Joan Makes History (20 page)

As well as dying, our clever Madge was good at being a lady
running a tight ship of a tea party on the lawn. Caroline would be there in a hat of her mother's with a white veil and a lot of blue cloth flowers, and Ellen would be there in her mother's patent-leather high heels and would later get the strap for having taken them out of their box. Our Madge was splendid in the moulting fur stole, completely bald over one shoulder, tattered of lining and smelling of camphor, that my own mother, that misty woman of gold teeth and too many wistful smiles, had left neatly packed in tissue paper in the top of the wardrobe. That stole had been the thing about her death that had made me cry, for it was in that stole, whatever the temperature of the night, that my mother had gone out with my father on their rare evenings together. She would be flushed with the excitement of it all, and anxious about her gold earrings, whose fastenings she could never quite bring herself to trust, so she had to keep plucking at her lobes all night, and would be splendid in the old stole, a farewell gift from her father in chilly Rumania. He had disapproved of his son-in-law, thought his daughter a fool for throwing herself away on him, found the idea of Australia ridiculous, but he had not wished his daughter to freeze in the barbarous land she was determined to go to. He had wished her to be protected from the snows of the new land, and he never guessed, poor man, that his daughter would never see snow again, and would never need a fur to warm her shoulders.

Mother had loved that stole, and cherished it in camphor and tissue paper, and never failed to mention her father each time she wore it.
The tears were standing in his eyes,
she told me a hundred times,
for he knew he would never see me again.
Her own eyes then never failed to fill with tears:
He was right,
she would say, and dab her eyes with her best linen hanky, a gift from me,
and Joan, it is the saddest thing, he will never know, now, how much his daughter loved her father.
Oh, fathers and their daughters, what tales of heartbreak! But that is another story.

The stole, then: Father, his cranium gleaming, would come then to take Mother in her stole off to a play she would barely follow, still after so long having not got the hang of English if it was too quick, or a dinner with business acquaintances who had to be charmed, so that poor Mother would return with a headache from smiling too much and pretending to understand more than she did. She would fling the stole off, forgetting to cry for her father, and lie in bed with a cold cloth on her forehead, and in the morning would fold the fur in its tissue again, and store it away in the top of the wardrobe before anyone was up.

That stole had seen many tears, then: those of that unknown grandfather, dead now after a lifetime of drilling molars: those of poor Mother, who had grown weepy thinking of her father, and who had wept over me and my strangeness, and who had cried stormy tears of rage, the year the moth got at the shoulder of the stole.

And now here was Madge, carrying such a burden of mixed sadnesses on her shoulders, but none of that old history was likely to bow her down. I had told her tales I had heard from my own mother, had told her of snows, wolves, pine forests howling under frosty winds, because I thought it right that some fragment of her beginnings should be known to her, that her particular kind of history should not be entirely dissolved in the new place where she was growing up.
Ah, Mum,
she whined,
not the wolves again!
and I had to admit they were pretty secondhand wolves by the time they got to her, and thin unconvincing forests,
for I had no vision of wolves or snow or pine forests myself, only the stories from that poor lost mother of mine. Of that mother there were no stories I could tell, for she had done little but weep over her stole and look confused in shops, and neither of those activities was enough to keep the interest of our matter-of-fact Madge for long. She pranced on the lawn and pirouetted in her stole for Duncan's camera, like every new generation, dancing in the shadow of history's griefs.

Dear Duncan! He had taken photographs of Madge, photographs of me, photographs of Madge and me together: he had carefully explained, and let me take photographs of him with Madge, and Madge had been allowed to hold the precious box for long enough to capture Duncan and me together by the front gate and on the back lawn. But it was a different kind of day altogether recorded here, on this last photograph, where all three of us are showing too wild a mouthful of teeth to the camera. There is a sort of hysteria here, and we are all frozen, staring at the black box holding our breaths, not moving a muscle, as if we are afraid the black box is not clever enough to catch us while we are moving. We are turned to grinning stone, staring at Madge's camera sitting on the gatepost in the front yard, ticking and whirring all by itself, until at last it clicks and we are released into a great deal of shouting and laughing and all talking at once. In this photograph there is a small dismay in Duncan's eyes, that cameras and their mysteries, which have always been his domain, are now mysteries that Madge knows more about than he does. She is a child no longer, and has bought a camera of her own, a cheap little thing, but she has worked out, as Duncan never has with all his paraphernalia, how to make it take a photograph all by itself.

This was the day Madge, flesh of our flesh, left the nest. She wore the red and blue striped skirt with the rope petticoat, and the middy blouse in red that her father had scolded her for wearing, for the way it allowed glimpses of her flesh.
It is not right, Madge, everyone can see your stomach,
he insisted, and Madge rolled her eyes and appealed to his reason:
But Dad, that is the whole idea, it is called middy because you can see midriff.
Madge thought her father had become a terrible old sobersides of a Dad, and I understood: I knew it was not in the nature of things for the world to stand still, and history was always out there waiting to be made not by parents, who had had their go at it, but the children of those parents.
They are all wearing them, love,
I tried to tell Duncan,
it is all right,
and I remembered how my own father had been moved to poke at my bare shoulder when I had worn some improvised gypsy garment or other, and remark,
If flesh is all you have, Joan, you have nothing.

Madge did not prance and preen and pontificate about making history, but she was more likely to do something about it than her mother had been. She was a bright girl, and all the sneering of the boys at school for being too brainy, and all the hints of the teachers that such enthusiasm for gases was not quite nice, had not as much as scratched the shiny gloss of her love of a good problem that needed solving.

It seemed that our Madge was not going to make any ceremony of this moment, and not acknowledge it as history. Everything was planned: the studies, the scholarship, and the room—I had seen it, Madge was kind enough to have asked our advice, though we all knew she did not need advice from us about her future—the room with the view of a passionfruit vine up a drainpipe and a small patch of sky. Madge had set all this in motion, heaven
knows how she knew so much: did I ever know so much more than my own parents?

As I had had to stand, embarrassed, translating for Mother at the butcher's, or try to look like a stranger to him when Father became excited on the subject of justice with someone at the bus stop who had just wanted to pass the time of day: as I had known enough to be ashamed of my parents, Madge knew enough to be kind where I had been callous, and knew how silent it would be when it was just Duncan and me by ourselves in the house.

Duncan sat in his armchair, the one with the worn place on the arm where his hand smoothed and stroked as he read or gazed out the window: he sat, not smoothing or stroking now, and without that faint bemused smile that meant he was at peace with his destiny: he sat listening to Madge in her room putting things in her suitcase, and opening and closing the wardrobe door.

And I: I could not sit in my armchair across from Duncan's, and watch Madge leaving home. I went into the kitchen, and was glad of the pile of dishes there, that could be scrupulously washed, and dried, and put away, and when that was done I was all for running up a batch of scones, the scones I could make now as well as anyone else, but what if Madge refused the scones and left me and Duncan with them as a steaming reminder that she was gone? So I busied myself snipping the yellowing leaves off the African violet that grew by the sink, and wiped down a cupboard door or two, and then I could not bear it any more, but had to go and watch, as Duncan was doing, while Madge packed her things, and left.

And what was it that Madge wanted to take with her from
the past into the future? Our Madge was not a remarkably sentimental girl, so I was surprised to see the teddy bear that Father had given her, that she had worn as bald as the giver with the energy of her love, and the old hand-tinted photograph of somewhere in Transylvania, where Mother had told me she grew up: there was the slightly flyspecked calendar from Murchison's, with the photo of the Bridge, and the Christmas card with the densely packed writing inside that had come from someone it made her blush to mention. I was glad about the photograph of Transylvania, for now that I was the age my mother had been when I had married Duncan and gone reluctantly to share his destiny, I felt for that poor mother of mine, who had risked everything for love, and made such a poor bargain: although as she confessed to me once, she would never have been able to forget my father if she had not come with him to the new land, so she did not regret anything.

Now it was time to say goodbye
—Just for now, Mum, not for ever,
Madge exclaimed at my tragic face—and I watched us all, like a spectator, as Madge left home. There was my husband, now a bald man with a grey moustache, and sick, and he stood in his slippers, waving with a tired hand.
Bye-bye, Madge love,
he called, and that Madge of ours, a thin girl full of sparks and with more brains than was good for her, laughed and waved back, buoyant to be leaving this house behind its hedge and her dull parents.
Bye-bye Dad,
she called, and I was there too, with the tea towel in my hand and the smell of the rubber gloves around me, and she ran back up the path to kiss me. Her cheek was hot: I felt the thrill she felt, and remembered feeling it myself, having her life's history still to be made, and anything possible.

It is all ahead of you, Madge,
I said, and wished for better words,
but beginnings and endings bring out the same old phrases.
Your father does not have long to go now, and me too: it is your life now, Madge.

But what daughter ever listens? My Madge kissed me, and kissed her father's pale cheek: it was her own car now beyond the hedge, ready to take her away to a future of her own, where one day some man would pant and exclaim over her, there would be a moment's electric interchange, and my daughter would become in her turn filled with the love that has no choice. We listened until the roar of Madge's imperfect engine could no longer be heard. Then it was just the humming of insects in the grass, and the mad rooster out the back, crowing like a lunatic at lunchtime, and the sighing sound of parents stranded, washed up on the beach where the tide of life had been, and had passed.

What a big thing this business of history is, and what absurd bits and pieces make it up! Take a handful of dirt. It began as nothing much, just a few chemicals gone hard and ground up into sand, and it would have stayed that way, except that things started living and dying on it. That handful of dirt soaked up the bits of moss and grass that withered on the stem, the leaves from bushes, the branches of trees, and every kind of worm, bug and fly that had its moment of life and then died: great scaly giants sank down on it to pant their last, birds dropped out of the sky and never rose again, every kind of furry thing hopped and ran across it and finally lay down for good. That handful of dirt rejected nothing: it soaked up the steaming urine of babies as they crawled across it laughing, and the tears of twig-like grandmothers slipping a hand under a cheekbone and waiting for the last sleep. Men and women lay down and melted into the dirt, or were put into holes and buried, or were burned away to a small heap of ash: in the end the dirt claimed them all.

It was that jumble of dead odds and ends that made that earth a fit place for men and women to sow there at last, and reap. They laboured mightily, under sun and rain, toiling not for that day's bread but for the future: in the lean days of winter they put seed into the ground, thinking of the feasts they would grow fat on, later: they had discovered the past and the future and could think forwards, with faith, as well as backwards. That was why their ambitions led them on and on, to greater and greater glories from that bit of dirt: they chopped and cleared, planted and harvested, herded and gathered, they picked and dug and cut, and they never stopped planning a more splendid tomorrow. They smoothed the dirt down and at last packhorses, penny-farthings, coach-and-fours, and motor cars travelled over it. They sliced the trees into planks and shaped the planks into masts, hockey sticks, church organs, books of etiquette: they invented bootees, strychnine, watered-silk and baldness cures: oh, how pleased they were with themselves!

They planned great things, and better worlds, and went on sowing, full of hope. Centuries passed, generations of babies grew old and died, and now it is my turn: here I am, pacing down a nicely turned bit of kerbing and guttering, pushing the pram containing my grandchild, and planning the stories I will tell her.

I thought my story was one the world had never heard before. I loved and was bored, I betrayed and was forgiven, I ran away and returned, and all these things appeared to be personal and highly significant history. Oh Joan, what bogus grandeur! There was not a single joy I could feel that countless Joans had not already felt, not a single mistake I could make that had not been made by some Joan before me.

There was a time when I would have raged against such a thought, or grown petulant. But now that I am such an old woman, and so many times a grandmother, I do not grieve, but grow pleased and plump at the idea. I swell like an egg: there is nothing I cannot claim as my own now, and although you may not think so to look at me, I am the entire history of the globe walking down the street.

I am weary and old now, pushing the squeaking pram and considering my life, and what a paltry thing it is. I wish I had known earlier that I was making history: if I had, I might have lived more carefully, and with my eye on the past and the future rather than on myself alone. Soon I will be part of the dirt, along with all the other things that have had their day. This hand, freckled with years of sunlight, these feet in their sensible shoes, this spine curved over the child in the pram, will be a scattering of loose bones before long, and this skull, that has been home to so many imagined lives, will become a receptacle for nothing more grand than another handful or two of dirt.

Such lugubrious thoughts should trouble me, but do not: I savour my share of life. Around me in the mauve dusk, I can hear a child screeching at the idea of bedtime, a woman singing over the dishes clattering in the sink, and someone somewhere is having a good sneeze. Long after I am dirt, there will still be such people screeching, singing and sneezing away, and I will always be part of them. Stars blazed, protozoa coupled, apes levered themselves upright, generations of women and men lived and died, and like them all I, Joan, have made history.