Visiting the family home was one exam your boyfriends had all been obliged to take. Both parents were themselves the children of Aged Ps, and consequently brought up under a code of conduct and behaviour a couple of decades more antiquated than that which the majority of their generation was required to learn. They had inflicted a similar fate upon their daughters.
A child of empire, your mother had spent her infancy in East Africa where her father was employed constructing a railway. She might occasionally regale a dinner table with her story of the restaurant where her parents had eaten, later closed by the authorities for cannibalism; she would sometimes refer to the other children she played with there as ‘picaninnies’. For her education, however, she’d been sent to boarding school in England and was obliged to spend the holidays at a great aunt’s home in Worcester, a house full of cats. Her toys were sent to Worcester too: when the wooden trunk reached her, the great aunt said she should have grown out of them, and they could be given to the poor children.
Your mother had lost her entire wardrobe of beautiful dresses in the Blitz, which, along with the story of the toys, was the explanation you always gave for why she was an obsessive collector of bric-a-brac, pottery, dated fashions, and indeed bargains of practically any kind. During the V1 and V2 raids she had worked as a nanny to the family of Joe Loss, the bandleader, and after the war had trained as a GP in London, where she met the de-mobbed man she would marry—who in those days bore a striking resemblance to the poet Eliot in early youth. Now a community doctor who worked part-time, she would spend her mornings doing post-natal clinics, adoptions, fostering and school health visits: weighing babies, checking scalps for infections, diagnosing ringworm and progressive deafness.
That evening, a meal of minced meat and potatoes and carrots passed without too many tricky silences. While we ate our platefuls, your parents exchanged what seemed like mysteriously barbed pleasantries about their respective days. Your dad was compiling an English Practice textbook for schools and had attended an editorial board meeting. Then he managed a satisfactory par round in the afternoon. Your mum had spent her regular morning with mothers and babies at the health clinic, then, while we were with Mr. Draper, fitted in a useful shopping expedition.
You mentioned between mouthfuls that we’d bought two tickets for Dorchester. The coach would be leaving at nine-fifteen the next morning.
‘Let me take you to the station,’ your father immediately offered. ‘It will mean an early start, and we don’t want you missing that coach.’
Your father then washed up while I dried. We began by agreeing about the linguistic corruption in saying ‘pacifically’ instead of ‘specifically’.
‘But you can hear it on the BBC,’ he complained.
He seemed a little younger than your mother. He had grey hair, centre-parted, drawn back from a high, dignified forehead. There was some firmness to his slightly pursed mouth. His pale, deep-set blue eyes bulged a little, with an abstracted gaze. He had begun his career as a teacher of English in public schools. Later, he transferred to sixth-form literature and pedagogic method. Now he was a senior lecturer at the local teacher training college.
He possessed a fine eye for linguistic detail. An excellent reader of proof, he would annotate the books he studied with editorial queries and correct solecisms. He wrote to the publishers of dictionaries pointing out words they had unaccountably overlooked, improperly excluded, or wrongly defined. Raised as a Seventh Day Adventist, he retained a sense of the world’s manifold corruption; it had come to express itself in points of usage and abusage. By this means he could hold himself aloof, maintain a sense of self-control and order, and try to keep the world he criticized at bay. Perhaps he could repay it thus for his mother’s early insanity, the Arctic Convoy war he never mentioned, a pupil’s suicide, the attrition of his marriage, or some barely perceptible and irremediable hurt done him long before.
Despite my family name, grammar and spelling have never been my forte. Still, those few years of practice had made me familiar with your father’s preferred lines of conversation, and I joined in with the case of a teacher who considered the split infinitive a matter for eternal perdition, the examiner at university who deducted marks if students used contractions in their essays, and the trailing clauses that had got me into such hot water with tutors. Then he took up the crusade by deploring those who say ‘disinterested’ when they mean ‘uninterested’. Here was a crucial distinction to preserve.
‘Yet it’s being eroded,’ your father warned, and asked could I distinguish metonymy from synecdoche.
‘I’m afraid I can’t,’ I had to admit.
So he explained that ‘England’ for a cricket team was a case of the former, while ‘a bit of skirt’ for a girl exemplified the latter. Then I volunteered the misuse of ‘hopefully’ to maintain the camaraderie of interests your father seemed almost to relish. He added that it was properly an adverb of manner and not an alternative form of ‘I hope’. Was there any difference between ‘judgement’ with ‘e’ and ‘judgment’ without? Your father averred that the legal profession reserved the former for the pronouncements of judges, the latter for anyone’s act of considered distinction making.
With only the cutlery and pans to do we shifted ground slightly and exemplified to his satisfaction a litotes and an understatement, the one being a negative of the contrary and the other any expression which states a case with restraint and for greater effect.
‘El Greco was not a bad painter,’ I proposed.
‘God works in a mysterious way,’ said Mr. Young, and added:
‘How about an oxymoron?’
‘Poor Rich’, Alice seemed to whisper in a tone not quite of mockery.
‘Can you have one made of two adjectives?’
‘They’re usually formed with an adjective and a noun,’ your father explained, ‘like Milton’s notorious “darkness visible”.’
My mistake, I reflected, as it dawned on me that ‘Rich’ in her witticism was primarily a proper name and only then the shadow of an adjective. Did we have our favourite zeugmas?
‘She left in a hat and a hurry,’ the washer-up offered.
‘Making love and art,’ replied the dryer.
Coffee was served beside the living room coal-effect gas fire. Your mother passed round a postcard that Kate had sent from somewhere in central France. A cousin had recently married, a baby expected late next spring. Then silence but for the sound of sips descended on the four of us.
‘I’m feeling quite tired,’ you said after a moment. ‘I think I’ll have a bath if the water’s hot. It is? Oh good, and then it’s off to bed for me.’
It would have certainly appeared discourteous to say much the same, to finesse an escape with you and leave the room together. Which is why I remained seated in that upright chair, wishing you ‘Goodnight’ and ‘Sleep well’ in a mistimed chorus with your parents. Your dad then rose to clear away the cups and saucers.
‘As you may know,’ your mother began almost as soon as he had left the room, ‘Mary has told me about you and Alice Mac … pherson? Is that her name? And I am glad we can have this little opportunity to exchange a few words, because I would like to be clear in my own mind at least what you expect is to happen between my daughter and yourself.’
The wall-clock’s tick steadily interrupted a continuous low hissing from the soporific gas fire. Then there was a squeak from Mrs. Young’s rocking chair.
‘Alice McLeod is a friend of ours from when we were students. We both read the same subjects and had a holiday in Holland together looking at paintings …’
Taken unawares by the directness of your mother’s approach, it hadn’t so much as crossed my mind that this might be an area of her concern. Evidently, it was not how she perceived the situation.
‘That isn’t quite what I understand from my daughter,’ she went on, as if inviting second thoughts. ‘She wrote to me before you left for Italy, as I am sure you are aware.’
The hissing of the gas fire, and ticking of the clock, the squeaking of your mother’s rocking chair continued. No reply came from me for so long that she finally felt obliged to begin again.
‘My daughter gave me to understand that you had left her for this other girl, and that as far as you were concerned your “relationship” with Mary is now at an end. Is this the case?’
Once more no words came into my mind, and none came from my mouth.
‘You see I need to know how I am to behave towards you both,’ she was explaining. ‘I would not like to have to act upon an assumed understanding between you that does not in fact exist. You do see that, don’t you?’
I did. And I saw that breakfast table in the hotel at ’s-Hertogenbosch. I heard myself promising to get in touch, intending to phone as soon as we were back from Italy; light falling across the white table cloth, over the butter, chocolate vermicelli, bread and jams, I heard her voice whispering the words: ‘a brief affair’. And how could I never speak to her again just because of events that were none of her doing? She didn’t even know what had happened. Write to her, I had to write to her. Suddenly there came a great longing to be with her again, to talk it through somehow, be understood and able to explain.
I was sitting quite motionless before your mother, her stilled facial expression now awaiting an answer. I was hearing the faint hisses, clicks and squeaks, trying to fend off her questions politely, unable to decide matters not yet understood, and trying to stop myself telling her straight out that it was none of her business; then standing up and escaping from the room. I was hoping for some inspiration, but no words came that would paper the cracks. It was as if my life had been sliced in two then roughly pasted back together. Only those who knew could unite the two parts across that jagged divide. There was only one person who could do that. What had happened had happened to you.
‘No, it was only a holiday. Mary and I are still together, and you can assume we will be, I think, after term begins at the Institute in London.’
Her face lightened with an inward smile.
‘Thank you, I really am so glad you have told me this. And my husband will be too, I’m sure. You know I have been very brave asking you, don’t you? It certainly is a relief to hear.’ Then, after a further moment’s silence: ‘Perhaps now you might let me run you a hot bath too?’