Chapter 16
The Education of Cecilia Blackwood
M y mother taught me to cry when I was nine years old.
I remember the lesson with the particular clarity that certain memories retain, not because they are important in any grand sense but because they are foundational, the way the first course of bricks is foundational to a wall.
Everything that came after was built upon that lesson, and the lesson itself was so simple that I am surprised, in retrospect, that it required teaching at all.
But it did. I was not born knowing how to weep on command.
I was born with the capacity, the same capacity that all children possess for mimicry and performance, but the capacity required shaping, and my mother was the shaper.
We were in the morning room of the house in Hampstead, a pleasant Georgian house with a garden that sloped down toward the Heath and rooms that smelled of beeswax and old books.
It was March, I think, or perhaps April; the light through the tall windows was the pale gold of early spring, and the garden beyond the glass was alive with the tentative green of new growth.
My mother was seated at the writing desk, composing correspondence, and I was on the floor nearby, drawing pictures of horses with a stick of charcoal on a scrap of brown paper.
I was content, which is to say I was neither happy nor unhappy but simply occupied, which for a child of my disposition was the nearest equivalent to happiness that existed.
My mother set down her pen. She looked at me for a long moment, her head tilted slightly to one side, the way a bird examines an insect it is considering eating. Then she said, "Cecilia, come here."
I went. I always went when she called. Not from obedience, because obedience implies an internal negotiation in which the desire to refuse is overruled by the desire to comply, and I had no desire to refuse.
I went because she was the most interesting thing in any room she occupied, more interesting than the horses I was drawing, more interesting than the garden and the light and the smell of beeswax, and when she called, I went, the way iron goes to a magnet.
"Sit," she said, indicating the chair opposite hers.
I sat. The chair was too large for me, and my feet did not reach the floor, but I held myself still with the particular stillness that she had already begun to cultivate in me, the stillness of a child who has learned that unnecessary movement is wasteful and wastefulness is a form of weakness.
"You are going to learn something today," my mother said.
She had a way of making statements that sounded like prophecies, not because she believed them to be prophetic but because she delivered them with the absolute authority of someone for whom the future was merely an extension of her own will.
"It is the most important thing you will ever learn.
More important than French or arithmetic or the names of the kings of England.
More important than anything they will teach you at school, because the things they teach you at school are designed to make you useful to other people, and the thing I am going to teach you is designed to make you useful to yourself. "
She reached across the desk and took my chin in her hand.
Her fingers were cool and dry and very still, the fingers of a woman who never fidgeted, who moved with the precision of a surgeon or a pianist, each gesture exactly calibrated to its purpose.
She tilted my face upward so that I was looking directly into her eyes, and what I saw in them was not love, not in any sense that I recognised or would ever recognise, but something more interesting: attention.
The total, absorbed, consuming attention of someone studying a subject of the deepest fascination.
"People are going to try to hurt you, Cecilia.
Not physically, or not only physically. They are going to try to hurt you by making you feel things you do not wish to feel.
Guilt. Shame. Fear. Pity for people who do not deserve your pity.
These are weapons, and they are more dangerous than knives because you cannot see them and you cannot defend against them with your hands.
" She released my chin. "Unless you learn to see them. Unless you learn to use them yourself."
She asked me to think of something sad. Not something that made me sad, because she understood, even then, that the word sad had no stable meaning in my interior landscape, but something that a normal child would find sad.
The death of a pet. The loss of a toy. I considered this instruction with the literal-mindedness of a nine-year-old and replied that our dog, Percival, had died the previous autumn, and that the house had felt quieter since.
"Good," my mother said. "Now. Think about Percival. Think about how he used to wait for you at the gate when you came home from your walk. Think about the way he would put his head in your lap when you sat in the garden. Think about the fact that you will never see him again."
I thought about these things. I observed, with the clinical detachment that was already my most reliable faculty, that the thoughts produced no emotional response in me.
I remembered Percival with the accuracy of a daguerreotype, his golden coat and his brown eyes and the particular way his tail moved when he was pleased, which was often, because Percival had been a dog constitutionally disposed toward pleasure.
I could recall these details with perfect fidelity.
But they were details, not feelings. They occupied my mind the way furniture occupies a room: present, identifiable, and entirely without the capacity to move me.
"Now," my mother said, "cry."
I stared at her. The instruction was so unexpected, so foreign to any framework of behaviour I possessed, that I did not know how to begin.
I was aware, in the dim way that children are aware of adult expectations, that crying was something one did when one felt sad, and that one felt sad when something bad had happened, and that the death of a dog constituted, by conventional standards, a bad thing.
But the conventional pathway from event to emotion to expression was, for me, a road that did not connect.
The event existed. The expression existed.
The emotion in the middle was missing, a bridge that had never been built.
"Close your eyes," my mother said. Her voice was patient, but there was an edge beneath the patience, the edge of someone who is not accustomed to failure and does not enjoy the prospect of it.
"Breathe in. Slowly. Feel the breath moving into your chest. Now breathe out, and as you breathe out, let your shoulders drop.
Let your face go slack. Think about Percival, and let the thought sit in your chest like a weight. "
I did as she instructed. I breathed. I dropped my shoulders. I let my face go slack. I thought about Percival. And nothing happened.
My mother was quiet for a moment. When she spoke again, her voice had changed. It was not angry, exactly. It was colder. The coldness of someone who has encountered an obstacle and is recalculating her approach.
"You are not trying hard enough," she said.
"I am trying," I said.
"Trying is not the same as succeeding, Cecilia.
You understand the difference. I have taught you the difference.
" She stood and came around the desk, and she knelt before me so that her face was level with mine.
She was thirty-five years old, and she was beautiful in the way that certain landscapes are beautiful, not because they are soft or inviting but because they possess a stark, unyielding authority that commands attention whether one wishes to give it or not.
Her eyes were grey, like mine, and her hair was the same auburn that mine would become, and when she looked at me I felt not warmth but something more interesting: the sense of being seen completely, every surface and corner and hidden recess of my interior landscape illuminated by a gaze that missed nothing and forgave nothing.
"You are not like other children," she said.
"You know this. I know this. The doctors who examined you at Guy's last year know this, though they do not have the vocabulary to describe what they have observed, and so they use words like peculiar and withdrawn and emotionally detached, as though naming the condition will make it manageable.
" A thin smile. "It is manageable. Not because the doctors can help you, but because I can.
What they call a deficiency, I call an advantage.
What they see as a missing piece, I see as a space that can be filled with something more useful than feeling. Do you understand?"
I understood, in the way that children understand complex ideas, not in their fullness but in their shape, the way one understands the outline of a building before entering it.
"I am going to teach you to cry," my mother said.
"Not because I want you to feel sadness, but because I want you to be able to perform it, and performing it is more useful than feeling it.
A woman who feels sadness is at the mercy of her own emotions.
A woman who can perform sadness is at the mercy of no one.
She controls when she weeps and when she is dry, when she appears vulnerable and when she appears strong.
She holds the audience's sympathy in the palm of her hand and opens or closes her fingers at will. Do you see?"
I saw, or I believed I saw, which at the age of nine amounted to the same thing.