The Obsessive Diary

Of course I had the outfit. What fool would go to Africa without a long swishing skirt and cowboy boots? I believed I was all set. During the week I stood before thirty children and tried to teach them things I thought I knew; the alphabet, how to spell “definitely”. In my hut I learnt to make dinner with one pot, a relentless vegetable stew that Willy eschewed for beer at the pub with the friends he’d made and I hadn’t. I marked workbooks with the pen that never had to write upside down. I listened to Simon & Garfunkel sing, ‘Homeward Bound’ and the tap dance of lizards on the roof. At weekends I ran off to Harare at the expense of a friend of my father’s, who owned a large hotel in the city. Photographs show us, the friends I had made, with white towels like turbans on our heads in plush rooms and beside a rooftop swimming pool drinking wine, aware but not ashamed of our privilege. Letters written home to my parents are gushingly dramatic; an awful lot of, Missing you terribly and, There’s something in the air here making all emotion doubly powerful. Over the Easter holidays I toured Botswana with another friend and her family. Throughout the first and second term the White priest with his picnic chairs and champagne came and went. My boots leaked and I caught bilharzia. The pills didn’t work and I caught malaria. Milk warmed on the paraffin stove gave me brucellosis. The long skirt which swished so pleasingly through the grass picked up tick-bite fever. And one morning while readying to walk from my hut to the low school buildings across the way a pain in my abdomen knocked me to the concrete floor. I remember someone running for the man who owned a car and being driven to the town where the white priest lived. The priest knew a surgeon, a mass of wild Scottish hair who was drunk from midday to collapse but catch him between hangover and beginning again and he could do all right under bright lights. In a hospital he removed my burst appendix. I woke in the priest’s house hours later, my left arm black with ants that had found me sleeping, a scar above my right hip, a bottle of whisky on the table beside me.

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At this age, their age, being together is a rare thing, not a given; a precious Here we are! that I catch in my hands and hold up to the light to remember. They are grown and I am grown and we swoop in at moments of worlds colliding, the end of summer, the beginning of work, just such this happened yesterday in London.

I had meetings, two of them, both long and twice yearly. The morning for someone else’s business, the afternoon for me and mine which is theirs which Jacobi came to. There’s a moment when it’s time to sit at the table, and we, the directors have been discussing this for a decade. When’s the right time? Should they be called or do we let them wander in at will? Luckily the stars had a plan. On the phone I mentioned it, and Jacobi said, Can I come? It took me a moment. Money is a funny thing. My children will have to work but the great privilege of their lives is that they’ll be able to pursue work they love. Building that ethic and verve, that lust for life and clear focus is a delicate thing. Too much, and why bother, too little and their dreams will sail on by.

He came. He asked questions. He was himself in a room that could have been intimidating if he hadn’t grown up believing all life to be equal. I was proud of him. Success is measured in heartbeats.

To Waterloo, the clock and our rendezvous with Blake who got snagged on a tube train and was late but unflustered and suddenly, in a wildly crowded train, we were together telling stories of our summer with voices a little too loud but the man behind us was laughing. Every second of our eighteen years together flashed like the fading scenery of London as we picked up speed out of city and towards home. My little poppets with their rucksacks and soft toys and trusting hands in mine. The games we played on trains choosing things to spot, the more unlikely the more points awarded; A man in a Santa hat! in summer. Someone with one leg in matching sports gear! We actually saw that. How they’d cluster around me for snacks and books and answers, how they’d fall asleep at funny angles. How time passed without them noticing but suddenly here we were, these magnificent humans and me on a train that decided in Woking it had had enough of this railway lark and gave up the ghost altogether.

Four thousand commuters disgorged onto damp platform, so thick with bicycles and briefcases we turned tail and got an Uber. While we waited, a man with a huge Jesus flag and microphone told us all how we could be saved while his accomplice in frou-frou net skirt got deep into skipping for God. Jacobi and Blake walked up to her. I’m not sure how the conversation went, but when we piled into the car come to take us the final leg, Jacobi said, Don’t go in with an agenda of changing someone’s mind. Start off with a, ‘hi, how are you’, and find out. Success is measured in heartbeats.

Eleanor

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Oxford. Took the train. Read The Best of Everything by Kit de Waal all the way there (it’s great). As I changed at Reading, the skies filled with a ready downpour and the carriage with students, or so I imagined the young people around me, too early for Oxford first years, but there were plenty of faces that described second and third years in that place fought for and won. Sophie begins in October. I will visit her there.

Stopped at the lights waiting to cross the road, a child grabbed his parents to him and I heard the father say, of course we’re a family. I tried to gauge his expression when he’d reassembled himself road facing, watching for the sign to cross. Sadness? Pride? An entire breakdown of a marriage in his bristly chin, eyes that said, we’ve made it work despite my heart breaking. I imagined grown up conversations between him and his organised wife who held the hand of their son, a neat line of, We will not let this affect him. They walked into the Society Café as I walked out, early for my meeting and in need of protein, an eggs and bacon affair they would not serve, a shrug from the girl behind the counter when I committed the ultimate café sin of asking if there was anywhere else nearby.

Stupid me, I thought as I walked away and the civilised still-a-family walked in. This was Oxford. Of course there was a place nearby.

Eggs, avocado, vegan sausage, earl grey tea no milk round the corner, I didn’t eat the sourdough and the serving girl apologised for me not remembering to say, no bread and then laughed when I said, No it was me that forgot and made a gesture with her hands like, that’s true. When I returned to the Society Café the same girl appeared not to remember me, was all help and smiles as I ordered triple mint tea. I took a seat at the counter and watched the scene unfold of a regular customer arrive. Hang on. I should say, Lover boy because he was over excited and so was she but neither had so far admitted there was anything more to it than him turning up and them chatting. He’d been running, he’d hurt his knee, she was somehow on the other side of the counter by now and he was describing the muscles in his thighs and even doing an impression of the pain and I was thinking, When he sits down he’s going to think, oh s**t, did I really do that? but right now they’re in the thrill of over excitement and he’s pretending he’s just come in for his normal coffee and corner table and she’s pretending he’s not flirting with her and her friends are whispering and holding their hands to their mouths.

Hysteria behind the coffee machine ensued. High pitched can’t contain it squeaks, still no one naming it, but they’ve been here before. The eyes tell all and she must front face it and take his order as if there’s nothing else going on. He is flushed with success. My meeting arrives and though I’m deep in it and engaged I can’t help hearing him say, as his lady love brushes past, I’ve drawn a horse and turn his lap top to show her. I wonder if he’ll have the courage to break the fourth wall and ask her out.

Lunch with T. A delight. Gossip and a shared history of decades. We hugged and said good luck in each other’s ears at the same time. Read The Best of Everything all the way home, and Jacobi arrived fresh off the plane from Holland full of 18 and turned into a man. We shared stories. Beautiful.

Eleanor

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A week in Scotland and I’m back, to southern England with her crowded roads and weather. We had the sudden torrential downpours of the far east yesterday, monsoon like, loaded skies. The bricklayer finishing the terrace outside the new garage cottage had to find frequent shelter.

I went for a walk after speaking with Kemi Nekvapil, my live with her on Australian time of 7am in the UK suited me just fine. Here’s the recording in case you missed it :

There were so many tangents I wanted to go off on - Praiseworthy, farming, brambles and apple pie - but we had a precious hour and had to more or less stick to the main road. This is what happens in the company of such a brain and heart, such a brilliant, straight talking human; my system explodes with possibility and I want to split into a million, reach everything. She’s a master of presence. Her practice shines out. My atoms danced and we free ranged and laughed and I’ve upgraded my subscription to her Substack so as to join the harvest gatherings she has once a month. It was the discussion on being without expectation, the silence of community, that did it.

And then I went for a walk.

I took my neighbour’s dogs, Syd, and Ronnie Barker, wolf hound and dachshund. Across the field and into the woods, eyes down I heard a voice, There’s a bird. A girl on the path above me, the path that met mine. She was in various shades of paint-spattered black, a huge rucksack on her small back, an easel under her arm. She pointed. A bird sat on the path. Syd ran past but Ronnie - look away now, it wasn’t pretty. I paused thinking of human smell and hands and what would Chloe do. Ronnie sniffed. I bent to push his nose away, he grabbed. There was a squawk, a flurry, a cry and a crunch, it was awful and quick, awful but quick, it was over and the girl said, It’s better that way, it was supposed to happen, it is out of its misery and turned, easel and rucksack, and walked away. You’re a painter I said hopelessly to her departing form. Yes, she said without turning.

The body of the bird, limp head on broken neck, Ronnie, pleased with himself, me, terrible at this sudden show of nature. The voice said, No guilt, stop berating. It came to die. And it certainly felt that way though I didn’t like it. A meeting of paths. A dog and a girl and a bird and me. I said a prayer over its body. The girl disappeared round the bend.

Eleanor

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A bunch of White, English, public-school kids off to teach in Zimbabwe. What could possibly go wrong. We gathered at Heathrow, I said goodbye to my mother, we flew to Harare via a skidding touchdown in snowy Sofia. At a farmstead we put up our brand-new tents and drank beer and tried out our thin camping mattresses on each other as if we were still in Chelsea. We met the priest in whose care we were placed. Also White, but large and old, he’d been a master at Sherborne. He read out the list of our pairings, strangers to each other, the person we’d spend the next year with, in a place we’d never been, mine was tall and angular, we’ll call him Willy which was nothing like his real name but was the nickname he preferred. Separated into our pairs we were sent off to our schools, Willy and I among the last to go, our village was in the south. A flatbed truck delivered us to Dhirihori late at night when the stars were out and the pub open. Willy jumped off the back and settled on the stone steps with a beer, making friends. I shouldered my rucksack to the low block of rooms across the way, tin roof, concrete veranda, a door that didn’t lock, one window. I’d packed according to the list: a paraffin stove, malaria pills, a water filter, sleeping bag, I’d added a pen that wrote upside down. I don’t know what scenario I imagined where that would come in handy, but here’s the important bit: my family are landowners, we have always owned the view. I slept on the floor and when I woke and opened the door, I remember thinking it was the first time in my life that the land outside my bedroom wasn’t mine. That was the extent of my experience of the world outside a tall, cold house in London. I had not the faintest idea what I was walking into. Our headmaster took one look and knew what we were made of. He was small and didn’t want us there, these ignorant White children come to fill in a year-off checklist at his school. He gave us what we deserved, the most glancing attention. As opposed to the White priest who liked to turn up in our village when the day was done and the magnificent African sun sent slanting rays across the grass. He would park at our hut, arrange picnic chairs on the concrete veranda and pour two glasses of champagne, one for him and one for me.

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His footsteps on the stairs, not the boy (I’d got him) but my father whose ferry had not left for France because of the hurricane that had ripped through England, ripping it apart. He’d turned his Porsche around and returned to London, parked it in the garage below my sister’s flat and seen the door kicked open. I was on my knees when I saw his feet, his shoes, looked up, saw him. I was scrubbing carpets in the wreckage, graffiti on the kitchen walls, the cooker pulled out, the fridge on its knees, a window smashed, the bathroom door off its hinges, furniture sideways, the stench of sick and cigarettes and beer and sex and teenagers who’d run off into the night. He didn’t talk to me for a long while after that. He’d say on the few occasions we’d be at the same table, Please tell her to pass the salt. And when it was my eighteenth birthday he stood in the hall and said, I’ve come up for your sister’s birthday so I won’t bother coming up for yours. But I’d got the boy, which was what I decided I cared about. A summer passed, my A levels passed, he must have forgotten it’s a bad idea to give a riotous girl in need of attention the keys to anywhere because when I was free from school forever, he gave me the keys to the house in France. I invited all my friends and some who weren’t my friends at all. We drank champagne in the sun and wine on mopeds and piled dirty plates in bin bags that we left out the back. We threw all the sunbeds in the pool. The idiot boys who were not my friends invented a game of shaming anyone who went to bed first by hauling barrels of water up the stairs and tipping them over the sleeping person. The beds were soaked, the mattresses ruined, the floor dripped through the ceilings below. We broke everything and left without clearing up or saying sorry. He didn’t talk to me for many more years after that, and I remember that hurt. But I was off, away from home, from France in disgrace to Italy, Spain, Morocco and soon, Zimbabwe.

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Home was a tall, cold house in London; intellectual, artistic, my father a writer, my mother an architect, guests, lodgers, friends and strangers, the bedrooms full of us and them, paintings on the walls, politics at the table. I moved amongst it all being pretty and clever, a seventies childhood of lentils and greens and feeling unseen, the house too full, my mother too busy, my father rarely there. I went to the local ILEA, The Marlborough, my mother was a governor. I was the only pupil in my year who lived in a private house. Everyone else came from the council flats across the road. I remember this because when I made the mistake of inviting a friend over, rumour spread in the playground that I lived in a museum. I hated school. I was lonely and uninspired. For a short time lovely Mrs Turner let me sit with her in the library learning to read but this was soon rumbled and I was thrown once again into the bear pit of the English state school playground, British Bulldog, Kiss Chase, and porn mags in the outside toilets. At eleven I went to Queen’s College, a private girls school, and started smoking. At thirteen I started clubbing, the Wag, The Mud, the Opera House and Heaven. I don’t remember who came with me but I remember my brown dress, tight and dangerous on a dark West End street, waiting for the night bus home. From Queen's I went to Westminster, a place of six hundred boys and thirty girls. Day one in Little Dean’s Yard had boys’ faces at every window choosing who would be theirs; I looked up and decided which would be mine. My sister asked me to water the plants in her flat while she went to America. I told everyone I was having a party. My father was supposed to be leaving for France that night. He kept his car in the garage below. He owned the flat. There was scaffolding on the building opposite. The party started, hoards came, many more than I’d invited, teenagers from other schools, word had spread. We barricaded the door but they hung off the scaffolding and threw bottles at the window. They kicked the door in. The music raged, bodies pressed, none of this bothered me; I was sixteen and only interested in the boy and the hurricane inside. I didn’t notice outside the wind that raged across England, tearing the land apart, stopping the ferry with my father on it from leaving.

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I rang him from a payphone in the arrivals hall. I hadn’t told him I was coming. I saw him weaving through the crowds of families reunited, suitcases, children, the sunshine of Israel glinting through the glass walls. He wore a yellow T-shirt. Sensible trousers. His tendrils of black hair were gone. For the first time I noticed his eyes were a little too close together. He took me by the arm and took me to his mother’s house where I sat at the table not able to understand the rapid conversation, his mother shelling beans and smiling occasionally but not in welcome, there was pity there already. He got me a hotel room. He explained, as he sat on the bed, that when he’d said he missed me he hadn’t meant missed me as if he wanted me to come. He said there was no way I could stay. He had devoted himself to his Orthodox faith, no amount of love or conversion would ever make me worthy, and he didn’t love me anyway. I was wrong on every count but especially the counting up of feelings on his fingers as he took off his trousers and pushed my head down. My sewing machine sat in the corner. My bag I’d packed forever.

I slept alone in a single bed and in the morning returned to the airport. At customs the military questioned this twenty-four-hour stay in their country; I had a stamp for Morocco in my passport from a trip long ago, they didn’t believe my explanation of why I’d been there or why I was leaving Israel so soon after arriving. They asked if I was a spy. I had to call my Israeli who wasn’t mine anymore, who never had been. I telephoned him from the payphone again, this time to come down to the airport and tell them a story of a stupid girl who’d bought a flight on a whim, who’d got the story of love all wrong. The military personnel thought it was the funniest story they’d ever heard. It must have been the way he told it. Oh how they laughed as I stood there, bag at my feet, sewing machine heavy in my hand. They waved me through, I’m not sure the Israeli said goodbye. When I got home, I found the note I’d left on the kitchen table unopened. At supper that night my mother asked, How was your day?

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I sat with the Rabbi in his plush, Regency room, red cushions, a view of the park. I told him I wanted to convert to Judaism. At school I had sided with the Jewish girls, opted for Jewish prayers instead of Christian, I felt that those beginnings at a private girls’ school on Harley Street had come full circle, it was meant to be. I told the Rabbi I was committed. My feet were bare, he was kind, he said love wasn’t enough of a reason. He sent me away to long for my Israeli in the stark uncomfortable spare bedroom of my mother’s tall, uncomfortable house. I sat at the desk facing the window and made necklaces from beads brought home from an Indian market. I didn’t talk to my family and they didn’t talk to me. Days passed. Weeks of silence. I was unthinkably absent from my surroundings. I was terribly sad. One day, unable to contain the loss, I picked up the phone and rang him. I remember the telephone in its alcove, the carpet beneath my feet, the sudden and unexpected jolt of his voice. I told him I missed him and incredibly I heard him say he missed me too. This was enough, the only invitation I needed, it was like pressing go on a racer who has leant against the starting rope, ears trained for the pistol. I was off. That afternoon I went to a travel agent near the station and bought a plane ticket to Israel. I came home and packed a bag. I imagined a life of headscarves and simplicity and picked up my sewing machine, too. Money allows for these things; a momentary flick of the switch, a plane ticket bought, no conversations had with anyone but him. I told no one. I took a taxi to the airport, a folded note on the kitchen table for my mother that I thought she’d find at breakfast. It said, Gone to live in Tel Aviv.

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