Elementals - A. S. Byatt [52]
Anyway, Jael. Why do I remember Jael? Metaphors. I do know – I have always known – that I felt a faint click of symmetry as I drove the point of my pencil into the paper. Pencil, peg. Another detached image, like the grenade. Pointed. Pointless. I do know also that whenever I remember that patch of fierce colour I remember, like an after-image, a kind of dreadful murky colour, a yellow-khaki-mustard-thick colour, that is the colour of the days of our boredom. For we were not unhappy girls, we were cared-for, nice, clever girls, and we were bored. It’s quite hard to think back to that time. All the buildings were the same colours, green and cream. We wore milk-chocolate-coloured gymslips over khaki-coloured shirts, with what we then amiably called nigger-brown ties. I do not believe any of us thought of the nasty meaning of those words, nigger-brown, we just recognised the colour. Ignorance, innocence, boredom. It’s strange how I hesitate, out of fear, to write down the true fact that we used that word, in that unloaded way. It’s so long ago, we shall be judged without being imagined. All the excitement of life was in books. Jane Eyre, with her burning bed-curtains, or being punished in the Red Room (I’ve made films with both those images, fire insurance and children’s furniture). Ivanhoe charging, Robin Hood in the dappled green light with his bow, Eliza escaping across the breaking ice, wolves and narwhals, volcanoes and tidal waves, excitement was all in books, none of it, nothing at all, seeped out into life. We were the pre-television age, and we cannot – that is, the absolute quality of our boredom cannot – be imagined by those who grew up with the magic lantern, the magic window on the world, the Pandora’s box peopling the world with temptations and emotions and knowledge and other places and people in the corner of the lounge/sitting room/front room. I know young people now have a worked-up nostalgia for an imaginary time when families communicated, people made things, played games, instead of passively watching. Now and then we did. I remember the physical pleasure of frenzied playground skipping. I remember the passionate life with which I invested a collection of lead ponies. But mostly – apart from books – I remember this smeared, fuggy, limited light of boredom, where you couldn’t see very much or very far, and the horizon was unimaginable.
Human beings are human beings, Lara and the cameramen might say. You must have had loves and hatreds, friends and enemies, then, as now. We did have gangs. We had two gangs, in our class, to be precise. They were called, unimaginatively, after their ‘leaders’. One was Wendy’s gang, and the other was Rachel’s gang. Wendy’s gang was bigger, because Wendy was the most popular girl in the class, which was surprising, perhaps, since she was also both the cleverest girl and the best at sports, more or less. She came top in English, and top in Maths (and top in Scripture, as far as I can remember – Scripture, as I said, didn’t count). She won races, particularly long-distance ones, particularly the junior school cross-country run. Wendy was good-looking in a completely inoffensive, unexceptionable way. She had honey-blonde hair, blue eyes, a broad brow, a wide mouth. She was tall, but not too tall, she was developing into a woman, but not awkwardly. She was a nice girl. It wasn’t fair that she should have everything, and be nice with it, but that was how it was. She was the person in the parable of the talents who was given ten talents and industriously made another ten talents. (Did I see myself as the servant with the one talent, who hid it in the earth in case it got stolen?) Rachel was dark, and sinewy, good too at games but not at all in Wendy’s class as an academic high-flyer.