JERUSALEM THE GOLDEN
From JERUSALEM THE GOLDEN
By Margaret Drabble
Clara is in her final year of high school in Northam, England.
1. The worst moments of Clara’s domestic life were not those moments at which domestic indifference fronted her most blankly and sheerly, for they could be faced by an equally stony frontage – they were those which bore witness to hidden chinks and faults, deep within the structure. One of the events which shook her most of all was the occasion upon which her mother gave her permission to go on the school trip to Paris. This school trip was not an annual event, but a newly-organised affair, to which the school’s attention had been drawn by the tireless Miss Haines; it was to take place in Clara’s last year, when she was seventeen, a year after her father’s death. All those who were doing Advanced Level French were encouraged to go, and most of them were only too glad to do so, because the trip was both cheap and co-educational.
2. Clara, when the idea was broached, declared instantly that it was not worth her while to ask her mother’s permission, whereupon the school embarrassingly said that if it were finance that were in question, then help might be forthcoming. Clara could not explain to the school that it was not so much a question of finance, as of her mother’s instinctive opposition to any pleasurable project – and anyone could see that a visit to Paris could not possibly fail to entail more pleasure than instruction.
3. Finance was not, in fact, particularly in question, as Mr. Mauhgam had provided for his family with a thoroughness that bordered upon the reckless – in so far as a man may squander upon insurance – he had done so. The school’s offer of support put Clara in a difficult position, because she felt obliged to make the project known to her mother. She did not feel she could turn down such charity without proof of the necessary conditions of rejection. She had, at first, absolutely no hope of consent, and for a week or so she tossed in bed at night preparing to brace her spirit against the inevitable refusal. And then, under pressure from her friend, Walter Ash, she allowed to slip into her mind the faint, faint hope that by some quirk of reasoning her mother might be persuaded to agree. Once she had admitted the hope, she was inundated by whole floods of desire; the project took life in her mind, the trees grew leaves, the cathedrals grew towers and arches, the river flowed beneath its bridges. A whole week in Paris at Easter seemed to her something for which she would willingly have sold her soul.
4. She tried, bitterly, to resist this fatal colouring; she tried to reduce the trip to words upon a notice board; but the mind had gone its own way, and she could not force it back into its grey and natal landscape. She turned on Walter Ash and reviled him for allowing her to hope, and indeed, despite the final outcome, it was his dangerous encouragement of this scheme that prefaced her final disillusion with him. She could not bear the sensations of loss with which she knew that she would be obliged to sit down and confront her mother. She hated the school for forcing her through the mockery of enquiry. She wished that the whole thing had never been. And yet, when she finally, despairingly, screwed herself up and loosed the small words into the drawing room air, her mother said yes.
5. Sitting there, knitting, watching the television, knitting, her lips pursed over some unimaginable grievance, she listened, and nodded, and thought, and said yes. Clara, who had phrased the question so deviously, flinching in preparation from a brutal negative, thought that she must have misunderstood, and repeated the whole rigmarole, and her mother once more nodded her head and said yes. Or rather, she did not say “Yes” – she said “We’ll have to see,” but in her terminology this counted as a positive affirmative. Clara, perched nervously on the edge of her easy chair, was almost too overwrought to continue the conversation, but she managed to say, “You mean you really think I might be able to go?” “I don’t see why not,” said Mrs. Maugham, with a tight smile which seemed to indicate pleasure in her daughter’s confusion. “I can’t say that I see why not. You say all the other girls are going, and if it’s such a bargain as you say, then I don’t see why not. Do you?”
6. Clara could hardly shriek at her, you know bloody well why not, you know bloody well why I can’t go, it’s because you’re such a bloody-minded sadistic old hypocrite, it’s because you think Paris is vice itself, and so do I, and so do I, and that’s why I want to go, and that’s why you won’t bloody well let me. She could say nothing. So, she said nothing. But she was almost choking with emotion. And not with joy, either. “I don’t see,” continued Mrs. Maugham, “why you shouldn’t have a bit of fun too. And if you say it’ll be such a help to you, with your examinations, I don’t see why you shouldn’t go.” Clara did not know where to look. “Thank you,” she said, and then, with a fine instinct for disaster, she tried to think of something to say to avert her mother’s next words, she tried to speak, but she could think of nothing, and her mother, shifting in her seat, said, “After all, Clara, you’ve had a hard year. With your father. You deserve a change.” And Clara sat there and endured it.
7. Because the truth was that this evidence of care and tenderness was harder to bear than any neglect, for it threw into question the whole basis of their lives together. Perhaps there was hope, perhaps all was not harsh antipathy, perhaps a better daughter might have found a way to soften such a mother. And if all were not lost, what effort, what strain, what retraced miles, what recriminations, what intolerable forgivenesses were not to be undergone? And who, having heard impartially this interchange, would have believed in Clara’s cause? Clara’s one solace had been the cold, tight dignity of her case, and this had been stolen from her, robbed from her by an elderly woman’s few words of casual humanity.
8. She had learned a fine way of sustaining the role of deprivation, but gratitude was an emotion beyond her range. She sat there in silence, and resentment made her cheeks hot; she resented the wasted hours of battle with her own desires, she resented her failed and needless attempts at empire, she was filled with hatred at the thought of lost anticipations. Now that she was to go, she knew that she might have had the pleasure of looking forward to going, instead of such long and cheerless debates and equivocations. Bitterly she thought, it is all spoiled, spoiled by consent, spoiled by refusal, it does not matter if I go or stay. By letting me go, she is merely increasing her power, for she is outmartyring my martyrdom. I die from loss, or I die from guilt, and either way I die.
9. It came to her later, as she started to do her homework, that Racine and Corneille (17th century French dramatists) appealed to her so strongly because their ways were hers. For one event, five acts of deliberation. But she played alone, because the other people would not play. And she thought, as she sat there translating a piece of Polyeucte (a tragedy by Corneille concerning the life of a Roman martyr), that if ever she could find the personages for the rest of her tragedy, then her happiness would be complete. That would be what she would want from life; she would want no more than that.
10. Before the departure for Paris, Mrs. Maugham fortunately forfeited her position by various gratuitous and irrelevant remarks about the expense. Clara, grown careless and ruthless now that the struggle was over, did not fail to point out that the school would have helped upon request. Mrs. Maugham countered this with contemptuous remarks about charity, and about the dignity of the family, and the lack of dignity of various families in the neighbourhood. Clara swore that she would pay for herself out of her Post Office Savings: her mother said that her dead father hadn’t put that money away for her to squander on trips abroad. Clara pointed out that it hadn’t been donated by her father in the first place, but by Aunt Doris, as birthday presents, over the past seventeen years. “Well then, your Aunt Doris didn’t give it to you to squander on trips abroad,” said Mrs. Maugham. And she was right there, too, but Clara was beyond the rights and wrongs of the case, blissfully carried away into the angry, amoral world of combat, wonderfully disconnected from truth and falsehood, freed from gratitude by meanness, released from effort by knowledge of fruitless impossibility.
11. And after no matter what contortions, it was upon Northam Station that she found herself, and with a ticket for Paris in her purse. And she thought, as she stood there with Rosie, Susie, Katie, Isabel, Janice and Heather, that none of it mattered, none of it had any importance, in view of the fact that she was going. What could those apprehensions signify, in the light of departure? Excitement had for days so filled her that she could not sleep, and now at last she had embarked upon it; thoughts of loss and martyrdom paled before the facts. What she had wanted, she was to have. And she thought, guiltily, I do not even feel guilty. Northam Station seemed to her a peculiarly lovely spot for such an embarkation. It was vaulted and filthy, black with the grime of decades, and its sooty defaced posters spoke to her of the petty romances of others, and she was going to Paris, albeit in a school raincoat, and with a beret on her head. The station had always been for her a place instinct with glory; its function beautified it immeasurably in her eyes. She felt herself to be of right there, to have a place upon its departure platforms, and the London train drew in for her with a particular significance. She had been to London once before only, and now she was going to Paris.
12. As the train pulled out of the station, she watched the black and ridged and hard receding buttressed walls, travelling through their narrow channel into some brighter birth, and into some less obstinately alien world. And as they passed the rows upon rows of back yards, the grey washing on curious pulleys, the backs of hardboard dressing tables, the dust-bins and the coal sheds, it occurred to her to wonder why she should so suddenly feel herself to be peculiarly blessed, and a dreadful grief for all those without blessings took hold of her, and a terror at the singular nature of her escape. Out of so many thousands, one. Narrow was the gate, and the hillsides were crowded with the serried (pressed together in rows) dwellings of the cramped and groaning multitudes, the ranks of the Unelect, and she the one white soul flew dangerously forth into some glorious and exclusive shining heaven.
Drabble, Margaret. Jerusalem the Golden. London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson.
11/Clara assumes that the reason her mother would not approve of Clara’s going to Paris is that
Select one:
a.
the trip would be a financial burden
b.
Clara is too immature to travel
c.
her mother would be unwilling to accept financial aid
d.
Clara would have a pleasurable time
12/See question 11 for story text. The phrase that indicates that Clara felt she had no choice but to ask for her mother’s permission is
Select one:
a.
“inundated by whole floods of desire” (paragraph 3)
b.
“pressure from her friend, Walter Ash” (paragraph 3)
c.
“willingly have sold her soul” (paragraph 3)
d.
“proof of the necessary conditions of rejection” (paragraph 3)
13/See question 11 for story text. The images “the trees grew leaves, the cathedrals grew towers and arches, the river flowed beneath its bridges” (paragraph 3) metaphorically express Clara’s
Select one:
a.
foresight
b.
anxiety
c.
determination
d.
longing
14/See question 11 for story text. Clara “hated the school for forcing her through the mockery of enquiry” (paragraph 4) because she is convinced that
Select one:
a.
her request will be refused
b.
she will have to undergo a cross-examination
c.
her mother will be alarmed by her audacity
d.
her mother will be shamed by the offer of assistance
15/See question 11 for story text. In Clara’s mind, her mother’s past attitude toward her has been
Select one:
a.
false
b.
stonyhearted
c.
overprotective
d.
suspicious
16/See question 11 for story text. Clara’s distress at being allowed to go to Paris stems from
Select one:
a.
believing that her mother will change her mind at a later date
b.
knowing that her friends will remember her former excuses
c.
being denied the fulfilment of her tragic expectations
d.
realizing that she does not really want to go
17/See question 11 for story text. The word that is closest in meaning to “solace” in paragraph 7 is
Select one:
a.
comfort
b.
grief
c.
purpose
d.
resentment
18/See question 11 for story text. Clara’s perception of being outmartyred by her mother (paragraph 8) reveals that Clara
Select one:
a.
acknowledges her mother’s sacrifices
b.
fears having a quarrel with her mother
c.
finds satisfaction in her role as a suffering child
d.
accepts her inferior status
19/See question 11 for story text. In the phrase “the other people would not play” (paragraph 9), “the other people” refers partly to Clara’s mother in that she
Select one:
a.
fails to appreciate Clara’s talent
b.
recognizes the dangers of Clara’s pleasure
c.
fails to provide the necessary dramatic conflict
d.
condescends to participate
20/See question 11 for story text. Mr. Maugham’s ample provision for his family ultimately has the effect of
Select one:
a.
making Mrs. Maugham a more generous mother
b.
causing Clara to appreciate her upbringing
c.
bringing Mrs. Maugham and Clara closer
d.
indulging Clara’s melodramatic instincts
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