Ghosting Page 5
After a while I discovered that the girls came and went with striking regularity. When I travelled to London to attend monthly editorial meetings, I would find that Cosima had been replaced by Nigella, or Sophia by Candida. There were new arrivals as well as bare survivals. And even occasional revivals, since it was not unknown for a girl to be recalled from the wilderness into which she had been so precipitately cast. Tiger alone had the power to pardon the condemned; no amount of special pleading by anyone else on behalf of the offender had any effect.
In due course Lucinda left to marry an Earl and Sabrina was put in charge of a book club. She claimed never to have read a book— she even confessed this to the press—but it didn't seem to matter. It was enough that she had been the girlfriend of a member of the royal family. It was clear that Tiger's appointments policy was full of purpose and intent, and I soon began to notice interesting patterns in the hiring, and also in the firing, a rare but always dramatic occurrence. On these occasions, reason was set aside while emotion did its dirty work. No one understood the specific trigger, but the reaction was extreme. Knives would be sharpened, and over the next day or two the girl in question, often quite oblivious of the offence she was alleged to have committed, would be branded and traduced. Tiger put energy into umbrage; his pique was majestic. And when his pique finally peaked, the most faithful member of the Old Guard would be called upon to do the necessary. Tiger himself was unable to face it.
Every so often he got a gleam in his eye, and we knew that he had fallen in love. Again. It was always a coup de foudre followed by complete infatuation. It had the energy of a natural phenomenon—a typhoon maybe, or a freak storm. Single orchids would be sent to the chosen one and French perfume would arrive by special courier. At these times Tiger behaved like a little puppy, rolling over on his back, paws in the air, simpering and slavering, hoping that his tummy might be tickled. Just like the rest of us, this mighty potentate could be made ridiculous by love. The girl so beloved would be designated La Favorita—a recognised position at the imperial court—and a job would usually be found for her in public relations. In the days that followed she would dine at the best restaurants and occupy a box at the Royal Opera House. Previous holders of the position would drop down in the pecking order, and for a while there would be furious spitting and pouting. Being La Favorita, however, was generally a short-lived affair. Though the after-tremors could be felt for some time, Tiger fell in and out of love quickly and decisively.
Now and then I sat at my desk on the top floor of the publishing house and listened to the complex sounds coming from the rest of the building. Telephones rang, kettles boiled, hairdryers wheezed. And some people didn't just talk, they squawked. They spoke, as it were, in italics, so that perfectly ordinary sentences were brought into prominent relief. Something as simple as “What are you doing?” was invariably “What are you doing?”—which gave normal dialogue a theatrical quality. They also spoke in shrill absolutes, so that someone was a total darling or a complete noodle. They said grotty and golly, they complained of a frightful pong, and they were never just angry, but always absolutely livid. The way they expressed themselves seemed every bit as significant as what they were speaking about; in some strange sense it was indistinguishable from it.
Of course, a lot of time was spent on the telephone, which was used just as much for making social arrangements as for conducting business. The collective sounds of Tiger's girls on the phone to their friends were not so very different from the whooping at a children's party. It seemed that if you were out of the top drawer you did a lot of shrieking. At closer range it was possible to make out the words, the discussion of menus and venues, of the night before and the night to come. And always of what was worn and what to wear. But the language was alien, brimming with chummi-ness, and there seemed to be no way in for those not born to it. You can come to imitate the way someone speaks, but you cannot take the substance as your own. Theirs wasn't a private language exactly, more a system of communication that naturally excluded. The vowels were particularly distinctive, springing from a place way down the larynx and travelling up fine, swan-like necks before emerging in beautifully modulated tone patterns. The Scots have short, stunted vowels, cut off in their prime, strangled humanely before they get too long and above themselves. They sprout from pinched throats and squat necks. Of course, this is to speak generally, for there are longer shorts in Kirkwall, say, than in Kirkcaldy. Even so, vowels can never be underestimated—they are basic in forming, and sometimes impeding, social contracts. Mercifully, human beings need very little to be able to understand each other's way of speaking—just a few sounds strung together in a sentence or two are usually enough to get the gist. But there is so much to distinguish one kind of speech from another, to separate us one from the other. There's nothing quite like language for coming between us.
I had been puzzled by language from an early age. When I was five years old my mother told me I was to have elocution lessons.
“What's elocution?” I asked, but all she would say was that it was to help me get on.
“Get on what?”
“Just get on,” she said, squelching the possibility of more questions.
I asked my friends if they knew what it was, but none of them did. My brother's friends were three years older, and one of them claimed to know. “It's whaur they learn ye tae speak proper,” he said in his broad Fife accent, and he gave a sort of snigger. I could not imagine such a place.
The lessons were to be on Tuesdays after school. They would take place in Dunfermline, an eight-mile bus journey away. While I was having the lesson, my mother would do some shopping. “Elocution costs a lot,” she said, “so make sure you listen and learn.” When the day arrived, I was excited about going on the blue double-decker bus and even risked asking if we could sit upstairs, though I knew it wouldn't be allowed. Every few hundred yards the bus stopped to let on women with large string-bags bulging with groceries. It was raining outside, which made the air inside heavy. It smelled of wet wool and raw mince. I soon began to feel unwell. I watched the condensation trickling down the windowpanes, zigzagging whenever the bus lurched. It was difficult to breathe, and for some reason I had to keep swallowing. When the vomit darted up from my tummy like a lizard, the bus conductor pressed the bell three times to make the driver stop. Everyone stared, and out on the pavement my mother told me she was black affronted, which I knew was one of the worst things a mother could be on account of her children.
Miss Menzies, my elocution teacher, was stiff and corseted. She had a breathy, hot-potato voice and told me her name was pronounced Ming-is. I must never make the mistake of pronouncing it Men-zeez, she said—only people who didn't know any better did that. I thought at first that her legs were bandaged on account of her thick stockings and swollen ankles. Poor Miss Ming-is, I thought. But it didn't last.
On the wall there was a chart with a diagram of half a human body, the top half. On either side of the chest there were two red shapes that looked like huge mutton chops. According to the chart, these were lungs, and they were surrounded by a mass of tubes and pouches, all connected to one another. Miss Menzies took a long wooden pointer and picked out the parts I was to learn: ribcage, thorax, diaphragm, and something called the bronchial tree. She said the names while tapping with the pointer, and I was to repeat them after her. This was not at all what I had thought elocution might be. “Never forget,” Miss Menzies warned, “sound conquers sight.” As she said this, she pointed first to her mouth, then to her eyes, but what she meant by it I had no idea. The diaphragm looked like the round top of a hill, and there was a sort of volcano underneath. This was to show, said Miss Menzies, how the breath was drawn into the lungs. She said that everything was capable of expanding and contracting, even the thorax—a truly alarming piece of information. Then there was the larynx, a hollow passage that led to the lungs, and the pharynx—a black cave behind the pink wiggly bit dangling at the back of the throat.
“Before being able to speak properly,” said Miss Menzies in very clear tones, “you have to learn to breathe properly.” I was five years old and had been breathing for all that time, but evidently I had been doing it wrong. “We have to breathe deeply, so that we can finish the sentence before taking another breath,” she said, though she didn't explain why we couldn't just take another breath. I wondered what the reason could be. We did lots of breathing exercises together, during which we stood facing one another at either end of a small rug. But even something as simple as standing had to be learned from the beginning again. My back had to be straight, my hands—not clenched—by my sides, and my feet positioned like the hands of a clock reading ten past twelve. It was a lot to remember, and that was even before I had started the proper breathing.
For the next bit, the breathing bit, Miss Menzies bellowed the instructions: “FILL your lungs! CHEST in! ABDOMEN out! HO-O-O-LD—one, two, three—and let GO-O-O-OH—four, five, six.” Miss Menzies’ chest was enormous, and her abdomen bulged despite the corset. When she showed me how to breathe properly she became like a rolling cargo ship.
After that we tackled vowel sounds, the long vowels, the short vowels, the -oo- sound and the -igh- sound, as in moon and soon and night and light. We held each vowel for fifteen seconds on only one breath. It sounded like a strange kind of singing. We practised short nonsense sentences that I couldn't imagine ever saying to any of my friends—“My, oh my, how bright is the night.” There were also things called diphthongs, which Miss Menzies said were vowels that moved, since they started out as one vowel and became another halfway through. Like few and loud.
As the weeks passed I discovered just how hard it was to speak properly. Apart from all the vowels and the diphthongs there was something called RISP—Rhythm, Intonation, Stress and Pronunciation. According to Miss Menzies, all four were vital for elocution, and without them you could not project your voice except by shouting—something you must never do. The hardest thing to learn was pronunciation: the way a word was meant to sound. Words like paw and poor and pour all sounded the same when Miss Menzies said them. I much preferred the way we said them at home—that way you could tell them apart. It seemed funny to pronounce he sawed and he soared in exactly the same way; how would you know what was meant if you just heard it? It could surely lead to all sorts of trouble.
To practise my RISP I was given little printed poems that had to be pasted into a notebook with hard covers and learned off by heart. I liked pasting them neatly into the book, but I thought the poems were silly. My very first poem, which was to help with my -ee- and -oo- sounds, went as follows:
I'm going to sweep the dirt away
I'm going to sweep the dirt away
I'm going to sweep the dirt away
Whoosh! Whoosh! Whoosh!
If you come in with muddy feet
I'll sweep you out into the street
Whoosh! Whoosh! Whoosh!
I hated reciting it. It made me feel babyish and stupid, and Miss Menzies said she wanted much more oomph in my whooshes, which only made matters worse. And when I practised it at home, my brother sniggered in the background. It was a ridiculous poem. But it has stayed with me, painfully, all my life. Besides poems, I had to memorise and recite tongue-twisters like “The Leith police dismisseth us,” and “She sifted seven thick stalked thistles through a strong thick sieve.”
Miss Menzies marked the RISP of my recitation every week and wrote a few lines in spidery letters that were hard to read. She also gave marks for what she called “deportment and carriage,” which had to do with my shoulders and feet. She never smiled, but sometimes she stuck a star in my book to show I had done well. A gold star was best, followed by silver and green. To please my mother, and because the lessons cost a lot, I tried very hard to get gold stars. There were competitions too, held once a year at the Assembly Rooms in Edinburgh, in front of a row of judges at a long table. I always felt terrified on these occasions and had to steel myself for the ordeal of walking onto the stage. Before the recitation I had to remember to arrange my hands and feet correctly, not to mention my head, which Miss Menzies said had to be tilted upwards slightly. When I started the poem, I always heard my voice ringing inside me, as if something had plugged my ears and was forcing everything inwards.
Elocution was a thing apart. It was something that happened on Tuesday afternoons in Dunfermline, and it did not get mixed up with the other days. At school I knew better than to speak in my poetry voice—everyone would have laughed—and I didn't even think much about the position of my diaphragm, as Miss Menzies had told me I must. At home, too, the way we spoke was not at all the way Miss Menzies taught and my mother bought—except if the minister or the doctor or the church elder came to our house, when there would always be a marked change towards the genteel. This involved frequent use of words like “sufficient” and “require” and “partake,” as in “Have you had sufficient to eat?” or “Will you partake of another scone?” or “Will you be requiring to visit the bathroom?” I knew that I too was expected to play my part on these occasions. Sometimes, for example, I would be asked by my mother to run an errand or get some coal for the fire, after which she would make a point of asking, very precisely: “Have you accomplished it?” Since a one-word answer would have let the side down, I had learned to give the reply that was expected of me: “Yes, I have accomplished it”—though it always sounded terribly put-on. On the days when there was no need to behave differently, however, there were hardly any vital vowels or dangling diphthongs or high-flown words. And although my mother could readily change her voice, my father didn't seem to bother much, certainly not with the length of his vowels. I suspected he was not in favour of elocution lessons. When I asked him why my brother did not have to have them, he said with a grunt that it wasn't anything a boy needed to learn. I thought then how unlucky it was to have been born a girl.
In our house it was usually easy to work out what was good and what was bad. Some things were regarded as good in themselves: for example, eating slowly, Formica, curly hair, secrecy, patterned carpets, straight legs, Scotch broth, bananas, going to the toilet before leaving the house, not crying whatever the circumstances— the goodness of these things was not open to challenge. Thus a child with curly hair who liked bananas and never cried was praised to the skies. By the same token, eating fast, straight hair, plain carpets, and so on were bad things and, where possible, not allowed. If it was not possible to ban them, they were simply frowned upon. All this was clear-cut and easy to follow. However, in the way we spoke and the words we used, it was much harder to know good from bad, right from wrong. The rules seemed not to be fixed. Working out what was allowed, or when it might not be, was something of a leap in the dark.
The person who came most often to our house was Uncle Bill. He wasn't a real uncle, but he was my parents’ oldest friend and had been best man at their wedding. He was a lovable, cheerful man and was always telling jokes, though he also talked a lot about death. Someone had usually just died and—this amazed me—he always knew who it was and how it had happened. We would all listen intently as he reported the grimly fascinating details: a man discovered dead in his bath, a woman lying frozen by her own coal bunker, a newly married couple run over on a Belisha crossing. The summing-up took one of two forms: people were either cut off in their prime—this was described as “a blinkin’ tragedy;” or else they had had what was called a good innings—in which case it was usually “a bloomin’ mercy.” I didn't know any dead people, and I used to wonder what it must feel like to know so many. The main thing to notice, however, was that when Uncle Bill visited, something happened to the way we spoke.
It is difficult to describe exactly what it was that happened, but it had to do with the shape of the sentences and the words that were in them—they seemed to be just the right words in the right place. The sound of my parents chatting with Uncle Bill was a joy—they used words like scunner and glaekit and puggled and wabbitli
nked together by lots of dinnaes and winnaes and cannaes. Uncle Bill led the way, and my parents seemed to take their cue from him. In my recollection they seemed happier at these times than at any other, laughing a lot, sharing together, not holding back or being secretive. They still argued with each other, but it wasn't serious in the way normal arguments were when Uncle Bill wasn't there. And even when they disagreed, there was still a warm feeling, as if something tight had loosened. They were relaxed in the rhythms, at ease with the words—as if they were real owners of this language, not just borrowers. And not pretenders either, for their conversation was real and full of rich meaning. It couldn't have been more different from elocution lessons, with all that whooshing the stupid dirt away. I loved joining in, and my parents seemed pleased with me when I did. It was like drinking hot cocoa. Everything felt safe when Uncle Bill was there.
When he went away, however, the mood would suddenly shift back to something less certain, less safe. Of course, I wanted it to carry on, and I would try to hold onto the magic that had bound us together only minutes before. I would repeat some of the things Uncle Bill had said, using his words and expressions, following the rhythms, trying to get my parents to respond, to be the way they had been. But everything had already fractured to bits, and there was danger everywhere. “Don't talk like that!” my mother would say, “You know that's no way to speak!” I felt crushed by this, by the unfairness of it all, so much so that I would appeal to my father. But all he would say was “That's enough now.” He said it quite gently but firmly, in a way that made any kind of protest impossible. Sometimes it felt hot behind my eyes and I would have to breathe in the way that I knew would stop the tears coming.