A Novel The Size of an Ocean

After the publication, in 1965, of 'Mrs Bratbe's August Picnic', my mother started work on a new novel. It grew into a leviathan of unmanageable proportions, and was never finished. It "shattered in my hands" she wrote to Dan Jacobson. However, there is some remarkable writing in it, and I have decided to put at least the first volume, 'Act of Go', into the wider world. The copyright of course remains with me and my sisters.

You may find more information about my mother, Jacqueline Wheldon, here.

Blogs being what they are, you must read bottom up, from 'Post 1' upwards. The novel begins with a letter from a character, Susan Sage, to a prospective editor, 'Tom'.




Wednesday 5 January 2011

Post 14

All wasted on Philip. He had disappeared. So had Aunt Molly.

Despite company, Aunt Molly had gone to her reading and wireless and television in her own room. Mine! she described these evening hours and forbore even to answer the telephone, once she had settled. She did not gladly endure interruption even during those hours not defined as Mine! Those given over to gardening and writing letters to the newspapers and chatting to her helpers. (In many ways, Constance and her Aunt Molly understood each other perfectly.) However, she had never been proof against Philip whom, as Constance knocked and opened the door, she was castigating wrathfully not, as might be expected, on the follies of what she called `the American intervention in Korea,' but on the follies of his Uncle Matthew.

"People expect too much of marriage, I agree. Whatever they expect, a great deal is what they'll get I dare say," said Philip pleasantly. He beckoned Constance over to the little sofa to sit by him. Aunt Molly allowed this interruption.

"In the mild, civilised life," she said, "marriage and family is where all the difficult personal learning and subtlety is. I'm talking about the vital personal discoveries, the relationship between trespass and forgiveness. The relationship, er, do you see, between the victim and the victor in ourselves, and how to live with those two invaders."

"I can believe that. I've met them."

Aunt Molly looked up. "Marriage really is to do with learning. You can believe that. Oh yes. It's a life-time's job."

"But not necessarily to do with happiness," said Philip.

"Exactly!" said Aunt Molly.

Sitting on the sofa with Philip listening to a lecture on marriage was nearly as good as getting married to him and Constance was more than prepared, comfortable, and satisfied, to make the most of it.

"The marriage home is, after all, for most of us, if we are lucky, the place where, where we practise indulgence and are indulged. Where we practise wickedness, ah yes! And are corrected. If we are lucky. Where the sins of the two are not only worst indulged, but best contended with. Our badtemper and violence, our greed for attention, and the world's goods, our jealousy, our petty lies and bad choice of friends, our self-hatred and envy, our wastefulness of talent and good fortune and... do you see, the marriage home is where we turn to teach and learn understanding of ourselves, constancy, and kindness, and not to be frightened. Of course it has to be learned! Because we are all born spiritually blind. Who can know self, who only self knows? The sentimental education, no less. And what an easy, busy, impersonal life some of us unattached settle for. I can tell you one thing, a good marriage, whatever it is, is not being half-dead."

As she looked down at her little hands, Constance was moved and could see, suddenly saw, that her Aunt had had a good marriage, was grieving for her husband, after all these years. For the personal loss to her own life of all her husband had meant to her. Constance did not want to see that grief, she had seen it often, but she softened her heart and let the sight of her aunt's old , memorous face join up with her own huge, constant sense of loss.

"I don't suppose you, dear Constance, will ever undertake anything half so adventurous as your marriage."

Constance sat up. University for Fran, Music and Art for Sarah, Marriage for Constance. At last!

"Why are you frowning?"

"Ah, but that isn't all, is it?" Philip was lying; but he had become irrelevant, and thereby captured the conversation.

"Ah! The comforts of the body? You mean? Do you mean? But that's the whole essence of course. Without the comforts of the body the rest simply wouldn't work, and vice versa..."

"And vice versa, sex by itself is so unsatisfying of the longings," Philip laughed.

Silence settled, discomforting only to Constance.

"Catholic priests don't get married" she said at last.

"Of course. And quite rightly. But one doesn't go so far as to presume to discuss the work and vessels of the Holy Ghost."

"Telephone, Aunt Molly. Labour Party." Frances put her head swiftly round the door and out again.

"You...you don't believe in the Holy Ghost!" It was rather a questioning uncertainty, for in previous discussions on such matters as related to the Holy Trinity for example, Aunt Molly had always used a dismissive tone which Frances had been, from childhood, quick to copy.

"My dear Constance, however that may be, I am not up to tackle more than one subject at a time." She went to the telephone.

Constance had seen the energy of grief on Aunt Molly's face and it softened her heart and reminded her how hard she was against her own grief. The business of not being known by or belonging to anybody special. She was suddenly very tired of the stiff upper lip. Molly went to the telephone.

"Marriage as the most important school for learning the most subtle intimacies of the moral life? Well I'm damned! That's how she's seen marriage for herself. And yet, you know, I can see that view of marriage turning its face, can't you? Then it not only seems like a little box where you might go insane, but I can hear Molly saying, `Insane? Perfectly possible!'" The image came too close to private places for Constance. It reminded her of her mother. "And yet," she said quickly and shyly, "there's a sort of adventure in the idea of marriage as she sees it, with all its risks. I've never thought of that." In case he thought she'd gone soft she dashed on. "She's jolly inconsistent, though. Before you came, she was damning marriage up and down. I think. Or perhaps...perhaps it was just Matthew's new one..." It was half a question.

"Oh that! More than likely..." He smiled to himself.

She was startled. His tone seemed absolutely to dismiss Matthew. She just stopped herself there from saying outright a very silly thing. Sarah had once said that Aunt Molly had been in love with Matthew and that was why she was so terrible to him.

"She is inconsistent, but probably not to her own meaning. All she's saying, I think, is that to her mind, there never was or will be a marriage as good as hers." But Constance was not ready to be so sure. "And the power in her experience of marriage, even after all these years, it's still living in her. You can imagine how intense her life was for her in those days. And now she's under a shadow."

"She's going to die." She gritted her teeth and said it. "She's getting ready to die." She looked hard at her hands. "I've noticed."

"No. You're wrong there. It's not the shadow of death. It's the shadow that settles over people when they are not full alive because they're no longer fully realised."

"Known, not realised. Not fully known."

"Yes maybe it's the same thing, better word. They are no longer fully known; don't live in a real world ..."

"Or perhaps because they never have been? known, realised."

"Perhaps, but not in her case."

"I wasn't only thinking of her case."

"In old age, to be in shadow is to be no longer intensely known by any other human being but only, perhaps if you're lucky, yourself. If you're lucky. But, your own knowledge is no longer self-enlightening, I can imagine that, unless you pray. If you wife or your husband is dead, or simply dead to you, your only human knower, your toucher, your quarreller, your listener, your lover, is gone. I suppose that's how it is. I suppose that's part of what bereavement means."

As a young girl with no parents, Constance reflected, to be in shadow is never to have been known. I mean, fully known. I do not mean understood, but known by a, how shall I say, by a loving and expectant curiosity. I did not know my parents and it is a great grief to me. But what is an inconsolable grief is that my parents did not know me. Who will know you, if not your parents. Who will expect of you? Who will touch and caress you, if not your parents. Who knows me? "A special kind of loving notice would do. But it must have curiosity in it," she said.

"Yes. A special kind of loving notice. Yes friendship is a sort of facade of fondness when there's no curiosity... that's right. Some kind of loving curiosity about her would bring her out of the shadow, you're right; but she has no intimates any longer."

I might go in and under, unnoticed, she reflected, drown with the weight of it all, life, and nobody might know, be curious enough, be intimate enough, love me enough to know that inwards I am dying. Aunt Molly is in the shadow and I have never been in the sun. That's it! That's what I want. To be in someone's sun. Frances and Sarah, is that what they want? She was so sure it was that she wanted to go to them at once. But he had used the word pray and had by that made her free with her thoughts and hold in what she could say. Funny thing that, like a door opening into an inner chamber.

"I suppose if she believed in God, she would know that she was known in the mind of God."

"Perhaps that's it. But that's knowledge not easy to submit to when what you want are other human hands."

"No, it isn't. But one thing God is, He is my knowledge that I am known in His mind. God is all the reality of people nobody knows. In God's way nobody knows anybody else. That's why wise people pray."

She hoped he would not argue with that, for she was convinced that it was true in her blood and bones, but had no words to defend it with.

"Con, we're talking about sexuality. Aren't we? Really? Not sex, but sexuality. You cannot love yourself with your own hands." He took her hands and placed them together. She had gained his hands but not his curiosity; his own thoughts had won that. "Richard St. Ains, a friend of mine said to me not long ago that Marriage is a door to reality. Mere appetites, you can satisfy them; there's the whole world. But marriage is a terrifying invitation to be introduced to yourself. He was thinking of getting married."

"And did he?"

He released her hands. "He sounded like St. George considering quietly what he'd do to the dragon, depending on its size." He laughed.