My Animal Life Read online

  I wasn’t totally sure it was me. Wasn’t it, well, a tad sensible? Didn’t I want to be Bohemian? (Not that I knew what Bohemian was.) I wore it with a black nylon polo neck sweater and my black intellectual squared-off glasses. Not a bad look, now I think about it, and I must have appeared more mature than I was.

  But at Cambridge, naïvety and ignorance told. I was interviewed at Newnham by a Mrs Leavis, a name that meant nothing to me. She opened the door with a yapping white dog which made my fear intensify. I was unused to dogs. Dad had forbidden them. It yipped and leaped and smelled damply alive, distracting me when I needed to think.

  (Would it bite my fingers? I dared not pat it. I became a bundle of naked fingers.) Mrs Leavis herself was also, in my memory, small, white-haired and puggish in appearance, with a crop of white hair that matched her dog’s. Her room was large and dark. She did not seem to like me. What would I prefer to talk about? Innocently, I volunteered ‘Keats’, not knowing that her husband, the god-like FR Leavis, had published a major ‘re-evaluation’ of Keats. (I must have heard of FR Leavis, but it wouldn’t have occurred to me that they were related, that critics had wives, and dons had dogs. For me, the world of books was so far from the real one, where real people lived in boxes, in Billingshurst.) I rambled effusively about the poet while the dog barked and Mrs Leavis looked stern. Which secondary sources had I read? The names I cited did not include ‘Leavis’. Time slipped away. I was drowning in words. Her questions were sparse and irritable. My suit and polo neck were very hot. At last, thank God, she had heard enough. By then, I was drenched with sweat under my layers. When I came out and reported to my fellow candidates, the more knowledgeable ones were aghast. Hadn’t I heard of QUEENIE LEAVIS? You talked about Keats? You didn’t!

  At Oxford, however, things went better. These interviews were spread over a whole weekend. Once again, some girls had inside information. For example, a thrilling rumour spread that we were all up for entrance awards. I remember the drunken feeling of pleasure, spreading through my veins like adrenalin, followed swiftly by unease. This phenomenon has shadowed me all my life; a path to glory opens, then I am afraid. An emptiness starts to spread in my ego when it is inflated by something outside, something that is not part of my essence. Something is overtaking me.

  Did it mean I would have to be clever for ever? Would I have to go on jumping through hoops, a never-ending tunnel of flaming hoops? Would I lose my self in the lights and the noise? My secret self, who liked bikes and clouds, a silent happiness which could not be destroyed — unless I let myself be lured away.

  I was letting myself be lured away.

  Who was I really? Should I be here? I was trying to please my parents and the teachers, as I too often tried to please. Doing it had brought me to this strange hall, these long dark tables lined with fluting girls. Did I belong with these flower-like sophisticates, in these elegant buildings with their endless corridors? (They seemed elegant to me, but this was before I saw the older, richer, men’s colleges. I thought all the girls had come from private schools; some had, of course, but some were frightened, like me. Some of them were probably spotty, and plain.)

  Yet I had been a child who liked to win races and come top in school exams. Part of me, coarser, hungrier, longed to do well, burned to do well. Part of me was competitive, and this was a bigger, better competition. (Yet burning, surely, meant you were in hell.) And these were interviews, not honest competitions. I was going to need social skills, alas. In social matters, I was utterly unskilled, though my ego couldn’t wait to go out and bat.

  All social situations, then, led to shame. I was horribly aware of getting things wrong; sometimes at the actual moment when my foot, with aberrant energy, lurched into my mouth, but always during the replays, and I was never short of replays. I made one gaffe I still blush to think about. Miss Woolf, the medieval specialist, was entertaining another proto-Scholar and me to sherry. It was evening; the general atmosphere was congratulatory. Though nothing was spelled out, the rumour was true, we were being considered for awards. But the other proto-Scholar was more charming than me, livelier, prettier, more graceful. I wanted to show I had gravitas, or wanted, perhaps, to say something, anything, probably grandiose with sherry, which I don’t suppose I had drunk before (I hate my young self: I pity my young self.) Something enormous burst out of my mouth. ‘Are there opportunities to do research?’ I had levered myself into the light conversation, sounding Germanic and oppressive. They were looking at me. The only way was forwards. ‘I would like to do — like to do — a doctorate.’ My ambition thwacked down on to the subtly shaded carpet. It sat there like a great pie, unwanted, a pink pork pie lobbed in through the window. My fellow proto-Scholar giggled charmingly, and raised and lowered her mobile dark eyebrows. Her mouth was full, her teeth were white. A gulf yawned before me. Then Miss Woolf replied.

  Her response may not have been scornfully meant, and yet it seared me to the core. ‘Ah yes, ah well, it’s perhaps a little, just a little early to be thinking about that,’ she said. ‘We would normally, ah, look at the performance of undergraduates at, ah, a much later stage, before we invite them to do research.’

  I could not sleep that night for reliving the moment. I had been what my father would call conceited. Had I even been what he would call swollen-headed? I lay awake till light scored the heavy curtains and flooded the strange unfriendly room. Why was I here? I felt large and empty. I would never sleep, my shame was too great.

  And yet, when I told this story to my husband, he could not understand why I was embarrassed. ‘It was a perfectly ordinary question. Have you really felt ashamed of it all your life?’ The sad answer is, ‘Yes’. The healthy response would probably have been to realise that Oxbridge dons have a way of sounding snotty. Perhaps my unease is also explained by the inchoate sense I had, even then, that this might not be the right path. (I did do a doctorate in the end, and it took me away from my real writing, though the reading — Sterne, Fielding, Thackeray, Woolf, Beckett, Nabokov, Vonnegut — helped me to be a novelist.)

  Two or three days later, in the Christmas holidays, a yellow telegram was brought to the door. It went something like this: CONGRATULATIONS STOP OFFER OF MAJOR OPEN CLOTHWORKERS’ SCHOLARSHIP STOP PLEASE ACCEPT WITHIN TWO DAYS STOP SOMERVILLE COLLEGE OXFORD. My mother cried with joy, my father was triumphant. Margaret had done it! Margaret had shown them! All my doubts disappeared at once. It was one of the happiest mornings of my life, whatever I have said about my queasy ego, whatever mixed gifts Oxford would bring me. I held my yellow telegram and sat in the bay window, which was drenched with winter sunlight, listening to the music swelling from the wireless, which played for me, and spoke to me, which would carry me away from my dull modern house, my squabbling family, my little village. Nobody realised I had got away! Perhaps my quiet self is the self that writes, but there’s poetry in success as well; in moments of glory; in watching the successful. They pass down the street, briefly touched with gold, though no one stays in the sun for ever. To ride in triumph through Persepolis … the fate of Marlowe’s Tamburlaine. That morning, I thought I saw Persepolis. I swam in the stream of joy from the wireless, ‘M-y-y shi-i-p is coming in … Baby baby, m-y-y sh-i-i-p is coming in …’

  Mrs Leavis cannot have entirely despised me, because Cambridge also offered me a place, but I accepted Oxford. I still had two more terms of school to go, and my A- and S-levels to take, though the scholarship was not dependent on them. I could get Cs and Ds if I liked. I was godlike. I was invulnerable.

  Many a slip; I nearly fell to my death. I was clever, but of life I still knew absolutely nothing.

  ii

  That Easter my father led a school party on an exchange visit to St Aigulin in northern France. It was weeks before my A-levels, but I was studying French, and I’d have plenty of time to do revision. I did revision, but I also found I was attractive to the local male population. To them I was not ‘Dobbin’s daughter’, nor that weird brainy girl who went t
o grammar school. Something marvellous, unprecedented, happened; I was taken up by the local group, the coolest boys, a foursome. My favourite boy was said to be ‘un noble’, Jean de something or other, thin and handsome, but all of them dressed well, in a ’60s way, and rode tiny motorbikes with great style.

  I worked for my A-levels every day, in the pretty upstairs room in the village inn where my family stayed, and in the evening, the boys took me out. Which literally meant ‘out’. We walked around, talking, under summer evening skies, and they showed me their bikes, and rode up and down. After that they went to the village hall and practised their music, while I admired them. It was the beginning of the life I wanted, or so I thought, before it all went wrong. They were boys, and I had grown up with boys, my brothers, my father, my family of males. I was learning afresh that I liked them. It was utterly, completely, innocent.

  But the minds of fathers of daughters are corrupted by fear, and suppressed desire, and by guilt about these feelings. My father must have seen I was starting to escape, right under his nose, and he could not bear it. He said I could go out, with an 11 pm curfew, but secretly he fumed and fretted. My mother warned me, but I only laughed. Dad had ‘heard the boys talking in the street beneath our window’. My father’s French was ludicrous, breaking down, when he spoke, within a couple of words, into loud, slow English. Nevertheless, he now claimed to understand it. ‘He thinks he heard them saying “Elle est facile,”’ my mother said. Was I hurt, or just contemptuous? Openly contemptuous (though only to my mother), secretly hurt, at a deep level. Mum knew as well as I did that the voice was in his head, the enraging voice saying, ‘She’s easy, she’s anyone’s.’

  All the same, I should have listened to his fears, and I should have kept the curfew. One night I came back ten minutes late and was shouted at, which made little impression. Was I trying to annoy my father or (more likely) unable to explain my need to be back by eleven to my glamorous new friends? The next night I came back at eleven-fifteen, escorted by all four members of the group.

  The moon was high: I remember that. I can still see the moonlit road before me, lined with trees, for we were in the country, the hotel ahead of us and on the left. We five young people were spread across the road, owning the road, laughing and happy, though I had a little undertow of worry — I was late, but surely, not very late. Then I saw my father, in the distance, hurrying towards me, down the middle of the road, a small hurrying figure; getting bigger; here. It wasn’t easy to see his expression. My friends greeted him, in poor, polite English; he grabbed my arm, and wouldn’t let it go; they left knowing he was in a rage, and turned tail, diminished, going back towards the village.

  I do not remember the fifty metres we walked, yoked together by violence, back to the hotel. He did not hit me till we got inside, having pushed me upstairs and into my bedroom. I will never quite forgive him for what ensued (though I must forgive him; I must. I do. If I don’t forgive him, it will never go away. After all, I was late, and he was terrified. Of what I had been doing, or what was being done to me.) He hit me by the window; I fell on the bed. He hit me, again and again, on the bed, inchoate with rage, inaccurate. On the arms and legs, on the side and shoulders, but I am pretty sure he also slapped my face. It would be consistent with behaviour I remember. And he shouted; don’t you have any self-respect?

  What was my mother doing while this went on? My memory after this point is hazy, but there is no doubt that she knew what was happening, because it later transpired that the whole hotel heard. I think I remember her coming in, afterwards, as I lay there swollen and furious with crying. ‘Are you all right, Margaret? Are you all right?’ Yes, my mother came in. I do remember. And I hated her as well, for not stopping him, for not protecting me, for being one of a two-parent system which did not see I was a separate person and had a right to be respected. (My father should have understood there is no self-respect without respect from others.) I rejected her; I hugged my bruises. (And now I wonder if my father sent her. He must have realised he had gone too far. Now my mother had to sort things out, as she had to sort out all family troubles. ‘Aileen, go and see that she’s all right.’)

  Next day was a nightmare. Life had to go on. We had to be seen in the hotel at mealtimes. The kind, attractive manageress stopped me on the stairs. Her face was serious. Was I all right? She was worried about me. It meant so much that another adult, not part of the family, bothered to tell me she was on my side, that something was wrong, that it wasn’t just my wickedness. Yet I also remember how eager I was to reassure her. Of course it was all right, indeed it was nothing. ‘Mais j’ai tout entendu,’ she persisted, grave. I heard everything. But I felt ashamed. I couldn’t get my father into trouble. Family came first. And it was all my fault. A large part of me felt it was all my fault.

  The story I have just told is not the reason, the overt reason, for the breakdown I had. It was part of a pattern of behaviour I knew, only different because I was nearly an adult, and because it involved my sexual self so closely.

  Lack of respect. That was what mattered. If only I had known enough to shout that back at him, when he was roaring that I lacked self-respect. What do children need? One thing daughters need from their fathers is respect for their sexual selves. Vic’s fear and desire made him crash through the wall. Fathers would do well to think the best of their daughters (I had done nothing; neither kissed nor touched; there were four boys, not one, they were my knights, my cavaliers, and my father was a sad and violent man. Part of me hates him for it still, a part of me that I strain to outgrow. Because he was my father, and loved me very much. I was his first daughter; he had had no practice, and would never get a chance to play that evening better. His feelings were tidal, and he was helpless.)

  But if fathers think the worst, the girls have nothing to lose. We have already, irrecoverably, lost our reputation.

  Life returned to normal, more or less, the first time someone laughed, at our table. Then the grim lid of gloom lifted away, and I was glad enough to see it go. Three or four days later, the fair came to St Aigulin, the summer fair, the village’s great event, which brought young people from all over the region. Perhaps inspired by guilt about what had happened, my father was almost eager for me to go. My curfew was extended to midnight. I remember what I wore, which I thought was high fashion, though it would only have made the grade in a French village: a knee-length, small red-and-black-flowered cotton dress, figure-hugging, with a Peter Pan collar, a short navy fitted jacket, which I soon took off, a long ‘chain pendant’, the metal indeterminate, which featured a many-armed Thai goddess, white fish-net stockings, navy heeled sandals. I felt like a chic seventeen-year-old, and for the French, I may have had that indefinable illusion of attraction that comes when one is seen as from somewhere else. I was the seventeen-year-old anglaise. It was a hot evening. We were all on heat.

  I was escorted, as usual, by my four French friends. They had been warier, different since the scene with my father. They warned me about one thing: ‘the boys from Bordeaux’. They weren’t like the boys from St Augulin. I could trust the boys from St Aigulin, évidemment — obviously — but not the others who would come to the fair. I hardly listened, or believed they existed.

  But the boys from Bordeaux really were at the fair, and you could pick them out by their knowing look, an air of slight loucheness, the cut of their jeans. My village group no longer seemed so cool. I saw a tall boy with tinted glasses, and he saw me, and perhaps he thought he could pick me out by my knowing look, for my father’s insults had taught me one thing, I was sexual, and people were likely to want me. Whatever he saw, this boy liked me. He saw me on the dodgems, with one of my friends, and I saw him looking, and I looked back. I felt proud, and reckless; I expect I was still angry. I was nearly grown up, I was going to prove it. I could look after myself, couldn’t I?

  He was slim, with jeans and a flowered shirt. Soon we were on the dodgems together, then walking round the fair, arm in arm. He had full
wet lips. I don’t remember his name, but in his dark glasses he looked mature and gorgeous. Somehow I had left my foursome behind. If I had stayed at the fair they would have found me soon enough, but the Bordeaux Beau had other ideas. ‘Let’s go for a walk,’ he said, and his arm was round my shoulders, hot and exciting, his fingers were stroking the back of my neck. Why not? I thought. It was a warm May evening, the sky was still bright with the afterglow, I would soon be eighteen, I could do what I wanted. Surely no harm could come to me? I can see us now, laughing and walking away, looking confident and conspiratorial. Even as we went I was picturing us, thinking, ‘Here I am with a handsome man, people will be noticing, and wondering where we’re going.’ It added to the tingle of pleasure in my stomach. Nothing had happened to me before, except for Frank Lammas, at my father’s school, and a beautiful boy, a Greek Cypriot, Dino, who’d kissed me at a party that New Year’s Eve, to the strains of the Beatles’ ‘Michele’. But these were mere boys. Now I was with a Frenchman.

  ‘Let me show you the house where I am staying. We could have a coffee, or a drink,’ he said. That sounded attractive, and grownup. The house was small and white, detached, pleasant. There was no one at home. Did he give me a drink? Soon he was showing me upstairs. I wanted to go, there was no coercion. What did I expect to happen up there? I must have thought that we would kiss. Anything further was beyond my comprehension.

  But soon we were kissing on the bed, and he was trying to take my clothes off. Without his shirt he looked lean and young, but without his dark glasses his eyes seemed crossed, and his tongue was enormous and slobbering. I was holding my dress down, and trying to explain. I still wasn’t frightened, something to do, perhaps, with that vulnerable lazy eye, and the almost girlish fullness of his lips.

  ‘Je suis vierge,’ I said. I am a virgin. ‘Montre-moi ton corps,’ he replied, he begged. Show me your body: show me, show me. I heard noises in the house, and grew anxious; I didn’t want to be discovered up there, perhaps by other French people, respectable French people, not from racy Bordeaux but St Aigulin. He was getting more insistent, and impatient. I resisted, and the kisses were too wet, and after a bit, became boring. He was much less attractive than he had been. I said I wanted to go home. He put on his glasses, but not his shirt, and left the room, saying, ‘Wait a moment.’