair. They look at me and I'm uncomfortable. I ask them, to appear brave, "Tell me, what time do your eyes see?" carefully putting my question, thinking of alternative phrases. They wheel the two glass wardrobes, each with a mirror in the centre panel, into positions facing each other with me between. I try to conceal the jewelry. The glass seems to trap me. I cannot move because I'll show the jewelry. The two women seem bent on tormenting me, I lose my force and when I try to shout to my sister, now also a tall Edwardian woman, she goes through the door without hearing. I begin to thrash, trying to break the glass doors, feeling that will save me. Luke wakes me. 6:20. An earlier dream about David - he'd been lost for a long time, I find him in a mountain shack, with some small girls, we celebrate his reappearance. I tell him that now I'm ready for him. - Taste of the dream includes a lot of comment and reflection on its happenings. - A little analysis of how I live and what it means. Alone with Luke, no interest in husband or father except for resentment that Roy claims fatherhood without doing any work; horniness; nostalgia for sharing creation and for a less stingy and more comfortable life. Loyalty and vulnerable affection for several women; erotic availability to men who are meant to go home afterwards, at least in the morning, and who flatter me - with it, some sentimental attachment that contains as irritation my sensitivity to indifference and domination and my longing for and pleasure in being generous. Need to flirt and laugh with people and to admire them. Joy in senses and creation, structures, forms, concepts. Want to get away on my own adventures for longer than a day or a week, but like meeting Luke in the mornings and evenings. The monastic life - I'd like women's lib nunneries, like holiday camps, where the sisterhood comes, away from their men, to study, work, sing and dance, make their own kinds of magic - retreats - gets high in any way, drink, play, find possibilities, do drama, gestalt therapy, something disciplined and ordered, experiments in life styles. Like Mafalda and Rob and I laughing over the dinner table, taking pictures, in the one warm room at night. 10 July [letter] Sunday a week since we came back from Portugal and found your letter among bills. Couldn't write from Portugal; it was another world sealed off from everywhere else, and when Roy phoned from England to see if we'd arrived I was cross to be disturbed - yes, Mafalda has her little baby, a tiny dark girl who looks like her, strong pointed double chin and delicate bony hands. For the moment, I won't say anything about Portugal except that it did me, and Luke, and 'us,' all sorts of good, and that the month we were away under that blazing turquoise sky was the worst wettest coldest June England has had since 1916 (and that by a hair)! I was sad to be back, my house seemed so drab and scabby, but I cleaned and cleared hard for two days and put a little of the hard clear feel of Portugal into it so that now it's good. Had nothing to do, school and pottery are closed for the summer, and am little by little letting my Portugal energy and high spirits choose me out some projects: like getting deeper into Women's Lib (ie politicizing myself a bit) and like beginning a co-counseling scheme with a girl called Sarah, and thinking about my film, and beginning to work on my PhD - can't stop studying when I feel good. Luke's turning into a very good-looking, bright, self-possessed, loving, humorous little boy. I take it as my usual luck that I should have such a satisfying kid, but am amazed and grateful all the same. Took him to the clinic for a vaccination and his 18-month developmental test, and when he began to put circles and squares and triangles into their holes he wouldn't stop 'til he'd done the whole series of tests. "He's amazing, this child," cried the doctor. While we were involved in some friendly chatter about how wonderful he is, Luke of course got into her cupboard and began unpacking her medicine samples. He's never been much interested in talking until now, and I've worried when the book said he should have five clear words at 15 mo, 7 clear words at 16, because he didn't. But now at 18 mo he's suddenly got the 9 clear words he's meant to have at 19 mo. He loves motorcycles and trucks, all animals including insects he treats with a special tenderness, and in Mafalda's baby's room he'd always whisper, touch her with one little finger, then run outside shouting babbie, babbie! He climbs onto alarming edges with his toes and fingertips, but knows his limits and never does anything he can't manage - I sit with my heart hammering trying to trust him as he walks along a brick wall with a six foot drop into brambles on the other side. Oo he's a very dear and special kid, which makes me feel good about my mothering so far. M - this is a very me letter which you'll have to forgive because I'm a little drunk on myself since Portugal; it will wear off. Can't you come here this summer even for a few weeks? I've much more time and serenity since I see less of Roy, we could do lots of nice things and have long talks every evening and you could learn about the kinds of life we've been making at first hand, and of course you could see Luke. PS I'm not cynical, I've merely shifted my enthusiasms to different
areas, and that's true.
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