The Swallow’s Flight

‘And after all, the weather was ideal. We took the cable car right up to the top. Near Crans- Montana. That’s what it’s called now, but it used to be Montana-sur-Sierre, back when she and Murry were there.’

Molly found herself between two women, one of whom was describing a recent trip to Switzerland. A loose scoop of hair, pinned back, threatened to unravel as she talked, but her dark fringe, thick and straight, was unmoved, slicing across her forehead high above her eyebrows. She flashed dark eyes at Molly, briefly, and seemed to catch her shadow self, the one Molly had discovered she could hide. The other woman was her own mother, eager, nodding. They were speaking across her, the way grown-ups often did, and it was true she hardly seemed to be there. The curve of the brown seat was not quite shaped to her body, or was it her body that was not quite curved to the seat? Molly wasn’t sure. She’d have liked her body to be more curved, she knew that. After all, she was twelve, nearly thirteen. Her mother had brought her along to this talk – a Birthday Party she’d called it – but what kind of party was it where you had to sit in rows?

‘The mountain air was sharp and clean. I felt so alive,’ the woman was saying, a ghost of perfume hanging around her. ‘I can see why Mansfield loved it so much up there.’

The room was humming. When they’d first come in, Molly had noticed a table, wide as an altar, at the front. Behind it, the first-floor windows reached up from floor to ceiling, framing the trees outside. Carousels of small cakes waited on another table at the back of the room, piped with swirls of icing, pale as sugared almonds, pink, green, yellow. But now the seats her mother had chosen carefully, three rows from the front, were being closed in by a forest of bodies, and coats flung onto chairs. Molly couldn’t see anything. She looked up. The plasterwork ceiling shimmered like a wedding cake.

‘The ones on each side are the novelists,’ said her mother - the ones they had come to hear. But even when she sat as high as she could, Molly could only just see the tops of their heads. A woman in blue was standing between them, her silver earrings gleaming like coins.

Afternoon light glanced across the room, pale on a gilt frame above the fireplace. Molly traced the patterns of its gold carving with her eye.

‘That painting’s by Vanessa Bell, Virginia Woolf’s sister,’ said her mother. ‘It’s a very natural scene. That’s why the colours are so muted. Can you see the barns?’ Why was she always trying to educate Molly? ‘Virginia Woolf’s the one who’s famous for saying that Mansfield was the only writer she’d ever been jealous of. Remember?’

Molly ignored her. Mansfield. Woolf. Bell. Her mother was always name-dropping. ‘Let’s go to the theatre to see the new Chekhov production. Let’s go to the Bloomsbury exhibition at the Courtauld.’ Let’s not, thought Molly. None of her friends’ mothers were into this stuff. They all went out to Nando’s, or the cinema. Or shopping. Molly had only come because a) she wanted to wear her new hat and b) she wanted to avoid her homework. But it was mainly the hat. It was soft, rose pink, cabled, and she wore it carefully with just a curl of brown hair showing at each side of her face, pinned to her cheeks. Her eyes looked bigger, deeper, framed this way. She’d caught sight of herself in the hall mirror before they’d left home, and seen the blush of pleasure reflected there. In that moment she’d almost forgotten where they were going, had forgotten to be angry. And the image had hung in her mind as she walked along beside her mother, a reality confirmed in the reflection she glimpsed in every shop window they had passed.

Small booklets were still being handed out at the door.

‘They’ve printed the talk, so you’ll be able to follow it more easily,’ her mother said. ‘The women on each side are giving the talks. They’re both novelists.’

They could have been zebras for all Molly cared. ‘You’ve already told me that. And what’s the point of reading what they’re saying? When I’m sitting here?’ It wasn’t like missing Chemistry and having to work out from her friend Lucy’s hopeless notes what had happened. And wasn’t it supposed to be a party? ‘What are they going to talk about anyway? And when’s it going to start?’

‘You need to be patient. Wait and see.’ Her mother, fluffed out in a pale green angora cardigan, was scanning the room.

Molly knew from experience that middle-aged authors always spoke about their childhoods. Their favourite books. Sooner or later. They used words like legacy. Influence. Molly hoped it wouldn’t start that way. But secretly, so secretly she hardly knew it herself, she also hoped that the aquarium effect would end – that she would somehow find herself inside this world of books and words, instead of looking at it.

Ten minutes. Five more. One of the Novelists jumped up, hands tucked in the pockets of her jeans, then out, gesturing, arms flung forward. There was something mercurial and unpredictable about her that alarmed Molly, as if she seemed ready to jump onto life and nab it, like a wriggling thing, even wrestle it to the ground.

‘I was thinking…shall we just start?’ she said. ‘Even if not everyone’s here …’

But someone had arrived with news from the world below.

‘Piccadilly Line…someone under a train…all the usual delays…’

The words passed like a rumour round the room, and vanished.

Someone under a train – but who? The horror of it filled Molly’s mind, like the toll of a bell that just kept on reverberating, and wouldn’t stop. She looked round urgently. Her mother was smoothing her black silk skirt, and picking off the tiny flecks of green angora that had strayed there.

‘Well, let’s start anyway,’ said a voice. And they did! The door was closed as if a train was just about to depart, as if a silent whistle had been blown, and the lady in the blue dress drew herself up - was an aria about to burst out? - and beamed. The jostling of bodies was stilled, the whispering ceased. The party had begun. Confused, Molly read the title of the booklet: The Legacy of Katherine Mansfield.

There were anecdotes. Someone had found unknown stories, someone else had a box of letters, pictures, recipes, pressed flowers. Molly thought of her own diary at home. She also drew pictures in it, and wrote about her day. She had a section at the back: Questions I would like to know the answers to. These were things she hadn’t been able to look up on Google, questions that wouldn’t go away, like, what will I feel like in two years’ time? Or four, or six. The future always presented a blank face when she tried to peer at it. Underneath she had penned possible answers, and set herself one goal: I will have a boyfriend by the time I am fourteen.

Outside the blue autumn sky was floating. Leaves spread themselves out in the low light. And the aquarium effect began: words were swimming past, clustered in phrases like shoals of little fish.

‘One of the greatest short story writers in the English language… witch-like cruelty…’

But one story she caught whole. She loved the picture of Carson McCullers reading Mansfield’s stories so often that the library copies had fallen apart. She couldn’t imagine doing it herself, but began to feel she could follow what was being said.

Now the First Novelist was standing up, her hair falling slightly across her face, shoulder length. Small flowers had scattered themselves on her dress, their tiny blooms light on the dark cloth. She was reading from her script, calm, poised, like someone who was presenting a problem, and solving it at the same time. The effect was almost invisible, just as sugar slid off a spoon into hot tea and vanished, but changed its taste all the same. The Novelist was describing herself winning reading competitions at school, or wearing high heels, make up hidden in her bag. Picking up boys. Molly looked closely. Another author with a faraway childhood.

Molly thought of her own stilettos, hidden at Lucy’s house. She’d found them in a charity shop but didn’t dare take them home. But Lucy’s mum didn’t mind what she wore, didn’t even keep track of what Lucy had, unlike her own mother. She thought of the make-up they put on carefully in the back of the bus, high on laughter, high on the top deck, naming the boys they hoped would notice them. But even as she saw these things (the slash of red lipstick across Lucy’s pale face like a wound) the novelist’s voice moved into her consciousness again. ‘Your heart will ache, ache…because no one wants to kiss you now.’

The words brushed her skin, tragic, whole.

‘…the greater doom is not merely that life takes us ineluctably towards death…’

Her mother passed the booklet and pointed to the place on the page. ‘Ineluctably,’ she whispered. ‘Something you can’t avoid or escape.’

‘Like homework?’

Sort of. More like, um, fate. Shhh. You’ll miss the next bit.’

But Molly’s eyes had travelled back up the page, catching again on the same words. ‘Your heart will ache, ache…because no one wants to kiss you now.’

No one? Why not? But now she realised these were words quoted from a story, by Mansfield, of course. They weren’t real, but for a moment she’d forgotten the Novelist actually speaking.

Absorbed, she followed the text at her own speed in a parallel universe. Then sounds touched her again, and although the words seemed to live at the edge of her hearing, like a pale echo (no matter how hard she reached for them), she felt them with a new kind of closeness.

‘She survives this first wounding and it will not be mortal. But to the reader the world she has entered, which has seemed through the prism of her untried adult consciousness, so various, so beautiful, so new, is transformed into a darker, much more dangerous place.’

Prism sounded like prison, but when Molly thought about it harder, she could see rays of colour fanning out.

The leaves outside were more dappled in the longer light, the tree bark reptilian. The Novelist was still reading from her papers.

‘Mansfield knew, with the Venerable Bede, that life is a sparrow’s flight through a great hall.’

A sparrow’s flight. The words swooped across the sky of her mind, forming tiny black wings drawn in ink. There was a symmetry in it all Molly couldn’t quite grasp, but she thought of the person under the train. She remembered that they had come on the Piccadilly line, she and her mother, without any delay, because it hadn’t happened yet. While they’d been travelling, had someone, that someone, been thinking about it? Someone who later had actually jumped in front of a train, stepping over the long yellow line on the platform – she remembered looking at it herself, seeing the thick, glossed paint, the way it invited rebellion, the way boundaries did, just by being boundaries. She’d seen the metallic rails, trailing away like shiny strands of liquorice into the dark tunnels. Mice scurrying, camouflaged by soot and dirt. But she hadn’t thought of jumping. She had just imagined standing perilously close to the edge. Would the train have rushed past her then, galvanising her with the force of air, electric energy, life?

But someone had done it, causing disruption to hundreds of people waiting on platforms for trains. Someone who’d probably never had an influence on anything much, on anyone, who’d failed to make their mark. Male? Female? Young? Old? The fact of their brief existence blared out in stations all over London. The person, whom none of them knew, had had the courage, if it was courage. Molly wasn’t sure. Something would have stopped her, even if she’d had the idea. She hadn’t even been able to jump off the middle board of the swimming pool. It had quivered so much under her feet, her careful movement along it to its end creating so much more vibration, that she hadn’t been able to steady herself to leap into the water. Had this person felt that quiver in their feet, and done what she could not imagine being able to do?

But now the Novelist was describing ‘a sense of the marvellous which lies ready to spring out at us from the quotidian world…which, typically for Mansfield, resists any explanation.’ Molly was getting lost again.

‘Mum, quotidian?’

‘Things that happen every day. Nothing you’d normally make a fuss about.’

Like the person under the train? ‘That covers most things,’ was all Molly said.

‘Well, things just being themselves. The way they just are,’ said her mother. ‘And maybe suddenly feeling special, when you least expect it.’

‘…as though you’d swallowed a bright piece of the late afternoon sun and it burned in your bosom, sending out a little shower of sparks into every particle, into every finger and toe.’

Outside the windows, autumn light was netted in leaves, wide and flat as open hands. Closer now than her own skin.

Now the Other Woman was up, talking about cats. They had names like Wing and Charlie Chaplin, and they seemed to be in her story. Or was she talking about Mansfield, who’d owned these cats? Molly struggled to find her place in the booklet. She thought of the cakes still sitting at the back of the room. As if alert to the movement of her thought, Molly’s mother was handing her a Starburst from her pocket. Molly ran her nail under the waxed paper, folded tightly like a little envelope, and levered it up. She wondered how long it took to wrap all the sweets. The stickiness of the sweet glued itself to her tongue, then her teeth, as it began to dissolve. Pink.

The Second Novelist was speaking fast, her dark brown hair swinging as she grew and transformed into the character whose story she was telling, someone who was batting words with another, invisible, person.

‘sepulchral…you know what sepulchral means, you’d say. Yeah obviously, I’d say, everyone knows what sepulchral means.’

Molly turned the remaining strand of sugar in her mouth.

‘Sepulchral - gloomy, melancholy,’ her mother said, passing another sweet. Green. ‘Death and tombs.’

But Molly didn’t need to know. There were some words you could feel, without knowing what they meant. They were instinctively dramatic.

The Novelist spoke fast, her Scottish accent rolling round words, pinning them in place, marking each with its own distinction. It was like one of those poems they’d made up at school where you could take up the whole page, and let the words form themselves into loops that moved around at will, or shaped themselves in imitation of the thing they were describing - a bird’s wing, or the coil of a snail shell, or a spiral or waves. In this river of words, Molly was carried, mesmerised, words glinting, yes, like little fish, but silver in the late afternoon light. Outside the leaves were glistening too with a new seriousness, their bronze hue deeper, more significant, but signifying what? Molly couldn’t say.

‘Supposing, she said, ones bones were not bone but liquid light.’

Molly seemed to float inside the image, as the story wrapped itself around her.

Though the park was full of people it was like there was nobody left in it either.’

‘Molly, are you alright?’ Her mother was prodding her gently, and pointing to a paragraph in the booklet. But Molly wasn’t sure whether she’d been miles away, or whether she felt more fully here. She knew from inside the hard stone of the fireplace, the texture of the coat in front of her, the close weave of its fibres ridged by twists of brown wool. A scarf trailed from another seat, scattered with little hummingbirds, whose wings almost lifted off the silk with a secret life of their own. Life is a sparrow’s flight through a great hall. Each wing was inked in with a closeness Molly knew she would never forget. But the thick colour of the walls – was it blue, green? Molly would be unable to remember afterwards, but she would feel the density of its pigment searing her, even in memory. There had been cake too, of course, and the popping of champagne corks flying out unaided when the novelist mentioned ‘the bliss moment’.

Life was, life was…but what life was, Molly couldn’t say.

KMS Birthday Lecture 2012