I WAS SENT HOME FOR a few days to the country. Ray managed a final major exercise in will control before the spirit drained out of him. I had my orders. No parties while away, no sex with strangers. No eating of junk food. No sexual fantasies. No masturbation. Alden piled in with his own instructions: no drinking, no smoking, no bitching, and no losing of the temper. Just life as a good Essex girl waiting to take up a post at an infant school after Christmas, going home for the week to enjoy the innocent pleasures of a Plymouth Brethren household.
Loki would meet me at Liverpool Street Station at five o’clock on the Friday afternoon, ready for an evening’s work, by which time the Lukas bed should have been repaired and some breakthrough achievable in Thelemy—The Murmur of Eternity. It was quite a privilege to be seen as responsible for the music of the spheres.
But a bore too. I would have to traipse all the way by tube between Paddington and Liverpool Street, at opposite ends of London, twice. I didn’t dare ask Loki to drop me off and pick me up at Paddington; to do so would mean confessing that home was in Wiltshire not in Essex, that I was Vanessa not Joan. I knew neither Alden nor Ray would tolerate Vanessa, who knew too much, thought too hard, and would laugh out loud at their faith in the Golden Dawn, Thelemy, OTO and all the ponderous self-importance of aspiring necromancers.
But it was good to be going home. I hadn’t been back to see Mum, Dad, the twins and my little brother for some four months. I may have as many mixed feelings about my family as the next person, but I love my home. It’s a rectory, next door to St. Michael’s, a small, rustic, hilltop church: 12th century, restored in 1845 and again in 1875, the year Mrs. Blavatsky formed the Theosophical Society, forerunner of the Golden Dawn, the Thelemites and the OTO. They say there was once a pagan temple here where they worshipped the sun.
There is a mention of our house in the Domesday Book, the 1086 register of larger dwellings. The Norman doorway with its dog-toothed arch must date back to that time. Beams twist, floors undulate, the plumbing is noisy, the roof creaks on still nights; but there are roses in the garden, and hollyhocks against old stone walls, and clematis, honeysuckle and jasmine festoon the mullioned windows. We have a ghost, a desultory poltergeist who moves papers from room to room, and occasionally makes plates fall off the dresser. But that may be the twins’ unconscious fault: kinetic spookery is often connected with the presence of neurotic, teenage girls.
My mother drifts around, sometimes in her vestments of office, sometimes not, always kind, vaguely anxious, trying to tempt the young in to her services with guitars, bongo drums, conjurers and prayers she makes up herself. She used to be a counselor and conducts her feel-good services as if they were a group therapy. Her congregation, elderly and dwindling, put up with her because she is a nice person and tries hard. She is always in the right, which is sometimes difficult for a family to take. My father is a stern Church of England traditionalist, and what he sees as my mother’s “soppiness” drives him to quiet apoplexy. He doesn’t believe in women priests. “A woman preaching is like a dog standing on its hind legs,” he quotes from Dr. Johnson. He once said she had herself ordained to annoy him.
Alison and Katharine accuse her of passive-aggression, but she just smiles and says they’re entitled to their opinion, and understands their anger. She forgives them which they say proves their point. Little Robert is her favorite, and she discourages any display of anger or violence from him, thus, my father says, threatening to make him turn out gay. Which to my father would be a terrible and disgraceful thing. To Mum, though she would deny it, it could be an outcome greatly to be desired, for then he might never leave her. Easier to lose a son to another man than to a woman.
So we have our family tensions, not least between Mum and myself, but she loves me and I love her. And my parents love each other, in spite of my father’s astonishing behavior with Jude, which my Mum has forgiven according to her lights, though I’m not sure I quite have.
All the same, I am her least favorite child. She thinks I live a secretive life, which I do, and that I lie to her, which I do. But I took the job at the Olivier in part to save my family’s face; so my parents could have something to say to their friends—“oh, Vanessa? She’s gone into hotel management—yes!—a training scheme at the Olivier in London, she could have stuck it out in academia, but she does like to work with people.”
What my mother really wants, of course, are grandchildren. I’ve failed her so far, and the twins are so backward sexually and so advanced intellectually, she’s resigned to not holding her breath. They communicate with each other rather than the outside word: for sport they throw Latin tenses and Greek conjugations around like tennis balls. Babies would terrify them.
I don’t know whether Robert is gay or not, and I don’t suppose it is anything to do with Mother either way. I’m pretty sure he won’t turn out like Hasan, who I hope by now is spreading happiness amongst my sisters all over the planet, whenever he can dodge his father. My brother currently slouches round in slacker mode, sneery, arch, spotty and reluctant, driving everyone mad: last winter he exasperated and embarrassed my father by getting suspended from Eton for a week for shaving his head. Even my mother acknowledges that currently he is being very “trying” but says it’s his anxiety about his sexual orientation that makes him like this. My father snorts and goes back to his books.
My grandmother pays Robert’s school fees by covenant from beyond the grave. I got left the paintings, and the twins will have a small flat in Oxford in a couple of years. All these goodies were earned by my grandmother on her back, as Lord F, her one-time husband loved to say. She was beautiful, charming and greedy, a courtesan, and no doubt it’s all somewhere in the genes, having by-passed my mother. My grandmother by all accounts flirted, seduced, and married for money and titles. She left angry men wherever she went—and I daresay once or twice heard herself described as the Scarlet Whore of Babylon—but not, I reckon, as often as I have in the last few weeks. When I was a girl I used to wonder what went on in the pagan temple where now St. Michael’s stands. Sex and human sacrifice, I supposed. It’s all rather tame now and getting tamer every day my mother is in charge.
I love all my family, of course I do. We’re a clever lot: we all enjoy the life of the mind. The conversation over the dinner table is lively and instructive. My mother relates the news of the parish—always a source of diversion and amazement; my father instructs us—like Alden he has a tendency to instruct rather than to converse—upon the fragile state of Western civilization. So it was a great relief to be out of London, and to be Vanessa not Joan any more, allowed to have an intellect. It is as difficult to appear stupid when one is not as vice versa. In London I always had to remember to leave repartee to Alden and Ray, and the effort of not delivering a smart line over dinner could be almost as tiring as being a mixture of experimental animal, sex slave and sex toy all night. And it was so good to be amongst books again: I realized how few there were in Alden’s house. This is what gave it its desolate air. Ray at least had a few old paperbacks about and some old Phaidon art books on which he perched and spilled his coffee mugs.
The week off was also an opportunity for various rather bruised, abused and battered parts of my anatomy to rest and heal, and for my heightened state of arousal to be calmed down by the kind of familiar, comforting boredom that sets in whenever a girl visits home.
But even after a couple of days’ quiescence I still seemed to be emitting a field of orgone energy. My mother had asked a theology professor friend and his wife round to dinner, and he played one-sided footsie with me under the table, with the calm confidence that suggested he realized the kind of girl I was. That shook me. I’d given him not the slightest encouragement that I was aware of. One likes to be seen as a good girl until revealing the bad girl, not the other way round. Sex begets sex, I suppose. It gets into the air. He was at least sixty five. They were old family friends, and came to dinner every few weeks. I respected him for his book—The Decline of Western Religion. I liked his wife very much. I jabbed his foot with a stiletto heel and he didn’t try again. My mother didn’t like me wearing heels around the Rectory: she was convinced they were bad for the floors and would cripple my feet and give me bunions—but then she didn’t know how useful heels can be as a weapon in defense of one’s virtue. She’d never had to do much to protect hers.
I took the opportunity during the week of going to see Dr. Philip Bardsey, our family physician. He was very busy but found space for me after hours on the Thursday evening. He was a fleshy, jowly man, now on the edge of retirement, a smoker and overweight, with stubby, not always very clean, fingers and blurry eyes—but a good diagnostician. He had been my doctor since I was twelve; he’d been giving me thorough internal examinations since that age, too.
On the very first occasion indeed he broke my hymen, by mistake, but told me it was just as well. Blood could build up in the uterus and that would not help my mental state; which was an issue at the time, since my mother had taken me in to him complaining that I was over-excitable and hysterical. He told her he preferred to see me alone. She’d made a scene, and admittedly so had I, but eventually he convinced her and she went on home and left me with him. He asked a list of questions, and then told me to lie down on his couch and face the wall with my knees up. In went his hand, latex-gloved; which was a mixture of the horrible, the strange and the delightful. A sudden sharp pain for me and a small cry of surprise from him—and when I was back on my chair, after a little spurt of blood had been mopped, he suggested that since my mother, of the two of us, seemed marginally the more hysterical, it might be better if I kept quiet about the matter of the hymen. I could see he was right.
I trusted him enough at the time to ask him if there was anything the matter with me, and he said actually he thought I might be Bipolar Two—I was a bright girl: I could look it up sometime—but it would be to my advantage not to get an official diagnosis. He was not going to write anything in my notes. Keep up the sex once you get to it, he said, keep up the shopping, take a tranquilizer if inside the head gets really bad, steer clear of psychiatrists and you’ll have a good life. It was really good advice, if not what my mother would have liked to hear.
Since then we had been in a kind of collusion. He knew something about me—that I was Bipolar Two and wouldn’t grow out of it, but he would save me from a damaging diagnosis if he could. I knew he had taken my virginity and the internal examinations weren’t strictly necessary, but I would shut up about it.
Later when I was at college the diagnosis was confirmed by the shrinks at the student health center. I’d been sent to them as a result of my involvement in a gang-bang scandal: but what the authorities saw as sexual excess, I saw as the perfectly normal pursuit of pleasure and excitement. They told me at the center that lithium might help stabilize my moods: I took it for a little and then stopped. I liked my moods as they were. My problems were more to do with my studies interfering with my sex life than the other way round.
Now I thought I should report in to Dr. Bardsey about the sudden surges of mental over-activity I was experiencing and see if he had any more suggestions.
I stayed in the waiting room until the last limping old lady and wheezing old man had left and then Dr. Bardsey opened the door and asked me into his consulting room. I stripped off to my bra and pants and lay on the couch. Why hang about?
“Straight to the point,” said Dr. Bardsey. “How have you been, Vanessa?”
I said I was fine, other than that my brain was firing on too many cylinders and he asked if I’d taken any unusual drugs lately and I said perhaps, but they came from the tropical rainforest and were perfectly safe.
He asked if I had ever been to a rainforest and I said no. He said he had, and they were foul, dripping, moldy, sinister places and that with a few notable exceptions such as curare, anything that came out of them was likely to be baneful, fungoid and evil. Never take anything, he said, except substances that are formally banned: they’re safer. I was probably suffering from rainforest medication: now a new health food store had opened in the area he was getting all kinds of cases of unexplained toxicity. It would probably wear off. He’d prescribe a higher dosage of tranquilizer if I liked. I said yes but I assumed I’d have to earn it, so I wriggled out of my pants, turned to the wall and pulled my knees up and in went the cold gloved hand in the familiar way.
“You’re quite swollen in there,” he said.
“Over-use,” I said.
“Better that way than the other,” he said. A finger from the other hand, ungloved and warm, now circled my clitoris. I shuddered and came.
“It’s so nice in there, Vanessa,” he said. “You really are my favorite patient. You’re so uncomplicated.”
“What do you like about doing that?” I asked.
“It’s the source of everything,” he said. “I never get over the marvel of it.” And he was such a greasy, unhealthy, flabby, crude kind of person from the outside, too. Reluctantly, the hand withdrew.
“Thanks,” he said. “I hope one day you have babies.” He was such a dear, romantic old softy.
I asked him if I could have a good supply of morning-after pills. For Alden had come to the conclusion that the birth pill I was on was impairing my libido and not helping Thelemy—The Murmur of Eternity, and that since sexual energy was strongest when a woman was fertile, the best thing to do was avoid any contraceptive precautions other than ex post facto ones; which made sense. Dr. Bardsey said he’d thought I was on the pill: and why did I think I needed them? I explained and his hairy eyebrows shot up and he asked had I gone mad? What was the matter with me? My hormonal balance would go to hell; and that was the last thing an undiagnosed Bipolar Two needed.
I wondered why I hadn’t thought of it myself. Being “under will”—and you never knew when you were and when you weren’t—was rather like living in an advertisement. All looked normal, but you had to detect the truth in what was missing, in the gaps between sentences. I knew quite definitely I had to bring home morning-after pills and that was that. Obliging Alden was more important than any hormonal cycle of mine.
“I’ll have full sex with you if you give me the prescription,” I said, and he looked bewildered and upset and said perhaps he was wrong about all this; perhaps I should see a psychiatrist after all.
I backed off quickly and apologized. He had his own way of doing things and I must respect it. I would tell Alden I had the morning-after pills and actually just go on taking the contraceptive pill. There was nothing wrong with my libido, I was sure of that. If it was damped down it was probably just as well. Otherwise I would explode.
I took off my bra and sat on the chair so he could palpate my breasts, as was his custom. I am shyer about exposing my breasts than my cunt. I suppose by the time you get to your cunt, it’s too late. While it’s breasts choices can still be made. Breasts seem so personal, so individual; cunts seem much of a muchness if you are a woman, though I suppose for men they do come over as more individual.
Good breasts—and I am proud of mine, though I tend to like to keep them to myself—are a family tradition, though it has by-passed Katharine and Alison. The twins once came giggling in to show me a naughty postcard they’d found in the family papers. It showed this lovely thirties-ish girl with a bare bosom, a delicate hand hiding one and the other proudly open to public gaze. It was my grandmother. The twins—they must have been about twelve themselves at the time—asked if I thought they would look like that one day, and I said no. They were flat as pancakes, and of a less robust build than the rest of the family, almost as if they shared one physical being between the two of them. They were not pleased by what I told them, but it was true. Just as I was not pleased to be told I was Bipolar Two, but it was true.
Dr. Bardsey came round behind me and felt my breasts carefully and lovingly. I was glad I hadn’t frightened him away. I should not have been so head-on: that was bloody Alden’s doing.
“You don’t ever have to worry,” he said. “These breasts will never get cancer. There’s too much pleasure in them.” He took his time. One hand felt; I don’t know what the other hand attended to, but it was no part of me, and I didn’t strain my imagination. When I was dressed we parted formally, shaking hands.
I left with prescriptions for tranquilizers, sleeping pills, birth control pills, a blood test done, but no morning-after pills. Well, I would manage.
Families are complicated. Return to the safety of home, and find you can’t say “please pass the salt” without it being a loaded statement. It will be heard to mean “the food is under salted” or “you’re neglecting me,” or “why didn’t you notice I needed it?” Because all the other unanswered questions are lying festering behind every simple pass-the-salt request: the important ones like, “Mother, why did you leave me standing at the school gate for hours when I was seven?” Or “why was I sent to a state school when Robert went private?” Or the really big one for me, “why did you have an affair with my best friend, Daddy?”
Such subtext infests every passing inanity; though the past is more or less forgiven, it’s never forgotten. Families are too complicated for comfort. So when I went back to London I was sad to miss them, and yet glad to be gone. One orgasm, and that clitoral, in one week, was just not enough. If my mother suspected what was going on she didn’t say, and it would never occur to my father that it could.
I got back to Paddington at 4:15, caught the tube to Liverpool Street Station, and was there on the dot of five for Loki to pick me up and take me back to the bosom of my real life with Alden and Ray.