The Pattern in the Carpet: A Personal History With Jigsaws Read Online Free PDF Page A

tarnish of age, not the bright flax of youth.) As far as I know, she never had a boyfriend or a love affair. When I was a small child her single status seemed natural and
desirable to me, for it enabled her to concentrate her affections on her nieces and her nephew. Later, I wondered whether she had lesbian leanings. She had several close female friendships, some dating from her college days when she did her teacher training course at Homerton, but none of them seemed to me to have a sexual component. (One Homerton couple lived together, but I doubt whether they were practising lesbians. Sexual abstinence, like sexual ignorance, was far more common then than it is now.)
    Born in 1909, she was too young to be considered a member of the tragic generation that lost its fiancés and lovers to the Great War, so I assume she lived alone by choice. She had several male friends, some of them connected with the trade that my grandparents had plied at Bryn, which they bought when it was already established as a bed and breakfast and tea garden. These friends included the toffee boys, as we called them, who drove a lorry full of confectionery up and down the Great North Road; another couple called Len and Arthur; and a young man who worked at a gentleman's outfitters in Grantham. I think now that maybe these men were what we would now call gay.
    I do not think my aunt had any sexual interest in men, although she liked children, and in my mother's view would have liked to have had a baby. Maybe she was asexual.
    In the late 1960s and 70s she and my parents came every year to stay with me in Hampstead for a few days over Christmas, and Arnold and Dusty Wesker, then living in Highgate, adopted a kindly habit of dropping in for a smoked-salmon high tea on Christmas Eve. I think they felt sorry for me, coping alone with such an intense and loaded domestic celebration. And, indeed, I sometimes felt sorry for myself. It was exhausting, for my first husband Clive and I had by this time separated, and it was a lot of work for one person. I don't know how it happened that I became the daughter who always did Christmas, and when I suggested that
it was somebody else's turn, I was met with a blunt refusal. 'They wouldn't want to go anywhere else' was the miserable excuse I was given. This was disingenuous, to say the least.
    Arnold closely observed the bickerings and manoeuvrings of the elderly trio (these became so fractious that eventually my father used to sleep in a friend's house over the road) and speculated at one point that maybe Auntie Phyl had been in love with my father when young. Arnold is a writer, and he saw a plot. Two sisters, both in love with the same handsome, eligible, upwardly mobile bachelor in Mexborough: one wins the man, marries him and has children, the other stays single all her life. An Arnold Bennett story. (My aunt's middle name was Bennett and, as we are from the Potteries, we claim some as yet unverified connection with the great man.) But I don't think Arnold Wesker can have been right. Arnold is strong on family and aunts, but his imagination is (or in those days was) inexorably heterosexual. I do not believe that my aunt loved and lost. It was not like that. I don't know how it was, but it was not like that.
    My aunt survived both my parents by nearly ten years, and that is one of the reasons why I now think of her so often. She lies more recently in my memory. And my memories of her are less painful than my memories of my parents. It is true that she could be rude, cutting, ungrateful, demanding, even offensive, but her insults or rejections were not wounding. One Christmas, she examined her newly opened gifts with some scorn, and complained that the book she had been given would be too big for her bookshelf, and that the chocolates were very near their sell-by date. I think the rest of the family just found this funny, whereas my mother's criticisms of presents I gave her wound me to this day. I remember