Guilty: The Lost Classic Novel (2 page)

The British writer and journalist Virginia Ironside, a professed fan of Kavan’s writing, has commented on what she identifies in her work as an abiding sense of guilt and associated pending punishment. Ironside speculates on the possible source of this guilt, considering Kavan’s heroin addiction and a childish sense of responsibility for her father’s suicide. He drowned in the harbour at Tuxpan, Veracruz, Mexico, on 22 February 1911, when Kavan was nearly ten years old. This tragedy had a huge impact on the child, compounding her already developed sense of parental abandonment. Did she experience guilt? Possibly. Children personalize rejection, assuming that their behaviour has somehow causally contributed to the event. However, if Kavan’s personal guilt is identifiable, it is to be found in her chosen position of social isolation, a stance necessitated by her impatience with hypocrisy and her intolerance of those she regarded as her intellectual inferiors. Her friends were few, mostly male and often homosexual, and she was wont
to estrange herself from them for periods of time, before cautiously reconciling. Mark describes this:

Anybody who’s ever attempted to do it will know that it’s never easy to start life again, especially with very little money and without friends. Eternal regret is the price I must pay for the idyllic companionship I have known and lost. Now I’m more alone than I’ve ever been, not only because I no longer have any friends but because I know that however closely another life may impinge on mine ultimately I exist in impenetrable isolation.

The reader of this, the latest in Anna Kavan’s impressive list of published works, will be intrigued by her handling of internalized and subconscious guilt. Her ability to navigate the inner landscape does not fail to impress.

Jennifer Sturm
University of Auckland, New Zealand, 2007

M
y father served with distinction in two wars and emerged from the army a minor hero; whereupon he astounded everybody by a public declaration of pacifism. I was very young at the time, but I distinctly remember the day he came back to our country cottage looking most resplendent, I thought, in his fine uniform.

My mother had been to the station to meet him, but I, because I was getting over some childish complaint, had, to my disgust, been left at home with the maid, a disappointment for which I expected compensation in the form of much attention from him. But he only said, ‘Hullo, Mark’, and gave me a careless sort of hug as he passed on his way upstairs. I was still convalescent and easily upset by small things or by nothing at all and, feeling most injured, began to whimper, glancing at my mother, who, with a flushed unhappy face, was gazing after him. I’d had her to myself for most of my life, and no doubt she had spoiled me, especially during my recent illness. So when she said sharply, ‘Oh, don’t start grizzling’, and then ran upstairs without taking any more notice of me, I was so astonished that I stopped crying at once.

The bang of the back door told me the maid had gone out, hurrying after her freedom, delayed on my account, leaving only the three of us in the cottage. Though I was tempted to creep up the stairs to listen to what my parents were saying, I didn’t dare do so with my mother in her present mood, eavesdropping being a sin she condemned
severely. All sorts of wild fancies went through my head, of which I favoured most the idea that my father had suddenly gone mad. Perhaps because the voices upstairs seemed to be arguing, my thoughts turned to a sensational crime (lurid details of which I had heard from the servant girl) committed recently by a soldier who, on his return from the war, had slaughtered his entire family.

Suppose my father were to kill my mother and then come down and kill me? My skin crept with delicious horror as I pictured him with the still smoking revolver in his hand, levelling it at me, saying something extraordinary before he fired. Would it hurt much? Would he shoot himself immediately afterwards, or wait to fire the remaining shots at the policemen who would come for him, reserving only the final bullet for his own death?

I still had a shamefully babyish fear of loud noises, and what I really dreaded most was the bang. Our home was far from any town, and treats such as visits to the circus or panto mime were made more attractive by their rarity, but my pleasure was always much reduced on these occasions if a gun appeared on the stage, keeping me in such agonizing suspense that when it was fired at last I could hardly stop myself screaming.

It was a different matter, however, to listen for a shot I knew would never come; an experience half agreeable, half terrifying, like the fearful thrill of the game where you hide in the dark and wait for someone to find you. But my imagin ation soon proved too strong for me. The pretence was threatening to turn into a waking nightmare, beyond my control, when, to my vast relief, my parents came downstairs again, and I ran to meet them. A sudden sense of something wrong stopped me dead, and I realized they were still too absorbed in their argument even to be aware of my
presence – a state of affairs so unprecedented and altogether unnatural that I felt the obscure threat of nightmare again, all the more frightening for being imposed on the surroundings and apparently normal circumstances of everyday.

While the situation oscillated between the two poles of nightmare and norm, I observed that my father, in this short time, had already changed into civilian clothes, in which I did not think he looked half so fine. I recognized the tweed suit as the one that had been hanging up in the big wardrobe ever since he’d left, taken out at regular intervals by my mother, religiously brushed and aired. Despite these attentions, it seemed to me old and shabby compared with the magnificent uniform he had been wearing and was carrying now on his arm. I noticed that he was also carrying several small boxes that looked interesting, as if they might contain presents, and, normality getting the upper hand, I moved forward again.

But nightmare reassumed its ascendancy as he walked straight past as if I had not been there and, closely pursued by my mother, went into the kitchen, thus completing my utter confusion, for I had never seen him in there and hardly thought he knew such a place existed. Should I follow? I had not been told not to. I could tell by their voices that my parents had been caught by one of those sudden emotional storms, always liable to sweep upon grown-up people like typhoons, out of nowhere, strange, frightening, incomprehensible outbursts of love or hate, which seemed to fling them about helpless as battered pieces of wreckage, while I was left out, ignored.

My one small satisfaction was to know I could watch without being noticed; but I had no sooner entered the kitchen than I’d have given anything to have stayed in the other room. Had it been possible I’d have run away. But
now, in true nightmare fashion, I was frozen in immobility, unable to speak or move, forced to witness my own horrific imaginings made real.

I’d imagined my father mad, and what but madness could now make him snatch the lid off the dustbin (my voice frozen within me, I trembled all over at the thunderous nerve-shattering clang with which it crashed to the floor) and proceed to stuff his beautiful uniform into it, on top of potato peelings, tea leaves and garbage of all descriptions? The bin was already half full. It was not easy to thrust the garments into it; he had to cram them down with both hands, finally setting his foot on the top of the lot, and with evident satisfaction stamping the fine material deep into the squelching, malodorous mess.

Aghast, I looked at my mother, wordlessly imploring her to stop this madness, or at least to assure me these acts were not as mad as they seemed, appealing to her (as hitherto in every crisis I’d appealed successfully) to save me from this fantastic nightmare. For the first time in my life the assurance wasn’t forthcoming. She neither put an end to the grotesque and frightful scene nor removed me from it. And as I watched her fluttering around, pecking and plucking at him with ineffectual darting motions and thin protesting cries, as flimsy and useless as a bird’s, it gradually dawned on me that, at this moment, she was almost as helpless as I was myself. She was not, as I’d always believed, infallible and omnipotent where I was concerned; there were some situations against which she was powerless to protect me.

I know one doesn’t grow out of babyhood on a single occasion, but I must have taken a long step forward when I made this shocking discovery. And perhaps the peculiar nightmare quality of the episode has stayed so clear in my memory, with all its crazy detail, because it obscured to
some extent the realization that the being upon whom I’d lived till then in total dependence was, after all, only human. Meanwhile, it was the turn of the little boxes which had looked so promising, when viewed as I normally viewed the chance of a present. Throughout my father’s performance, they had been lying disregarded on the dresser beside me. I wished I’d slipped one of them into my pocket, as I easily could have done at any moment up to now, when he gathered them up in his strong sunburned hands, snapped them open one after the other, ripped out the medals embedded within and consigned these, too, to the dustbin.

I remember our kitchen as rather a dull little room, a drab background across which the decorations flashed, briefly exotic as a shower of meteors, before they slid out of sight with no more fuss and less noise than coins sliding into a purse; far too pretty, I thought, with their rainbow ribbons, to be swallowed by the sordid, dirty grey bin full of disgusting rubbish. Since there was no room left in it for the cases that had contained them, my father threw these on to the floor and dispatched them in the same summary fashion, stamping them into shapelessness and grinding beneath his heel those that resisted destruction.

It was all over in a moment. The glittering discs and crosses were gone without trace. Nothing was left of that brave display but a few broken scraps of framework and torn shreds of leather and velvet, which he kicked into a corner where they could not be seen. Lifting the fallen lid, he replaced it carefully on the bin, looking around to make sure he’d left no sign of disorder anywhere. Then, satisfied that the room was restored precisely to its original state, he went across to the sink and turned on the tap.

A child’s time is different from an adult’s, and I seemed to have been locked in nightmare for an eternity. I felt I’d
reached the ultimate point of endurance where I must escape or die. Most opportunely, the noise of water rushing out of the tap, that most ordinary of household sounds, came now to the rescue, reasserting the existence of all that was known and familiar in my daily life.

The exotic, the splendid, the terrifying, the mad had disappeared, snapped back as if on an elastic band to the world of magic, both good and bad, which for me was all the while lying as close behind the common face of appearances. The sight of my father in his old clothes, calmly and thoroughly washing his hands with green Puritan soap, as if he’d never been a hero or fought in a war, reaffirmed the unreality of the magical. Could I have imagined the uniform and the medals? Could I possibly have imagined the whole incident?

It didn’t seem so very unlikely, for there was not then any hard-and-fast line of division between my two worlds, which at times overlapped in a confusing manner. I thought of the tall, thin man, as substantial as my parents in every detail of his appearance and just as much a reality to me (only differing from other people in his harmless habit of coming through doors without opening them), remembering how bewildered I’d been when I discovered that nobody else could see him. I’d known him for years, and we’d always been on the best of terms till, shortly before my illness, my mother had told me I was getting too old for such fancies. Though she’d spoken kindly, after this I was no longer at ease in my mind about him and wished he would stop coming to see me – but it was impossible to say this to an old friend – as henceforth his visits would have to be kept secret. Later, while I was lying in bed (though I knew I couldn’t be scolded for anything till I was well again), the problem her words had raised weighed so heavily on my sick brain that I used to implore him to go away when he stood
looking down at me reproachfully, and afterwards beg her to tell me he hadn’t really been in the room.

Now, in the same way, I longed to call out, ‘None of that really happened, did it?’ But she, as if suddenly tired, had sat down at the scrubbed table, on which she rested her arm, deliberately placing her head upon it as if she’d just decided to take a nap there. Only she never took naps in the daytime; and I knew that, if by some chance she were to do so, it would certainly not be with her head on the kitchen table.

So the nightmare was still going on, though I could stand no more of it. And when I realized that she was quietly crying this was the last straw. Absolutely at the end of my tether, I lifted up my voice and started to weep aloud, making a lugubrious duet of our mutual grief.

I don’t remember any more of that day’s events. Curiously, I wasn’t troubled again, at least not consciously, by feeling responsible for my father’s mad actions, and if there were consequences below the surface I failed to recognize them.

My mother never talked to me about his pacifism, keeping from me all the unpleasant publicity the case attracted. I’ve no doubt she meant to shield me from her own unhappiness by saying nothing, but it might have been better for me if she’d been less restrained, for I couldn’t help being aware of the conflict between them, which changed the whole atmosphere in which we lived. I see now how close to each other they must always have been, so that they were too absorbed in their personal tragedy to consider how lost and bewildered I felt, deprived suddenly of my importance as a part of the family unit – one that was breaking up – both of them too preoccupied to think much about me. But at the
time I could not understand their apparent indifference to my feelings. Though there were no arguments in my presence, I’m sure my mother did everything in her power to dissuade my father from his new opinions, making use of every weapon at her command – blandishments, as well as appeals and denunciations. It must have been hard to convince her that he couldn’t be shaken, but, once she was convinced, the thing obsessed her, and she persuaded herself that he’d disgraced us all. Since her nature was too gentle for bitterness, she lapsed then into a state of aggrieved melancholy, withdrawing into herself more and more, seeing no one, staying indoors and doing all the housework, dismissing the maid we had employed for years. When my father protested that it was too much for her and that there had been no need to get rid of the girl, she replied in terms of veiled reproach, somehow implying, so that even I half understood, that his principles were to blame, as though he’d deliberately imposed on her this penance of drudgery and isolation.