go to the barn,And keep herself warm, And hide her head under her wing. Poor thing,’
I murmured, and then was sorry because she had no idea what I was talking about. How could she? When I was small my mother Angel would say the rhyme if I ever worried about the future, and really it was no consolation at all.
‘The north wind doth blow,
And we shall have snow. And what will poor robin do then? Poor thing.’
‘Things looked kind of permanent, at the Golden Bowl,’ I corrected myself. ‘And they seemed very responsible. They won’t just dump her.’
‘That’s what they want you to feel,’ said Joy. ‘But the marble is only veneer and that terrible white stone is so cheap they can hardly give it away. Why can’t she go somewhere more ordinary? Why does she have to be so special?’
‘The Ching was very positive about the Golden Bowl,’ said Felicity, when I came down with my bag, closing the book and rewrapping it in the piece of dark-red silk kept for the purpose. I felt such affectation to be annoying. ‘Though it seemed to see some kind of lawsuit in the future. Thus the kings of former times made firm the laws through the clearly defined penalties. What do you think that means?’
‘I have no idea,’ I said, briskly. ‘I do not see how throwing three coins in the air six times can affect anything.’
‘Darling,’ said Felicity, ‘it isn’t a question of affecting, but reflecting. It’s Jung’s theory of Synchronicity. But I know how you hate all this imaginative stuff.’
I said I’d rather not talk about it. My mother Angel had kept a copy of the I Ching on her kitchen shelf. She had no truck with silk wrappings or respect. The black-and-red book, with its white Chinese ideograms, was battered and marked by put-down coffee cups. ‘What’s the big deal,’ she would say, ‘it is only like consulting a favourite uncle, some wise old man who knows how the world works. You don’t have to take any notice of what he says.’ She would quote from Jung’s Foreword. ‘As to the thousands of questions, doubts, and criticisms that this singular book stirs up – I cannot answer these. The I Ching does not offer itself with proofs and results, it does not vaunt itself, nor is it easy to approach. Like a part of nature, it waits to be discovered.’
One day when Angel had brought home bacon and sardines from the shop, rather than the milk we needed, because she’d thrown the coins before leaving the house and come up with something disparaging about pigs and fishes, I’d lost my cool and protested. ‘Why do you have to throw those stupid coins, why can’t you make up your own mind, then at least I could have some cereal! You are a terrible mother!’ She’d slapped my face. I kicked her ankles. She seldom resorted to violence. When she did I forgave her: she’d get us confused: it was hard for her to tell the difference between her and me. To rebuke me was to rebuke herself. The sudden violence meant, all the same, that the downward slide into unreason was beginning again, and I knew it, and dreaded the weeks to come. My violence, in retaliation, was childish, but that was okay inasmuch as I was a child; I must have been about ten. Her white skin bruised easily. The blue marks were apparent for days. I felt terrible. I think that was at a time before my father left me alone with her: he simply didn’t understand mental illness. He felt she was wilful and difficult and was doing everything she could to upset and destroy him, while doting on me. I tried to tell him she was crazy but he didn’t believe me. I expect believing it meant he would have to take responsibility for me, and he wasn’t the kind of man to do that. He was an artist of the old school. Children were the mother’s business. Anyway he left, sending money for a time. I was alone with her for six months before Felicity turned up to look after us. I’d found her phone number in my mother’s address book and called her. We’d run out of money and there was no food in the cupboard and my mother wasn’t doing anything about it. My grandmother stayed until my mother was hospitalized, and I was in a boarding school, and then went back to her rich old husband in Savannah, the one who left her the Utrillo. She couldn’t stand any of it. Well, it was hard to stand. Visit my mother in her hospital ward, in a spirit of love, and find her white-faced with wild glazed eyes, tied down, shrieking hate at you. They didn’t have the drugs then they do now, and made no effort to keep the children away. I told them at school I was visiting my mother in hospital, but I didn’t tell them what kind of hospital. In those days to have an insane relative was a shame and a disgrace and a terrible secret thing in a family. No sooner had Felicity flown out than my mother simply died. I like to think she knew what she was doing, that it was the only way out for all of us. She managed to suffocate herself in a straitjacket. ‘Throw the coins and throw the pattern of the times,’ Angel would say cheerfully, in the good times, and she’d quote Jung’s Foreword, which she knew by heart, relieving me of the duty of believing what she believed.
‘To one person the spirit of the I Ching appears as clear as day, to another, shadowy as twilight, to a third, dark as night. He who is not pleased by it does not have to use it, and he who is against it does not have to find it true.’
As if that settled everything. I try to keep my mind on the good times, but you can see why I like to live in films rather than in reality, if it can possibly be done. I wondered what Krassner’s hang-up was. I thought I probably didn’t want to know, it was an impertinence to inquire. Art is art, forget what motivates it. What business of anyone else’s is why?
Felicity walked with me to the limo, her step still light, her head held high: age sat on her uncomfortably: it didn’t belong to her: I wanted to cry.
‘Thank you for coming all this way,’ she said. ‘I do appreciate it.
It’s made things easier. That place is okay, isn’t it? Of course I’d rather live with family, but one doesn’t want to be a burden.’
‘That place is a hoot,’ I said. ‘I’d give it a go. If you don’t like it I’ll come over and we’ll try again.’
I sank into the squashy real-leather seat.
‘Of course you’re not my only family,’ said Felicity. ‘There was Alison. Though I daresay they changed her name.’
Charlie was looking at his watch. But I was truly startled. I kept the limo door open. We couldn’t leave until I shut it.
‘Alison?’
‘I had Alison before I had your mother,’ said my grandmother. ‘On my fifteenth birthday. That was in London, back in the thirties. I wasn’t married. That made me a bad girl. They made me keep the baby for six weeks, and breastfeed, then they took her away, put her out for adoption.’
‘How could they be so cruel?’ I stood there with the car door open, in the middle of Connecticut, and the past came up and slammed me. And it wasn’t even mine, it was hers.
‘In the name of goodness,’ she said. ‘Most cruelties are. It was in case we changed our mind, but how could we, we unmarried mothers? We had nowhere to live, nowhere to go.’
‘Who took the baby?’
‘I don’t know. They didn’t tell you. It wasn’t allowed. They said so you could put the past behind you and the baby could live without the stigma of its birth. They said it was for everyone’s good but really it was for our punishment. It was a long time ago. Don’t worry about it. She’d be in her late sixties now, if she made it to that.’
‘An aunt,’ I said, jubilant.
‘Always
