Friday 25th: Mathilde, Monday, School Trip

Immortalised and fixed in the cultural consciousness by this apocryphal utterance, the Princess Louise (always with that obligatory definite article) began her after-mauling life as a generous, humble benefactress, scarred terribly in the physical sense but transformed and liberated mentally: the standard interpretation is that her new physical hideousness and disability lent her a spiritual and moral stillness and strength; from this position, in the cool, revealing light of the spacious palace rooms, she was able to reflect on her life and review her previous behaviours, and, from that analysis, resolve to use the time that remained to her to better purpose, and in pursuit of the common good. She thus became a lasting symbol: a symbol of how a person – and a people – could change, turning away from a selfish and venal life and (despite personal hardship and physical suffering) embrace a life of generosity and philanthropy.

Inside the cathedral the teachers corral the children into an aisle, and Mathilde directs their gaze to the stained-glass window that was dedicated in the Princess Louise’s honour in [date]. The bright chunks of refracted light play on the children’s faces as their eyes move from image to image in the big leaded pane, which is dominated by the cowled Princess handing over alms to a mixed congregation of the picturesquely needy: the elderly, the lame, the blind, the orphaned. The Princess’s face is tastefully obscured by the pale blue sweep of her cowl, but her single visible eye is dark and reverentially upturned towards heaven, from where a cleansing white light falls upon the idealised scene. She is an image of selflessness, self-knowledge and self-sacrifice, and she has been the moral bogeywoman invoked to shame the generations of ungrateful, disobedient, selfish, surly children who have questioned why they had to do anything that wasn’t to their taste or convenience. She’s the unimpeachably pious goody-goody and bete blanc of the modern teenager, just as she was in Mathilde’s household when she was passing through those difficult adolescent years after her parents’ divorce.

[Her father eventually leaving in the Autumn of <1974>, the day before – something that fixes it for her at a precise historical moment…this is the important continuation of the story of her {my…} emotional makeup… {{In the morning, how there’s sense/smell of her father’s usual shaving cream/aftershave/presence in the cold grey bathroom when she’s getting ready for school: no sense of her father having been there that morning…that puzzling space and absence, as if the house has somehow got bigger, changed shape. (Think of the bathroom at Northolt…)}}]

The children are all looking at her, waiting for her continue [she’d gone off into a ‘remembering her parents splitting up reverie – which always makes her feel sad and nostalgic, and yet determined (for the nth time…) to try and overcome the emotionally hobbling behaviours that continue to be the legacy of this period…].

[…]

The cathedral is becoming busier, with the crowds of tourists outnumbering the small band of irritated believers, and the noise level is rising, the hum of murmured conversations overlaying the squeak of shoe soles and the echoed hush that’s the base sound of the building’s cavernous interior. The children are allowed to light tremulous candles of tribute to the Princess Louise, and then they’re moved along to their final destination for the day: [the baths? the nat. hist. Mus.? Sci Mus? Zoo?…zoo would provide an opportunity for the kids to be off doing something that M isn’t supervising, and an opportunity for her to drop into a Jan/Mariette-centred reverie…perhaps zoo-based, then shading into memories of the ‘shell lamp’ at their house (all part of the same summer holiday visit?) – this could bring me back to her relationship with Jan, and prepare the ground for when (after her positive/surprised reflections on the day) she gets home and the house is full of people talking about him…]

[…]

[Her relief and amazement that it (the river trip) all went so well. The returning power of self-belief, and realising how ‘silly’ her worries have all been. (Everything turned out OK in the end, as usual. It wasn’t as bad as she thought it would be – as usual. She surprised herself by being competent and enjoying herself – as usual.)] [cycle =Fear; Enforced action, overcoming/ignoring/despite fear; Relief and resurgent self-belief.]

[Aggregates/something mineral in sacks scraping heavily up the brick walls of a canal-side warehouse…]

The sound of the [?] in the rough hessian [?] sacks [scraping] against the brick as the little crane jerks them up the side of the warehouse is evocative of shingle being tumbled by waves on a beach: a sloshy, weighty, wet scrunch, with a suggestion of grit, and of shiny surfaces scraping over each other in the dark. She imagines the gritty feel of sand on surf-smoothed stones, and the salty, fishy smell of crab fragments and shells collected on childhood beach walks, and remembers the mixed delicacy and knobbliness of the bags of shells in Aunt Mariette’s workroom.

Whenever she visited Aunt Mariette and Uncle Jan with her parents, she looked forward to being able to slip away from the adults once they had sat down in the ever-chilly lounge with their cups of tea and too-small pieces of insubstantial sponge cake. The bus journey over would always be a tight-lipped, aching buttocked affair: her mother would be picking at stray hairs and bits of fluff on Mathilde and her father’s clothes, fussing at Mathilde’s hair, and – always at least once per journey – spitting on her sweet-perfumed handkerchief and wiping at the corners of her daughter’s lips, where a tiny glob of marmalade or speck of toast had anchored themselves during the family’s rushed, tense breakfast. The bus journey would be conducted in silence, with Mathilde knowing that her parents would both be so moody and irritable that even the most innocuous of comments or questions could invoke an industrial strength nag or admonition. When they arrive at her aunt and uncle’s house, her mother will tug at hems and straighten lapels before ringing the door bell. Mathilde once received a shockingly sharp slap to the back of her leg and a hissed “Pack it in!” when she dared to run her fingers over the pale blue paint that was flaking away from part of the front door frame; there were still surprised, indignant tears in her eyes when Aunt Mariette, typically [70s] elegant in her nylon trouser suit and multicoloured hooped woollen cardigan, opens the door and smilingly welcomes them. Mathilde remembers the guilty feeling she had as she sat in her relative’s parlour, so close to her aunt and uncle, and with the dusty residue of her misdemeanour evident under her fingernails, and dry on her fingertips when she rubbed them together surreptitiously in the shadowed space between her leg and the side of the capacious armchair.

After sitting passively for a few minutes, sipping at Aunt Mariette’s milk-weak tea, Mathilde would always ask if she could ‘go to the toilet’. Upstairs, where the stilted, low-toned voices of the grown-ups barely carried, she would tiptoe along the landing and gently ease the workroom door open, where Aunt Mariette’s works in progress were arranged along the worktop […]

(c. 1200 words)