Undue Influence (2 page)

My mother had been an art student when girls at the Slade wore long belted smocks and had waved hair. I know this—about the hair, that is—because there is a portrait of her by Sir Gerald Kelly in our dining-room. He seemed to have caught her essence, although she was very young at the time: she is seated in three-quarter profile, with her hands in her lap, the waved hair caught with particular precision. She has that absentminded dreaming look that women had in those days, and which must have been
de rigueur
for girls of a certain class. She married my father, a structural engineer much older than herself, as soon as she had finished her studies. I never saw what must have attracted her, apart from a certain stolidity, a certain reassurance. I imagine that they enjoyed furnishing the flat with its curiously uncomfortable furniture; at least nothing was ever
changed after he died. I suppose that I shall keep everything as she left it, since I have nowhere else to go. And anyway I am fond of Montagu Mansions, and I can walk to work in Gower Street and back again in the evening. Come to think of it, my life is as divorced from the world as my mother’s had been. Yet I find it impossible to imagine her as ever having entertained the thoughts that have kept me so busy over the years.

I wanted her to have had a romantic life before the days when my father’s stick heralded his passage from one room to another and his heavy body subsided into a chair, the stick propped up by his side. I objected to him on aesthetic grounds, although the lost look in his remaining good eye stirred me to uneasy feelings of compunction. I wanted my mother to have had lovers, although I could see that this was impossible. She was simply too transparent to entertain disloyal thoughts, although she had been very good-looking as a girl. Her looks faded somewhat after her marriage. Come to think of it Sir Gerald Kelly has caught something of her true nature in that passive seemly three-quarter profile. It behoved me to play my part, in deference to her innocence. To all intents and purposes I was the good daughter, and I believe that was how others saw me, as if I had inherited my mother’s blamelessness. At moments I even believe this may be true, although it is not entirely true. Those holidays I take, with her blessing, are not spent exclusively in French provincial towns looking at cathedrals, although such towns are as amenable to adventures as any other place. It is enough for me to entertain my mother on my return from Chartres or Amiens or Bourges or Strasbourg with an account of the byways of the town visited, and with the photographs and postcards to prove that I was there, to make me feel straightforward, reconnected with her worthiness in a way that has been studiously mislaid from time to
time. Besides, I like French cathedrals, although not perhaps the flashier ones. Vienne and Autun are more to my taste than Troyes, although Troyes has a lot going for it. Le Mans was the only dead end: Dijon came close. Coutances was pleasant. Mostly I walked, speculating on the people I passed, on the conversations I overheard. These are the consolations of the solitary walker, and the habit has stayed with me. Misconceptions are inevitable, but as I am never put to the test they somehow fail to signify. In any investigation I should be a most unreliable witness.

I believe that my mother’s life was one of almost pious simplicity. I believe she thought that I would marry as she had married, obediently, and that this would come about naturally, or rather supernaturally, given that we hardly knew anyone. My mother’s life was a straight line from her cradle to what was now her grave, or rather her ashes. Once I got my job with the Misses Collier I was out all day, so could hardly envisage how she spent her time. I knew she did what women, or rather ladies, did when she was a girl: shopped in the morning, went to town in the afternoon, although ‘town’ in her imagination consisted of the Royal Academy, the Tate, and the National Gallery. I was introduced to these places at an early age and for some years kept up the habit, although gazing in silence is a somewhat lonely occupation. It was during a visit to the National Gallery that I met my friend Wiggy, Caroline Wilson. We were both standing in front of
The Execution of Lady Jane Grey
when this small person remarked, ‘Silly of her to have worn her best dress.’

‘Maybe not,’ I responded. ‘There is nothing like making a lasting impression. Besides, she owed it to the painter. She probably knew he had all those highlights in reserve.’

‘Do you like it?’ she asked. ‘I genuinely want to know.’

‘I don’t object to it,’ I answered. ‘I just think the size is a mistake. But I suppose he wanted to get in all those wisps of straw in the foreground.’

I took her home with me for tea. My mother was enchanted by her, and not only because Wiggy is an artist of a sort. She paints portrait miniatures of babies and small children from photographs, so that doting grandmothers can have them framed and keep them on their bedside tables. She lives above a café in Museum Street, and is the quietest and most tactful person I have ever met. Naturally I never told my mother that Wiggy had been the mistress of a married man for the past six years; there was no point in worrying my mother with that sort of information. Sometimes I wondered if she knew what an illicit affair involved. I would not have put it past her to doubt the validity of such attachments, although Wiggy and I were of an age to have chalked up a certain amount of experience, most of it uncertain. But even so, the rueful quality of the experience notwithstanding, I always felt I knew more than my mother ever had.

On
her
bedside table my mother kept the first present my father had ever given her, a copy of
The Golden Treasury
inscribed ‘To Madeleine, the epitome of womanhood’. This has always struck me as noble but inadequate, as if he had to trust the poems to do his courting for him. And yet there was something decent about that gift: it could foretell nothing but marriage. They all got married in what I think of as the old days. My generation hardly goes in for it in the same way, too enlightened, I suppose, too progressive, too career-oriented. I admit that my notions of marriage are archaic, as I suspect is the case with most women. In my case there is a particular reason for this, or perhaps one I have simply adopted from my reading of the bundles of defunct women’s magazines stored
in the basement of the shop. These date from the early 1950s, an age when men wore hats and went to the office and women stayed at home and wore aprons and mysterious underclothes. These articles are immensely reassuring, as if marriage were a seamless garment with no snags in the fabric.

The letters to the dignified women who are supposed to know about these things all evince the same perplexity, albeit in different guises. ‘Should I let my boyfriend go all the way?’ The answer is always the same: if he respected you he would not demand it, even suggest it. This prospect of shamefaced young people—for the young man must have been in a state of disarray—is amazing to me. These days intimacy takes place at the beginning of the affair rather than at the end, and the women giving the advice are only too eager to reveal their own histories of alcoholism and anorexia. In the letters to ‘Worried. Ealing’, tolerance is urged on the less than happily married. Also humorousness. This might have made for an easier life but it seems unnecessarily fatalistic.

It is the illustrations to the stories that capture my attention, one in particular: a woman is shutting the garden gate of her house behind her as she prepares to do her morning shopping. She wears gloves and a small hat shaped like a pancake; she has a wicker basket over her left arm. The gate behind her is the sort of sunray pattern that probably still exists somewhere, for people do not change their garden gates in obedience to the dictates of fashion. Needless to say we do not have that sort of gate in the environs of Montagu Mansions. I do not know what this woman does when she gets home again. She manages to be elegant in an old-fashioned way. It would not occur to her to worry about her weight.

From three o’clock onwards, or so it seems to me, she anticipates her husband’s return on the evening train. What does
he think as he strides manfully in at the sunray gate? Not a lot, I would say. They are both bound to be very well mannered. On what happens when they retire to the bedroom, having spent the evening darning socks and listening to the wireless, the magazines are silent. A virginal discretion is maintained throughout, as if married couples need no instruction, are privy only to their own secrets. Sex is underdeveloped, and yet it seems so peaceful. Naturally someone of my generation could not envisage such a union, which seems faintly dreadful. And yet the image of that woman in the pancake hat, on her way to the sort of shops where customers are served by a man in a brown overall, has stayed in my mind for some time. It holds a definite attraction, as if one might, if one were very lucky, attain to a similar plateau of satisfaction. The woman in the pancake hat wears an elusive smile. Maybe her husband is not such a bore after all.

I do not wish this consummation for myself. Rather, I wish it retroactively for my mother, of whose life it is so natural for me to think. My mother was taken straight from her parents’ house to this slightly forbidding flat where her husband had pitched his tent some years previously. The kitchen cupboards were still filled with his first wife’s glass and china. There had been no children of that earlier marriage, although my mother would have welcomed them—she was still young enough to crave companions. And the stout authoritative man to whom she was married was no companion. I knew this at once, from a very young age. It was not given to my mother to wear the elusive smile of the woman in the magazine. Her smile was always a little puzzled, as she made her dutiful way round the galleries. I dare say my birth was the ultimate proof of her married life. For that reason she loved me too much, as I loved her. We were both discreet about this, tacitly acknowledging the
absence of a man who would have made possible an easier relationship, one less charged with the mournful consciousness of lost alternatives. I never heard her complain, yet as my father grew more handicapped and more selfish her smile became more diplomatic, as if aware at last that this was not a normal life for a woman with a simple, loving nature. As a widow she remained virginal. I would have liked her to marry again; instead she kept up an unalterable wifely routine, shopping in the morning, looking at pictures in the afternoon, I was a sort of company, I suppose. Not for a moment did I seriously think of leaving her alone, and yet it now occurs to me that this was what she was waiting for, her final release into freedom.

On the evening of the day on which she had died, and died in the company of strangers, I said something of this to Wiggy, who merely remarked, ‘It’s you who are free now. Will you make any changes, do you think?’ She views our lives as anomalous, as I do. She loves her married man, but knows that he has arrested her development: no garden gate and shopping basket for her, and yet I know that with her country background she would accede almost gratefully to such a condition. As for me, my days have settled into not very interesting compartments: our life, now my life, at home, and the excursions into what I think of as cathedral territory, where minor adventures may or may not take place. None of this is entirely satisfactory, which is why I have become something of a mental stalker. In my observations, as I go about my days, I feel as if all my activity has been forced upwards, into my head. I know remarkably few people in what I am tempted to call real life, and yet I seem to get closer to them when I construct their lives for myself. Wiggy says I should write a novel, but in fact I read very little. Working in a bookshop makes one acquainted
with titles rather than texts, and in the evenings I long to get out and about. I walk a lot. That is how most evenings are spent.

‘When will you go back to work?’ Wiggy asked me.

‘In a day or so, I suppose. Well, no, after the funeral, in fact. They won’t want to see me before then.’

All at once I was filled with a painful longing for my working life, now denied to me for a decent interval of observance. (But it seemed to me that my mother had died long ago, and more recently in those mute days at the hospital, when she was almost pulseless.) I love my work, which takes place at the top of Gower Street, in a second-hand bookshop called Ex Libris. It belongs to two aged sisters, the Misses Collier, Muriel and Hester, although only Muriel sits behind a desk, usually reading. Hester, who is the elder of the two, and that means in her mid-eighties, turns up every afternoon with a cake for our tea, which is my signal to emerge from the basement and put on the kettle. Hester is pretty deaf, but very spirited; Muriel is more austere. They were both Land Girls during the war, which may explain their durability, despite Muriel’s knotted legs and Hester’s hearing aid. They seem to be in the best of health, although both are frighteningly thin. It is difficult to imagine their existence away from the shop, which they inherited from their father, St John Collier, on whom they have bestowed the status of a man of letters, although I dare say he had already claimed this for himself. It is their intention that his various writings should be gathered into publishable form, be privately printed, and be available in the shop. They are, and always have been, unmarried. Father looms large in their conversation. Mother rarely gets a look in.

My job is to extract St John Collier’s articles from the piles of rotting newspapers and magazines, to transcribe them on Muriel’s huge upright Royal, and to arrange them in some sort
of order. ‘Naturally you will feature in the acknowledgements,’ I am assured. The late man of letters operated on several fronts, as a minor belletrist, as a contributor of nature articles to
Reynolds News
, and, on the strength of having been a lay preacher in his youth, as the author of homilies in those women’s magazines that I find so beguiling. These homilies are not half bad, if you care for that sort of thing. Reassurance seems to be the keynote, as if God had cheerful plans for us all. To tell the truth I prefer these messages to the ones about the spotted wagtail and the willow warbler, which occupy another sizeable section of his output, but I plough on conscientiously, amid the smells of defunct newsprint and the occasional floating fragment of disintegrating paper. I do all this in the basement, where the foreign language books are kept. I am rarely disturbed by customers. In fact most people do not realize that the shop is open for business, since the door sticks so badly that it is almost impossible to gain admittance.