The warden stepped over my suitcase, crossed the room and drew the curtains. They were grey curtains, with a darker grey stripe, matching the covers of the two single beds that stood foot to foot along one wall. She smiled at me, indicating the room, its wardrobe, washbasin, two desks, two chairs. ‘You’ll have first choice then, won’t you?’ She put into my hand a key; attached to it was a big wooden fob, with ‘C3’ written on it. ‘You’ll find it best to lock your door when you leave your room. Hand your key in at the front desk when you leave the building.’ She put her lists down on a desk, tapped them together and secured them with a snapping bulldog clip. ‘May I take this opportunity, Miss McBain, to wish you every success in your university career? If you have any problems, queries, do come to see me – at some mutually agreed hour, of course.’ The warden went out, closing the door quietly and leaving me to my life.
I rubbed my elbow. It felt disjointed, irretrievably strained. Should I be here? A vision came into my head of the home I had left, of the stuffy room, with the glowing electric coals, where I had performed the study, where I had formed the ambition, that had delivered me to this room. A horrible longing leapt up inside me: not the flames of apprehension, but something damper, a crawling flurry in my ribcage, like something leaping in a well. The suitcase lay across the doorway, at an angle and on its side. I stooped, crouching to apply a final effort to it, bracing my knees; as if they had been waiting for the aid of gravity, tears ran out of my eyes and made jagged patches on the sleeves of my new beige raincoat.
I straightened up and opened the wardrobe door. Six metal hangers clashed together on a rail. I took off my coat and hung it up. I felt that it had somehow been spoilt by my crying on it, as if salt water would take off the newness. I could not afford to spoil my clothes.
A clock struck, and as I had no watch – I travelled without such normal equipment – I counted the strokes. I sat down on the bed nearest the window. It would be mine, and so would the bigger of the two desks, the better lit. It was more natural to me, and perhaps easier, to take the worse desk and bed, but I knew that Julianne would despise me for any show of self-sacrifice.
So, I sat on the bed. My fingers stroked the rough striped cover. The sheets beneath were starched and crackling like paper: tucked strap-tight into the bed’s frame, as if to harness a lunatic. There seemed to be no traffic in the street below. A lightbulb burned in its plain paper shade. A silence gathered. Time seemed to have stopped. I sat, and looked at my feet. Certain lines of verse began to run through my head. ‘Then we let off paper crackers, each of which contained a motto / And she listened while I read them, till her mother told her not to.’ I could hear my breath going about its usual business, in and out. I was eighteen years old, plus one month. I wondered, would I ever get any older: or just go on sitting in this room. But after a time, the clock struck again. ‘And dark as winter was the flow / Of Iser, rolling rapidly.’ I got up, and began to put my clothes into the drawers, and my books on the shelves.
I grew up in a small town, the only child of elderly parents. Our town, a cotton town, had fallen into decay by the time I was born; cheap textiles from the Far East were beginning to flood the markets and those mills that remained struggled on with antiquated machinery, which it was not worth the cost of replacing; the workers too were ageing, and by the time of my middle childhood were like a parody of themselves, a southerner’s idea of the north. Under the factory walls of plum-coloured brick, stained black from the smoke and daily rain, plodded thick-set men in bib and brace, with shorn hair and flat caps: and angry-looking women in checked head-scarves, with elastic stockings and shoes like boats. Beyond the mill chimneys, you could see the line of hills.
The streets of our town were lined with brick-built terraces, interrupted by corner shops which gave no credit: by public houses in which people would declare they never set foot: by sooty Nonconformist churches, whose attendance dwindled as the 196os drew on. There was a time when each of these churches had outside it a wooden board, and pinned to the board a discreet notice in fading type, announcing the times of services and Sunday schools and the names of visiting preachers. But a day came when these notices were replaced by posters, splashed in screaming colours: CHRISTIANITY HASN’T FAILED, IT‘S JUST NEVER BEEN TRIED. The town’s cinema shut down, and was turned into a supermarket of eccentric design; the Mechanics’ Institute closed its doors, had its windows smashed, decayed for eighteen months, and then reopened as a tyre salesroom.
My mother, made redundant from her job in the weaving shed, went out cleaning houses. A change took place in our own form of worship; the priest, now turned around to face the people, spoke a debased lingo that they could all understand.
My father was a clerk; I knew this from quite early in life, because of my mother’s habit of saying, ‘Your father’s not just a clerk, you know.’ Each evening he completed a crossword puzzle. Sometimes my mother read her library books or looked at magazines, which she also called ‘books’, but more often she knitted or sewed, her head bowed under the standard lamp. Her work was exquisite: her tapestry, her drawn- thread work. Our pillowcases were embroidered, white on white, with rambling roses and trailing stems, with posies in plaited baskets, with ribbons in garlands and graceful knots. My father had a different cable-knit cardigan for every day of the week, should he choose to wear it. All my petticoats, cut out and sewn by her, had rows of lace at the hem and – also by the hem on the lefthand side – some motif representing innocence: a buttercup, for example, or a kitten.
I can see that my mother was, in herself, not exquisite. She had a firm jaw, and a loud carrying voice. Her hair was greying and wild and held back with springing kirby grips. When she frowned, a cloud passed over the street. When she raised her eyebrows – as she often did, amazed each hour by what God expected her to endure – a small town’s tram system sprang up on her forehead. She was quarrelsome, dogmatic and shrewd; her speech was alarmingly forthright, or else bewilderingly circumlocutory. Her eyes were large and alert, green like green glass, with no yellow or hazel in them; with none of the compromises people have when it comes to green eyes. When she laughed I seldom knew why, and when she cried I was no wiser. Her hands were large and knuckly and calloused, made to hold a rifle, not a needle.
My father and myself were fair, lean, quiet people, our features minimal and smooth; our eyes changed colour in different lights. I was a little Englishwoman, my mother said: cool. This struck a chill in me, a deepening chill; I wanted to believe I belonged to another country. My mother and father had both left Ireland in their mothers’ wombs, and their workaday north country accents were as flat as mine. My father looked entirely like an Englishman; he could have passed for an earl, or an earl’s flunkey. His narrow body bent itself in strange places, as if hinged and jointed differently from other people’s. His legs were long and seemed extendable, and his feet were narrow and restless; when he came into a room he seemed to hover and trail about it, like a harmless insect, daddy longlegs.
It was my parents’ habit, at intervals, to shut themselves in their bedroom; then my mother would mention, loudly and contentiously, the names of strange towns. Colchester was mentioned, so at another time was Stroud, and so was a place my mother pronounced lengthily as Kingston – upon – Hull. Later I realized that these were places to which we might have gone to live, if my father had taken up an offer of promotion. But for one reason or another he never did. When I was in my teens they would take me into rooms separately, and hiss between their teeth – false, in both cases – about who had wanted to go and who hadn’t, who had wrecked whose chances. It was beyond me to make any sense of this: to trap them in a room together and get them to have it out, spit out the truth of the situation. Perhaps I already suspected there was no truth to be had; their fictions were interwoven, depending one on the other.
In summer, when I was a small girl, we would take a bus to the outskirts of the town, and walk in the hills, rambling along the bridle paths in clear green air. We were above the line of the mill chimneys; like angels, we skimmed their frail tops.
Once you have begun remembering – isn’t this so? – one image springs another; they run through your head in all directions, scampering animals flushed from coverts. Memory’s not a reel, not a film you can run backwards and forwards at will: it’s that flash of startled fur, the slither of silk
