Auto Da Fay. Fay Weldon

sat us down to proper cooked meals, instead of the sandwiches my father favoured. I was not sure why she was in my father’s bed at night: there was a perfectly good spare room: it was wives who shared beds with husbands and by lying close together, I had worked out, they had babies. I got up early one morning and slammed and slammed the kitchen door to get them out of their bed and my father called out in annoyance and I cried. I stood on the tap of the rainwater tank. But it was rusty and broke and all the water ran out and away, and I cried and cried. My father was irritated but Edna said, ‘She misses her mother, poor little thing,’ and I cried some more, full of self-pity. That was the first year of the war, my mother was ill again and we stayed on in Coromandel and went to school there.

      

      When we got back to Christchurch six months later there were nits in our hair. My mother said, pulling and tugging with the nit comb, ‘Fine school doctor she turns out to be!’ and I decided that you didn’t speak about the South Island when in the North, or about the North Island when in the South, there was too much antagonism around. I had tropical sores on my shins, too, which came, or so my mother said, from walking barefoot to school. I was quite proud of them. They ate deeply into the flesh, right down to the bone. I have the scars to this day.

      

      On our ritual journey up to Coromandel the following year, when we were walking in the Wellington Botanical Gardens looking for rare ferns, my mother told us that Edna and Frank were married. The sky darkened and the ground seemed to open up. The weather had been dry and the lawns were sparse and networked by myriad little cracks where the earth showed through. Now these seemed to deepen and widen, and I had to stand very still for fear of being swallowed up by nothingness. I was not sure whether this was a real earthquake or one of the ones in my head. I kept my face still and said that was bigamy, since he was married to my mother. She said that she and Frank were divorced and had been for two years. She explained what divorce was. It was the first I had heard of such a thing. And why would anyone want Edna, when he could have had my mother?

      

      What a strange family we were, and unhappy, judging from the look on my mother’s face, and things had so nearly gone well. And how stupid I was not to have realized. I could tell that nothing was ever going to be right again. The pattern of my life was establishing itself, and it was not good, and there was never to be any curing it. Jane said nothing and stared at her shoes. They were well polished. Mine were scruffy. We were too embarrassed to look at one another, or indeed at my mother. The ground reverted to normal though it was some time before I felt safe enough to move.

      

      I did not discuss the matter with Jane. We both kept our own counsel. Nor did I speak freely or easily to my father thereafter: I thought he must take me for such a fool. I was taken to the Botanical Gardens in Wellington a couple of years back, while on a book tour. It seemed rather a pleasant place and the lawns were well watered: nor did the earth yawn. But I still had the feeling that it was a place where the devil had once flown by, and we’d got caught up in the dark wind of his wings, because we just happened to be standing there, the three of us, Margaret, Jane’nFay, in his path.

      

      It was shortly after that that Jane got bored with my tagging along. She’d tell me to go away and stop following her: she turned and looked at me once with an expression so dangerous and manic that I was frightened: I never trusted her with a confidence again, or my mother, let alone my father. Life, I could see, had to be borne on one’s own. I smiled and skipped about as expected but I had learned to be wary. Being sociable, I put my trust in friends and learned to turn my family life into playground narrative, the better to entertain them. I knew it was a kind of disloyalty, even then. I have never stopped. I put it on paper now, elaborating further and further away from the original tale, with a succession of what ifs, what ifs, but the source, the riverhead, is the playground narrative.

       A Burning Bush in Hagley Park

      My mother was losing interest in worldly matters. She had seen angels in Hagley Park: where once I had held my father’s hand and seen a parachutist floating down from a clear sky, now she saw, floating down, pillars of light: the light spoke to her, reassured her; she was in despair at the time, she said, as to what her life had come to, and ill, and anxious as to how to keep us, but they told her all would be well in the end. She was special to them.

      

      I read a description in C. S. Lewis’s Perelandra of just such pillars of light: he too described them as angels. They too appeared at a time of crisis. Such visions are both transfiguring and dangerous: the Church is suspicious of them (Joan of Arc ended burned at the stake) and psychiatrists spend a lot of time and energy trying to explain them away, as they do point-of-death-experience. Some neural disturbance, some hormonal imbalance, they claim. But I don’t think so, I think she did see angels: and after that nothing that happened, nothing she did or saw, seemed quite real to her again, as if she was living in shadow, waiting for the sun to return.

      Visions came to her from time to time, as if the sun came briefly out from behind the clouds. She described a vase of flowers to me, once, as it suffered a sea change into its proper self, floating with an intensity of being and beauty, before returning to its everyday self. She had glimpsed what Plato would describe as the perfect form, of which all mundane things are the shadow: it was the heaven even the nuns had spoken of, when it is enough just to gaze and adore in the Light of the Lord.