The Apple (10 page)

William sits straight in his chair, squares his shoulders, smooths his thinning hair flat to his scalp. He took a little too much medicine; that’s plain. Lucidity has returned. He still has a fever, but it won’t stop him doing what has to be done. A cold chill runs down his back, as though a prankster is trickling ice-water under his shirt-collar. An intolerable itch attacks the insides of his nostrils … but this time it doesn’t catch him napping. Quick as thought, he fetches his handkerchief from his pocket and sneezes mightily into it. Not a drop spilled.

He breathes deeply. The day is still young. He examines the contents of his desk. A cup of cold coffee. The pile of unanswered correspondence. His inkwell and pen. He retrieves the letter he’d been writing, ready to resume where he’d left off. A quarter of the page has already been filled, in his somewhat untidy script.

He cracks his fingers, takes up the pen, slides the page into position, and reviews what it says so far.

Begin
, is all it says.
Begin begin begin begin begin
…

A Mighty Horde of Women in Very Big Hats, Advancing

M
y father made half of me. Exactly half, my mother said. She didn’t specify which half, so for some time I imagined my head, arms and chest to be the handiwork of my father, who was the artistic type and might therefore have enjoyed the challenge of crafting my facial features – especially my eyes, which seemed to me miraculous bits of apparatus. As for my mother, I imagined her taking responsibility for my lower torso, legs and genitals. (There was nothing sexual in this, I hasten to add: I was only seven, and you must remember that it was a different era.)

My misunderstanding about the manufacture of children might have become one of those beliefs that we can never quite unbelieve, one of those daft convictions whose last chance to be removed is overlooked one Tuesday morning in April and which consequently burrows deep into our brain. But it was not destined for that. My mother and I were very intimate, you see. We had long conversations each day, about everything. I suppose I must have made some remark about the half of me my father had made, perhaps speculating about the authorship of my belly-button, because I remember her giving me a corrective lecture about
ingredients
. Each human person was a mixture of ingredients, like a soup, she said. The mother provided half of them and the father the other half. Then they all got mixed up and cooked and the result was the child, in this case me.

To be honest, I rather preferred the mistaken version of the story. I didn’t like to think of myself as a bag of stew, an envelope of pale skin with all sorts of dark, gooey stuff slopping around inside. It was undignified, not to mention alarming. I was an adventurous boy, and had spent my first six years in the wilds of Australia, crawling over stony terrain, falling off logs, rolling around in dirt, and generally taking advantage of my permissive familial circumstances. I knew all about scratches and bruises, but the thought that a chance injury might spill out my entire contents: that was something else.

Looking back now, I can see that the spring of 1908 was not an innocent season like the ones before it, but a conspiracy of alarms, a concerted assault on my childish self-confidence. The news about my soupy ingredients was just one of many intrusions into what had been, until then, a life of serenely self-absorbed play. I suppose the time had come for me to learn that I was not exempt from History, but mixed up in it.

You know, because I was a child in what’s now called the Edwardian era, and because I was born the day Queen Victoria died, I always think of the Edwardians as children. Children who lost their mother, but were too young to realise she was gone, and therefore played on just as before, only gradually noticing, out of the corners of their eyes, the flickering shadows outside their sunny nursery. Shadows of commotion, of unrest. Sounds of argument, of protest, of Mother’s things being tossed into boxes, of fixtures being forcibly unscrewed, of the whole house being dismantled. And the child plays nervously on, humming a familiar little tune.

Was I aware that the English empire was under siege from its own subjects? Was I aware that, while I was fashioning warrior spears out of gum tree twigs in the semi-savage suburbia of the Great Southern Land, all sorts of troublemakers had been rising up in London, like the Labour Party, the suffragettes, Sinn Fein, the Indian Home Rule Society, and trade unions of every stamp? Was I aware that there were strikes, hunger marches, pickets, riots? Of course I wasn’t. Even prime ministers behaved as if none of this was happening. But eventually, the removal men cannot wait any longer; they barge into the nursery, and start ripping the pretty pictures from the walls, and the child covers its eyes, but can’t help peeping through them. That’s what was happening in 1908.

The first things I noticed were strictly personal, of course. For some reason I never understood, my family had decided to return ‘home’. Home for me had always been Australia, so the thought that we had somehow been lost or only on holiday, and must travel twelve thousand miles on a ship to find our proper beds, was shocking. But my mother insisted that home was England, and six weeks of seaborne misery later, that’s where we were. Our new abode was in Calthorpe Street, Bloomsbury, which my mother told me was not very far from where the great Charles Dickens had once lived. I hadn’t a clue who this person was; all I knew was that I was now very, very far from where
I
had once lived.

To add to my confusion, my first day at school made me doubt the new home address I had memorised so carefully. A sour-faced old lady wrote my name in a ledger and informed me, in a voice dripping with disdain, that Calthorpe Street was not in Bloomsbury but in Clerkenwell. My parents denied this so insistently that I began to think they must be in the wrong, and to this day I hesitate for a moment before claiming that I ever lived in Bloomsbury, even though I’ve since been assured by many experts that Calthorpe Street is most definitely not in Clerkenwell and that the sour-faced old lady was the one at fault. But that’s Britain for you. Within minutes of setting foot inside my new school, I’d learned how much unease can be generated out of bloody nothing.

And what an education I got! For the first time, I had English playmates, rather than a rabble of Antipodeans adrift from the confines of class and decorum. It seemed incredible that children so young should have such a sophisticated and comprehensive knowledge of social subtleties. But they did. Everything, from one’s street address to the positioning of a coat-button, was loaded with meaning, and the meaning was usually a humiliation.

One’s parents, of course, were one’s Achilles heel. One was made to feel that one had chosen them, and chosen badly. In learning what English children considered normal, I got the message that almost everything about my parents was abnormal. At Torrington Infants School, judgement was passed according to an intangible textbook of rules, and my parents were guilty of infringements galore. For instance: my mother had given birth to me, her first child, in her early thirties; this was most bizarre, even Biblically far-fetched. In fact, according to some of my schoolmates, it was simply impossible. Surely she must have been married before, and left behind a brood of strapping children, in order to begin afresh with a new man? I summoned up the courage to ask Mama if Papa was her first husband.

‘Of course he is,’ she said with a grin. ‘And he’ll be the last, I promise you.’

‘But what were you doing before?’

‘Exploring the world.’

‘Like explorers in Africa?’

‘Exactly like explorers in Africa. Except not in Africa.’

‘Where, then?’

‘I’ve told you where, many times.’

‘But why weren’t you married?’

She peered into the distance, as if trying to spot a landmark lost in mist.

‘I wasn’t ready.’

‘All other women get married when they’re young.’

‘That’s not true. Think of Aunt Primrose. She’s never been married at all.’

‘She’s a spinster.’

‘My, my, that’s a word I never taught you. And there was I, thinking they teach you nothing at school except how to sing “Rule Britannia”.’

‘I learned “spinster” from Freddy Harris.’

‘He’s a stupid boy. You’ve got more brain-power in a hair that falls off your head than he has inside his whole skull.’

Which gave me a new conundrum to worry about: did one lose tiny amounts of brain-power every time one’s hairs fell out? Was that why very old, bald people tended to be daft?

‘Why did you stop exploring?’ I asked my mother.

‘I haven’t stopped,’ she said. ‘I’m exploring more than ever. This is the strangest country of all.’

I couldn’t disagree with her there.

* * *

Intimate as we were, I didn’t tell Mama that another boy had taught me a different word for what Aunt Primrose was:
unnatural
. Aunt Primrose lived with us in our house. She had always lived with us, even in Australia, even before I was born. She was a good five years older than my mother but, looking at photographs of her now, I can appreciate what I had no conception of then: that she was an extraordinarily beautiful woman. More beautiful, certainly, than my mother, who, although she had big blue eyes, also had a slight double chin, a slightly protruding brow, and unruly, fleecy blonde hair. Aunt Primrose was blessed with perfect features, an exquisitely sculptured neck, chocolate brown eyes, a glossy swirl of dark hair that stayed obediently in place. A few decades earlier, she might have been a muse for the Pre-Raphaelites, although they would have insisted she wear a figure-hugging velvet dress with an embroidered bodice. The Edwardian years were not conducive to such things.

It was a bad time for women’s fashions, to be frank. My mother customarily wore what just about every female of her class wore: a plain white blouse, cut wide and shapeless, to accommodate the unsupported bosom which hung low, muffled by undergarments, so that her torso resembled a pigeon’s. Her blouse she tucked into an ankle-length grey skirt reined in tight at the belt. In my toddler years, I remember her looking fantastically impressive in fox furs, but shortly after arriving in England, she came home from a mysterious public meeting (she was always attending mysterious meetings) and declared that killing foxes was wicked. That was the end of the big cuddly pelts I’d adored. Instead, she took to wearing a long black woollen coat that had all the style of a cabhorse’s feedbag. Inside the house, she wore her hair in a continually unravelling bun; out of doors, she wore a hat that could have served as a cushion on a piano stool.

Aunt Primrose, by contrast, was always immaculately tailored. So why did my schoolmates regard her as
unnatural
? Because her tailoring was masculine, that’s why. She favoured formal suit jackets and frock coats, altered slightly to give a subtle feminine puff to the shoulders or a swell to the bosom, but essentially no different from the garb of august parliamentarians. She even wore a fob watch. I never perceived it as mannish at the time. I was too accustomed to seeing Aunt Primrose together with Mama on the divan, laughing and lolling about. In my eyes she was soft and kittenish, a million miles removed from the men who walked stiffly through my daily life, the dour schoolmasters and glum crossing-sweepers and grim policemen. But, looking at a photograph of her at the remove of fifty years, I am startled by the unwomanly directness of her gaze.
Who are you to judge me?
she seems to be saying to the photographer, as she poses in a dressing-gown, high-collared shirt and cravat.

I always called her Auntie, never Primrose. My mother called her Poss. She called my mother Sophie.

Where did my father fit in this arrangement? Apart, that is, from having made half of me? I am still not sure. He called my mother Dear Heart, always Dear Heart. But he said it somewhat distractedly, the way men talk to themselves when they are busy with an absorbing task. Or he would pronounce it with waggish emphasis, mocking what she was asking of him, and she would respond with an irritable upwards puff from her pouting lip, blowing the loose curls off her brow.

My father, although hairy and deep-voiced, was not very tall, and, like Aunt Primrose, failed to meet the standards of normality set by my English schoolmates. He was an artist, for one thing: a painter. Other people’s houses were full of knick-knacks, china and the smell of potpourri; ours was full of books, half-finished canvases, old rags stiff with dried paint, and the whiff of turpentine. Not that we were any less well-off than the people with the knick-knacks and the china, mind you. We were securely middle-class. But nobody discussed money in those days, so I have very little idea how our comfortable existence was supported, other than that my father would occasionally get a commission to paint someone’s portrait, which would put him into a foul mood and provoke him to impassioned speeches on the sanctity of pure artistic expression. ‘Filthy lucre!’ he would mutter, kicking at any loose object that had the misfortune to be lying on the floor. I guessed that ‘lucre’ must be some sort of dirt traipsed into the house off the mucky London streets.

I think Mama had an inheritance. A sizable amount of money had apparently been left to us by an enigmatic figure called Miss Sugar, who came up in murmured conversation only when I was judged safely out of earshot. Miss Sugar: what a name! Speaking it now, I have to admit it sounds like a figment of fantasy, halfway towards Father Christmas or the Tooth Fairy. Can it have been genuine, I wonder? All I can say is that in the late-night reminiscences I overheard in my childhood, Miss Sugar was discussed as a real person, my mother’s steadfast travelling companion during their exploration of the world.

Ah, but I’ve allowed all these larger-than-life females to distract me from my father, as always. My father … what was my father, apart from a painter? He was … he was a
bohemian
. Again, this was not a word my mother taught me. I learned it from Mr Dalhousie, a master at my school, who pronounced it as if his tongue had been smeared with aniseed. My father was disqualified from the company of men like Mr Dalhousie, because he slept late in the mornings, and spent much of his day squeezing paint onto palettes, scratching his beard, pacing the floor of his studio absentmindedly tossing a peach from one hand to the other, and taking naps.