I, Joanna May; not so young as I was, not so strong as I was, but braver: finding courage. My bed is empty again, but I dream it is filled, with lovers real and unreal, lovers I remember and men I never knew I wanted. I wake to find Joanna May sleeps alone, to face a day now peopled with the ghosts of the past: they throng around me, reminding me, instructing me. This, they say, relates to that. How simple! Why did you never see it before? But still the nights are stronger than the days. When the days triumph, I will act.
How the feelings of childhood haunt us. We think we forget, but we don’t. Those initial pains grow stronger with the years: instead of fading, as one might expect, they merely afflict the present more and more. One image now torments me. I remember standing on the wide polished staircase in the big house in Harley Street. A scarlet carpet runner ran down the centre of the stairs. The pattern was both boring and complicated. I must have been very small. The front door bell rang and the receptionist walked through the hall. She wore a white coat, and was not friendly to me, or anyone. She opened the door to the patient. On the step stood an old woman. She had on a black coat with a fur collar and brought with her an air of what I can now see was genteel despair mingled with anxiety: the sense of a life misspent, of opportunities missed, of knights in white armour who never came, of husbands, children who were never grateful. So many of the patients were defeated women. Women, I perceived at that moment, were by their very nature supplicants. The outside world knocked on our front door and yielded up its goodies, and its goodies were nothing but female desolation, decay and disappointment. My father’s voice sounded from behind closed doors in one direction: my mother’s from another. My mama played bridge, and I was not supposed to disturb her. I ate in the kitchen, with the receptionist: rationing was in force. There was a war on. Food was simple and boring: so was conversation. My mother and I were not evacuated from London: she said we must defy Mr Hitler but I thought it was because she did not want to miss her bridge. My father said the same about Hitler and I thought that was because he did not want to miss his patients. Even fear was a deceit. Sometimes bombs fell and the outside world trembled and crashed and the door knocker banged of its own volition, but the house didn’t fall down, which was what I wanted to happen.
I remember standing on the stair as my father’s patient was let into the house, and voices sounded, muffled by closed doors, and I knew I was cut off from the real world; that I was alone: that other people would never quite touch me, or me them: that I was only acting this child upon the stair: there was no real and undeceitful me: therefore the voices that came would always be muffled. The prescience was true: children fall into uncontrollable grief when they realize, small as they are, certain truths about the world, and about themselves. ‘I just feel like crying,’ the small child will explain. Don’t believe it. The future is seen: the grief is real and profound.
Only Carl could I hear loud and clear; his voice came through to me not muted, but somehow at first hand. I didn’t like what he said or did: that didn’t matter, it wasn’t the point. When I met him I thought he was rude and plain and rather short, but his edges were somehow defined; quivery, like a real person superimposed against a fake background in an old film. And that was that. I don’t suppose it was love I felt; I think I just recognized an opportunity for being healed, for becoming real, breaking through the shrouding veils and mists, and that for me was all, at the time, I needed. I somehow knew what Carl knew, though I had come to the knowledge in a different way than he. Carl had suffered cruelty and hardship and I had not. Carl’s early world had been small, black, wretched, terrified, until suddenly the clouds had parted and revealed a new bright world, full of privilege, animation, possibility: and with the last drop of strength he had leapt out of the one world into the other. And myself, female, given everything yet nothing, in my grey, muffled, lonely world, bred to serve, to be a supplicant, knew a different kind of cruelty, but the same kind of terror – the inevitability of illness, age, death: the impotence of love. When I lifted my eyes to Carl’s I thought how peculiar, how bright and naked they are – and then realized that was how eyes ought to be. It was other people’s which were out of order, clouded by wishful thinking and self-deception. There were just the two of us, in all the world, who knew what the truth was, and how terrible it is. ‘You have my kind of eyes,’ he said.
It took little to persuade me that I didn’t want children. How had it happened to me that I knew what Carl knew? The thought frightened me. How could you protect your own children from that one dreadful moment on the stair, the prescience of defeat and death? You could feed your children, love them, nurture them, act the good mother, do all you could to be close to them, and still it might happen. On that one occasion when I thought I was pregnant I was afraid. When I had what at the time I thought was a termination I was relieved, as well as angry. Let me not deny it.
When Isaac said of the card ‘Death’ that it meant rebirth too, I took leave to doubt it. But then Isaac’s eyes did not have the naked brightness of Carl’s. I liked Isaac because he talked to me. Even good wives get bored. What are stay-at-home wives, executive wives, determinedly childless, supposed to do, even if, like me, they are wives of captains of industry not the mere foot soldiers? It is all performance in the real executive estate. She must be like the others, or he will know the reason why, and so will they. She must act, in the first few years, as if she waited for a child: she must hold the babies of other women, and sigh with longing, although the little wriggling thing appals and upsets her. Is this the sum of woman then – to be the instrument of reproduction, a walking womb; the pulsing, gurgling, bloody redness inside the whole point of her being? Never, but let her dissemble! Later she must act out the emptiness of not having children; lament her inability to conceive: it is expected of her: though she glories in the leisure of her mornings, the flatness of her belly, her peace of mind in a world where the lot of women appears to be worry, grief, toil and anxiety, as their children, their hostages to fortune, sap their cheerfulness, will and energy. Only later, when it’s too late to change her mind, when the cyclical messiness has stopped, does a kind of truthful desolation set in, as the world around her empties; and she understands that of her own volition she has become one of nature’s dead ends: an experiment set aside, because it didn’t work. Then she may well blame whoever’s around (as I do Carl), whoever, however unreasonably, she holds responsible for her initial decision, the tying of the knot that severs her from the future. She curses fate, instead of herself. Her executive husband has not got quite where he wanted, what he wanted: whoever does? She has seen him through an affair or so: smiled bravely and grimly through this or the other dinner party, when his mistress picked at her avocado and crab salad; worried through his threatened heart attack, put up with the bad temper and depression of his mid-life crisis; and at last she says what about me, me? Where is this promised life, this happiness, this fulfilment? It must be somewhere!
Perhaps, she says, she could be of service to the community. But how? She has learned something about the world, for all the comfort and security of her life: enough to know there’s nothing she could tell the poor and oppressed that they didn’t know already. That what the poor want is not advice but money. She knows above all the value of money: how it keeps people quiet and good. Put a hundred thousand pounds in the hands of a child abuser and he’d stop abusing. She can’t even give all she has to the needy, because she has nothing of her own to give. It is his. The outside world knocks upon her door: she goes to open it, softly on deep carpets, and outside in the storm, begging for shelter, stands a crone, a beggar woman, and it is her future self. She slams the door, she closes her ears: calls up her bridge partner. If it’s not too late, if she’s kept her looks – and why shouldn’t she? – she ‘takes’ a lover. Well, one just happens to come along, even if she’s married to Carl May. Forget takes. A woman gets taken.
I, Joanna May! See how easily it comes to me to turn from ‘I’ to ‘she’ – joining my lot with other women, universalizing an experience, as if the better to justify myself. As if I, a woman who never gave birth but has four daughters, an only child with four sisters, could ever be quite like anyone else. Perhaps what Dr Holly took away from me at the Bulstrode Clinic was not so much my identity, as my universality. He made me particular, different from other women: he turned me into someone of scientific interest. Worse, he stole my soul, the thing that threads me through and back to the human race, and never mind that in my heart I’d tied a knot in it, it wasn’t too late at thirty to change my mind, give it a sharp tug, untie it, take my chances along with everyone else, not let the moment on the stair last a whole life, but send my children and my children’s children on down through the centuries, mingling and mixing with the others, sharing and partaking, into the future. I think when they took that part of me, the singular me, away, and interfered, they stopped me in my tracks. It isn’t reasonable to think so, but when Dr Holly says to me, ‘You haven’t changed,’ I think he’s right, and I think it’s his fault I haven’t changed. He has stolen thirty years of life from me. And now it’s too late. For me, but not for them. I have my four more chances, and that’s how I must see it.
How had it been for the Queens of Wands, Pentacles, Swords and Cups? If Dr Holly was not interested, I was. I would ask them. I wondered if they lived their lives, or acted them. I wondered if they had their equivalent for the moment on the stairs, and if they had overcome it, as I, their master copy, had not. I felt what it was to be Dr Holly, to want to find out: I felt the pleasure of it. I felt what it was to be Carl, and want to change the world: I felt the power of it. But most of all, I wanted to see what I would be, born into a newer, more understanding world: one which allowed women choice, freedom and success. Perhaps I had merely been born thirty years too early and that was the only trouble. The young Queens of Wands, Pentacles, Swords and Cups: myself the ageing Empress: not devastating, frightening, shocking any more – just how very interesting to see how it all turned out. What fun it would be – that rare commodity.
It was with pleasure, animation and excitement that I waited impatiently for Mavis to come to me with the names and whereabouts of my sisters, my daughters, my twins, myself.