upon the shelves: and leaving me, of course, bereft of the comfort of Laurence’s presence, however tiresome and maudlin he might be, however given he was to saying, ‘Oh, it is useless, hopeless. It is not just the beginning of the end, it is the end itself. We had better just give up, and die together.’
Now that I can no longer see people I hold memories of their appearance in my mind. They appear on the pale sheet of my memory: black-edged, cut-out figures, clearly defined. Laurence stands looming in a doorway, outlined by the light, blocking it out: sensuous, thick-set and fleshy: facing me, four-square: then he turns his head so that the light catches his face and his eyes are as wide and his cheeks as delicate as a girl’s.
Isabel lies upon a stone slab, hands folded in prayer, like some carved saint who achieved great glory in life and is remembered in death. Light from stained glass windows shines upon her imperfect profile, and glances off her long, broad-hipped body, the breasts unduly flattened after Jason’s birth. Then in my vision she sits up, and turns and smiles at me, and rises and stretches, confident and proud of her body, and saunters off, in so modern and careless a fashion as to put all thoughts of graven knights and saintliness out of my mind.
When she is gone the church is cold and empty and I am left in the dark again.
Isabel’s profile is imperfect because when she was nine she was kicked in the jaw by a horse her mother loved. ‘Don’t fuss,’ said her mother.
The Flying Doctor did, however. Isabel and her mother lived far into the Australian outback and were dependent upon rather makeshift medical arrangements. The doctor flew in, and wired and stitched and re-firmed teeth, and all would have been well had the horse not got her in the jaw a second time, barely a week later.
‘For Christ’s sake,’ said her mother, ‘what do you do to that horse?’
Here and now, sisters. Here and now. Build your houses strong and safe, love your children, and die for them if you have to, and try to love your mothers, who didn’t.
‘I patted its rump,’ said Isabel. ‘The way you told me I should.’ But her mother wasn’t listening. She was on the phone, getting a message through to the Flying Doctor. ‘I feel a right Charlie,’ she said.
The wet season was upon Harriet and Isabel by then: the helicopter carrying the Flying Doctor back crash-landed, and the doctor was injured. The yellow mud rose up around: if you went out in the rain your head hurt. The new injuries to Isabel’s jaw got forgotten, one way and another: her chin thereafter protruded too much and her mouth was flattened, and her teeth leaned backward, and joggled together; the doctor lost an eye and a leg. Isabel felt the responsibility of it all, but thereafter, having survived that, dreaded none. And the imperfection of the bottom half of her face, compared to the cool, gracious, wide-eyed perfection of the rest of it, gave her a quirky charm when she was young and a look of intelligence as she grew older. She inspired love as much as lust, in the souls of the young outback boys, who roamed in packs across the desert in that for the most part loveless land.
Pit-pat, spitter-spat. Rain in London is safe and mild, for anyone, that is, except the blind. It beats upon hard pavements and rolls away down drains. It doesn’t drown the world in yellow mud.
‘It’s no life for you here,’ said Isabel’s mother when her daughter was fifteen. ‘Not someone like you. You’d better get out.’
‘Come with me,’ said Isabel. They were all each other had.
‘There’s the horses,’ said Isabel’s mother. ‘I can’t leave them.’
Of course. Isabel had forgotten, momentarily, about her mother having the horses. They weren’t splendid horses; they were rather shaggy, moulting, ailing animals, plagued by a hundred insect pests, who did nothing but stand reproachfully in a field and consume what was left of Isabel’s patrimony, in sacks of feed and vet’s bills. They kicked up dust in the summer, and stirred up mud in the winter.
Isabel’s mother loved them; and Isabel tried to love them for her mother’s sake, and failed. Chatto and Windus and Heinemann and Warburg and Herbert and Jenkins – (Seeker died, of a snake bite). Memories, all, of Isabel’s mother’s past. Isabel’s mother grew up in literary London and was swept out of it and into the outback by Isabel’s father, who farmed and was Australian. Presently he went off to war and never came back, preferring life in a grass hut with a Malaysian girl to life with Isabel’s mother and Isabel. Mother and child stayed where they were, selling off land, thousand acre by thousand acre, until there was nothing left but the wormy wooden house with its rickety balcony, and the six horses in a single field, and the snakes sleeping in the tindery undergrowth, and Isabel’s mother, dusty and yellowy, grown into the landscape.
Where else was she to go, what else was she to do? Pinned down by war, world events, her own stubborn nature, and a baby? When it rained it was as if she called down the heavens to avenge her, and if they drowned her doing it, so be it. Pit-pat, spitter-spat.
‘But what will you do?’ Isabel asked her mother, ‘when I’m gone?’
‘What I’ve always done,’ said her mother. ‘Look at the horizon.’
Isabel thought her mother would be glad when she had gone: that her mother had done her duty by her. That though she, Isabel, felt great intimacy with her mother, her mother did not feel the same for her. The child is accidental to the mother. The mother is integral to the child. It is a painful lesson for the child to learn.
Seeker’s body had gone to the knackers; all except the head, which Isabel’s mother had had stuffed and put in the hall. It rolled glass eyes at Isabel the day she left home, while the flies buzzed about it. Seeker was the horse responsible for Isabel’s lopsided jaw: her mother had wept when he died, swollen horribly.
‘Why are you crying?’ asked Isabel, at the time. She had never known her mother cry before.
‘Everything went wrong,’ said her mother. ‘It was the war. And how could I go back afterwards? Everyone would have said “I told you so". They never wanted me to marry your father. They all said it wouldn’t work.’
‘What everyone?’
‘Everyone,’ said her mother, desolately.
And who indeed was everyone? Harriet’s friends and family had scattered. That was what war did. It took families by the scruff of their neck and shook them and tossed them in the air, and didn’t even bother to see where they fell, as the farm dogs did with rats.
But Isabel’s mother hadn’t been there to see the war, of course. War rolled across far continents, killing everything it touched. Isabel’s mother just sat and gazed at an unchanging, yellow horizon, over which a red sun rose and fell, and the people of her past had atrophied in her mind, set in their condemning ways. Would anyone bother now to say, ‘I told you so'? Of course not. Or was there anyone left to say it? Isabel’s mother could hardly know any more. She never answered letters, and presently they’d stopped coming.
Now she wept over Seeker, who had ruined her daughter’s face; but saved her character.
‘It’s unlucky to be beautiful,’ Harriet said to Isabel, once. ‘If you are, some man just comes along and marries you and stops you making your way in the world.’
The hot sun and the hard rain had turned Harriet’s skin to leather, and stubbornness had set her mouth askew, and her eyes were red-rimmed from staring at the horizon. But once she had been beautiful. Isabel thought she was still beautiful. And
