Where have they gone, who were so alive? Ubi sunt. The lament of generations, the poets grieving for us all.
What is a soul? When my mother died, around 5.30 in the morning, just before the first light leaked into the ward, there was an absolute sense that someone had gone. Wherever she was heading, she had quietly set off, leaving nothing on the bed but a pile of clothes. Her breathing had gradually grown quieter. It was a far gentler death than my father’s. I kissed her cold face, I kissed her hand, but of her it was the merest simulacrum. As the long night ended, she slipped from the stage, and I began the decades of my life without parents.
My animal luck (viii)
We are each other—
‘we are each other’s parents’1
It was because of Nick that I did not feel an orphan, though I missed my mother painfully. He was there in the tiny cubicle room that the hospital provided for relatives, and as I slipped into the single bed we were sharing, at 6 am, as morning began, there was the wonder of his warm, tender body, and I cried against him, my tears on his skin, and we made love, and I fell asleep exhausted, but when I woke up, the worst horror had gone. When my mother-in-law died, his lovely, lively, unconventional mother Peg, we were still relatively recently married, and her death made me realise how much I loved him as he trusted me with his grief, and we shared it.
In a way I had always missed my mother, ever since childhood when I took her for granted. So many times in my adult life she could not be there, because of Dad’s rules, because they always had to come as a pair, and as a pair, they made me anxious. When I gave birth, when I got married, I loved my mother, I missed my mother.
I shan’t write very much about my marriage, because it is dangerous to write about the living. I have asked my daughter, and got her permission for ‘anything between birth and adolescence’: I tell my two brothers I will love them and leave them out, because their stories are theirs, not mine. My husband has given me carte blanche, but how can you write about a twenty-six-year marriage? It is a space where we are safe to love. I love having it, and fear losing it, or Nick losing me, leaving him alone.
I say that as an offering to the universe, conceding that happiness is always perilous, and I am grateful for what we have. Yes, quarrels, explosions, days of stormy temper, days when I can’t imagine why I married this man, and he can’t imagine why he married me. And yet, such animal happiness, such fun and permission, such infinite freedom. The joys of insults, and friendly abuse. The times when we are like jostling siblings, and the times when lots of incest is nicest. Long sunlit mornings in the marital bed. The constant pleasure of talking, listening, sifting the beaches of each day’s meaning. That he is me, and I am him.
When I was little, I used to wish my bed was a boat, rounded off to a prow that would float through the night, bob over the waves, rock me awake in the morning. My boat was male, my boat was female, it blended adventure and the arms of my mother, holding me tenderly whatever happens. Though Nick is a very masculine man, in some ways he is both my father and mother, a better father than my father was, as good a mother as my mother was.
I cradle him. He cradles me. Our marriage is a boat where we bob together. We have passed many rocks, many bleak landscapes.
Reader, I meant to leave it at that. But my mother’s dying left a long shadow. I had been too close; death breathed too hard. As I write about it, I long for life.
Reader, come with me, out of the dark. The blazing heat of full summer.
August 6, 1983. The sun shone down; we were touched by the gods. I took a train from London and met Nick in Cambridge. We had both dressed like cultists, without prior discussion, me in a long white satin antique nightdress, the only white thing I possessed, Nick in a loose white Indian overshirt and cheesecloth trousers, gathered at the ankles: to the casual observer, we were both in our pyjamas, but I was gilded at hand and foot, with a small gold bag, gold bangles, gold sandals. Like everything else, we did it by instinct. We had two witnesses, John Waite and Barbara Goodwin: he a youthful best man, she a mauve-and-silver bridesmaid.
The props were all in place for us. We needed flowers, had forgotten them, but a stall appeared by the side of the road we were tearing along to the registry office; our best man stopped his yellow car and I saw the gold chrysanthemums, great heavy-headed things on proud straight stems. I bought half a dozen, they were meant for me. They matched my hair, my gold haloes of bangles.
Our animal selves were jostling with the angels. My chaste white nightdress clung to my breasts. My yellow hair reached down my back, and Nick’s was thick and deep brownish-black, long for a man, and he was bearded. He is very handsome, the camera shows, but what surges up still from the photographs is our hunger, our yearning; the love is palpable, a summer heat that shimmers off the skin of the image. We are drugged, drowning, drenched in each other. In one photo he is kissing me and I am pressed back, we are arched together, a bow of longing pointing to the future.