What to Look for in Winter Page 4

  The person I met in the diary was referred to as ‘the beautiful bolter’. It was like being sicked up. I couldn’t get the smell of it from me, because I was made of the vomit. Of course, part of having any kind of publicity, which is now a wretchedly essential part of selling books, carries an afterwash, but this was in the diary of someone I had loved and respected, to whom I had sent the only frequentative Valentine cards of my life, apart from those to my children. The adjective disquieted me as much as the noun in Jim Lees-Milne’s phrase. And in those pages I met Fram, Minoo’s father, damaged, and that by me.

  My father as a boy I met in the autobiography of Frederic Raphael. The author had ascribed to Daddy the wrong first initial ‘F’, turning him into the sculptor F.E. McWilliam, but he meant my father Colin Edgar. Boys of that time had not much use for one another’s first names. I had known that my father was a committed socialist and enraged by injustice, but I hadn’t quite known how lifelong this lay. He appeared in these pages as defender of the small Raphael against anti-Semitism at Charterhouse. It also seemed that he had been the dux classical scholar in the school and on account of this (there could have been no other reason; he hated authority and loathed punishment, though he was perforce to mete it out to me) head boy of the school.

  I knew nothing of this. It is unusual for public school men of my father’s generation not to allow their children to understand to what it is they are expected to rise. My father was not of this type. He terribly disliked male institutions, large groups of men, or men at all of a certain bullish type. He was a sophisticated man reflexively prejudiced against his own class, unless some mutual architectural or artistic enthusiasm would allow him to forget what they had in common in those unutterable ways.

  I was astonished to learn of my father’s rank at school, for his dislike of authority was complete and mischievous all the time I knew him. He was sceptical even of the Brownies, an organisation he couldn’t quite agree was not crypto-Nazi at some level. Later, in a long and kind letter, Frederic Raphael tried to recall for me this tall gentle senior boy, ‘a kind of demigod to a new boy’ at the school. To my surprise, he remembered my father showing off a scarf that he had purchased for his ‘Popsy’ one Christmas. Popsy was the word used; I could hear it.

  All his life my father was irresistible to women. He was handsome and fragile, funny and fundamentally, I think, rather cold, or cool. Catnip. I had always assumed that he had had a relationship involving what he called ‘the usual thing’ (for which Simon was expelled from Charterhouse) with his friend Simon Raven at school. I used to think that that was why Simon liked me, but now I think that they were simply friends, and anyhow I’m not sure how much Simon did like me; I was simply an experimental frog, though a frog he was once able in my twenties consciously to rescue from a nasty admirer by being fantastically rude to him over tea in the Stafford Hotel.

  My father, not wholly a fiction man, loved Simon’s Alms for Oblivion sequence of novels; I think their classical heartlessness confirmed something for him, and he enjoyed the long tease on his boyhood bugbear William Rees-Mogg. Always, for a clever and subtle man, surprisingly willing to embrace prejudice were it against a Tory, my father was nonetheless open-hearted always about the boy, and the man, James Prior, another contemporary at Charterhouse.

  Then: ‘Why do you like the Queen, Mummy?’, my undergraduate daughter, who, as it happens has had far more actual contact with the royal family than I have, asked in the car on the way to the eightieth-birthday gathering of the man who is not my father, but whom I address, as do his six blood children and their children, and my children, as ‘Papa’. And then I knew I had to write this book to tell her.

  I like the Queen because she isn’t dead. I like her because she defers, as far as one can see, most gratification. I like her because she was there and is here, because she puts duty before sensation, because my father carried me to see her on Princes Street when she was a new Queen, because going to the cinema is connected with her dreary but durable anthem, because she is happy in Scotland, because she is the Duke of Lancaster and a woman, because she has found a way of looking and looks it, has found a way of being and is it, because she is absolutely not stupid but not intellectual, because she is not me, not even the best of me, but she is my times, and shelters my life. In the car I tried to say this.

  ‘I like the Queen because I loved my parents,’ I said, trying again. It stuck like a granny-knot, instead of flying like the standard I had intended.

  ‘But Grandpa was a republican.’

  He was a contrarian, of course, a formalist and an anarchist, a patrician flincher away from all unfairness, a detester of privilege who knew great houses more intimately than some of their owners. He had that eye, yet was not, unlike me (until this closing of my eyes), a voyeur.

  Now though, I am more a voyeur of what is coming back to me out of the past than of what offers itself to my closing eyes. They are becoming like lychees, jelly with a stone and a thin rind lid. And over it all still reigns the reigning Queen.

  ‘Like’ is too passionless a word for what I feel for her. The Queen is an emblem and carrier of memory, as rock music for my daughter perhaps.

  Then again, as bores say, just as one thinks one can make a bolt–that word!–for it, then again, the Queen is like my own mother in one single way. She is safest, we imagine, among creatures. Where the Queen has her mystery and her awesome power of patronage, pure in itself but corrupting for the corrupt, to defend, my mother had her horribly vulnerable person; my mother was eaten up by other people wanting a bit of her. She was made of sex appeal, sweetness and unconfidence.

  Two things I have said, in attempt at self-definition, for years. I’ve not believed them as I said them, but I was impersonating the solid sort of person who might be heard to say such things.

  One is, ‘I don’t trust the sort of woman who prefers the company of animals to the company of humans.’

  The other (which I haven’t said for about twenty-two years, prevented by some prefiguring shadow maybe) is, ‘I cannot stand a woman drunk.’

  The first is Mummy.

  The second, who might as well have modified her statement’s punctuation to, ‘I cannot stand, a woman drunk’, is, of course, me.

  LENS I: Chapter 5

  The sort of unpopularity that I enjoyed during my first period of schooling was regrettable mainly for the sort of popularity it set up later. I was unpopular because I was odd and then popular for the same reason. This made an unsound base for the dreadful glamour that visited later, attendant upon my mother’s death and the passive allure of my widowed father.

  Today, when I am writing this, is a Monday. Monday is washing day; I do the big wash on Monday, which is right. I know this because

  They that wash on Monday

  Have all week to dry,

  They that wash on Tuesday

  Are not so much awry,

  They that wash on Wednesday

  Are not so much to blame,

  They that wash on Thursday

  Wash for shame,

  They that wash on Friday

  Wash in need,

  But they that wash on Saturday,

  Oh! They’re sluts indeed.

  My godfather Francis Gordon of Cairness gave me for my first birthday, 1 July 1956, the book from which this jingle comes, an airily laid out nursery rhyme collection called Lavender’s Blue, compiled by Kathleen Lines and pictured by (these are the terms used) Harold Jones. I enjoyed that crossed wire of nomenclature, as soon as I could read the poems for myself, that it was actually Harold Jones who did the lines. His is a line-led relaxed style, not fussy but full of detail and shading. He makes the human figure architectural, though not massive, as in a frieze, and architectural detail, such as that of London Bridge as it falls down, dances along the page. The rhymes, proverbs and nostrums are placed handsomely within each page. Print and its layout drew me very soon; I loved lettering, but I remember being churlishly resistant
to my godfather’s encouragements to learn calligraphy, the exercise sheets, the nibs, the black Indian ink that shone coppery if you spilled it on anything hard and non-absorbent. I had an ugly hand till I was about eleven, and after that a self-forced Italic that was over-decorative and built, thanks to that early shirking, on an insufficiently Roman armature.

  Fram writes a good Italic hand. His was inherited from Wilfrid Blunt, brother of Anthony, who had taught that hand to many generations of boys at his school. I taught myself mine in order to have an accomplishment with which to win book tokens. I used regularly to win a handwriting prize sponsored by Brooke Bond tea.

  Much of my childhood was to do with line and the materials used for making, drawing, following, understanding lines–pens, pencils, crayons, T-squares, protractors, chisels. My parents drew lines but hardly ever drew the line, save in matters of moral taste. After one outing with another family, I used an expression to which my father objected. If I think of it now I taste earth in my mouth. It was ‘little Jew’. I copied it from a father who was describing another father. My own daddy took me out of our house and walked me through the old streets. He sat me down with a book, with those photographs, the heaps of legs and deep-shadowed eyes, the shoes, the spectacles. I do not know where the book was kept in our house as I had found every other book that might be mined for prurience or horror by the time I was eight. I felt none of the sense that this was a world to come, that I felt when I poked about in Gray’s Anatomy or Fanny Hill.

  I felt that this was it. This was the world from which the destroyed worlds of my night-time fears had come, that people could do this to other people. It was not a nightmare; it was the truth. It was not a private horror but a filthy fact. The next time we visited friends, the man of whom had been in Auschwitz, he got me to look at the number on his arm and to sit and listen. He gave me a maths tutorial immediately after the talk of how it had been in the camp, which no doubt he watered down. Never had mathematics been so welcome, so consolatory. I counted the white hairs in his beard with delight as though they were shoots coming through. Time looked valuable suddenly.

  My father had that certainty, that racial or religious discrimination of any sort was evil. He had been raised in a household where everyone, including the servants, attended–Anglican–family prayers every morning. He hated that and was mortified though seldom mentioned it since the source of the piety was his mother and he was never in my hearing disrespectful of her, very likely never was so in his life. He was a choral scholar at the Pilgrims’ School, which supplies the choir for Winchester Cathedral, as were his brothers, Ormiston and Clement. Clement went on to become the organist at St George’s Chapel in Windsor Castle, then at Winchester Cathedral. My father loved the liturgy all his life, attended church, and sang, but I’m not sure what he believed. He loathed the Pilgrims’ School and its School Hymn, into which he would insert the word ‘not’, as in

  He who would valiant be

  ’Gainst all disaster

  Let him in constancy

  Follow the Master

  There’s no discouragement

  Shall make him once relent

  His first, avowed intent

  NOT to be a pilgrim.

  It was a hymn at my first wedding, an occasion it is too late now to ask my father about. Was he wretched or relieved that another man gave me away? What had happened to make this possible?

  At the time of taking me out into the streets to tell me about the Holocaust, to shake me out of my sleep of reason, my careless imitation and failure to listen or hear, I think that he may already have lost any faith he had, and that he was an intelligent sceptic with anarcho-Anglican leanings, and knew he was lucky to live in a country that allowed all these contradictions to be lived by, lived through, lived out even. He was idealistic about line, and the Labour Party, which embodied, then, post-war socialism. It is hard to explain to my children the simplicity of his belief, when he was so complicated. Labour was for the working man and was the natural party for making good the ruin of the war. Men like my father, classically educated modernists who believed in conserving what was good and beautiful about the past, thought that all this was possible. They thought, because so many they loved had died in war, as had my McWilliam grandfather, that there had to be a reason for all that loss, that things could be made good, that something new and fair was possible. It is extraordinary that these thoughts have come in three generations to sound so naïve as to be alien, swivelled and uprooted and shaken aside by the advance of consumption, save where, perhaps, they are subjecting themselves to smart repackaging.

  By the end of his life I think he felt the public world was all chaos. For a subtle man he enjoyed hating rather much. I think that he felt such rage about Mrs Thatcher, whose virtues he was incapable of seeing, although his wife was not, that his outrage really did all but kill him.

  When I was going through a holy stage, after my mother’s death, I asked my father to listen to my prayers at night. He reasonably replied that he could not offer me that certainty. He was deeply thoroughly self-subvertingly principled. He could not bear the appearance of emotion for fear that it be inauthentic.

  Nonetheless it is clear to me as I live that he felt it, hid it, and suffered from its burial.

  I have come back just now from a trip into the centre of Oxford, the town in which I don’t feel I live but where actually I have for twenty years. I took my white stick and held my head up in the way that makes it possible to see the crevice through which I negotiate myself. I was going to collect a prescription. I get so many of these at the moment that the surgery calls to say, ‘Your script is ready.’ ‘Script’ is the junkie word, not the straight-world word. There are elaborate courtesies extended at the rear of the old-fashioned department store where I collect my drugs and the methadone-dependent collect theirs. The pharmacists are bilingual. They are as charming and responsive and chatty to those of us who say, ‘Mustn’t grumble’ when asked how we are as to those of us who reply, ‘In fucking bits, mate, kicking off all over the place.’

  The drugs I’m collecting at the moment constitute a sort of capitulation, but I’m trying to think of them as a contribution to a process that collaborates with hope and with my writing all this stuff I swore I would not write, ever. They are antidepressants, which I fought off for a good while, since I don’t think that I am depressed at all; I am sad.

  Many things combine to induce that sadness and it seems a rational state in which to find myself at this point of my bewildering life. Indeed I think that to be not sad would be to be dim, or to use a similarly sight-suggesting word, unenlightened. But I agreed to take chemical help because something needed to change even if its terminus was not, quite, sight, or not the sort of sight that I had so greedily enjoyed. So, I caved in to these drugs and asked for their, as I saw it, only fair counterparts, which was something to close me down at night against the racing thoughts in the double dark, though we blepharospastics often see better at night, I am told; I haven’t yet met another ‘functionally blind’ person, as I feel that attending Alcoholics Anonymous is already a great enough adventure in fellow feeling, and I can’t face more, but must conserve it in order to invent characters in fiction, and put them through suffering. I have not written a novel for thirteen years, though short stories have come out of me like sprits from a forgotten potato.

  I was in town on my drug run just now and I garnered two ribald jeers and a couple of flinches from people I recognised and who, in their shyness at what they registered as my catastrophic change, twisted their eyebeams away and moved swiftly on. One brave acquaintance spoke to me. The consolatory hyper-observant me was absent from this tame safari into Oxford. Even at my shyest and most reclusive, I’ve been visually fed by people in the street. By fascination with how they present themselves, how they sound, when that is compared with, or added to, how they appear; all those things. Because I couldn’t garner any human interaction and haven’t been able to for a while, I we
nt into the clothes shop Zara, which I find can top me up. It’s something to do with its being Spanish, perhaps. The girls don’t snip at a blind woman holding up the garments to feast off their detail, and the smell is good, which is extra important. The cottons smell like cotton, the lurex has a foily taint. The wool is sheepish and soft. I harvested Zara and came home, passing a woman who smelt of lily of the valley and a group of people who smelt like synthetic bananas; is that the smell of poppers?

  There are a number of medical people who have given advice on my present blindness, which does feel as though some dreadful thing, a sight-burglar, maybe, or another childhood terror from the dark, such as one of the Cauliflowers, the monsters who lived in my brocade nursery wallpaper, were sitting on my own head, my own deep brain’s poor florets. These expert eye doctors are of the firm, committed and explicit opinion that to seek relief from my affliction by any means other than sternly physiological would be deluded and even self-indulgent. Two other medical people believe that there are certainly psychological causes–they maintain that it’s hard for me to face life as it is at the moment conformed, with the result that I have taken refuge in my blindness.

  I am not sure which is the case, but suspect a category error in any hard and fast distinction. All I know is that I am falling through the dark and that utterance feels like the only available light. I’m entirely unsure what stone, even what sort of stone, it is that I am looking for, as I sieve and pan the past, in order to lift the blinding weight off the seeing part of my brain.

  In town groups of boys or girls catcalled. I look odd and slow and vulnerable. I creep along and hold my eyes up in their itching sockets as people hold spilling glasses of drink above a throng–as though the drinks with their precious realised meniscuses are threatened, and must be protected with an exaggerated care. I have also started to make involuntary noises and pre-emptive twitches and sallies with my head, which aches even by the end of a morning as if weighted with lead beans at the back as I hold it up as though trying to read the world with my chin. I saw (actually saw: she was sitting for some reason on the ground and I can at the moment see the pavement) a child with a rucksack in the shape of a teddy. He had sewn-on felt crosses on the blanks of his eyes and I knew how he felt.