Flotsam and Jetsam

Flotsam and Jetsam

She had spent the day clearing out, for no particular reason, though the day in itself encouraged hiding indoors: it was grim and grey and rainy out, the latest in weeks upon weeks of stormy days that winter, and a good enough reason to stay indoors with her thoughts and her books.

Some of the stuff was years old; a lot of it not even hers, but it always seemed to fall to her to clear up, even to clear up other people’s messes, large and small. Maybe it came with the territory of the eldest child. She had finally arrived at the corner cupboard in the basement store-room. There was an odd assortment: books that had belonged to her late father, which her mother had kept after his death, and which were subsequently packed up when her mother died, six years later. Most of his books were neatly packed into storage boxes which still inhabited an upstairs landing, almost twelve years later, but some had washed up here. Never enough shelves in the house. It is passing strange to find oneself not only clearing out relics of one's own life, but relics of other people's too. Like emotional archaeology. At the bottom of it all, she wondered if this recent interest clearing out stemmed from a decision, not consciously made, to move on. Or was she moving out?

She composed a mental inventory:

One pair of wings, dried up and faded, from a butterfly that was trapped in a window long ago. Three deep blue glass beads, recovered from a pilfering toddler. Two pale blue satin rosebuds, carefully stitched on, to be worn, out of sight, on her wedding day. The ghost of a silver sixpence, in the form of a newer five-pence piece, now obsolete itself.

A piece of quartz. This made her smile, having come to the unavoidable realisation that she had, perhaps unsurprisingly, mothered another magpie, so that they now returned from seaside trips with four pockets bulging with delicately-pink oyster shells, rainbow pebbles, and other treasures impossible to leave unclaimed.

Books, reappearing in some unknowable order:

-Mollie Keane, a second-hand copy, but whose?

-Michael Ondaatje (she remembered how she had wept at the film, at the tragedy of a love that refuses to die).

-Assorted books on chair-making, property of her hobbyist father.

-A book on the Georgian architecture of London, given as gift when she left her job there to return home.

-A travel guide to Brittany and Normandy, relic of holidays by ferry with small children. Odd, as this last week, she had been remembering them, reliving driving through sleepy French villages on hot afternoons, and wishing for the feel of sun on her skin. A reminder of being a family that is no longer a family, but nonetheless a family.

More surprisingly, a clutch of books on industrial research methods and cost analysis. Together with a recently-discovered notebook, she gauged that her late father appeared to have attended management school at British Rail in the London of the late 1950s. She was surprised that the revelation had only come lately, for how else could he have returned from London in the early 60s to mysteriously take up a senior management role in a local business? Does anyone ever really know their parents, or is the life they live before children essentially unknowable to their offspring? Dance-dresses, dinner-suits, amateur musicals, all-night dances at the Curragh Camp, Sunday morning expeditions to Borough market in the mysterious long-ago.

Assorted baby paraphernalia, which now seemed to her like exhibits from some strange folk museum she might once have visited.

A collection of golf trophies, her mother’s, for she herself was of the school that considered it a good walk spoiled. She blamed this on her mother rather ambitiously counting her in from the tender age of seven or so. She always wished for home and a book, not a seeming eternity trudging after a golf-cart and the incomprehensible chatter of her mother and friends. As a young woman, she had laughingly abandoned games halfway round the course, leaving her mother in the company of the unfortunate young man who was subsequently introduced in the clubhouse as 'A’s current boyfriend’. Her mother was right, of course, he was sent packing soon after. Worse than a fair-weather golfer, she was. In this she took after her father, who had once famously landed a hole-in-one, presumably much to the chagrin of his companions-at-arms. Perhaps he felt that once that was done, there were no more Troys to burn, and he could go back to his records and his books, his woodwork and his music.

Cochineal, vanilla, coffee flavouring. The baking gene had skipped a generation, to her daughter, the magpie.

Baby mittens, a single tiny shoe. She had no idea if they had been kept as mementoes, or with the intention of handing them on, though she might well have put them there herself. She thought a moment of how she and other industrious professional mothers –the stockbroker, the purchaser, the solicitor- with children of similar ages, had passed things on to one another: cots, clothes, buggies, toys. Some people have odd ideas of privilege, and what it entails. Always a relative concept. Slightly younger couples she knew appeared to think they had a monopoly on sustainability, though it always struck her as a particularly narrow, po-faced, and joyless version of the creed to which they aspired, with their knowingly distressed but ruinously expensive clothes. She could see no virtue in making one’s own jam, or baking, with an entire professional life to manage in addition to a family, though her mother had been expert at both. Maybe she did think like a man at times. But sharing things, passing them on, if they were made to last? Country girl to the last.

A flowered shoebox full of cards from her 40^th birthday party. It had been a big bash, in the glory-days of the Celtic Tiger. Sometimes she wondered if they had been personally responsible, people like her, being given to small madnesses like taking off to Dublin, pre-children, for sessions in the Shelbourne Bar, seventy miles away, on Friday evenings whenever they took a whim. Or house parties where people only drank champagne, in the late ‘90s. It sometimes puzzled her at the time how she found herself there, for she had started out a quiet, shy studious girl. There were cards from friends, family and professional acquaintances, many of whom they had socialised with, few who were coupled-up that she now spoke to at all. Such is the lot of divorcée and divorcé. People presume, perhaps, that you will devour their spouses whole, or give them notions of independence, not realising that the one spouse who led to your being divorced was probably quite enough to put you off for a lifetime after. There were caterers, gifts of champagne, the lot. The only dry Saturday after a summer of wet weekends. She remembered too that she had ordered sparkling red wine, and that the suppliers had sent white, to her great disappointment, but much too late to rectify, as they were in Dublin. Her best friend had told her she looked skinny, high praise indeed, which was the unintentional result of a week with a chest infection and a sick toddler in the run-up to the party. She was about to wear her customary black, but thought it made her look ill, so at the last minute she chose a sheer flesh-pink silk top and jeans, with an unlikely (for her) pair of satin sandals. Unlikely, because sartorially, she had always strayed on the blue-stockingish side. Looking back, even this late-breaking femininity in dress seemed at odds: maybe it was the result of motherhood, hormones, God knows. During the evening, her four-year-old son had thrown as many bottles of cleaning products as he could find out of the downstairs bathroom window, aiming sagely and presciently at the head of her bank-manager. It made her laugh, then and still. A younger friend was escorted home early by her much older husband, who cut in on a pas-de-deux with a Toilet Duck. The night, which by then was the morning, ended with her singing along to Janis Joplin, atop a raised flower-bed, wearing a rather excessive Mongolian lamb boa, ostensibly against the chill of a September dawn, her pink satin heels sinking backwards into the soft clay. Her brother’s camera jammed as he tried to capture the moment. She was glad of it. Some things are best just remembered. Or forgotten.

A sympathy card penned by the young librarian at the college library of the outreach campus where her mother studied for a degree in her 60s. She was awarded a diploma, and later, an honorary degree, weeks before her untimely death, their first graduate at degree level. It was horribly poignant; she herself was newly pregnant with her second child. Death has no respect for anything, not even new life. Then there was her stumble at the funeral: the reading was from Ecclesiastes ‘To every thing there is a season’. She loved it, had chosen it herself. She had not rehearsed, being a confident reader. The line ‘a time to be born, a time to die’ stopped her dead in her tracks, tears welling up, the pregnancy not yet announced publicly. Otherwise she coped, played the organ, typed the hymn sheets, took care to include prayers and readings in Irish, as her mother would have expected, though she left no instructions. She had no idea from whom she had inherited the stiff upper lip. It was a false friend, at any rate: you don’t get over things by ignoring them. Bad memories lurk, and reach out and pull you down unexpectedly unless you hunt them down in their hiding-places.

Later in the day, an entire sideboard drawer full of cards and letters, mostly from when she had lived in London. The one that struck her most was a postcard from a flatmate in Fulham, her landlord. It was written in the most perfect script, almost like print, sent from the south of France. She had all but forgotten him. He was, she now realised, one of the best photographers she had come across in more than half a lifetime, but worked in a dead-end clerical job at one of the biggest and most notorious London bureaucracies of the time, leaving his desk early every afternoon to go drinking with his workmates. He was small, almost no taller than her, prematurely bald, pudgy. A colleague who had moved in after her told her that Andrew had thought her ‘wonderful’. She wondered, at the rate he had been drinking, if he was even still alive now.

On the day that was in it, other objects floated to the surface as if by their own volition: sitting in plain view under the sideboard, perched on a box of her ex-husband’s CDs, the fruit of another recent excavation, was the book she had been reading the week she gave birth to her younger child: Stephen Hawking’s ‘The Universe in a Nutshell’, with no reference that she could discern to certain lady mystics with whom she had more recently become acquainted through the agency of another academic. Two roads converged in a wood, and she still did not know where she was going, she thought ruefully. These days she was more content to let the ebb and flow of life pull her along, but still paddled furiously and mostly invisibly below the surface.

The preceding week had also seen a slew of old photos posted on social media by her cousins, of her mother’s family as young men and women. They were a handsome family without doubt, and wore it with ease. There was a photo she had not seen before, with her mother as a witness at her older sister’s wedding, showing a startling resemblance to herself at the same age that she had not seen before, her mother’s face youthfully soft and apprehensive. She was used to the slightly older and more confident version in photos of the time, with cheekbones on which you could have balanced a china cup and saucer. The eldest sister was widely held in family lore to be the beauty, but now, to her eye, this beauty appeared to be of a time gone by, dark and high and severe. Her mother’s was more accessible, and as for the next sister, who rarely got a mention in despatches-how pretty she was, with her sharp, clever, face and her pointed chin! And the youngest, posed in a school team photo…well, she was the putative model, sent to Dublin at sixteen to a model agency, only to be hastily recalled when her mother heard that she was ‘going to cocktail parties with black men’. This always amused my mother, who felt that the fear of coloured gentlemen of dubious morals for once outweighed that of the demon drink. They were all beautiful, by general standards. And they had turned up in her timeline with no advance warning, taking their place in the parade of her life, it seemed.

She pondered on what it is that ties you to a place: was it people, memories, possessions, or plain old duty? The lie of the land itself, that old Irish call of dúchas, hardly to be understood, but to be heeded silently and without question? Perhaps more than anything, this was what drew her back unrelentingly, to the walks by the river, footsteps trodden and retrodden over the decades, since she first walked there as a child of three, on visits with her grandmother and aunt to the lock-keeper’s house a half-mile below the bridge. It was hardly friends that detained her, for none remained, all washed away in the recession that had preceded the current one, called by necessity and sometimes ambition to other places, other shores. Ending up here had never been part of her own plan, but she had ultimately been driven by duty, and the financial exigencies of others. The house perhaps, for it had grown into her, and she into it over the years, so that now when she was finally free to go, she felt most at home. She had been handed the keys of the kingdom, and when she looked about, the thought of now parting with familiar faces made her sad; who, though never close, had become the warp and weft of her everyday existence; the people who had known her from before she even knew herself, who knew also her family and their history, and whom little surprised, in all likelihood. Life in the country might move slowly, and with that comes a tolerance for people and situations than unfolds over decades or even generations, and a depth of knowing and understanding, with no need for forgiveness, that would no doubt surprise the superficially tolerant city petit bourgeoisie into which she had married, and lately unmarried. There was some comfort in that.

Lastly, an old floppy disc, subject penned on the side in her mother’s sprawling hand: archaeology.