If You Sit Very Still by Marian Partington; Jessica Kingsley, £13
Marian Partington is the sister of Lucy Partington, who disappeared on her way home on December 20, 1973 and whose remains were found 20 years later in the cellar of the house in Gloucester owned by Fred and Rosemary West.
The subtitle, “A Sister’s Fierce Engagement with Traumatic Loss”, barely captures the intensity of the author’s grief and suffering. Yet the book has a strangely redemptive quality to it which raises it to a different level when compared with other books of this kind.
We learn that Lucy, a gifted third-year student of English literature at Exeter University, had become a Catholic just five weeks before her disappearance. Asked about what she intended to do after graduation, she had replied that she would do something “up to the hilt”. And in answer to the query “Where are you going?”, she had responded, “Towards the light” – perhaps an allusion to the meaning of her name, but possibly a premonition that in her case the “light” would emerge very soon.
Understandably, Marian’s book evolved over many years. She began to write it in 1995, the year after the appalling truth behind Lucy’s disappearance became known, in the full glare of the media coverage surrounding the Wests’ crimes (several other bodies were unearthed at their house).
Now a Quaker, attending Buddhist retreats and also making the Camino pilgrimage to Compostela, the author admits that she glimpsed “a long process of facing, accepting, and letting go of decades of unresolved pain, and the spiritual implications of my recent choice to become a Quaker, that there is ‘that of God in everyone’ ”.This led her to realise that “there was no room for demonising. I realised that we share a common … humanity. I recognised my own capacity to inflict harm.”
Confessing to having terminated four pregnancies, she states with great courage and insight that “this has helped me to feel more compassionate towards those who have killed, legally or illegally”. Indeed, her own spiritual journey has prompted Marian to accept that “women [can also be] violent towards other women, towards men and towards children”.
This attitude helped the author to try to reach out to Rosemary West, who is serving life imprisonment (her husband committed suicide while in prison awaiting trial.) So far she has met with rejection. Now she works with prisoners in a scheme called the Forgiveness Project.
For me, the most moving, even heart-stopping, passage in the book was when the author acknowledges her need to say goodbye to her sister’s remains. At the mortuary, she writes, “I gasped at the beauty of her skull … I was full of the joy of finding something that had been part of Lucy after all these years … I lifted her skull with great care and tenderness. My lips kissed the bone of her brow.”
Outside the context in which it was written, such an act could seem macabre. Instead, coming as it does after many years of grieving, at the same time as not knowing what had happened to her sister, it sounds cathartic in the way the ancient Greeks intended the word: an act of purgation and purification following the depths of tragedy.
At the time of her disappearance, Lucy had been studying the medieval work Pearl, a 14th-century dream retold. Her sister has chosen to follow a similar structure in her book, which is divided into sections entitled “Crisis”, “Confessing”, “Comprehending” and finally “Transforming”. It seems a sensitive and highly appropriate way to treat her theme.
All readers will also accept the truth of the author’s simple observation: “Lucy’s disappearance taught me that … there is no certainty that, when you say goodbye to someone, you will ever see them again.”
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