Post 3

MARKS OF FAVOUR

As a small child, the first time I ever heard the phrase, I was intensely interested in marks of favour. Aunt Molly asked Father Horbark one day in my hearing how somebody had come by `that mark of favour'. And as she always ignored the presence of children up to about the age of twenty five and had a masterly habit of speaking over our heads without ever giving the impression that she imagined we did not hear what she said, we had the best of the silent world. So I had learned to be quiet and listen; even in young days it never occurred to me to butt into an adult conversation with a question. Personal questions were for one to one where they could not be put aside. I was delighted with this new idea. I turned it over and over, testing it on the senses. I never wanted to ask what a thing `was'. I took this particular gem of a phrase to be a mark left by `Favour', whoever Favour was, so the first time I ever saw a disfiguring but fascinating bright red mark almost covering the face of a crisp old soldierly man with clawlike hands buying carrots in the Birley Fine market-place I knew without being told that it was a Mark of Favour.

Whatever that mark might have told me about Favour I was never to know, being dragged hastily along by one of the young nurse-maids who came and went at that time during the first days of the war to help the Nanny to look after us (five or six of us, sometimes more). They were very carefully brought up these girls, much at home with horses - which I was already by that time in desperate fear of; and they came from families living in the country town where my grandmother, Sarah Yokeham, lived. They were also very young, as even I could tell by their being much inclined to argue gravely with us children, paying the homage of earnest attention to our childish sins of assertion and proposition.

"That gentleman has a birth-mark, and it is something that nice people do not notice," said this very young woman dragging me inescapably after her by reason of having my arm under a painful form of propulsion restricting to the backward stare. That Favour should be implicated in birth did not surprise me; as to `nice' the idea that I was not was disobliging to my sense not of my good manners but of my private self. This young person could have no slightest idea how extremely `nice' my private self was. I was greatly indignant. I concluded that I probably had a special kind of eyes that ordinary nice people had not got. I was most puzzled, perhaps, on account of the young lady herself seeing it only not to notice it.

Before it achieved clarity, my mind fell into a condition of prodigious density in the matter of `marks of Favour'. I had checked with the eager assistance of my sister Sarah that, disappointingly, I had no birthmark - without telling her, of course, what the result of the search might mean to me. After that a Mark of Favour had come by sequent stages to mean any eccentric mark which might be construed as `a sign' providing it took my fancy. A satisfactory image of Favour I could not arrive at. Favour's job in life I could not delineate for myself any further than that it was, at least, to give secrets and pleasure to me and my special eyes.

For example, there was in Birley Fine a tremendous tower. As you came down a paved alley-way, with cottages and little front gardens on one side which were threateningly overpowered by a pale brick wall of tremendous height and length on the other, you turned out then on to a fine piece of common land that lay between my grandmother's house and the town-houses. There was The Tower. It stood decorating and retaining the prodigious brick wall as it came round the corner and rushed through the open space and down into the town to meet there an identical tower, of no significance to me. My tower at the corner of the alley-way had upon its common-facing face one high wide aperture or slot from the sill of which fell, like a beard, a very long black smoky lop-sided stain. It gave the entire edifice a disturbingly vital look as of a being hungry to be fed, despite the number of birds it appeared constantly to swallow and regurgitate, or of a mouth uttering mournful prophecies to a careless because absent multitude; or, of some huge Moloch demanding horrible sacrifices. Sometimes its stained mouth seemed to sing dolefully over the common. And some days what I wanted, impossible I knew (and I discouraged myself on behalf of all those who would discourage me if I mentioned it), was to stand on the top of this uncommonly favour-marked tower, which spoke only to me, and look out over the common and the town, as near the sky as possible, and see what it and I could see: what Favour had in store up there. Some days the old tower wanted that too. But Favour denied it. I can remember coming down that alley-way, with one or other of my elder sisters, Frances or Sarah, full of erotic excitement and fear, to behold the mouth with its strange beard. I can remember waiting in a state of potential nerve-explosion in case either of them mentioned it. Fortunately, neither of them ever did; although it was Frances, catching me transfixed perhaps in fascinated gaze, who told me that the building behind the wall was St. Peter's Hospital. It had never occurred to me to take notice of the building or its vast ornamental gate further down, let alone ask what it `was'. Frances was always very free with information one did not need, and in this case, as in so many, she was wrong. It was St. Peter's Court, the headquarters of the county waterways board.

A line of one of the first hymns I learned to sing deepened the power of Favour. `To whom the lips of children make sweet hosannas ring' it ran. I saw Jesus bending down for each child to kiss him, and each pair of childish lips left on his cheek a sweet hosannas ring. I worked this out after a while to be the unlipsticked equivalent of a lipsticked kiss, a little round mark with tiny radials circling from a vacuole. In short, a mark of Favour called `a sweet-hosannas ring'.

Incidentally, there were several misconstructions of hearing in my head as of understanding in my mind at that time. An evening prayer which one of our Nannies taught us caused me a good deal of dreadful speculation in those moments before I eventually fell asleep, leaving my problem where it fell in the lap of God. It was a very simple prayer, sung to a simple tune.

Lord keep us safe this night
Secure from all our fears
May angels guard us while we sleep
''til morning light appears. Amen.

We used to sing it every evening before she left the room. To me it was badly upsetting, and no sooner had she gone than I would be at it, word for word, somewhere between prayer and exegesis. Lord keep us! This is very necessary, something very frightful might happen to us, might it? It seemed so. Save this night! Oh, save it indeed. But how would the Lord `save' the night? Why did it need `saving'? The possibility of not being able to take night and day for granted was certainly there. And suppose the Lord was not listening to our feeble pipe, and forgot to save it? Or suppose he refused to save it? What would then happen to it? If this were not terror enough, the next line was much worse. Seek cure for all our fears. The idea that even God had to seek cures before He handed them out! Who, on Earth, then, could be sure of finding one for himself? And supposing the answer to the last appeal was No, angels may not guard you while you sleep? What would happen? In our sleep would it be? (Some dreadful Archimago at work, I suppose I thought for although I had never heard of Archimago then, I recognised him at once, that giver of bad dreams having consequences in the real(ish) world, when I met him.) Or would it be behind our backs? Bombs, maybe? But there were perils much worse. Volcanoes? Earthquakes? Floods? All very much worse because although the war had started and bombs had fallen, I still retained a much greater respect for acts of God. And if angels may guard us, I pursued Him, then may they also not depart a moment earlier than morning light, please. I thought it safest to repeat, over and over again, the appeal for the angel-guardians (on the grounds, no doubt, that they at least would know their way to Heaven in the event of emergencies) and I put please at the beginning and in the middle and at the end of that diminished one-line prayer and finished off with several Amens.

Hymns and carols gave me great trouble. The line `Be we low or high' produced the low `beewee' and the high `beewee' to my lasting amazement, and `Joy has come for you and me' caused disgruntlement that Joy, coming as she did with a capital letter, was no further described as to hat or coat nor furnished with a good reason why you and I should go with her on Christmas morning. I settled to my satisfaction that she was Father Christmas's big wife, a replica of the old man himself without a beard but with a very bright red lipstick.

Gradually, egg, larva, pupa, the hosannas-ring and the beewee and the answer-do and that cruel invocation `Suffer! little children' found their way wriggling through the crevices on the outermost margins of the secret place where I had parked them and re-emerging at last shook their wings took their perfect shape and arrived in the common world, unnoticed by me. For it is only later when one recalls, accidentally, how the curious little eggs were laid in the mind that one realises that they, after all, emerged imagos and fled long ago.

`Mark of Favour' was in a quite different case. By the time Aunt Molly applied the phrase to me personally (and I knew not in what respect for I only noticed that I was being noticed just as the substance was disappearing) it had to its name not only kiss marks and rain stains on walls and rust speckles on books and birthmarks, but my grandfather's bookplate (I never saw that grandfather, either), the HMV trademark dog and gramophone; the Royal Standard and, to go with that, an intensely mysterious and magical sentence, bearing to me no sense whatever, which had said Swynnerton bore "Silver, a flowered cross sable", seen once in one of my grandfather's ancient journals and never since rediscovered. It did not need to be. I had copied it out so many times, the mark it made on the page, with its mysterious quotation marks (and the flag, as I took it to be, above it) was enough.

I suppose I had looked up at Aunt Molly very warily, considering perhaps in my mind what mark of favour she had found in me that I had been too nice to notice, and wondering if I should be pleased with it enough to admit it to the pantheon, or if I should be dissatisfied with its insignificance and disappointed in myself. I was asking myself, privately, the questions. But she read my face and she said, "A mark of favour means that you are distinguished, by someone, from the common run of people, and esteemed, by them, above others." I knew better.

Her answers to questions asked often raised more problems than they solved. Either because she did not understand children, having none of her own, only us three Yokehams, her nieces (which, I suppose, with Philip Harisonn, and sometimes James Harisonn, and Tom Kellory, Matthew's son, was quite an experience of children); or because she had a theory about children; or because she was lazy, as I sometimes incline now to believe; all of which are not the same thing but come to the same thing; in any case she never `talked down' to children and forbade others to do so `in her hearing'.

"It means you have been noticed, with interest, by someone," Matthew said, regarding me, his fingers spread out tips to tips, his legs - over which I stood astride, my ankles touching his - stretched out some yard or so in front of him.
"I know. And that someone's name is Favour," I said, always eager to show off for Matthew, ready even to throw my secrets away for him. At the time he was about forty, I supposed, but the most handsome man I had ever seen. He had a lovely face.
He laughed. "I think your Aunt was referring, in a roundabout way, to God."
Two things I knew. One was that Aunt Molly was not interested in God, roundabout or in any other way. The other was that you could not laugh and make jokes about God. So I knew it was Favour. Furthermore, I had enough experience to know that I had been `noticed with interest' by Favour already. I was going to marry Matthew, for one thing. He had a brown triangle mark I liked by his right eyebrow.

By the time the jays had distinguished me and set me above others by their notice, it was Favour's powers of noticing me that I was most keen on. Of course, I still noticed the work of Favour in Marks I found about me. But I was now able to construe the process as Favour noticing me. I was a scrupulous examiner. The jays were shy, therefore I was special. I began to think well of Gallop and Gallop: British Birds.

Post 2

I went straight to Aunt Molly's room for her Gallop and Gallop: British Birds.
"Have you seen my reading spectacles?"
"You've got them on. I've just seen a pair of jays. Fed them with breadcrumbs."
"Extremely unlikely." Aunt Molly smoothed the distraught cushions, violently interrogated in the glasses-search, while I described the blue flash. "Jays aren't breadcrumb birds." Buncrumbs to be accurate. "Get me the book."

I'd got it. Handed her British Birds impatiently. She always took longer than I did, and infuriatingly read silently before utterance. "Jays, it seems," she said at last. "If you can be trusted to say what you saw. It says here," she adjusted her reading glasses, "Jays do not tolerate any familiarity with human beings." She chuckled.

"Exactly what one would expect of that book." I had always disliked it for good reasons. All the browns and blacks of the birds I knew well were so very smart and paperweight on the page, the sky so very smart old vicarage drawing room blue, and there is nothing to be said, as I said then and there, for a picture of a sparrow all nicely flecked-out and spruce when the scrabbling in the dust and the tail-twitching hind-uppermost on the rail and the cavorting in the bushes - making the hydrangeas jump and shake and twitter as if they were being tickled to death by fleas - is so missing, there is not even the merest suggestion of life in bone or feather. Here the jay, garrulus glandarius, looked as timid and wistful, and just about as menacing as a willow-warbler, roughly the same size; and certainly without enough energy to pick up so much as an acorn. But the colours were rightish. Aunt Molly had settled to a good bird-read. Here the raggedy crow was hooked and fierce, but impeccably gentrified in city black, just as I remembered on the very margins of memory, my lovely Uncle Paul Absecond, Aunt Molly's husband, used to be even on Saturdays and Sundays.


I did not know much about birds, despite my occasional bird-watching walks of childhood memory with Matthew. They were as much poetry-rendering as bird-watching, and as a consequence perhaps certain birds never were mere birds for me. But I reckoned I knew more than the book about the birds I knew, which were all brown and beige or black and grey; sparrows, thrushes, blackbirds and pigeons, the kestrels on the common, and the choughs on the rocky pre-Cambrian coast of Wales; a bull-finch, a bluetit, a robin, a pheasant, a partridge, oh, and herons.

Once, on a steamer going up to Hampton Court, I counted seventeen shabby herons like judges, at the very least Tulkinghorns, to a man, still and silent, hunched shouldered, slit eyed, stalk legs, each giving off an aura of secrets from the charnel house, standing along the bank in the clear-water margins of an island below Richmond. They were drawn urgently to the attention of a young man opposite me and fiddling with a very large portable radio by his girl-friend who was leaning lovingly on his arm (he having taken the best seat next to the water) to get a better look at them. After a long moment, in which I feared he would miss them altogether, he glanced up at the last one of them for a second. "Some species of a penguin," he said magisterially, and went back to his radio mechanics. Oh yes, I'd seen that. I already had a deep interest in sex and its perversionary process.

There was a class of birds that I did not count as birds at all. They were manifestations of mysterious Ideas, immortals, each with a secret ministry; and that was thanks to Matthew. There was in me, a place where certain delightful creatures, things, people, sayings, poems, stories, lived and thrived together. I do not know by what qualification they passed into this dark sanctum (although some arrived by my faulty understanding and on declaring themselves naturally passed out of it), but at the heart of it I had in it the peacock, the swan, the skylark, and the nightingale. I had abundant evidence that all these creatures actually existed. I had seen the lot. But in my secret mind they had a life richer and of much greater significance in time and story than the feathered one.

I could never see the peacocks, most beautiful, most useless, most mysterious peacock, the Glory of God, hanging like strange foliage in the trees or displaying the iridescent lacy green and the blue and black of the eye feather in the grounds of the old castle, Aunt Molly's (and Matthew's as it turned out) , favourite hotel in Edinburgh; I could never see a swan open its back on the river as if it were a bride or bridegroom of goodly hue needing only to be crammed with flowers to float upriver to its wedding and back to merry London, my most kindly nurse, the air trembling against the bridal day which is not long, sweet Thames running softly, the song never-ending and my hand in Matthew's; I could never see the larks rising higher, higher, higher into the breezy summer skies over the South Downs and trilling with happiness to be so near heaven, singing hymns unbidden until the world is wrought to sympathy with hope and fears it heeded not; I could never hear fall the tiny leaflets of chased silver and gold that the nightingale sprinkled all over the beechen gardens shadows numberless of Golden Square in the small hours of summer mornings, charmed magic casements opening on the foam of perilous seas in faerie lands forlorn; never see nor hear without being captured as if rooted to the ground by my feet, without being tied by my heartstrings to whichever of those creatures it might be, without my heart aching with the loss when I and they were parted. Immortalised in the spun gold web of English poetry, birds they never were, they were not born for death. They belonged to me. They belonged to me and Matthew.

I was fond of the auks and parrots and storks and humming birds that belonged to the fairy tales I read, and I did not at all mind looking at Birds of Java or Birds of India for hours on end, because although they too were paperweight and spruce, I did not miss on the page the life in them because I had never seen them, they were all fairy-tales to me. But they were commonplace-mysterious and they never crept into the secret part of my life.


"Jays are crows. They eat birds, breaking them in pieces with their claws. They eat chicks, eggs, mice, fish. Important to acorn dispersion. Go back to acorn stores in hard winters, and so on." Aunt Molly pushed her glasses back, and the cushions had better look out.

There was about this information much that assorted well with my imagination of the jays, a strong sort of formidable creature intelligence with plenty of backbone, fearlessness; there was something of Matthew there. So I allowed also that they were possibly stand-offish with human beings. Therefore, it followed, I belonged to the elite to whom these predators would come to eat breadcrumbs, buncrumbs to be exact. I conceded that, for that day, there was something very special about me. There are days like that.

"They were probably feeding on the flying ants. There has been a swarm here this afternoon, hateful things."

I did not care. It was still a mark of favour, the jays coming down to me like that; a visitation from the gods. I was not one of those who put a mark of favour lightly aside, or accept[ed] it without letting it do its work. It was a sign. It spoke well for the coming summer.

Aunt Molly brushed her hand fastidiously across her lacklustre greying hair, and knocked her glasses off. I picked them up.

Post 1

Dear Tom,
It is a year since we first re-met and discussed this project. Many lunches and suppers between then and now have not taken us any nearer to the answer to the question: What do you actually want out of it? Publication, a private print-out? Do you simply want to slake our curiosity? I have been too busy simply enjoying myself, after all this time, in your company.
Now that I have something to show, a little for a lot of labour, I have decided to write you the First Report to put into my Yokeham File. It may not thrive to grow big, I realise, but time has come to put something on paper.
As you know, I accepted your assignment in the first place because I needed the money. It was also because I was flattered, and because our re-meeting after all these years exhilarated me. As you also know, you did not make clear the prodigious size of the proposed task. "Massive hoard" you said. How could I have expected nine foolscap boxes crammed with manuscripts constituting, at a fair guess, six separate books? And none of it in any order of chronology.
The `first' of these, it seemed the earliest work, so far as I can disentangle it, seems to be seven hundred pages of close-typed, or close-handwritten content, mixed. That's point number one. Number two is that I now accept your assignment because I cannot leave it alone.
What I did not realise, as you could not have, is the extent to which these papers have to do with very private family matters, yours, the Yokehams - the world's private and professional business. To my confounding amazement, much concerns my own young inhibited self, `the dreadful Susan Sage'. Your youthful political views are preserved intact, your father's ancient love affairs are investigated, your step-mother's love affairs (well, I never liked her), Philip's death is here, and her sisters Sarah and Frances are turned inside out, and there is a fair amount of speculation about who had, and who nearly had, whose babies. If we are going to share this manuscript on a professional basis, it is going to be, sooner or later, very difficult to look each other in the eye - and here I make only a sort of joke. If, after reading the enclosed first sample of what I take to be the first book (it seems like some sort of beginning) you still want this `sorting out' to be done and still want me to do it, then we must sit down business like and unwaylaid by our revived mutual admiration, and work out dates and relationships - why Molly Absecond is `Aunt Molly', how it is that Philip and James Harisonn are your cousins, and so on. If I ever knew I can't remember, and I can't get on without knowing.
There is one slight difficulty, may be serious. It depends upon whether you would seriously think of publishing or just want a private print-out. Let me say, first: the idea that Constance Yokeham as a young girl was a bit odd, or fey, or absent-minded has to be entirely forgotten. Also that she was often mysteriously physically absent. She was writing and to that end watching, listening, judging, inventing, eavesdropping, hiding, stealing letters, diaries, papers, anything that was grist to the mill. She was writing it all down, sometimes in what seems like the bowels of the earth in the cellarage of the Golden Square House. Down there she was grinding us all exceedingly small. The trouble is that all the stolen papers, letters, all sorts of documents are enclosed with this vast undertaking: and they all belong to somebody, heirs or extants. We should have to find them all. We might even have a reunion, a general mixture of elements rather than the return of the original pairs together.
Constance was merciless with titles: there are literally ten upon ten: The Grodust Construction. Daughters of the Flood. The Yokeham Files. Writing for Pleasure. Good Morrow to Our Waking Souls. Rooms of My Native Country. Contes du Temps Passe. The Meat of the Fowl. The Management of Public Dinners. Plaque Near The Dwelling. The Way She Went.
I can only do my best to make sense of this `massive hoard', but for the sake of my own renewed old life I cannot put it down. I have double vision. On the other hand, if you as publisher want this seriously pursued, you cannot pay me as one of your readers. This is a full-time job as I choose to make it so on your behalf, so I should need a proper salary.
I look at my own children nervously. When say we meet? Answer me. I am setting up my Yokeham File.
The first question: read, and then say: Do you want me to go on?

As ever,

Susan