When I Was Otherwise Read online

  When I Was Otherwise

  A Novel

  Stephen Benatar

  In memory of my parents.

  Also of Gran, Jack, Molla, Joan

  —and Nancy.

  INTRODUCTION

  From the start of this subtle, complex and compassionate novel we know the sad and macabre outcome. It is set forth in the unembellished Guardian newspaper report from March 1983 telling an all-too-frequent story: the death of a reclusive old person in a locked, dilapidated house, found when police, alerted by neighbours, break in. Except that in this case there are two bodies and one of them is a skeleton. And there is a survivor. I remember reading the account at the time, and my own commonplace reaction—how dreadful, how bizarre, it’s unimaginable, how could it have happened? Then I allowed my mind to slide away from the dreadful facts, because they are dreadful, embodying as they do our deepest fears, of sickness, old age, helplessness, loneliness, of the process of dying and of dying unloved. But Stephen Benatar did not let his mind slide away from uncomfortable facts. He imagines the unimaginable for us and shows us complex truths about human nature, our universal longings and regrets, our hopes and fears, our gradual accustomization to our circumstances which confine but do not entirely define us.

  The shocking ending revealed in Chapter 1 might lead us to expect grim desperation. Instead what we get for much of the time is sparkling social comedy—the best sort where social conventionality, hypocrisy and conversational manoeuvring part hide and part reveal underlying emotions and moral attitudes. The comparisons that come to mind are Ayckbourn’s plays and Austen’s minor characters. Like them Benatar can make us want to shut our eyes and stop our ears, not because his characters perpetrate horrors or are monsters of depravity but because they make us squirm with embarrassment. They do this in particular when they are most conscious of acting a part, when the role required by circumstances isn’t quite in line with inner feelings, sometimes because there is no ‘inner’. Inexperienced, ‘not interested in anything’ Marsha, recently married, makes both reader and her husband cringe as she plays the role of coquettish doting wife—in public too. Daisy, the monstrous central character, is constantly presenting herself as Joan of Arc, or Greta Garbo or Sarah Siddons or, as she puts it, she ‘plays the giddy goat’. Both women have a distressing propensity to burst into song. They share this with tragic, embarrassing Rachel in Benatar’s brilliant novel of encroaching madness ‘Wish her Safe at Home’. Songs articulate both fantasy to escape to and familiarity to cling to. And they help to place the characters in their historical context.

  Both novels map a territory Stephen Benatar has made his own: the weird hinterland of ordinary life where eccentricity shades into the bizarre, battiness into delusion and dementia. He explores the disjunction between the inner self with all its vulnerabilities and insecurities, with its craving for admiration and affection, and the public self, clinging either to conventionality or to eccentricity as a defence from the inner void. His tragedy is the tragedy of the mundane. His lonely, hapless characters are often instinctively manipulative in their need to think well of themselves in the face of the knowledge of their own inadequacies. They fear scorn and rejection. They long to shine and to find their rightful place in the world. As in real life their place is largely defined by their physical surroundings: the thin walls of Marsha and Andrew’s first house which play their part in a disastrous dinner party, Erica’s wallpaper, so scorned by Daisy, Daisy’s ‘flat’ which Andrew when in Galahad/Romeo mode discovers is really a bed-sit. Only Dan, the charitable owner of the house the police break into in ‘When I Was Otherwise’ seems not to be discontented with his lot until malnutrition and household squalor make him angry. His delusions are benign, consisting of nostalgia for the time he now thinks of as ‘the good old days’ however imperfect they actually were—except when poignantly contrasted with his widowed present.

  In ‘Wish her Safe at Home’ Stephen Benatar had focused with painful intensity on the increasingly delusive world of a single, extremely unreliable narrator. The scope of ‘When I Was Otherwise’ is much broader and his methods more complex. The story opens in Chapter 2 when Daisy arrives at her brother-in-law Dan’s invitation to live with him and his sister Marsha in his semi-detached house in Hendon. Even before the ‘party’ to celebrate (the first of a number of comic meals in the novel) we are taken back to earlier examples of Dan’s tolerant generosity, and its attendant embarrassments. Throughout the novel Benatar cuts between the period when the three live together in the last years and months of their lives and their reminiscences of the past, some shared, some individual. The structure therefore prevents us from hurrying forward too urgently to devour the catastrophe. Rather we must think about the characters’ lives as a web of family influences, social interactions and historical circumstances. It allows Benatar to make telling juxtapositions as in the brilliant little episode in which comic frustrations around a telephone box darken in a sentence to foreshadow world events. Perspectives are constantly shifting. His episodes and characters have affinities with some of Jane Austen’s. Marsha’s husband Andrew, for instance, views the prospect of an unexpected weekend guest with grim dismay worthy of Mr John Knightly at the prospect of a party, and the downright rudeness of Mr Palmer in ’Sense and Sensibility’ in his masculine deployment of the newspaper. Whatever she thinks later on, a newly-wed Marsha describes her husband, embarrassingly, as ‘an absolute card’ while laying her cheek against his. Like Charlotte Palmer she describes her husband’s boorishness as ’droll’. But whereas Mr Palmer disappears when his comic potential has been exploited, Andrew has depth as well as surface. When Marsha tempts him with a specially bought peach as a peace offering for having invited Daisy for the weekend, he won’t take it and eat it immediately because he would hate to be greedy. It must be eaten, decently, with knife and fork, for dessert. Benatar skewers him brilliantly when clandestinely at Doncaster races with Daisy he backs a winner. Back in London he buys Daisy a frivolous hat; when he gets home he gives Marsha three pounds for herself and a guinea to put in the baby’s Post Office Savings account. We are not told what he does with the rest of the twenty pounds. But he is basically a conventional, limited, scrupulous man, and as we later learn in one of Benatar’s asides a heroic one.

  We are cunningly lured by the author to make assessments of the characters, to catch them in their manoeuvres, their hypocrisies, to feel sorry for them or to scorn them. They are after all fictional characters, not alive, so fair game. But a ‘framed piece of woolwork which could have been Victorian’ which Marsha and Dan bring back from a jumble sale for Daisy has a text as well as flowers and butterflies: ‘Judge not, that ye be not judged’. Daisy feels sure that the woman who worked it must be dead. ‘Alive she would have been just another woman, not someone you could speculate on with any real degree of satisfaction.’ She shares our satisfaction in fictional judgment. In calling her a monster I have of course misrepresented her. True she is the most theatrical of his characters, not quite a bogey-woman, but deeply unsettling to many of those whose lives she touches. She is opinionated, combative, scornful. She is adept at wrong-footing others. She is manipulative, she preys on other people’s sympathies. She cadges constantly, especially cigarettes and drink. Her chuckle could drive one mad. She can be rude and vindictive. She is boastful about her education, littering her conversation with quotations (the Bible, Shakespeare, Congreve, Kipling, Pope). Drawn into the power games we feel smug when we recognize them, miffed if we don’t. This habit of Daisy’s also serves to universalize the story and by implication to assert the importance of literature in enlarging and clarifying experience. But it can infuriate other characters and in the end contributes to her downfall. We c
an’t be sure how much Daisy deludes herself. But she has shown fortitude in two world wars and twice the author speaks truth in his own voice to assert her stalwart capacity for devotion and compassion in her private life. Though she frequently talks of ‘taking a dose’ she actually believes that to commit suicide except in insupportable terminal suffering is the action of ‘an ingrate and a coward’. It is painful to see her increasingly diminished, powerless and angry in old age, still not able to curb the devilry that made her antagonize people. Like thousands of old people she wishes she could be somewhere else: ‘And abruptly she brought her fists down on the bed, one on either side of her, in a despairing attempt to release a little of her frustration. She suddenly felt so very much unloved and isolated and homesick.’

  Home as a place of safety becomes an obsession for Marsha. She knows she has become a stick-in-the-mud ‘at first through force of circumstances, but finally through inclination’ and she resents this. Initially no more than a pretty face with no inner resources, in two instances she is selfishly decisive. She dominates the final phase of the novel as she draws her brother into a reclusive existence. She effectively creates an exclusion zone around those over whom she wishes to have power and she retreats into fantasies of the past in an attempt to rectify the disappointments of her life. Nothing however can disguise the presence of the skeletal body in the bedroom. In a short, unforgettable paragraph we are made to examine it and see a kind of gruesome beauty. Here we are forced to confront the great fact of life. But the novel also allows us, as Marsha longs to do, ‘to laugh over the trivial, unmemorable things that make up the fabric of a life.’ And laughter, according to Daisy was ‘the only thing which kept you sane. No, it was the only thing that kept you alive.’ Memories make up the fabric of this novel. It is closely woven, dark and light together, and brilliantly executed. If you read this book you will be touched, entertained, appalled. The intricacy and subtlety of its design will reward you if you read it again.

  Gillian Carey

  When I Was Otherwise

  Man knows where first he ships himself, but he

  Can never tell where shall his landing be.

  Man’s Dying-Place Uncertain, Robert Herrick.

  Part One

  1

  On Wednesday 23rd March 1983 there appeared in the Guardian the following report:

  An inquest is to be held on the two elderly women whose bodies were found on Monday in the dilapidated North London house they shared with a man who was the brother of one and the brother-in-law of the other. Post-mortem examinations revealed yesterday that they had both died of natural causes—but that the older woman had been dead for up to a year, her demise probably hastened by complications arising from a fall.

  As the story of the hermit-like existence of the Stormont family gradually emerged, a spokesman for Barnet Council and for the local health authority defended doctors and social workers who had been involved with them. “It’s a bizarre case. You can’t make people go to hospital or have meals-on-wheels if they won’t have it. But we did try,” the spokesman said.

  The two women and the 83-year-old widower (ironically, his birthday was on Monday) refused all offers of help. But for months the grimy windows of the house in Alderton Crescent, Hendon, hid a gruesome secret. Mrs Daisy Stormont, who would now have been 89, lay dead, while Mrs Marsha Poynton, 67, and Mr Daniel Stormont continued their strange, reclusive existence. A police spokesman said that at one time Marsha had slept in the same room as her dead relative, unable or unwilling to leave her chair.

  Police were alerted twice in the last twelve months by a neighbour concerned about the family’s health, but were turned away by Mrs Poynton, who spoke to them only through the letterbox.

  Last week police were alerted a third time, forced the lock on the front door and found Marsha ill in bed. An ambulance was summoned but both she and her brother refused to leave the house. Nor did they disclose the macabre presence of their deceased sister-in-law. A home help called at the weekend, without being able to gain admittance. On Monday it was decided once more to force the lock. This time Marsha was found to be dead.

  Later, the skeletal remains of Daisy were discovered.

  Mr Stormont, now recovering in council care, did not wish to speak to anyone yesterday—not even to a nephew from Australia.

  2

  “Well, here I am, you see. Turned up again, like the bad penny! I’ve brought a cake.”

  “Hello, Daisy. Oh, isn’t your cheek cold! How wonderful to see you.”

  “And you, dear. My things are in the car. Shall I fetch them?”

  “No, that’s all right, I’ll bring them in later.”

  “I haven’t been inside this house for an eternity—maybe longer! Where’s Dan? Too scared to put in an appearance?”

  “No, you big silly. But he thought he’d have time to slip out to the shops. I kept telling him he wouldn’t.”

  Marsha closed the front door and, having tried unsuccessfully to relieve her sister-in-law of her coat and woollen gloves, led her into the lounge. She had switched on the fire some half-hour earlier and Daisy made straight for it, standing with her back to the imitation live coals, rubbing her hands.

  “Ah! This is a bit more like it! With any luck, I may begin to feel human again!”

  “I’ll put the kettle on, shall I?”

  “That’s the spirit.” Daisy gave her customary, rather husky, laugh. “Talking of which, I was meaning to provide a bottle of Scotch…to go with the cake. But the pubs were shut.”

  “I’m very glad they were. Drink these days is hopelessly expensive.”

  In the doorway Marsha hesitated.

  “Oh! But would you like just the tiniest drop of whisky now? Instead of the tea?”

  “What a lovely thought, dear…a real piece of inspiration! Oh, but do you think we should? No, tea will be very nice.”

  “I’m going to pour us both a whisky,” announced Marsha, wickedly.

  “Well, I can see there won’t be any stopping you!”

  “No, there won’t.”

  “Because the bit’s well and truly between your teeth! By the way, dear, I take mine neat.”

  “I shan’t be long. It’s in the kitchen.”

  “In that case, wouldn’t it be sensible to put on the kettle at the same time?”

  A moment later she informed the empty room:

  “But what a funny place to keep your whisky! Never heard of anything so extraordinary!”

  On Marsha’s return, Daisy had taken off her coat and thrown it carelessly over the back of a chair. She had stuffed her woolly pompommed hat into one of its pockets and run stubby, impatient fingers through her tight black curls. She was a short woman, trim, but even in her old age—Dan and Marsha had the previous night decided on seventy-six, at least seventy-six—she was still a sturdy one. Her white blouse looked a little grubby; her green jacket and pleated grey skirt could likewise have done with a good clean. But her solid black lace-ups shone as if newly and vigorously polished. Daisy had pulled up one of the armchairs very close to the fire and the elements were reflected in the leather of her left shoe.

  Marsha issued a warning. “Now you watch out that you don’t get chilblains!”

  “My dear girl, why should I? Such things belong exclusively to the frightened folk. They exist only in the mind.”

  “Well, if that’s so, I must surely be one of the frightened folk.”

  Marsha set down the tray and handed Daisy her drink. Daisy certainly managed to thank her, but only as an afterthought. Oh, my hat! Whisky served up in a sherry glass! Why not use a thimble and have done with it?

  “You must have a very steady hand. You didn’t spill a drop.”

  “I think I do have a steady hand. But I also took care not to overfill the glasses.”

  “Yes, that’s true, dear. I noticed. Anyhow…here’s mud in your eye! Happy times!”

  They drank.

  “I see they changed the wallpaper. Jus
t as well. Not that this one’s much of an improvement.”

  “Why? What’s the matter with it?” Marsha’s laugh was a little nervous.

  Daisy merely shrugged.

  “I always considered Erica had quite nice taste,” said Marsha; never having thoroughly learned to leave well alone.

  “Oh, taste. Yes, possibly. But did you ever see anything so utterly wishy-washy in all your born days?”

  “Now, Daisy…”

  “Naturally I’m referring to the wallpaper, not to Erica.” Daisy looked about her with disdain. “Dull. No spirit of adventure.”

  She added as though it were the final and most crushing epithet in anyone’s vocabulary: “Suburban.”

  “I really don’t think it’s so bad.”

  “Yes, I know, dear. I daresay you’re right.”

  Daisy gazed into her empty glass for an instant. She sighed lengthily, held it over her tongue to make sure there wasn’t any more to be extracted, then put it in her lap. Marsha at once stood up, took it from her and replaced it on the tray.

  “Mean-spirited,” said Daisy.

  Marsha smiled. “I don’t see how a wallpaper can be called mean-spirited.”

  “Don’t you?”

  Marsha took Daisy’s coat and hung it in the hall. She said when she came back: “I must say you’re looking fit.”

  “What’s that?” Daisy fiddled a moment with the bulky hearing aid which she carried in her breast pocket. It gave a high-pitched whistle. “Oh, drat this thing! I’ll swear it has a mind of its own.”

  “Like you, Daisy.” Marsha mouthed the words and pointed.

  Daisy chuckled. “Yes, dear, like me! How right you are. Just like me, thank goodness! Ah, that’s got it!” This final exclamation was as triumphant as if, after prolonged effort, she’d swatted some persistent fly. “Now, what was it you said?”