Letters From Constance Read online

  They have brought breakfast and when we have consumed it, it will be the Welsh coast reaching out into the sea. Fergus doesn’t eat much, Cuillane nothing at all, but I eat. It passes the time.

  I have a pile of letters stacked in front of me. One must always reply to letters. I haven’t replied properly to yours yet.

  I still feel surprised, though why I don’t know. I knew when Kennedy was assassinated that the world was a lawless place. I had hoped that being humble one might be sheltered, but there is no valid equation between anonymity and immunity.

  There. We are over Wales now.

  Love,

  Constance

  Sussex

  June, 1978

  My dear Sheila,

  I have had pen and paper put in front of me. The family hover, looking pleased. This intention to write is to be encouraged. But where do I start? You have been here, your face has swum into view and disappeared again more than once over the last months. You probably know more than I do. All I recall clearly is the days just after we flew back from Ireland. ‘Fergus,’ I said more than once. ‘Talk to me. You have talked to me all our married life; you can’t stop now.’ So he talked, but his heart wasn’t in it.

  We had our neighbours to dinner because they had been so kind and looked after the house and the animals while we were away. After they had gone I didn’t have the energy to clear up. I remember sitting at the dining-room table, saying to Fergus, ‘There was something wrong with that casserole.’ He said, ‘I thought it was all right.’ He was away across the Irish Sea. We sat there looking at the cluttered table, not talking. It was that which finished me, all that crockery. Suddenly I cried out, ‘He died and I wasn’t there to hold him, my lovely, smiling baby.’

  I don’t remember much else. I seemed to sleep and wake crying, ‘My baby, my baby,’ and sleep again, and I noticed some of the children had come home. Then you were there. And Harpo. I was never alone. The children, friends, Fergus, there was always someone with me until one day I remember saying to Fergus, ‘I haven’t any intention of doing away with myself, but if I’m not let alone soon, I well may.’ Suddenly it was summer and I was settled in a reclining chair on the lawn, with a blanket because I am always cold.

  Fergus has something besides sorrow added to him, a constant anxiety. It will be a relief to him when I come to you. If he tells you I am very fragile still - or whatever words he finds fit - don’t pay any attention. I need at least one person to be themselves with me, not a keeper, and I’d like it to be you.

  Angela’s mother wrote to me - you remember Angela, Dominic’s erstwhile partner? She said how much she had liked Stephen and how she had envied me this lovely son. How unexpected people are.

  Cuillane is watching me through the window. She has come home to tell me something but cannot find the right moment to do it. It is a beautiful day and the Downs look at their humpbacked best. I can see a spidery path and people walking up it in single file. It is a steep pull; I wonder if I shall ever do it again. There is a field dotted with grazing animals, cows, I would guess; they are too white and too big to be sheep. Did you know Harpo is afraid of cows?

  Cuillane is walking across the grass towards me. Now she kneels at my side. I look at her. She has a clear skin and delicate blue shadows around the eyes; her face is fine-boned and pale and she has the look of an early Christian martyr. She needed more of my time, the time I never had; she would have rewarded long careful study. Now I must put this pen down and listen. When I am with you we will talk of what it is she has to say.

  Love,

  Constance

  Sussex

  October, 1978

  My dear Sheila,

  Is it because I have for so long been turned in on myself that the light in Dorset seemed so blinding? You were exploding with energy. I felt had I touched you I should have received an electric shock. I have been reading the manuscript you gave to me, searching for clues. It is a brilliant evocation of early childhood. What a wonderful thing it is to be a writer. I had not thought the creative process so potent; in my innocence I had imagined that only physical passion could so arouse a woman.

  It is intriguing to read about that part of your life before we met. Your memoirs are refreshingly different from those of so many writers, those delicate plants, inhibited at home, ill-treated at school. Here is this rough little girl, used to fighting three brothers, terrifying the pretty creatures in her kindergarten and kicking one marauding boy so hard his parents withdrew him. I can just hear Miss Addiscombe when you were presented to her together with your previous school report: ‘She does seem to be something of a hooligan, but I dare say we shall be able to civilise her.’

  You asked for news of the children. Cuillane has gone to Ireland. My brainy child for whom there seemed such a splendid academic future is now working in a counselling job in Dublin. Kathleen has been to see her and assures us she is all right.

  Gillian is going to study in Brussels this autumn. She seems to have blotted out the past and has given herself totally to the pastry- board. James has finished his teacher training course. I don’t know that he got much out of it, he isn’t very talkative lately. Peg is working at an employment agency in London. It doesn’t sound very interesting but she is remarkably cheerful. When she comes home she is subdued at first, but something is bubbling inside her.

  Fergus was glad to have me home, but he has changed. There is a new look behind his eyes which will never go away. Occasionally, when he is laughing or arguing - which he does less now - it is masked, but as soon as his face is in repose it is back in its place. It fits in so well there must have been an empty place there waiting for it. He is doing more prison work and has become concerned about the people who were arrested for the Guildford bombing. As for me, I am much better for my months with you.

  My love and many thanks,

  Constance

  Sussex

  December, 1978

  My dear Sheila,

  Don’t worry. I am doing all right.

  Fergus and I had a talk about his job recently. He has had to take so much time off and things are not very pleasant there. He admitted that his heart was no longer in his work.

  ‘That has been the case for years,’ I said. ‘Where could you put your heart? Say, and we’ll do it, whatever it is.’

  I could see him in that pharmacy in a small town in Ireland. I could also see him deteriorating there, becoming one of the local bores. It was a relief when he said he preferred to keep his dreams intact.

  ‘What is your heart in?’ I persisted.

  ‘You,’ he said.

  I have had to wait over thirty years for this declaration and by the time another is due I shall be dead. So I made the most of it and cried and was comforted. Later, we agreed that he should take early retirement. He does a lot of work for a prisoners’ aid society and would like to do more. I know you are sceptical about the Guildford Four and what you say is true: Irish people deplore the bombings and as soon as an arrest is made they declare the police have made a mistake. But in this case there is so little evidence to justify the convictions. We must talk about it. Or better still, Fergus shall do the talking.

  What about a further instalment of the recollections of a Methodist childhood?

  Oh, and by the way, our civil servant neighbours came to dinner bringing with them a visitor who lives in your neck of the woods

  – Janice Oliver.

  Love,

  Constance

  Sussex

  February, 1979

  My dear Sheila,

  In reply to your letter. Mrs Oliver, if you want it verbatim, said, picking up one of your books, ‘This is our local poetess. A very strange woman. She takes nocturnal walks on the heath and lonely cottagers lock up their husbands. Our farmer neighbour has such a passion for her he runs off in the night and howls outside her window and Critchley, our gardener, who is a bit of a poacher, said he once saw them in the orchard, mother naked.’

&n
bsp; It would be awesome to think you able to sustain this rural ravishing. Something quiet and sad, befitting one in the late autumn of life, would seem more acceptable. Is it the man I once described as a working farmer? A blunt, sturdy man, not gentry. He has an ailing wife, I believe you said.

  Don’t tell any more than you want. We all have things we hold close.

  Poor old Potter must have been glad when I left and he no longer had to be your excuse for nocturnal walks.

  Love,

  Constance

  Sussex

  March, 1979

  My dear Sheila,

  Your words spit at me from the page. All these years and had it escaped my notice that you are passionate, I prudish? True. But is there not a puritan streak of austerity in your passion? You are a bewildering person; even those who know you best can suddenly be confounded. Your poetry is tough, sharp, laconic, very much of the present time - and yet, and yet - you and this man fell in love at a Methodist prayer meeting? As I read your letter it is not a modern man and woman whom I see but characters at the turn of another century, scorched by passion, hobbled by gritty integrity. You seem to know nothing of the modern solution - pack your bags, purchase airline tickets to romantic places and leave the sick wife in the care of the welfare. Well. You have always demanded a certain scrupulousness of your men and at last you seem to have found someone as implacable as yourself; he sounds as if he is all of a piece, this Ned, hewn out of the rock of his native county. But you belong in two worlds, Sheila; it must be uncomfortable for you. And yet, I wish a little of that sterner age survived in me.

  Let’s not write for a while. It’s the years we have in common. Time is on our side and will heal our differences.

  Love,

  Constance

  Sussex

  November, 1979

  My dearest Sheila,

  You ask if you have stood in the corner long enough and may now come out. I had no idea that was where you were. It was a joy to receive your long letter. I spent the summer being rather dreary and when I thought of writing to you there seemed nothing to fill a paragraph, let alone a page.

  Then, recently, quite a lot happened. Gillian is to marry a Belgian baker and we go to Brussels to meet him in February. Last week, James announced that he is to become a priest. It is not what we had ever imagined for James, but he has changed a lot since Stephen’s death. It always seemed to me that his beliefs were strong, but uncomplicated - just as mine were before Suez. A few minor adjustments here and there would not do for James. He is no pinchpenny and the new wine must have new wineskins. Fergus fears he will find the celibate life hard.

  Kathleen is spending two years in Brussels studying the European approach to sociology, or something to that effect. We shall stay with her next month. She says that the baker is ‘all right for Gillian’; this seems to be her assessment of most men - all right for someone else. Not much news of Peg or Cuillane (still in Dublin). Dominic and family thrive. Dominic was much affected by Stephen’s death. Ever dramatic, he is now wholly devoted to the accused; there are scarcely enough rascals for Dominic to defend. He has joined the Howard league. The course of his professional life has changed but not his personality. Isn’t that true of us all, though? It is the way we are looking which changes, the manner in which we apply our powers, not the powers themselves. It would be nice, though, wouldn’t it? if, when this change takes place we could hand over some of our more irritating traits in exchange for ones which would make us more lovable. But no, we have to carry them with us. So with Dominic, so with me.

  I expect it’s too late to ask you here for Christmas, but when we return from Brussels will you come to stay with us? It seems so long since you were here.

  Love,

  Constance

  Sussex

  January, 1980

  My dear Sheila,

  You demand to know why I was dreary all summer. I am not always to write about the small change of life and keep my precious metal under lock and key. You ask if my faith has helped me or failed me. I scarcely know the answer.

  My faith has not comforted me; but it has given me the assurance that this is not the end for Stephen. Don’t misunderstand. I don’t feel his presence. I don’t look from the kitchen window and see him playing his drums on the lawn, or get a glimpse of him in a crowd, that characteristically hurrying slope; I don’t suddenly catch my breath, hearing his laughter. None of these things happens. I am not caught unawares because I am never unaware. Whatever I do or say, whether I seem to attend to the preparation of a meal, listen to music, argue with the children, laugh, even, I am always aware of his death. I feel its weight whenever I move, draw breath. But that is me.

  As for Stephen: when I consider all the learning, the experimenting with life which goes into the becoming of a person, I can’t accept that all that remains at the end is in the nature of an endowment. ‘He lives in you now; your life will be the richer,’ people say, meaning to be kind. To me, these are platitudes. It is too personal, this learning that each one of us has to do; too personal for it to be some communal endeavour that lingers on after we are gone. Whatever Stephen learnt in those last years in Ireland no one knows except Stephen; that learning experience won’t be passed on to anyone else, won’t benefit anyone else. But I can’t believe it was wasted. I believe it was a necessary part in the process of the making of Stephen, the creation of him, which still goes on. I don’t think the light that was in him was snuffed out in a field in County Clare. Had I thought that I would have waded into dark water and let it close over my head. But I believe that he lives and not through me and my memories, dear though they may be to me. I believe he lives quite independently of me. So independently it gives me little joy, selfish creature that I am.

  Joy I did have of him, though, in his life, and so I try not to allow my beloved son to be the means by which I am attacked by that most corrosive of agents, bitterness. Bitterness and anger seem to me futile, an ultimately irrelevant way of confronting life, like a child crying into the wind. Life is - like the river is - and we have to go with it, there isn’t a choice. For me, existence is a mystery and all I can do is live the mystery. And if that sounds reconciled, it is not my meaning. I am far from reconciled.

  There will be more to say one day, Sheila, but not now.

  Love,

  Constance

  Brussels

  March, 1980

  Tuesday

  My dear Sheila,

  It is the first time I have been abroad (I don’t count Ireland) since we went to Spain and I insisted on going by boat and train so that I could see as much as possible. Zeal was rewarded by a dull, cold day. There was a violet haze in the sky as we sailed out of Dover and the sea bubbled like mercury. The ship breasted the waves leisurely and without effort; one could feel it breathing at the right moment. By the time we came into Ostend the haze had turned into altocumulus cloud and there was faint sunlight on the grey hull.

  On the train we travelled between fields oozing slag-grey water. We passed a dun farmhouse with all its windows painted red; a row of white, red-died houses neatly squared in between low hedges; corrugated sheds, again painted red. Whereas English country buildings so often have the look of growing out of the gentle slopes of hills or crouching in the valleys, in this flat country the buildings looked to have been tossed from some passing aircraft.

  We passed a small town with long avenues of poplars and a church with something like a grey chamber-pot atop its spire. There were grandiose new houses designed like small churches with stepped gables. We ran alongside a big canal and saw an enormous barge with a deck a Swordfish could have landed on. Then we were out in the country again, passing a copse with green eldritch trees with their feet in water; a trim windmill with new-looking sails like steel combs; numerous little canals and mud everywhere. Mud such as I had never seen before, so thick and heavy it would pull your boots off as you walked. It suddenly came to me that this was Flanders and I recalled how y
our father talked of the mud of Flanders, which seemed more intransigent an enemy than the Germans.

  We stopped at Brugge, glimpsing churches with strange spires like a lot of crowns set one on top of the other. And then, at last, Brussels and Kathleen waiting, eager to greet us. She drove us through rain-wet streets, light reflected on gleaming cobbles. We passed a big square lined with old buildings of astonishingly decorative ingenuity, the rain falling in golden cascades past the lighted windows. We drove round another, smaller square with an orderly garden in the centre, the trees fiercely lopped.

  ‘There is so little traffic,’ I said. ‘Is it always like this?’

  ‘We think it gets worse daily.’ She has only been here just over six months, but we are to understand that she is a resident as distinct from a visitor.

  She has a one-room basement flat in a house facing one of the small squares. It is warm and clean with whitewashed walls and brilliant red heating pipes, the latter being Kathleen’s own work. ‘If you have to look at them, why not make them part of the decor?’ A little garden, just above the level of the room, offered a reassuring glimpse of greenery. Most of the floor space was taken up with a big mattress on which Fergus and I were to sleep. She would curl up in the kitchen area, which is separated from the rest of the room by a bead curtain.

  ‘You will see how fortunate I am,’ she said in a tone which brooked no argument, ‘when I take you out tomorrow.’

  Wednesday

  I did indeed see what she meant. The square, which is near the centre of Brussels, is pleasant and in the streets running off it are bakeries and other small shops where she can buy most of her food. It would cost a small fortune to have such a well-placed room in London.

  ‘You will have to wear flat shoes, the streets are cobbled,’ she had told me before we set out after breakfast. Fergus was intent on visiting the Africa Museum. We were all to lunch with Gillian and her baker, but this morning Kathleen and I were on our own. It was soon impressed upon me that she was very much in charge of me, herself and Brussels. In the short time that she has been here her French, which was always good, has become fluent. I was not expected to make any vocal effort on my own behalf; nor was I allowed to cross a road unadvised. She treated me as if I were a frail eighty-year-old. It was touching and I soon relaxed and suffered myself to be mothered by my dear daughter.