In Search of Mary (29 page)

After a possibly very long time she sets me down the right way up, tenderly placing my feet on the bottom of the pool as she steadies me. I find my feet, and then my balance. As I adjust, my eyelids gradually begin to move apart and a
funny thing happens. Patty is smiling, there right in front of me, her face close to my face. As my eyes slowly open, I involuntarily utter a little noise. Not a moan – I am British for God’s sake – more of a croak: a small sound of gratitude and surprise. It just bursts out of my mouth. And I’m not even embarrassed.

She smiles again, says “Take your time,” and swims away from me. I look around. I’m too stunned to take in anything beyond the sight of my arms and legs. They are covered in small silver bubbles that tickle my skin. I wipe them away: they fizz up to the surface, then immediately return, silvering my skin. I do this a few times, slowly and a bit stupidly, like someone under hypnosis. The water is fizzy. I didn’t even know. I love it.

Somehow I get out of the water and find my way back into my clothes. I am smiling, rumpled and dazed. I have probably grown a pulsating rainbow aura, or at the very least some kind of halo. I stagger off in search of Jean and Will. They have also been Harbined: I find them splashing around, naked, in the heart-shaped spring water pool. “The sign says ‘Swimwear Optional’ but no one’s wearing any,” says Jean, “so we just joined in.”

We may have resisted the
Vagina Monologues
, but apparently we’re ripe for conversion here. I tell her about my small croak, and we have a fit of laughter. Will is getting sleepy, and we’re in danger of becoming hysterical, so we settle him down in his buggy and go for a walk along a mountain path. The wooden sign says “Serenity Trail”. As we go, we joke about my croak. What was it? The final gasp of the Dragon of the Crock? The renunciation of a life of hippy-resenting?
The Croak of Acceptance. On Serenity Trail. We laugh like drunken teenagers, and Will conks out in minutes.

In the quiet space of Will’s sleep, Jean and I relax in the Blue Café. As well as bathing, massage and being reborn, Harbin offers courses in such things as ‘Timeless Loving’, ‘Sky-Dancing Tantra’ and ‘Let the Crazy Child Write’. I observe this straight-faced; I’ve lost the capacity for sarcasm and I don’t even care. Some people walk by wearing only bracelets and body art. We share a vegan black-bean burrito and pumpkin cake with our almond-milk lattes. For all my professed antipathy to anything patchouli-flavoured, I’m doing pretty well. The day floats ever so gently onwards.

At some point Jean drives us back home, slowly, through this land of languorous valleys and trees so massive that you can see the centuries. We agree that it’d be rude not to drink all that in. The Porter Creek vineyard in the Russian River Valley is a properly delicious place to stop off. Oh go on then, why not? Several locals are milling around, here to try the latest offerings.

The beardy owner looks as unlike a starchy sommelier as is humanly possible. I tell him about my Wollstonecraft trail, and he mentions that Robert Louis Stevenson travelled through California’s nascent wine valleys, making free with the local goodness. Stevenson wrote:

I am drinking California. I’ve been rebirthed as a Harbin love child and now I’m imbibing the birdsong and greenery, in glass after glass of sunlit wine. Jean has gone off playing around in the garden with Will – as today’s driver, she’s not indulging. They leave me to get lightly, goldenly intoxicated by myself. I become talkative and tremendously witty, engaging my co-tasters in unsolicited anecdotes about Mary Wollstonecraft. No one seems to mind. It’s mellow. Mellow! Did I really just say that?

Wine and life haven’t tasted this good since that blinding orchestral moment at the end of Norway’s silver trail. We travel the full grape spectrum, and I try out wines that are described as “fruit-forward” and “earth-driven”, immediately evoking Annie Sprinkle. I roll them lasciviously around my mouth, playing with them, allowing them to come into me. Annie would be proud. Even the wine is ecosexual in California.

Chapter Eighteen

“Acquire Sufficient Fortitude to Pursue Your Own Happiness”

In the end, it’s something very small that breaks unexpectedly into the Californian spell. There’ve been a few phone calls and emails from my beloveds back home, but not many. Then this morning an email arrives. Justin has sent a short recording of Eva’s violin practice. The scratchy sound comes out of my phone, and it’s like treading on a pin. I can hear Elsa and Zola chattering in the background. These small common sounds cut deep, it’s the sound of home. It hurts, and I know immediately that we’ve been away for the right amount of time. Any longer will be too much.

Saying goodbye to Jean and Doug isn’t easy, but I’m also elated. Not only by the trees, wine and food, but by the many answers I’ve gathered. “It’s so much easier now,” I tease Jean. “The next time we’re asked about feminism, we can say: ‘I’m identifying as a post-binary, non-gender ecosexual right now. I may well shift along the continuum this evening or next week.’”

Time is running out, the time of this trip. Will and I spend our last night in a hotel, and I’m transcribing my interviews furiously during his midday sleep. The remaining moments feel almost countable. The moments of this rainbow life on the road with my baby. They’re finite. Just the thought of this
makes me take the risk of going over, leaning into his cot and lightly touching his hair. His chest rises and falls gently.

Has this whole thing been an excuse to revel more deeply in the last baby days of my last baby? Repeating ripples of thought about how he’s growing up become regular waves, waves of a tender sadness. With every new thing he learns, he is deeper into the world and further from me. The mysterious bud of Will blossoms more every day. His babyhood is now behind us.

I ache with a sudden longing for the lost moments. Something comes back from the past, lines that I learnt off by heart when I still didn’t know what they meant. It’s from a poem by Goethe, a contemporary of Wollstonecraft. He was writing about a woman, but it could just as well be Will scampering on that Californian beach with his hair stuck down in the wind and his belly poking out:

Wollstonecraft too leant over her baby, on those far Scandinavian shores, blessed her sleeping face, heard her small feet
pattering on the sand. She too felt the loss of the moment. You can only see it as it moves away. This is why, when you’re holding your newborn, smitten women lurch up to behold it with their tear-stung eyes. You patiently repeat: “It’s a girl… four weeks old… six and half a pounds.” But they don’t really care about all that. What they want is to reclaim their own baby in yours. They can’t believe it, because they are seeing the thing that they have lost forever.

Soon Will and I will be all the way back into the torrent of the real world: shouting kids, falling out with friends, shoes everywhere, school rush, laundry, deadlines, childcare, work, getting everyone fed and then doing it all over again. This is our last precious bubble of exclusive time. Somehow it’s heightened by Will’s complete oblivion, as I gaze on his sleeping face.

But even screechy mornings trying to get everyone into their shoes and out the front door – even these are “moments”. And this is why the squeaking violin causes such a stab in my heart. At home it’d be a background irritation. Here it is singled out, amplified with all the grandeur of a church organ and given meaning. That small sound is part of my life and all the meaning of my life.

Wollstonecraft stares at her baby and goes on to talk about being not an island, but part of the grand mass of humanity – just as I am feeling the magnetic pull of home. Those ancient domestic resentments have been ironed out by some newer freedoms. They are freedoms that were hard-won, and not by me. They are freedoms I didn’t appreciate before, and they are tempered by knowing not everyone can do this. What about the Lago showgirls and the Holbeck estate mums. What about them?

Well, even if it’s been a selfish journey, the witches taught me not to let that bring me down. We’re picking up what’s right in front of us. Above all, I’m dying to see Justin and the girls again. What led me away from home has now brought me closer. There’s no place like it. And I’ve officially given up caring if I sound like I’m on the mommy drugs.

It lashes down with dark grey rain on our last day. It pours down the back of my neck as I load Will into his car seat this one last time, on our way back to San Francisco International Airport. Even Ms Satnav seems a bit sullen. We have to do a huge loop around Presidio because she kept silent. Funny how things get faster at the end, like the last few grains of sand speeding through the hourglass. I’ve packed in a blur. If I get searched I definitely hope they find my Annie Sprinkle DVD:
How To Be a Sex Goddess: Action Tips from Post-Modern Porn.

But the writing – the impulse to record it all, the clapping of the net over the butterfly of the moment – was it useful? I have spent a thousand hunched hours on it. Hours spent away from my kids, but writing about them. Often without knowing
why. I was on it, so I kept going. The usefulness or otherwise of this is debatable. What is beyond debate is the power of the book that made me do it.
Letters from Norway
, and the multi-directional adventures bursting from its yellowing pages. Her centuries-old words reinforced the need to go out and live things a bit deeper, right now. And then, that haunting call, to

Will and I set off with one set of Grand Principles of Action:

and managed to clock up some new ones quite by accident:

It didn’t always seem like a direct path. But it did lead us directly out the front door, out of the daily scramble of hurrying and stuff and squabbling and laundry and whatever else it is that makes it suddenly be much later than you thought.
Because life spreads out like a spilt glass of water, running its way, in a small and brief trickle. For a short time, we took the water off its course and managed to freeze it, lift it up and look through it. And that was enough. Let that spilt water go, evaporate, form a cloud elsewhere; I can call it a day.

Wollstonecraft stood alone and stands alone. I never wanted to be an expert, just a companion. And for her thoughts; her courage and indignation, to accompany others too. “I do not wish [women] to have power over men, but over themselves.” What could be more powerful than completing a quest? Even if it was a quest that I couldn’t properly see until we’d done it.

The very end of the trip too suddenly arrives, and we’re on the flight home. Will only thrashes for almost an hour, and then he falls into the deepest, dearest sleep. I flop my head back on the seat. I’m tired, but it’s not the grinding exhaustion of everyday motherhood: it’s a profoundly satisfying tiredness. My mind has run up and down several mountains of thought, while my body carried this baby along for the ride. There’s an elated sadness that doesn’t stem entirely from this double gin-and-tonic. Cheers, Wolly. We did it. I sigh theatrically, disturbing the hair of the man sitting in front of us. I don’t care. We’ve done the three journeys and now I can come home.

When I pulled Will out of his warm cot, all those long months ago, and set off on that bright early morning to Norway, I had no idea what we’d find. Or that what we would find might
lead us onwards to further and bigger adventures. Together we flew against the scarcely perceptible current of daily life, the current that floats us along, ushering us beyond the moment and into old age without noticing; letting

I expected to chase some freedoms and have some fun. I wasn’t looking for searing insights into my own existence. And don’t worry: I haven’t found any, and am resolutely continuing not to look. So that’s OK and you can cut the end theme music swell right there. But I’d be lying if I pretended that I’ve managed not to learn anything. On top of the stuff I actually wanted to learn, that is, about Wollstonecraft and women’s lives. It turns out that it’s not selfish to