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  To my Darling love for last Christmas of the Century with 1000 years of devotion

  It was a shock. I had to put the book down and let the hyacinth’s perfume numb this moment like morphine. Then I picked the book up again and gazed at the inscription. I wondered who that spectral woman was, twenty years ago, the woman who had received this book with its loving inscription.

  I tried to connect with Her (who is my younger self), to remember how she had responded to this gift at the time. I did not want to see her too clearly. But I did try to wave to her. I knew she would not want to see me (so there you are, nearly sixty and alone) and I did not want to see her either (so there you are, forty years old, hiding your talent, trying to keep your family together), but she and I haunted each other across time.

  Hello. Hello. Hello.

  My younger self (fierce, sad) knew that I did not judge her. We had both lost and gained various things in the twenty years that separated us from the moment of my receiving this gift with its loving inscription. Now and again I got flashbacks to the family house. It was haunted by my unhappiness, and though I tried to change the mood and find something good about it, the house would not oblige my wish to make a new memory of the mood. The crumbling apartment block on the hill was much more modest than that house, yet its mood was upbeat, serene, gentler, hopeful rather than hopeless.

  I glanced at the inscription again.

  To my Darling love for last Christmas of the Century

  The odd thing was that the book itself (by a famous male author) was about a man who has left his family and sets about making a new life with various women. One of these young women adores him so much that she reaches over to take the snot out of his nostrils. She has made him her purpose in life and we are clueless about her own sense of purpose. They have lots of sex but we have no idea if she enjoys it as much as he does. If this author’s female character feels or thinks about anything at all, her feelings and thoughts are about him.

  It was likely that I had requested this book at the time, so perhaps I had turned what is called a blind eye to all of this, or maybe there was something I wanted to find out. After all, I had brought it with me to the new shed. Yes, all these years later, there was something I still wanted to find out about writing character, in particular female character. After all, to think and feel and live and love more freely is the point of life, so it is an interesting project to construct a female character who has no life. The story in this book was about a woman who has gifted her life to a man. This is not something to be tried at home but it is usually where it happens.

  How would a writer set about the massive task of giving a female character no consciousness, not even an unconscious life, as if it were the most normal thing in the world? Perhaps it was normal in his world. And yet it takes a lot of work to construct any sort of character in fiction. The writer and film director Céline Sciamma noted that when a female character is given subjectivity, she is given back her desires. It occurred to me that to create a female character with desires that were not just his own might have been something an author of his generation couldn’t even imagine. In a sense, the she in his story was a missing female character. Her own desires were what were missing. For this reason, the author’s book had been useful to me. Its lack of consciousness was a house I had attempted to dismantle in my own living and working life. Real estate is a tricky business. We rent and buy and sell and inherit it, but we also knock it down.

  At this time, I found myself possessed by the ending in Elena Ferrante’s novel The Story of the Lost Child, in which Lila, now in her late sixties, has disappeared without trace. From childhood to womanhood the lives of Lila and Lenù have been braided together, yet finally they are separated by Lila’s disappearance. ‘I loved Lila,’ Lenù writes. ‘I wanted her to last. But I wanted it to be I who made her last.’ By the end of the book, Lila has become a missing female character.

  As I sat in the chair by the window in my new writing shed, I asked myself why I was so interested in missing female characters? Perhaps I did not mean women who had literally gone missing (such as Lila) but who were missing their own desires.

  And what about the women who had acted on their desires but then been cut down, their life rewritten, their existence retold to dilute their power and undermine their authority? Perhaps I was searching for a major goddess who, in the patriarchal rewrite of her existence, had become lost and gone missing?

  I was thinking of Hecate at the crossroads with her burning torches and keys, Medusa with her snakes and fatal gaze, Artemis with her hunting dogs and deer, Aphrodite with her doves, Demeter with her mares, Athena with her owl. Whenever I saw eccentric and sometimes mentally fragile older women feeding pigeons on the pavement of every city in the world, I thought, Yes, there she is, she is one of those cut-down goddesses who has become demented by life.

  Were the goddesses real estate owned by patriarchy?

  Are women real estate owned by patriarchy?

  And what about women who are rented for sex by men?

  Who owns the deeds to the land in that transaction?

  Most married, heterosexual male authors of my age were looked after by their wives at literary events. One of these men told me at a book festival that if he did not transgress too many boundaries in his marriage, there would always be a comforting pair of slippers warming for him by the fire. Thankfully, his wife managed to run away for a cigarette on the fire escape.

  I regarded her invigorating conversation with me as much more interesting than any of the events I had attended at the festival. Many people in the audience would have enjoyed her thoughts on fragile tyrants, the ways in which love is altered by physical infidelity, and how she had dreamed her breasts were made from glass.

  Would there ever be a comforting pair of slippers (pink, feathered) warming for me by the egg-shaped fireplace? Not unless I became a female character in a vintage Hollywood movie and paid a housekeeper to put them there. ‘Mx Klimowski,’ I would say, ‘I believe in the morning my arthritic elbows will need to be massaged with oil of arnica.’ Very well, madame. My housekeeper would be a character with many desires of their own because I was writing the script. I could see them leaning against the dusky-pink plaster walls of my real estate, wearing a brooch in the shape of a bee. Your soup is ready. I have fed your wolves and prepared the smoking pipe with your desired brand of tobacco. By the way, madame (my housekeeper’s lips were stained from the raspberries they had devoured for lunch), I note you are thinking about Real Estate. The word ‘Real’ derives from the Latin word ‘Rex’, meaning ‘royal’. ‘Real’ also means ‘king’ in Spanish, because kings used to own all the land in their kingdoms. For Lacan, the Real is everything that cannot be said. It has nothing to do with reality. Is there anything else you require before I run my bath and listen to Lana Del Rey?

  ‘Yes, Mx Klimowski,’ I would reply. ‘If you could kindly prepare my plate of Turkish Delight—the rose and mandarin flavours are very pleasing.’ We have run out of the Delights, madame. May I suggest if you want a sweetmeat you get it your fucking self.

  They would retire to drink gin and have mystical visions and also pragmatic thoughts about how to make more money and buy a house of their own. Meanwhile, I would read the poetry of Sappho and Baudelaire by the egg-shaped fireplace while the phantom of love gently peeled an orange nearby.

  If I were asked to name the chief benefit of the house, I should say: the house shelters daydreaming, the house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace.

  Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space (1964)

  I began to wonder what I and all the women missing their own desires and all the rewritten women (such as the goddesses) would possess in their property portfolios at the end of our lives. Including my imagined housekeeper, who at this moment is running their bath (a splash of rose and geranium oil) while listening to Lana Del Rey. What do we value (though it might not be societally valued), what might we own, discard an
d bequeath? If, like the great struggling goddesses, we were too powerful for the fathers and brothers of patriarchy, how did our repressed power and potency make itself manifest on a Monday? And indeed, if I was writing the script from start to finish, what did I want my female characters to value, own, discard and bequeath? Perhaps I was channelling Jane Austen, except the prospect of marriage was not a solution.

  It was not lost on me that quite a few middle-class people my age had paid off their mortgages and owned at least one house elsewhere. I’d go to dinner parties and someone would announce they were leaving the next day for their pile in France or Italy—or, and this was the one that hurt most, they were off to write in a magical modernist pavilion specially built for them in the English countryside. Meanwhile, I was returning to the grim Corridors of Love, which still had not been repaired. There were some small improvements. I now owned not one electric bicycle but a fleet of electric bicycles. In this sense, as far as I was concerned, I resembled a rock star I knew who owned a fleet of aeroplanes. Yes, I had one e-bike locked up under the tree and two more in the garage. Friends came to stay from all over the world and we cycled around London together. It was a gesture towards a life I wanted, that is to say, an extended family of friends and their children, an expanded family rather than a nuclear family, which in this phase of my life seemed a happier way to live. If I wanted a spare room for every friend, my flat could not support this idea. If I wanted a fireplace in every room, there were no fireplaces in my flat. So what was I going to do with all this wanting?

  I stared out at the very large garden in which my new shed was situated. Instead of buying some real estate, which I could not afford to do, perhaps I could gift my shed landlord a swimming pool, to be built on his land. I would then be able to write and swim and my lifestyle would have been achieved. I would own none of it but I could use it for as long as our friendship lasted. My daughters would swim in all weathers. What a gesture from their mother. What a gift to the landlord from his writer friend.

  We would frolic in the water amongst the dragonflies and I would plant wild mint on the banks of the pool. I googled how much it would cost and came upon a site for eco pools. An hour passed. Eco pools were expensive. I realized my landlord might not want me to dig up his garden. I would have to put my imaginary spade down for the moment and get on with some work.

  The second book I had brought with me to the new writing shed was a series of essays by various psychoanalysts, scholars and artists about one of my favourite film directors, Pedro Almodóvar.

  In one chapter, Almodóvar describes the meaning of the phrase in Spanish You are like a cow without a bell. He explains, ‘To be like a cow without a bell means being lost, without anyone taking any notice of you.’ I thought I was a bit like a cow without a bell, but I was not lost. Maybe cows prefer not to have bells because they need to wander away from the field and from the threat of slaughter. The holy wandering cows I had encountered while strolling the streets of Ahmadabad, India, were very appealing to me. I liked to pat their backs and see the dust rise from their hides.

  In the Hindu tradition, cows are a sacred animal. The mother sustains life with her milk and for this she is honoured and garlanded.

  THREE

  NEW YORK

  At the end of May 2018, I was in New York, West Side Manhattan, to help clear out my deceased American stepmother’s apartment.

  My best male friend, who happened to be in New York at the time, offered to help. We had to figure where the local thrift shops were located and then go out on to the street, hail a yellow cab and ask the driver to take sixteen bags full of clothing to West 79th. The wrapping up of someone else’s life (my stepmother was a distinguished academic) made me wonder if I should tear up my old diaries and throw away all the letters I had kept for decades? It was unbearably sad to see my stepmother’s shirts, scarves and trousers neatly folded in drawers. I had agreed to clear out her closet to save my elderly father from the pain of doing this himself. He was very broken by her death, and when he phoned me from Cape Town (where she died) with the news, it was the first time in my life I had heard him cry.

  There were two small glass jars full of buttons she had removed from various garments and saved to sew on to other garments. These buttons were the only things I kept for myself. Three of them were in the shape of white horses, their manes flying in the wind.

  In my property portfolio so far, I owned a flat in my crumbling apartment block, three e-bikes and three wooden fairground horses from Afghanistan. I had bought these hand-painted horses from a dusty shop full of rugs and lamps in a desolate part of London when my children were young. The horses were big enough to seat a toddler. A friend told me they were ‘antiques’, possibly from the 1930s, but I did not know that when I bought them. To be antique suggests something old and dead, maybe even ghostly, but I was pulled towards these horses because they were so expressively alive. Somehow they signified freedom to me, and beauty too; each of the carved beasts had a very particular defiant mood. These horses, about two foot tall (two white, one black), now stood on the long windowsill in the crumbling apartment block on the hill. Sometimes I placed an avocado between their alert wooden ears when I wanted to ripen it. At Christmas my daughters and I garlanded their heads with holly and mistletoe. Everyone was pleased to kiss the horses (given the kissing rituals associated with mistletoe) but was also a little in awe of them. I thought that was right; after all, they were not cuddly toys. The man who parked his motorbike next to my e-bike in the back car park told me that every time he looked up and saw the horses in my window, he thought of them as my guard horses.

  A woman I knew, who was abundantly wealthy and had never held down a job, wanted to buy my horses from me. There was only one time I nearly cracked, but in the end I could not part with the horses, which had, to my amazement, proved to be valuable in financial terms. It seemed that my Horses of Liberty were very much part of my property portfolio so far.

  This woman told me that she never knew what to reply when working mothers asked her, ‘What do you do?’ I suggested she reply, ‘I am an heiress.’ That would probably end the conversations she found so awkward. And it did. It worked. It was true that being an heiress was her main job. All that money had to be looked after, as did her many properties. Her literal real estate was as vast as mine was tiny. She owned houses in Paris, Vienna, Paxos, Scotland, Spain and London. Most of her attention was focused on the upkeep of her properties, cooking vegan recipes, her three dogs and her vast orchard of olive trees in Spain. I thought she was an impressive woman in many ways. At least in winter she wore a beanie and not a green felt hat with a pheasant feather poking out of its ribbon. She was something of a Buddhist. A Buddhist with worldly riches, but with quite simple tastes. Sometimes when I met up with her she had saved a couple of perfect apricots in her pocket for our delectation, or a handful of almonds, or a wedge of hard regional Italian cheese for me to taste, given she was strictly vegan. She would slice it with the small penknife she kept in her purse, and then magically conjure up a couple of purple figs, which she said were friendly companions to the cheese. The heiress herself was a friendly companion. Apparently, her husband, who was from Naples but who was not vegan, knew how to plait mozzarella, braiding three strings of this milky cheese together for feast days. The process of making mozzarella, she explained, is called pasta filata, and the favoured milk is from the water buffalo. This had me wondering if water buffalo should be honoured and garlanded like the holy cows in India, but I preferred to think of them ecstatically submerged in swamps, rivers and ponds.

  I did not share with her my everyday problems or my dream of owning a grand old house with a pomegranate tree in the garden. She was an heiress after all. My life and living were too distant from her experience of life and living, but I respected the intelligent and playful way she handled her own turbulent family problems.

  Every Christmas I bought olive oil from the heiress to give to my friends as gifts. Th
is oil, from her farm in Andalusia, was the elixir of life, green and peppery, startling to taste. She told me it was ‘first-press oil’, often called virgin oil, and she combed it through her hair every Friday. Each olive released only one or two drops of oil, so, she said, imagine how many olives are needed to make just one kilo of oil? Sometimes I would sprinkle sea salt on a wedge of sour green tomato and dip it into the peppery emerald olive oil. It was as if I had struck on something good that was within my reach.

  I was fond of the heiress and not that envious of her real estate. This lack of envy (given that every one of her many villas came very close to the home of my dreams) frankly surprised me. In a way, she had so many homes that she was homeless. Every month she seemed to be travelling between her properties across a number of countries. When she rang my mobile there was always another dialling code on my screen. Although my flat was small and humble, it was certainly my home, our home, our perch in the sky, though I needed some Buddhism to help me endure the grey communal corridors. The owners of the freehold had recently mended frays and tears in the old carpets outside the lift with blue masking tape. For this repair they sent enormous service-charge bills. All the same, it was encouraging to stare out at the sky and know that everything is always changing, that a dark sky lifts into another mood.

  Meanwhile, here I was in New York trying not to combust while clearing out my stepmother’s flat, which was much swankier than my own. I thought about how little I knew about her life before she met my father. Now I was sifting through her shower caps, cardigans, berets, nightdresses, umbrellas, various boxes of make-up and hair curlers. In a way I was getting to know her better, which was sad and weird. When my own mother died, it was my younger brother who had done most of the heavy lifting in this regard. I now realized he had saved me the misery of this awful task. I think he knew me better than anyone else, because I once overheard him say to a woman who asked why his sister (me) liked to work in a shed, ‘I think she likes a feral space to write.’