What to Look for in Winter

I was keen on the self-betterment side of suicide, so convinced of angelic afterlife was I, on account of knowing for sure that I had a guardian angel, partly because on my nursery wall was a reproduction of Ghirlandaio’s painting of Tobias, slung with the fish, gall from whose liver was to cure his father’s blindness, and his Angel, and partly on account of my guardian angel having told me firmly not to turn on my bedroom light switch which went on to give my mother a great shock later that day. My mother was undoubtedly attractive to shocks.

Also, someone had written on my nursery window with a diamond, which showed that a child or young woman (the writing made that clear) had lived in that small tall shuttered room before. The words were ‘October 1893’. What was important was that all the letters had serifs, so once someone with a lot of time had looked out over the garden and over the wall to the river and up and over the narrow walkway to the railway bank, maybe, and certainly within knowledge of the cemetery over that bank, where The Red Lady, it was known, walked by night and had done since thirty years before my guardian angel had written her tidy date on my windowpane.

The idea that suicide is a way of refining oneself is not new, to humans, to children, to girl-children, to girl-children of religious bent, nor to anyone who seeks a solution. Often the solution sought is temporary, and this temporariness ca

Marilyn died and as a child I loved the most the pictures of her with her intelligent husband, always so evidently and photogenically intelligent, Arthur Miller. His dark looks established, together with almost all medical doctors whom we knew and the cold Edinburgh weather, which necessitated that men wear long tailored overcoats, what could be called my ‘type’, as in Proust’s ‘she was never my type’. Later this received a top dressing of Sydney Carton from A Tale of Two Cities and of the hopeless clever drunk Charles Stringham from A Dance to the Music of Time, Prince Andrei too. About the only thing I can say in my defence in this area of daydream is that I have never fancied Vronsky.

Hopeless, clever, drunk; that trio of adjectives reminds me of something that happened on the same day as I read that sexy and offensive sentence about Marilyn, and it reveals what conversation was like in the long afternoon winter drawing rooms of Edinburgh among my parents and their friends. We were some doors down from the house where Compton Mackenzie would hold court in his great downstairs bed. ‘We’ were, I suppose, another family, of two parents and four children, a grandfather and a very thin aunt who I realise now was dying, and my parents. The oldest daughter of the house, about sixteen, was reading The Flight from the Enchanter or some other novel by Iris Murdoch that I had seen my mother read.

‘Why do the adjectives in Iris Murdoch’s books come so often in threes?’ she asked.

So the game was to use only triplet adjectives for the afternoon and all of us played it. The taste of that house was black treacle with yellow cream, in bowls of uncooked oats. Over the dining table there was an oil painting of the mother, Marjory, in a hat covered with flowers. The father was a landscape architect. All the children save the boy, Simon, had dark eyes. Simon told me not to let people know how much I knew if I wanted more friends. We were six and took turns on the rowing machine that was there for the frail ones in the family. Simon and Polly were twins and I was a severe bore for them because I tried to copy them in order to be normal; copying twins who are not identical is a tangle.

But who to be?

When my mother died I had someone to be, perhaps. But it was in the days before people spoke about such events after they had happened, and we were in Scotland, where speaking was less the done thing, even, than in England, or speaking of dramatic personal matters, or personal matters at all.

I suppose there was some mongering of scandal.

But Scotland it was that saved me. I am sure of that, for all that I was sent away quite soon. The being sent away very possibly fixed Scotland for me, deep-laid as it was in a way that I had not understood was happening, as my father drove me and my mother all over the roads, never as the crow flew, but round and deep about and through the sea lochs and mountains and glens of the North to look at the houses, castles, villages, mills and towns he worked to preserve.

In the back as he drove, I sang my sagas and sucked on a fresh lemon against carsickness. The lemon had come, my mother had always said, as she pulled it from her travelling-basket the moment I started to whine, from su

LENS I: Chapter 8

I do not need to invent her because I can see her in the children. She had a terrible temper, slanting eyes, outrageously long gesticulating hands, cheekbones like a Russian, a faint overbite, too much height, a silly voice, a gift for making rooms and occasions with nothing more than, say, sweet peas, a matchbox and herself. She put nasturtiums in salads, she was u

In aesthetic terms, then, she hadn’t my father’s unerring line, but she did have colour. She loved magazines, as I loved comics. She longed to subscribe to the (then) French magazine Elle; her first copy of it arrived the week after her death. I would have tea with other families because they took comics. Fat use I was as a playmate when all I did was lie on my tum and read comic strips about large families in the midst of a large family, like the Mitchisons who had an au pair and Patum Peperium for tea, or the Michies, who were Communists and had a na

Mrs Waterstone’s condolence letter arrived very soon. People were good to my father.

I don’t know exactly what my mother did. A pupil, some thirty years my senior, at a course I taught once told me that my mother had changed her will and my father had changed it back. What kind of person tells one these things? Another told me that she had broken up the flat of someone outside our family the day before she ‘did it’. I can’t see it. Is that the thing I’m refusing to see? That my mother was incontinent with grief during her last days? How could she not have been? Why else choose to die?