I want to run for about a mile.But I’d better get the walking right before I try. I too, like this body beforewe met, have fallen over more than once in my insane and infantile rejoicings.But I’m strong as a bull and savage with – with what? With life, what else.
With LIFE.
(Andone extra, wonderful thing. All the fingers of this body are intact, andfunction – unlike the damaged fingers I was left with that ruined my work lasttime. Plus the whole rig is strong as a camel.)
Andthen I think of my father.
I picture him, when I was fifteen,that handsome, elegant man, like an actor, but by then... more frail, a frailtyI couldn’t (wouldn’t?) see, as to me he was eternal.
What would he say aboutwhat I’ve done, have chosen to do? He would hate it. He would beoffended and startled, and perhaps attempt to hide that from me, sweet as hewas, and liberal as he tried always to be.
I can recollect now, that thingthat happened, those months before he died.
My pretty mother, you see, somefour years younger than he and still in her thirties, had embarked on a little ‘fling’.That is, she had gone off on holiday in America with some ‘fascinating guy’ shehad met somewhere or other in London. It wasn’t, she had said, ‘an Affair’.Just something she ‘needed to get out of her system’, and so she ‘sensibly’told us, my father first. I was shocked stupid and went to bits, and so he, mydad, stayed calm, and calmed me as much as he could. “These thingshappen,” he said. “She’s right. Get it done, and then we can go on as before.”Which was what, I think, my lovely, clever, kind, filthy little bitch of amother intended. (Like breaking a strict diet at Christmas, and virtuouslyresuming it afterwards.)
(When I asked my father if hehad ever indulged in a ‘fling’, he looked in my eyes and quietly said, “No,Lizzie. I never needed to. I had everything I wanted here.”)
She was gone a while. And whileshe was gone my appalled rage at her – which later I tried, and partly or totallysucceeded in wiping off the slate of my mind – turned to a determinedly jealouswish she should never come back into our lives. Not mine. Not Dad’s.
And I set up a sort of, well Ican only call it a campaign. I have to make this clear: I wasn’t incestuouslysexually in love with my father. But I was emotionally in love with him.Always had been, always would be. In some ways still am. I’d tried, with somejustification, to be what he would have me be, which was nothing bad at all – artisticallybright, a little dramatic, glamorous, open to adventure and to thought. Butwith her having shown her true colours, evil, dirty ones at that, I began totry to shut her out. I suggested to him, ‘tactfully’ at first, then moreboldly, that he too ought to have an affair or two. There must be lots of girlswho’d be more than happy, etc. And I’m sure some would have been. My aim,however, was that he should have fun, and also take his revenge on my mother,closing her out, and turning instead to me – not for sex, obviously – but forintellectual and creative companionship. Elsewhere, outside, he would have sex.And I would be his platonic wife. What else did he require?
Only of course, you see, I waswrong. As a substitute for my mother’s company I was neither fitted nor – wanted.
In the end, one thunderymiserable evening, in our new, miles-away, not-so-far-from-London house, he satme down and told me flatly that No, he would not be having an ‘affair’ withanybody, did not want one, and fervently hoped I would stop mooting it, howevermuch sophisticated kindness I intended. Also, I must stop cursing my mother,and trying, metaphorically, to paint her in such murky nasty tones. They didnot, he said, suit either her, as portrait, or me as the painter. He needed, infact, he told me, to be alone. Even I, he said, much as he loved me, wasbecoming – which word did he use? It wasn’t any version of ‘needy’, nor ‘exhausting’– I have fully eradicated the title or phrase for what he told me I was not,but was becoming.
In wretched silence I slunk away,and he took a train for the city. I barely saw him again until my motherreturned, she a little crushed, which by then I couldn’t even glory in.Awkwardly, we settled back, (ostensibly), to our former ways.
How odd it seems to me now, thatI never ever questioned why my father, young enough, vital, active, was nevercalled up to soldier in the Second World War. I have an idea I’d assumed whathe did as a businessman was of so much use to the war effort, that he’d beentold to keep on with it and leave the fighting to others. Nothing was eversaid, and I know if he’d been sent I’d have been frightened crazy. Years andyears after, in my thirties then, I’d had a horrible possible insight, which I’dbrushed off me like a stinging insect; but it left a tiny dab of poison.Probably, honourable man that he was, he had tried to enlist. And then theymust have found something just not quite right with his heart. And that waswhy, of course, of course, he’d never been thrown into the stye of battle. Thatwas why I didn’t lose him, my darling, then.
I remember I bustled off andbought the facsimile of the Queen of the Night aria, and wrapped it withcare, hoping that once his birthday celebration arrived, things could reverse,at least for me,
