The Lemon Table (16 page)

I was half-heartedly collecting “sottises” for you; the one that annoys me most is the notion that in England we have something called “the Summer” and that sooner or later “it comes.” And then we all sit out in the garden after dinner being bitten by gnats. Granted ’tis about 10 degrees warmer and you can go out after tea. The middle-aged all tell me that when they were young summers were red-hot and you wassailed on haywains etc. but I tell them that as I am quite thirty years older I remember perfectly well that May was a lousy month in their youth, and they have forgotten all that. Have you come across “Les trois saints de glace”—I forget who they are, but they have to be past before you can have a proper—Latin—summer. I spent one May in the Dordogne and it rained all the time and they were beastly to the dog and showed me their operations and bread was only made once a fortnight so sucks to Aquitaine! I love the Drôme, though.

Books I haven’t read:

All Dickens

All Scott

All Thackeray

All Shakespeare except “Macbeth”

All J Austen but one

I do hope you find a lovely gîte; I adore the Pyrenees; the flowers; and the little “gaves.”

You see, I went round the world in 1935, before everything was spoilt. Also in a lot of boats, not
avions
.

You say, re coincidence, why not ask to see an armadillo or a snowy owl, that would test the power of intentional coincidence. I shall not rise to this, but will tell you that we lived in Putney back in XVI. Putney is next to Barnes.

Well, thanks a lot for writing. Now I’m feeling better, & the moon has come round the corner behind the pines.

Sylvia W.

Parrot D. back in window.

16 September 1986

Dear Julian,

Your novel has proved educational, not on sex lines, but because your character, Barbara, has exactly the same slippery methods of discussion as our Warden here. Her husband is the acme of insolence to me, yet I know that if the word “bloody” slips out I am totally sunk with the Gov. Bod., which approves of me so far. Yesterday I was on the way to the letter-box when the Sgt-Major accosted me and suggested it was an unnecessary journey. All the deafs and mads here give him their letters to post for them. I said, “I may no longer be driving my car but I shall continue taking the bus into town and am well capable of tottering to the letter-box.” He looked at me impertinently and I imagined him steaming open all the letters at night and tearing up any which contained complaints about the Old Folkery. If my letters suddenly cease you may conclude that either I am dead or else under the full control of the Authorities.

Are you musical? Well, I suppose I am a bit, but, only because being clever and starting the piano at age six, I very soon got good at sight-reading, playing also the double bass & flute (more or less) so constantly asked to play church organs. Liked making terrific roarings on these instruments. (Not church myself. Think own thoughts.) I like going into town—always badinage in the bus or morris dancing in the shopping precincts with Brandenburg Concertos on a machine and proper persons playing violins with them.

I have read some more As and Bs. One of these days I shall tot up the number of drinks consumed or cigarettes lit, for padding purposes in novels. Also “vignettes” of waiters, taxi-drivers, vendeuses and others, who play no further part in the story. Novelists either go in for padding or else for philosophizing, what we were told to regard as “generalizations,” chez Balzac. Whom is the Novel for, I ask myself. In my own case for someone of an undemanding nature who requires to lose herself between about 10 p.m. and bedtime. This may be unsatisfac. for you, I can see. Also, to be able to do this, it is essential that there be a character sufficiently like myself to identify with and, Maverick that I am, there isn’t often.

Still, the As and Bs remain a cut above the monthly supply from the Red Cross. They seem to be written by Night Nurses in the long hours when they have nothing else to do. And the sole theme is desire for marriage. What happens after marriage doesn’t seem to have struck them, though to me that is really the crux.

A Famous Person in the art world wrote in his autobiography a few years ago that he first grew to love women by falling in love with a little girl at his prep school dance. He was eleven at the time, and she was nine. There is no doubt at all that I was that little girl: he describes my dress, and it was my brother’s prep school, dates right, etc. Nobody else has fallen for me since, but I was a pretty child. If I had deigned to look at him, he says, he would have followed me to the end of his days. Instead he chased after women all his life and made his wife so unhappy that she became an alcoholic, whereas I never married. What do you deduce from this, Mr. Novelist Barnes? Was this a missed opportunity seventy years ago? Or was it a fortunate escape on both our parts? Little did he know that I was to become a bluestocking and not at all up his street. Perhaps he would have driven me to drink and I would have driven him to philandering, nobody would have been better off except the wife he thereby wouldn’t have had, and in his autobiography he would have said that he wished he’d never set eyes upon me. You are too young for this kind of question, but it is the sort you increasingly ask yourself as you become deaf and mad. Where would I be now if two years before the Great War I had glanced in a different direction?

Well, thank you enormously, and I hope your own life is satisfac. and offspring all you wd. wish.

With love from Sylvia W.

24 January 1987

Dear Julian,

One of the mads here has been seeing ghosts. They show themselves as little green flashes, in case you should wish to spot one, and they followed her here when she gave up her flat. Trouble is, whereas they were benign in their previous location, they have reacted to finding themselves incarcerated in an Old Folkery by playing the merry devil. We are each of us allowed a small refrigerator in our “cubicles” in case of Night Starvation, and Mrs. Galloway fills hers with chocolates and bottles of sweet sherry. So, what have the sprites been up to in the middle of the night but eating her chocolates and drinking her sherry! We all demonstrated due concern when this was raised—the deaf showing more concern, no doubt because they were unable to comprehend—and tried to offer condolences for her loss. This went on for a while, long faces being in order, until one day she came into Lunch looking like the Cheshire Cat. “I got my own back!” she cried. “I drank one of
their
bottles of sherry which they left in the fridge!” So we all celebrated. Alas, prematurely, for the chocolate continued to suffer nocturnal depredation, despite handwritten notes, both stern and pleading, which Mrs. G took to leaving attached to the refrigerator door. (What languages do you think ghosts can read?) The matter finally went to the full assembly of Pilcher House one suppertime, with Warden and Sgt-Major present. How to prevent the spirits from eating her chocolate? All looked to Head Girl, who miserably failed the test. And for once I have to praise the Sgt-Major, who showed an estimable sense of irony, unless—which is perhaps more likely—he actually believes in the existence of the little green flashes. “Why not get a fridge lock?” he suggested. Unanimous applause from Ds and Ms, whereupon he offers to go himself to B&Q to obtain one for her. I shall keep you au courant, in case this is useful for one of your books. Do you swear as much as your characters, I should like to know? Nobody swears here, except me, still internally.

Did you know my great friend Daphne Charteris? Maybe your great-aunt’s sister-in-law? No, you said you were Middle Clarce in origin. She was one of our first aviatrices, Upper Clarce, daughter of a Scottish laird, used to ferry Dexter cattle around after she got her licence. One of only eleven women trained to fly a Lancaster in the war. Bred pigs and always named the runt of the litter Henry after her youngest brother. Had a room in her house known as the “Kremlin” where even her husband wasn’t allowed to disturb her. I always thought that was the secret of a happy marriage. Anyway, husband died and she went back to the family house to live with the runt Henry. The place was a pigsty, but they lived quite contentedly, getting deafer together by the month. When they could no longer hear the doorbell, Henry rigged up a car horn as a replacement. Daphne always refused to wear hearing aids on the grounds that they caught in the branches of trees.

In the middle of the night, while the ghosties are trying to pick Mrs. Galloway’s refrigerator lock to get at her Creme Eggs, I lie awake and watch the moon slowly move between the pines and think of the advantages of dying. Not that we are given a choice. Well, yes, there is self-slaughter, but that has always struck me as vulgar and self-important, like people who walk out of the theatre or the symphony concert. What I mean is—well, you know what I mean.

Main reasons for dying: it’s what others expect when you reach my age; impending decrepitude and senility; waste of money—using up inheritance—keeping together brain-dead incontinent bag of old bones; decreased interest in The News, famines, wars, etc.; fear of falling under total power of Sgt-Major; desire to Find Out about Afterwards (or not?).

Main reasons for not dying: have never done what others expect, so why start now; possible distress caused to others (but if so, inevitable at any time); still only on B at Lie Brewery; who would infuriate Sgt-Major if not me?

—then I run out. Can you suggest others? I find that For always comes out stronger than Against.

Last week one of the mads was discovered stark naked at the bottom of the garden, suitcase filled with newspapers, apparently waiting for the train. No trains anywhere near the Old Folkery, needless to say, since Beeching got rid of the branch lines.

Well, thank you again for writing. Forgive

epistolomania.

Sylvia

P.S. Why did I tell you that? What I was trying to say about Daphne is that she was always someone who looked forward, almost never back. This probably seems not much of a feat to you, but I promise it gets harder.

5 October 1987

Dear Julian,

Wouldn’t you think language was for the purpose of communication? I was not allowed to teach at my first practice school (training college), only to listen to classes, as I got the tu of the Passé Simple wrong. Now if ever I had been taught Grammer, as opposed to Knowing French, I could have retorted that nobody would ever say “Lui écrivis-tu?” or whatever. At my “school” we were mainly taught phrases without analysis of tenses involved. I have constant letters from a Frenchwoman with an ordinary secondary education who happily writes “J’était” or “Elle s’est blessait” regardless. Yet my boss, who dismissed me, pronounced her French Rs with that horrid muted sound used in English. I am glad to say all that is much improved and we no longer rhyme “Paris” with “Marry.”

I am not sure as yet whether the long letters I write have lapsed into senile garrulity. The point, Mr. Novelist Barnes, is that Knowing French is different from Grammer, and that this applies to all aspects of life. I cannot find the letter in which you told me about meeting a writer even more antique than me (Gerrady? sp?—I looked for him in the library but could not find; in any case I shall surely have conked out before getting to the Gs). As I recall, he asked if you believed in survival after death and you answered No and he replied, “When you get to my age, you might.” I am not saying there is life after death, but I am certain of one thing, that when you are thirty or forty you may be very good at Grammer, but by the time you get to be deaf or mad you also need to know French. (Do you grasp what I mean?)

Oh! oh! oh! for a real croissant! Yet French bread is made with French flour. Do they get that in your part of the world? Last night we had corned beef hash and baked beans; I wish I didn’t love my food so. Sometimes I dream of apricots. You cannot buy an apricot in this country, they all taste of cotton wool impregnated with Austerity orange juice. After
frateful
scene with Sgt-Major I cut lunch and had a samwidge and knickerbocker glory in town.

You write that you are not afraid of dying as long as you don’t end up dead as a result. That sounds casuistical to me. Anyway, perhaps you won’t notice the transition. My friend Daphne Charteris took a long time a-dying. “Am I dead yet?” she used to ask, and sometimes, “How long have I been dead for?” Her final words of all were, “I’ve been dead for a while now. Doesn’t feel any different.”

There’s nobody here to talk to about death. Morbid, you see, and not naice. They don’t mind talking about ghosties and poltergeists and suchlike, but whenever I get going on the real subject the Warden & Sgt-Major tell me I mustn’t scare the ducks. All part of my battle against the tabooing of death as a subject—or Fear of It—and the energy with which the medical profession tries to stop the dying from dying, keeps alive babies born brainless, & enables barren women to have artificial children. “We have been trying for a baby for six years”—Well! so you go without. The other evening we all got double-yolked eggs—“Why? This is strange.” “They are giving the pullets fertility drugs to bring them into lay earlier.”