Country Girl: A Memoir (32 page)

It was after midnight and bitterly cold when I came out. Without a thought, I asked the taxi driver to go to Carlyle Square and recognized my error only when I climbed the front steps and saw a milk bottle beside the foot scraper, with a note thrust into it. It was not my house anymore.

Each day, at my desk, I looked out at the communal gardens, at the hole from where the magnolia tree had been dug up, the steep flights of steps down from each of the tall houses, and heard the Labrador, who would be left outside by its owner, barking, barking, well nigh to dementedness. I had lost my Cherry Orchard, something I would rue for a long time, if not to say forever. I loved a man who did not know me as I really was.

It was a refrain that I would hear again and again from many a woman, but never did I hear it more poignantly put than at Christmas in King Edward VII Hospital in London, where I had gone for a hip operation. An alloy of metal and ceramic, five inches long, had been inserted in my hip bone, and on the bed was an open book, with exercises recommended for when I went home—leg swings, knee bends, and foot lifts.

Time and responsibility had been beautifully deferred. I thought of mothers in the shires, wrapping presents, stuffing birds, at near-breaking point when there was yet an elaborate dinner to be cooked, as I listened to the sweet chimes of the bells from various churches, extolling the festive day that it was. It had been snowing in the night, and the world outside was a veritable Christmas card, the side street and the slanted
slates of the houses covered in a soft, powdery snow, with a bluish tint to it.

The atmosphere in the hospital was festive. A nurse wearing a huge red earring that flashed on and off like a traffic signal had brought me tea very early, and nailed to my door was a small wicker basket with chocolates, a miniature Christmas cake, and a miniature port wine, gifts from the hospital, wishing me a Happy Recovery. There was also a book of jokes in alphabetical order, and I read at random a Hollywood producer’s verdict on Esther Williams as an actress: “Wet she’s a star, dry she ain’t.”

The cocktail party, to which the assistant matron insisted I go, was at noon. She said that I might meet people I had not met for a long time, an old beau perhaps, “love’s sweet refrain” once more. With this in mind, I had to get ready. Shoes were out of the question, but I had new striped angora socks, which a lovely friend called Therese had left downstairs for me, being too reticent to come up. Getting dressed was no mean feat. From a stick that had a flipper hook at one end, I had to negotiate donning the socks, then pulling the red silk kimono on over the hospital gown. Staff had gone to great lengths decorating the corridor. Stars of Bethlehem, swags of holly and lamé-crested cards all but concealed the various drawings of vertebrae, injured shoulders, and buckled knees. Most patients had gone home for Christmas, and the gathering was composed mainly of staff, who were off duty and in a high state of merriment, bedecked with paper hats and comparing the trinkets which they had acquired from their crackers. A house doctor looked absurdly forbidding in felt antlers, which were a gift from a “grateful patient” in Lapland. One of the anesthetists wore a white mask with a blood-red gash for lips and held a card which read, “Here comes the vampire.” There were very few guests. A young Arab woman with long jet-black hair, sloe eyes, and a large emerald pendant was surrounded by her
cohorts. They drank Coca-Cola. The other visitor, seated in the best armchair, was a stout Englishwoman, expounding on the deteriorated state of the country. She had fallen in her kitchen the day before, simply getting down that silly tin of sardines, and what with her maid gone and the floor slippery, she had come a cropper. More than an hour elapsed before the ambulance came, and she was brought to a hideous National Health hospital, kept waiting for hours in a room full of foreigners, a ghastly Babel. Worse, she had been kept there overnight, and with a missionary zeal she announced, “I now know what it is like to be in prison, having spent one night in a National Health hospital.” She was now where she should have been in the first instance, in a hospital of which she was actually a trustee, and she was also on her second, if not to say third, glass of champagne. The conversation then turned to the Queen’s Speech, one of the nurses saying that we would probably be on the plum pudding at that point, having had our first course, roast turkey and trimmings, and we would be in mellow mood. The battle-ax begged to differ. She would not be in mellow mood. She would not even listen to it—as a monarchist all her life, she could not bear to think that her beloved Queen had sold out to Europe. The doctor with the felt antlers tried to remonstrate with her, saying it was not the Queen’s decision, whereupon she requested her crutches and rose like a general about to survey the troops.

I had hobbled back to my room when a visitor was announced. It was the writer Andrew O’Hagan, a new friend, who in a matter of two years had become a steadfast one. He brought the snow in with him; it was on his shoulders and on his eyelashes, so perfectly crested it might have been applied with curling tongs. He had walked miles in the snow, having earlier gone to Mass, where the singing of the choir brought him back to the scenes of his childhood, the family allowance book, his mother
with four boys and a useless husband, an advertisement for Bell’s whiskey on top of Central Station in Glasgow with the beguiling “Afore ye go.” He had brought loads of presents: candles, gloves, a bottle of double malt, and a jigsaw puzzle with a picture of Emily Brontë in a tiled interior of pale brown and sepia, like a replica of the work of one of the Dutch masters. Emily Brontë, with her size-three shoes, said to have the mind of a navigator, instead remained in one place and navigated the perplexities of the crooked heart. He poured himself a little malt and discovered still another present in his Santa Claus bag. I asked him why it was that we, who had known hardship, were so profligate, and he thought about it and said that maybe it was because Saxon big brother made us Celts believe that we were “wee.” I asked for a song, and he sang Robert Burns’s “Where the Bonnie Lassie Lives,” as various nurses put their heads through the door to nod their approval.

It was evening time, and after turning down my bed, Irina, a nurse from Eastern Europe, wondered if she might sit for a few minutes. She was lonely. She would have liked to have gone home, but home was five hours on the express train and cost much monies, which she could not afford. She was saving for the little house in her dream that was in her own country, and the other dream was of man, perfect man, coming to her. She had a boyfriend whom she loved, but he go live with other woman, but that other woman now tell him, “Go, go,” because he fall for still other woman. She cried then and dried her eyes and apologized for crying and cried more, saying, “I have peace, but I have lonely.” Seeing the books and notebooks and pens on my bedside table, she asked almost in invocation, “Madam, please write book for men about love, because they do not understand it as womans do.”

I had not the heart to tell her that great love stories told of the pain and separateness between men and women.

I had left north London and moved back to a rented house in Chelsea, walking the back streets that I knew, past the small terraced houses with cottage gardens and enclaves of green, seed pods and pollen blowing all over the place, people sneezing, idlers exchanging the odd word. One pensioner from the nearby barracks would be in a wheelchair, while his companion went to get groceries, proud of his scarlet jacket, his tasseled hat, and a green paper swizzle, a bauble that he waved. He would say the same thing at intervals, “In Wales,” giving Wales the mythic resonance of Troy.

The words would not come, and I would remember when they had come and it had been so effortless, the rapid, handwritten pages of this story or that. I had brought Zig pens specially from America that were lucky and were also photo-safe, acid-free, waterproof, archival quality, light-fast, fadeproof, and nonbleeding. But they did not suffice. Henry James said that these lapses or intermissions or spirals of depression, or whatever they might be called, “were good for [his] genius,” but I was more inclined to agree with Virginia Woolf, who in one of her shriven states had said that she should go to John Lewis and get a dress made, nearing madness. I reread the books that I loved, the old ones and a few of the new ones that had something of the timbre of the old ones. I kept a diary. I read with misgivings that only the very young and the very mad keep diaries. There were jangled entries—the “Poisoned Flower of the Borgias,” “Pluto’s Dark Door,” Nietzsche’s “We possess art, lest we perish of the truth.” All very edifying and useless.

Sometimes I went to speak to students at universities or colleges where I was supposed to be imparting nuggets of wisdom. I brought Kafka to read to them and told them how Kafka had said a book must be the ax to the frozen seas inside us. In Hull the wind from the North Sea, with a wet spray to it, hurled against the windowpanes, which shook and shivered, naked to the world. In the almost empty dining room, the talk came round to the blank page and the places writers flee to in the belief that it will help them to write. One of the lecturers had just returned from Lapland, a Boadicea on her sled, driving
four huskies through the snows, chopping her own wood, making her own fire, setting up her own tent. Each night, before settling down to sleep, she looked out at the silent, silver, blanketed night that became the substance of her dream, in which she conceived a fairy tale that was an astonishment to her, but that alas vanished at the very moment of her wakening.

I thought of the numerous futile journeys that I had made in desperation. Who in her right mind would go to a small house in the country of England, in bleak winter, for the ministrations of a guru who claimed to have gleaned the secrets of the libido from East and West? He wore white, white robes and a white turban and was waited upon by a bevy of ex-wives and current mistresses, who addressed him as “Guru This” and “Guru That.” Taking his cue, perhaps, from Wilhelm Reich, he was clearly an advocate of the orgasm, insisting on nudity for massages, where he pressed his being on the various chakras for added intensity and panted more than was reasonable. All that was needed was an orgone box. I had years before sat in one under the supervision of a Norwegian doctor.

In that small country house we were three patients, a friendly woman who ran a restaurant, a woman who coughed, and myself. The walls were paper-thin. One could hear the coughing at night and the giggles from the more private quarters, where the guru and his harem lived.

We drank juice with a concoction of minerals and vitamins, which was supposed to dispel hunger, which indeed it did. Since it was raining, we spent most of our time in the sitting room, the smell of burning joss sticks wafting in from the hall, little to say to one another as we read our horoscopes in out-of-date magazines. After two listless nonwriting days, I decided to cut my stay short. This did not go down well. The female brigade warned how distressing it would be for their guru, and he himself tried to persuade me to stay, saying I had
not given his methods their due respect. In the train I felt I had been let out of school, and ordered a quarter-bottle of Australian white wine that was lukewarm.

The spa in Austria was different, more austere. One went for the “cure” and everything revolved around that. The dining room looked out onto a lake, with hotels distinctive as castles ranged on the opposite side, and the steep mountain slope was covered with evergreens that ran all the way to the summit, where the mountain dipped and soared, shutting out the last bit of lilac sky. Patients were advised to chew their spelt bread forty times until it reached the consistency of a puree. We sat at tables of four, Austrians, Germans, English, and myself, chewing the bread and pondering, perhaps, our digestive systems, or whether to have the mild or strong Epsom salts before retiring. I looked up the German word for saliva and copied it into my notebook. Talking was discouraged, and so was reading. The girls who waited on us were dressed in Tyrol costumes and little half-aprons, were polite but stern about our regime, so that there was no question of an extra rice cake.