In a cafe reading a Balzac novel while my daughter did some drawing at my side I had a strange feeling of well-being. My tea was of the perfect temperature and strength. My work for the day was done. My teeth were clean. Even when my least favourite song in the world came on, Mr Tambourine Man, I hardly minded. Age is softening me. I’m not even allergic to Wordsworth any more.
It was only when I glanced down at my daughter’s picture that I felt my old friend anxiety patting me hotly on the nape. On her innocent piece of cartridge paper there was a drawing of colourful symbols each of which had been labelled with the following abstract nouns: hate, jealousy, anger, despair and fear.
I winced. What happened to last month’s still-life of a full English breakfast, the sausages like swollen hills amidst bacon valleys and golden scrambled egg clouds?
“That is”, I remembered to be low-key and casual in my language, “a very, uh, strong drawing”.
She smiled and labelled a purple serpent shape “deathly disease”.
“Just my homework,” she said.
I imagined a curious teacher, keen to learn more about her charges, asking the children to illustrate what they thought of in the small hours.
“Can you say a bit about your picture,” I asked her. I did not use the word “unpack” but it may have been there in my tone. In Joanna Hogg’s latest film, Exhibition, an artist is interviewed by her artist-husband, so mother-interviewers cannot be far off. We have been to artists’ talks. She knows that certain photographer-artists “make” rather than “take” photographs. She knows that I don’t like it when people talk about “the art” in a museum or gallery as it seems coarse to me. (I prefer it when people say “the works of art”, or “the pictures” or “the paintings”, just so you know.)
“It’s all the bad things rushing out of Pandora’s box,” she said. “My picture.”
She drew in a little pale blue dove. “This”, she said, “is hope”.
That night, when the house was silent, I started to think of what the opposite of Pandora’s box would be and visualised a compendium of precious items wrapped in sky-blue tissue paper… I don’t mean sugar and spice and all things nice, or even truth and/or beauty. I was thinking of things in their loveliest rendering: delicate luxurious medicinal things for which I have a soft spot. Things I look to as cures and compensation, saving things.
When I went to university I wrapped all my clothes in a box with light blue tissue and white ribbons. It was a bit princessy, to be sure, but as I had already left home the year before I was conscious that I was seeing myself off and I wanted to do so with a bit of style. In the children’s stories that I loved, orphans at dance academies or motherless girls at boarding school were often sent off with seven of everything of the best quality, lace-edged cotton lawn …
Lamb to the slaughter
The baby-blue tissue paper, the white ribbons couldn’t help but suggest gifts, although the clothes themselves were uniformly old. Was university the present? Was I the present to it? Was I just a lamb to the slaughter going off to an Oxford where public-school boys, drunk on squalor, thought little of concocting Bloody Marys with real girls’ blood? Good luck with tissue and ribbons against that kind of carry-on!
Recently, I have started imagining people going through my things after I am no more. I listen out for their verdicts and pronouncements. The funny thing is that I often shop with these people in mind now, eager to make a good impression, to startle and win admiration and smiles. They have no names or faces, these merry sorters, but I suppose they must be people I know or why would I care? “What beautiful, beautiful things!”, these women exclaim, elderly, Disney nursemaid types in pastel cloaks with hoods and a keen eye for quality which comes with lost wealth…
Buying sheets recently for the first time in 20 years — dimly hoping they will see me out — I knew these imagined attendants would be satisfied with nothing less than the best. (They are rather exacting about the rightness of things.) So I shopped widely and wildly for the finest Irish linen money can buy. It is possible I prefer high-quality cotton, which feels like paper taffeta on the limbs, but I worried such a choice would not count as first-rate and I don’t want to be frowned on when I’m gone.
—Financial Times
