Walking in the Shade (23 page)

‘Who
are
the Eichners?'

‘They have four children of their own, and they have children at holiday times.'

‘Yes, but
who
are they?'

‘They are Austrians. They came here as refugees.' Never had I heard from either parent the slightest hint of anti-Semitism, so when she said, ‘But they're foreigners,' she didn't mean Jews. ‘They aren't Roman Catholics, are they?'

‘I don't know. I never asked.'

Why Roman Catholics? Was it that Emily Maude McVeagh had had her childhood affrighted by Roman Catholics because her stepmother was the daughter of a Dissenting minister? But if Roman Catholics were so terrible, why had she sent her precious daughter to a Dominican convent? All of it incomprehensible, exasperating…
impossible—
as usual.

When, on one of the trips to the south coast, she had Peter baptised, she told me later. Defiantly, but she knew she was in the right. It wasn't the baptism I was angry about—as far as I was concerned, it was something not far off a pagan ritual—but that, as usual, what I thought didn't count. ‘And now you're going to have to take him to church,' she ordered. As it happened, he was going to church, because it turned out that he had a beautiful voice and he was singing in the choir. ‘And you could ask Joan to be his godmother.'

‘But how could she be a better friend to Peter than she is, if she were his godmother?'

She came to see my flat soon after I got into it. She stood there in her good hat, with its little veil, in good gloves, her fox stole, her polished shoes, and she looked at my ugly furniture.

‘You didn't buy that stuff?'

‘No, it came with the flat. You know, they went to Australia.'

‘You'd better have mine; I'll take it out of store.'

When the stepmother died, my mother had the furniture from the Victorian house put into storage, and paid to keep it there, year after year, even when there wasn't money for the grocery bills. When at last they ‘got off the farm' and went back to England, there might not be a place to live at first, but at least there would be a houseful of furniture. This was not because she liked the furniture. On the contrary, she had hated the heavy dark house she had been brought up in, and everything in it.

Now she could not see that for me to fill my flat, the first place I could say was really my own, with her furniture would be like putting myself into her power, into a prison of the past, into a shirt of Nessus.

‘I don't want it, Mother. Sell it.'

‘You can't, you
can't
prefer this rubbish….' And she looked at what filled my rooms, and then at me, and we looked at each other, in our usual hopeless, helpless misery. She could have cried out then, as she had when I was a girl, ‘But why do you hate me so much?' Or I, to her, ‘But you never liked me, did you?'

What had liking and disliking, hating or loving, to do with anything now?

For God's sake, Mother, just go away and leave me alone
. No, I didn't say it. And that is what she did. First laying briskly on the ugly desk some papers. ‘These are the receipts for the furniture. Do what you like with it.'

And she went back to Southern Rhodesia. To her son.

The furniture was, of course, Victorian. The mere word
Victo
rian
then earned a superior or a contemptuous laugh. Very soon indeed it would be worth a great deal of money. I did not want to be bothered with it. I wrote to my cousin, my aunt Muriel's son, and asked did he want it. He came to see me, said he had no use for any old furniture. He does not remember coming. He was very hard up then.

So I told the furniture storage to sell the stuff and send the money to my mother. It was hardly worth sending, there was so little.

There is a mystery here. For a quarter of a century, my mother had been writing to her great friend, Daisy Lane. When my mother was in London, about which she had been dreaming all those years, she needed a place to live, and as it turned out, so did my aunt Daisy. Why then did they not live together? At the time, I thought of it with the bewildered exasperation that went with all my thoughts of my mother: I could make no sense of it and so did not think of it much. But now I put two mental images together. Aunt Daisy, younger than my mother, a tiny little bent woman in heavy black, was an old woman. But my mother, at seventy, could be taken for fifty, was vigorous and healthy. To whom was my mother really writing for twenty-five years?

You have to be grown up, really grown up, not merely in years, to understand your parents. I was middle-aged when it occurred to me that I had never known my father, as he really was, as he would have been, without that terrible war. Young, he was optimistic and robust, played football, played cricket and billiards for his county, walked and—what he enjoyed most—danced at all the dances for miles around, thought nothing of walking ten miles to a dance, dancing all night, walking back again. The war had killed that young man and left a sombre, irascible man, soon to become a semi-invalid, and then a very ill man. If I had ever met that young Alfred Tayler, would I have recognised him? And, similarly, my mother. Yes, I knew that the war had done her in too, not least because it killed the great love of her life, so that in the end she married one of its victims—and spent the rest of her life nursing him. But it took me a long time to see something else. This was the girl who had defied her father to become a nurse, standing up to years of his refusal even to speak to her. This was the woman who impressed everyone she met by her vigour, her competence, her independence, her humour. I cannot imagine that had I met the young Emily Maude McVeagh I would have had much to say to her, but I would have had to admire her.

I think what happened was this: When she arrived on that farm, which was still virgin bush, with not so much as a field cleared on it, not a house or farm building—nothing; when she knew that this would be her future, a lonely one, because of her neighbours, with whom she had nothing in common; when she knew that the forward drive of her life, which had been towards some form of conventional middle-class living, was blocked; when she knew her husband was an invalid and would not be able to keep his grasp on life—when she knew that nothing she had hoped for could ever happen—then she had a breakdown and took to her bed. But words like ‘breakdown' and ‘depression' were not used then as they are now: people could be suffering from neurasthenia, or low spirits. She said she had a bad heart and probably believed it, as she lay in bed with her heart pounding from anxiety, looking out over the African bush, where she would never ever feel at home. She lay there for months, saying to her little children, ‘Poor mummy, poor sick mummy,' begging for their love and sympathy, and that was so unlike her it should have given me reason to think. And then she got out of bed, because she had to. But
who
got out of that bed? Not the young Emily Maude (she had become Maude by then, the Emily had gone—she had dropped her mother's name) but a woman who kept telling her children she had sacrificed her life for them, that they were ungrateful and unfeeling and…all the litany of reproaches that are the stock-in-trade of the female martyr. A creature I am sure she would have hated and despised when being herself and still young—and undamaged by war.

She went back to Southern Rhodesia, after four disappointing years in England, told her son and his wife—again—that she would devote her life to them, and—again—her daughter-in-law said to her son, Either her or me. And she began on a round of visits to friends. In the letters she wrote, she said, I hope I shall make myself useful; I don't want to be a burden.

 

The nicest result of the visit to the Soviet Union was that I became a friend of Samuel Marshak, one of the prominent Soviet writers, a winner of the Stalin Prize for Literature. He was a poet, translated Burns and Shakespeare, wrote children's stories. At that time writers unable to write what they wanted, because of the persecutions of serious literature, chose to do translating work: this is why the standard of Russian translation was so high. I had not noticed him more than the others, when I was there. But suddenly I got a telephone call from the Soviet Embassy. That must have been 1954 or '55. Would I visit Samuel Marshak in his hotel in Kensington. Things were loosening up, because Stalin had died, but even so, I was on my guard. After that, when he came to London, which he did several times, I was telephoned—and I went. I would arrive at about nine or ten, when the child was asleep, and leave probably about one or two. In between, I listened. That was my role. As a very young man, he had been in London with his first wife. That was before the First World War. They had no money, but they were in love, with each other and with London. Those were the happiest times in his life, he told me. He wanted to talk about that old London: the British Museum, trips to the country, the parks, the bookshops. I reminded him of that wife, he said. But then she died, and there was another wife. She died in the Second World War, of hunger and cold. He liked talking about what that war meant for Russians.

I sat in one armchair, and he in another, and he talked into the past. Sometimes he would slightly raise his fingers from the wrist of a hand, which rested on the arm of the chair, and that meant there was more he could say but he was afraid of invisible listeners: the KGB bugged all hotel rooms their protégés were put in.

The day-by-day struggle to live during the Second World War, or the Great Patriotic War…I sat and thought that it was not easy for anyone in Britain to imagine such hardship, such cold. Later he loved another woman, who worked in the Hermitage, in Leningrad, but he was living somewhere outside Moscow. It was hard to get permission to travel then, even for a prominent writer, but he did sometimes take the train to Leningrad—Anna Karenina's train, he reminded me—and she got the day off from her work. She had survived the siege of Leningrad, and she was very thin and weak, and not well. In her room they sat together all day and talked or were silent, and then he took the train back to Moscow. There was no need even to talk, he said. It was enough to be together. That was how that love went on, but she died too.

He also talked a lot about politics, about the times under Stalin. ‘I never betrayed anyone,' he insisted, over and over again, raising his voice and giving angry looks at the telephone, where he believed the KGB bug must be. ‘We were all compromised, every one of us. You don't understand, people like you in the West. There was no possibility of saying no to them. But when I was interrogated I would not speak about other writers—and that was what they wanted. They wanted to frighten us, that's why they interrogated us, even if
he
had decided not to send us to prison.'

He also wanted to warn me about the dangers of politics for writers. ‘You are still young. I was young too, once. I was a boy genius. I was a peasant boy. Gorky noticed me. He said I was a genius. He and I were alike. We were both from poor families. We both liked to walk by ourselves through the villages. He walked all over Russia, and so did I. Sometimes I was months by myself, walking. The peasants fed me. But later Gorky was destroyed—they killed him—and so was I, but in a different way. I have spent my life on committees. That is where my genius went. I always tell young writers, Don't go on committees, they'll finish you. And that's what I am telling you too.'

‘Ah, but you see, I learned that long ago.'

‘That's good. That's very good. But it's easy for you. You can say no. It is hard for us to say no.'

He told a story of how, when he was on a country road in some province, Gorky saw him, stopped his car, made him get in. ‘I want you to see something. You'll see an important man today.' Some writers were meeting in a country house, and Stalin had sent word that he would drop in. He did. He listened to their deliberations, all flattering to him. Then Gorky stood up and spoke directly to Stalin, telling him that everything that had been said was false. Conditions were terrible for the people. ‘We were sitting there in that fine house, but all around, people were suffering. And the writers were suffering too. The Party's ideas about literature were wrong and not good for writers.

‘We were holding our breaths,' said Marshak. ‘We were all of us white with terror. I was shaking—I was a very young man, and these were all big, important people to me, and Gorky was treating them as if they were just naughty children. And no one ever defied Stalin. You don't understand, you people here. Then Stalin stood up, very deliberately, and he said he was glad there was one honest man present—Comrade Gorky. “All the rest of you are liars, and you only say things to please me.” Then he went off with his guards.'

I have heard this story about other dictators. Clearly, we need to hear about this ‘one honest man'.

I was fond of Samuel Marshak, and I think he was of me. But what he needed was someone to listen to him, pay him attention. He was lonely. Yet this was an important Soviet writer.

He wanted to meet Peter. Next time he came, we met in the daytime, had tea in a park, went shopping to buy Marshak some shoes, for all the visiting Russians bought shoes and good clothes. He loved Peter, and Peter liked him. He gave Peter a very fine knife and some of his children's poems, in Russian. He wrote some verses for Peter, but I don't know what happened to them. Later Marshak's son, a physicist, used to come, and I was telephoned from the embassy: would I take him shopping for shoes and clothes?

I do not see how any writer could have a worse fate than Samual Marshak's. To be a peasant boy with genius—or even talent—at that time, was to be seen as the inheritor of a glorious future. To be Gorky's protégé was to be accepted by the most famous writer in Russia. Gorky steadily fought Lenin over the inhumanity of his policies, procuring the release of hundreds of political prisoners, and then he fought Stalin too: it would have been easy for Marshak to feel allied with the good side of the Revolution, for it was then still possible to think there was one. Slowly he was absorbed into the structure of oppression, but hardly knew it was happening. By the time he knew he was trapped, it was too late. Easy to say, for people who have never lived with the experience of political terror, ‘He should have opted out.' How? He would have been sent to die in the Gulag, like dozens of other writers. ‘I never wrote what I should have written,' he said. ‘I could have been like Gorky. Really my talent was for realistic writing. I should have written what I was seeing around me.' Samuel Marshak, to this day, arouses the most extraordinary degree of contempt among Russian intellectuals. They seem to want to spit (a very Russian expression of contempt, enshrined in the language) at the sound of his name: he was a Stalin Prize winner, he was synonymous with Soviet power. They are reluctant even to allow that he made good translations of Burns, Shakespeare, others. But surely the sad and humble old man I knew was as much a victim as Maxim Gorky, who was murdered by Stalin?