Читать книгу Then Again: Travels in search of my younger self - Irma Kurtz - Страница 7

Nowadays, instead of Tampax I pack a small box of the hormone pill that slows down bone loss and enough calcium supplements to see me through. Half a century ago lipstick was all I wore for everyday appearances; I pack more make-up now, though far less than I did twenty or so years ago before libidinous hope had utterly expired. Only a small case slung over my shoulder, nevertheless, it would have been less problematical to take off impulsively to Calcutta than just down the road to the Isle of Wight. I have roamed around India without prior knowledge of train timetables, changed plans on the Australian hoof, and bussed all over the American vastness rarely choosing a destination more than a day in advance. In England, however, where I am at home yet not, I know too much, and for that very reason, because I know it almost all, before I set out I need to know more, particularly when travelling by rail. A national taste for convolution and a compulsion to fix what ain’t broke, complicated by the greedy fragmentation of what used to be a premier railway system, means that irregular travellers must ask for help to make sense of British timetables and tickets. It vexes me after nearly forty years to be mistaken for an American tourist, but that’s what happened as soon as I opened my mouth and asked about train and boat connections to the Isle of Wight, thanks to the sharpness of the British ear for accents, from which in part derives a marked gift for mimicry and theatre. In my long and footloose travelling life I regret not being a car driver only when I find myself in a London train station where architecture of imperial design is these days belied by avarice and confusion.

Many women of my generation learned late, as I did, to drive a car, or do not drive at all. Women drivers and mothers-in-law were comedy mainstays of my childhood. Mom-in-law stood for the viperine nesting instinct of the female and deflected the entrapped male’s frustration away from his own mother and his wife to put it where it would do less harm. And the car was a symbol in the 1950s not so much of freedom as of power and capability: he who drove, chose his destination. She who drove, drove him to the station, the kids to school and the dog to the vet. My mother was born three years before Henry Ford began mass production of the automobile. Given her innate loathing of even the most innocuous machinery, it is understandable she never once in her more than ninety years sat in the driver’s seat. My father, upright and tense, drove our Buick through the back roads of New Jersey as if it were a tetchy elephant with a basket on its back. I have a hunch my brother would rather not drive at all, only he lives in southern California where to be unable or unwilling to run a car relegates one to life on buses and pavements among the mad, the maimed and the destitute. I’d be surprised if more than a dozen girls at my urban university in the early 1950s were learning to drive; to be driven was part of the deal we were expected to make. When I was pushing fifty, I finally took driving lessons. To my surprise, I liked doing it and I got my licence first try. But it was too late. Not too late to acquire the skill or practice necessary to make me a good driver: it was too late to park a car in my imagination. ‘My car’: a tripping phrase now for women but one that I could find no space for in my mind – no more than I could ‘my husband’.

‘1954: Mooky (my pet name for my brother) would love the railroad train I am on as I write this. Evelyn and Midge and I are facing each other in high-backed seats in a small discrete area like an old stagecoach. There is a table between us to give us a place to take tea. Tea! I wish I liked tea!’

‘You don’t know what good is,’ my maternal great-grandmother – I called her ‘Gay Gammaw’ – used to scold whenever I refused some gristly titbit considered a delicacy when she was a girl in what was then Ruthenia. At least, I think Ruthenia was her home before she emigrated and somehow washed up in Indiana where my grandmother and mother were born. Our family’s history has been mythologised beyond tracing on my mother’s side, and on my father’s side despised and hidden as a contemptible secret from us who were learning to pledge allegiance to our American flag. I was three or four when Gay Gammaw died. I seem to remember being lifted to look down and see her, pinch-nosed and powdery in her coffin. Her English was never fluent, nor was mine yet, so I never put to her questions I now wish I had. What was your name when you were little? I’d like to ask her. What did your house look like? What did you eat and sing and play? Who were you really? Where do you come from really? Do you know why some little girls have to leave home?

‘1954: My first day in England! Everything is so small!’

Gay Gammaw was right: I did not always know what good was. We young Gullivers from the land of giants, when it came to war and bombs, painful separations and stringent rationing, did not know what bad was, either. But we sure as hell knew what big was. After so long in Lilliput, have its proportions begun to suit me? More likely, I am shrinking with age; getting on for fifty years later, outward bound via the very line on which once I had entered London for the first time, everything I saw through the train window looked of normal size. For a full ten minutes out of Waterloo Station on the first lap of my odyssey, two old dears who were no doubt taking advantage of the off-peak rate for old dears, as I was, did not stop complaining loudly to each other that the layout of the coach, even though the train was half empty, meant most passengers had to ride backwards. They sat in a double seat, one of the few, it so happened, that faced forward.

‘A lot of people feel ill going backwards,’ said the one who was boss.

‘Too right. You’d think they’d do something about it,’ piped her companion and glanced around for allies. Or a fight.

I looked away quickly because I was alone at a table yet nevertheless had wilfully chosen to face backwards. I knew how futile it would be to justify or defend my choice against two old ladies. Not many of us who are starting to crumble dare to risk being left without a leg to stand on. Challenge any of an aged person’s long-held opinions, knock the existence of a higher power, say, or the efficacy of cod-liver oil, or even just suggest a need sometimes to ride a train backwards, and the whole delicately balanced construct must totter. The last thing a body past mid-life can do is change its mind. Particularly since the rise of youth as a dominant market and political force, it has become the genuine duty of the aged to object, to carp, to cavil, to kvetch, to dig in arthritic heels and act as a drag on gimcrackery and whiz-bang technology, to put the brake on whippersnappers who might otherwise hurl humanity into space, leaving behind a ruin of history. Little old ladies like those across the aisle, if they are doing their geriatric best, must right to the end remain a pain in youth’s ass. No argument, OK? I know what I am talking about. Shut up and listen, child, who once upon a time rode that very rail in the opposite direction; let me tell you why you will always prefer to leave London backwards. Remember how you stood on the deck at the start of your journey watching America recede into a westernmost glow? Facing backwards is the right and proper way, the only way, to leave home. And facing backwards, it would surprise you to know, young I, is the way you will one day choose to leave London and only London: waving farewell.

‘10 July 1954: My first full day in London! We started at 8 a.m. with a rise and shine from our leader, Tony. By 9.30 we hit the London streets. Scary at first because the cars go the wrong way. Then the Changing of the Guard: crowds of tourists peering at tall, wonderful men in red suits and fuzzy black hats. Company A’s captain changes swords with Company B’s captain, while all the men play instruments. Silly but awfully thrilling. The high spot of the day for me was the Tower of London. When I touched the rough wall I felt an electric connection with the past through my fingertips. I kept myself as far from the group as possible there. I feel things better on my own! I feel better on my own! The Tower where the two little princes were killed! The very spot where Henry VI was murdered at his prayers! It was real! It happened and not just in books! You can feel it thrumming in the stone! The day was overcast and there were ravens, black and proud and ugly and hopping awkwardly like Richard III! There seems to be a dry and constant flow of jokes everywhere in London but no loud laughter. The city is scarred and charred from the Blitz but not Tony or the guide, nobody referred to any of these black gaps in the London smile. We went to a buffet for tea. How the woman wrinkled her nose when I asked for coffee! (How I wrinkled my nose when I tasted it!) And we went to the theatre. The play! Wonderful! Bliss! Then we bought food for one shilling. Buses are two or three cents a ride. What a funny place this is, like looking-glass land. The smaller the sum, the larger the coin! God! I wish my room-mate would paint her damned toenails in silence and shut the hell up!’

And I wish you had thought to name the damned play you were all taken to see. Could you not foresee that such a detail would be important to you later? Shakespeare, I imagine, in aid of colonial improvement. Then again, our leader, Tony, could be a mischievous young chap, perhaps it amused him to take his little Yanks to something wild and racy. Noël Coward? Terence Rattigan? You had a crush on Tony, perforce. All the girls in the group did; your college room-mate and best friend, Marjorie, when she was on the Study Abroad tour the previous summer had loved him madly. His softly tailored summer suits, his plummy vowels, that thing he did with his longish hair when it fell over his forehead: he had altered her criteria of the opposite sex for ever, she declared. Presumably, you thought you too would remember Tony always; is that why you left no physical description? Trying now to bring him back to my mind’s eye, my impression is of an Oxbridge undergraduate, young, fair and willowy, with wit enough to make the way he patronised us smitten girls enchanting and more than forgivable. Although he laughed with us and gently laughed at us, too, during our long journeys by chartered coaches around England and later on the Continent, he could suddenly become reserved as Americans rarely are, as detached and cool and secretive as a spy, in a way that suggested much, much more than his own welfare alone depended upon his never spilling the English beans.

As for your annoying and nameless room-mate, it is good for a traveller to learn early that suffering and boredom are the price paid for company on the road, especially if it is female. You are going to know women, intelligent though they are at home, who as soon as they find themselves in the big abroad respond with tantrums to the least impediment or delay. To travel with any one of them is to travel with an immense spoiled three-year-old who must have the window seat or sulk; must eat when she’s hungry or make a scene; must set the pace and call the shots or she’ll kick her little feet. And, yes, your first night in a great new city, she will paint her nails while chattering on endlessly about her toys and boys at home, never mind that literature and history are crying to get a word in. Travelling companions in general are one of life’s torments and especially for you, girl, because of your blasted diffidence bordering on servility, and your inability to rise to anger except on occasion with a man. After every trip with a woman friend, and quite a few with men, battered and shaking, you will cry with relief to be alone again.

Mind, young’un, there is all the difference in the world between a travelling companion and a fellow traveller. Observing strangers on a train, talking to them when you can, and parting in the natural course of the journey, will add depth and joy to every journey, and supply a reason beyond necessity for you always to prefer public transport. Of course, it used to be that strangers, usually men, talked to me; but that wench is dead. Now, I talk to strangers increasingly. Incessantly? And as often as not, they are women of around my own age. If you want to travel quietly and speak to nobody, the most dangerous person to sit near is an ageing woman on her own. Nothing important remains for her to lose, no beauty, no shame, few of the sad boasts that collect in failing men; all an old woman has left and is dying to share is her opinion. Or, as I have seen in my mother and catch glimpses of in myself, she suffers from residual and indiscriminate need to be admired left over from parties to which she is no longer invited and platforms she used to dominate.

The train to the coast and the Isle of Wight stopped at an outlying London station where a young woman boarded and sat at the table across from me. I sized up the potential victim of my assault. In her low twenties, very slim and casually dressed in jeans, she took immediate and total possession of the table between us. Marjorie used to be equally cavalier when it came to shared space, and she had similarly tawny good looks, right down to the deep-auburn hair and full, slightly overhanging upper lip that gave them both a look of cultivated melancholy. Except that the girl across the table wore a mop of curls and Marjorie’s hair was straight and long, the resemblance was uncanny: they could have been twins, separated, of course, by forty or fifty years. In the years to come of our best friendship, Marjorie was going to decide to major in Art History. A degree in Art History was of even less practical value and much easier to get than my own degree in English Literature. Not that Marjorie saw things that way. She was a serious girl, very serious, and like the rest of us very, very, quite terribly seriously devoted to The Arts. Marjorie’s ruthless streak would have suited her for a degree in Business Studies had such a vulgar course been open to girls in those days. But it had to be Art History, a course tailor-made for the daughters of the very rich, of whom there were a great number at Barnard College. Among the many things that Marjorie’s father owned was a bank. And needs must.

So close was Marjorie in my memory that when the young girl on the train began turning the pages of a large portfolio open in front of her, I was not in the least surprised to see it contained photographs and pencil sketches of classic statues. She studied them with critical intensity. She twiddled her hair as Marjorie used to do. Still does? I wondered if this one also had a room-mate who helped write her papers? Did she too play Scarlatti sonatas on a baby grand piano? Marjorie’s father gave it her when we moved out of the dormitory at the start of our third year, right after my return from Europe, in fact, and became the first two Barnard girls ever to live off-campus nominally on their own; our flat was always full of company. After a year or so, inexplicably and I begin to think inevitably between youthful best girlfriends, coolness set in; we began to argue, for nearly the last time about a documentary film on the recent bombing of Hiroshima. Marjorie thought the pestilential cloud that rose, puffed up and proud as death, was beautiful; I said there could be no beauty that entailed human suffering. I was wrong. We were both wrong as I had to admit many years later under an airborne inferno in Vietnam, and later still when I sat by my ailing mother’s bed in New Jersey and watched the televised image of a skyscraper down the road being violently converted into September dust.

The stranger turned a page to yet another naked male of marble and scribbled a few words in the margin. She raised her eyes; they were dark brown like Marjorie’s, but lacked the interesting cruelty of my old friend’s quest for beauty and nothing but beauty.

I nodded towards her sketches of male nudes in marble. ‘Dirty pictures?’ I asked.

Her face mimicked a crabby middle age ahead. ‘These’, she said, ‘are not dirty pictures.’

We both sighed and I turned to the window.

Outside, April bullied the countryside. I have never loved early spring, it manages to be both mawkish and acidic, like the lime and lemon sweets my brother and I always left at the bottom of the bowl. Clumps of daffodils on the verge were practically indistinguishable from their plastic replicas. Bare, knuckled branches lay under a haze of sickly green; the sky threatened rain. I returned to the book I had grabbed from the pile at the side of my bed. When it comes to reading on the road I occasionally give in to a weakness for unlikely combinations and impulsively I had packed The Bolivian Diary of Ernesto Che Guevara as perfectly unsuited to the Isle of Wight. What a tender and likeable man was the young Argentinian who fussed over his hairy guerrillas as a father his difficult sons. Meanwhile, the girl across the table had returned to her portfolio. The next time she spoke it was to Daddy on her mobile phone to tell him we would be pulling into Southampton in twenty-five minutes; would he meet her at the station? As she was repeating her request, garbled under a bridge, I read how Che, while bivouacking in the Bolivian jungle, discovered that several tins had been stolen from supplies by one of his hungry men – he had a pretty good idea which one. I glanced at the portfolio on the table, then reread his short sentence of rueful explanation and forgiveness. This time I had to laugh out loud. The few words seemed to me to contain the fact of many matters, I cannot say precisely which or why. But that doesn’t mean I am wrong. The moue across from me, silly moo, was cross and fearful. She’d known it all along: I was a half-crazed old bat who ought to be locked up.

‘Tinned milk’, Che had written, ‘is a great corrupter.’