Interpretations of Love

DR AGNES JOSEPHINE STACEY • The day of the Wedding Reception

Article continues after advertisement

I emerged into today from a bad dream; not quite a nightmare but bad enough to persuade me that I was anxious about the day to come and more anxious than I was prepared to admit to myself.

I was watching a woman who was being held by the neck while a voice says, ‘You cow. You stupid cow.’ Suddenly, vividly, over the woman’s face shimmers an expression hard to read, as though her features are dissolving, as though she is being viewed under water and then, as is the way with dreams, suddenly she is under water, looking up at me, her eyes filled with tears and with the water that also fills her open mouth and lungs as carefully, remorselessly, she is held there until she is dead. As dead as a dead cow which, somehow, she now becomes. I realise with fear that the woman looks familiar but I cannot tell what expression I had hoped to see. Shock, yes. Anger, that would be gratifying. Grief, no. But the words sound so good I say them again. ‘Don’t patronise me, you cow. You stupid cow.’ She is now nothing more than a dead cow, washed away in the filthy flooding muddy river water, left abandoned on a rise in the land as the waters recede.

But I’ve never, ever, used that expression, ‘you cow’. Never. When I opened my eyes there on the ceiling, just detectable to practised eyes such as mine, were ripples of sunlight reflected off the ripples of water out there in the canal, echoing here in my room the layers of movement of the ever-moving early-morning river under the bright dawn sky. So I was under water, in a manner of speaking.

I closed my eyes again and thought about my dream. There had been a picture on the news last night, floods somewhere in India, a cow’s bloated body left stranded on a riverbank by the vanishing water. So that was where the image came from. And who was this poor cow? Perhaps I was the poor cow? Stranded here on the riverbank, and I smiled to think how literal my dream was in that respect, but also stranded, even abandoned, metaphorically, on the margins of the social world I would be entering today. Unhusbanded, impoverished, a reputedly clever but only moderately successful academic, emotionally compromised, as it happens, by my love affair with the photographer of the occasion, whose wife, Ann, since I myself had invited both her and her husband, would surely be present. Ann the unknown woman. Ann, whom I had never met, about whom I knew so little. Only that she and Freddie had been childhood lovers, high school sweethearts, in Cape Town before marrying and leaving that city to seek their fates in London. Ann, who often returned to visit her parents on their ostrich farm near Oudtshoorn. I shifted uncomfortably in the bed; I found it impossible to think of Ann clearly. Would we have liked each other if we had met elsewhere? What would she think of me today, and I of her? I had been unable to resist one of my characteristically foolish impulses when Bettina had said to me, ‘Do you know of any good photographers, Agnes?’ and I had replied, ‘Yes, an excellent person. Freddie. Shall I contact him?’

I stretched, looking for the reassurance that I find in the feeling of physical comfort that normally spreads through me at such times. I sleep naked now. In the latter years of my marriage I wore pyjamas buttoned to the neck and each morning woke sick with fear with tears in my eyes, holding them shut after consciousness had returned, postponing the moment when I had to confront, once again, that prison of a house. My kind doctor, Charles, had said I was depressed. For it was such a beautiful house. And the garden was extraordinary.

One of the sheets was so worn that the thinned cotton was threadbare. I could poke my finger up through the torn patch; so much of my life needed attending to, mending and putting right. The worn fabric was now so soft and fine that it lay like silk against my correspondingly worn, softened, crumpled skin as I curled within this second skin of sheets. There were folds of flesh lying now around my waist where long ago I felt the arms of a lover or two, and, not so long ago, Freddie’s. But this morning the pleasure I took in these simple sensations, moving my hands down over the soft warm swell of my stomach, was contaminated by some prescience of pain. I moved my hand to my breast, palpating the soft skin, was it there, the insignificant lump? Noticed for the first time last night, was it still there this morning?

Uneasily, I scrutinised again the continuing, plaiting, ripples of light on the ceiling. That rapid movement meant, I knew, that the surface of the canal was being disturbed, by a boat, perhaps, a narrowboat, too early for punts, surely, or maybe even a large swan, or several swans. At this time on a cloudless June morning such as this appeared to be, the rising summer sunlight would stream under the arches of the bridge, a couple of hundred yards downstream, and bounce off the shining water onto the whitewashed walls of my small home and onto this ceiling, offering me a coded, mirrored vision of the river before I rose to inspect it. But I postponed this view of the river and thought instead about particle partners. This seductive term is used by physicists to describe the effects of instantaneously communicated influences. Particles, it seems, can move apart while maintaining a mysterious connectedness. The example they used was that of a person tossing a coin in New York and when seeing it land ‘heads’ knowing that a coin in London was landing ‘tails’. Once I would have said that I could tell, by examining the ripples of feeling in my heart, what was disturbing the waters of Freddie’s soul. My particle partner: once upon a time life without him had seemed unsustainable. And perhaps, after all, it was. I had decided a few months ago, soon after suggesting him as the photographer for today, that our love affair had no future and should end. I will meet him at Lippington House with Ann, I said to myself, and behave beautifully and shake hands and say goodbye. I will demonstrate to Freddie and to myself how mature and sensible I am and I recalled with incredulity that I had decided the time had come for chastity and continence and that I would remodel myself as a serene and sweet-natured older woman; complete in my celibate life, intellectually and spiritually fulfilled by my work, my thoughts, my books. But solitude is an art, I reminded myself, and it is an art I have not yet mastered despite a lifetime’s apprenticeship. And I felt my eyelids beginning to close again in urgent search for the release of obliterating sleep.

And the room would have let me sleep, its kind, familiar shapes clustered around the too big bed; the overladen bookcase on the right beside the door, the small wardrobe packed into the corner, the three-sectioned mirror standing on the old dressing table in the bow window to the left of the bed, holding within its stained and discoloured surfaces remembered reflections of my body as Freddie undressed me, excited both by what he did and by what he saw himself do. But this morning there was an intruder, the dress hanging sulkily on the wardrobe door, a material representation of the respectability I would be temporarily assuming today as the mother of the bride. And then I reached out for my cigarettes. Just one. Today, I told myself, was, after all, a special day.

I opened the packet and sniffed. An old trick but it still worked. Yes, there I am. Down on the sands at Merebridge. A child on the porch lit with erratic morning sunlight, sniffing at the cigarettes left out last night after my mother and father had gone to bed. My feet bare, my body light and taut. Free in the way a happy child is free; with no responsibility except to stay alive, and that seems easy. Nothing else. I walk tentatively across the worn matting on the floor of the porch, curling my toes into the bare patches, lifting my small insteps slightly at the rub of the fibres on my soles, reaching the packet of cigarettes as the sun moves out from behind a cloud and its light shoots through the damp, dewy air and onto my perfect hand as it lifts the packet up from the corner where it has fallen. A sniff, an aroma, stored somewhere in my busy head forever, and my mother’s voice, ‘Bring me the cigarettes, Agnes darling. And come and have breakfast.’ The only real memory I have of my mother. The only one. Not even the details of her face. Just the happiness, the cigarettes, the sunlight and her voice.

‘Come and have breakfast.’ A different voice. My daughter’s voice. Dizzied by returning sleep, I pushed myself up off the pillows. The half-smoked cigarette, always disappointing but the ritual did not work unless it was completed, still hung from my fingers, ash accumulating. The light in the room has changed. The ripples on the ceiling have gone, sunlight as bright and sharp as the blade of a knife now slices through the panes of the bow window and gathers around the edges of the three-in-one mirror like a halo.

My daughter Elfriede stands in the doorway, her eyes full of reproach.

‘I wish you wouldn’t smoke, Mum. I really wish you would give up. And you know it is dangerous to smoke in bed; you were drifting off to sleep again. You could set the bed alight. Anything could happen.’

When I think about the reasons why I might have married my husband I wonder whether I was in search of my mother’s unremembered face. The two holiday snaps I have, and the one formal studio portrait taken for her twenty-first birthday, show a rather beautiful girl with clear pale skin moulded to fine bones, a wide forehead, severe eyebrows, well-spaced level eyes, a straight nose chiselled at the tip and a soft mouth. My former husband, Richard Stacey, an elegant man, had just such a face when I met him and I cannot believe that I contributed much to the glowing beauty that emerges in the fortunate genetic mix that is my daughter. She is well-named. She is elfin in build, slight, with dramatically pale skin and thick dark hair skilfully cut into layers. If you stroke her head it feels like a puppy’s fur. Her grandmother’s features reinforced by her father’s have gifted her with a lovely face. She knows little of her grandmother, of course. For someone of her age the war and the dreadful car crash happened so long ago it could scarcely be said to matter. And then, there is the youth. That angularity of chin and neck, the uprightness of the shoulders, the slenderness of the waist, the unveined feet. ‘I’m sorry, Elfie darling,’ I said, gabbling my apologies, trying to recoup some grace left over from last night, ‘I’m so sorry you have had to wake me up. Have you slept at all? You look lovely already.’ ‘I’ll go and put the kettle on, Mum.’ There was disapproval in her voice but she was laughing as I pulled on my dressing gown and followed her downstairs where I put my arms around her and felt with a kind of wonder her slenderness, the smallness, as it seemed, of her bones and the coolness of her cheek pressed to mine.

‘It’ll all be all right, Mum.’

I worry that my daughter and I speak a different language. For me facts are slippery things, as I try to hold them, grasp them, they slide around in their soapy suds and fall from my hands; whereas for her they are solid and reliable and you can lay one on top of another and build a safe house with them. But, sometimes, we understand each other. And so, while my daughter put the kettle on, I stood in the kitchen on the day we would celebrate her wedding with my customary if transient feeling of triumph and pleasure. I had made it through another day and another night and here I stand, intact and whole as far as I know, in this lovely room with almost all that I need and love and that view towards the river and, here, the purple-black geraniums. The kitchen was warm, too warm. As I pushed open the long French windows full of morning sun I could hear the flicker of wings as the pigeons that come to feast on the grapes each morning swept out of sight. The vine grew profusely over a wooden trellis which I had had erected over the small paved area here outside the kitchen when I bought the house for myself and my little daughter after my divorce. A small but significant triumph over the forces of dispossession.

No, the dress was not the right colour. And it had cost far too much. Fluid silk, brown and pale cream, like the reflection of clouds in river water I had thought when I saw the material. But, beautiful though the fabric was, these were not good colours for me. I had taken Nancy shopping with me but that had been a terrible mistake, for Nancy, a warm-hearted friend but an extravagant, inveterate shopper, had deluged me with advice in over-lit, overheated fitting rooms until I, staring disconsolately at my own lumpen body, worn out and close to tears, had gratefully allowed this cool silk to slide through my fingers, watching it glimmer as I let it fall. Like moorland water, I had thought. And I had said, ‘I’ll have this one.’

Now I noticed that it had a very unflattering neckline. What would Freddie think? Would he think I looked older? I tried on the wide-brimmed dark brown hat decorated with a single, beautiful, creamy floppy rose. Not too bad but when I removed the hat, it seemed to me that my hair clung to my head in the most unflattering way. The car would be arriving in twenty minutes. I would put my shoes on downstairs. The heels were far too high and I dreaded balancing on them all day.

By the time I had dressed, Malcolm had arrived. Malcolm is a bit of a mystery to everybody. Like my mother, he was academically gifted. He went off to the university and never left. I’m tempted to say, he never grew up. His college is Pembroke and he has done well, becoming a Fellow at a young age but then that was where he stuck. His subject is the Old Testament and for years, it seems to me, he was working on the Book of Jonah and the theme of exile. I asked him once when I was in my teens whether he found the idea of exile attractive and he said, rather irritably, ‘Of course I do, Agnes. We are all exiles.’ I think he meant from Paradise, as in Paradise Lost. But I have not had a proper conversation with him for years. I remember him being very kind to me when I was a child: taking me on nature walks with a little notebook and showing me how to dry flowers in blotting paper between the pages of a book. And he certainly supported my academic career. He lived in college until recent failing health required that he move to a small care home in north Oxford. He used to take me to college dinners where he would decline the noisette of lamb and ask for steak and kidney pie. He gives the impression of being perfectly satisfied with his life. He drinks a bit, but mainly wine from the college cellars which is, of course, of impressive quality. In the vacations he used to like to go hill-walking. Often alone but sometimes he would join a group. When he does it seems he is well-liked. He sings in several choirs. He may be gay although he has introduced me to several interesting women in the past. He is kind and generous and unfathomable. When I came downstairs he was chatting to Elfie who has always loved him. ‘He’s not odd, Mum. He is very spiritual, that’s all.’

Elfie was wearing her wedding dress. It was made of a soft, wispy, copper-coloured organza, gathered at the shoulders and below the bust and falling just below her knees in layers of ochre and scarlet and orange. She looked, there is no other word for it, heavenly. Round her neck she wore my mother’s pearls given to me after my mother died and worn by me at my wedding to Richard.

The car Richard had sent was his lovely old Bristol, a deep dark blue, spacious inside. Elfie settled herself on the fawn leather seat as though coming home. She looked bemused and charitable and I thought, not for the first time, that when people are happy they are generous. Malcolm chose to sit in the front so that I could sit next to my daughter, ‘Lovely to see the two of you. Both so beautiful today.’

I noticed a slight slurring of his usually immaculate speech and wondered whether he had already been drinking. Or, could it be something else? I decided to check with him later but not here, in front of Elfie. She didn’t need anything else to worry about today. The smooth passage and general grandeur of the car seemed to have silenced all its passengers and I was glad to have time to return to my own thoughts. I was experiencing a kind of release. I had arranged myself on the seat beside Elfie with my hat and handbag next to me, the car door had closed with a heavy expensive thud, and the die was cast; an irrevocable step had been taken. No matter how reluctant I felt it was now too late to go back. But I was going back. I was returning to a world I had formally left a long time ago. When Elfie and I left, I had chosen to abandon all my former ties to that unhappy world, as I thought of it. Telephone calls soon petered out. Half-hearted invitations to coffee or tea or supper soon lost their spurious rationale. And I then embraced with a surprising passion my new old world: while Elfie was at school or asleep I took a part-time course at Reading to manoeuvre my first degree in Philosophy and Theology to a B.Phil and then took a D.Phil (on virtue ethics) back at Oxford and then, a real stroke of luck, I managed to get a six-hour lecturership at Oriel. Returning today to, as it were, the land of my marriage, where I had once been so miserable, I could not help but wonder what it would be like. And then, like the compass needle searching for magnetic north, my thoughts returned to Freddie. And to my dream. To that worrying speck of remembrance: was I watching a woman being drowned? I thought again of the ripples of light reflected off the river onto the ceiling that morning and I reminded myself that I must behave well today. What mattered was Elfie’s happiness.

__________________________________

From Interpretations of Love by Jane Campbell. Copyright © 2024. Reprinted with permission of the publisher, Grove Press, an imprint of Grove Atlantic, Inc. All rights reserved.