dais, slumped next to the couple as they exchanged rings, was their dog Bruno, an ungainly slobbering half-breed, tarry black, bleakly unappealing, intermittently dangerous. He’d twice bitten their postman, and their mail now had to be picked up at the local post office. The ring had been attached to a string around his neck, and the wedding celebrant, who to my surprise wore neither beard nor sandals, had some difficulty getting it off the beast’s neck, and into the hands of the increasingly anxious groom.
Further noxious blather ensued. Suzy’s crimson parrots seemed to mock and threaten me, as her hand released the firmness of its grip, and became still, coolly resting in mine. When the groom, finally, kissed the bride, with more enthusiasm than I thought seemly, the pleasure on Lucy’s face soothed me. Next to me Suzy wiped her tears. Our daughter was married.
I presume it should be a happy memory, but its edges are frayed and foxed by sadness. Happiness is fragile at the very moment of pleasure-taking, so easily defeated by a toothache or an itinerant virus. And past happiness? That lovely weekend at Lake Garda? The week that Suzy’s first novel came out? Delicate, easily bruised, soon rotten, evanescent. Do we lie on our deathbeds remembering such nonsense? Who cares? Who cared?
I was undelighted by Lucy’s choices and prospects, though I am unsure, as things developed and she entered fully into her life as wife and mother, whether I was right to worry so. And now worry seems a pallid, almost desirable state of mind compared to my daily dose of helplessness, desperation and withdrawal. Oh, to have some worries! School fees. Recalcitrant teenagers. Marital disharmony. Any of the above, please. All of the above. Anything, rather than this.
When Lucy was three, I recall her slight and wispy in a favourite cotton dress, white with tiny pink hearts perhaps – I can’t remember – but in the story I am constructing she looks dreamy in it, worn unfashionably long for one so tiny, floaty and ethereal as an angel. She would walk alongside as we went to the local shops, reach up on tiptoes and, if I leant down, put her hand in mine. We weren’t holding hands, hers was too slight to grasp mine, yet, but I would enfold her tiny fingers in my palm, and squeeze them as gently as if I were testing a downy apricot in the supermarket, anxious to avoid bruising.
I found myself whistling quietly as the song drifted through my head: Johnny Mathis’s ‘Misty’, a sentimental ballad that I had always scorned, though when I was sixteen my first girlfriend found it moving, though not moving enough. I get misty, just holding your hand. The metaphor felt surprisingly appropriate, for such a rotten song. Love fills every available space, soaks, suffuses and diffuses like a sea mist filling a room. Distances recede, all you can see is what is in front of your face. It makes you feel soggy. Nothing is better than love.
It was striking, only a year or so later, when Lucy had gained a couple of inches and no longer had to tiptoe, nor I to lean, that we could walk hand in hand, she giving me an answering squeeze, as firm as she could. We were both aware, I felt, of some new dimension to our relations, something grown up, reciprocal but diminished. I had stopped singing ‘Misty’ by then – you had to lean down to feel that way.
Her childhood reappears, now, only in cloudy vignettes that I rather suspect I have invented, or at least elaborated considerably. I suppose it doesn’t matter. We reconvene what time allows, and the arc of our stories is drawn from the few incidents that we recall, or make up. Most of my memories of her as a tiny girl are set in the summer. In the winter she was a demon, felt the cold terribly, shivered and sniffled, and resolutely refused to wear warm clothing when she went out. One Christmas Suzy bought her a chic olive green duffel coat with wooden toggles, which Lucy loathed from the very moment it emerged from its wrapping paper and refused to wear.
‘No buttons!’ she would howl. ‘No! No! No buttons!’
I was inclined to struggle and to confront, hold her steady and force her arms into the sleeves, to insist on doing up the dreaded toggles.
‘Not buttons!’ I said, trying to keep calm. ‘Toggles! Toggles good, buttons bad!’ I pushed her little arms firmly into the sleeves and commenced toggling her up. If she cried, too bad. Children have to be taught to stop crying. ‘Do hold still! How are you going to keep warm without a coat?’
‘Don’t you say that to me! No buttons!’
What was so objectionable about buttons was unclear. She hated them on a blouse, on pyjamas, on a coat. We eventually capitulated, for Lucy was amenable to zippers, which she liked to play with, and (particularly) to Velcro.
‘Velcro! For fuck’s sake. I have a daughter who loves Velcro . . . Kill me,’ said Suzy, initiating a lifetime’s disappointment with her daughter’s tastes. She even disapproved of Lucy’s Laura Ashley phase: ‘all those cutesified anodyne patterns, the awful pastel colours, the sheer drab mediocrity of it. She’s Welsh, you know.’
‘Who is?’
‘Laura Ashley. All you need to know.’
Call me a damn fool, but I loved it, at least on Lucy. Her mother would have looked soppy swanning about in all those flowery garments, but on a three-year-old they looked peachy.
I want to remember Lucy’s dress as it was, that summerised day walking to the newsagent’s. I scrunch my eyes up to replay it, to see us walking so slowly and happily up the street, hand in hand. Some sort of little girly dress, wispy and delicious. I can make one up if I want to. I try a variety of colours and patterns, of the kind that she loved. Pink? For sure. Polka dots against a cream background? Or perhaps white? I try them on her. She looks – we’re in the present tense all of a sudden – she looks gorgeous in it – cream is better! So delighted and free, aware of herself.
That was the past, then: not immutable, oddly biddable, malleable. There was no one to object, and it no longer mattered. The past is something we make and remake, remember or disremember – same thing, almost. You can polka-dot it, change times and seasons, rewrite the dialogue, rearrange the cast of characters. There is no dissembling in this. Most is lost, the vast percentage of what we have been. This is what it is to be a person, and it gets worse as you get older.
‘Worse?’ Not that, not quite. As we age, our stories are reduced until the constituent flavours are enhanced and concentrated. And sometimes, as in this story of little Lucy, too great a concentration gives not pleasure but something closer to pain, as a reduction of the essence of sensual pleasure, say, would produce something unendurable. As my recollection of my little daughter causes me to smile and to wince.
I am reduced to this. I live in reduced circumstances, left with the unendurable intensity of wormwood and gall (whatever they are), with fading hints of honey. There is something both inevitable in this, as we move towards the final telling of our final stories, the last version of ourselves, and something moving.
This journal? A coming-of-old-age book, dispirited, hopelessly knowing. For what happens, faced squarely, is loss. Loss of what we have been, loss of the history of our dear loved ones, loss of the incidents and narratives that have defined us.
I cannot locate much by way of gain in this process, save that most of what I have forgotten wasn’t worth remembering. Good riddance really, like clearing the attics before the house is sold.
So what? I can’t even remember the plot of the novel I read last week. Or its title. I struggle sometimes to remember what the names of common objects are, I keep losing things. A fork, a sofa, the Prime Minister. I am still a master of adjectives and verbs, and pretty damn good at summoning adverbs, but I am losing my nouns at an alarming rate.
I would worry about early onset Alzheimer’s, only I’m not young enough for it. But you can get away with a lot when there is no one to talk to but yourself, and
