Without children to play with she invented Daisy, an imaginary friend. She protected Daisy from the stained-glass dragon and played with her in the park. Daisy admired all Marguerite did. Her advent alarmed Nurse Knott, who suggested to Mary Jane that her daughter needed friends.
Told to desist from this game, Marguerite had a temper tantrum and bit her nurse on the hand. Ushered to her mother’s bedroom, where her mother was brushing her hair, she refused to say her imaginary friend, her alter ego, did not exist. More than a game, it was an exercise in consolation, an endeavour to repair a fractured world. Her father had called her Daisy, and a Marguerite is a genus of daisy. Her mother saw in her face and manner an image of the man she loathed. She pushed her to the bed and beat her with the silver hairbrush. When she had finished she consigned her to the nurse and slammed the bedroom door. ‘It was a hard whipping given and received in temper, an unfortunate whipping.’ It was one of many administered while her mother was out of control. Its predictable effect was to inspire her daughter with defiance, hatred and rage.
In 1886 Grandmother Diehl returned to Philadelphia. Marguerite was to go for her summer holiday to Marlow-on-Thames with her mother and nurse. Her grandmother would stay on alone for a while in the Notting Hill house, then sail. Marguerite pleaded with her to take her too. Her grandmother cried, bought her a caged canary called Pippin and told her to be a comfort to her mother.
‘Life all at once became blank, empty, awful.’ Marguerite was separated from the only person she loved. Mother, with her beatings and exhortations, was best avoided. Father, the worst person in the world, had disappeared. Her mother said she was like her father, ergo she was bad.
She retreated inwards, was solitary, watchful, strange. She did not know how to play with children, trust a parent or how to feel safe. In the inchoate world of childhood, responses were formed by her and reactions made. She took into her feelings all that happened, sought control of her world, made emotional equations, disturbed connections, that echoed on into the books she was to write and the adult life she chose. Dark forces informed her early years. Abandonment elided with insecurity, hatred of her mother with aggrandizement of herself. Unfairness called for justice and violence for revenge.
2
Sing, little silent birdie, sing
Marlow provided consolation. Marguerite picnicked in the meadows with her nurse and went boating on the river. ‘It was delicious to go to bed in the twilight and to lie there listening to sounds in the garden beneath, the twittering of birds in the trees, the strains of a distant band playing on the deck of a passing steamboat.’
Mary Jane seemed happier. In London, a child and an ever-present mother cramped her style. The Marlow hotel was comfortable and anonymous and Mr Rutland, a young man in white flannels with black curly hair and a red face, took her out at weekends in a smart carriage. Nurse Knott disapproved and nor could Marguerite like him. His visits meant periods of peace and good temper, but he laughed too much and called her a queer little fish.
The holiday ended abruptly. Mr Rutland visited when Mary Jane was with another suitor – a portly one with side whiskers who gave Marguerite chocolates. There were raised voices from Mary Jane’s sitting-room and the sound of her tears. The men left hurriedly, Mr Rutland to his carriage, the one with side whiskers to the steam launch on the river. Nurse Knott and the housekeeper were instructed to pack. They were all to leave for London on the afternoon train. In whispers, the servants complained of their employer’s tantrums, the unscheduled departure, the hurry and discomfort. The nurse said she would give notice were it not for the child.
On the train, Marguerite questioned her mother. The portly gentleman had, she was told, gone to France. Mr Rutland was not to be mentioned again. Her mother gave the London taxi driver an unfamiliar address. Marguerite asked where they were going and was told to be quiet. She persisted in a keening monotone – Where are we going, I wonder? Where are we going I wonder? – was warned, then hit. They arrived at new lodgings, a small house in Bayswater, and she was sent to bed.
Her mother lived in a chaotic world of impulsive actions, tantrums, resentments and sexual intrigue. Her egotism ruled. Marguerite was conscious of frustration and evasions over issues intrinsic to her own life. To resist her mother and to assert a personality of her own, she developed an implacable obstinacy, a refusal to kowtow or comply.
She particularly disliked her mother’s bedroom, where often she was chastised. It had magenta curtains and wallpaper with bunches of pink roses: ‘A foolish indefinite sort of room with too many trifles, too many ornaments, too many chairs, too many pictures all inferior, too many colours, too much of everything and too little of anything that really counted.’
On an autumn morning when she was eight she was summoned to it and told that next day she would go to school. She was to be good and make nice friends. Nurse Knott took her to Whiteleys and bought her a black pencil-box with a gold pagoda and Chinamen on its lid, short and long pencils, an Indiarubber, a white bone pen-holder, a tortoiseshell penknife, a brown leather satchel, a shiny black mackintosh, a grey skirt and cotton blouse. They were possessions of promise. That night Marguerite kept them in sight on a chair by her bed.
The schoolroom seemed long. At the far end was a blackboard with a pointer. She was allocated a desk. The head teacher assessed her new pupils to assign them to classes. They began with reading aloud.
