Sorrow and Bliss(3)

Forty-four people came in units of two. After the age of thirty, it is always even numbers. It was November and freezing. Everyone took a long time to give up their coats. They were mostly Patrick’s friends. I had lost touch with my own, from school and university and all the jobs I have had since, one by one as they had children and I didn’t and there was nothing left for us to talk about. On the way to the party, Patrick said if anyone did start telling me a story about their children, maybe I could try and look interested.

They stood around and drank Negronis – 2017 was ‘the year of the Negroni’ – and laughed very loudly and made impromptu speeches, one speaker stepping forward from each group like representatives of a team. I found an ambulant toilet and cried in it.

Ingrid told me fragapane phobia is the fear of birthdays. It was the fun fact from the peel-off strip from sanitary pads, which she says are her chief source of intellectual stimulation at this point, the only reading she gets time for. She said, in her speech, ‘We all know Martha is an amazing listener, especially if she’s the one talking.’ Patrick had something written on palm cards.

There wasn’t a single moment when I became the wife I am, although if I had to choose one, my crossing the room and asking my husband not to read out whatever was on those cards would be a contender.

An observer to my marriage would think I have made no effort to be a good or better wife. Or, seeing me that night, that I must have set out to be this way and achieved it after years of concentrated effort. They could not tell that for most of my adult life and all of my marriage I have been trying to become the opposite of myself.

*

The next morning I told Patrick I was sorry for all of it. He had made coffee and carried it out to the living room but hadn’t touched it when I came into the room. He was sitting at one end of the sofa. I sat down and folded my legs underneath me. Facing him, the posture felt beseeching and I put one foot back on the floor.

‘I don’t mean to be like this.’ I made myself put my hand on his. It was the first time I had touched him on purpose for five months. ‘Patrick, honestly, I can’t help it.’

‘And yet somehow you manage to be so nice to your sister.’ He shook my hand off and said he was going out to buy a newspaper. He didn’t come back for five hours.

I am still forty. It is the end of winter, 2018, no longer the year of the Negroni. Patrick left two days after the party.





2

MY FATHER IS a poet called Fergus Russell. His first poem was published in The New Yorker when he was nineteen. It was about a bird, the dying variety. After it came out, someone called him a male Sylvia Plath. He got a notable advance on his first anthology. My mother, who was his girlfriend then, is purported to have said, ‘Do we need a male Sylvia Plath?’ She denies it but it is in the family script. No one gets to revise it after it is written. It was also the last poem my father ever published. He says she hexed him. She denies that too. The anthology remains forthcoming. I don’t know what happened to the money.

My mother is the sculptor Celia Barry. She makes birds, the menacing, oversized variety, out of repurposed materials. Rake heads, appliance motors, things from the house. Once, at one of her shows, Patrick said, ‘I honestly think your mother has never met extant physical matter she couldn’t repurpose.’ He was not being unkind. Very little in my parents’ home functions according to its original remit.

Growing up, whenever my sister and I overheard her say to someone ‘I am a sculptor’, Ingrid would mouth the line from that Elton John song. I would start laughing and she would keep going with her eyes closed and her fists pressed against her chest until I had to leave the room. It has never stopped being funny.

According to The Times my mother is minorly important. Patrick and I were at the house helping my father rearrange his study the day the notice appeared. She read it aloud to the three of us, laughing unhappily at the minorly bit. Afterwards, my father said he’d take any degree of importance at this stage. ‘And they’ve given you a definite article. The sculptor Celia Barry. Spare a thought for we the indefinites.’ Later, he cut it out and taped it to the fridge. My father’s role in their marriage is relentless self-abnegation.

*

Sometimes Ingrid gets one of her children to ring and talk to me on the phone because, she says, she wants them to have a very close relationship with me, and also it gets them off her balls for literally five seconds. Once, her eldest son called and told me there was a fat lady at the post office and his favourite cheese is the one that comes in the bag and is sort of whitish. Ingrid texted me later and said, ‘He means cheddar.’

I do not know when he will stop calling me Marfa. I hope, never.

*

Our parents still live in the house we grew up in, on Goldhawk Road in Shepherd’s Bush. They bought it the year I turned ten with a deposit lent to them by my mother’s sister Winsome who married money instead of a male Sylvia Plath. As children, they lived in a flat above a key-cutting shop in, my mother tells people, ‘a depressed seaside town, with a depressed seaside mother’. Winsome is older by seven years. When their mother died suddenly of an indeterminate kind of cancer and their father lost interest in things, in particular them, Winsome withdrew from the Royal College of Music to come back and look after my mother, who was thirteen then. She has never had a career. My mother is minorly important.