I did not wish to be defeated by this town. I wanted to bring it to life. It seemed to me that money might be the magic required so to do. Money, I had often been told, opened many doors. I had money in my pocket – six ten-franc coins and four hundred-franc notes. I sat on my stone bench under its deformed tree and jingled it. My experience is that if you do this, sooner or later, and usually sooner, someone will come and, taking you for a fool, do their best to extract it from you. This at least is activity, energy in action. I longed to see some.
Sometimes of course you have to wait quite a while. I remember going on an outing with my mother, when I was nine and Robin was three, and she was in, if not sane, at least competent mode. We went to the beach for the day. We sat by a rock pool, clear, deep and happily and prettily fringed with seaweeds and salty flora: and my mother Tamara prised open mussels and dropped little portions of pinky yellowy flesh onto the clean pale sand of the rockpool floor, and said ‘Wait! Now wait!’ And Robin and I waited, and presently a small crab appeared out of nowhere, and then half a dozen prawns, and feasted, and such was their joy, such the commotion, that the very rocks around began to move and a giant claw shot out, and grabbed the best for itself. ‘See!’ said my mother. ‘First the small fry, then the large. A sprat to catch a mackerel.’ And we puzzled over this, Robin and I. It made sense, but no sense. Nevertheless, I have always observed – jingle money and wait, and something happens, whether you like it or not.
I sat jingling in the square for ten minutes or so: a shutter in the house next to the boulangerie was thrown back with a clatter that made cats hop and pigeons rise and a young woman appeared in the window. She had a baby on her arm. What did she find to do all day, I wondered, behind the blank façade of the house? She seemed cross. I was not surprised. Then the blind of the boulangerie rattled up: fermé became ouvert. I went in and bought a long thin loaf with a ten-franc piece. The bearded woman in the faded navy dress who served me counted out change unwillingly, as if knowing it would just give me more to jingle in my pocket. It did. The doors of the charcuterie and the supermarché were now open. I bought sausage from the first and wine from the second. On both occasions I was served by women. As I left, the doors closed behind me in a kind of exhaling breath which I felt to be part relief, part disappointment. The relief was that peace had been restored: the disappointment that no one’s fortune had been made by its disturbance. But there, nothing is as bad as one fears or as good as one hopes. I was disappointed in them, too. What is the point of a town without men? Or inhabited only by the ghosts of men?
For I must report that as I walked back with my provisions to the empty Hôtel de Ville, I heard footsteps behind me, echoing my own. I stopped. They stopped. I looked back. No one. An echo, perhaps? But I could see no wall to make such a reverberation of sound; just the dull, empty, hot street, and ugly wrought-iron gates with their tubs of practical red flowers. Dogs which should have barked didn’t. And when I resumed walking, the steps came after me again – and not with the shuffle of the dribbling ghost, or the light tentative movements of Robin, but with a strong, young, forceful pace, so I kept thinking whoever or whatever it was would catch up with me, that someone would appear at my elbow, but of course no one did. The unseen follower did not pursue me into the courtyard of the Hôtel de Ville: the footsteps stopped as I came up to the little grassed slope to the gate – and I looked behind again and saw nothing unusual except that the sturdy-if-rusty child’s swing, which for some reason stood on the slope, was creaking to and fro, to and fro. And that of course could have been the wind. Winds do get up quickly in these parts – not that I felt any when I licked my finger and held it up. But of course, my not feeling it did not mean it was not there. These things are so subjective.
I nodded towards the swing and went inside the gate. It never does to show fear, even to ghosts: which is another way of saying we must face the past and our own guilts unafraid. And even if this one was, as it were, nothing to do with me, I doubted the capacity of any ghost to do the here and now any harm. I was not afraid. Was I not Sandra Harris the great and famous, next in line to Astronomer Royal (if so I chose), mistress of Mad Jack Stubbs the trumpet-player, dweller in the here and now, and invincible? All the same, the hairs on my arms stood up, the back of my neck tingled, my body betrayed me. I showed the physical manifestations of simple fright.
Now it is important, when presented with the unknown or unexpected, not to panic; not to flail about with limbs and mind, but to switch smoothly into emergency gait, and deal swiftly and calmly with the symptoms of the untoward at once, and ponder underlying causes later. So no doubt my father would have done.
So, a ghost stood at the gate, waiting and listening: summoned up by myself, raised by some accord between myself and it? His ghost, perhaps? My father’s?
My half-brother had already been to visit: bringing his disordered soul to bear on mine. Why not my father now, a visitation of malicious order, to bring me back to heel? But the universe would hardly be so concerned with me, and besides there seemed no threat or danger here: nothing even very personal: just some kind of statement that needed to be made, in the strong, steady, unseen step. I breathed deeply: the tickling feeling of impending fear receded. Let him stand and wait, whoever he was. I would just get on with my book, and he, or it, would drift away and become one with the hot smell of mint and lavender mixed, on the other side of the wall.
We all have ghosts to haunt us. Mine seem particularly near. Sometimes as I stare up at the stars, when the heavens arch above me, before I begin the defining and focusing business that brings this section or that of the galaxy into precise and narrow attention, I seem to catch sight of a face, formed no doubt by the vagueness of the starry clouds, as do the hills and valleys of the full moon – why, there’s the man in the moon, romantics amongst us say to a race of children who know well enough there’s no man there, only that bleak and rocky emptiness. He’s taken a step or two back, I daresay, into the constellations of the Milky Way, and that’s who I see. ‘You’re always seeing things,’ my friends complain. I saw Jehovah himself once; I was on a tour of Israel, with a group of astronomers. We went round in a minibus, escorted by a handsome army captain, armed with a machine gun. We took the narrow dusty road to the Dead Sea, through a land bleak and rocky as the moon, but as hot as the moon is cold, baked rather than frozen, and up and up the hill to the cleft in the rocks which would let us down again into the valley of that salty, mechanical sea, which is nothing more than heavy metals in suspension and good for neither man nor beast – though I believe they have spas there nowadays; and use the black and sinister mud to cure psoriasis – and I saw Jehovah’s face loom down through the clouds: he was the God of Vengeance all right; a surprisingly personal Patriarch; he would have spoken to anyone in his bearded old man ire, his eruptions of outrage, and made them tremble. Both paranoic and obsessive, I thought, with his vengeance wreaking and his detailed rules for his terrible laws, and his insistence that everyone kept them, and, seeing him, I was more than ever glad my brother had died young. I bowed my head and closed my eyes, and when I ventured to open them the vision was gone; all there was by the side of the road, viewed briefly as we passed, was a burning bush: flames flickering, flaring, quickly dying: a wisp of smoke; gone. ‘Was that a burning bush?’ I asked the captain. We were lovers, as it happened. I hadn’t slept properly or long enough for four nights: it makes one visionary. He laughed. ‘It happens,’ he said, ‘people throw cigarettes out of cars.’
Well, I see these things, or think I do. Sometimes I am pursued by the pattering of little feet, and know they are the ghosts of my dead children. All women have these, pitter-pattering round them like leaves rustling from a tree in autumn: the spirits of children conceived and destroyed, or merely unborn by virtue of her disinclination to allow them life. Every month she keeps her legs crossed, takes a pill or whatever, another one rustles and falls, reproachful, wasted. It’s the aborted ones who are vociferous, bold in their game of Grandmother’s Footsteps, tugging at the coat of their ferocious mother: ‘I got so far,’ they say, ‘so very far. Why did you stop me?’ And the answer ‘why, for the sake of those already living’ is as little satisfactory as my Israeli captain’s answer to me, when I beheld a burning bush – ‘People throw cigarettes out of cars.’
But I won’t have them brought into being, I won’t. I make myself deaf to the pleas of the unborn. As many as my father brought into existence, I will keep out of it. I will make things even, as the whole universe craves to do: to balance its books, as the isotope struggles for ever, to the detriment of all around, to bring itself to heel, to get electron and neutron in proper proportion.
Let him stand outside the wall and breathe his ghostly breath, and wait; I won’t have his children, no I won’t. Though the hot scent of mint and lavender rises – perhaps as he moves, and the herbs crush beneath his feet. For that’s what he is, I bet. He is the universal father.
He is Godfrey the bearded goatherd, with whom I lived for five years, who at first begged and pleaded with me to have his child: but I wouldn’t. I knew how they’d be. Little country-cottage children, muddy, shaggy-haired; with slow minds and droopy eyelids. Their noses would run in the icy winds, which the cottage walls would fail to exclude. And how would I get on with my work?
For I knew what pregnancy did to the mind, the animal stupor which descended upon the will: the horrible apathy: the seductive voice in the head which said ‘what is the point of striving, of endeavour? Just be, be; split, procreate; forget yourself, be the vessel through which the future can express itself’ – a feeling so strong it made the journey to the abortionist almost impossible. The footsteps lagged: the will only just triumphed, I can tell you.
But that was when I was eighteen: look, the father was sixteen. It was impossible. Everyone said so, even the family doctor.
Around thirty, I was broody. I would look into prams, coo at babies. I hated myself for it. For still I would be me, me: I would not split myself, define myself; I was flesh and spirit: I would not let the flesh win. I would take what pleasures I could from it and not pay the awful female price. My place was somewhere else: my business pulling the stars down to earth, not motherhood.
Matthew wanted children: I did not. It was our chief quarrel – or at any rate his. But I knew what they’d be like. Little city children, of the wealthy, well-groomed kind: smooth and orderly, with the clear complexions and sensitive mouths of those who go to private schools. Matthew’s children! One would trot them between dancing class and the orthodontist, and produce another race of Matthews. It was not to be borne. Neither were they.
Jack’s child – ah, now there was another matter. But too late now, thank God.
My friend Clare, mother of so many, would reproach me for my determination not to have children. ‘It’s unnatural,’ she’d say. Only through motherhood, her thesis was, could you embark upon that journey of self-discovery which was the purpose of our existence upon this earth. Poppycock, I’d say. Romantic twaddle. What is this talk of ‘purpose’? Nature sets traps to lure us into motherhood, that I’d agree: but once the trap is sprung she offers precious few rewards for her Nature’s purpose. I could as well declare victory, to finally produce a generation which wouldn’t want to reproduce itself. Enough would be enough. And I’d make Clare shut up about her virtue in thus producing her noisy, tormenting children: I liked her, almost loved her, in spite of her children, not because of them. I remained lean, lithe, small-breasted, flat-stomached, barren, a defiance and a lure to men, and that’s how I liked it.
Forget the breather at the wall, the watcher by the gate: the steady footsteps after mine. Perhaps the first child, unborn, claiming life through me? He’d be in his mid-twenties now: of military age. It didn’t bear too much thinking about. I was sorry to have deprived him of his sexual pleasures, the joy of young strong limbs – but then think what I’d saved him, all the humiliations and despondency flesh is heir to. He should thank me, not haunt me.
Just then the scent of mint and lavender mixed, and the hot sun beat down, and the doves cooed and pecked, and I wished that Jack would hurry home, and all of a sudden I was scared out of my wits.