The Last Ocean by Nicci Gerrard

Author:Nicci Gerrard
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2019-08-12T16:00:00+00:00

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In 2017, I talked to two women who have meant a great deal to me, in their different ways. The first, Mary Jacobus, was once my tutor. She was still young when I was an undergraduate and I was both a bit scared of her (although she isn’t a scary woman but softly spoken and attentive) and wanted to be her. She was – and still is – attractive, quite private, formidably clever, scrupulous, self-questioning and kind; a woman of integrity. She was a bit of a pin-up for the male students: I remember her giving her lectures sitting on the edge of the platform, wearing boots. (And because I had been brought up to be a good girl, I also vividly remember an occasion when, in a small seminar when I was the only woman, she asked who would drink their coffee out of a jam jar, since she had run out of mugs, and I at once offered. She looked at me severely: ‘No. I’m asking the men. Don’t do that.’ A small jolt of pleasure ran through me.)

We didn’t lose touch. I have visited Mary and her husband in Ithaca, upstate New York, when her children were little and sat in her lovely old house there, full of books and paintings and baby clothes (she has lived there for four decades but is now in the process of selling and ‘dismantling’, downsizing to a condo); been to her terraced house in Cambridge when she was living there; she has come to see me, bearing a fragrant rose bush that still stands in my garden. She’s become my friend – my friend whose husband has dementia. He was diagnosed several years ago and is now entering the mid-stage of the illness, and she is his main carer – although ‘carer’ is a world she has grave reservations about. Throughout her career, she has been a powerful advocate for women’s writing and the female voice. She’s a feminist who came of age in its second wave, and she is psychologically acute about the ways in which women have to actively resist selflessness: the ideal of female saintliness that can be deadly. She talks about the experience carefully, without resentment or self-pity; she’s her own shrewdest critic. She is experiencing it and she is thinking about it, what it means, how to find a way to live, what her boundaries should be. She is thinking about how to survive.

Normality, she tells me, provides a form of scaffolding: they walk their dog each day (an adopted border collie who is a great bond); they do, or try to do or fail to do, the Guardian crossword together. But ‘it is endlessly difficult to do or think about anything other than managing our situation in Ithaca day by day . . . it consumes all the time unless I absent myself.’

‘It’s a two-body problem,’ she says to me as we sit in the café of the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge.

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