Walking with Ghosts

engineering.’ You described the treasures of Tutankhamun. You were a precocious child. Everyone patronized you; but even the adults were a little scared. You could see it in their eyes.
    Everything in your childhood was special, but more special than anything else was your education. For your mother the highest learning was history. You spent seven years in a class with five other girls under the personal tuition of Miss Masefield (‘Not, like my namesake, a poet; though, believe me, young ladies, poetry has been for me the most edifying inspiration of my life.’) Miss Masefield hated children and loved knowledge, and her mission in life was to wed the two together. As a child you watched her grow haggard with the struggle.
    Apart from Joan, the other girls in the class were stupid. Joan was your cousin, and like yourself, an only child. You agreed to be sisters on the day an atomic bomb destroyed Hiroshima, and you still think of her as your sister now. Together with Joan you looked at the photographs of the wedding of Princess Elizabeth, and years later you reminded Joan that Lady Day was serving a prison sentence when the princess and her prince walked up the aisle. Lady Day had taken a cure earlier in the year, but then got herself arrested as a user in Philadelphia. She was sentenced to a-year-and-a-day at the Alderson Reformatory in West Virginia. Joan’s something big in Women’s Lib now. She became politicized late in life, about the same time you were beginning to turn to God.
    Joan made it to Oxford too, only she did not stay the course. It was different for you. You were a sticker. You clenched your teeth in the face of the humiliation, the patronage, the sheer bloodiness of a masculine preserve. There was not a day, not a single day at the University when you were allowed to think of yourself as other than a woman, a poor relation of man. Hesketh-Darwin-Jones, your tutor in the history department, was struck dumb by the swish of a skirt. He had chosen academia in preference to the military or the church to avoid the female sex; and, lo, the establishment had betrayed him. He was dumb. He never spoke a word to you in three years. He coughed and stammered and constantly rearranged the features of his face, he pointed at books and scribbled unreadable notes, but he could not speak. Now you can laugh about it. Almost forty years have passed.
    Lady Day died when you were in that place. Her life came to an end before you’d ever heard her sing. She slipped away before you’d heard her name. It was years later that you were penetrated by her haggard voice with its plaintive cry. The Classical and the Gothic were your teachers then; it was to be some time before you discovered ‘What A Little Moonlight Can Do’.
    And it was at Oxford that you met Arthur. The one place in the world that your mother thought you would be safe from miners was the one place where you met a man with coal dust in his eyes. Arthur. He had coal dust in his soul. Mother never knew. Until her dying day she thought he was the son of a country parson. She should have married him instead of you, she would have managed him better. She would have appreciated his aspirations. That was something you never did, Dora, because while he was climbing up the social scale you were intent on climbing down it. You were searching for the working classes while he was trying to forget them. What a funny couple you were. What a hilarious duo. How you mauled each other. How you marked each other.
    And yet it could have worked. You could have sacrificed yourself as other women did. Arthur wanted you to sacrifice yourself and you refused because you thought your own life had meaning, import. You were full of... history. The English Civil War was more important to you than a miner’s son with coal dust in his eyes. You judged his aspirations spurious and let him go. He would never understand why. He did not have the insight. He was a miner’s son. A philosopher, an economist, an idealist in his way. Arthur, the father of your children; a child himself who wanted that you be his wife first and last. Arthur, who reminded you of your vows. Arthur who, in truth, did not want much, but who sought it from you who could not give.
    And if his aspirations were spurious, Dora, what about your own? Did you really think it possible that they would give you a Chair? You? A woman? A married woman? A divorced woman? A woman with children? And the working classes; did