A Life's Work (16 page)

I believed that I would never have lived in such a place when my life was my own; and although it is in the purpose of such places to ensure that it is not, to remove your life from your control and hence prevent it from becoming a public danger, I had to claim my share of responsibility in the matter of relinquishing London and the existence to which over the years my unfettered desire had given shape. I could not tell you how great this share was: I never had time or opportunity to quantify it. All I know is that it began to grow in me after I had a child: a second gestation, of dissatisfaction, sometimes of actual distress. A feeling of dispossession and rootlessness took hold of me, thrived in me, putative but vigorous, and it was only once I had ceased to house it and actually brought it to life that I saw it was merely a phantom, a construction. I had given, it seemed, concrete expression to my grief at the fact that I could no longer live the life that I had been living. I had moved away because I thought I no longer belonged where I was.

No sooner had I done it than I found myself remarkably restored. Everything that motherhood had seemed to put at an unbreachable remove now was obstructed by mere geography. The loneliness of hours spent with a baby at home merged with that of moving to a new, friendless and uncongenial place. What was staid and humdrum and restricting and depriving about motherhood found its incarnation in our surroundings. My life shed its burden, passed it on. Imagine, I found myself saying to my partner one day, how much easier it would be looking after children if you weren't stuck in this boring hole, if you had all your friends around and places to go in the evening and things to do at the weekend. You mean in London, he said.

So our life in the provinces quickly took on the tenor of a prison sentence, whose term could not be set because of the difficulty of admitting to ourselves or others that we had erred. There was an etiquette, I felt, to the making of such mistakes: they ought to take time, although we did have a friend who had moved out of London and back in the space of a few days. He played in a tennis four on Saturdays, and managed to relocate his family to the north of England, realise his error, and bring them all back again without missing a game. In any case, at first our new life felt, if not exactly right, then at least like something more bearable than a mistake. It was late summer, and in a languorous heatwave we swam daily in a nearby river, a wide, still ribbon of water that meandered through a great meadow where cows and wild horses grazed. People boated on this river: elderly couples in motor launches, boisterous groups on canal-boat holidays, people sailing dinghies down this quaint, pastoral strait as if it were the sea. There were men dressed in sailing garb – jaunty caps and handkerchiefs tied around the neck – that would have looked more at home in a San Francisco nightclub. There were couples you could glimpse through the fishbowls of their glazed, airtight cabins, the man sitting grimly at the wheel, the woman flicking about the cabin with a duster or making cups of unearned tea. On another stretch of river people poled punts through the thick green waters; students and tourists mostly, their loud laughter or silence alike indicative of self-consciousness, for this was a well-worn idyll, an enactment of privilege derived from the pages of
Brideshead Revisited.
Once I saw a group of students on a punt, the boys dressed in white flannels and boaters, the girls in diaphanous dresses and straw hats. Someone even carried a teddy bear. They had a picnic basket and an old-fashioned gramaphone on board, from which emanted loud, distorted strains of Edith Piaf. They held champagne glasses. One boy waved the bottle at other punts as they passed. They were a strange group, ill-fitted for the hedonism at which they strained: the boys were spotty and beak-nosed, the girls dumpy and bespectacled. Their riotousness was uncertain, bordering clumsily on abuse. I cringed for them, but the taint of their pretentious outing remained on my mind over the long months, like a warning, impossible to rub away.

Slowly the year rolled over: summer turned to autumn. My daughter learned to crawl and then to stand as the days drew in and it started to rain. Her development was not, as I had expected, taking the joyful form of a sprightly liberation from the paralysis of babyhood. Instead it was a slow and frustrating business. Watching her was like watching a film running backwards. Her body was tormented by some invisible force that made her get up and fall over again and again, that caused her to struggle and stretch, like someone drowning, for a chair leg or table top to which to cling. It was as if she were fighting to emerge from quicksand. My head ached with the tension of her efforts. It became dangerous to leave her unguarded for even a minute, for her physical drive was like sand issuing from a fathomless hourglass, like time: it flowed from her in a constant stream which we fought to channel and contain, spilling hazardously over when the telephone or a knock at the door occasioned a moment of neglect. I recalled remarks I had carelessly heard other parents use, phrases like
she never stops
or
she's on the go all the time
, and pondered what they actually meant. An instant's distraction would find my daughter inching over the top of the stairs, pulling electrical leads that were about to bring the kettle or iron down on top of her, delving into the rubbish. She husked records from their sleeves and shredded letters in their envelopes with the speed of a harvesting peasant. She aimed herself at bottles of bleach or hot cups of tea, trundling across rooms like a slow but deadly missile and changing course only if someone actually went and stood between her and her target. Suddenly our life was like a drama in which a bomb is being disabled against the clock. We were, all at once, the slaves of time, and we kept our daughter to the kitchen so as better to contain her ticking, to contain her power to destroy. Only when she was upended, neutralised by sleep, did the ticking stop; interludes which washed swiftly and soundlessly past us like flood waters, bearing away the pleasure of books or conversation too quickly for us to do more than grab at them.

The business of looking after a child possesses a core of unruliness, a quality of continual crisis, and my version of motherhood lacked, I saw, the aspect of military organisation with which such a core should be approached. I do not use the word ‘military' lightly: conscription to the world of orthodox parenthood demands all the self-abnegation, the surrender to conformity, the relish for the institutional, that the term implies. People understood this in the town in which we now lived. Its residential recesses were ‘geared' to the good mother. This, I came to understand, was why so many mothers lived here. Here you could be free from the torments and temptations of life on the outside, from bars and movie theaters and shops selling impractical shoes. Here the restaurants had high chairs and changing facilities, the buses wide doors and recesses for prams. The exalted sphere of the university, its silence, its privileged, patriarchal enclaves, lived on undisturbed. A hierarchy was in place and its provision extended from the lowest to the highest.

A health visitor came to see us in our embattled kitchen. She produced sheaves of leaflets and laid each one lovingly on the table for me to study while behind her the baby looted her handbag undetected. Have you taken her to toddler group, the health visitor enquired. I had not. Like vaccinations and mother and baby clinics, the notion instilled in me a deep administrative terror. I took the baby to shops where I tried on clothes, to cafés in the centre where students sat packed in a fog of cigarette smoke. I took her for walks across bumpy fields where the stroller became mired in mud. I took her to London, where she cried frantically in noisy restaurants, in traffic jams. The health visitor produced a typed list of groups in my area. It helps, she said, to meet other mothers. You can chat, and even have a coffee if you feel like it. I sensed that I should feel abjectly grateful for this lowly provision. As it was I drank cup after cup of strong coffee alone, and smoked cigarettes in the garden when my daughter was asleep. I'll see, I said. I suppose it would be good for her to meet other babies. As far as I knew, my daughter believed that she was the only one of her kind. I worried that the truth might come as something of a shock.

The kitchen floor had a hard, tiled surface. We put down rugs, but in spite of them several times each day my daughter's head would make contact with it. She would pull herself to her feet and stand, often for ten or fifteen minutes, before falling slowly backwards, ramrod straight like a felled tree. During the long seconds of this fall, whoever was with her would run towards her, occasionally diving or skidding like a baseball player lunging for base or even fielding a cushion towards the spot upon which her head was about to make contact; and in the moment of impact they would freeze, suspended in a posture of horror and protest by the sound of her skull hitting the tiles. The narrative of her adventures ran on in the background of our lives like a radio. Sometimes we attended to them and sometimes we didn't, but some miniature quest was always underway, stairs being scaled, cupboards excavated, objects scientifically analysed for their properties. Pain had lent her a certain toughness, a core of bravado which made her unwilling to admit failure or distress. I would occasionally look up, alerted by silence, to find her hanging grimly from a cupboard door or from the rungs of a chair in which her feet had become trapped. The world of things was her unresting opponent, her wilderness, and she took the risk of its instability, its unpredictability. One day she pulled herself to her feet on the rungs of her heavy wooden highchair, and it fell on top of her. I watched from the doorway, too far away to intervene, as she fell straight back on to the tiles with the tower of the highchair bearing down on her. Her head hit the tiles with a crack. Seconds later, the highchair's protruding wooden tray smacked against her forehead with the force of a sledgehammer. I picked her up and ran out into the street with her. I didn't know what else to do. It was as if I were surrendering her, or making some appeal for her safety to the outside world. There was a dent in the centre of her forehead. It turned yellow with bruising. Every time I looked at it I felt ashamed.

One morning I found the health visitor's list under the kitchen table. It informed me that a toddler group was convening in fifteen minutes' time at a church hall a few streets away. We put on our coats and set out along the windy pavement beneath a low grey sky, hurrying through the indeterminate heart of a suburban mid-week morning, through the flat terrain of the unimportant, the unoccupied, for all the world as if we were rushing to make a train or a meeting or a thrilling date. The hall was a modern one-storey building attached to the flank of a Gothic church. Inside, a circle of empty chairs had been methodically placed around a tidy miniature landscape of toys. We were the first to arrive. A busy, nervous woman wearing a small silver crucifix on a chain around her neck told us to write our names on stickers and attach them to our clothes. We stood about, shy and agonised like people at a party. The woman asked me if this was my first time at the group and I said that it was. My daughter set off determinedly for the toys, displacing one of the chairs. She picked up a plastic fireman's helmet and put it on her head. I don't know if they'll all come, confided the woman anxiously. I shouldn't think they will. You see, the holidays have started. I asked which holidays these were. She mentioned the name of the expensive private school whose manicured playing fields bordered our garden. I wondered what these holidays had to do with me, and realised that the answer was nothing. So you see, said the woman, it might not be so good this week. Oh well, I said. Presently she asked me if I had lived here long. Only a few weeks, I replied. And is your husband attached to the university? she enquired.

Other women were arriving. I saw them through the windows, coming up the path with their strollers. Hel-lo, yodelled the organiser, beaming, hel-
lo.
She rushed hither and thither, administering stickers. My daughter's face was sombre beneath her helmet, her demeanour important. She tended the toys authoritatively. Presently she caught sight of me sitting alone and came over to place a plastic turtle with wheels and mad revolving eyes comfortingly in my lap. Released from their strollers, the other children moved towards the toy area like people arriving at work and began to occupy themselves. A small boy approached my daughter and stood silently in front of her until she relinquished the blue teddy bear in her hand. She appeared to understand perfectly what was going on, which was more than could be said for me. I had not conversed with anyone outside my family for several weeks, and now appeared to be suffering from a form of Tourette's syndrome. A woman asked me how I liked the area in which we were living, and to my concern I found myself embarked on a lengthy denunciation of it which I was apparently unable to curtail. I saw, as if from a great distance, her worried face, her uncomprehending eyes. So what do you do? I said abruptly. This only appeared to make the situation worse. Julia bakes
marvellous
cakes, the woman next to her informed me after a pause. Really? I said, with frantic delight. I've always thought I'd love to be a baker. Do you make any money out of it? The two women looked at each other like schoolgirls, with horrified eyes. What does your husband do? somebody asked me. When next I looked at my daughter, I saw that a child with straggling hair and crossed eyes was gripping her by her thick red curls and banging her head repeatedly on the floor. Cordelia! trilled the child's mother distractedly. Cordelia! The organiser was bringing out cups and saucers which clattered loudly in her shaking hands. Steam rose from a boiling kettle. She went about the room, bending discreetly towards the groups of talking women.
Coffee
, she mouthed to each one in a stage whisper, as if she were interrupting important meetings. Nearby, Cordelia's mother was discussing Cordelia's proclivities. Whenever she sees a black person, she said fondly, she just bursts into tears! It's quite embarrassing really, she added above the laughter of the others. She's obviously, you know,
a bit frightened.
They nodded their heads sympathetically, hands over their smiling mouths.
Coffee?
whispered the organiser next to my ear.