The Girl Who Passed for Normal (2 page)

RTK
: One could see a problem arising if people can’t separate the character they see on the page from how they imagine you perceive them in life. But then as Graham Greene famously said, there’s ‘a splinter of ice in the heart of a writer.’

HF
: Yes. I’ve always thought it’s probably more like a splinter of humanity, in a block of ice …

RTK
: As the reader proceeds through
The Girl Who Passed for Normal
, would it be fair for them to suspect that the book’s title could apply to any one of the main female characters?

HF
: Yes. It’s supposed to be Catherine, the daughter, who’s most evidently ‘not normal’, but by the end of the story the teacher Barbara, who was supposedly normal at the outset, has accepted all sorts of things that your average person would not – murder, for one. But then most normal people do accept these things go on, even if they’re not involved in them first-hand …

RTK
: And the mother, Mary, who laughs in saying that she thinks her daughter is ‘mad’? Is she perhaps not so very sane herself?

HF
: I’ve always thought that about 95 per cent of the world’s population are insane.

RTK
: Clinically?

HF
: Well, if you scratch almost anybody you’ll find it. We keep up masks, and if you can’t mask it then the world judges you insane. That doesn’t mean to say that just because you
can
mask it then underneath you’re not. I’ve met very few people in my life who weren’t – when it really comes down to it, when push comes to shove …

RTK
: Barbara appears reasonably ‘grounded’ in some ways, and yet we do worry about her from the start, mainly because of her romantic attachment to the elusive David, when all the evidence points to this being a fixed delusion on her part.

HF
: Yes it’s not a satisfactory relationship. And she’s already lost her first husband …

RTK
: She’s looking for love
…

HF
: She is. And I think the clincher is that Catherine says to her, ‘I love you’, and for the first time Barbara really does feel loved. And maybe Catherine does love her, though she’s also using Barbara for her own ends. But that is pivotal.

RTK
: David’s friend Marcello seems like a sane voice in the book. At the start he’s quite condescending to Barbara. Yet by the end he’s rather afraid of her.

HF
: Marcello is made nervous by her because he guesses the extent to which she’s prepared to go. And she sees him as someone who can pontificate as he does because he’s firmly in ‘the establishment’, as it were, whereas she is excluded for all sorts of reasons. In the end she gets what she wants – it’s a bit of the Saint Therese/answered prayers syndrome. But she pays the price.

RTK
: Do you think you’re inclined by temperament toward ‘dark’ endings for your stories? Rather than, say, ‘redemptive’ ones?

HF
: Oh, I think most of them are redemptive in a way. People get what they want … Like Barbara, or like Wilbur in
An Artist and a Magician
. Originally I wanted to call that book ‘A Tax On Added Value’ but I was advised it wasn’t a good title. Essentially, though, that is what the book is about. Value has been added to Wilbur’s life but he has to pay a moral tax on it. You could say the same of
The Girl
.

RTK
: You say your characters ‘get what they want.’ But I sometimes find myself wondering how they would manage to go on with their lives after the last page.

HF
: Well, that’s something we all have to deal with, isn’t it?

RTK
: The Girl Who Passed for Normal nearly became a film, didn’t it?

HF
: Yes.
A Painter of Flowers
was optioned but never filmed, then I met the director George Cosmatos in Rome who bought
The Girl
and wanted to make it. But he had a contract with [producer] Carlo Ponti, and had got into a lot of trouble over a film called
Rappresaglia
starring Richard Burton and Marcello Mastroianni, to do with the Pope not defending the Jews during the war. George was being sued over it, and he thought if it went against him he might not work again. He did get through it, then he made
The Cassandra Crossing
, not terribly good but hugely successful. Then he went to Hollywood, where he wound up making
Rambo
… But
The Girl Who Passed for Normal
went by the board.

We stayed vaguely in touch, and some years down the line he told me he was in a position to make anything he liked, and really wanted to make
The Girl
. He came to London, we talked about it, he asked me to write a script, I did and I sent it to him. But I heard nothing back, which was most unlike him. I called his son in Vancouver and asked if he was all right? The son told me he’d suffered a brain tumour and lost his sight, and about two months later he died.

RTK
: Earlier you mentioned Patricia Highsmith as an influence on your writing. Highsmith famously said that she was ‘interested in the effect of guilt’ upon the heroes of her stories. Do you think you are interested in something similar?

HF
: No – not ‘guilt’, that’s not something I really recognise. I would say I’m interested in characters coming to terms with things, in themselves and in the world. It’s about their arriving at a knowledge, of murder, of death … And then they use this, and grow out of what they were. That’s a conscious theme of all my books.

RTK
: In your own life would you say you’ve had experiences that affected you in just this way?

HF
: I think for my generation a big part of it was growing up just after the war, in the shadow of that, which had a profound effect on me, certainly, and from an early age. I remember, at school, reading accounts of concentration camps. And you were told this was what the Germans were capable of – or the Russians, in the case of the gulags. But these things weren’t dreadful because they were done by Russians or Germans. I thought, ‘This is what
human beings
are capable of.’ It led you to wonder how you would cope in that situation – cope, I mean, whether on one side or the other, whether one was in such a camp or running it.

The other main theme in my books, I suppose, is the ‘beauty and the beast’ element – that you have to have them both, you can’t have one without the other. Beauty without the beast is shallow, meaningless.

RTK
: Would you say it’s a necessary acknowledgement of evil in the world?

HF
: Not ‘evil’, just the facts of life. I don’t really ‘do’ evil (
laughs
). I hate the word ‘innocent’, too – I know what people mean by it but I just don’t buy it. There’s ignorance and then there’s knowledge, or there should be.

People say Francis Bacon’s paintings are horrific, but I find them beautiful as paintings. The subject matter is, in a sense, irrelevant. If you consider the power of Renaissance painters who painted crucifixions – the subject may be tragic or whatever you want to call it, but if the paintings are beautiful then in that way you get the whole package. The Grunewald
Crucifixion
in Colmar, for example, is horrific but also beautiful. Whereas paintings by someone like Renoir who just did flowers and rosy-cheeked girls are much uglier to me.

RTK
: So the artist needs to make an accommodation with the horrific, to look at it squarely?

HF
: Oh, I think everybody should, artists or no. I should say, I don’t think artists are any more corrupt than anyone else – I just think they should stop pretending that they’re
less
.

She opened the door of the apartment. It was quiet and dark inside, and across the hall, through the open door of the living room, she could see that the shutters were closed.

She called “David,” but there was no reply. She picked up her suitcases, carried them into the hall, and closed the door. She turned on the light, then went into the living room and opened the shutters. She took off her coat, and noticed that one of her mother’s curly, greasy hairs was sticking to the shoulder. Her lips twisted a little in distaste, and she removed the hair and dropped it in a wastepaper basket. She had checked the coat five or six times since her mother had said good-bye to her, had put her fat arms around her and put her greasy head on her shoulder, but every time she checked she found another hair, or a trace of the gray-white mohair sweater her mother had been wearing. She thought, with disgust, that she would probably go on finding traces of her mother for days and days, and just when she thought she had found them all she would find another — and when she had found them all she would still be able to smell her mother’s smell, that mixture of sweat and cooking fat.

She wondered where David was. The apartment looked clean and neat, almost unlived in. There were no books lying around, no pieces of paper or pens. The ash trays were all clean, and there was a cover on the record player. She went out of the living room and across the hall to the bedroom.

That, too, was clean and neat. The twin beds were made and the covers on them. There were no clothes lying around. She wondered where David was.

She had been expecting him at the station. After she got off the train she’d looked at all the people waiting; and when she hadn’t seen him she’d put her luggage down and waited, in case she’d missed him in the crowd, or in case he was late. But when everyone had gone and she was still standing, with cold hands, at the end of the platform, she had realized that there was no point in waiting any longer, so she had taken her suitcases, and found a taxi.

When she arrived at her glass-and-brass street door she had rung the bell with David’s name on, and waited with her mouth by the grille to say, when David called softly, “Who’s there?”, “It’s me, David. Will you come down and help me with the cases?

But David hadn’t answered, so she had searched in her handbag and found her keys; had let herself in and, painfully, carried her cases up the three flights of stairs, telling herself that there was no point in feeling hurt. David might be
working
, or he might have had to go away for the day — though she couldn’t imagine where.

She sat down on one of the beds and wondered where he was. He might at least — she stood up and opened the windows and the shutters and looked out into the street as
if she would find some sign of David there — see him running up the steep little hill, calling up to the third floor, “I got held up on my way. Why didn’t you wait?”

But there was no one in the street, and the tree, opposite, that had been so summer-full when she had left, three months ago, was now almost bare. She shivered. It was only
mid-November
and should have been quite warm still; but it was a gray, bleak afternoon, and she was tired and cold, and the apartment was empty.

She went into the kitchen and lit the gas for the central heating. She glanced up at the electric water heater; that was on.

She went back to the bedroom and looked through the wardrobe; David’s clothes were all there. She stared at herself in the mirror on the wardrobe door. She was looking cold and bleak as the day. She smiled at herself in the mirror; frowned, pursed her lips, and narrowed her eyes; but her face remained wintry. She didn’t want David to see her like that. She pulled the rubber band off her hair and shook her head. She ought to wash her hair. It looked too hard; it always did after she had dyed it, and especially when her face was pale and her lips painted a bright, extraordinary red. She shouldn’t have put any lipstick on. David hated it. He said it gave her lips a life of their own, made them look obscene. But it was better, she had thought on the train, to attract the eye to the fat red fish when the pond they were swimming in was not only shallow but muddy as well. She had felt muddy on the train, simply with the fatigue of the journey; now she felt muddy and bleak and awful, and her shoulders ached from carrying her bags.

Perhaps David had left her a message somewhere. She dosed the wardrobe door to shut off the offending image, and looked around the room. There was no message there, no sheet of paper saying “Be back soon Love David.” She went into the hall and looked around; on the bookshelves, on the chair, on the coat rack. She went into the last of the three rooms of the apartment, David’s study. There was no message. She wondered whether David had received her
letter
. Perhaps he had gone away before it had arrived, and hadn’t yet returned. Perhaps she hadn’t been clear in her
letter
; had said the 25th of November instead of the 15th. Perhaps the letter had got lost in the post and never arrived at all.

She went into the living room and sat down. The letter couldn’t have got lost, and even if it had, David, presumably, had been seeing the Emersons. She had written them at the same time, so they would have spoken about her to him, surely. Both letters couldn’t have got lost in the post. But then — if David had been going to the Emersons, if he had been teaching Catherine, he couldn’t have gone away. Unless the Emersons had gone away. If they had, before they had received her letter, David might have thought it a good
opportunity
to go away himself. Perhaps he had gone somewhere with Marcello. And if he hadn’t read her letter, he could have hardly been expecting her to return, when only ten days before that she had written, “I’m afraid mother is very sick indeed; the doctor says he doesn’t know what more he can do.”

Perhaps. She didn’t know. She felt tired and miserable. She had come home, and home looked like a hotel room, empty and neat. She had come back to Italy for David —
for if not for him she couldn’t think why — and David was not there. She felt her lips twisting on her face, leaping and writhing as if they had a life of their own, trying to hide the fact that they were wounded.

She took a cigarette from her handbag and lit it quickly. That was better. She inhaled a couple of times, then stood up and went back to David’s study. She opened the top drawer of his desk, where he kept his letters, and saw the letter she had written him. She took it out and read it.

She put the letter down. He had received it and read and put it in his drawer, and she had been quite specific about the day and the time. She picked the letter up again and pressed her lips together. It was a horrible letter. Perhaps David had thought that. Perhaps she had hurt him by hinting
at what her mother had said in their twenty-minute shouting contest. She shouldn’t have mentioned it. He had always known her mother didn’t approve of him; she always thought he was too lazy, or too cynical, or too “brilliant,” and not quite, as she put it, straight enough. It had never worried him before. He had always said that her mother had fallen from another, more puritanical century; her mother, who had worked so hard all her life, first as a waitress, then as the owner of a small restaurant for truck drivers. Her mother had raised two, as she thought, talented daughters, and then felt unhappy when they went off with two talented men, and disappeared — as she had always hoped they would and worked so they could — from her life of hard work and
sacrifice
.

David had always said he liked her mother, and that it was natural for her to feel as she did about him; it would have been unnatural, a betrayal, had she not done so.

But perhaps, Barbara thought, after he had read the letter he had felt that she had come to share her mother’s opinions. Perhaps he had believed that she had gone off to England and stayed there three months because she wanted to get away from him, and had made up the whole story of her mother’s sickness.

She cursed her mother for being fat and ugly, for having greasy hair and a foul smell, for having worked too hard all her life, for being sick, and for lying. She cursed her for having said all the things she had said about David, and everything else she had ever said. She wondered where David was.

He couldn’t have gone away; not without his clothes, not just like that, without any message. He must have cleaned
the house for her homecoming, and then, for some reason, gone out. He would be home soon.

Suddenly, she felt more relaxed. She decided to have a bath. Perhaps while she was in the bath, he would return. Perhaps he was out buying her some flowers. He would be home soon.

*

She had her bath, washed her hair, dried it, unpacked her bags, made herself some coffee, looked at her watch about twenty times — and when it was seven-thirty there was still no sign of David.

She began to feel frightened. Perhaps he had had an
accident
on his way to the station.

At eight o’clock she rang Marcello.

Marcello didn’t know where David was. He hadn’t seen him for more than a week. He asked Barbara when she had got back.

“I got in this afternoon,” she said, “but David’s not here. I don’t know where he is.”

Marcello didn’t sound worried, or even particularly interested. He suggested that David had had to do something urgent.

“Did David say anything about my coming back when you saw him last?” Barbara asked.

“No.”

“I’m worried, Marcello. It’s — oh, I don’t know. It makes me frightened. He should be here.”

Marcello told her not to worry, but said that if David hadn’t returned by ten she should ring again. “Then I’ll worry with you. O.K.?”

Barbara nodded at the telephone and said, “Yes. I’ll call you back.”

*

Once before, David had disappeared. It had been his
birthday
; two weeks before, Barbara had said, “I don’t care what we do, but I want us to spend that evening together. We can go out and celebrate, or we can stay home.”

“O.K.,” David had said vaguely.

When the evening of his birthday came he insisted that they eat early. As soon as they finished he said he was going out to buy cigarettes. He didn’t return until two the next morning. Barbara waited up for him, determined not to make a scene; but as soon as he came into the bedroom she started crying. “You did it deliberately, just to hurt me,” she said, and David looked at her as if she were a fork that wasn’t quite clean. “I met Marcello,” he said. “We had a drink together. Then we met some friends of his and —”

“You could have rung me up. You could have —” she tried to control herself, but she couldn’t. “You should have asked me. You promised we could spend this evening together.”

David had looked petulant. “It’s my birthday, isn’t it?” Then he had added, “Besides, you don’t like Marcello.”

She had cried, and David had undressed and got into bed without looking at her, and turned out the light without
saying
anything to her; and eventually she had fallen asleep.

When she woke up, David was not there. He didn’t return for a week. He had gone to Switzerland with Marcello. When he did return he was tanned and looked relaxed. Barbara felt that she had withered in his absence, and become twenty
years older than he, instead of the five that she was.