Family Romance

by John Lanchester

  But I’m sure I was never directly told. That wasn’t the way we did things. For instance, I was never told in as many words that my father had had a heart attack in 1974 while I was away at boarding school. It was something I was allowed to work out, to gather, to infer. It was a bad heart attack and it permanently affected my father’s health – he took early retirement five years later, and died of another heart attack three years after that, at the age of fifty-seven – but the mere fact that something was very, very important was no guarantee that my parents would approach it directly. If anything, the reverse was true. Looking back at my childhood I have the feeling that much of the most important information I was given, I wasn’t given. I was shown the dots and had to make the picture for myself.

  It’s not that my parents were evasive. They weren’t shifty. They did not duck and weave. But there were topics which did not come up, or came up only with great difficulty and in a way which made it clear that things would be better for all parties if they did not come up again. Important subjects by definition carried a powerful charge of feeling, and that made them difficult and dangerous; and if a thing is dangerous, then it is sensible not to do it unless you have to. Better to put it off, or approach it indirectly, or allow people (i.e. me) to work things out for themselves; better still to avoid the subject, if at all possible. My father used to tell the story of a tutor at his university, a Viennese professor of something or other. Once there was a general conversation about what people would have, if they could have anything in the world. There were some surprising answers – a youngish woman don said she wanted an enormous wine cellar. When it came to the old professor he sucked his pipe for a moment, and then said, ‘Well, if I could really have anything I wanted, anything at all, I think I would choose … permanent delusions of grandeur.’

  Dad loved that story. He liked it because it was funny, but I think he liked also the idea of a permanent state of feeling that excluded difficulty or pain. For instance, he could never bring himself to discuss money. He could talk about it in the abstract, in relation to businesses in the news, or tax policy, or things like that. But he couldn’t bear to talk about money in any personal context, anything to do with his income or – and this was a particular issue – my pocket money. I wasn’t allowed to ask for money or ever to mention it. The subject caused Dad too much pain. It touched on things from his own childhood, to do with the fact that his father had used money as a means of control and interference.

  What was odd about this was that my father worked for a bank. Dealing with money was what he did all day, every day, for his entire working life. And yet he couldn’t bear to speak of it at home. As a teenager I would resort to simply stealing money from his wallet rather than having to put him and me through the impossible ordeal of asking for it. I would steal it resentfully, too, from the wallet he left openly on the hall table. I felt that I didn’t want to steal but had no choice, and that the whole episode was showing both our characters in their least good light. I now see that the banking and the not being able to discuss money were tightly linked: he had gone to work in a bank because his father had bullied him into doing a job that would keep him grounded in the real world – which, in his father’s world-view, meant doing a job that was all about money. The memory of that, and all that it implied, was so painful for Dad that if I ever mentioned money to him, he was overpowered by flashbacks from his youth, and sent into a profound gloom. Working with money all day and not being able to talk about it were at some psychic level part of the same deal.

  My father, whom I loved deeply and whose memory I revere, was not a direct man. He was open and friendly in manner, unstuffy and funny, and he was also that rarest of all things, a good listener. But when there was any sense of difficulty about a conversation he found it impossible to address himself to it head-on. It’s not so much that he disliked confrontation with other people as that he disliked confronting himself, the parts of himself – anger or sadness or simple embarrassment – which he did not want to encounter. The one time I remember him directly trying to tackle a subject he would have preferred to avoid was during a summer holiday in England when he and I had a talk about sex. At least, that’s what I realised, years later, it had been. Part of the trouble was that before he began he took the precaution of getting comprehensively pissed. My father never slurred or rambled or fell over or lost himself in drink, indeed he never seemed that different, only a little more cheerful. It certainly didn’t make him any more direct; but perhaps it helped him to think he had been more direct. On this occasion my mother had gone to bed saying over her shoulder to him, ‘If he was a girl I would have done it.’ He sat down with me in the kitchen, offered me a beer, and, while fiddling with his own glass of dark rum, his inexplicable preferred nightcap, told a long, rambling, difficult-to-follow story about some rowers he had known at university in Melbourne who had, the night before big races, used to do this thing, which was a silly thing but, anyway, they had tied strips of towel to their backs, so that if they lay on their backs during the night they would be uncomfortable and would turn over, because it was while you lay on your back at night that you might have certain sorts of dreams, they sometimes, you know, and they thought that, you know, would sap their strength, ha ha wasn’t that silly, the idea that it might sap their strength, even though they had a point, and anyway … We chatted on for a bit more and then went to bed.

  I didn’t have a clue what Dad was talking about. This was 1978 and I was sixteen. It was years later – five years later, at university in 1983 – when somebody asked me if I had ever had any formal sex education. No, I said, not a word, and as for my parents – and then I had a sudden flash of memory, and it hit me that my father’s mumblings on the subject of towels and rowers at the University of Melbourne had been an attempt to fill me in on the details of human sexual reproduction, with special reference to the subject of puberty. I realised that my father had been talking, or trying to talk, about wet dreams. When the rowers lay on their backs they had wet dreams. Hence the towelling strips, to stop them lying on their backs. This was Dad’s attempt at my sexual education. The sudden memory of his sweetness, gentleness, and chronic inability to tackle difficult subjects made me laugh aloud. To fill your son in on the details of how sex works in such a way that he realises what you are talking about only five years later – now, that’s good going.

  My mother’s gift for avoiding subjects was very different from my father’s.

  She would never have left things like that. If she brought up a subject, you knew it had been brought up. You could sense the formidable head teacher she had been. But she was very, very, very good – a genius – at not bringing things up. She had the ability to make certain subjects unbroachable. My mother didn’t quite have, as Steve Jobs of Apple Computers is said to have, a Reality Distortion Field, an aura that causes people near him to agree with his version of reality, in preference to the generally agreed version outside his head. But she did have a kind of Enquiry Suppression Field in which there were things you couldn’t ask, psychic places you couldn’t go, and wishes you were not allowed to acknowledge or voice.

  ‘I want to ask your mother things about her childhood,’ a friend once said to me, ‘but I can’t. I don’t know how she does that.’

  ‘Me neither,’ I said.

  She had an ability to ensure not so much that certain topics were off limits, more that they just did not exist. It wasn’t that she would dodge a subject, or evade it, as that she would behave as if it were not there, and do so with an absolute conviction that was impossible to challenge. Or at least, that I found impossible to challenge. Even having a desire implied that there was something you wanted that she hadn’t anticipated, which meant that it was in some sense a criticism of her. And you couldn’t criticise her, implicitly or explicitly, ever. She had a talent for making tiny actions or exchanges carry a tremendous weight of emotional violence. At the same time, if you tried to explain why it was so violent, you wo
uldn’t be able to. There was never anything you could call her on, since everything was unspoken and implicit. She managed to preserve total deniability.

  There is no word for ‘no’ in Irish. If someone asks you a direct question, ‘Are you going out tonight?’ you can’t just say ‘No’, you have to incorporate the question in your answer: ‘I am not going out.’ Even if you want flatly to contradict somebody, you have, at least partly, to incorporate or acknowledge that person’s wishes by speaking them out loud. I’d be reluctant to make too large a general point about this, but it does often seem to me that this provides a clue to the Irish way of relating, which is keener to divert and deflect, to digress and elaborate and distract, than to confront. An Irish talker, if he doesn’t like where you are headed, is not likely to stand directly in the way of your intention, but he is quite likely to come along beside you and give you a nudge, so you end up somewhere you weren’t expecting or intending to be. Certainly that’s what my mother was like. You knew where you were, and you knew where the Keep Out signs were, too, even if you didn’t know the reason for them.

  The zone of undiscussability blended into her preferred mode of getting what she wanted, which was to treat you with fait accompli. She was a master of the fait accompli – it was her favourite tactic for getting you to do something she suspected you didn’t want to do. It’s a highly effective tactic, too, if you don’t mind the furious resentment it will cause. The key point is never to ask for something, because that implies the possibility that somebody might say no. Don’t ask if someone will be in for dinner, just tell them what you’re cooking. Don’t ask for help going to the supermarket, just announce that it’s time to leave. Don’t ever admit that there are things to discuss. Don’t ever say goodbye.

  What this leads to is a relationship which proceeds by negatives. It was almost impossible to have an explicit argument with my mother, but you could certainly have bitter, explosive, violent rows – only they tended to be carried out not in the medium of language. The preferred method for her expressing anger involved sulking, silence, distance and omission, so this became the only effective way of communicating these feelings back at her. She couldn’t be outfought – she couldn’t be fought at all – and she was devastatingly good at being unhappy at people. But you could simply not be there; you could not be there physically, in so far as it was possible, and when you had to be there physically, you could learn not to be there emotionally. So I did that. I rose to Olympic standard at that. Our arguments tended to fall into patterns of explosive but silent withdrawal, with her sulking and me absent. And none of this, obviously, was ever discussed.

  Well, that’s families, I suppose. A book which gave a true and full account of any family’s inner life would have to be able to explain how a remark that is short, plain, and apparently neutral – ‘there’s that draught again’ – can have in it a thousand-page history of rage and hate and emotional violence. It would have to capture that family atmosphere, of all the time spent together blending into a miasma of exhausting, exhaustive intimacy, combined with all the ways in which family members, who feel that they know one another so well they could die of boredom, also hardly know one another at all. But nobody would want to read that book; it would be too familiar.

  I’ll just have to ask you to take my word for my mother’s force of personality. It was something you could sense in her speech. In rendering it I find it hard not to resort to italics. She often spoke with great emphasis; she never qualified or dithered, and she had no use for rather or somewhat or very. ‘If I’m ever caught up in a disaster, a fire or earthquake or something, and they ask me what it was like – heaven help them if they ask me, “How did you feel?” – but if they ask me what it was like, I’ll just say, “It was bad.” Just that. It was bad.’

  ‘OK Mum,’ I said.

  In the days when she was drinking most – this would be the seventies and early eighties, when she would get through half a bottle of sherry a day, hardly ever more and not often less – I would sometimes tentatively raise the question of whether she really truly wanted me to go to the fridge and pour her another glass. When I did that she always said one of two things. If she was cooking she used to turn away from the stove or chopping board towards me and say, with maximum emphasis, ‘The labourer is worthy of her hire.’ (She was quoting the Gospel according to Luke.) My favourite, though, was the other one, when she wasn’t cooking. If I ‘cast nasturtiums’, as she called it, she would waggle her empty glass and less crossly but more defiantly say, ‘And is there balm in Gilead?’ This was intended to be, and somehow managed to be, a complete answer.†

  It would be giving a misleading impression of her if I failed to convey just how entertaining, how funny, how alive she was. She was tricky, moody, difficult, powerful, superstitious, neurotic, and she projected an emotional force field that was like something out of Star Trek; but she was also brilliant, funny, and invariably quick to see a point and get a joke. She was one of the best talkers I’ve ever known – she was famous for it. She loved a drink and loved a good meal. Most of all, though, I remember the talk. Or rather, I don’t remember it exactly, since good talk is the most evanescent thing in the world, so bound up as it is with timing and mood – but I do remember Julie’s catch-phrases, things she could be relied on, with absolute fidelity, to say in specific circumstances. Whenever she saw something was unexpectedly expensive – when she peered over my shoulder to look at a car magazine, say, and found a picture of a Ferrari with a £150,000 price tag – she would firmly announce, ‘I’ll have half a dozen.’ Whenever someone had a name that was definitely, irrevocably Irish – for example, the current Archbishop of Westminster, the wonderfully named Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor – she would say, ‘Good Turkish name.’ Whenever something came up which she should have known but didn’t, she would say – it was the punch line of an old, old joke – ‘God bless us and save us, said poor Mrs Davis, I never knew herrings [pronounced “herons”] was fish.’ Whenever I was hungry and cleared my plate, she would say, ‘Poor boy, he lost his appetite and found a horse’s.’ Whenever I praised her cooking, or she thought something hadn’t turned out as well as I thought it did, she would say, ‘Hunger is good sauce.’ When she offered you something and you said you didn’t want it, she would say, with comedy disappointment which also managed to be real disappointment, ‘Be like that.’ Whenever anyone gave any indication of snobbery or class prejudice, she would say, ‘God bless the squire and his relations, and keep us in our proper stations.’ Whenever anyone dropped or broke anything, she would say – alluding to an old cartoon – ‘The happy home.’ Whenever anyone said anything critical of the Guardian, she would say, ‘The Guardian has been a good friend to Ireland.’ Once every six months, she would say, ‘Don’t forget, if you’re ever in trouble, you can always turn to the Js’ – meaning the Jesuits, of whom she had a high opinion, based on the Jesuit priests she had known. ‘They can be relied on.’ To which I would say, ‘If they’re so great, why does everybody hate them?’ To which my mother, calmly: ‘That is their Cross.’

  Ireland was a big subject. I was brought up with a profound ambivalence about Ireland and Irishness. On the one hand, my mother was deeply proud of being Irish: she talked about Ireland all the time, sought out the company of Irish friends wherever she went – ‘the Murphia’, my father called them – and had the habit common to people from small countries of thinking that everyone else came from them too. ‘That man has spent time in Ireland as a child,’ she would say to me about someone overheard asking directions in the street, or ‘He’s from Cork’ of a man behind us in the queue for the Star Ferry, or ‘That’s a Kerry name’ of somebody mentioned in the South China Morning Post. This drove me nuts as a child, but what drove me even more nuts was the extent to which she was right – when I got older and bolder I would go up to people and say, ‘Excuse me, my mother is from Mayo and she says you’re from Wexford. Is that right?’ I gave up after three or four goes bec
ause it turned out that she had been right every time. Now it’s me who’s prone to saying things like, ‘Sullivan? That’s a Cork name,’ while my family around me grimace and flinch. She loved Irish talk and was proud of Irish writing and of Irish attitudes – or some of them, anyway. A certain kind of Irish male omniscience used to irritate her, but it was more than balanced by the pride she exhibited in such things as the fact that the Irish word for ‘generous’ is the same as that for ‘princely’. Her Irish itself was pretty good: when we went to the Gaeltacht, the Irish-speaking part of County Galway, I was deeply impressed by how well she got by in Irish. Once in a bar in Buncrana in Donegal a man, clearly not quite believing her to be Irish (though we’d gone there with friends who were well known in the area), spoke to her in the language, and she unhesitatingly, and at some length, spoke back in Irish. She was proud of all that.

  But there was a shadow side to her attitude to Ireland and, in particular, to her family. I was brought up to believe that I should not trust them. This wasn’t a question of specifics – apart from the warning that one of her sisters was a ‘troublemaker’, a deeply unfair assessment it seems to me now. Occasionally she would tell me something more directly: when my wife and son and I moved to a larger house in 1998, she, with her inimitable maximum firmness, gave me her policy about the family: ‘Never let them know you have a spare room.’ But that was her comedy mode. There was something darker and not quite explicit about her sense of her family, something I got from her without it being spelt out: there was a source of danger, of unreliability, of potential treachery and ill will. That was it more than anything else: the feeling that they did not always wish her well.