Grievance. Marguerite Alexander
it about men that they always have to have the last word? Don’t they know it’s a sign of weakness?’ Tant pis, he thinks. At least the worst of this wretched day’s now over.
Less than an hour later, Steve is sitting in his basement kitchen with his wife and daughters, drinking tea. The setting would confound Pete, whose ideas of minimalist splendour in a riverside or Clerkenwell warehouse, the architectural equivalent of Steve’s monochrome clothes, leather jacket and motorbike, are rooted in magazines rather than experience. The tall, early-Victorian house is in Primrose Hill, an area of London that acquired a fashionable status among intellectuals at a period beyond the reach of his students’ memories. It was bought with a mixture of family money (an aspect of his background on which Steve has kept so uniformly silent that he has almost forgotten it) and the earnings from his groundbreaking book on critical theory. And far from being minimalist, the kitchen is cluttered with the residue of family life – schoolbags dropped on to the floor; a cork board covered with notices of school events, parties, dental appointments and photographs of Steve’s daughters, Jessica and Emily, making funny faces for the camera; and a cat sleeping in front of a stove in which a real fire – albeit the smokelessfuel variety that is permitted in London – is burning.
All the internal walls of the basement have been removed. At the front of the house, facing the street, there is a refectory table, currently strewn with interrupted homework. The working kitchen area is in the middle and a family sitting room, with the stove and a french window leading into the garden, at the back. Jessica and Emily have rooms fully equipped with desks and computers, but often prefer to do those parts of their homework that require less concentration within reach of their mother. In the Woolf household, work, conversation and the rituals of family life are part of a continuous, seamless process.
Steve is stretched out in front of the stove that his wife, Martha, has lit for the first time this year, at one end of a once elegant, now sagging, sofa, with a mug of tea in one hand and his free arm round the shoulders of his younger daughter, Emily. At fifteen, Emily is a reluctant teenager who has yet to engage her parents in the turbulent pitched battles of adolescence, preferring instead to prolong her enjoyment of the physical and emotional warmth of childhood. Martha is standing at one of the kitchen counters, preparing vegetables for the sauce they will eat, with pasta and a salad, for dinner but, thanks to the kitchen design on which she herself insisted, she is still enough part of the group to be involved in what is happening.
Jessica is sitting cross-legged on the rug next to the cat, reading an essay on the Reformation that she finished half an hour ago. She is quicker, livelier, more ambitious than her sister, and hopes to read history at Balliol; and although Steve is opposed on principle to all forms of élitism, he thinks none the less that it would be a waste of his daughter’s considerable talents if she were to entrust them to a lesser institution, where the best possible teaching in her subject is not available.
It’s difficult for Steve to remember now (although Martha occasionally teases him about it) how reluctant he was to have children. The life of the mind has always played a crucial role in his own personal mythology – not just the level of his intelligence but his insistence on living according to reason – and it seemed to him that the desire for children was pure biological determinism. Not only would his own life be more satisfactory without them, in terms of personal freedom, but he’d seen the deplorable effects of parenthood on his contemporaries. Their brains turned to mush, they had no shame in drooling over the most routine achievements of their offspring, recounting every early utterance as though it embodied the wisdom of the ages, but most shocking of all, they lost the ability to make principled and objective decisions. Self-interest, disguised as laudable concern for their children, ruled.
In the event Martha went ahead in the teeth of his opposition, saying that, if it came to it, she would bring up a baby on her own. As she had known all along, there was no need for such desperate measures. He was overwhelmed by his own feelings, falling in love, first with Jessica, and then, despite his fears that an experience of such magnitude and importance couldn’t be repeated, with Emily. They forced him to acknowledge the blind spots in his own reason. Now, despite the preoccupations he brought home with him, and his urgent need for Martha’s good sense and counsel, he is in a kind of heaven, with Emily nestling comfortably against him and Jessica, who has inherited his looks, intellectual ambition and restlessness, filling him with pride for her powers of argument and elegant prose style.
She ends with a flourish and a graceful tribute to his tuition. In a clear, ringing voice, she quotes from Donne’s third Satire –
‘“On a huge hill, Cragged, and steep, Truth stands, and he that will Reach her, about must, and about must go…”’
In the course of an earlier consultation on the essay, Steve supplied the quotation, to illustrate the tireless questioning of the English Protestant at the time of the Reformation.
‘Well, what do you think?’ Jessica asks, when she has allowed a short pause for her achievement to be assessed.
‘I’m speechless with admiration,’ Steve says.
‘That isn’t good enough,’ says Jessica. ‘Nothing’s perfect, you must have some criticism. You can’t put your critical faculties aside just because I’m your daughter. Unless the fire and the prospect of dinner are making you lazy.’
‘You’ve silenced and stunned my critical faculties,’ Steve says. ‘By showing them perfection, you’ve rendered them redundant.’
‘What would your students say if they could hear you now?’ asks Martha, who has finished her preparations for dinner, and is now sitting in an armchair facing the sofa. ‘They’d think you’d gone soft in the head.’
‘They would be just as impressed as I am. Only the chronically resentful fail to recognise true excellence when they’re presented with it.’
‘So, how many of your students are as good as I am?’ Jessica asks.
‘Oh, pipe down,’ says Emily. ‘I bet none of his students are as vain as you are.’
‘I wouldn’t bet on that,’ says Steve. He looks at Jessica steadily, consideringly. ‘No, none of my students is as good as you.’
‘In that case, I have a request.’
‘There are almost certainly none as crafty as you,’ says Martha.
Steve’s deep sigh expresses the dilemma of the doting father, who finds himself unable to refuse his daughter something she really wants but fears that what she wants may not be good for her. ‘Go on, Jessica, I’m listening,’ he says, in a deliberate parody of the Victorian paterfamilias.
‘I want to go clubbing in Leicester Square on Saturday night with a crowd from school, and I want not to have to leave at a set time, and not to have to ring you in the course of the evening, and then I want to go back and sleep at Louisa’s house. I intend to turn up here at around lunchtime on Sunday, a touch jaded, perhaps, in the short term, but reinvigorated by a much-needed shot of youth culture. That’ll leave me with plenty of time to do any outstanding homework, although as it happens I’m well ahead of the game. Please, please, please.’
Jessica still has the manner of the precocious child. Her mastery of the situation, of the language and argument required to present her case, is charmingly at odds with her childlike demeanour. And Emily, who feels that, however hard she tries, she will never be able to achieve her sister’s dazzling blend of naïveté and sophistication, leaves the shelter of her father’s arm and slumps at the other end of the sofa. In many ways she would prefer not to be a witness to the scene that is being enacted, but she is fascinated by Jessica’s performance none the less.
Steve gives another deep sigh and, released by Emily, adjusts himself into a more purposeful sitting position. His opinion of Louisa is well known within the family. He first made her acquaintance when he bumped into her on the landing one night, not knowing that she was in the house, on his way to bed after arriving home late. A mask-like face, of a kind that could only be achieved with the application of several layers of makeup, had loomed out of the darkness, and further inspection had