Chapter Two Of The Whole Story

Chapter Two “What was it that Tom gave you?”, they asked. She’d started to think about this. “Wrong”, they said. “Don’t think, feel”. She thought, sorry, felt, that he’d given her a harbour. He’d given her a place where she could be all of her selves. In the kaleidoscope of life, where all the beautiful parts of the pattern fall into a small, untidy heap at the bottom of the lens, that’s where she fell into Tom. Not in the beginning, of course. The beginning had been tempestuous, recurring collisions of mutual incomprehension. They met shortly after she arrived in his country to take up a post for a year. She was twenty-nine, he was nineteen. They couldn’t have been more mismatched. He tall and bony, she short and somewhere between going to fat and getting thin. He self-absorbed and unshackled, she with two children under ten and a history of taking responsibility, whether it was required of her or not. Despite all these differences, the attraction was mutual and irresistable. After a year or so, during one of those collisions, she experienced a blinding insight into her own behaviour within a relationship; she heard herself twisting words and actions in a waterfall of words (words had always come easily to her) and relentlessly battering her opponent into a submissive recognition of his shortcomings and therefore ‘blame’. Like someone drowning, she saw her life as a girlfriend, lover, wife, flash before her in unflattering truthfulness. This was what she’d always done. After the initial falling in love part, she’d slowly but surely beaten her lovers down until, cowed and careful, they’d lost all their attraction for her. She’d pigged-out on righteous indignation for years. God, what a horrible person she was. As with drowning, this realisation, complete with illustrations, lasted only seconds, and culminated in a solemn oath to herself to do it differently this time. You always hurt the one you love. Some Tin Pan Alley songwriter had worked it out years before. It’s the same old song And I sing along And as usual, somewhere in the second chorus, it’ll all go wrong Her grandmother was born in 1900. So was her father. Her mother was the only child of an actress mother and sailor father, and had been brought up largely by her grandparents. The actress was too busy with her career, and even if she hadn’t been, she was a natural diva, and the sailor went to sea. The grandparents died and the sailor was torpedoed in World War ll (she still has the scroll in which King George thanks her grandfather for dying for him). Her mother felt trapped, unable to leave the actress who’d never learned to look after herself. When her mother met her father, she must have seen it as her only chance to escape. Unfortunately, her father was a weak man, not wont to wander the paths of Avalon, or in this case, Aberdeen, rescuing damsels in distress. The grandmother saw this weakness, and used it to her advantage. She bought a house so that Jack didn’t have to build one, with the implicit assumption that she would also live there. And so the mother’s half-hearted attempt at rebelliousness was nipped in the bud. And into this strange, two-thirds-geriatric ménage à trois (her father and grandmother were the same age) she’d been born. With an inherited talent for the arts and two dislocated hips. Her sister was born six years later, and with her, a pentagonal power-struggle. Of course, the situation was doomed from the start. Grandmother had been spoiled, and was demanding and fractious, a turn-of-the-century control-freak. She busy-bodied the married life of her daughter and son-in-law relentlessly, and took it upon herself to correct and improve constantly. The two small girls would be dressed by their mother to go out, and when she left them waiting in the hall while she fetched her coat and handbag, the grandmother would appear, and fuss the children anew, adding a scarf, or subtracting a pair of gloves, or even changing a coat. This was particularly irksome in the winter, because then the whole process of dressing was extra lengthy. First a cotton vest and pants. Then a liberty bodice. It’s called that because only when you’re wearing one, do you realise what a liberty it is not to wear one. Woolly tights, pleated skirt, hand-knitted twin-set, and that completes the first stage, by which you’re already becoming uncomfortably warm. The coat, the gloves (strung through your coat-sleeves as a precautionary measure) and the hand-knitted woolly hat. The shoes or boots have to be put on for you, since at this point you can no longer bend from the waist. The final touch is the wrapping of the scarf, round your neck (preferably taking in your chin with it) crossing over your chest, and then tying it in a knot at the back, leaving you trussed and ready to roll. When the mother returned, there would be the inevitable row. Under the heads of the two snapping, snarling generations of women, the girls stood stoically waiting until the acrimony wore itself out, and became grumbling and whining, and then finally the three generations of women could go out and greet the world. The cracks firmly in place, behind the façade, not for public viewing.